aj_rock

Your body will naturally derive some energy from the amino acid pool in your body when fasting. BCAA's on non-working days simply ensures that they get burned instead of being pulled from other sources

Double post! Booooo hisss booooooo

Clearly, digits did not go home. Snakey boy, everyone gets scared as all shite when comtemplating school. It's why first week of college is always such a BIG DEAL to people. A LOT of people also over-estimate the difficulty of school. For the most part, the actual difficulty lies in over-coming the lethargy towards school work that most people develop. If you put quality time in, you'll succeed, and I've known plenty of people who worked full-time while earning their degrees. It's doable, so long as you don't freak yourself out and panic.

Go epic or go home?

Me, sarcastic? Oh heavens no, you've got the wrong man

But when do we get to meet her? I joke I joke. I don't think anyone here has SO's on NF besides wildross.

Car expenses and Coldplay getting in the way of reducing debt? Yeah, not surprised one bit.

Amusingly enough, I was gonna add more clarification to prevent trolling a la 'overweight' CoreyD over there BUT I ran into the same problem as Snake. How can we properly term someone with excess body fat without resorting to calling them 'fat' or 'obese'?

Overweight? Silly Snake, you aren't using that term correctly. I mean, the great and all powerful Spezzinator herself is technically 'overweight'.

What Lachy said. Injured athletes eating an athlete's diet = soon to be fat athlete.

Sorry for the double guys, but r/fitness lead me here: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15615615 Extremely relative, probably not just to NF/IF

That's why I feel like part of it + LG works well, especially if you want to work out in the evening. 20 min HIIT to start your day, then suffer through to your first meal

The three laws of Engineering (as taught by the main design engineer behind the CN Tower) 1: You can't push on a rope 2: F = ma (we were first year cut some slack) 3: To find the answer, you must KNOW the answer. FTW

Let's face it guys; HIIT just sucks in general. If it ain't uncomfortable, it ain't HIIT. I feel like you may be fibbing Zorch, if only because if it was REALLY HIIT, you woulda puked. No way around it Just playin mate GW: If you care about squat and deadlift strength, I wouldn't do it on workout days. Good HIIT will definitely impact intensity. Unless you choose some avenue other than running/biking. Swimming is a good one, and ellipticals/rowing machines, while still largely leg intensive, will kill your leg strength to a much lesser degree. That being said, doing HIIT on recovery days will impact, well, recovery. If you can handle it, sure, do three times a week. Ok, if I was doing it personally, I'd work it in two training blocks. Day 1 = weight training with squats and whatever else, Day 2 = HIIT, Day 3 = weight training but upper body only OR light weights. Day 4 rest, Day 5 weight train with deadlifts, Day 6 HIIT, Day 7 rest. One of the two major leg compound movements per week only because lets face it; you're doing this to lose fat, and weight room intensity will generally take enough of a hit that you won't WANT to do more than that in a week anyway. This schedule is actually pretty close to what I'm currently doing cardio versus strength training wise (mind you, I'm also mid-season for rugby...) My only real worry in this period is just not overtraining the legs.

Well he presents a pretty honest and fair evaluation of things. I will say that he may be a little *too* in favour of ephedrine. He downplays what they REALLY are very strongly, which is an amphetamine. Same classification as ADD/ADHD drugs and cocaine. Soooo take that for what you will. Not saying it IS that bad, but people HAVE gotten psychosis from it. The other one he recommends is yohimbe, which, while decidely more 'natural' (its technically a bark from a tree), still has negative side effects, and is still only pseudo legal. This post is purely explanatory. Not condoning or reprimanding drug use in any safe. Stay safe kids

Lyle's usual response is "If it wasn't hard, then everybody would do it. It's a sledgehammer approach." The rest of the book, while a great read for understanding stubborn fat and why it exists, does play a little fast and loose with moral grey areas. Case and point, of the four protocols, two involve pseudo legal substances.

Well that was a monster of a post. Feel free to correct/question anything I said, feedback welcome

