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The Ultimate Eating Out Survival Guide.

So you’re on a diet, but an occasion comes up in which sticking to it becomes difficult. It might be a night out, a party, a wedding or maybe you’re just travelling and don’t have the ability to cook. The opportunity to say ah fu*k it shows itself, do you give in? I’m going to help you screw the ah fu*k it and stay on track. The key to results is consistency, so if you let occasions like this take you off track too often, you’ll lose that consistency and therefore any potential results.

Here is your Step by Step Eating Out Survival Guide:

1) Follow a Flexible Diet

This hopefully isn’t new to you, but if it is, flexible dieting essentially means that you give yourself a break. You screw up one day, or maybe just one meal, as long as you’re consistent with the majority of your meals you’re A OK.

Basically, when an occasion like this crops up, you do your best and then the next day, you get back on your nutrition plan.

The great thing with this approach is that because you allow yourself some flexibility you never feel the need to stray from your diet. You know as long as you’re on the straight and narrow most of the time, you will see results. You have the bigger picture in mind. Thus, we avoid binges or cheat meals, so instead when you screw up one day you don’t say ah f*ck it and just drop your diet, you get back on it the next.

2) Plan Ahead

So you get flexible dieting, but you’re extra eager to stay on track, you want results as fast as they can come. Therefore, you want to plan ahead. Know you’re eating out with friends in the evening?

Why not check out the restaurants menu beforehand, select something that fits within your diet and then work your day around it.

That way you know you’ll be on track. However, restaurant food is not like home cooked food, the chef doesn’t care about your fitness goals, they only care about making food taste good. That means they’ll not worry about adding extra butter, oil or sugar to your food. So expect the food you eat out to be higher in total calories than meals you would make yourself.

Some insider tips:
– Many chains give you the nutritional breakdown of their meals, so make sure to do a google search beforehand.
– Pick easy to guestimate meals e.g. steak and chips, pasta with tomato sauce, Margherita pizza etc.
– Ask for any dressings on the side & vegetables without added butter.
– Search for the meal in question on myfitnesspal & use a suggestion that looks about right.
– Over-estimate fats & under-estimate protein.
– Enter the components of the meal into myfitnesspal & use cups to guestimate quantities e.g. a cup of rice, half a cup of chips etc.

As you eat out more often, you’ll get better. Like anything practice makes perfect. For example, I love pizza so I used to eat out at Pizza Express a lot because they provide their nutritional information. Great! But I wanted to try other joints, so overtime I became more confident in my ability to guestimate other pizzas. You too can do the same with any meals. If you’re someone who weighs their food and tracks the nutrition, you should have a good idea of how many calories are in different foods. Plus remember tip number 1, you should be following a flexible diet, and by estimating you’re doing really well, and if you’re off by a little bit it isn’t a worry as long as you get back to your home cooking soon enough.

3) Create Buffer

This one I find very handy, and makes complete sense, make yourself some buffer room so you can enjoy more grub.

Basically, you change your calorie output or intake in and around the event, thus creating a buffer.

While I do not advise doing a bunch of what I call ‘guilt cardio’ I don’t see anything wrong with trying to increase your NEAT (Non Exercise Activity Thermogenesis). Doing extra cardio for me rings alarm bells. In my past I remember binge drinking and then doing very long runs the next morning, this is what I call ‘guilt cardio’. To me this is an unhealthy relationship to have with food, and in future can lead to problems. However, making sure you don’t just sit on your butt all day and actually get up and go for a walk I do agree with. For example, you have a takeaway with friends or family, instead of falling asleep on the sofa, maybe you go for a 30 minute walk.

Or during the day before the event you decide to do some housework you have been putting off, or clean the car. That way you can nail two birds with one stone, getting something productive done while giving yourself some extra buffer for the event. For me the big difference between this and doing the extra cardio work is that you don’t measure this NEAT, you are just more aware of your activity in the day, whereas with the cardio you might be tempted to think ‘Oh I must have burnt 1000 calories doing that’ and then overeat at the event, and I feel that sets you up for failure.

