MikeOO17
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- Joined: 1/8/2004
- Location: Vancouver, BC <<44>>CANADA<<44>>
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To anyone cutting or bulking...
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Wednesday, March 03, 2004 2:06 AM
which is everyone really. I found this while reading over a link that Jetamuski posted in out of bounds. I'll post the info followed by a summary of the text.
Q: One big debate in bodybuilding is whether one should bulk up first and then cut down, or whether one should cut down first and then bulk up? Which do you think is better?
A: Most popular opinions on this topic suggest that the best way to get the ideal physique (big AND ripped) is to bulk up first and then try to diet down. The proponents of this strategy suggest that in bulking up, you will be adding muscle mass. They further state that this muscle mass will be helpful, metabolically speaking, when you go to diet down. Since muscle is the engine that burns fat, doesn’t it make sense that with a bigger engine you will burn more fuel and will get leaner much easier?
Well, although it makes sense intuitively, I’d like to present some data and an argument that may lead you to rethink this strategy. I pretty much want to propose that the simplistic idea of bulking up before cutting down is a relatively useless one. It doesn’t take into account how much muscle and fat you have already. I mean, what if you’re 15-20% body fat but only weigh 160 at a height of 6 ft.? This is a relatively low ratio of lean body mass to fat mass. So should you still "bulk up" to gain some muscle and metabolic power before you try to get lean? The answer to this question and a few more will be addressed below.
Before I talk about this issue though, I want to clearly state that I doubt there ever will be a legitimate research study examining this question in healthy male and female weightlifters. I just can’t picture the National Institutes of Health (NIH) throwing big research dollars at a project designed to figure out how to make already muscular men and women bigger and more ripped. They tend to fund studies that aim at curing cancer and heart disease and stuff like that. So this question will probably never be answered scientifically. But using some other literature, we can come to some pretty cool conclusions.
The data I’m about to present isn’t really new. However, for some reason this information hasn’t trickled down into the bodybuilding community as of yet. And I’m not sure as to why. I guess it’s probably due to the dogmatic approach of most weight lifters who are guided by tradition rather than objective science. Geez, I’m starting to sound like the late Mike Mentzer, aren’t I?
Anyway, while ignored in weight lifting, researchers have known for years that one of the biggest determinants of your muscle loss to fat loss ratio (when dieting) and your muscle gain to fat gain ratio (when bulking up) is your initial level of body fatness. Basically the amount of body fat that you have (percentage and total pounds of fat) will be a major determinant of how your body responds to over eating or under eating.
Several studies have been done to explore this phenomenon and G.B. Forbes has compiled the results of these investigations into one review article (Ann N Y Acad Sci 2000 May;904:359-65). For organizational purposes, I’ve split the results up into a weight loss experiment section and a weight gain experiment section.
Weight Loss Experiments
In several experiments, subjects were underfed to varying degrees in order to produce weight loss. Here are the results of these experiments
Subjects were given the following three hypocaloric diets to produce weight loss:
Diet #1 — 0-450 kcal/day
Diet #2 — 500-1000 kcal/day
Diet #3 — 1000+ kcal/day
The interesting results of this study show that:
1. At the same calorie levels, the fatter subjects kept more muscle and lost more fat.
Let’s look at the numbers:
Initial Body Fat/ Caloric Intake/ Lean Mass(% of Weight Lost)/ Fat(% of Weight Lost)
20 kg (44 lbs)/ Lowest/ 60%/ 40%
20 kg (44 lbs)/ Higher/ 20%/ 80%
60 kg (132 lbs)/ Lowest/ 35%/ 75%
60 kg (132 lbs)/ Higher/ 10%/ 90%
I hope it’s clear from this table that eating a diet too few in calories causes a substantial LBM (lean body mass) loss, while eating a higher calorie (but still hypocaloric diet) preserves more lean mass. In addition, it’s especially interesting to note that the fatter subjects on both the higher calorie and the lower calorie diets have a remarkable shift in the muscle loss to fat loss ratio toward more fat loss and less muscle loss. This shift is especially striking in comparison to what happens when their leaner counterparts diet.
Several other studies show that this phenomenon is not exclusive to humans. It is also present in fasting and hibernating mammals:
Initial B.Fat/ Caloric Intake/ Lean Mass(% of Weight Lost)/ Fat(% of Weight Lost)
10% fat None 80% 20%
30% fat None 40% 60%
50% fat None 18% 82%
Since all of the above studies were done in non-exercise trained humans and mammals, further studies were done to determine the effects exercise on weight loss. If exercise is used in place of, or in addition to calorie restriction or fasting, more lean body mass is preserved than if there was no exercise. However the same trends are evident in that the fatter individuals preserve more lean mass while the leaner individuals lose more lean mass.
Now that you’ve seen these data, I think that the take-home message for dieting should be as follows.
1. Always use exercise in conjunction with diet to promote loss of fat and preservation of lean mass.
2. Always consider your initial body fat before deciding how severe your diet should be.
3. When starting a diet with a high level of body fat, your diet can be more restrictive and/or severe since you will lose the fat preferentially.
4. As you diet and get leaner, you should adjust your calorie deficit so that it is actually smaller. So if you start a diet eating 1000 calories below maintenance, as you get leaner, your daily deficit should decrease to 500 calories per day.
