GAINS, YOU NEED GAINS PT 1 - Consistency & Macros

Gains, gains you say? Gains I say, what are gains you say? A measurement of success I say, not just in the gym, in all aspects of life.

There's many reasons and also many excuses as to why people lack gains. This will be a series of articles addressing many of the common mistakes people unwittingly find themselves making when it comes to the gym.

Lack of consistency

By consistency, I mean going to the gym 3-5 times/week and very rarely missing more than a consecutive week or two throughout the year. Even following the most horribly designed program and nutrition, someone consistently pounding away at the gym will be able to make some form of progress over the guy who goes once or twice a month.

The most common issue with inconsistency is lack of patience, adaptation is a slow gradual progress. You are not going to achieve your idealistic Tyler Durden body overnight, a year of consistent lifting with a good program however? More than possible! When people complain about the lack of progress after a few weeks with a program and then hop to another program, not only does it fuel anger for my squats, but it's probably one of the biggest reason why gyms these days are full of physiques that look like they haven't touched a weight in their lives.

The other issue with consistency is lack of a goal, just going to the gym and lifting weights is great and all, but your program should be designed with a goal in mind and a time in which that goal is achievable. This can be applied to many aspects of life, want to save £1000 by Christmas? Bench 100kg by the new year? Don't talk about it, plan to make it happen. Not only does this allow much more focused programming it's also a lot more motivating to come into the gym with a goal in mind.

Goals can be missed, which is why I like setting small achievable goals under time constraints and just keep the big goals in mind, if you set a time constraint on big goals then you're far more likely to rush them near the end. A nice example of this is weight loss, a lot of people set arbitrary dates regarding this and end up trying to rush it when they don't look like they're going to hit that date, crash dieting is obviously never ever good and comes with a lot of complications. If you need to hit a certain weight for something important like a contest/holiday then it needs to be planned well in advance, but setting an arbitrary date is more than likely going to do more long-term harm than good.

Ultimately, being motivated and having both a long term and a short term goal that contributes to said long term goal will increase your consistency in all aspects of life.

Tracking macros

Eyeing things up is not acceptable, swaying from macro targets constantly because of lack of will power is not acceptable.

This is also a matter of consistency. How is one meant to make progress when one is eating an extra 250 calories from what they are prescribed due to lazy tracking? (This is easy to consume in just cooking oil alone) That's an extra 1750 calories a week which works out to half a pound of fat per week that could have been burnt just from pure laziness when it comes to tracking. One cannot simply disobey the laws of thermodynamics. Track wrongly for a few weeks and suddenly that half a pound is several pounds, you wonder why you're not making progress, your motivation is down, was it really worth eyeing things up instead of taking the extra 30 seconds to weigh and measure things?

The same goes in reverse for bulking, while some may advocate the eat-everything-in-sight bulk method it's not advisable for health reasons, excess fat gained while bulking is also fat that will need to be burnt at some point. As anyone who has ever cut to a low percentage of body fat knows, the longer you're in a choleric deficit, the more people are going to want to avoid you.

The point is, track everything, to the gram/ml! For the extra 5 minutes a day you're saving yourself a lot of time wasted trying to cut/bulk, http://www.myfitnesspal.com is a great resource for this.

Programming and supplements shall be covered in part 2, if anyone is looking for a program for the New Year please drop by our Facebook page from the link on the side as we would be happy to help.

Why you shouldn't be afraid of Carbohydrates!

Carbohydrates are, in fact, not quite the same as eating lumps of fresh lard as the media would like you to believe. Influential phrases such as 'NO CARBS BEFORE MARBS' are gleefully preached as if going near a source of carbohydrates will instantly cause you to gain fat. Now I don't know many people who don't love carbs, but I do know many people who would love to just eat them and diet. The problem is they're stuck in the thought that eating carbs and losing weight are like separate dimensions. While I've gone over this quite in depth in the IIFYM blogs (read them before this one if you haven't), people I've spoken to about this still appear to be overly confused by carbohydrates and their general purpose/role in the body. Here are 4 incredibly common myths.

MYTH 1 – CARBOHYDRATES MAKE YOU FAT

SOURCE – NO CARBS BEFORE MARBS AND VARIOUS OTHER CELBRITY/MAGAZINE STUPIDITY

Lets take a brief look again at the metabolism of carbohydrates (1) -

1. You eat them, they're tasty, you wonder why on earth you stopped eating them.
2. Digestion begins in the mouth and they get broken down further in the stomach.
3. In the small intestine they get broken down into glucose/galactose/monosaccharides and then absorbed directly into the bloodstream.
4. The pancreas is informed that the blood sugar levels have risen and releases insulin*
5. Insulin transports the glucose to the cells that require it (mostly muscular cells)/liver.

Now where in this chain of events do you see 'HOLY SHIT I'VE EATEN A CARBOHYDRATE BETTER GET A NEW WARDROBE AND PREPARE FOR OBESITY TO SET IN'. Wait, you don't. For de novo lipogenesis (conversion of carbohydrates to fat), you must consume so many carbohydrates you become completely saturated with glycogen, this is actually quite a rare thing to happen.

Lets look at it in a metaphorical way, your glycogen stores can be seen as a bucket -

This is where people begin to believe the no carb dietary myths simply because their inactivity is causing their muscular stores (80% of the bucket) to be untouched. They are untouched because the body prefers to use fatty acids as fuel when in a state of inactive/low activity (2). Consequently you're not going to gain bodyfat eating any type of carbohydrates unless you go on some truly excessive binge or do no exercise.

CONCLUSION – IT TAKES A LOT MORE THAN JUST EATING TO STORE CARBS AS FAT

*Insulin is often cited as the fat storage hormone, it's main purpose is transporting glucose. What it does do is inhibits glucagon and the resulting lipolysis (breakdown of fat) until blood sugar levels return to normal. Insulin is not a fat storage hormone in times of normal carbohydrate consumption as you are led to believe, it is a transport hormone.