Another way you can create buffer is to use one of the ‘Flexible Pillars’ from Get Big, Stay Lean. I use this Pillar with all my clients, and it is moving up to 20% of your calories from one day to another. Why 20%? Well I think this is enough to give a decent amount of room, but not so much that it messes with another day. Say you’re usually on 2000 calories a day, you can take up to 400 calories and move them from one day to another, so you would consume say 1600 calories before the event and then on the day of the event 2400 calories. You could even take this a step further and spread those calories, so still having 2400 calories on the day, but taking 100 calories from 4 other days, having 1900 calories. Obviously the more calories you have to play with the more buffer this method will provide, thus someone bulking has a lot of leeway. For me that is a very easy, and sustainable approach, and gives a lot of potential buffer while keeping you right on track.

There are many other potential ways you could give yourself buffer, like doing extra exercise. For example, you could really restrict your calories around the event, sticking to say just protein and vegetables in and around, making for very low calorie days. However, just like the exercise example, I don’t really like this because I think it doesn’t provide a healthy relationship with food. For me this sets you up for failure, you think ‘oh I’ve basically starved myself for 2 days’ and therefore binge like crazy on the day of event.

Doing ‘guilt cardio’ or ‘starvation intakes’ around these events for me is not a healthy mindset to have, I do not ever advise my clients to do it, or anyone else. I believe it sets you up for binges, because in your eyes you’re making them OK, but believe me, binging is never OK. It is an eating disorder. So if anyone tells me they’ve binged and want to do a tonne of ‘guilt cardio’ to burn it off, I tell them NO, just get back to your usual diet and activity the next day.

4) Take a Diet Deload

Next up is for those of you who may be or have been on quite a strict diet for a long period of time. You may be on really low calories, and therefore even with all of the above you’re still struggling with how to tackle eating off plan. Well, for you guys I think it may be a perfect time for a ‘diet deload’, similar to a training deload;

you’re reducing the stress to allow you to continue making progress.

So in a training deload you tend to drop volume and maybe intensity too, these are the main stressors, this then allows you to recover for further progression. So the diet deload uses the same principles, except your stress is the restraint on calories, so in this case you simply reduce this stress by eating a bit more. By taking a day off plan you give your body and mind some time to recover, refresh and therefore continue onwards with your diet. This is not an excuse for a binge, this is to prevent exactly that, to give yourself a break from dieting.

This could be used for just one meal, for example Lyle McDonald recommends free meals to be incorporated into your plan. Essentially it is one meal during the day, that would not be at home, in which you can eat what you like, and then be done with it. Get back to your diet the next day. What if it is longer than a day, well this would be more along the lines of a ‘diet break’ in which you take 1 or more weeks of eating at maintenance. This would really help your body ramp up all the things that come down during a diet, it would also give you a really nice mental break. Which of these you choose will depend on the occasion and on where you are in your diet. Just like with training deloads, they may only be one lighter session, but they could be up to a month of lighter work, it all depends on the stress accumulated before. If you’ve been training really hard for a long time, or dieting in this case, then you would probably warrant a longer deload. Personally for my clients, I tend to introduce 1-2 week long diet breaks every 3 months, and then free meals are used sparingly, because they have all the tools described above and they’re usually enough for one off events.

5) Day of Tool Kit

Right so it’s the day of the event where you’re not eating on plan. How do you go about tracking your grub? I use a lot of the tools I am going to talk about on a weekly basis, for example this weekend I am away with family in the Lake District, so eating is far from routine. Last weekend my girlfriend and I went to a food festival, there were samples from homemade cheeses to flavoured ciders, and I enjoyed it all. This weekend I’m not taking my scales weighing every portion of food, and I’m eating with family, whether it be out at a restaurant or homemade grub.

My first tool is a pre-event protein shake, or if it is a holiday or prolonged period away from home, take some protein powder. This is just handy, because protein is expensive and whereas picking up some bread is easy, finding lean protein sources isn’t. For example, when I was going to the food festival I wanted to make sure I wasn’t ravenous, so I had a protein shake before leaving. Want to make this extra filling? Add some xanthum gum, this adds fibre, will thicken up the shake and slow digestion. Another option is to have casien protein, this is very slow to digest when compared to whey protein, therefore keeping you satiated for longer. The idea of this is that you are not starving hungry when going to the occasion so you’ll be less likely to overeat, but still haven’t consumed a tonne of calories and made a massive dent in your intake for the day.

