How to Avoid Looking Flat When Dieting
How do you avoid looking flat and small when losing body fat? Try these tricks and tips:
Avoid Looking Flat During Fat Loss
The Bullet Points
- If you’re a natural lifter, you probably can’t avoid it, but you can mitigate it.
- Muscles get “flat” when dieting because you have decreased intramuscular glycogen and water, especially with lower-carb diets.
- There are some tricks to help you maintain fullness, muscle tension, and muscular pressure.
- Creatine 13 can help.
- Increasing electrolyte 8 levels also helps: sodium, potassium, and magnesium. One sign of being low on electrolytes is brain fog and headaches. (“Keto flu” is actually a sign of low electrolytes.)
- When you cut out crap food, you’re also cutting out a lot of sodium 2, so less water is held within the tissues. That’s why a bodybuilder who looks flat backstage before a show will eat salty chips. The sodium increase fullness and vascularity. A cheat meal can do the same.
- When dieting, you’re probably increasing cardio and, therefore, sweating more. Again, you’re sweating out sodium. Dieters should maintain sodium intake and maybe even increase it.
- Another strategy is to have higher carb days during the week. With carb cycling 39, you go low carb for a few days, and when you’re muscle glycogen stores start to deplete, you have a higher carb day (not a full cheat day).
- Can doing explosive exercises help? Yes and no. Anything that increases neurological activation increases muscle tone. “Tone” is just a partial state of muscle activation, but it’s not fullness. The muscle may, however, feel harder. Explosive work can transiently increase muscle tone for a few hours after training, but so can strength work.