MYTH 2 – YOU CAN ONLY EAT LOW GI FOODS OR YOU'LL GET FAT/DIABETES

SOURCE – FOOD COMPANIES

So now you know you won't gain any weight with carbohydrates, lets dispel the thought that eating a diet of wholemeal bread and fruit is healthy whereas haribo and white bread will cause rapid fat gain. This is down to the glycemic index (GI, 3) and the erroneous way it has been pushed to the public by the media. Here are my issues with it -

1. The GI index of foods was worked out in a study using fasted subjects and using pure carbohydrate sources. I don't know anyone who eats a diet of 100% carbohydrate sources while fasted. As soon as fat/protein or even food that's still digesting enters the equation, it completely changes the glycemic response (blood sugar levels) to eating said foods. This alone completely discredits the GI scale.
2. The GI index does not take into account quantities at all. If you think eating 5 bananas (110g of carbohydrates roughly) is going to have a lesser glycemic load on the body than eating a packet of fruit gums (40g of carbohydrates) because of the scale saying they aren't absorbed as quickly, then you have been misinformed.
3. The human body itself is incredibly sensitive to small changes in blood sugar and will regulate it very fast and efficiently with insulin and glucagon.

The conclusion of this being that the science behind carbohydrate metabolism does NOT support the notion that eating 'bad' carbs will make you gain fat any more so than 'good' carbs, nor does it support the notion that rapid increases in blood sugar will happen by eating faster absorbing carbs. Because to be quite honest, unless you're eating a diet consisting of 100% carbohydrates, you're not going to notice any difference between white refined bread and brown wholemeal bread for example, other than the mineral/fibre intake.

CONCLUSION – A CARB IS A CARB, 1G=4KCAL REGARDLESS

MYTH 3 – NO CARBS BEFORE BED

SOURCE – MAGAZINES/SUPPLEMENT COMPANIES

Your metabolism does not change into a fat storage machine over night. The processes are the same, the rumours are pushed by companies/magazines to sell various products that promise to repartition the nutrients. If your 'bucket' is not full when you go to sleep it's not going to suddenly overflow, to test this theory, please purchase a bucket, put some water in it and then tell me if it somehow overflows while you're sleeping.

CONCLUSION – YOUR BUCKET WON'T OVERFLOW

MYTH 4 – MY METABOLISM IS SLOW I CAN'T EAT CARBS

SOURCE – OBESE PEOPLE TALKING RUBBISH/BLAMING GENETICS

Leptin is a hormone and like most hormones it is governed by homeostasis. The body wants to keep body fat at an optimal set point, not shredded with striated deltoids and most certainly not obese.

This is where leptin comes in. Leptin is produced in fat cells, so essentially the more body fat you have, the higher your leptin levels will be and the lower your appetite should be. This is also a reason why woman generally eat less than men because of naturally higher fat levels.

The issue here is that chronically obese people have so much leptin that they become leptin resistant, resulting in eating ridiculous amounts of food to feel 'full' and just worsening the problem. The other side to this is ridiculously lean individuals such as a competitive bodybuilder after a show having an insatiable appetite. This is because the body attempts to restore itself to a homeostatic amount of body fat, this is not ripped with striated deltoids, nor is it obese with several chins. The body actively attempts to prevent this happening with the hormone leptin.

What people like to say however, is that they got obese because of eating carbohydrates and having a slow metabolism due to genetics.

 

If this was a photo, that may be true. The reason people get obese and end up in the leptin resistant hole in the first place is down to poor dietary choices combined with disproportionate amounts of diety fat (basically over consuming food). Often combined with lack of activity.

Another note to make on the subject of leptin, low carb dieting (4) tends to reduce the short term output in Leptin which can lead to large amounts of hunger. This is why refeeds and carb cycling tend to be popular at lower levels of body fat (<10%). It's also why large uncontrolled binges tend to happen on low carbohydrate diets, even more so when alcohol is involved and the impulse to eat an entire loaf of bread at the end of the night overcomes logical thinking and leads to a bit of fat gain.

CONCLUSION – YOU ARE OVERWEIGHT BECAUSE YOU EAT TOO MUCH, NOT BECAUSE 'GENETICS', YOUR METABOLIC 'DISORDER' IS MORE THAN LIKELY A BYPRODUCT OF YOUR WEIGHT

A short anecdote of my own experience of carbs and dieting is that I was able to drop about 70lb, from an obese state, to under 10% bodyfat without the exclusion of any carbohydrates at any point in my transformation. The last stages of the dieting phase were full of wonderful cheesecakes, chocolate and various other things that one would just simply not think to include on a diet. How? IIFYM!

To conclude, the thing that matters the most is ENERGY BALANCE (calories in<calories out). If your bucket overflows, it will spill into fat storage. If not, enjoy your tastier new way of eating. 

 

1. Self Nutrition Data (2012) Glycemic Index [Online]. Available at: http://nutritiondata.self.com/topics/glycemic-index

2. Ripptoe, M. and Kilgore, L. (2010) Practical Programming for Strength Training. 2^nd Edn. Aasgard Company

3. Raw Food Explained (2012) How Carbohydrates are Digest and used by the body [Online]. Available at: http://www.rawfoodexplained.com/carbohydrates/how-carbohydrates-are-digested-and-used-by-the-body.html

4. Pubmed (2000) Twenty-four-hour leptin levels respond to cumulative short-term energy imbalance and predict subsequent intake. [Online]. Available at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10946866

5. Pubmed (1997) Effect of fasting, refeeding, and dietary fat restriction on plasma leptin levels.[Online]. Available at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9024254