by Siim Land
8 and 9 mean that you’ll feel great and are motivated to train. You’re eager to push yourself hard and aren’t afraid of squats, deadlifts or even HIIT. Have a heavy workout.
Don’t let yourself go below 6 or 7. This compounding effect will make weaker and destroys your nervous system. Most importantly, don’t neglect recovery. For the beneficial adaptations to actually sink in we need to give our body some time to repair itself. If we were to bust in another sledgehammer without having healed the previous impact, then the super-compensation and growth will never take effect. Frequency, volume, and intensity go hand in hand and we should always choose 2 of them.
Principles to Remember
I have to say that I’m not trying to force you into any given way of exercising because it all still comes down to what you’re trying to accomplish. But there are still some key points you should keep in mind.
When training, have a clear idea of what you’re trying to achieve. Exercise, go for a walk, play sports and do yoga just for fun, but train with a specific goal in mind.
Structure your workout routines around only 2 of the 3 variables of the triad. They are frequency, intensity, and volume. Don’t try to scale them up all at once.
When you’re aerobic and can breathe easily through your nose, then you’re burning primarily fat. If you start breathing heavily through the mouth, then you’ve reached the anaerobic zone and will be utilizing glycogen for fuel.
If you do cardio, then avoid the Black Zone. Running and cycling for more than 30 minutes are supposed to be aerobic. Start slow and you’ll be able to go faster as your heart rate improves.
Doing Tabata and HIIT is a much more time-efficient way of improving cardiovascular health for the majority of people.
Resistance training is a lot more important for health, longevity, muscle growth and bone density. The least you should be doing is 12 minutes per week but for more optimal growth slightly more is needed.
Nutrition is more important than exercise. Whoever you may be, lowering your carbohydrate intake will be beneficial for your health and body composition. But low carb won’t work if you don’t have an idea of what you’re doing. It would only keep you in the Black Hole of eating.
Instead of trying to avoid the momentary discomfort of working out, you’d have to muster enough guts and courage to occasionally push a heavy boulder up the hill. Once you do that, you don’t have to compensate that much for your lack of insulin sensitivity with other miracle drugs or interventions – you’re just fit to handle it. That’s the idea of cycling anabolism and catabolism as well – sometimes you need both. The next chapter delves deeper into this topic.
Chapter VIII
Anabolic Autophagy
“The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart.
One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
Albert Camus
One of the ultimate pursuits of physique building is to build more muscle and lose fat. Preferably simultaneously and as fast as possible.
When it comes to burning fat and losing weight then intermittent fasting has been shown to be very effective. Not only due to the physiological effects of fasted ketosis but also because of the increased adherence and convenience.
Fasting is also one of the critical components to overcoming this dichotomy between mTOR and autophagy. It’s the quintessential component that will flip the context of how these pathways manifest completely upside down.
What about muscle growth and bodybuilding? Can you build lean mass with intermittent fasting and time-restricted feeding? Or are you destined to be at the mercy of meal-prep, nutrient timing, and the anabolic window?
This chapter will delve into the realm of anabolism through resistance training, protein intake, nutrient partitioning, and intermittent fasting.
Can You Build Muscle and Lose Fat at the Same Time
Like mentioned in earlier chapters, being in a fasted state is a catabolic stressor to the body, which is the opposite of anabolism. If you’re depleted of your endogenous resources, it’s very difficult to build something out of nothing.
This coincides with physics and Newton’s First Law of Thermodynamics, which goes like this as viewed through the anabolic window:
To lose fat you have to be at an energy deficit i.e. burn more energy than you consume.
To build muscle you have to be at an energy surplus i.e. consume more energy than you burn.
It might seem obvious and self-explanatory because energy can’t just appear and disappear. However, muscle and fat tissue have distinctive roles and they’re used differently by the body as well.
A surplus of calories is context dependent because it can cause a completely different NET gain effect on body composition, depending on the proportions of macronutrients and quality of nutrients. Furthermore, overall conditions on the body are equally as determining in what the person’s going to look like. The same applies to a deficit of calories combined with training.
Calories aren’t just calories because they can be partitioned differently according to the macronutrient ratios, quality of nutrients, hormone levels, training status, and overall energetic demands on the body.
Menno Henselmans, the founder of Bayesian Bodybuilding, is a scientist and physique coach who’s written an amazing article about this on his website (https://bayesianbodybuilding.com/gain-muscle-and-lose-fat-at-the-same-time/). I’m going to reiterate a lot of what he’s said there to convey the idea of how it’s possible to build muscle and lose fat at the same time.
Calorie Partitioning and Muscle Growth
In 1982 Heymsfeld et al assessed the biochemical composition of muscle tissue in normal and semi-starved individuals[385]. This is what human muscle tissue is composed of (See Figure 57).
Figure 57 What muscle tissue is composed of
According to this, muscle is composed of a lot of water (H2O), different proteins, stored glycogen and triglycerides, which are energy substrates. This shows that you don’t need a whole lot of extra energy to build muscle as long as there’s an adequate stimulus for growth. Most of these „ingredients“ can already be found inside the body.
