Distance Running/Long Cardio Doesn't Help with Dad Bod?

To add to the diet topic, alcohol does 2 negative things to the body. It adds empty calories and suppresses GH secretion which is a key in maintaining muscle mass, libido, and efficient metabolism.

Especially when you look at body builders who tend to utilize slow steady state cardio over HIIT stuff. I don't know how much juicing would affect this.

I had a bit of a dad bod a few years ago and HIIT training a few days a week, three full body weight workouts, and one or two days of 30-60 meter sprints got me pretty lean without being completely skinny. I'm 52 now but I'm a former D1 800meter runner who used to be way too skinny due to the mileage we used to do. I was actually happier with the way I looked after a few months or HIIT, weights, and sprints. I lost some of my fitness during COVID  but am in the midst of going back to my HIIT, weights, and sprints routine.

HIIT certainly has value! HIIT does an excellent job at hitting more fast-twitch fibers and is, perhaps most importantly, easier to digest in terms of amount of time needed to see quick results. It's easier to sell folks on doing a few sets of short repetitions instead of "30-40 minutes a day" of easy running. 

The good news is that no one would need to reduce their mileage NEARLY that much to add a little upper body size/definition. 1-3 strength efforts per week, each of only 5-10 minutes, to give yourself a bit more size/definition in your pecs and deltoids, plus some definition in your abs. Done.

Anyone nearly disciplined enough to run 50-60 miles per week could easily add this extremely modest effort to their regimen. And OK, at worst, shave off 2-5 miles/week, if that's what it takes to squeeze it in. Your running won't suffer.

1. I've lost quite a bit of weight just by running as a 40 plus year old man. Dropped about 30 pounds over a year without changing my diet at all.

2. Don't know why people think HIIT is so good... you can only do so much so often... won't get you nearly as fit a long steady exercise.

3. I still have Dad-bod when it's all said and done and that's due to diet. one of these days I'll probably try to reign it in for performance reasons but it's hard to care too much about carrying around an extra 10 pounds when you're a 40+ hobby-jogger. Maybe I'd break 17 in the 5K if I got down to proper weight but is that really worth starving myself over?

You do realize the average person would consider that to be a highly intense training regime right?

I'm not getting the sense that you know what a contradiction is. A hint: when you have one, what you're saying doesn't mean anything.

Define your terms.

As stated, the above claim is not literally true, only true enough to be useful for a majority of people, especially those who don’t weight train or those who are largely sedentary.

It is indeed possible to gain weight in a calorie deficit and possible to lose weight in a calorie surplus. The reason is that muscle is a bit over 20% denser than fat and takes over 25% fewer calories to build from scratch compared to burning fat of the exact same weight. For example, burning a pound of fat provides around 3700 C but building a pound of muscle only takes ~2700 C, so you could technically be in a modest deficit while still losing say one pound of fat and gaining 1.2 pounds of muscle for a net weight gain. Likewise, because burning a pound of muscle only provides barely 900 C, you could be in a modest caloric surplus of 2000C but still lose two pounds of muscle and gain one pound of fat for a net weight loss of a pound.

Lift. Sprint. Don't drink beer, don't eat like you're in college.

I was starting to develop a slight dad bod over the last 4-5 years. Skinny upper body with a little bit of weight around the midsection. Two things fixed it in about 4 months. Increased my mileage from 15MPW to 40MPW, cut out alcohol completely. After 4 months, I was just skinny but with abs. 6' and 144 lbs.

I stopped running 3 weeks ago, no cardio whatsoever and added in pushups, situps, and now full weight routine. I'm up to 147, and 3 weeks of lifting really makes an upper body difference when you're that skinny. I'm still skinny compared to the majority of the population, but definitely slightly bigger and more defined chest, arms and shoulders.

It's not that I avoided weights because I didn't want to gain weight when I was running more, I simply didn't want to go to the gym on my days off of running. I'll likely start alternating days, 4 days running and 3 days gym per week.

Just get on TRT. It’s not hard.

Well the problem there is you might lose muscle mass as well...

Except your body is more injury prone with that kind of intense training the older you get. So it's a Catch-22.

Except you gotta be in reasonably good shape to even do HIIT without getting injured. so the easy running to get some basic fitness is a must. You're not going to safely getting a 5'11, 250-pound, 40 yr old couch potato to do HIIT.

When you are no longer young it's fairly more harmful on the body the wear and tear from doing pointless mileage. Maybe 400/800 is exteme, but 800/1500 most certainly is not

Or to burn more as you eat.

So there are 2 wheels which can be turned:

1) Calorie intake

2) Calorie burn

Not sure how something which produces less strain on your connective tissues could cause less wear and tear than speed training....