Along the same lines is portable protein. You might think I have some sort of fetish with protein, and well you’d be right, it is awesome. Not only is it only 4kcals per gram, it is also the most satiating macronutrient. Portable protein comes in handy because sometimes you just want a snack, but most things you can easily pick up are not overly diet friendly, although you can get some very suitable bars. Such as a quest bar, they’re reasonably low in fat (sub 10g), high in fibre (around 20g) and have a decent hit of protein (20g) which makes them quite ideal when you might be lacking fibre and protein during your vacation. You might think chucking some in your suitcase is a waste of time, but for me whenever I’m away they’re a life saver.

OK so now we’re onto actually tracking on the day. So when I was at the food festival I was trying all sorts of things, and every time I had something I made a mental note. Then when I got a spare moment I would jot it down in my notepad on my phone. This enabled me once home to tot everything up. But, how did I know how much I was eating of the food and how did I workout the nutrition of the food items? Well this is where guestimation has to come into play. As said before, if you have been tracking your intake somewhat for a period of time you get a good awareness of how many calories are in things, or at least what an amount of food looks like. So I ate some random homemade cheese, I had some samples of cider and picked at some brownies. When I got home I searched for generic versions of all these that looked roughly right, we follow flexible diets and so don’t sweat the small stuff, so this is good enough. I then entered amounts that matched up with my thoughts of the foods. You could take this a step version and take a picture of everything you ate to help assist once home. Once you have come to a guestimated amount you can then fit the rest of your diet around this.

This next tool is even more flexible and is for those of you who don’t want to have to track in your notes, and try and add things up afterwards. For you guys I recommend just setting aside a good number of calories for the event. Like if you know you’re eating out, you make sure to leave yourself a good 1000 calories or so, and then choose foods that hit that allowance. This can be tricky if it is an evening event, as you might not leave sufficient room, but then you can use the ‘Flexible Pillar’ that is your 20% swaps if you wanted, thus lowing your intake the next day.

The Bigger Picture

Just remember, your diet should be flexible enough to allow you to enjoy whatever occasions come up. Sure there will be some people that doesn’t apply to, such as those in competition prep, but then you are not intending to sustain the diet you’re currently on. Most of us however are trying to somewhat sustain how we are eating now, and if we can’t we should question our diet.

My advice above is meant to allow you to enjoy your life while sticking to your diet, pick the approach above that causes you the least stress.

You may find that some tools suit different occasions, like for me if I was eating a meal out I would simply plan ahead of time, but if I was on a 2 week holiday I’d utilise tools 3, 4 and 5. However, always remember Tool Number 1; that is a Flexible Diet, which means we can slip up now and then, so long as we get back on track and we remain on track the majority of the time. So I actively encourage you to take some time off now and then, because like when you take time off training, taking a break from your diet will help you in the long run.

So there you have it, the Ultimate Eating Out Survival Guide, now you can enjoy all the food and stay on track with your nutrition. No all out binges, no food restrictions, no carrying around weighing scales required.

If you found this helpful, or think others would too, I actively encourage you to share it. If you have any questions on the above, or anything relating to health and fitness, please email me, I will respond to every single person.

Further Reading:

– [NEW] Podcast – Discussing Get Big, Stay Lean with Jay Scott. 
– [NEW] Website – http://www.revivestronger.com
– [NEW] Blog post – Meal Frequency Part 2 
– [NEW] Fat Loss Success story – Chris Janssen 

Meal Frequency – Part 2

Why meals more isn’t better

In Part 1 we looked at whether there was any logic or reasoning behind this. Basically coming to the conclusion that what may sound good on paper, doesn’t actually come to fruition.

No more following theories like mindless chickens.

This time round we are going to take the nail in the frequent feedings and hammer it in a little further.
Why Frequent Makes No Sense

There are two main reasons:

1. Individuality
2. Impending Doom

Individuality
First up let us consider something that is incredibly important when starting diets or nutritional protocols; The Principle of Individuality. Which in simple terms just means you have to take the persons individual characteristics into account, cookie cutter, just doesn’t cut it. That means their physical characteristics, their environment, their preferences etc. etc.

So when we hear blanket statements about how eating every couple of hours, or eating mini meals, are given, they stamp all over the individual. So what might work for The Rock, may not be very suitable to anyone else.

For example, a small female, weighing in at 140lbs, trying to lose fat, may be aiming for 1400 calories a day. Split that between 6 meals, and you have 233kcal ‘meals’. Not only is it going to be a pain preparing 6 tiny portions of food, but they’re going to feel dissatisfied every time. It would make more sense to split it between 3 meals, making each 466 calories. Enough to actually represent a meal.

