by Jen Heath
In the first installment, I covered how you should be lifting for a sexy physique. Now I'll cover the topics of nutrition and metabolism. Here are the five key components you'll need to add to the mix to complete the recipe.
The key to simultaneously building muscle and shedding fat is maximizing nutrient partitioning. Nutrient partitioning refers to how many calories are directed into muscular stores verses how many calories are directed into fat stores when you consume food.
Muscle growth occurs mainly through a process of signaling and supply. Before your muscle can grow it has to be "signaled" to grow. You provide the growth signal whenever you tear your muscles down through intense workouts. Once the muscle gets that signal, it has to have enough material on hand to carry out the remodeling process. You provide that raw material when you consume the nutrients your body needs to grow.
In a perfect world, every single calorie you ate would be directed into your muscles without ever spilling over into fat stores. However, it's not quite that simple. The problem is, you can't really localize nutrient intake. In order to get enough nutrients into a muscle for growth to occur, that also means the entire body will have to receive a nutrient excess. What tends to happen when we feed the entire body a nutrient excess? We put on fat.
That explains why it's difficult to build muscle and lose fat at the same time, or gain a substantial amount of muscle without putting on some fat in the process. In order to direct enough muscle-building nutrients to your individual muscles, you have to flood the entire body. So what you really want to do is maximize the ratio of the calories that go into your muscles in relationship to your overall caloric intake.
Look at it like this: Assuming your diet is solid, let's say you have a fat gain threshold of 2000 calories and a muscle gain threshold of 2200 calories. What this means is that in order to supply enough nutrients for your muscles to grow you'd need to consume 2200 calories per day. But that also means that if you eat more than 2000 calories you start putting on fat.
So for each unit of muscle you gain, you'll gain some fat too. But wouldn't it be great if we could keep the fat threshold the same (2000) while lowering the muscle gaining threshold all the way down to 1300 calories per day? That would mean you could eat anywhere from 1300 to 2000 calories per day and simultaneously melt off fat while building lean muscle!
That's what we do when we fully maximize nutrient partitioning! When nutrient partitioning is fully maximized we can gain muscle and burn fat at the same time. This is called steady-state repartitioning. Our weight may not change, but our muscle-to-fat ratio does.
So what can we do to get your body into a solid phase of steady state repartitioning? Well, assuming your training is already maximized, the first thing you have to do is maximize the content and timing of your macronutrient intake.
The first thing we must do is consume a nutrient rich diet. A nutrient rich diet is one that contains a lot of health and muscle building nutrients per calorie. To illustrate the difference between a nutrient dense diet and a standard diet just compare a good 2000 calorie bodybuilding diet to a standard American 2000 calorie diet. They both contain 2000 calories but that's where the similarities end.
The American diet would probably have around 50 grams of protein, 200 grams of simple sugars, and 100 grams of fat (most of it being trans and hydrogenated fats).
A nutrient rich, bodybuilding diet will have a higher protein-to-calorie ratio along with less processed fats and simple sugars relative to total calories. It would have three times as much protein, an equal amount of carbs (but three-fourths less simple sugars), ten times as many anti-oxidants, phytonutrients, vitamins, and minerals, half the overall fat, and ten times as much "good" fat like fish oil.
To set up a nutrient-rich diet it's helpful if you understand a little bit about the various macronutrients and what they can do to help us from a physique transformation perspective:
Supplies muscle glycogen for energy. Glycogen attracts water and this contributes to cellular hydration and swelling, both of which increase anabolic potential.
Important for hormonal status, fighting inflammation, and general health.
The four step maxim to maximum nutrient partitioning is:
1. Eat enough protein to provide raw material for growth.
2. Eat enough carbohydrate to keep your muscle glycogen levels full and keep your muscles in a well-hydrated and anabolic state, but not so much that you spill over.
3. Eat enough fat to add satiety, control blood sugar, and keep hormone levels optimal.
4. Total calories should be set up at a slight deficit, which will allow the body to use fat for fuel.
For most people, maximizing those nutrient numbers will look something like this:
1 to 1.5 grams per pound of lean bodyweight per day
Start at about 1 gram per pound of bodyweight per day and adjust up or down as necessary. Consume approximately half of those carbohydrates in a period from two hours pre-workout to two hours post-workout (pre and post-workout drinks like Surge are great for this.
