Simple Supplements

Given this whole Animal Cuts / ZMA thing… I’ve been thinking about supplements a bit the last few days. And I think I should stop going crazy trying supplements. Especially supplements that play around with hormones – they really don’t work for me.

So – the supplements that I’m very happy taking right now:

• Protein – whey and caesin
• BCAA
• Creatine
• Carb – waxy maize
• NO Supplement (motivation and dedication at the gym)
• Multivitamin
• Omega 3
• Greens+
• Meal Replacement Drink

The only one of these that I’m not taking right now is the NO supplement, and that’s primarily because I’m already drinking too much! When I move to Extreme Fitness, I’ll fit that in in the morning walk up to the gym.

One sidenote… I don’t want to exclude a fat burner from the mix, given that a half to one week stint on the burner can do wonders for my system. So I’m going to include it in SMALL DOSES:

• Fat Burner – Animal Cuts

And that’s it. Really. I don’t want to boost testosterone, I don’t want more Size On kind of solutions that taste uber sweet and are made of pure sugar… I don’t want to keep trying. I’m happy to keep things somewhat basic and go from there Because balance is vital here. That’s what I’ve got to remember… but this doesn’t mean there’s any negative to what I’ve been experiencing thus far

Thomas DeZago – Training Plan

Just in case the training plan disappears from bodybuilding.com, which can happen a lot, I wanted to ensure I captured it here on the site.

Click on for the plan…

Bad Nutrition

I’ve learnt my lesson. Last weekend was terrible, and still now – I feel bad. OK – some of this may be down to the fact that I’m managing the result of those vaccine’s, but I still feel bloated and not totally great.

I’ve learnt my lesson. When I want to splurge, I splurge in moderation, and with good stuff. Instead of a Domino’s pizza, a gourmet pizza (lower in fat), a tenderloin, a wild salmon, a rich pasta… something that has some some positive nutritional value for me.

Because as it stands, I’m expecting that this week nothing’s happened. I don’t feel right. I don’t feel like I’ve progressed, even though I know I have. Thank goodness I’ve had two weeks to lose that final 0.5% bf. This weekend and next week I’m going to be studiously following my nutrition plan to ensure that last 0.5% falls away. Because it has to. I need it to.

Understanding Insulin

What I’m learning…

• Insulin manages the body’s blood / sugar level.
• It acts as a transport for nutrients – pushes them directly into the muscles or fat cells.
• The negative of Insulin is that it can transport nutrients to muscles if they muscles are willing to accept them.
• On the flipside, it automatically shuts down fat burning – meaning any surplus carbs that induced the insulin spike – if not utilized by muscles – will go into fat storage.
• This means timing is vital.
• Muscles are most receptive after you’ve been destroying them after a hard weights workout. Best to create an insulin spike right after the workout.
• That insulin spike should be supported by protein so that it’s shoveled directly into the muscles.
• A liquid drink immediately following the workout would spike and get protein to the muscles faster… then a whole food meal about 30 mins later. Potentially with another whole food meal about 60-90 minutes after that.
• The peak period of muscle willingness is 3 hours post workout – this should be leveraged.
• The body can’t differentiate between a small candy bar, or a large meal – so the insulin spike remains the same, no matter how large or small the original ignition was.
• Stick with pasta, rice, potatoes, oatmeal, and other classic bodybuilding sources of carbs, and you’ll probably hit the mark pretty well.

One recommendation I’ve read about:

• Have a high carb & protein shake immediately after the workout.
• For me – at 165lbs – I should have about 35-40g of carbs immediately post workout.
• Whey protein should account for about 40-50g.
• Liquid is best immediately after the workout, as it’ll prime the muscles. About 30 or so mins later, another boost of whole foods with the same concentration (40g carbs, 50g protein). Whole foods are recommended for the remaining meals.

Sidenote: in reading Precision Nutrition, they recommend men to have about 60g of protein on each sitting. Adding another 10g may be tough, but not impossible.

One option that’s been recommended, is that you have about 40-50% of your daily intake in the 3 hours immediately after training. So the shake, and then meal. We can probably also include the pre- and during-workout shakes here too. But that’s me wondering – rather than noting from specifics.

Summary:

• You want a significant insulin spike immediately after training.
• The benefits of training last 3 hours after training – this is the window to pack as much protein and muscle building nutrients into the system as possible.
• After the workout, immediately have a shake high is simple carbs (30-40g), protein (50-60g) and creatine.
• 30 mins after the workout, have whole foods that match the same criteria as above (minus creatine).
• 90-120 mins after, have an additional whole foods meal that also matches the same criteria (minus creatine).

I’ve got excerpts from the references after the break…

More on Insulin

So here it is. The straight and narrow / simple:

So, time carb intake right with exercise and you can get a lot of those muscle-building and glycogen-storing benefits of insulin. Then, back off the carbs.

Have a huge carb intake after the workout. This’ll ensure the muscles get the greatest input and ability to grow. Then back off the carbs. Have to remember this for mass gain cycle.

Nutrition Rotation

Another piece of advice from PN that I’m going to implement hopefully soon – is the goal of rotating your nutrition. Right now, my diet is pretty static. It’s chicken and rice / pasta in the evening, turkey with crackers and peanut butter for lunch and 5x eggs and wholewheat toast in the morning. It’s structured, and the same, day in day out.

There are two things wrong with that:

1. It’s boring. Getting to Weds and thinking that you’ve got another 3 days of chicken and rice… kind of demotivates you.
2. It doesn’t keep the body guessing. The body gets used to it too quickly, and then doesn’t need to adjust anymore.

