How Tracking Biofeedback Leads to Quicker Fat Loss and Muscle Gain
We’ve all heard the phrase, “listen to your body.”
However, what exactly does this mean, and how can it help you lose body fat and build muscle faster?
As your coach, I can give you the most “perfect” diet and training program in the world, yet if your biofeedback is absolute dog shit, then it can be difficult to make sustainable progress. Plus, you’re gonna hate me and the overall process.
I know what you’re thinking….
Biofeedback….? What exactly is this and why should I care?
Bio {Body} Feedback {Signals}
Biofeedback is a technical-sounding term for all the signals your body tells you throughout the day.
By tracking your biofeedback, this allows us to assess how well your body is functioning during your diet so we can maximize your progress.
In short, your biofeedback metrics will reflect that by how you’re feeling, moving, training, and sleeping.
Everyone knows that if we can manage our diets and training properly we’ll be feeling, moving, training, and sleeping better. This means it starts by focusing on what’s going on inside out to ensure your body is positively responding.
This is why measuring and assessing your biofeedback is crucial to maximizing your progress.
As your coach, my top priorities are:
---> Do no harm
---> Guide and educate you to maximize your progress.
This is where assessing your biofeedback along with your training and nutrition on a weekly basis is so important.
In this article, I’m going to walk you through all the key biofeedback markers I look at with online clients and how best to understand them to improve your fat loss and muscle-building results.
#1 Sleep
This is the first biofeedback marker, as it’s the most important marker. It may seem like we’re starting on a boring note. However, this up as it has the biggest impact on your progress.
The research is clear: if you sleep less than 7 hours of sleep daily, you’re leaving a lot of progress on the table. Getting great sleep helps you adhere to your diet because poor sleep has been linked to:
---> Higher Stress
---> More Cravings
---> More Hunger
---> Lower Willpower
With their forces combined, this makes it way harder to actually adhere to your diet and training when you’re undersleeping/ not recovering. Your training and recovery will suffer from poor sleep, and if you’re tired, you’ll move less throughout the day (i.e. lower N.E.A.T), meaning you’ll burn fewer calories throughout the day.
This is something we can keep an eye on and manage as much as possible with sleep routines and lifestyle modifications. Generally, our bodies need anywhere from 7-9 hours of quality sleep per night.
This is just the tip of the iceberg, as I’ve written an entire article on the importance of sleep that you can check out here.
#2 Motivation
Together, we want to assess your motivation to keep tabs on two main components:
How motivated you are (as the client) to do the work (this is fairly obvious)
How well you’re following the plan
It’s only when we stop doing the things we know we need to do that motivation begins to lag. This is exactly why we want to keep track of your motivation.
By giving a motivation rating of 1-5, we are basically asking
---> How well are you at following the plan?
When my online client’s motivation rating starts to fall as a client, that’s our warning light that you need help.
We’ll work together to discover a solution and remedy so you can get back on track to continue crushing your goals.
My online clients and I work together to set up a checklist of actions they’ll need to do to reach their goals.
Not only does this allow my clients to feel empowered actually to follow through on these actions, but you’ll also be more motivated throughout the process.
#3 Stress
Stress and sleep go hand in hand, as poor sleep is often linked to higher stress rankings and poor sleep quality. When stress levels are too high, this can inhibit your ability to stick to your nutritional plan.
This is important because stress has a significant impact on your cortisol levels and can inhibit your fat loss efforts. When cortisol levels are too high this causes you to hold onto more water weight.
However, the real detrimental effect of stress is it lowers your adherence and willpower.
When you’re stressed out of your mind, your hunger levels are typically higher, making you want to eat anything and everything in sight.
Over my years of coaching, I’ve noticed a direct correlation between stress, sleep, and hunger. When one of these three is off, everything can quickly derail.
To prevent this, I have my online clients rank their perceived stress levels on a scale of 1-5. When stress levels start creeping beyond a 3 and affecting their other biofeedback markers (i.e., sleep and motivation), it’s time to start impediments to stress-relieving activities.
There are literally hundreds of different options to choose from, yet here are a few of my go-to stress relief options:
---> Deep Breathing,
---> Reading
---> Meditation
---> Journaling
---> Walking
---> Any other activity that feels calming and enjoyable to them (i.e. watching a tv show, playing video games, drinking a glass of wine, etc.)
#4 Hunger and Cravings
Without question, properly managing and controlling your hunger and cravings plays a critical role in your ability to adhere to your fat loss goals.
Generally speaking, hunger and cravings are indicators of:
---> Ensuring Food Quality
---> Are your meals keeping you full and satisfied?
---> Have you been in a deficit too long?
Luckily, I’ve created a system to ensure we can keep hunger and cravings at bay. Each of these points is important so let’s address each one individually:
Why Food Quality is important?
When in a calorie deficit (or even maintenance), if you have more hunger than expected, this is usually the result of less than optional food quality, aka not eating enough high-quality, nutrient-dense whole foods.
This is important because these high-quality foods come along with fiber, water content, vitamins, and minerals and usually allow for more food volume. In addition, these foods are more likely to be single-ingredient foods.
For any online clients struggling with hunger in a deficit, one of the first things we have them add is a big ass salad during their day. These big ass salads are loaded with greens, chopped veggies of their choosing, and some lean protein, and a low/no fat dressing.
These big ass salads give lots of food volume, fiber, micronutrients, and protein, and take time to chew and digest to finish. The combination of all these factors results in you feeling full for very few calories which is a win-win in a caloric deficit.
