Subject: The Bodyopus experience week 15 Copyright Lyle McDonald 1996 Date: 1996/08/11
Continuing in the vein of last week, here's the continuation of Lyle's Unofficial Bodyopus FAQ where I try to answer (for the last time?) some of the more common questions I'm having to field about the diet. 10. Ok, the topic of this week's FAQ is Bodyopus Recomposition. I find it strange that this is where people are having the most problems since it's the one area of the book that Dan went into the most detail about. Go figure. First, let me say that I'm not going to give out the exact recomposition numbers. Buy Bodyopus if you want the details. What I will answer is some of the main questions I'm getting in terms of food choice, protein intake, fat intake, supplement intake, etc. 10e. How much fat should I consume and when should I eat it? This question actually came up on Paul Moses' Training and Nutrition list. I hadn't really thought about it before but had to to try and answer it. As far as amounts, in passing (the last sentence of the recomposition chapter in Bodyopus) Dan recommends an intake of Essential Fatty acids of 15% of your maintenance caloric intake. Let's figure maintenance for most of you animals at 3000 calories. 15% is 450 calories or 50 grams of fat for each 24 hours. Here's the conundrum. The point of the recomposition is to crank lots of carbs into the muscles along with high insulin levels to stimulate an anabolic growth response. And, Dan mentioned that the lack or presence of fat can break or make the carb-up. So. no getting around it, we have to take some in (as an interesting contrast, in the Anabolic diet, it is recommended that fat be kept a about 30-40% of total calories, even on weekends. I haven't quite figured out the discrepancy there yet but I'm working on it). But, we know that the addition of fat to a meal will slow gastric emptying and lower the insulin response to a given amount of carbs. A real dilemma. I *think* I have the solution. We know several other things: 1. Immediately after the depletion workout, insulin sensitivity is super high so we can have (and need) super high insulin levels to take advantage. So, we don't really want the fat here. (On which note, I wonder if it's really important to take vanadyl, etc with these first meals. Insulin sensitivity is sky high and they might not even be needed. I could see a good argument for saving the insulin agonists for later in the day when insulin sensitivity is starting to drop.) 2. Right before stopping the carb up, we want to get an insulin spike to cause hypoglycemia. Fat taken in here would limit the insulin response. So, none during these meals. 3. The middle meals are when we are taking in considerable amounts of carbs but insulin sensitivity is lower. So, slowing digestion and lowering the insulin response would likely be a good thing to avoid fat spillover. The fat goes here. So, for the 24 meals of the recarb, I would suggest: Meals 1-4: no fat Meals 5-8: 1/8 of your daily fat intake with each meal (about 5-6 grams or a bit more than 1 teaspoon for the example person above) Meal 9-12: 1/8 of your daily fat intake with each meal Meal 13-16: 1/8 of your daily fat intake with each meal Meal 17-20: 1/8 of your faily fat intake with each meal Meal 21-24: no fat. I could see some rationale for putting more of the fat on meals 9-12 instead of 5-8 since insulin sensitivity *should* be higher earlier on but, for now, I think the above recommendations should be fine. And, recomposition is already anal enough. 10f. Should your diet on Friday be any different than the rest of the low carb days? This is actually a question I asked of Dan but it bears discussion. Recall that the point of the whole recomposition is to rebuild any lost muscle tissue and take advantage of the increase in insulin sensitivity due to carb depletion and the high rep workout we all love so much. Well, we know that saturated fats decrease insulin sensitivity. Now, during the week, this isn't an issue as there aren't any carbs in the diet. No carbs means no insulin. But, on Friday we are getting ready for the big carb-up. Now, we don't know how long saturated fats decrease insulin sensitivity. It could be minutes, or hours or days (if it's days, we're fucked from the get go and it doesn't matter). So, I wondered if there should be any decrease in saturated fats or increase in the use of insulin sensitizers (chromium, etc) on Friday prior to the workout. Dan suggested that saturated fats be avoided on Friday up to the workout. So, I've been shifting from my normally high intake of saturated fats during days 1-4 (Mon thru Thu) with eggs, butter, cheese, red meat to unsaturated fats. A typical Friday eating pattern up to the carb up is: Breakfast: designer with olive oil and flax oil (replaces eggs in butter) Lunch 1 and 2: pink salmon with mayo Since the Friday workout happens early evening, my normal dinner meal of ground beef is avoided. Thus, no saturated fats prior to the carb-up. A bit of a pain in the ass but probably worth it. 10f: The depletion workout. There seems to be a bit of confusion regarding this workout. Common complaints are of nausea or poor carb ups (no pump during the weekend). What I typically see happening is one of two things: 1. Too short of rest periods between