So that’s what I’m going to try and do… rotate things more often. I still live close to work, so I can rotate my lunches… even if that means making an omlette or something. The PN package has some amazing ideas that I’ve already looked through – and I’m excited… tacos, omlettes, blah blah blah… things that I haven’t thought about for quite some time. It’s gonna be good… and hopefully this’ll get me more excited too!!!!

ReFeed / Go Wild Day

I was just reading through some articles on Precision Nutrition, and they talk about a ‘ReFeed’ day… or what I’d call a ‘Go Wild’ day.

If you stick to a structured meal plan for 2 weeks, then there’s one day when you can ‘Go Wild.’ It should be planned for in advance, and you can have anything within reason. That within reason means: 3-3.5x the standard calorie allowance for the week. AND it means that you have to be 100% committed during the other 13 days. No deviations.

A couple of reasons for me noting this:

1. This is similar to my strategy right now, of having every Saturday off nutritionally. Well, I don’t mean EVERY Sat off, I mean dinner. This supports this strategy (albeit doing it less often – once every two weeks, rather than weekly)… something to focus on.
2. When you splurge, you also do a weight training session – all those additional calories need to go somewhere, and they should go to rebuild your body, rather than directly to your stomach. Right now, Sat is typically a walk far day, and not a workout day. I should turn that around.
3. It’s good insight for the next phase / part of my training plan – aka starting in 2010. I’ll have the Precision Nutrition plan – which I hope will be useful to me (we’ll see), and implementing some of these recommendations will also help a lot.

Days 31-32

I was up at the cabin this weekend. It was a really good weekend. I slept a lot (sorry Murray). Apparently my body needed a lot of recovery from the past week. I’m glad my body got what it needed.

Nutrition wise, I was extremely good… no white foods (yippee)… all good!

Probably the most important element of this weekend was the settling in of this plateau state, and what I can and need to do to get over it. As it typical for me, I’m not going to take this situation lying down. I’m going to achieve 20% bf by the time I leave to go on holiday… and here’s how I’ve decided to achieve it:

• Eat a maximum of 1,700 calories a day – unadjusted for exercise. Exercise is now additional expenditure, it doesn’t change my daily calorie allowance
• Eat only wholewheat / multigrain – no more whites. Potatoes, white rice, white pasta all off the menu. Only browns from this moment on
• Continue the training plan – as far as I can tell, the training plan’s working well – I’m enjoying it, and it pushes me. I’m still motivated and dedicated
• Include a thermogenic supplement - Animal Cuts is a thermogenic that seems to have pretty good reviews. I’m going to trial it out… see if that can help me over this hump I’m experiencing

None of the above is severe… it’s all within standard guidelines… I’m just pushing harder to achieve my goals. As they say – nothing worth achieving is easy. The harder I push now, the harder I’ll work to maintain the state that I’m in when I finally get to where I wanna be. Notice that these are ‘whens’ and not ‘ifs’

Calorie Deficit Outside of Exercise

I was just reading this interesting article on Fitness Black Book about ’skinny fat’ people. It’s about people who look reasonably trim, but who have additional weight around the body… they’re carrying excess, so they’re not quite as ripped or lean as their outward appearance leads on.

I’d certainly classify myself in that group. I’ve been with my body long enough to understand what I can wear to hide what I don’t want to showcase. And it’s worked pretty well so far!

But – this article says something that I found really interesting – and intuitively, it makes a lot of sense.

What it said was that when losing weight, we should create a deficit outside of exercise. So let me think of Lost It – my iPhone App. In calculating my calorie intake for the day, it adds the number of calories I’ve burned through exercise… so my daily budget is 1,700 cals – if I burn another 700 cals at the gym, that means Lost It is allowing me to eat 2,400 cals a day.

What this article is saying is that that logic is the standard logic. Eat more, spend more time at the gym burning it off. It says that that logic is incorrect. That the gym and resistance training is additional to the calorie count… ie. if my goal is 1,700 a day, that’s what I should stick at: 1,700 cals.

This is interesting, and seeing it presented in this way, it makes a lot of sense to me. This week’s been a little bit different – because of the increase in cardio, I’m well under my cal limit for the day. So that’s fine. But – we’ll see how much I’ve lost in 7 days tomorrow. And depending on the success of that, I may change the way I count calories from Mon onwards (given that this weekend is up the cabin with all sorts of goodies).

Good Nutrition Plan

This guy’s a full-on bodybuilder, but he’s got quite a nice – and simple – nutrition plan.

Check out Antonio Diaz from bb.com.

OK – given that that link goes to a generic page, I’m thinking that that page will change… so here’s his plan:

Meal 1

• 1 Scoop Whey
• 250g Chicken Breast
• 100g Pasta
• 1 Banana

Meal 2

• 1/2 Scoops Whey
• 100g Oatmeal
• 15 Almonds
• 1 Banana

Pre-Workout

• 3g BCAAs
• 3g NO2 Supplement

Post-Workout

• 2-3 Scoops Waxy Maize Starch
• 5-10 G Creatine
• 5 G L-Glutamine
• 3 G BCAAs

Meal 3

• 300g Chicken Breast
• 125g White Rice

Meal 4

• 300g Lean Beef
• 100g White Rice

Meal 5

• 300g Chicken Breast
• 50g Pasta
• 1 Large Green Salad

Meal 6

• 300g Chicken Breast
• 1 Large Green Salad
• 7.5 Ml CLAs