I am not saying frequent feeding is bad, but to say it is for everyone is wrong. Heck a 200lb male who is trying to pack on size may need over 4000 calories, he’d probably do well of more frequent meals.

We are all unique and different in so many ways.

Impending Doom
Sounds pretty horrific right? Well because the individual is removed from the equation failure in inevitable.

I remember back when I believed all the ‘theories’ about mini meals. So much so I would always have my tupparware with my food, and just incase I couldn’t take it with me I had a shake replacement. This added a load of stress onto my plate, and at the time I was studying for exams and it made the situation a lot harder.

We all have enough things to worry about during our day, nutrition need not add significant stress. How often do you hear ‘I missed a meal’ and the negative connotations associated with that? All the bloody time.

The person feels ashamed, like they have really done something wrong. This can led lead to giving up, stopping their diet and blowing out. Completely destroying their progress.

The truth is meal frequency does not matter for 99% of people. So trying to abide by some magical number of meals makes very little sense, and as seen above, can be destructive.

My View
We come back to the principle of individuality, and so long as you have the right overall nutrition in place, eat when and as you like. As I have said before, self experimentation is a wonderful thing. Find 6 meals is easy and keeps you fuller and more energised? Great stick to it. Maybe you find 2 meals allows you to enjoy your food more, great stick to it. Stick to what is providing you sustainable results.

Next time I am going to look deeper, into what might be an optimal frequency of meals for muscle gain and fat loss. Remember, optimal on paper may not always work out in practice, however it is still something we can strive for.

Spread facts, not dogma, if you liked this or any of my articles please feel free to share them using the social media icons below #ReviveStronger

Chris Janssen – ‘Your ability to adapt to my hectic lifestyle and stay the course has been the biggest boost to helping me achieve my goals.’

Chris, what were your goals when signing up with me?

Drop fat, gain strength and improve overall aesthetics.

What reservations if any did you have before we started working together?

I was a bit reserved about the time difference, as the only other coach I had worked with was always in my same time zone.

How was I able to help you with your reservations?

The time difference actually worked in my favour (maybe not yours), as I would always have an email from you to wake up to on check in day. But regardless, it has never been an issue.

 

In point form, can you list your achievements training with me thus far?

• Fat loss with muscle gain with pauses in the deficit.
• Increased strength with an all time PR on deadlift.
• Bodyweight PR on squat and bench.
• Worked around nagging injuries that I no longer have pain in.

Is there anything else you’d like to add?

With all of the travel I do personally and for my job, I am often super focused trying to keep up with the demands that pull me in various directions other than fitness. I must pick and choose what I can dedicate my efforts to on a day to day basis and those priorities are often changing.

This means that fitness and my ability to track, check in, and respond to you is not always consistent. Your ability to adapt to my hectic lifestyle and stay the course has been the biggest boost to helping me achieve my goals.

You take a lot of pressure off of me, so that I do not have to worry about training/diet programming, which allows me to utilize that time for work/personal tasks.

Further, for being a younger trainer, your professionalism, in depth responses, and quick response times are outstanding no matter how long anyone has been in the business.

I started working with Chris 6 months ago, and we have come a long way. He is a great example of how you can make progress, that is sustainable and livable, so long as you take the right approach. We have gone through holidays, various on-going injuries and work events but managed to make progress consistently. This is largely down to Chris being able to respect that progress might take more time, but it will be much more liveable and will last. This is why we have been so successful.

Interested in online coaching? You can check out what I have to offer here.

Cameron Winter – ‘Gained a National Qualifying Total for Powerlifting’

Peak for powerlifting meet and to lean out whilst maintaining as much strength/muscle as possible.

What reservations if any did you have before we started working together?

The only reservation I had was that, maybe, is that it would be difficult to convey exact feelings with the medium of communication being the internet. Added to this, the experience may not be as personal as face-to-face coaching which I have been used to from sports etc.

 

 

How was I able to help you with your reservations?

With video updates, mainly, and very personalised changes to diet/training plans depending on feedback I gave.

In point form, can you list your achievements training with me thus far?

• A National qualifying total (405kg)
• Dropped 4kg.
• Learnt how to use flexible dieting whilst still achieving desired results.

Is there anything else you’d like to add?

Dieting done…time to make some gains.

