All too often, you'll see people train super hard in the off-season with heavy weights in the five to 12 rep range, only to change everything and train in circuit fashion with light weights and minimal rest to 'maximize fat burn.' The problem with this is the overload on the muscle completely disappears, and your body no longer has any reason to hold onto the muscle it's built. The most common mistake I see trainees make when dieting is forgetting the type of training they used to build their muscle in the first place. Of course, there will be slight drop-offs here and there (especially in pressing exercises), but if you aren't too far off your best in the grand scheme of things, and your relative strength is on the up, you're doing well. Remember, if you want to maximize muscle retention, you need to focus all your efforts on maintaining your strength.

RECENT: Get Stable, Get Strong: Pressing, Pulling, and Squatting We don't have the benefit of exogenous compounds to protect muscle, so we need to be more meticulous in our training to make sure we hold onto strength in the latter stages of dieting.

For natural lifters, their training is all they can rely on to maintain their muscle mass when reaching the extremes of body fat. When your body fat and calories are low and cardio is high, and you're still able to build a little or at the very least maintain all your strength, you've found a winner. I've always thought that any training program that works well in a hard dieting phase is a program worth doing.

3 splitt program