Cheers
great article man !!

Ken

Thank you.

“lylemcd on October 12th, 2010 12:20 pm

It’s a good question. Certainly what we know about calorie partitioning and such would suggest that it’s possible, I might suggest that that’s what’s going on with some of Martin’s Leangains results and my own UD2 relies on a similar ‘trick’ (integrated over a weekly vs. daily schedule). So…maybe.”

Thanks again Lyle, you’re awesome!

Could one burn fat in the morning, and build muscle through the evening?

I think people get in trouble when they decide that they will stay fat and “lfit to displace fat” (i.e. avoid dieting). Or conversely, they just decide “it would be a waste to lift” and blow that off. The former is a much worse practice than the latter.

What’s even more bizarre is some who will say that “lifting prevented weight loss” as if a calorie consuming activity could prevent weight loss! It’s more the opposite! Some of them will even insist on this belief in COMBINATION with thinking that it is impossible to build muscle while dieting. I’m life wtf on that…

Goran: I can’t say if you gained muscle and lost fat, that’s what body composition measures are for. Strength is a proxy but you can gain strength with no change in muscle mass so it doesn’t mean anything by itself.

Last fall I i had a cycle where i was cutting and bulking every other week.

For example:

Week 1: bulking
Week 2: cutting
Week 3: bulking
Week 4: cutting

And so forth…

This experiment i kept doing from august until late november. On the “bulking” weeks i had a small surplus (about 500kcal) every day. On the cutting weeks i had a small deficit (about 500kcal) every day. I used certains keylifts such as benchpress, deadlifts, chins to keep track of my progress. During this 3 month stint i improved my bench from 2 reps at 76 kg to 2 reps at 84 kg. My deadlift from 2 reps at 140 kg to 5 reps at 152,5 kg. My bodyweight was about the same during the whole stint (somewhere between 80-82kg).

So i guess what i want to ask you is this: Is it safe to say that i gained muscle while loosing fat (or at least keeping it to a minimum)? Do you think that i could have achieved greater gains (muscle + weight on the bar) if i followed a more traditional bulking and cutting approach? Im not so sure… shouldn’t what matters be the total net effect? For example: “My approach” with on week cutting followed by one week bulking for a timeperiod of 3 months would mean 6 weeks of effective cutting and 6 weeks of effective bulking simultaneously. Would the net effect be the same if i focused on bulking for 6 weeks and then afterwards started cutting for 6 weeks?

I’m very interested in hearing your thoughts on this.

I have nothing that supports this, but in my mind, “My approach” seems much more logical if one prioritizes staying in decent shape all year round.

Rohit:
1. That’s what I said.
2. Mechanistically, nobody can say what’s really going on. There is something to muscle memory but nobody knows for sure why it occurs.

Tim: Nobody knows for sure. Just accept it as ‘magic’.

Julie: Read around on the site, this is addressed elsewhere and not relevant to this article or the comments section.

Eric: Yes, natural; had I wanted to talk about drugs, I’d have mentioned drugs (they are talked about in the Calorie Partitioning articles I linked). Drugs changes all the rules and a lot of what people think they can acheive comes out of bodybuilders using powerful repartitioning drugs (clen, testosterone, etc). So you’ll hear about contest prep pro bodybuilders losing fat while they maintain weight. What you don’t hear about is their drug stacks. And it doesn’t work for naturals.