sets. This is a long workout, not an impossible workout. Take 1' between sets and 5' between circuits. Also, try to alternate either upper and lower body exercises or pushing and pulling exercise or both. A good circuit might be: leg press/squat, bench, row, leg curl, shoulder press, lat pulldown, calf raise, tricep pushdown, barbell curl, abs, low back rest 5' and repeat. Or, any exercise choice where you group 1. a leg exercise 2. a pushing exercise 3. a pulling exercise 2. Too much weight. Not sure how this got confused but this workout is not supposed to cause any muscle damage. Heavy eccentrics (and the damage they cause) cause short term insulin insensitivity, not what we want for optimal carb up. I've found that using about 50% of your best 6-8 rep weight is about right for 10-20 reps. And, you should not be taking these sets anywhere close to failure. Stop at least 3 reps out if not more. And, keep the cadence of each rep fast but controlled (a 1/1 cadence works pretty well). Also, some have asked when do you know when to end the workout. Dan mentions that it typically takes 2 hours and anywhere from 2 to 20 sets should be done. It's hard to describe the feeling but you just 'know' when you're done. If you've ever done long endurance training and bonked, this is the feeling you are looking for. It's sort of the same kicked in the balls feeling you get the first week on Bodyopus. Alternately, simply use a drop in reps with a given weight as an indicator that your glycogen is getting depleted. So, if on leg presses I went: 1st circuit: 300X20 (3 reps short of failure) 2nd circuit: 300X20 (3 reps short of failure 3rd circuit: 300X20 (getting harder) 4th circuit: 300X18 (stopping 3 reps short of failure) I'd take that as a signal that my quads were getting pretty well depleted. If other body parts will still strong, I'd keep working them until the same thing happened. I imagine that larger muscle groups will take more sets to glycogen deplete than smaller but it's just a guess. On the one hand, larger muscles store more glycogen. On the other, for a given absolute effort, they should use as much glycogen as a smaller muscle would for a given amount of time. Oh yeah, repeat sets of 20 in the squat aren't very fun. 11. Water during recarb. This is something that just ocurred to me this last weekend. Again, understand that the purpose of the recarb is to ramjet glucose, electrolytes AND water into the muscles to cause the swelling that seems to promote protein synthesis. We know that for every gram of glycogen stored, an additional 3-4 grams of water is stored as well. We are storing shitloads of glycogen in the muscles on the weekends. For optimal growth stimulus, we need shitloads of water. Lets say that over 24 hours I am taking in 600 grams of carbohydrate and that 100% of it is going into the muscles. At 4 grams of water per gram of glycogen, we need 2400 grams of water for optimal results. Now, 1 gram of water is equivalent to 1 cubic centimeter (cc) of water. And there are 29.573 cc per oz of water. So, 2400 cc/29.537 = 81 oz of water. 8 oz of water is 1 cup so that's 10 cups of water in the first 24 hours. Now, most foods have some water content and you will be getting some in your first liquid carb meals. But, for the sake of maximal recarb, I would suggest drinking as much water as you can put down (assuming you're not carbing up for a contest and have to worry about water spillover to the skin). You'll just eliminate (i.e. pee) whatever's extra anyhow. For the same reason, I would suggest staying away from caffeine or any other diuretic during this period. Also, Dan has pointed out that diuretics will deplete sodium which is necessary for optimal recarb. As talked about last time, you probably can use some time off the ECA stack anyhow. Next time: more recomposition confusion and some other tidbits that occur to me. Lyle On that note, anyone else out there have major unanswered Bodyopus questions that I didn't answer in either the diaries or this FAQ? If so, please send them so I can get the damn things answered once and for all. I guess I'll have to get my WWW page put together now so I can archive this sucker somewhere. ------------------------ The body composition log: Taken with Slimguide calipers first thing Monday morning upon awakening. Day Date Wt Pec Abs SI Thigh Sum3 BF% FM FFM -------------------------------------------------------------- Mon 7/8 152 3 20 10 6 29 8.5 12.75 139.25 Mon 7/15 157 3 20 11.5 6 29 8.5 13.35 143.65 Mon 7/22 159 3 21 13 6 30 8.5 13.5 145.5 Mon 7/29 162 3 24 15 6 33 9.4 15.2 146.8 Mon 8/5 164 3.5 24 16.5 6 33.5 9.4 15.4 148.6 Notes: Ok, I don't know what I did last week but it worked much better. Instead of gaining 2 lbs of fat and 1 lb of lean body mass, I gained a little fat and almost 2 lbs of lean body mass. Perhaps the new workout format is the culprit. Eating and carbing stayed about the same (still just force feeding most of the time) so that's the only thing I can figure. IAE, this gives me at least one more week of mass gaining (and perhaps also week 6) before I start cutting again. Which is fine with me since dieting sucks the big hairy one. Key: BF% = body fat percentage FM = fat mass in lbs FFM = fat free mass (total weight - FM) My week at a glance: ------------------- Sunday: