The bigger man's guide to slimming down

Men with naturally larger physiques often find it difficult to shed weight and develop leaner bodies. Scott Laidler explains how to do it.

As I mentioned previously in my "skinny man's guide to bulking up", most workout plans you’ll come across in health and fitness magazines were designed by natural athletes, who expect everyone out there to get the same easy results from exercise that they’ve had.

Unfortunately this is not always the way it turns out, leaving many people feeling frustrated and wondering what went wrong.

Genetics play a large part in what we can achieve with our bodies. Different body types react differently to exercise stimulus and different food types. This means that the workout plan you follow should be tailored to your body type.

So here's a brief guide to how those with "endomorph" body types should approach losing body fat.

The endomorph

Firstly, let’s acknowledge that every individual body is, to one degree or another, unique and we all possess traits from the each of the three main body ‘types’ (ectomorph, mesomorph, endomorph). However, classifying ourselves as predominantly fitting one of these types does help us make some basic decisions regarding our training and nutrition.

Generally speaking, ectomorphs are naturally slim, and don't put on a huge amount of muscle even when working out regularly, unlike mesomorphs, who pack on muscle more easily.

Endomorphs, on the other hand, find it more difficult to shift excess body fat. Other traits common among endomorphs include:

Wide hips and shoulder base;

Pear-shaped body;

Round face;

Higher body fat;

Insulin dominance;

Low carb tolerance.

Nutrition

Endomorphs tend to gain muscle relatively easily. They also tend to gain fat pretty quickly too. This is because as an endomorph your body is hormonally insulin dependent. This effectively means that your body is less able to use insulin to lower its blood sugar levels. This poor carb tolerance means that endomorphs should reduce the amount of carbs they consume. What's more, those sugary carbs that the other body types may get away with should be avoided, except before and after training.

Designing an endomorph's diet

To keep your fat loss plan simple, it's best that we avoid complicated formulas and aim for a daily intake of 2,500 calories, (take this down to 2,250 if you are over 40). We will be looking to lose on average of 1.5-2lbs of weight per week and if we keep blood sugar levels stable and protein intake of a high quality, the vast majority of this weight will be body fat.

Give your body one week to adapt before you start to tinker with your calorie intake, because you will lose water in the first week as you clean your diet up. After week one, if you do not lose enough weight you can reduce your daily calories by 250 and see if that changes things. If you are losing more than 2lbs per week, put your calories up by 250 as that's a bit much to lose so quickly, and you run the risk of losing precious muscle tissue (which would further slow down a naturally sluggish metabolism).

Typically, a natural athlete or ‘mesomorph’ will recommend a 40% carb, 30% protein and 30% fat split of macro nutrients. Unfortunately that isn’t optimal for the endomorph body type, which is much more suited to a ratio of 25% carb, 35% protein and 40% fat.

Keep your carbohydrates as low G.I. as possible in order to keep your blood sugar levels stable. Great choices include: sweet potato, quinoa, oats, pearl barley and brown rice.

Another great tool for the endomorph is to use carbohydrate cycling during their fat loss plan. This involves eating fewer carbohydrates on rest days and higher amounts on training days, allowing you to keep blood sugar levels very low on rest days. This enables your body to utilise existing fat stores as fuel, as glycogen stores will have been exhausted through exercise.

I have found the supplement sesamin to be very useful for endomorphs on a cutting phase. It is concentrated sesame seed oil and acts as both a natural fat oxidiser, burning your existing fat stores, and also appears to inhibit the storage of new fat when consumed with a meal. However, please consider this an auxiliary tool, not a central focus of you fat loss plan.

Training

The advantage the endomorph has is the ability to recover from exercise rapidly, so frequent exercise is a good idea. Intensity is also important; the endomorph is naturally strong and finds muscle gain easy, so high-rep resistance training is usually responded to well.

Cardio is well suited to the endomorph, who stands to gain from both the metabolism boost of high-intensity training and the ongoing benefit of ‘fat burning zone’ training of steady state cardio.

An Ideal week for the bigger man looking to shed some fat would look much like this:

Monday: total body resistance (compound lifts 14-20 sets) / high carb intake

Tuesday: high-intensity cardio (Tabata/circuit training 20-40 minutes) / moderate carb

Wednesday: steady state cardio 60-90 minutes (105-120BPM) / low carb

Thursday: total body resistance (compound lifts 14-20 sets) / high carb

Friday: high-intensity cardio (Tabata / circuit Training 20-40 minutes) / moderate carb

Saturday and Sunday: rest / zero or low carb

Impressive lean physiques can still be carved out of the endomorph body type, it just requires that the training plan and nutritional guidelines are tweaked to favour the natural traits of the individual.