There’s more to gaining muscle than balancing caloric pluses and minuses. While a calorie isn’t just a calorie, the reality is that you need enough raw materials to support a muscle building investment. Total calorie intake shouldn’t be ignored. How much is an important question. But an even more important question: What’s your body going to [...]
There's more to gaining muscle than balancing caloric pluses and minuses. While a calorie isn't just a calorie, the reality is that you need enough raw materials to support a muscle building investment.
Total calorie intake shouldn't be ignored. How much is an important question. But an even more important question: What's your body going to do with that how much?
You might be eating “enough.” But that depends on how that enough gets used. It's your job to ensure enough is really enough.
Are you doing your job?
Ready for this? A calorie isn't just a calorie. But total calories are important. If that doesn't make sense, don't worry. I think we're on the right track.
Everything you digest is delegated to some kind of function. The delegation process is otherwise known as the signaling process. So not only do you have caloric baggage, you also have signaling baggage. This is why focusing solely on calories is a failure.
Each macronutrients has a function. The body processes each and uses each differently. If all calories were created equally, eating trans fat from fried food would be the same as eating saturated fat from coconut meat. This signaling and delegation in relation to physique improvement is often described as partitioning.
- Good partitioning = more of what you eat is used to upkeep and create muscle.
- Bad partitioning = more of what you eat is stored as fat.
Eating 2500kcals with bad partitioning is different than eating 2500kcals with good partitioning.
Partitioning is hugely genetic, but there's also environmental play. Ori Hofmekler, in The Warrior Diet, talks about stubborn body fat. Stubborn body fat has different receptors and blood flow patterns than “normal” body fat, but it's also linked to carbohydrate intake, protein intake, and training history. So even the nastiest physical hiccups are controllable.
Most professional athletes have fantastic partitioning.
“Despite his incessant habits of working out and incredible physical stature, Adrian Peterson seems to think something entirely different is at hand when explaining his quick recovery from a torn ACL last off-season. Peterson credits much of his medical success to his genes, FOX Sports reports.
Peterson said of his aunts and uncles, “they're all ripped. At 50 years old, they've got six packs and eight packs.”
You'd be surprised to find out how little professional athletes know and care about nutrition. Not all. But a lot. Most athletes I worked with at the Division I level had no care for nutrition. Yet they maintained muscularity most people dream of having.
Some people just sustain a more muscular base with a lower calorie intake. More of what they eat is used for muscular purposes. Other, like me, deflate two or three days into a decent calorie deficit — I withered into nothingness just five days into an experiment I did earlier this year, which I wrote about in Getting Lean and Staying Muscular.
For us genetically disadvantaged, it's all about two things:
- Fixing partitioning (hence the solid base recommendation [ Getting Lean and Staying Muscular ] )
- Making sure we eat enough at the right time to support support muscle building
We have to eat. Probably more than we think we need to. But consistently overfeeding ends in consistent overfattening.
Once you get down to your solid base, you can't be afraid to jack up the calories here and there. When you're at your solid base, you have a lot of short term caloric play.
There's a classic muscle building analogy in the strength world. You need enough bricks to build whatever you're trying to build. But, at some point, more bricks don't yield more building. The workers can only work so much.
But the real magic here is this:
At the end of things, total calorie intake is probably going to determine whether or not you gain or lose weight. But weight doesn't distinguish between muscle or fat. It's your signaling and partitioning that's determines how much of that “weight” is muscle and how much is fat. (Focusing solely on calorie intake also neglects metabolic upregulation and downregulation, but that's a story for another day.)
The video below explains it in full — especially how it relates to cyclical overfeeding and underfeeding — so check it out. After you watch the video, if you have further interested in the clean bulk, sign-up for the early bird launch of The Chaos Bulk to get some free goodies. (There may or may not be a program included…just saying…) Throw your name an e-mail into the sweet colored box below the video.
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Throw your name and e-mail below for the early launch of The Chaos Bulk. Don't miss out on the perks of being an early bird.;
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Browse similar posts:
Clean Bulk Fail #1 You're Creating Training Noise
Clean Bulk Fail #2 You're Tuned Into the Wrong Station
Clean Bulk Fail #3 You Don't Have Cojones
Clean Bulk Fail #4 You're Think a Calorie Is Just a Calorie
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