As stated last week, I did an easy 45' skate this morning with friends. Continued carbing until 6pm and then switched back to fat and protein. Got a long day at work tomorrow but have to get psyched for 305 (or might go 315) on the squat bar tomorrow. As described last week, I changed my workout for last and the next two weeks. It is: Mon Wed Fri --------------------------------------------- Squat (4/6-8) DL (2/6-8 or 5X5) Squat (2/6-8) Leg curl (2/6-8) Overhead press (3/6-8) Leg curl (2/6-8) Chins (4/6-8) Barbell curl (3/6-8) Seated row (4/6-8) Inc. DB bench (4/6-8) Tri. Pushdown (3/6-8) Machine bench (4/6-8) Seated row (2/6-8) Forearms (whatever) Chins (2/6-8) Machine bench (2/6-8) Abs (whatever) Inc. DB bench (2/6-8) After two light warmups (50 and 75% of top weight for the day), I jump to the heaviest weight I'll use on that exercise to failure. Additional sets are taken at a 5% decrease from the original weight with the goal of getting identical reps to failure on each set. Additionally, antagonistic bodypart exercises (i.e. chins and inclines, flat bench and cable row) are alternated with about a 1:30 rest in between. This gives 3'+ rest between exercises without doubling the length of the workout. (See last week for a longer discussion of this workout.) Monday: As always, nothing new to report. Same food, same supplements, same everything. But, what a fucking day I had. Appointments started at 7:45am and ended at 6pm (I did have some breaks in there). It didn't help that I stayed up until 1 am last night wasting time on this idiot box computer. After appointments, I trained the ex-girlfriend (7:45pm-8:45pm). Then I trained myself. I was exhausted before I ever started warming up but that's the life of a jock. I Took my standard 2 grams of glutamine 30 minutes prior to the workout along with 600 mg of calcium (Pasquale suggests that it may help prevent fatigue as it's one of the major ions involved in muscular contraction) and 500 mg Vitamin C (to help with muscle inflammation). Monday workout: I should lift when I'm exhausted more often. Although I may have crippled myself in the process, I had another in a string of incredible workouts. Poundages and reps are jumping on all exercises. Squats went from 285X8 last Friday to 315X5. I probably jumped the weight too quickly but I didn't feel like loading the bar to 305. And, 3 45's per side looks manly. Considering a past PR of 315X1 or 2, I'm pretty happy about this. On incline DB's, I bumped from 55's to 60's (also a PR) with no drop in reps (got 8 last time and 8 this time). This is the first time I've ever handled weights this big in this exercise. Chins are almost back to bodyweight (next Monday workout). Even machine bench and cable row (worked as secondary exercises to chins and inclines) went up. Don't know what it is but something is working. I likely won't be able to move tomorrow but it's worth it. Also, back at home and I'm in ketosis yet again within about 30 hours from stopping carbs. I wish I'd known about this workout while doing my cutting cycle. An extra day in ketosis would have been a very nice thing when I was cutting. Also, I didn't take any Super Vanadyl Fuel yesterday or today to see what would happen. No chromium or magnesium either (other than what's in my multi- vitamin). And I still hit ketosis the same as the past 4 weeks. Which suggests to me that they just aren't that important in the grand scheme of things. Of course, we'll see if I'm in ketosis tomorrow. Tuesday: Now, most Tuesday mornings I've dropped back out of ketosis. This morning I didn't. All I can figure is that the longer I'm on this diet, the quicker I'll get into ketosis and the easier I'll stay there. Decided to go for a 20' easy walk pre-breakfast for two reasons: 1. Burn some ketones 2. Start reconditioning my body to do cardio for when I start cutting in about 10 days. I'm looking sooo forward to it. BTW, that's sarcasm. While I dread the idea of restricted calories and daily pre-breakfast cardio, I look forward to getting below my previous best 8.5% bodyfat and having the abs that I've wanted for the last 7 years or so. And, this time, come hell or high water, it will happen. To badly paraphrase Scarlett O'hara in "Gone with the Wind": With grog as my witness, I will never be fat again. Or something like that. Gotta go take a shower and go hurt some people. Actually, when all was said and done, I probably put in about an hour of cardio today. I forgot that I get to walk with clients (we don't have friggin treadmills at the Wellness center). more than I would have liked but all very low intensity. My lower body is torched today. Quads screaming. Hams decimated. Ass blasted (hee, hee, anyone seen the Butt Blaster machine at your gym?). My low back is killing me (squats and deads make Lyle a sore boy). It feels like I tweaked something in my right glute (feels like a pinched nerve. I hope it's not sciatica) with my overly macho antics last night (just so you know, jumping from 285 to 315 lbs on an exercise is not generally a good idea. But, I'm a dumbass sometimes and what little testosterone I have takes over my brain. Also, 315 looks a lot cooler than 305 (umm, that's 2 45's a 35 a 5... Oh, fuck it just put 3 wheels up there). And, I've only got 5 more workouts in the mass cycle before