Badger's Bodybuilding Blog

A big part of dieting while bodybuilding is working out your TDEE, or "Total Daily Energy Expenditure".  This is the amount of daily calories that your body needs to maintain its current weight.

The idea is, that you find this number, typically using a calculator on the web and then you subtract 500kcals if you want to cut (burn fat at the expense of muscle) or add 500 if you want to bulk (gain muscle and unavoidably, some fat).  I've been "cutting" in some form or another for over three years now from a starting weight of just under 200lbs/90KGs, with some good progress, and a lot of not so great progress. ;)

I didn't realise how inaccurate these online calculators could be until recently.  I track my daily calorie intake pretty much every day as you can see here

I then weigh myself about once a forghtnight, I did this last Tuesday and it confirmed that I had gained about 4 pounds in the last 3 months.

I always thought that my TDEE was around 2500 and from November 2012 till the end of April I've been bringing my Kcals in at 1800-2000 a day.  In January I was a bit more strict and took this down to under 1900 and that seemed to really kick in the fat burning with me weighing in at 150lbs in March.

I have been doing less cardio this year due to tendonitis in my left knee, I swapped two of my four weekly runs for a swim and a crosstrainer session instead, so this may effect my TDEE too.  I've also done away with the Marathon and Half Marathon distances due to the horrendous fatigue, muscle burn and injury they rack up.  My knee feels really good now, so I'm really up for more running!

At the end of April I hit a bit of overtraining that made me feel pretty ill, so I upped the kcals to over 2000 a day thinking it was the bodies way of saying I needed more food.

So here we are in June and my weightlifting has improved, but the bodyfat hasn't.  I was pretty surprised I was making any gains in the weights but the extra kcals would explain it. Here's how my current main lifts are stacking up:

The other consideration is that since Februrary I've been working my Squat 3 times a week and am now up to squatting 85KG, could the "noob gains" from this be responsible for extra pounds?  Wishful thinking I reckon! 


All this just goes to show that to work out your TDEE, it takes a consistently tracked diet and weight.

My plan going forward is to get back to around 1800kcals a day but this time never do weights + cardio on the same day as that always seem to lead to overtraining.  I will do away with the 2nd weekly rest day and see if that works out OK, the deciding factor being if I am awake enough for a Friday night trip to the pub, as usually by Friday night I am exausted.

Here's my plan for the weekly workouts:

• Mon  : Starting Strength Workout
• Tues : Cardio - Run
• Wed  : Starting Strength Workout
• Thurs: Cardio - Swim
• Fri   : Rest + Refeed
• Sat  : Starting Strength Workout
• Sun  : Cardio - Run

The danger here is 6 days in a row of training, but I think if I am smart about it and keep the cardio to 45mins or so I should be OK.  Another huge factor is sleep!  As long as I can get enough good sleep this will be fine, but every now and then the family and/or our dogs will manage to wake me up in the night, and I'm a terribly light sleeper as it is. :/

It does sometimes feel a bit embarrasing that it takes me so long to figure out the right plan, even now I will probably look back on this in three months and spot loads of errors, but the only way to progress seems to be to be consistant, track everything and make small changes.

Here's hoping the next four months yield the results I'm after!