Half a gram per pound of lean bodyweight (lean body mass) with a minimum of 6 grams coming from omega 3 fish oil such as that contained in Flameout.
Most people can build muscle and shed fat at the same time if they train consistently and eat 4 to 6 meals per day while keeping their macros fairly close to those numbers.
So, what foods should you eat? Here's a basic list of foods that won't steer you wrong:
Fish
Eggs
Chicken breasts
Lean red meat
Cottage cheese
Milk protein isolates
Whey protein isolates
Green vegetables
Salads
Legumes
Low glycemic index fruits
Oatmeal
Sweet potatoes
Mixed grain bread
Fish oil, flax oil, olive oil
Mixed nuts
Now, here's a list of foods that you'd want to try and avoid:
Fatty meats
Fatty dairy foods
Most lunch meat (processed)
Whole milk
White bread
Refined sugars
Most cereals
Soda
Fruit juice
Bagels
Fruit bars
Candy
Margarine
Vegetable oil
Corn oil
Heated or fried oils in general
We can further enhance the nutrient partitioning process via the use of certain supplements. I've noticed many of my female clientele believe that most muscle building supplements are only for men. Creatine is one such example. In my opinion, both men and women should use it.
Nutritional supplements basically enable us to amplify the relative anabolic signaling strength of our nutrient supply. Thus, if you normally had to eat 500 extra calories per day to gain muscle, through the use of proper supplements you might be able to eat maintenance or even below maintenance calories while still maintaining a good muscle building state.
If you were to eat over maintenance calories, supplements would enable you to gain muscle just that much faster. So, what supplements are best for this purpose?
Consider that muscle isn't really built by protein ingestion, but rather the breakdown of that protein into individual amino acids, which then build the muscle. Some of those amino acids are more important than others at building muscle. The really important muscle building aminos are the BCAAs: leucine, isoleucine, and valine.
BCAAs are used directly by the muscles for energy. It makes sense that getting more BCAAs to a muscle would boost anabolism in the muscle, and that's something demonstrated in both empirical observations and scientific studies. (1)
Now, there are two ways to get extra BCAAs into muscle:
1) Consume a ton of extra protein per day (remember that BCAAs are components of protein).
2) Supplement with BCAAs.
The problem with option one is in order to get a decent level of BCAAs we also have to take in gobs of extra protein, which means a lot of additional calories. Thus, option two might be better for those on limited calorie diets.
I personally take in an extra 5-10 grams of BCAA per day during and after my workouts. I take in even more during my competition preparation when I'm really restricting calories in order to help compensate for the lack of actual nutrients being consumed.
Another good nutrient partitioning supplement that has stood the test of time is creatine. Not only will it contribute to immediate strength gains but it allows the body to greatly boost tissue hydration which contributes to an anabolic state.
Typically it would require hundreds of extra carbohydrate calories to get the pump that creatine gives. That "pump" not only means better immediate strength and anaerobic endurance, it also means a muscle will be more apt to grow with less nutrient influx (calories). I personally take in 10 grams per day most of the year.
Now for a supplement that was formulated specifically for women: Biotest's Se7en.
I used the earlier version of Se7en and achieved great results with it. Put this supplement together with BCAA and creatine and, in my opinion, you have an unstoppable trio to use both in calorie deficient states and at times you're trying to accrue lean muscle tissue.
There are lots of other supplements purported to boost partitioning, but those are three I'm convinced have great effects on body composition.
Let's say we have a 135-pound woman at 20% body-fat who's training with purpose and intensity. Her starting intake might look like this:
150 grams of protein per day: 600 calories
135 grams of carb per day: 540 calories
65 grams of fat per day: 585 calories
1725 calories per day
Supplements:
10 grams BCAA taken during and after training
5-10 grams creatine per day
2 capsules of Biotest's Se7en
From here, she'd monitor her strength and body composition and make adjustments up or down as necessary. When a couple of weeks have gone by where she hasn't changed in measurements, skinfolds, and strength, it's time to make adjustments up or down.