5. If you don’t decrease your calorie deficit as you lose fat, you will begin to lose an unacceptable amount of lean mass.
Weight Gain Experiments
In several experiments, subjects were overfed to varying degrees in order to produce weight gain. Here are the results of these experiments
These studies have shown that when overfed, initial body fat level is also important:
Initial B.Fat/ Caloric Intake/ Lean Mass(% of Weight Gained)/ Fat(% of Weight Gained)
10 kg (22 lbs)/ Overfeeding/ 70%/ 30%
20 kg (44 lbs)/ Overfeeding/ 30%/ 70%
40 kg (88 lbs)/ Overfeeding/ 20%/ 80%
These striking differences in the ratio of LBM gained to fat gained illustrate the need to start an overeating phase while lean. In the leanest subjects, there was a 2 1/3 pound muscle gain for every 1 pound of fat gained. However, for the fatter subjects, 4 pounds of fat were gained for every 1 pound of muscle gained.
From these overfeeding studies, it’s clear that lean individuals gain less fat and more muscle when overfeeding when compared to their fatter counterparts. Since these subjects were not exercise trained, adding exercise would have probably lead to a shift toward more muscle gain with less fat gain. Exercise has a nutrient partitioning effect, shuttling nutrients preferentially toward the lean tissues. As such, you’d expect more lean gain during exercise training and overfeeding. However, either way, the trends would probably remain and fatter subjects would gain more fat during overfeeding than lean individuals.
One of the coolest things about this article is that a predicative equation was generated that allows us to calculate the amount of muscle and the amount of fat that we can expect to gain, based on our initial fat weight. Check it out.
Lean Mass Gain/Weight Gain = 10.4/[10.4 + initial fat weight (kg)]
In addition, this very same equation is valid when dieting for the prediction of muscle loss and fat loss.
Lean Mass Loss/Weight Loss = 10.4/[10.4 + initial fat weight (kg)]
While not flawless, these equations are handy tools for estimating how much LBM and fat you may gain or lose when underfeeding or overfeeding. In addition, they allow us to decide whether it’s a good time to try to bulk up or not.
Therefore, for someone who is 92 kg (200 lbs) and 5% body fat (4.6kg fat), about 70% of the weight gained during an overfeeding phase can be expected to be lean body mass (10.4 divided by 10.4 plus 4.6 is equal to 0.70), while the remaining 30% is expected to be fat weight. However in someone who is 92kg and 10% body fat (9.2kg of fat), 53% of weight gained will be lean body mass.
Keep in mind that the opposite is also true. If you’re 92 kg (200 lbs) and 5% body fat (4.6% fat), about 70% of the weight lost during a dieting phase can be expected to be lean body mass.
So perhaps a good idea is to only overfeed when relatively lean and to diet hard only when over fat. If you’re 200 lbs and around 10-15% body fat, these equations predict that about half the weight you gain will be fat and half will be muscle. If you try to gain when fatter than 15%, much of the weight you gain will be fat mass.
I must offer a word of caution, though. Remember that these equations were mostly generated using diet alone. The addition of weight training and cardio would have changed things up a bit. In addition, these numbers may be different if supplements are used. Some supplements change nutrient partitioning parameters (alpha-lipoic acid, fish oils, presumably Methoxy-7, etc); others preserve lean body mass when dieting (ephedrine, caffeine, etc); and others increase protein synthesis (anabolic steroids and androgens). Any of these factors can change the exact ratios.
However, as I said before, the basic principles remain. When dieting, the leaner you get, the less your calorie deficit should be or else you’ll lose more LBM than necessary. And, when bulking up, your best bet is to start lean, as most of the weight you gain will be LBM. If you start fat, much of your weight gain will be fat gain.
Although this was a roundabout way of answering your question, the bottom line is that it looks like it is better to diet down first then bulk up rather than the other way around.
John M Berardi is a scientist and PhD candidate in the area of Exercise and Nutritional Biochemistry at the University of Western Ontario, Canada. His company Science Link: Translating Research into Resultsâ„¢ specializes in providing integrated training, nutritional, and supplementation programs for high-level strength and endurance athletes. You can contact Science Link at: JMBmuscle@hotmail.com.
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Definitely worth a read, however if you're lazy (being bodybuilders you probably are  ) I'll tell you what it all means. Some studies were conducted using bulking phases and cutting phases. In both cases they had participants of various body fat percentages. In the bulking phases, they found that people who already had a high percentage of fat gained more fat than muscle. Those with leaner builds put most of their mass on in the form of... more lean mass. Cutting was also interesting. Those with the highest fat percentage lost most of their mass from fat. Those with the lowest fat percentage lost most of their mass from lean muscle. Its fairly simple to see, if you are already bulky, you need to cut and if you are already lean, take advantage of your situation and bulk up to add a significant amount of muscle. Only cut while lean in preparation for a contest otherwise you will be sacrificing a large majority of muscle for a small amount of fat. I hope my summary was clear enough, although I strongly suggest that you read over the text. This is not mainstream information as John Berardi points out, although due to the significance of it, we should do what we can to make it mainstream!!!
< Message edited by MikeOO17 -- 3/4/2004 9:27:54 PM >
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