Bulletin No. 55, No Limits: How To Break Through Plateaus, Part 2

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In the first part of this series I discussed breaking plateaus in your muscular development. Most of the article dealt with nutritional considerations and how to manipulate and regulate your nutrients to spur muscle growth. At the very end I began to delve into adjustments in your training to spark lean mass gains should you reach a plateau. There are several more aspects concerning training and muscle gain that need to addressed before I move on to the second part of the discussion, breaking through fat-loss plateaus. So if you’re ready, let’s get started.

I get people who call all the time, looking for my “blessing” to take a couple of days off. “What about over-training’” they ask. “Should I cut down on training’” “Should I take a lay off?” Everybody these days is worried about over-training. I would like to respond to this on two levels. First, if you think you will stimulate your muscles to grow bigger by not training them, you’re fooling yourself. It’s the workout that stimulates your muscles to grow. Less workout means less stimulus. Rather than cutting back on your training, consider increasing your nutritional support instead. This is where supplements can really help - when you’re training so hard that you can barely recover. Of course it is possible that you may fail to recover from your workouts, and in that sense you may be “over-trained.” That doesn’t mean that you’re exercising too much however, it means that you’re not recovering enough. This state of “over-training” really describes the state of your body’s balance between stress (exercise) on one hand and recovery on the other. If the level of stress is so high that you’re not recovering, the answer most people give is to train less. Rather than this imbalance being a problem of too much exercise, I view it as a problem of not enough recovery. People are not over-trained, they’re under-recovered. Before you cut down on your training, beef up your nutrition and get more rest. Approach your nutrition with as much intensity as your workouts. Also, make sleep a priority. Eat right, eat a lot, get enough sleep, and you probably won’t feel over-trained any more. What’s the alternative? Train less and eat less. Does that sound like the way to get your body to grow?

Now I would like to respond to the question of over-training at a second level. This has to do with the volume of exercise versus the intensity of exercise. You cannot make up for low intensity exercise by increasing the volume. If you’re lifting half-heartedly without giving it your full effort, then adding a few extra sets onto the end of your workout won’t help. While these low intensity sets will not stimulate muscle growth, they will however use up your recovery ability. If you find your weight training sessions are dragging on for two or three hours and you’re still not growing, I suspect your exercise volume is too high and your intensity is too low. When you enter the gym, you must be very serious and all business. You’re not in there to socialize and have fun. Hit the weights hard at full intensity. Generally, you should be done with your workout in 60 minutes, and 90 at the most. When it comes to over-training, I find that the volume of high intensity exercise is rarely the problem. The problem usually turns out to be a large volume of low intensity exercise. This is not an effective stimulus for growth but will contribute to fatigue.

Another area often overlooked is aerobics. When discussing this issue, many people will say if you spend your energy on aerobics then that leaves you with less energy to grow. This is a rather short-sighted solution to the problem. Your muscles need nutrients to grow. They need blood flow. Moderate to high intensity aerobic exercise will increase capillary density and blood flow to muscles, providing for greater nutrient delivery (1,2). This will allow for more growth over the long term. I am convinced that if you include aerobic exercise in your training program this will allow for greater overall muscular development over the long term. You should obviously do more aerobics when preparing for a contest and less while you’re trying to gain weight, but I believe you should do aerobics year round. Twenty to thirty minutes a day on the bike will burn 250-300 calories, so if you’re trying to gain weight just eat a few more calories to make up for it. Think of it this way: in the off season eat a Parrillo Bar and ride the bike for at least 30 minutes. You’ll strengthen your cardiovascular system, have a richer blood supply, and end up with bigger muscles. The other benefit of aerobics is that it helps you burn fat, so while you’re gaining muscle you’ll stay lean. Some bodybuilders are afraid to do aerobics in the off season because they think it will make them lose muscle. This won’t happen if you simply eat enough calories to compensate for those used during the aerobic activity. If you eat enough high quality calories, this will support muscle growth while the aerobics helps you lose fat.