If your workouts are stimulating the muscles enough and if you follow it up with adequate muscle protein synthesis by consuming enough protein, then the rest of what you need can be derived from stored body fat. Likewise, you can gain fat and lose muscle at the same time by doing a lot of catabolic exercise like chronic cardio for hours and over-consuming daily calories with very little protein.
It also shows that it’s still possible to gain muscle and lose fat at the same time if you’re clever with training load, nutrient partitioning, and meal timing. Therefore, energy conservation is irrelevant to caloric partitioning and how your body composition changes.
There have been several studies showing how it’s possible to build muscle and lose fat at the same time:
Overweight police officers with 26% body fat started weight training and lost 9.3 pounds of fat while gaining 8.8 pounds of lean mass in 12 weeks[386].
Women who start resistance training lose fat and gain muscle[387]. Sometimes even when they’re on sub-optimal diets.
Elite level gymnasts on low carb ketogenic diets dropped their body fat percentage from 7.6% to 5% and gained 0.9 pounds of muscle[388]. They also increased relative strength and the amount of chest to bar pull-ups they could do while training up to 4 hours a day and eating less than 22 grams of carbs a day.
Many powerlifters and strength athletes recomp their bodies consistently by losing fat mass and increasing their lifts[389].
An extremely overweight person who hasn’t trained before may start resistance training at a huge caloric deficit and they’re more than likely to end up with losing body fat and building muscle.
These are not anecdotal results or broscience as they’ve been replicated by both elite athletes as well as overweight people. It is possible to build muscle and lose body fat at the same time, resulting in improved b
ody composition. You don’t have to even eat anything to refill your muscle glycogen after working out. Whaaat?
It’s true that carbohydrates immediately after resistance training exercise will replenish glycogen stores faster just by virtue of them being consumed. However, compared to just drinking regular water, there isn’t much difference in the coming few hours.
Pascoe et al (1993) did an experiment on two groups of men who trained leg extensions in a fasted state[390]. Some of the subjects were given 1.5 g/kg of a carbohydrate solution and the others an equal amount of water. Total force production, pre-exercise muscle glycogen content, and degree of depletion weren’t significantly different between the two.
During the initial 2-hour recovery, the CHO group had a significantly greater muscle glycogen re-synthesis compared to the H2O group. However, after 6 hours, muscle glycogen was restored to 91% of pre-exercise levels in the CHO group and 75% in the H2O group. Keep in mind that this was fasted – no food was consumed beforehand nor afterwards. The carbs did promote muscle glycogen resynthesis slightly more but the subjects who didn’t consume any calories at all still resynthesized 75% of the glycogen they had lost during the workout.
That’s just mind-boggling – you don’t have to eat anything at all to restore the glycogen you’ve lost. Of course, having something to eat will promote recovery and muscle growth but the self-resourcefulness of your body is just phenomenal.
The 1.5 g/kg of carbs simply consumed in a solution isn’t something I’d volunteer for. For an average person weighing 70-90 kilos, that would entail over 100 grams of carbs just from the drink. That’s not a really good trade-off in terms of the insulin spike and carb load. The effects weren’t even that significantly better…
The carbs in Pascoe’s study spiked glycogen resynthesis during the first 2 hours post-workout but by the 6-hour mark it had kind of flattened out a little bit. The higher glycogen rates in the CHO group were then primarily due to the ingested carbohydrates not because of carbs flipping some sort of a magic switch. Most of the work was done by the body itself. But how does this work?
The adipose tissue consists of stored triglycerides, which is an ester comprising of three fatty acid molecule chains and a glycerol backbone that holds them together. This single fat particle can cover most of the body’s metabolic needs in at least the short term. Fat is fuel that most tissues and muscle can use.
Figure 58 Different fuel alternatives the body can use to produce energy
However, the brain and some other organs still need a small amount of glucose because fatty acids themselves can’t cross the blood-brain-barrier. During glucose deprivation, the liver will convert that glycerol backbone into glucose through the process of gluconeogenesis. The other 3 fatty acid chains will be metabolized into ketones and all of these substrates will be used to cover the brain’s energy demands.
Even if you’re not eating anything you can resynthesize the glycogen you’ve lost during exercise. Part of the restored glycogen will come from glycerol and fatty acid gluconeogenesis but a significant proportion will also come from lactate[391].
Lactate is the byproduct of glucose metabolism and it’s been shown to contribute up to 18% of skeletal muscle glycogen synthesis after high-intensity exercise[392]. Basically, during high-intensity workouts, you’re producing a lot of lactic acid by burning off your muscle glycogen. To eliminate the burn effect and restore the glycogen you lost, the body uses some amounts of that lactate for muscle glycogen resynthesis. Whaatt...that’s amazing! Your body literally recycles the energy you burned off and then restores it.
