EATING FOR MASS BY CHRIS ACETO This two-week quality nutrition plan will build quality muscle To pig out or not to pig out. Often, bodybuilders go from the most stringent diets to the least restrictive ones between the contest season and off-season. For bodybuilders who want to continue to grow and then get lean, this has long been considered the best way to keep growing. But you don’t have to blow up to 300 pounds of blubber if you want to increase your muscle mass. Bodybuilders who’ve built quality physiques understand that off-season mass building isn’t about gorging the body and getting enormous. Witness 220-pound Dexter Jackson, who never gets sloppy. Neither does Jay Cutler, nor others like Troy Alves and Darrem Charles, who always stay in good off-season shape. Eating for sloppy-free mass is more than eating a multitude of crappy calories. You have to pay attention to consuming good food all year long. Other important aspects of off-season dieting are consistency and variation. Consistency means eating six times a day, every day. But one of the most essential elements is to vary the number of calories and macro-nutrients (protein, carbohydrates and healthy fats) that you take in daily. When you load up the body on one day with high calories, you drive your body into a temporarily heightened state of anabolism. Here I explain how you can create such an anabolic state by rotating medium-, low- and high-carbohydrate intakes while varying protein and dietary fat consumption. I’ve built it into a two-week cycle. Repeat this cycle for as long as your off-season lasts, and you may find that you’ll achieve your best-ever off-season gains — without getting fat. Days 1-5 Start with the 2:1 rule For the first five days of your cycle, you should eat a base of two grams (g) of carbs and 1 g of protein for every pound of bodyweight. For a 200-pound bodybuilder, that’s 400 g of carbohydrates daily with 200 g of protein. With regard to dietary fat, you don’t really need to count it. You’ll get what you need from your protein foods. Beef, chicken, whole eggs and low-fat dairy products will give you plenty, along with added calories to help you grow. Eat these core foods prepared simply, and you’ll be providing your body with all the basic nutrients it needs to grow as much as it can without the concern of adding large quantities of bodyfat. Do this for five days as you prepare to take your calories up even more. * Hardgainers can go directly to a 3:1 ratio, and eat that for days 1-10. If that’s too much of a calorie shift, though, hardgainers can eat 2:1 on their first two-week cycle, then go to 3:1 for days 1-10 of their second cycle after the body has accommodated the increased calorie intake. Days 6-10 Shift up to 3:1 Next, bump up your calories by taking in 3 g of carbohydrates per pound of bodyweight. The same 200-pound bodybuilder will now consume 600 g of carbs (that’s 2,400 calories just from carbs). Continue to take in 1 g of protein per pound of bodyweight. This high level of calories from carbs will help you keep your muscles saturated with glycogen. Glycogen — carbohydrates stored in the muscles — is an indicator of growth, so the more the better. Glycogen helps fuel your training, so saturated glycogen stores are important for maximal energy output at the gym. Follow this plan for five days. Bodybuilders who don’t pay much attention to off-season nutrient shifting often miss the boat here. Days 11-12 Drop to 1:2 After you have loaded up your glycogen stores, you can continue to make great off-season gains by dropping your carbohydrate intake. Your glycogen stores will fall. At first, this may seem detrimental, but it ultimately has the opposite effect. Take your protein consumption up to 2 g per pound of bodyweight (400 g daily for a 200-pound bodybuilder), and drop your carbohydrate consumption down to 1 g per pound of bodyweight. This will provide you with enough total calories that you won’t drop weight. At the same time, you’ll be providing your body with all the aminos it needs to prevent muscle catabolism (breakdown). A high-protein lower-carbohydrate intake improves insulin sensitivity in muscle tissue, priming muscles to uptake not only a greater amount of carbohydrates but also amino acids on days 13-14. The final dietary manipulation here is to switch your protein intake to include fattier sources. That doesn’t mean grease and oil. It does mean eating more beef — cuts with moderate amounts of fat, such as T-bone steak and minced beef. Include more whole eggs, regular cheese and yogurt to make up, calorifically, for the drop in carbohydrates. This dietary adjustment will help improve your muscle-building hormone levels. Hardcore off-season training can cause an increase in cortisol, and elevated cortisol can crush testosterone levels. A temporary increase in dietary fat can help keep testosterone levels in athletes (not in sedentary people) from falling. Also, when carbohydrates go down, an increase in dietary fat positively affects insulin sensitivity, further priming muscles for a greater anabolic response. At the same time, your glycogen stores will drop. Keep reading to find out why this is important. Days 13-14 Eat up Here comes the fun part. When you overeat, you generally get fat. However, when you overeat coming out of a dietary approach as outlined for days 11 and 12, your body’s response is super-compensation and a burst in anabolic hormones. Now, you’ve set up your body to store more carbohydrates than ever before. Temporarily overeating also causes thyroid, growth hormone and insulin-like growth factor levels to rise. All are important anabolic hormones, messengers that stimulate growth. Calories are certainly vital for growth, but hormones play a huge role. This approach harnesses both. Take your carbs back up on these days. Eat as much as 4 g of carbs per pound of bodyweight, and fix your protein consumption at around 1.5 g per pound. A 200-pound bodybuilder will take in 600-800 g of carbs and 300 g of protein. In terms of dietary fats, go with lean sources of protein, as you’re getting plenty of total calories on these days. Emphasise a mix of one or two whole eggs with egg whites, protein powders, chicken and turkey breast and lean cuts of red meat. This phase will fully saturate your glycogen stores and encourage them to fill up even more than they have before. When you drop your carbohydrate intake, your glycogen stores diminish, but the pathways responsible for retaining and storing carbohydrates as muscle glycogen over react. You can take advantage of this over reaction to fill up your muscles and keep growing. Follow this cycle as long as you want to keep adding quality mass. At the end of a two-week phase, start over. You’re eating enough every day to keep growing, but the variations in calories and macro-nutrients will encourage the addition of muscle mass rather than bodyfat. FLEX To order Chris Aceto’s training and nutrition books, including Championship Bodybuilding and Everything You Need to Know about Fat Loss, visit www.nutramedia.com.*