aj_rock

Kishi: What you are asking about is extremely similar to the targeted ketogenic diet. Basically, you eat carbs ONLY however close to your workout that you can tolerate, and ONLY enough to fuel the workout, thereby maintaing a keto state for 90% of the time, and enhancing... fat burning? *shrug* I've stated my opinion before. Keto type stuff might be helpful if you are close to your goals, but otherwise, status quo. Knockingdog: You might just have a naturally low set-point. I am insanely jealous, and unless you start running into endo problems or what not, go ahead and see what you can do scotticus: you suffer from the same malady as moi. Lean everywhere except where it counts. Le sigh*. Definitely a) close, and around 12% BF DaveSix: generally speaking, only the genetically gifted and/or drug users are able to grow significantly on working out 1-2 times a week. If you want to keep that minimalist style though, you should look into reverse pyramid training, and go to failure as often as possible. Most workouts that call for only 1-2 trips per week are usually very fatiguing to the nervous system because of the emphasis on failure, so you would do best to do so as well Waldo, morethanjustamom, and anyone else who was a skinny bastard in highschool: not fair guys. Totally

Not even hardwired. When I found out how much harder things are for you just because you were overweight throughout puberty, I died a little on the inside >.>

Whatever you do, don't read about leptin and set-point. Known to cause depression in those seeking lower than normal fat levels.

Keep reading this as bandtches. Too lazy to quote, but eh scot, remember that Martin Berkhan took several years to get to where he is now. An admitted fault of the leangains system is that it takes longer than traditional bulking/cutting. Also don't forget that a lot of the extremely ripped people you see on teh netz are a)genetically gifted and or using 'gear' It's an awesome article though Usually what I refer people to when they complain about lack of progress. I feel a lot of people could learn a thing or two by perusing Lyle's articles.

What I try to do, is take my pictures at about chest height in low-ish lighting. After all, that's about the height and situation that I meet the population I'm interested in showing off to in the first place Consequently, I only seem to impress girls that are about 5'6" these days...

Honestly, for dem abs that people see in magazines n such, its pure lighting. Just make sure that you have your lighting set perfectly whenever you walk around shirtless

That sounds like great fun and hilarity for those that get to watch. Not so much for me

Totes manscape. I don't like it on girls, I don't see why I shouldn't return the favour Mind you, I dislike body hair in general... If I could get rid of it all without it getting weird, I totally would.

25? 50? 75? grams of carbs? Honestly, ketosis isn't worth the fight. Especially since you can't establish it in one day while at rest. If only for sanity's sake, I'd allow a leeeetle bit more carbs on rest days.

No one will ever obtain 100% fat loss. Unfortunately, unless you track meticulously like Waldo does, it's pretty hard to tell how much you lose in actuality. Mind you, in the severely obese, a bit of lean mass loss isn't a big deal. It's mostly loss of thickness in ligaments, tendons, and slight heart atrophy as your body loses the need to support all that extra tissue. A 90/10 split is probably the best you'll get though, although I have no idea what to really expect using the zig-zag most people do here. Lose the protein or exercise and you'll drop to 75/25. Sit on your butt all day and starve yourself and it'll drop to 50/50. To everyone else: yeah, the idea was that the fats would be metabolized rather than stored, which is what you want the EFA's to do. As for results... I'm doing pretty well Weight fluctuates a helluva lot, but despite being uhhh less rigorous on weekends, I'm noticing changes, even with an average deficit of probably around 250 cals/day.

Hey guys! Was doing some, err, light reading, and was enlightened to a useful fact that I think you should pay attention to! So... EFAs. AKA essential fatty acids. I'm assuming most of us take them in the form of fish oil or flax seed. And why not? The benefits are bountiful. However, you MAY not be taking them optimally while doing LG or IF! See, EFAs are indeed fatty acids... so, it's fat. Fat that only does us good if stored in our body. If you could take every ounce of fat your body is holding right now and replace it with EFA, only good things could happen (well, not EVERy ounce, but you get the idea). So most people go, Hey! Sounds awesome! I'll take up to 6 1g pills a day! Well, how do you take them? I bet evenly spread out is the answer... Well, if you're doing IF THATS WRONG! Like I already said, it's fat. So if you consume these calories, your body will either store them (woo!) or burn them (booo!). Yes, this is contrary to the direction we want most calories to go. Shut up! Anyway, you consume that fat while fasting, GASP! IT GETS BURNED! The horror! That EFA is wasted on bringing you a little out of fasting! It is unable to exert its benefits! So how do we fix this? We wait until we consume other calories, and THEN take our EFAs. It allows them to sneak past the burninators and make it's way into your body! So, TL;DR, wait until at least after your first meal to take any EFAs.

Ah ok, I thought you were talking about taking a course not unlike PT Masters in management eh? I'm looking into doing an MBA myself... Bsc in Engineering

Maria: 1. Between eggs, meat, fish, dairy, and protein powder, you should be able to get adequate protein. If you insist on more options, nuts and seeds are ok. Some tofu products are very high in protein as well, although I've never personally tried them. 2. At your grocery store, just look for the vitamin enriched/whole wheat versions. The additives sometimes make the vitamin profile better than veggies (veggies still make you more full though).

In the long run, DOMS is insignificant anyway. Can't judge your progress based on it. Can't decide on intensity because of it. Just another road-block to work through

What are you studying? Last I checked, dietician was a full out university degree, at least round these hurr parts.

