I’ve been doing 5x5 for 4 months now but I don’t seem to be dropping weight. I can definitely tell I’m getting stronger. An acquaintance of mine that works out suggested that I stop 5x5 because it’s for bulking and move to 5 days a week major muscle groups each day, legs, back, chest, arm, etc because it’s for weightloss…
He also suggested I do Sustanon 250 with androgen inhibitors but I just don’t know enough about it to start doing it. Any advice is greatly appreciated.
Well, with 5*5 you start with the bar and work your way up from there usually with 5lb increments. Once I got over the initial pain phase from muscles not being used much it’s been pretty good. I started skipping weight to get where it was challenging. So over the 4months I went from 45lbs to the stats I placed above.
Should I just do more of a calorie deficit and lighten the workout? Estimated tdee is 4200 with my workouts, figured 3000 was a decent deficit, I just hate losing muscle while trying to lose weight… If that’s the way it is, then that’s all there is to it.
Calorie deficit for sure. Lighten the workout? Well I think as long as you can keep adding weights on a linear progression, I don’t see the need to lighten the workout just yet. Yes, it isn’t advisable to do a 5x5 linear progression on a deficit, but if you can still keep adding weights linearly with good form, then I think you can maintain the deficit for now. If I were you, I’d only sit down and consider the deficit part when you start having trouble adding weights - at that point, the choice is whether to keep losing weight, or keep adding weight on the bar.
The calorie estimates are estimates. Drop your calories until you’re losing a couple pounds of week. You’re a pretty big guy, so you should be be able to lose at a good rate for quite awhile. No question your calories need to come down.
I think most of us should at least do the minimum cardio to improve our health markers (even though I hate doing it); I wouldn’t overthink this or go crazy about it - just get in half an hour 3x a week of whatever you feel like doing aerobically.
How you lift weights is pretty irrelevant for fat loss, and losing weight is not a death sentence to get weaker. Competitive bodybuilders get weaker in the last weeks before a contest - that has now become an excuse for all of us to think we have to get weaker every time we clean our eating up a little, which is ridiculous; the situations are very different.
So:
Lift weights however you want
Do some cardio for your health
Drop those calories so you’re losing, on average, 2+ lbs. a week (I would actually expect it to be a faster rate while you’re still over 300)