How to consolidate your body recomposition progress when you hit your goal

Making the right choices to avoid the yo-yo approach

The past few articles have focused on getting started and maintaining adherence to the fitness component of a body recomposition strategy. But now let’s fast forwards 6-12 months - you’ve successfully achieved your primary body recomposition goals and want to switch to a maintenance strategy that allows you to keep the results while allowing some more flexibility into your routine.

Doing less work but maintaining the same results is technically the truth, but there’s still the requirement to manage your energy balance in line with your goals. Let’s step through how that works.

Making your energy balance decision

If losing body fat was a component of the body recomposition goal then it’s likely you were in an energy deficit before achieving it. Maintenance doesn’t require an energy deficit and therefore we can reduce energy expenditure and/or increase energy intake up to an energy balance that will allow body composition to be maintained (where intake matches expenditure).

Most of my clients choose to increase their energy intake and maintain physical activity at the current level, while others select to make smaller changes to both. However, very few opt to keep energy intake at the same level and reduce physical activity. There are several reasons for this.

Firstly, the food intake at the point of hitting the goal is lower than long-term habitual intake. So while the strategy can be well built to ensure the optimal rate of change to ensure it’s adhereable, it’s still different from what you were eating before.

Using the example of someone who consumed 3000kcal per day before they started. Their strategy may have started out at 2500kcal and then with reductions ended up somewhere around the 2100kcal mark (remember exercise also increased) over the 12-month strategy.

This is almost 33% lower than previous habitual intake and while they needed to reduce to 2100kcal towards the back end of the strategy, this is less intake than they could consume in the maintenance phase. Increasing energy intake can allow the consolidation of these changes at the new intake level (i.e. 2500kcal instead of 3000kcal), which is more adhreable than 2100kcal.

This is important to developing a sustainable approach to managing your body composition. If you’re constantly working hard to improve body composition followed by periods of non-adherence, return to previous intake (i.e. 3000kcal) and gaining weight, it can create an endless loop that yields little progress for the perceived effort.

Secondly, many people want more flexibility in their routine. The back end of any body recomposition strategy requires an element of restriction compared to the long-term habitual intake, which can be challenging. It’s nice to go out for a meal and order whatever you want without needing to consider your body recomposition goals because this is factored into your maintenance strategy.

Finally, they have built a solid exercise base and now want to focus on improving towards a new objective. These might be more advanced strength goals such as lifting a certain weight or fitness goals for running or cycling. This is the ideal outcome of the primary body recomposition strategy.

Two benefits of maintaining physical activity

Eating more food

The great thing about maintaining physical activity in the routine is that it continues to scale as your strength and fitness improve. Lifting heavier weights or completing more repetitions increases the work output and energy expenditure from each session. 

The same goes for fitness. As you develop a base level of fitness, you can run faster and for longer, increasing energy expenditure.

This often means that people can further increase their energy intake while still maintaining an energy balance. It’s not about exercising to eat, it’s eating to fuel your training. 

The greater the energy intake you have to work with, the more flexibility you have with energy intake and adherence is easier. You can’t eat an entire pizza for dinner every night of the week, but it becomes much easier to indulge once evert week or so while still maintaining body composition. Of course, this depends on other adherence during the week.

While this is great, there are also some things to be wary of. Firstly, energy intake will need to adjust when physical activity drops. It’s all good to need large amounts of fuel to get through high training volumes, but you have to drop these down in line with physical activity declines. 

This is my weakness. If I finish a large training block without something else to get into, or have a period of low training due to injury or something else, it often takes a few weeks to adjust my nutrition intake. At this point, I’ve often gained a few kilograms, which means I need to either further reduce food intake (which is hard) or wait until the training load builds up to do it (the smart option). I usually do a bit of both.

Fitness becomes the objective and drives adherence

Building strength and fitness have much higher ceilings than losing bodyweight. Once you’re in a healthy bodyweight range, there’s not much to gain by losing another kilo or two, unless you want to become a competitive bodybuilder or physique athlete.

Chasing gains in strength and fitness can be a great driving force over time. You might be training for your first half-marathon and each training session becomes a key component of helping you to achieve something that you couldn’t do right now. The same can be applied to other fitness, strength and even mobility goals. 

This is particularly important for people who initially had body recomposition goals but little focus on strength, fitness and mobility, and exercise was more to burn energy (which is OK). There is nothing stopping you from adhering to a fitness plan for the rest of your life and never enjoying it, so long as the outcome (body composition, health and wellbeing, etc) is worth the work. But if it’s not, you’ll slowly start dropping off from the physical activity and unless energy intake is adjusted, gain body fat.

Doing something you’ve always wanted to do

I’ve previously discussed the benefit of having a long-term fitness goal because it helps align the initial fitness component of a body recomposition strategy with the long-term objective. This can be great for helping drive adherence in the early stages.

But not everyone knows what they want to do, or it changes as they progress towards their initial goals. For example, it’s hard to imagine running 10km when you haven’t run more than 200m for ten years, but then once you start changing body composition and building fitness, this becomes something that is achievable and exciting. 

It’s worth constantly reflecting on what the longer-term objective might be. Having one isn’t critical to adherence in the initial phase of achieving your body recomposition goals, but it’s highly valuable when the focus becomes maintenance.

The exciting thing about this stage is that you’re taking forward steps and working towards something new.

Summary 

This is the end of our six-week exercise blitz discussing how to set up, adhere to, and progress the fitness component of your body recomposition strategy.

If you’ve taken steps towards your fitness goals, that’s great. But even if you haven’t, it’s still handy to conceptualise the journey you are looking to begin soon because a plan that you can see is much easier to implement then one that isn’t.