Eventually, every woman will hit a point where in order to lose more fat she'll have to reduce calories below what's optimal to feed her muscles for growth. Likewise, in order to gain more muscle she'll have to eat more food than an amount that allows her to lose fat.
So what's a girl to do when that happens? Good question. Here's what I recommend: instead of steady state repartitioning, you'll then work in "cycles."
Let's say a gal begins training properly, follows the above macronutrient and supplement intake, and in three months puts on enough muscle to take her arms from a soft 9 inches to a rock solid 10.5 inches while simultaneously dropping 10 pounds of fat in the process.
But suddenly, despite religiously sticking to her training and diet plan, she gets stuck. She's no longer building any muscle and no longer shedding any fat. So what happened? Well, the problem is really twofold:
1) At this point, she's still training properly and stimulating plenty of muscular breakdown (a.k.a. growth), but her arms have reached a state of homeostasis. The amount of nutrients she's delivering to them (even with supplements) is still not enough to provide the necessary raw material to stimulate growth.
2) With her current diet, the total caloric intake is now too high to cause any further fat loss.
She could raise calories up and increase her nutrient intake. That would enable her to build more muscle. However, that would also mean she wouldn't lose any fat. She could also lower calories and drop some fat. But if her muscles aren't growing now, why would they grow with even less nutrient intake? They won't!
When most people (particularly women) reach this point, they stay stuck for months and months, if not years. They continue to train hard but look basically the same year after year. Fortunately, there is a solution. The solution is to work in short phases where you alternate focused muscle building phases with focused fat burning phases.
Am I recommending a bulking cycle? Not really. What I'm recommending could be better called a lean mass accrual cycle, and it's one of the most effective methods to maintain a more desirable state of leanness during your off season.
A woman could take a month or two, increase her calories by 300-500 per day, and focus on feeding and stimulating her muscles while keeping her body fat relatively constant. During this time she might gain 5-10 pounds of bodyweight. She could then take two weeks to a month and focus on decreasing her caloric intake and increasing her activity to burn fat.
During this time, she'd shed any fat she had accumulated in the increased calorie phase and likely even shed some additional fat. At the end of 6-8 weeks she'd be both noticeably more muscular and leaner. She could continue alternating phases like this indefinitely.
A fat burning diet might look like this:
1-1.5 grams protein per pound of body weight
50-75 grams of carbohydrate per day (mainly coming from green veggies)
Half a gram of fat per pound of bodyweight per day
An additional 45 minutes of cardiovascular activity per week.
Note: Every fourth day eat an extra 200 grams of starchy carbohydrates
A muscle building diet might look like this:
1-1.5 grams protein per pound of body weight
150-300 grams of carbohydrate per day (enough to gain approximately 1 pound per week which will vary depending on the individual woman)
Half a gram of fat per pound of bodyweight per day
You can see the only real difference between a fat loss diet and a muscle gain diet is the variance in carbohydrates. Nothing else would really need to change from the above training scheme. The focus would still be on getting stronger, and inevitably sexier, over time.
There are also other benefits to a cyclical approach. One additional benefit is it'll enable you to build a faster metabolism over time.
Although there are a lot of scientific explanations of how this works, here's a simple summary: Caloric expenditure does seem to chase caloric intake to a good extent. Gaining muscle requires increased eating and training. Good eating, training, and additional muscle mass all build faster metabolisms. The more muscle you gain, the more you have to eat, and the more you eat, the faster your metabolism gets. The faster your metabolism gets the easier it is for you to drop fat.
(Note: In the past it's been touted that each additional pound of muscle you put on your body burns an astronomical amount of additional calories — I've seen as high as 50 — but this isn't really true. Each additional pound of muscle you put on might burn an extra 10 calories per day. The increases in metabolism aren't so much from the increased muscle mass as they are from the optimization in endocrine status, thyroid, and sympathetic nervous system activity inherent to a good lean mass accrual cycle.)
This is in contrast to the approach a lot of fitness oriented women take where they chronically diet year round in an effort to stay ultra lean. Those ladies just end up slowing their metabolisms over time, and I don't want that to be you!
Have you ever seen what happens to a person who diets down to a low body fat and tries to hold that body fat for an extended period of time? For a variety of reasons having to do with their natural body fat homeostasis, their body will often start to rebel against them. They'll often begin to lose muscle and gain fat without really changing their caloric intake.