Cameron came to me seeking help in peaking for his powerlifting meet. Fortunately Cameron was following a decent programme and I only had to make a few minor adjustments to help hip peak effectively for his meet. I was very proud to see Cameron qualified for nationals. We then progressed with dieting down further, whilst maintaining strength. Cameron is a pleasure to coach and keeps me on my toes with on-going social events and niggling injuries, but nothing we cannot work around. I look forward to taking Cameron into a gaining phase and progressing his impressive lifts further.

Interested in online coaching? You can check out what I have to offer here.

Where There Is [No Struggle], There Is [No Strength] – Part 3

Training Age & It’s Implications

So far in Parts 1 and Part 2 we have covered the idea that we need to ensure progressive overload to get stronger, and to do that we need to take deloads now and then. These are then put into a long term programme via periodisation, the way you choose to do this is dependent on many factors. We have also looked at picking rep ranges and how you can pick different ones to emphasise your goals.

Today I am going to share with you some thoughts on how your training age impacts how you set up your periodisation cycles. Regardless of your goals, if you do not set up your training in a way that is specific to your training history, you will not see the progress you desire.

What is Training Age?
By training age I basically mean the amount of time you have been training. However, there is a caveat, because some people train but not appropriately, or with any sort of intelligence (I was one of them). Initially that is fine, you can get away with it as a novice lifter, but to progress past that stage, you need to set your training up with a longer term focus.

So when I talk about training age I mean proper, periodised training with good nutrition to back it up. If you have been lifting 5 years but for 2 of those 5 you were dieting, and 1 of those 5 you were inconsistent with the gym, you sir have a training age of 2 years.
So your training age is the time you have spent lifting with a proper programme and eating in a way to support that training.

Are you a novice, intermediate or advanced lifter?
Once you have the number of years you have been training the next step is determine where that puts you in terms of advancement. Are you still a novice, or have you progressed to an intermediate or even advanced lifter? If you’re reading this and it is all new to you, likelihood is you’re a novice. Many of you will be going into or will be well into the intermediate zone. Very few of us ever reach advanced lifter status.

Novice – 6 to 9 months of training
Intermediate – 6m to 4 years of training
Advanced – 2 years to 6 years of training

What we must remember is that you can actually fall back into different categories. For example, you had been training 3 years but then went travelling for a year and then took another year to get back into a routine. Because you have had such a period of time out, you have gone from intermediate, back to novice status. However, you’d quickly get back up to intermediate with the right training and nutrition.

Also remember that you’re better off under estimating your experience than over estimating it, the stuff that works at the start will work better for someone more advanced than trying to use advanced protocols for someone less trained. So don’t go looking in magazines at the elite lifters and trying to copy their training regimes. Because you’re not ready for that, and it wouldn’t provide you the results you desire.

Right so you now know where you sit in terms of training age and therefore your training status, what does that mean for your programming?

How to periodise appropriately for your training age
So as we progress as lifters the gains we see get slower, and smaller, just like when we lose fat, initially it is easy, but as time goes it takes much more effort and time. As we learnt in Part 1, you need to create enough stress to cause an adaptive response. When you are new to lifting this is easy, but as said, when you progress past this you need heavier loads to cause enough stress to warrant an adaptive response.

As you become more trained you can handle more load, this takes more out of you and therefore you cannot keep using them all the time. This is where periodisation comes in, you build up volume, then reduce it and replace it with intensity, to eventually show some progress in strength. As said in Part 2 we accumulate volume, then we reduce it in place for intensity.

This is where training age comes in, as a noob to weight lifting you can see this progress every single workout. But once you’re an intermediate you will not progress that quickly, it shifts to weekly progress. Past that stage, when you become an advanced lifter you’re doing well to progress every month.

Novice – daily progress
Intermediate – weekly progress
Advanced – monthly progress

The way you therefore set up your training needs to take into account your training age. If you are a novice and go onto an advanced training programme, you are limiting your potential, because you could be gaining daily. Whereas if an advanced lifter tries to progress every single workout, they will stall out. They need to take a longer term perspective, build up their volume and replace it with some heavy highly stimulating loads, over the course of several weeks.

Where there is no Struggle, there is no Strength
So there we have it, you now know that without struggle there is no strength. However, the amount of struggle needs to be appropriate to you training age, and how you select your struggle protocols needs to be specific to your training goals

James Driscoll – ‘’With a hell of a lot of encouragement…anything is possible”

James, what were your goals when signing up with me?

