Building Muscle With Feast And Famine Feeding

Most diet plans are based around losing weight, but what should you do if you want to build muscle? Building muscle is probably the second most common asking I get as a Glasgow personal trainer after weight loss. Conventional wisdom is to over eat for many weeks while weight training to bulk up before strictly dieting to strip away fat. Unfortunately long term over eating adds lots of fat and under eating costs you lots of muscle so you neb up taking 2 steps forward and 2 steps back. A better plan is to follow the feast and famine feeding cycle that shaped our evolution.

It is only recently that ample food supplies have been consistently available. For most of human history this was not the situation and the body evolved to operate to times of feast and famine in ways that you can employ to build muscle. During the initial days of a famine you burn body fat before hormonal changes befall to protect our fat stores to help clock us through the famine. Famine also primes the body to respond aggressively to pronto abundance of food to aid survival by prioritising the strength to defend against immediate threats ( predators ) over the fat stores intended to penetrate you through next famines. So profuse calories are initially used to hand over muscle fuel stores before being used to quickly build muscle.

After a few days the body stops building new muscle and stores nonessential calories as fat.

To duplicate this Swedish scientist Torbjorn Akerfeldt promotes 14 days on very low calories then 14 days on high calories. He found that cycling between famine and feast sees a fat / muscle loss ratio of 2: 1 during famine but a fat / muscle gain ratio of 2: 1 during feast, bottomless better the average bulk then outline plan. While this worked for me, and may be the best option from a technical perspective, the 14 day diet was very hard. It is much easier to sustain 7 days famine followed by 7 days feast long term. A 7 day cycle also eliminates the phrase at the edge of the feast when your body transitions to chiefly storing the causeless calories as fat.

As the driving force behind feast and famine feeding is the curt changes in calorie intake achieving this should be your main concern. The balance of protein, carbohydrates and fats is not too important as long as the famine stage intake is low enough to prime the muscle building response to the significantly higher intake during the feast lifetime.