What about supplementation? Can this help me gain more muscle? Yes, but I want you to sort out the problems with your diet and training program first rather than hope that supplements will somehow fix everything else. Remember, the foundation of bodybuilding success is hard work, consistency, and dedication to a solid diet and training program. Supplements are the icing on the cake, not the foundation. If you’re eating sloppy and training half-heartedly, supplements will not give you the results you’re after. On the other hand, if you’re eating right and training as hard as you can, supplements can improve your gains over what you could achieve without them. The single best supplement for gaining muscle is Creatine. This is a molecule stored inside muscle cells and is involved in energy production (1,2,6,7). It increases muscle size and strength dramatically within the first month of using it. Muscle gains of 4-14 pounds and strength increases of 10-15% are typical during the first month of creatine supplementation. That’s quite amazing when you think about it. Most of the muscular weight gain is do to storage of water inside muscle cells. As creatine is stored in the muscle, it attracts water, causing the muscle cell to swell. The strength increases are due to increased energy producing ability of the muscle (1,2,6,7). While muscle gains during the first month of creatine supplementation are miraculous, things slow down after that. After the muscles are saturated with creatine they can’t soak up anymore, and after that it’s a matter of maintenance of creatine stores. For the first 1-3 weeks you should use 20 grams of creatine a day to fully load the muscle, then after that 5-10 grams a day is enough to maintain muscle stores. It stands to reason that muscle protein gain will ultimately be enhanced as well, leading to faster muscle growth, because you’re able to train heavier while using creatine. This, of course, if providing you increase your protein and calories to support this growth.

The next most important supplements are ones which provide these calories and extra protein, since inadequate caloric and protein intake is the most common reason for failing to gain more muscle. The best choices are Hi-Protein Powder?, Pro-Carb?, and CapTri® which are specially formulated to minimize fat accumulation while increasing calories. A scoop of Pro-Carb? and Hi-Protein? mixed together in water has the perfect nutrient profile to support muscle growth. I’m working on a new combination product which will contain essentially this same nutrient breakdown. If you’re prone to gaining fat whenever you increase calories, I suggest you use CapTri®. CapTri® is unique in that it is a way to provide more calories with virtually no tendency to be stored as fat (4,5). At the high end of the supplement ladder are the amino acids. Muscle Amino Formula? supplies pure branched chain amino acids, the most common amino acids incorporated into muscle protein. This supplement is usually reserved for competitive bodybuilders and endurance athletes. It has the effect of making the muscle harder and fuller and is especially useful to minimize muscle loss while dieting for a contest. If you’re training hard and long enough to lose your pump by the end of your workout, this is a tremendous supplement for you. Liver-Amino Formula? is also a great supplement because it contains 1 grams of protein per tablet as well as heme iron. Take five to eight with each of your six meals, you’re looking at an additional 45 to 72 grams of protein. For additional calories, the Parrillo Bar is a tremendous addition to your diet. It contains 250 calories per bar, which includes 11 grams of quality protein, 37 grams of complex carbohydrates and five grams of CapTri®. You should now have a pretty good idea of the areas you should concentrate your focus on if your goal is to pack on lean mass. Now I want to share some tips on what to do when your progress stalls when you’re dieting to lose fat. Of course, gaining and losing are contradictory by nature. What you’ll find, however, is that the goals in bodybuilding and fitness dictate that you do both at the same time. It’s a crazy thought, but it’s possible. Want to know how. Read on.