So a person might diet down to a low body fat on 1600 calories per day, hold it for a while, and suddenly find they start to get weaker and gain fat on that same intake. But let's say they get their body to the leanness they want and decide to take a month where they focus on gaining 4-5 pounds of lean body mass. In order to gain that LBM while still keeping their activity high, they'll probably have to raise their caloric intake up to around 2500 calories per day.
That increase in calories stimulates the metabolism and prevents it from ever slowing. The increased muscle mass is another big benefit. With each subsequent muscle gaining phase they'll usually find they have to eat more and more calories to gain, and with each subsequent fat burning phase they'll be able to eat more and more calories to lose. How about that, ladies? No more complaining about how you have to eat like a bird in order to get lean! Score!
Have you ever heard of bodybuilders eating 6,000 to 8,000 calories per day while still being under 10% body fat? Those athletes certainly don't start off eating that much, and on paper they certainly shouldn't require that many calories. But as the bodybuilder eats, exercises, and pushes his muscularity up, the metabolism increases a lot more than what might be predicted.
A bodybuilder might start off eating 3000 calories and might gain 5 pounds per month off that intake. Yet by the time he's gained 15 or 20 pounds he might find he has to eat 5000 calories per day just to avoid dropping any weight. That's one good way to build the metabolism over time.
And this brings me to the last step in my recipe, one that will help add quality to all the other ingredients you've read about today.
The fat and calorie burning effects of cardio are obvious, but it's also advantageous for partitioning, metabolism building, and muscle building.
Muscle building? But isn't cardio detrimental to muscle growth? Only if you don't eat enough to make up for the calories you burn through it! In fact, as long as you don't overdo it, cardio can actually help you build muscle!
In addition to burning calories, it increases glucose uptake into your muscles, which means your muscles can store more glycogen and you can eat more food without "spilling calories" into fat stores.
Additionally, cardiovascular activity increases muscle capillarization, which means you can get more blood to your muscles. This helps with both nutrient delivery and recovery. The real formula for building your metabolism over time is to do cardio as if you want to be lean, yet lift and eat as if you want to gain muscle. When you combine those three things together you get a lean, muscular body and a metabolism like a furnace.
Regardless of whether you prefer HIIT (high intensity interval training) or regular cardio, either will burn fat, increase nutrient partitioning, increase your work capacity and blood flow, and improve muscle recovery. (2, 3, 4)
So what type of cardio is best and when should you do it? First, let's talk about morning cardio. In a nutshell, it's overrated. And performing completely fasted cardio is a good way to lose muscle. I generally recommend you perform cardio either after your weight training workouts or on days that you're not lifting at whatever time suits you. If you're going to do it first in the morning, at least consume 20-50 grams of protein beforehand.
Now, how about high intensity vs. low intensity cardio? In direct comparisons there's really no contest. High intensity cardio has been shown to be at least twice as effective for fat loss despite much less time investment and half the calorie expenditure during exercise. (5)
Many say the main advantage offered by high intensity cardio is the stimulation of your metabolism that causes you to burn more calories after activity. This is called EPOC, or Excess Post-Exercise Oxygen Consumption. However, if we look to the science, EPOC is most assuredly overrated.
EPOC will average 7-14% of total calories burned during activity. So if you burn 500 calories during a bout of cardio you might burn 35 to 70 after exercise, depending on whether you did low or high intensity cardio. Not a whole lot.
In one study, subjects performed 20 one-minute intervals with two minutes rest between. While the EPOC was about double that found in subjects who performed 30 minutes of steady state work, it still only amounted to about 32 calories. (6)
So if EPOC doesn't really occur much, why is high intensity better? One reason is probably the fact that the more intensive effort gets adrenaline jacked up, which has a positive affect on partitioning, fat burning, and appetite suppression.
Additionally, the glycogen (carbohydrate) depletion that occurs with high intensity activity causes the body to utilize fat more effectively at rest. Glycogen depletion is determined by exercise intensity. When you exercise at a low intensity (as in walking), you primarily burn fat for fuel. When you exercise at a medium intensity (as in slow jogging), you burn a mix of fat and carbohydrate. When you exercise at a high intensity (sprinting), the activity is entirely fueled by the burning of carbohydrates.