Figure 59 The conversion of lactate into glucose through gluconeogenesis and back again
That’s just phenomenal – your body literally is a survival machine that can adapt to almost everything. It means that even if you don’t consume any food at all, you could fuel a few good workouts with just the resynthesized glycogen from your own endogenous energy stores. While still not having eaten anything.
It means that even if you’re eating a high carb diet you need far fewer carbs to replenish muscle glycogen than you think and you’re wasting a lot of readily available fuel that’s already produced by your body. With keto-adaptation, you’re more likely to increase the rate at which lactate and glycerol contribute to muscle glycogen resynthesis without even eating any food at all because of limited glucose in the diet.
This is just an example of how proper fuel partitioning can make you gain muscle and lose fat at the same time. You can be in a caloric deficit and still build lean tissue as long as you train enough and provide the other components of muscle protein synthesis i.e. protein, amino acids, and leucine. The body has the energy – fatty acids, lactate, ketones, glycerol, and glucose – it just needs the building blocks from food. A clever and carefully orchestrated nutrition plan would be structured around optimizing lean muscle growth with virtually zero fat gain.
Furthermore, meal timing and protein intake will be even more important for making this kind of a recomposition possible. There are certain times the body needs more fuel and amino acids than at others. For instance:
After working out, the muscles are more prone to shuttle the nutrients you’ve consumed into glycogen stores and to stimulate muscle protein synthesis. In that scenario, all the calories you eat would be primarily directed towards positive muscle growth rather than fat accumulation because the body prioritizes recovery rather than storage.
On the flip side, eating a bunch of excess calories without having moved a flower will inevitably be more pro-fat gain just because the body isn’t under such energetic conditions that would favor high energy intake. What the body doesn’t need right away will be used for storage.
Of course, at the end of the day, what you do throughout the entire 24-hours is going to dictate the end result. However, it’s safe to say that some moments are more important than others and they’ll yield a more favorable outcome in terms of body composition.
In the case of intermittent fasting, you would inevitably see a much bigger lean muscle gain if you were to consume most of your calories after a resistance training workout. The dominos will all be set in line – the mechano overload from exercise, depleted glycogen stores, activated mTOR, and nervous system fatigue – everything is much favorable for building muscle as long as you stimulate MPS and bring in the building blocks. Eating that same food without having stimulated these anabolic mechanisms won’t be nearly as effective. You may still gain lean muscle if you workout afterwards but it wouldn’t be that well partitioned.
If you haven’t worked out and the muscles aren’t in need of recovery, it’s better to not eat anything and continue to fast. At least that’s what I would do. I mean, if the anabolic signal hasn’t been set, then I’d prefer to continue fasting as to reap the benefits of more autophagy, get into deeper ketosis, and burn extra fat. The only time I want to eat is after having trained and stimulated the muscles as to make the calories more directed towards lean muscle growth.
Most people would see a more optimal body recomposition with more muscle and less fat if they were to backload the majority of their calories into the post-workout scenario. The thing is that there’s only a certain amount of calories you need to build muscle and in order to lose fat you can’t be eating an unlimited amount of food. Therefore, with limited calories, it’s simply smarter to consume them only when there’s an actual need for it.
Intermittent fasting and time-restricted feeding are such powerful tools for building muscle and burning fat at the same time.
Whenever you’re fasting, you’ll be burning more fat, suppressing hunger, and promoting growth hormone that helps to maintain muscle.
You don’t need a bunch of calories or energy to do strength-based resistance training. That’s the main catalyst for muscle growth and it can be easily done with limited supplies.
Eating food after working out will promote more muscle growth rather than fat gain. It will facilitate a more anabolic response whil
e still eating fewer calories.
Eating more food before working out may make you lose a bit more muscle if you’re eating at a caloric deficit. The reason being nutrient partitioning and meal timing.
That’s why even if you’re not fasting that aggressively you’d still want to fast as long as you can every day and eat most of your protein and calories after working out. If you want to build lean muscle with virtually zero fat gain that is.
As long as there’s an adequate stimulus there will be a sufficient response. The degree of how much or effective it is depends on many variables we’ve been talking about indefinitely by now. You just have to know it’s possible, understand the principles, and use various tools to control the direction you’re heading towards.
Losing Muscle While Fasting
Now that I’ve shown how it’s possible to build muscle and lose fat at the same time, I want to turn to refuting some of the myths about intermittent fasting and muscle growth.
You might have heard from bodybuilding experts and fitness gurus that you need to eat every few hour or else... or else you’re going to lose all your muscle mass. I’m going to tell you right away that yes that is possible if you don’t know what you’re doing. If you do things right you’ll be actually able to build lean muscle while still losing fat.
One of the biggest reasons why fasting doesn’t equal immediate muscle loss is because of growth hormone. Under normal conditions, your body has only one spike of growth hormone in the morning and another one at night.
Studies have found that when you’re fasting, your body goes through these spikes of growth hormone several times during the day[393]. So, you experience surges of growth hormone more frequently when in a fasted state. Part of the reason has to do with the body trying to preserve more muscle despite being deprived of calories.