When you talk to most people about fat loss, the most obvious way they’ll say to lose weight is to restrict calories. And in fact, the fastest way to lose weight is to stop eating altogether. Unfortunately, when you lose weight by severe caloric restriction about half of the weight you lose is muscle. This is known as “the starvation response.” When you severely restrict food intake your body thinks it’s starving (which it is) so it makes certain metabolic adaptations to allow it to survive longer without food. Your body fat represents stored energy for just such an emergency, so your body tries to make it last as long as possible. During starvation your metabolism shifts and you end up losing as much muscle as fat. Recall pictures you have seen of prisoner of war survivors or famine survivors. True, they have no body fat, but they have no muscle mass either. By losing muscle mass your body can decrease its metabolic rate, or the number of calories it requires to survive each day. This means the fat stores will last longer, since with less muscle the body requires fewer calories to maintain itself each day. So during severe caloric restriction you lose muscle and your metabolic rate decreases. And with a slower metabolism, the rate of fat burning slows down. All of this makes great sense from the point of view of surviving a famine, but it’s exactly the opposite of what bodybuilders want to achieve.

Bodybuilders don’t want to lose any muscle while they lose fat. Furthermore, we don’t want to slow down our metabolic rate because that would mean slower fat loss. So how do we do it? The key is to continue to feed your body the nutrients and calories it needs to maintain its muscle mass, and to draw on stored body fat as a source of energy. Resist the temptation to cut calories or skip meals. That’s the worst thing you can do. But before we deal with the specifics, we need to lay some groundwork. Some of the basic issues are: How many calories should I eat? Don’t I need to cut calories? How fast can I lose fat? What can I do to make sure I’m not losing muscle?

Many times in previous articles I’ve referred to a concept called your “maintenance energy requirement.” This is the number of calories you need to consume per day to support your present body weight and activity level. Metabolically speaking, this is known as your total energy expenditure, or TEE. It is the sum of your basal metabolic rate (the amount of energy your body expends while at rest, such as during sleep) plus the energy you expend during activity, including exercise, plus the thermic effect of feeding plus another factor called adaptive thermogenesis. There are several ways that research scientists who study metabolism have of figuring this out. One way is to have a person live in a special chamber called a calorimeter and measure the heat given off by the body. This technique is referred to as “direct calorimetry.” Another way is called “indirect calorimetry” and involves measuring the amount of oxygen consumed by the body and the amount of carbon dioxide produced and using this data to calculate the amount of calories expended. These are obviously expensive research procedures and are not available to people who just would like to know what their TEE is. You have an easy way of figuring this out for yourself, however, and it doesn’t cost anything. Simply weigh all your food and record everything you eat for a week sometime while your weight remains constant. Pick a week when you’re doing your normal workout and your normal amount of aerobic activity. Calculate the average number of calories you consume a day during this period and this is your maintenance energy requirement (MER). Most bodybuilders on the Parrillo Nutrition Program weigh their food and record their calories anyway, so it doesn’t take any extra work. Just look over your Diet Trac Sheets from a week when you didn’t gain or lose any weight and calculate the daily average. If you haven’t done this yet, you need to. It provides a scientific basis for making many decisions about your diet. I can’t tell you how many calories to consume until you know this number. The concept of the MER also provides a useful way to teach you how to construct and adjust your diet.

After you determine your MER, we can talk about calories. If you want to maintain your present body weight, you need to consume the number of calories equal to your MER - this is simply the definition of MER. If you want to gain weight, you need to consume about 300 to 500 calories per day more than your MER. This will result is a positive energy balance, which means that you are consuming more energy (calories) per day than you are expending. These extra calories can be stored as body weight. If you’re eating right and training hard, most of it will be muscle. If you want to lose weight, you need to achieve a negative energy balance. This means that you need to expend more calories per day than you consume. There are two ways we could go about this. First, we could consume less calories than our MER, meaning that we’re eating fewer calories than our body needs to maintain itself. This will result in weight loss, but as we discussed previously, anytime we reduce calories we run a risk of losing some muscle. Alternatively, another way of bringing about a negative energy balance is to increase our energy expenditure. By doing more aerobic exercise you can increase your TEE and achieve a negative energy balance while still consuming your MER. This means enough calories and nutrients will be provided to maintain your present muscle mass as you lose fat. Whereas the weight lost by caloric restriction can be as much as 50% muscle, the weight lost by increasing aerobic exercise activity while maintaining constant calorie intake is almost entirely fat (7,8).