Gain confidence.

What reservations if any did you have before we started working together?

My reservations before I started were more on a personal level, unsure if I was able to achieve my goals but although a fair way from them, it’s a positive start!

How was I able to help you with your reservations?

With a hell of a lot of encouragement from yourself I started to believe that anything is possible given the right nutrition and training from someone who knows their stuff!

In point form, can you list your achievements training with me thus far?

• Gained strength.
• Lost fat with 15lbs lost in 3 months.
• Feeling happier within myself, now able to progress into a lean gaining phase.

Is there anything else you’d like to add?

Steve, you have been great so far, way more than I experienced from previous experiences with personal trainers, and I’m exited to enter the next phase and get to my long term goals.

James came to me unsatisfied with past experiences with other personal trainers. I explained my approach and gave him confidence that he could see the results he desired. James has not missed a beat, keeping right on track the whole time, while enjoying a flexible diet. We have lost a great deal of fat and actually gained strength, now James is in an ideal position to start a lean gaining phase!

Interested in online coaching? You can check out what I have to offer here.

Meal Frequency – Part 1

Optimal No. of Meals?

You read right, Dwayne Johnson, otherwise known as The Rock, consumes 7 meals a day! We ain’t talking salads either, we are talking proper meals, meat, vegetables and potatoes. Just check out his diet below:

 

Dwayne Johnson’s Diet	Meal 1 10 oz cod 2 whole eggs 2 cups oatmeal	Meal 2 8 oz cod 12 oz sweet potato 1 cup veggies
Meal 3 8 oz chicken 2 cups white rice 1 cup veggies	Meal 4 8 oz cod 2 cups rice 1 cup veggies 1 tbsp fish oil	Meal 5 8 oz steak 12 oz baked potato spinach salad
Meal 6 10 oz cod 2 cups rice salad	Meal 7 30 grams casein protein 10 egg-white omelet 1 cup veggies (onions, peppers, mushrooms) 1 tbsp omega-3 fish oil

 

This is his so called ‘muscle-building’ diet. No doubt it has worked for him, the man has some muscle! But, remember how I said we should question everything? I know it seems we have a winning formula, 1) The Rock is hench 2) The Rock eats 7 meals a day. So put two and two together and we should all be eating 7 meals a day to get hench?

Too often it is acceptable to have an idea of why something works, and then use this to sell it without any testing or proof. There is no experiment that asserts validity. And thus many of the accepted truths in the nutrition and training field fall within this, and they persist due to habit. I think that is ludicrous, I think times are changing and I want to push this change. In reality you should provide proof that the idea is based on facts, and testing to ensure it works.

 

Trouble is it seems kinda logical to have many meals in the day if building muscle is our goal. And traditionally bodybuilders have been under a strict eat every 2-3 hours rule, to ensure constant supply of nutrients to our muscles. By eating more often you not only provide our muscles with fuel, you stoke the metabolic fire and avoid spikes in our blood sugar levels amongst other benefits. While that all sounds great, and on the surface I see the potential logic, but often the premise is flawed, lets look at each claim in further detail.

 

Yo Bro

“Eating more often spikes your metabolism”

 

OK so where does this claim come from, because every claim has a source. When we eat we do in fact increase our metabolism, through something called The Thermic Effect of Food (TEF). TEF equates to the energy burnt to digest the food, yup, we don’t ingest something and get 100% of the energy, some gets lost in digestion (around 10%). So the thought was by eating more often, we are stimulating more TEF, thus increasing our metabolism. Mini-meals ftw.

 

However, TEF is directly proportional to the amount you’re eating. This is where the above argument losing its standing. When two people consume identical diets, no matter how many meals they eat, the amount burnt in TEF is the same. So when diets are matched studies have shown no differences in expenditure between nibbling and gorging. It becomes another one of those situations where people miss the forest for the trees, because when you focus on the bigger picture, the entire diet over the long term, there is no difference.

Hang on, I heard if you skip breakfast you don’t ignite your metabolism, and if you don’t do that you’ll burn less. Intermittent fasting, in which you go through periods of typically 16 hours of no food has destroyed this argument. Our metabolism doesn’t operate that quickly, we do not impose some sort of starvation response by missing a meal.