I start cutting bodyfat. Training will likely change (not sure what at this point since I haven't decided on what dieting protocol I'm to use. More details coming later) but will definitely be lower volume. I hurt. I need a hug. Or some jelly beans would do nicely. Can't they make these with nutrasweet? Wednesday: Did my normal carb-spike with jelly beans and candy corns today (also with 1 scoop Ultra Fuel and 1 scoop designer whey) first meal of the day. My buddy MF (who I have incorrectly listed as Marc Flores in this diary. I have apologized to Marc Florio in private email but wanted to give him due credit here) suggests that I at least try doing the carb spike with a maltodextrin/ glucose polymer to compare results and see if I get back into ketosis faster. Thing is, I still can't find any of the shit. All the supplements I can find have some amount of fructose in it which makes it no better or worse than jelly beans and they taste better. Maybe next week. My whole body hurts and I really don't want to lift today. But, considering that I felt this bad on Monday and had one of the best lifts of my life, I'm ready. Took my 2 gms glutamine, 600 mg calcium, 500 mg Vitamin C 30 minutes before. Wednesday workout: Well, tonight was tough. I can tell that the workload of the Monday workout is taking it's toll. Decided to go for it on deads today. Jumped from 225X8 last week to 275X5 and then ramped down 3 sets. Jumped too high on shoulder DB presses but bis and tris got stronger. I'm still trying to figure out why my DB presses are only 10 lbs less than my incline DB presses. Either my DB press is very good (for me) or my inclines realy suck. Same difference either way. I was pretty nauseous during this workout. Something tells me that dinner of two chicken breasts with mayo was not the best thing to do 2 hours prior to workout. I managed to get through it without yacking but I sure didn't enjoy the workout. Oh, yeah, back in ketosis before the workout which doesn't usually happen (usually takes until after). Which supports my theory that the body gets used to being in ketosis and gets there more easily as time passes. Thursday: Nothing to report today. Ate protein and fat. I hate my job. I still don't have a girlfriend or a life. At least I have the carb-up. Oh, I did sit down and do some calcuations for my cutting cycle to see what I have to accomplish to come in at 5-6% bodyfat by the end of the 10weeks I allotted (i.e. the length of the MM2K contest). The numbers look bad and I don't think I've given myself enough time. Gonna be another kamikaze ketogenic diet cycle for Lyle. At least I know what I'm doing this time around. Friday: This morning was a typical day. Switched to unsaturated fats as described above. Going to train the ex early (she's doing a shortened depletion workout) and then train myself. Decided to get out of ketosis before training so took approx. 50 grams carbs with 18 grams whey about 1.5 hours out. Even though I'm doing a tension workout, I still want to make sure I burn glycogen for fuel instead of ketones. Also, MF has suggested in private email that ketogenic workout, on top of not being fun to do, may compromise progress. Too complicated to get into here. Friday workout: Workout went ok. This was the first one I've had were things didn't go swimmingly. Made a bit of progress on squats (a rep here and there), machine benches and rows went well as did inclines and chins. I imagine by the 5th week of full tilt training, I'm a bit overtrained anyhow. One more week (weak?) of the heavy stuff and then I start cutting. Since I know this cutting cycle will go perfectly (since I got to iron out all the problems in the first 10 weeks), I'm already planning my next mass phase. Think I'll do a more traditional powerlifting cycle along the lines of: Mon: squat, calf raise, abs Tue or Wed: bench, delts, tris Fri: deadlifts, rows and curls or chins and shrugs, grip and go 5X5 on all exercises. If you're not familiar with the 5X5 system, it's a time tested method of adding strength and size. You do 2 progressive warmups of 5 reps and then 3 work sets of 5 reps with the same weight. Whenever you can get all three work sets for 5 clean reps, you add weight. Very basic. Very simple. Very effective. The only thing to watch out for with the split above is overtraining the low back. For those pulling major weight in the DL, you might be better off only training it to maximum every other week. Saturday: Guess what I did today. Ate carbs. Slept. Ate some more carbs. Slept some more. The only thing I don't like about this diet is the total non-productivity on the weekends. I just eat and sleep all day. Sunday: Well, after much debate, and looking at some calculations, I've decided to start cutting this next week (i.e. tomorrow). To start the process, I went for a long, long skate this morning after dropping some ECA plus tyrosine. After 5 weeks without it, I was definitely wired. Put in about 2.5 hours total with several friends. Probably a bit too much but it was all at very low intensity. Continued carbing until 6pm to make sure I have enough carbs to get through tomorrow's workout. I'll discuss some dieting options and what I'm going to be doing this following cutting cycle in next week's update. See ya next week. Lyle McDonald, CSCS