Read 35 times since Wednesday, January 18, 2012
Most diet plans are based around losing weight, but what should you do if you want to build muscle? Building muscle is probably the second most common request I get as a Glasgow personal trainer after weight loss. Conventional wisdom is to over eat for many weeks while weight training to bulk up before strictly dieting to strip away fat. Unfortunately long term over eating adds lots of fat and under eating costs you lots of muscle so you end up taking 2 steps forward and 2 steps back. A better plan is to follow the feast and famine feeding cycle that shaped our evolution.
It is only recently that ample food supplies have been consistently available. For most of human history this was not the case and the body evolved to react to times of feast and famine in ways that you can manipulate to build muscle. During the initial days of a famine you burn body fat before hormonal changes occur to protect our fat stores to help see us through the famine. Famine also primes the body to respond aggressively to sudden abundance of food to aid survival by prioritising the strength to defend against immediate threats (predators) over the fat stores intended to see you through future famines. So excess calories are initially used to replenish muscle fuel stores before being used to quickly build muscle. After a few days the body stops building new muscle and stores surplus calories as fat.
To mimic this Swedish scientist Torbjorn Akerfeldt promotes 14 days on very low calories then 14 days on high calories. He found that cycling between famine and feast sees a fat/muscle loss ratio of 2:1 during famine but a fat/muscle gain ratio of 2:1 during feast, far better the traditional bulk then cut plan. While this worked for me, and may be the best option from a scientific perspective, the 14 day diet was very hard. It is much easier to sustain 7 days famine followed by 7 days feast long term. A 7 day cycle also eliminates the period at the end of the feast when your body transitions to mostly storing the surplus calories as fat.
As the driving force behind feast and famine feeding is the sudden changes in calorie intake achieving this should be your main concern. The balance of protein, carbohydrates and fats is not too important as long as the famine week intake is low enough to prime the muscle building response to the significantly higher intake during the feast week. Iain Smith (MPhil/CSCS) owns Standout Gym, an independent warehouse gym in Glasgow, focusing on weight loss. He offers small group training as an affordable alternative to Glasgow personal training. Iain is a former international decathlete with 17 years coaching experience. www.standoutgym.com.
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