What Actually Counts as a Training Day? | ETP#227

For the first 5 years of Aaron's coaching business he kept a running doc of every question a client ever asked. Hundreds. The single most asked question was a form of: "What actually counts as a training day?" Sounds simple, right up until you have to draw the line. And that line quietly decides whether you run one set of macros or two, and how you feed a surplus, a deficit, and everything in between. The definition we keep coming back to is dead simple: a training day is something you need to recover from. That alone drops a lot of the confusing stuff, big step count days, hikes, a long zone 2 ride, into a gray area, and the call there is about duration and cost, not a hard yes or no. A 30 minute spin is not a training day. A 90 minute zone 2 ride is. From there we run the whole thing through nutritional periodization, because the phase you are in changes the answer. Maintenance, surplus, and deficit each get an argument for splitting your training and non-training day macros, and an argument against. The deficit is where splitting really earns its keep, so that is where most of the episode lives: protecting training intensity as the number one lever for holding onto muscle, pulling food off rest days to hit your target rate of loss, and the psychology of dieting that no spreadsheet ever accounts for. That last part goes deep, from why hard training kills your appetite while rest days leave you bored and food focused, to the counterintuitive move of eating less on training days, to how going bland on purpose and cleaning up your Instagram feed can pull your hunger right back down. We wrap on the constrained energy model and step counts, HIIT versus low intensity cardio, why your wearable's calorie number lies but its trend does not, and the non-bodyweight reasons, stuff like metabolic flexibility and quality of life, that never make the spreadsheet but matter anyway. Covered in this episode: The one definition that cuts through it: a training day is something you need to recover from Why needing to recover from something every single day means you are probably doing too much The gray area of big step counts, hikes, and long zone 2 rides Why a 30 minute zone 2 is not a training day but a 90 minute ride is What happens if your expenditure is genuinely too high, and why body weight tells the truth Using nutritional periodization to decide when to split training and non-training macros Maintenance: absorbing meals out and protecting insulin sensitivity versus keeping it simple Why maintenance is the only phase where letting appetite drive the bus makes sense Whether biasing calories toward training or rest days matters if the weekly total is met Surplus: nutrient partitioning, GLUT4, and intra-workout carbohydrate Loading carbs pre and post workout so 8pm does not become a 100 gram carb problem Monitoring a surplus with photos, performance, and a well-timed DEXA The build calculus: is the extra muscle from the last six pounds worth dieting it back off Deficit: protecting training intensity as the number one driver of muscle retention Pulling food from non-training days to hit a target rate of loss around 1% per week Bryan's opposite approach: eating less on training days to manage food focus Why hard training blunts appetite for a couple of hours and rest days do not Going bland on purpose, and how the Instagram algorithm quietly doubled the hunger The constrained energy model, step counts, and where movement stops paying off HIIT versus low intensity cardio in a deficit, and why your leg days pay for it Non-bodyweight reasons to split: metabolic flexibility, fat digestion, and quality of life Higher carb versus higher fat by phase, and why a deficit favors higher carb Why a wearable's calorie number is unreliable but its trend is accurate to you Consistent inaccuracy: pick the same food entry every time and let the trend guide you Why we pull cardio before steps when the rate of loss runs too hot Timestamps: 00:00:00 - Intro and updates 00:05:00 - The six minute cardio ramp, and why lifting isn't a zone 2 substitute 00:09:00 - What actually counts as a training day: recovery as the definition 00:10:30 - The gray area: high step days, hikes, and zone 2 00:13:00 - Nutritional periodization and the maintenance phase 00:17:30 - Appetite blunting, rebound hunger, and the weekly average 00:22:00 - Surplus: insulin sensitivity and nutrient partitioning around training 00:29:00 - Monitoring a surplus: DEXA, and whether six more pounds is worth it 00:31:30 - Deficit: the phase where splitting matters most 00:34:00 - The psychology of dieting and Bryan's opposite approach 00:37:30 - Going bland on purpose: flavor, the algorithm, and hunger 00:42:00 - The constrained energy model, steps, and the Pontzer research 00:47:00 - HIIT versus low intensity cardio in a deficit 00:50:00 - Non-bodyweight reasons: metabolic flexibility and quality of life 00:54:00 - Wearables, the trend over the number, and pulling cardio before steps Training hard, but don't look like it? 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