Cool, sounds like people are interested Ok, so briefly covering the main points of LG: - Fast until early afternoon, consume all calories within 8 hours - Ideally, work out early in the morning The second point has a lot of people scratching their heads: what advantage does working out fasted have? Martin gives several reasons which I will not consider for the moment. What I WILL consider is, where does the energy to work out come from, and what happens after. Many of you should be familiar with the concept of 'zone training', where more fat is burned at low intensities, more carbs are burned as you go higher. While this is shown to be LAREGLY ineffective when designing cardio programs, it is inherently true. An all out sprint for, say, 30 seconds, will exhaust atp and creatine stores within a few seconds, then move to anaerobic carb usage. Lactate builds up from this use, causing the familiar burning sensation. When you stop, your body continues using carbs until the lactate build up has diminished. You get a similar effect from weight training; any activity that causes you enough discomfort to stop after some time interval up to a couple minutes. This is why high-rep training is inherently more uncomfortable than high-intensity. The important part is that the overall calories being expended per unit time doesn't change all that much; you would burn many more calories doing high-rep circuit training for an hour than doing SS type training for an hour. Ok, so both weight training and anaerobic activity cause carbs to be preferentially burned as fuel, at least during the activity. However, everyone has a finite amount of carbs (stored as glycogen) within their body. Limiting carb availability is what causes ketosis to develop, a process where fat is coverted to ketones in order to provide the brain with glucose-like fuel (fat CANNOT cross the blood-brain barrier; only glucose or ketones may be used by the brain). Therefore, burning through a significant portion of your carb stores in the morning will promote not only ketosis, but the preferred oxidation of fat within the body entirely. Although I won’t go into it here, initial ketosis such as being achieved here is VERY protein-sparing; deep ketosis is not, due to increased FFA usage in general (just accept the hand-wave dammit!). So, what Martin was aiming for is this ‘transient’ ketosis development; between ketosis and BCAA supplementation, fat is preferentially burned while protein is spared to a larger extent than normal. NOTE: carb depletion combined with transient ketosis SUCKS. A lot. I personally ran Lyle’s UD2 during the winter, and the depleted days just sucked so very much. UD2, and the protocol I am (getting around to) describing are NOT for the faint of heart.Why? Your body just doesn’t like being helpless, which, when you’re fairly depleted, you pretty much are. You just deprived your body of it’s ability to perform at high intensity for any length of time, which, in a flight-or-fight scenario, would probably end in disaster. So it punishes you. Ok, so we know that LG causes fat to be burned throughout the day. But you’re probably asking yourself A) wouldn’t the re-feed just throw the fat right back on? What does this has to do with STUBBORN fat? C) Why is aj_rock so GODDAMN good looking? The first two are what I’m getting around to. The third is a deeply philosophical question requiring soul-searching and true enlightenment. Sorry, but I have one more detail I need to provide in order to solve this puzzle, and it’s the most physiologically involved. I’m talkin ‘bout alpha and beta adreno-receptors. Erm, what? As simply as I can put it, adreno-receptors are what bind adrenaline and its ilk in order to, ya know… do stuff. The two receptors are essentially polar opposites in terms of effects though. Beta receptors upregulate the s*** out of everything. Blood pressure goes up, heart rate goes up, most importantly, fat mobilization (local to the receptor) goes up. Alpha does the opposite. The one we care about is how it inhibits fat mobilization. All tissue has some of both, and we care especially about the ratio of the two. Areas of the body with lots of betas (arms, lower legs, most visceral fat) tend to store transient amounts of fat and mobilize it quickly. First place the fat comes off. Areas with alpha, well, put fat on and then leave it there. For most guys, this would be that tire round your tummy. For girls, it’s dem thighs. Receptor patterning is one of those ‘genetic’ things that determine how your body’s fat patterning looks. Obviously, I wouldn’t bring the subject up and bore you to death with it unless it was important. Turns out, the hormonal responses to ketosis, carb depletion, and high-intensity activity ALL work to inhibit alpha receptors. Yaaaaaaaaaaaaay! So now we ‘kinda know’ why Martin designed his workouts as such. We’re gonna take things up to eleven. Recall that strength training just don’t burn that much energy, unless you do circuits or something equally silly. An hour of strength training will burn about 300 calories in the heaviest of us, but most people store 800+ calories worth of glycogen in the body (random side note: this is why people ‘bonk’ while training; carb levels get too low and your body DEMANDS that you lower the intensity). However, we still have high-intensity exercise available to us. HIIT is definitely the primary choise, although regular intervals can work too (sorry, tabata just doesn’t burn enough calories). 20 minutes following your morning workout seem optimal. Another option is to simply perform HIIT in the morning, and leave weight training for the evening. Obviously, HIIT should NOT be performed every morning… maybe 3 times a week max, especially if you’re doing an explicitly fat losing cycle. Choose whatever HIIT routine floats your boat; obviously you’ll want to work it around your leg training, as something I doubt you want to do is squat heavy and then run your ass off. Just remember to get 20 minutes. So you did your training, carbs are depleted, and free-fatty acids have effectively just been dumped into your blood stream. If you REALLY want to take advantage of this, add low-intensity (and if you did weights AND HIIT, I really do mean low) aerobic activity, maybe 40 minutes or so. Stubborn fat is thusly mobilized burned, and maybe even re-distributed to other areas of your body (don’t quote me on the last one, but it *can* theoretically happen). Congratulations! You now know one of the Stubborn Fat Protocols! If you like it (you masochistic bastard) and/or want to know the rest (there’s four!) and/or feel like supporting the guy who actually came up with this crap, buy Lyle’s books. By all means, he deserves the reward . So, TL;DR - something something THE FORCE something something DARK SIDE - perform 20 minutes of HIIT early in the morning, followed by 40 minutes of easy aerobic activity, all on an empty stomach - mix and match with LG as it applies. You can do your training then grab something to eat, or have some BCAA, probably coffee cuz you’ll need it, and suffer until your eating window opens - Like I sais earlier, this is not for the faint of heart. Fasted HIIT will absolutely destroy energy levels for the rest of the day unless you consume some sort of energy booster. It will also be extremely uncomfortable WHILE performing. Feeling weak, disoriented, and on the verge of puking while doing the HIIT is not uncommon. If you don’t feel like that, you aren’t trying hard enough.

Creatine is best taken with carbs and water, and plenty of both. It tends to draw both into the muscles, which is part of the effect of taking it (besides the simple increase in total body creatine). Other than that, assuming you supplement 5g a day, the timing doesn't matter too much. For everybody: I got a little teaser article prepared for you all If y'all are interested, I have details on one of Lyle Mcdonald's Stubborn Fat Protocols that fits in verrrrry verrrrry well with IF and Leangains. I'll even go so far as to explain the physiology involved (AKA why it works)

How nice of you to rotate all the pictures 180 degrees so they look normal to everyone else +1 more for having your own swing set.

Nothing to see here. No triple post here, nosiree

TRIPLE POSTTTTT WOWOWOW

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DRY HUMPING FTW AMIRITE

+70 to squat in six weeks? Verrrrrrry ambitious.