 

Whether you eat 3 meals, 11 meals or Dwayne’s 7 meals, when diets are matched, there is no difference in metabolic rate. Any effects of meal pattern on the regulation of our body weight are mediated through effects on the food intake side of the energy balance equation. Increasing the number of meals in hope of boosting your metabolic rate is a total waste of time.

 

But Bro

“What about your blood sugar, it’ll crash”

 

This claim again on surface seems very logical, that if we want to keep stable energy levels, we need to be grazing constantly. Feeding our bodies little and often, to keep a nice flow of energy coming in. Further to that, surely eating frequently means we avoid getting hungry too. Again, that all makes sense on the surface, so lets delve into it.

Contrary to the above, our bodies actually regulate our blood sugar levels incredibly well. You know what our bodies love? Homeostasis. Whether it’s our body fat, temperature or blood sugar levels, our body is extremely well adept at keeping them tightly bound to a strict range. Assuming you are perfectly healthy we don’t see our levels climb and sink like a crazy yoyo. In fact more recent studies done on younger fit and healthy subjects have shown them to have greater blood sugar control on 3 as opposed to 6 meals, go figure.

 

But Bro

“You’ll go catabolic if you don’t keep feeding your muscles protein”

 

So we know our blood sugar levels do just fine without frequent feeding, and it doesn’t magically jack up our metabolism. But surely if we want to maintain or grow muscle, and protein is the key to this, we need a constant supply of it. If we go for hours without, won’t our bodies start eating away at our hard earned muscle?

 

Right so the thinking is we are better off having say 30g of protein split into 6 meals as opposed to 60g split into 3 meals. Because, we want a constant supply of aminos to not lose muscle. This misses something quite important, and that is digestion speed. You eat more, it takes longer to digest. After a high protein meal amino acids are released slowly into your bloodstream. A typical meal takes 5-6 hours to get digested, so even if you are having 3 larger meals, you’re still digesting and using the last one!

 

The only time meal frequency shows to make any difference with this is when protein intake is inadequate. In cases where the person isn’t getting enough protein (1g per pound or so) a higher frequency of feedings can help spare lean body mass.

So the body does not trigger a hormonal cascade to signal starvation if it goes without food for hours, in fact it copes well with this. The only time a ‘starvation response’ really kicks in is after 3-4 days of very low calories.

 

But Bro

“Your body cannot digest loads of protein at once”

 

The thought is that our bodies can only digest a certain amount of grams of protein at once, the rest gets wasted. Thus we are better off eating smaller amounts more frequently. I mean it isn’t like we are masses of meat in one sitting in the past is it…oh wait. Therefore, lets look deeper into this.

 

So we know our ancestors were hunter gatherers, they went through times of feast and famine. They certainly had no problem eating a tonne of meat at once. When you eat more protein, it takes longer to digest and be used. That is about as complex as it gets. a standard meal is still being digested 5 hours later, that means amino acids are still being released into the bloodstream and absorbed by our muscles.

 

From E.M. Forster

“Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.”

 

Just as the point Forster is making, stop abiding by so called ‘theories’ that people have repeated enough times so they become ‘facts’. If you allow others to give you orders, you do not learn, instead question everything and come to your own conclusions and #ReviveStronger

 

In part 2 I am going to look deeper into why eating frequently can actually be a bad thing for some, and then in the final part I will finish with some practical application. It isn’t as cut and dry as eat whenever you want…

 

Further Reading:

• Learn more about intermittant fasting: http://www.leangains.com/
• Lyle McDonald on meal timing and energy balance: http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/research-review/meal-frequency-and-energy-balance-research-review.html/
• [NEW] The Coach & Client Connection Episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82CHJbe00no
• [NEW] Blog Post for Physiqu Apparel: http://www.physiqapparel.com/blog/can-we-outwork-our-genetics/

Where There Is [No Struggle], There Is [No Strength] – Part 2

How to Pimp yo’ Programme

In Part 1 I introduced to you the concepts of progressive overload, deloads and periodisation. You learnt that you have to push, and push hard to create enough stress to stimulate a positive response from your body.

However, you cannot push all the time, as without sufficient time off (deloads) you cannot grow stronger to overcome the beating you have taken. These two are played against one another in something called periodisation, which is essentially how you set up your training programme.

In todays article I am going to go over some of the programme variables you have at your disposal, and how you can use them to individualise your training. Furthermore, I am going to touch on setting your programme up for success, manipulating your intensity and volume. Combining this information to help you pimp yo’ programme.

