Simon Gama
You have been dieting for weeks to lose bodyfat but can’t seem to shed the rest of those fat layers. Sounds familiar?
One problem might be that you have been in a calorie-deficient state for too long. Your body has adjusted to that calorie level and has stopped burning fat as a result. When denied enough food, the body begins to feed on protein in muscles. Because muscle is the body’s most metabolically active tissue, depleting it lowers your metabolic rate. To break the plateau you must make a number of changes:
1. Move into a caloric-surplus state to recharge your metabolism. For several weeks gradually increase your calories — even to the point of gaining weight at the rate of a pound per week per 100 pounds of bodyweight.
2. Be sure to increase your calories with the proper foods — lean proteins, starchy carbohydrates and fibrous carbohydrates.
3. Without shorting yourself on calories, try dropping starchy carbohydrates (e.g potatoes, rice, yams) from your last meal of the day. This modification will further stimulate your body’s fat burning capacity. One easy way to keep your calories up and stimulate your body to burn fat is to obtain your calories from supplementation with MCT oil.
4. Avoid conventional fats and simple sugars at all costs. Both are easily converted to body fat through various biochemical pathways.
The muscle gain plateau
Maybe you have been trying to pack on muscle by performing “killer” workouts but getting nowhere fast. Believe me, I endorse killer workouts, but only if you’re taking in enough quality nutrients and calories. If proper nutrition isn’t there to help you recover, those workouts won’t do any good.
Here is what to do: Boost the effectiveness of intense training with supplementation. Proper diet involves more than just eating the right foods. You must also eat the foods at the right time of day.
1. Get in the habit of making your nutrition as intense as your training. Increase your caloric intake for a few weeks to see if you can start gaining muscle again.
2. Design a supplement programme for yourself that, along with proper food, will help your body’s muscle-building machinery work more efficiently. These supplements include a maltodextrin-based carbohydrate supplement that, when taken immediately after a workout, helps restore muscle glycogen for faster recovery: a protein powder to ensure that your body obtains enough muscle building protein; MCT oil, a source of extra calories with the potential to naturally elevate growth in the body; and creatine monohydrate, a nutrient that increases certainly energy compounds at the cellular level, thus allowing you to work your muscles even harder during workouts.
3. With high calorie, nutrient-dense nutrition to undergird your muscle-gaining efforts, adjust your workouts. Lift heavier weights, change exercise or adopt a new routine.
4. Be sure you incorporate my technique of fascial stretching into your workouts. This stretching is done between exercise sets when muscles are fully pumped. Muscle size increases when fascial stretching is a regular part of your training programme because it stretches the fascia, protective sheath of connective tissue that envelops the muscle.