Remember, the objective of a calorie deficit is to eat as much as possible, not as little as possible.
Think abundance, not scarcity.
As your coach, I want you to eat as much as possible while maintaining that calorie deficit, not eating as little as humanly possible.
For those reasons, assessing food quality is the first place we look when hunger is high without a clear reason. I wrote an entire article covering how to stay full in a calorie deficit that you can check out here.
For those reasons, assessing food quality is the first place we look when hunger is high without a clear reason.
I wrote an entire article covering how to stay full in a calorie deficit that you can check out here.
Are your meals keeping you full and satisfied?
Next, we want to look at your actual meals. Overall, your meal needs to have these characteristics:
---> Prioritizing whole, minimally processed foods
---> Fit onto one plate
---> Fitting your nutritional targets (i.e. portion sizes and/or macros)
---> Being enjoyable
---> Being easily repeatable
At the end of the day, you want your meals to be enjoyable and easily repeatable rather than just hitting your nutritional targets. By being enjoyable, I don’t just mean it tastes good. Rather, I want your meals to taste good, digest well, and makes you feel good AND satisfied so you’re not snacking afterward.
Let’s use that big-ass salad example from earlier. Maybe your big ass salad has spinach, grilled chicken, and some fat-free dressing. Overall, this is good, yet if you don’t feel satisfied and you’re still wanting something when you finish. So we’ll add something to make it more satisfying (like some crispy jalapeno pieces) so it maximizes your fullness, enjoyment, and satisfaction while fitting into your nutritional plan.
Have you been in a calorie deficit for too long??
This would be the last item on the checklist, especially if you have more weight you’d like to lose. However, if you have been in a calorie deficit for weeks and weeks, you could just be ready for a diet break.
Spending some time at maintenance can be the mental and physical break you need in order to get back at it.
#5 Training Performance
In order to change your body composition, you’ll need to train hard in the gym. When in a calorie surplus, the hard training sessions will help build the most muscle possible.
However, when in a calorie deficit, those hard training sessions will help you preserve the most amount of muscle while dieting.
This is why it’s important to track how your training performance is going to ensure you’re making optimal progress
By tracking your training performance, this gives us clues on what’s going on:
---> Are you hydrated?
---> Is sleep going down, and you’re seeing it reflected in your training performance?
---> Do you need to add a pre-workout meal?
---> Are outside stressors taking a toll on your training?
I’ve usually found that fixing one of those biofeedback markers can benefit your training performance as well.
#6: Body Fatigue/Recovery:
While it’s important to be training hard in the gym, it’s even more important to ensure your recovery is on point. You don’t just build muscle within the gym. Rather, your body can only adapt to the training you can recover from.
If you are crushing yourself within the gym, yet your sleep is absolute shit, your diet is a mess, and the only water you get is from coffee, then your body is going to be feeling like shit!
Recovery is strongly influenced by all the previous sections (i.e. sleep, stress, food choices, etc.) By addressing these factors, we can indirectly improve your recovery to jumpstart your progress.
However, if you have everything dialed in and still want to improve your recovery, you can….
---> Add external modalities like massage, stretching, and/or foam rolling.
---> Make sure you’re getting enough carbohydrates, especially post-workout.
---> Take a look at your training intensity and volume to ensure they are dialed in.
With that being said, the majority of your efforts should come from prioritizing sleep, stress, hydration, and diet.
This means you should be prioritizing the following throughout your day:
---> Having adequate protein and calories
---> Lowering stress levels
---> Increasing sleep quality and quantity
---> Being hydrated
Bonus Metric: Step Count
Technically, this isn’t biofeedback, yet it does provide great insight into the amount of movement a person is going outside the gym so we can fix any stalled progress.
Your overall movement has a strong influence on your metabolism. All in all, your metabolism is made up of the following components
Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR): This is the number of calories your burn in order to survive.
Physical Activity Level (PAL): This is the number of calories you burn inside the gym.
Thermic Effect of food (TEF): This is the number of calories you burn via chewing and digesting food.
Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis (NEAT): This is the number of calories you burn outside the gym aka walking.
We have minimal control over our BMR (i.e genetics) and TEF outside of eating more protein), so this leaves us to focus on movement both within and outside the gym.
We cannot continuously push burning more calories within the gym as 1) you probably cannot afford to live in the gym, and 2) this will significantly inhibit our ability to recover from working out.
For those two reasons, we need to prioritize on getting additional NEAT throughout the day and the easy means to do so is by tracking your step count.
Step counts are something we can control and it’s a way to assess movement. When you’re dieting, your body tries to burn less calories to keep what little energy remains. Your body does this by slowing your NEAT aka your movement throughout the day.
For example, if your step count starts to dip from 10K per day to 4-5K steps per day, that’s a significant decrease in total calories burned. Rather than slashing your calories, we’ll focus on increasing your step count back to normal to restart your progress.
As an online client, you are expected to track a BUNCH of information, yet it’s all for maximizing your progress. When you start coaching with me, these are all the things we take into account to make sure you’re getting the absolute best results possible.
Do you know the other two critical factors to whether your nutritional program succeeds or not?
Accountability
Structure and a clear plan to follow
My online coaching service provides you with both. At Mack Performance, I firmly believe that the best diet is the one you enjoy while making long-term, objective-based progress.
Together, we’ll create a tailored plan to get you to the physique you’ve always wanted, and expertly guide you through every step of your transformation.