Reps, sets, load, rest…
When developing your programme you have a lot of tools at your disposal, not just exercise selection but also your rep and set scheme and load used amongst others. The combinations will produce different training effects, and they all overlap.

The above table clearly shows you the variables you can manipulate and how you can select appropriate zones to allow you to train towards your goals. Now you must remember, if you want to get bigger, you sure want to be training in the hypertrophy zones.

However, to get the most out of these zones you need to be using heavy loads, so you also want to be strong, therefore it makes sense to utilise some strength protocols.

Furthermore, to be strong you also need to develop power, this will directly influence your strength. Yet we must not forget endurance, although having arguably less importance to muscle hypertrophy it will allow for us to maintain performance for longer.

As you can see each help one another develop to a degree. This is true for almost any goal. So you want to use each protocol in your training programme, but you can prioritise those that benefit your overall goal most.

Volume & Intensity
Volume and intensity were introduced to you in Part 1.

Volume can be thought as total number of reps x load used, Intensity can be thought as the % of your one rep max. The two are manipulated to bring about specific training effects. They do not go well together, because you can’t lift a tonne of weight for a lot of reps. Likewise you don’t want to go to the gym, lift puny weights and not do many sets. There is a balance needed.

In general most programmes call for a high volume, low intensity phase followed by a high intensity, low volume phase. Many reps with relatively light loads is called accumulation/extensification. Fewer total reps but heavier loads is called intensification.

The first phase is generally used to lay the foundations for the second. Imagine gathering your building material and then hammering it together, that’s extensification and then intensification. The lengths of each of these can be manipulated, you can also choose to extensify and then intensify different exercises at different times. Maybe your bench is a weak point so you keep a higher level of volume on this lift for longer before ramping up the intensity. So you can intensify your other prime lifts beforehand and then focus all your efforts on bench press when the time arrives.

This brings us to The Principle of Individuality. When selecting your approach you must look at a persons weak and strong points, training background, injury history, goals, time available and level of training proficiency.

That last point came up in part 1, and essentially it is your training age, the amount of time you have been lifting with a decent training and nutritional programme behind you. As a novice your intensity doesn’t need to be very high to push progress, you can pretty much improve with any variable of strength, speed and hypertrophy used. Whereas someone more experienced will need clever manipulation of the above, light loads all the time won’t spur progress but nor can we lift heavy non-stop.

What have we learnt?

• You need to use different training variables to produce certain characteristics (strength, hypertrophy etc.).
• Each characteristic interplay with one another and want to be included in your programme. The degree to which depends on your goals.
• Volume and intensity need to be manipulated in a periodised fashion. Both can’t be high, both don’t want to be low.
• In general a high volume phase will then lead into a high intensity phase. This is called extensification and intensification.

For a look at periodising your training according to your training age be sure to check Part 3.

Mark Newman – ‘I look better, I’m stronger and have a much better understanding of how to do so’

Mark, what were your goals when signing up with me?

Look good & increase strength.

What reservations if any did you have before we started working together?

I didn’t really see how results could be achieved with the approach you took to dieting. Pizza and abs don’t really go together. I also thought that tracking calories and training would be too intense, and that I wouldn’t be able to stick to it.

How was I able to help you with your reservations?

Just by being there to answer all my questions, explaining everything clearly. Also the resources you provide in addition to the programming helped me understand everything in a simple way. Plus results came which was evidence enough.

In point form, can you list your achievements training with me thus far?

• Significantly stronger.
• Increased lean muscle mass & reduced body fat percentage.
• Massively increased knowledge around diet, training and the human body.
• Improvement in form in all lifts.
• Better mentality.
• A more varied diet with improved cooking skills as a result.

Is there anything else you’d like to add?

I honestly have had a great time. Although I haven’t grown significantly in size, I look better, I’m stronger and have a much better understanding of how to do so.

 

Mark came to me wanting to look good and get strong, like many of my clients. He was new to flexible dieting and planned training programmes. Initially we cut fat for a month, due to holding a little excess body fat, before then entering a lean gaining phase. This put Mark in the best position possible, able to learn technique and drop unwanted fat in the first month, to then really push forward to gain lean muscle there on. Mark has been a pleasure to work with, always asking questions if he was unsure and really embracing the flexible diet.

Interested in online coaching? You can check out what I have to offer here.