It was posted here so I could find it
About a year and a half ago........here you go baby:
I just read an article yesterday written by John M. Berardi.
It was really interesting and this is what I have felt from my own personal experiances in dieting and bulking.
Sorry for the long post:
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 FatCaloric IntakeLean Mass Lost
(% of Weight Lost) Fat Lost
(% of Weight Lost)
20 kg (44 lbs)Lowest60%40%
20 kg (44 lbs)Higher20%80%
60 kg (132 lbs)Lowest35%75%
60 kg (132 lbs)Higher10% 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 Body Fat Caloric IntakeLean Mass
(% of Weight Lost) Lost Fat Lost
(% of Weight Lost)
10% fatNone80%20%
30% fatNone40%60%
50% fatNone18%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 Body FatCaloric IntakeLean Mass Gained
(% of Weight Gained) Fat Gained
(% of Weight Gained)
10 kg (22 lbs)Overfeeding70%30%
20 kg (44 lbs)Overfeeding30%70%
40 kg (88 lbs)Overfeeding20%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.