Fuel selection acts like a pendulum. When you burn a lot of carbohydrates during activity, your body will burn more fat at rest. That's why glycogen depletion enhances fat oxidation. It makes sense that we'd want to create that depletion to burn fat at rest since the majority of our hours aren't spent training during the day.
All good, right? If you want to be a fat burning, super lean lady all year long just do a lot of super high intensity activity, right? But the same things that make high intensity cardio superior in comparison to regular cardio can also be one of the biggest disadvantages of high intensity for weight training athletes if it's not used judiciously.
Disadvantages? Yep, that's right.
Why is this? Well, what else depletes glycogen and impacts the body and metabolism much like high intensity cardio? Weight training! High intensity cardio is, well, intense. It recruits the muscles and stimulates the metabolism, nervous system, and endocrine system much like weight training, yet it also requires recovery time like weight training.
Your body and your muscles can only handle so much high intensity activity. If you try to do a ton of high intensity cardio in addition to weight training, the following are likely to happen:
A) You'll be chronically recruiting your fast twitch fibers and exposing them to large amounts of endurance work. This will cause some of your fast twitch fibers to take on slow twitch characteristics, which will likely cause you to lose strength and size. (7)
B) You'll be engaging in exercise that requires a high intensity effort every day. Much like trying to lift weight at a high volume six or seven days per week, this high intensity of effort can lead to over-reaching and burn out.
A weight trainer can get on an inclined treadmill and walk for 45 minutes six days a week and not suffer any ill effects. But try getting on a treadmill and running sprints six days per week and see what happens to your strength and energy levels!
People like to argue that low intensity cardio doesn't do a whole lot other than burn calories, yet that could also be considered an advantage. It's basically "free" activity that allows you to recover from your weight training while still getting a fat burning stimulus.
Providing you keep it to the point where you're not coughing up a lung and aren't generating a ton of lactic acid accumulation, it'll burn calories but won't burn you out and won't negatively affect strength. (8) That generally means you should keep your HR at about 120-140. If you have to stop or lower the intensity due to breathlessness or cramping, you're probably exercising too hard.
So girls, what to do? It really depends on your personal needs. I generally recommend a maximum of two 20 minute high intensity cardio sessions per week and up to three sessions per week of long duration cardio.
Two or three total sessions will be about right for most people. You might perform one or two high intensity sessions and one or two normal cardio sessions. If you choose to do high intensity cardio, don't do it on the day immediately prior to your lower body weight training workouts or the day immediately after your lower body weight training workouts. Either do it immediately after you train your legs on the same day, or on another day altogether.
A high intensity cardio session can be done on a bike, treadmill, stair climber, elliptical, or outside on a track. It might look like this: sprint for 45 seconds and go for 1:15 at an easy pace. Repeat 6-10 times.
A long duration cardio session might look like this: Walk on an inclined treadmill at 3.5 mph on 12% incline for three minutes. Jog for one minute at 5.5 mph. Repeat for 30 minutes total.
Although weight training gives you the "meat and potatoes" for achieving that strong sexy body you're after, a proper cardiovascular program will complement that nicely.
Making the progress you want isn't as far away as you thought, nor does it have to elude you any longer. Now you have it. Put the ingredients together, get to cookin', and your body will look leaner, stronger, and sexy as hell!
Jen Heath is a professional natural bodybuilder and training and nutrition design consultant. She can be found at www.jenheath.com and here on this site.
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7. Thayer, Collins, Noble, Taylor. A decade of aerobic endurance training: histological evidence for fibre type transformation. J Sports Med Phys Fitness. 2000 Dec;40(4):284-9.
8. McCarthy JP, Agre JC, Graf BK, Pozniak MA, Vailas AC. Compatibility of adaptive responses with combining strength and endurance training. Med.Sci.Sports Exerc. 1995;27:429-36.
9. Schuenke, Mikat, McBride. Effect of an acute period of resistance exercise on excess post-exercise oxygen consumption: implications for body mass management. Eur J Appl Physiol. 2002 Mar;86(5):411-7. Epub 2002 Jan 29.
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