What is the correlation between food and strength?

[BigSnacks]

I'm not sure if this is the best forum for my topic, but it seemed like the best place to start.

To keep this short and simple: I tried to bulk up over Winter and got careless, putting on 26lb over a period of 3 to 4 months. In February I re-evaluated my situation and adjusted my caloric intake to create a deficit in order to try and attack some of this fat I had put on. I didn’t want to go too low, so I was eating around 2400 calories a day. It didn’t *seem* too low, as the scale wasn’t budging from week to week, but my lifts started to suffer. I should also note, as I don’t know if it has any impact on this, that I began a transition off caffeine in January and had eliminated it completely by mid-Febrary. Because my weight wasn’t budging, I dropped my calories down even more to 1800-1900, but after a few weeks of that I still hadn’t seen any results (nor were my clothes feeling any looser). I felt weak in the gym, however, and I thought I might had gone too low, so I went back up to 2400 at the beginning of April and decided to give Keto a try. I lost a few pounds of water weight initially, but that was about it; in the gym, however, I continued a downward spiral. Was I still going too low? It’s possible, as guy_a (who was my size) said he cut on 1900, but guy_b (my size) said he had to eat *at least* 3k/day or else he would shrink. Conflicting information: the bane of BB.com

Also, in mid to late February, I started C25K, so I had adjusted my workouts from 3 days a week (alternating between push+squats & pull workouts) to 2, so that I could run the other 3 (weekends are usually a bust for me, as a single father). I wondered if this had any impact on my strength loss, so a couple weeks back I returned to heavy lifting on M/W/F and only run on T/Th now, but I wasn’t seeing a change. Last week I, once again, upped my calories to 2800, deciding to stick Keto out a couple more weeks to see how things progress, since I’ve finally started to see some movement in the scale over the last week or two.

In January I was deadlifting 405+; last week I was down to 365; yesterday I got 355 a few times but failed 365. That’s a decrease of 50lb, or 12%.
In January I was squatting 315+; last week I was down to 275; today I squat, so I’m not sure. So far that’s a decrease of 40lb, or 13%.

Other lifts are suffering, too, though not as significantly. Not only that, but the last couple of weeks I’ve been/felt more prone to injury (pinches/pops in the neck, shoulders, etc), but that may be because I’m trying to keep the weight up and start sacrificing form…

So I’m wondering how much of a factor caloric intake plays on strength gains. It obviously plays a part, as my lifts got bigger as my intake went up and my lifts suffered as my intake went down (and it makes sense why powerlifters/strongmen have, historically, usually been “fat”), but where’s the line? How do you find balance? Or can you? Is it one or the other in this situation? I’ve seen threads/discussions on maintaining mass/size while cutting fat, but I don’t think I’ve seen strength addressed (I’m more concerned about actually *being* strong, rather than looking it). I couldn’t find anything by searching, but it might have been the terms I was using.

[nobrah]

Loss of strength can have a number of causes, but given your story two likely ones stand out:

Glycogen stores: Your muscles keep a store of glycogen to use for anaerobic energy. If your diet has caused those stores to decrease, your ability to generate energy for short, intense exercises (eg. weight lifting) is reduced. Insufficient quick energy can affect your strength. A quick and easy test of this is to carb load and then see how your strength responds the next day on the most affected lifts.

Central Nervous System: CNS efficiency plays a rather large part in strength, and if the system is fatigued from insufficient nutrition and/or overload, you'll definitely see a decrease in efficiency. Deloading and refeeding for a week would correct CNS fatigue.