To summarize, in order to lose weight you have to burn more calories than you eat. This is called a negative energy (calorie) balance. You can do this by either eating fewer calories or by burning more calories. The approach I recommend is to eat the number of calories equal to your MER and to increase the amount of calories you burn by doing more aerobics. This will result in more efficient fat loss and less muscle tissue loss than the approach of cutting calories. You still provide ample calories and nutrients to maintain your muscle but draw on stored body fat to fuel your aerobic exercise. Furthermore, aerobic exercise builds the metabolic pathways that burn fat (1,2). It increases the mitochondria and enzyme pathways that metabolize fat. And by NOT cutting calories, your body will not decrease its metabolic rate and enter into the starvation mode. Not only is this strategy logical, but it is backed up by the scientific literature. More importantly, it is backed up by the real life experience of thousands of bodybuilders. It’s just the way that works best. Now keep in mind we’re talking about your MER here. If you just finished a weight gaining cycle you probably were consuming 300-500 calories in excess of your MER in order to pack on some mass. So you may in fact want to decrease calories from what you had been consuming to gain weight, but don’t decrease them below your MER. This is why it’s important to have some idea what your MER is. This is a useful baseline number that allows you to make some rational adjustments instead of just guessing. Also keep in mind that as you increase muscle mass your MER will increase as well. Muscle is metabolically active tissue and requires energy and nutrients to support. For every 10 pounds of muscle you gain you will have to eat about 300 more calories a day (roughly) just to maintain your new body weight. So don’t forget to keep checking your MER periodically and make adjustments. If you keep a nutrition log and Diet Trac Sheets like you’re supposed to, it will be easy. So when I say not to cut calories to lose weight, what this literally means is don’t reduce calories below your MER, the level you need to maintain your present muscle mass. If you’ve just been in a calorie-excess mode, then reducing calories to your MER is reasonable.

Parrillo Performance Products
(800) 344-3404

References
1. McArdle WD, Katch FI, and Katch VL. Exercise Physiology: Energy, Nutrition, and Human Performance. Lea & Febiger, Philadelphia, 1991.
2. Wilmore JH and Costill DL. Physiology of Exercise and Sport. Human Kinetics, Champaign, IL, 1994.
3. Maughan RJ. Creatine supplementation and exercise performance. International Journal of Sport Nutrition 5: 94-101, 1995. 4. Greenhaff PL. Creatine and its application as an ergogenic aid. International Journal of Sport Nutrition 5: S100-S110, 1995.
4. Baba N, Bracco EF, and Hashim SA. Enhanced thermogenesis and diminished deposition of fat in response to overfeeding with diet containing medium chain triglyceride. Am. J. Clin. Nutr. 35: 678-682, 1982.
5. Bach AC and Babayan VK. Medium chain triglycerides: an update. Am. J. Clin. Nutr. 36: 950-962, 1982.
6. Bouchard C, Tremblay A, Despres J-P, et al. The response to exercise with constant energy intake in identical twins. Obes Res 2: 400-411, 1994.
7. Hill JO, Melby C, Johnson SL, and Peters JC. Physical activity and energy requirements. Am J Clin Nutr 62 (S): 1059S-1066S, 1995.
8. Flatt JP. Dietary fat, carbohydrate balance, and weight maintenance: effects of exercise. Am. J. Clin. Nutr. 45: 296-306, 1987.
9. Flatt JP. Use and storage of carbohydrate and fat. Am. J. Clin. Nutr. 61: 952s-959s, 1995.
10. Swinburn B and Ravussin E. Energy balance or fat balance? Am. J. Clin. Nutr. 57: 766S-771S, 1993.
11. Acheson KJ, Flatt JP, and Jequier E. Glycogen synthesis versus lipogenesis after a 500 gram carbohydrate meal in man. Metabolism 31: 1234-1240, 1982.

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