How often to Run?

Right now I’m 5’7", 154 lbs, with about 15% bodyfat… trying to get it down to 9% before I bulk.

I do Men’s Health Iron Manual Phase I on Mon, Wed, Fri with a 20 minute jog about 4 hours later. On Tues, Thurs, Sat I do a 21 minute session of HIIT and abs. Trying to get around 2000 cals on workout days and 1800 cals on non workout days.

Should I be running more or less, working out more or less, and/or eating more or less?

What do you all think?

Personally I would put more emphasis on weights, less on cardio.

I’ve dropped 7% BF in just under 2 months and I don’t do any cardio by design, although I have played racquetball and gone swimming/biking and so on. Just bust my arse 5 days/wk in the gym and watch the lbm eat that fat away, or however it works.

Doing cardio while hypocaloric and trying to retain/gain LBM is a very touchy edge. It’s extremely easy to over cardio it, thereby burning your LBM and cutting the knees out from your lifting numbers.

Surely someone directed you to read the FAQ and then all the previous issues in the steak everyday thread.

If you’re doing 3 HIIT sessions weekly AND doing 20 min. of cardio on the other days, I’d say that is more than enough. If your 20 min. sessions are low to moderate intensity, why not just perform them after your weight sessions on MWF?

Your weight training frequency is good…either 3-4 sessions a week is the ticket. I’m not familiar with the Men’s Health workouts but I hope what you’re doing is better than most of their programs. Make sure you’re doing the good stuff (squats, deads, cleans, etc).

Your cals are probably okay…maybe a tad low depending on the intensity of your weight training sessions. What do your food choices actually consist of?

Let’s see, you’re 154lbs @ 15% bodyfat. That means to be 9% bodyfat you’re going to be about 144lbs. So you’ve got about 10lbs of fat to lose to meet your goal.

However, with the volume of running you’re doing you’re going to end up under 140 for sure. Dude, you are doing WAAAYY too much running. Ease up. You are well on your way to losing some of your hard earned muscle.

I’m not familiar with the Men’s Health program, so I can’t comment on that.

As for your diet, give some more specifics.