DOMS has everything to do with exercise intensity and much less to do with diet. I would hazard a guess that you mayyy be exercising with a higher intensity due to better exercise fueling and thus experiencing a DOMS renaissance. EDIT: dammit Laura put your new challenge thread in your sig! So yeah, I would say that you have been doing spectacularly for this challenge, maybe in part because of your change in diet. Either way, makes perfect sense to be sore after setting so many new PRs

You really wont notice a difference until you get to a low-ish body fat level. Until then it's pure cals in vs cals out. Shiggles: if you're training more than an hour before your first meal, BCAAs. Otherwise, most protein powders carry a pretty decent amino acid profile anyway. Optimum Nutrition whey gets you about 6 g of BCAA per scoop.

That's nothing. When I was doing 24hr carb loads over the winter, I had to get about 1000g in me. S'lotta bagels.

Just like all investments, they only really work if you're willing to give up your liquidity for a long, long time. If a stock you own drops a bit, you can't just panic and pull out; a stable company WILL go back up eventually (well unless you're RIM...) Really though, unless you're willing to put a significant amount of time into it, it's not worth doing yourself with serious money. Either do small investments or have somebody manage it.

Any activity you can sustain for 5 hours is gonna fall under the aerobic category and use fat primarily as fuel regardless. But anyway, long story short if you start worrying about eating enough, pay attention to your temperature and resting heart rate. Underconsuming calories raises resting heart rate, and one of the first systems that shuts down when calories are restricted is heat production, so if you start feeling cold and clammy all the time...

Good to hear that you've adopted a healthy level of skepticism with regards to your weight. Ifffff you're getting better results with the calipers, then my answer would be water fluctuations. For guys getting lower than 15% BF, water does strange, strange things. That combined with a small amount of muscle gain can easily explain your weight waffling by 10% any given day. Not to mention that in three hours you probably take in quite a bit of water. You're usually dehydrated upon waking, plus most people void their bladder. A liter of water will push you up by two pounds. Good point about the absorption rate. That's also why on IF you really can't be ingesting much sugar; quickly absorbed and all that. As to the zero point. That's one of many problems that I'm having. The thing is, the calhr levels change drastically depending on where that zero point is. Also, on a fat loss scheme, you'd drop below zero and then stay there for a really long time. It also doesn't account for metabolic slowing, which would shift the zero point down over time as well. A couple more thoughts I've had since: Hormonally, we know that the body responds to deficits and surpluses differently depending on the magnitude and amount of time spent there. For example, being in an overfed state for a long time causes fat gain, but also increases NEAT and TEF for most people. Underfeeding is mirrored, but times like 1.5 in strength of response. As we all know, the body defends against losses much better than gains. So I think a relationship may exist between consecutive calorie hours spent in surplus or deficit and hormone responses. What this implies is that, for example, a deficit that causes -1000 caloriehours will behave the same hormonally whether it was two hours spent at a 500 cal deficit, one hour at 1000, or 10 hours at 100. This would explain why diet-breaks and re-feeds work so well; after dieting continuously for a couple months, your body behaves the same as if you starved for a week. It also gives credence to set-point theory, which is a rather unfortunate by-product. Assuming all this were true, then I'll make one more assumption regarding training, which is that regular training causes *some* calories to be stored, but in a good way, i.e. protein as mucle, carbs as glycogen. A fair assumption that we all make here But a result of this assumption is actually that early morning fasted training is a BAD idea, and that it should always be followed by a sharp intake of lots of food, followed by a tapering off of said food, because following a workout without a sufficient intake of food won't help (how I could fit BCAA into this I'm not quite sure). Similarly, it means early-morning LISS type training could be very beneficial, as it quickly establishes a decent caloriehour deficit for the remainder of the day, but requires regular eating (i.e. non-IF) in order to keep the net deficit at a sane level and not mess with daily energy levels. So if you went for a early run, getting say 300 calories deep, and then started eating 3 hours laters, you'd have a 500 calorie deficit the whole day, but be able to eat normally, getting you adequate negative caloriehours without causing any hormone problems. If this doesn't make much sense to anybody, that's ok, I'll have a tell-all thread made when I gather my thoughts Looks pretty good!

In Brampton? Not bloody likely. Maybe find a place serving poutine but Brampton caters to its largely middle-eastern demographic quite a bit.

Waldo, sounds like you're suffering from FFB (former fat boy) syndrome. All us lads who used to be chunky get it. It takes some mental ballet to really wrap your head around the fact that you have less of a paunch than the guy next to you.

Sprinting is power training. It's closer to oly lifts and plyometrics that way. From the muscle's point of view, the objective of power lifts is to recruit as many muscle fibers into the movement in as short an amount of time as possible. However, most power lifts are also highly technical (so are sprints really). Someone else correct me if I'm wrong, but you can get a little bit of hypertrophy from power lifts, in that they are highly anaerobic. So glycogen stores, mitochondrial density, all that goes up. Not as much as hypertrophy-specific training (that 12-15 range) will, and I wouldn't bet on much strength gained either; you simply aren't moving enough weight to cause your muscles to need to adapt. That's assuming you're in a normal weight range though; heavier individuals, or even light individuals using weight vests or hills could possibly build muscle. Second part, absolutely. Personally, my rule is that: if the exercise occurs in sets (intervals) and requires a significant amount of rest in between, you will need recovery. I know that, personally. I do four day training blocks every week and by the end of that last day my legs are absolutely dead.

It's grounds for admission into a psychiatric ward to voluntarily drive in toronto.