Maintenance: The single most powerful tool to improving your body composition and performance.
You don’t always have to be building muscle or losing fat
Very few people have the natural ability to maintain weight whilst never thinking about food. In the health and fitness industry, maintenance can sometimes seem like the unloved cousin to weight loss and muscle gain.
Everybody wants to progress all the time, whether it be ‘cutting’ and losing fat or ‘bulking’ and gaining muscle. Maintenance is like the uninteresting topic to health and fitness, and that’s a real shame really, because so much personal growth comes out of maintenance.
If you’ve ever come out of a long fat loss plan you’ll know just how mentally challenging it can be to reintroduce more food. The thought of possibly gaining the weight back can often trigger feelings of anxiety.
On the other hand, sitting in a maintenance after a long bulking phase can also be uncomfortable. Athletes are often left fighting back the urge to enter a cut almost immediately especially if they aren’t used to being a certain weight.
So if maintenance is such a struggle to many people, why bother doing it?
Because its the perfect time to practice great eating habits and mindsets, and I don’t mean eating like a hamster and only eating kale and spinach, I mean practicing eating everything and noticing any negative thoughts that enter your mind when you eat things you wouldn’t normally allow yourself to.
Maintenance is a great time to reintroduce all of the foods but in a manner that can be done slowly and reasonably.
In other words, eating all your favourite foods without the anxiety or feelings of guilt. Eating slowly, mindfully and within reason.
What do you notice about yourself when you eat your favourite foods? Do you go faster? Keep going until you can’t eat any more?
Do you get to the end of the meal and tell yourself you shouldn’t have done that? Or tell yourself you need to get to the gym to “burn off” all that food?
These are all common eating behaviours that is even more prevalent in the health and fitness industry. Us athletes and coaches tend to be hard on ourselves, feel pressure to look or perform a certain way.
Well I’m here to tell you, there is no need for that.
“Unless you killed the chef or the farmer, there should be no guilt about your eating choices.”
By the end of this blog I hope to highlight some of the benefits to remaining on a maintenance phase instead of constantly looking forward to the next cutting phase or bulking phase. After all, if you can’t find happiness in the mundane, you’ll always be chasing after the highs, and eventually the highs won’t be highs any more.
Fine tune your training
Maintenance is a wonderful time to work on form and improving your personal best score.
This might be really obvious but I feel the need to say it; don’t try to lose weight when you’re pushing for new PR’s. It can happen but that’s a bonus and shouldn’t be expected.
Focus on one goal at a time: fat loss during a deficit, performance goals for maintenance and muscle gain during a bulk.
Use maintenance to work on increasing speed, strength or power. Practicing great eating habits whilst maintaining weight is going to do your mental health and physical health wonders.
Enjoy life
If you found yourself in a rather restrictive diet, maintenance should feel like a break. If relaxing the rules a little with your food choices results in an ‘all or nothing’ mentality where you’re either eating really well or eating terribly, take heart, you were probably not meant to be in a ‘cut’ that deep or for that long.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen athletes emotionally dipping in and out of diets because they haven’t learnt the proper tools to understand how to enjoy a balanced diet.
If this is you, ditch the food scale and food apps. Learn to eyeball your food portions, eat when you feel hungry and stop when you’re full. Enjoy your favourite treats but do it with mindfulness.
Whatever foods you felt you needed to give up during your cutting phase (which by the way is totally unnecessary), add them back into your diet and enjoy life.
Prepare your body for the next phase
Assuming you have just come out of a cutting phase, remaining in a maintenance phase (ideally this should mean you’re eating more than you were on your cut) will increase your chances of success in your next ‘cut’, should you choose to do another one in the future.
Maintenance, when done properly primes your body for the next cutting phase. When you feed your body with the right fuel, its metabolism is on full charge and ready for whatever you throw at it.
If however, you continue to push your body through deficits, eventually it will stop losing weight, your training will struggle and that’s usually a sign that your metabolism has slowed down.
So increase your energy intake, and if there is a little bit of weight gain in that process, no biggie, it will level off if you stay consistent and practice great habits.
Work on long term habits
If you’re a regular reader of my blog you’ll know just how much I talk about habits and behaviours.
The benefits to practicing good eating habits are endless, but remember, when we talk about good eating habits we are referring to the practice of eating a balanced diet made up of both whole foods and processed foods and not an obsession with ‘clean eating'.
These habits are great for improving your relationship with food; eating mindfully, noticing how hungry you feel when you start a meal and how full you feel right at the end of the meal, and being able to differentiate between genuine hunger or just simply craving some snacks.
Top tip: Surrounding yourself with better foods by creating whole food shopping lists and stocking your cupboards and fridges full of fresh foods could also be added into the mix.
Gains all over
It’s easy to roll your eyes at these basic practices because they seem too simple to actually be effective, but research after research has shown that adopting healthy eating habits like eating slowly and mindfully can help you maintain weight, and in some individuals even help them lose weight.
Nutrition science is important of course, but without the application, it’s just unused knowledge.
So as we approach Christmas, here’s a quick reminder that you don’t have to be trying to lose weight OR gain weight. Just maintain.
If Christmas isn’t the perfect time to apply some healthy eating patterns like eating without guilt of noticing and naming those negative emotions, when is?
Happy holidays you lovely bunch!
