So that’s the topic of today’s article:: The Full Diet Break.  What it is and why and how (to a limited degree), to do it.

What is a Full Diet Break?

Whenever I bring up this topic, I tend to get sort of confused looks from people; what do you mean I’m supposed to take a break from my diet?  As I opined on the podcast, I have no idea if this is just an idea endemic to America (where we suffer from a long-history of a Puritan work ethic) or is just common to dieters but most people who are trying to lose weight or fat seem to feel that the key to success is to be as miserable as possible for as long as possible. While this certainly isn’t the only reason diets fail, I don’t think it helps.

This was actually a big part of the reason that I originally wrote A Guide to Flexible Dieting as there is a good bit of research (comparing rigid and flexible dieters) showing that people who are more flexible in their eating patterns are more successful in the long-term, showing less binge eating habits and weighing less.

And while that idea might seem contradictory given the other book I mentioned The Rapid Fat Loss Handbook, I’d only note that that book incorporates many of the flexible dieting principles anyhow.  But I’m getting off topic.

The idea of a full diet break, in short, is that it’s a period, typically 10-14 days where explicit dieting is stopped.  Calories should be raised to roughly maintenance (I often recommend adjusting estimated maintenance down by about 10% to account for metabolic slowdown and such; here’s How to Estimate Maintenance Caloric Requirements) with carbohydrates in the 100-150 gram/day range as a minimum.  I’ll explain some of the rationale behind these recommendations in a second.

I’d note that I’m not the first to suggest this idea by any stretch.  The first formal suggestion I remember of this came from an early mentor of mine, Dan Duchaine.  He routinely recommended 2 week periods at maintenance between periods of active contest dieting for a variety of reasons.  I’m sure others did as well.

I’d note that I really formalized the idea of the full diet break after reading a fascinating little paper I came across.  Since it’ll be faster, I’m just going to excerpt from A Guide to Flexible Dieting:

Before I continue, I want to tell you about one of the coolest studies I’ve seen in a while. I say cool mainly because of the fact that the scientists failed so miserably in their goal, while making an absolutely wonderful discovery. For anybody who wants to look it up, the full reference is “Wing RR and RW Jeffrey. Prescribed ‘Breaks’ as a means to disrupt weight control efforts. Obes Res (2003) 11: 287-291.”

The study was set up to find out why people go off the dieting bandwagon. That is, the researchers wanted to determine what behavioral things happen when people go off of their diet for some period, and why they have trouble going back on.

So the subjects were first put on a typical diet meant to cause weight loss. Then the subjects were told to go off the diet for either 2 weeks or 6 weeks so that the researchers could see what happened when people fell off their diet but hard and started regaining weight. Here’s what happened: not only did the subjects not regain very much weight, but they had almost no trouble going right back onto their diet when the 2 (or 6) weeks was over. So the scientists completely and utterly failed to reach their goal of studying what they wanted to study.

Basically, they made an almost accidental discovery which raised another set of questions:why didn’t the subjects regain a ton of weight and why did they have little problem returning to their diet? That is, knowing that most people who go off of a diet for even a short period will balloon up, regaining weight rapidly, and fall off their diet, what made this study (or these subjects) different?

The basic issue seemed to come down to that of control. To understand this, let’s consider two different situations. First let’s say that you’re the typical rigid dieter hammering away on your perfect diet, no lapses, no mistakes. Suddenly something comes up that is out of your control. A stressful period of life, the aforementioned vacation, whatever. Feeling out of control, you figure your diet is blown and the binge begins. Does this sound familiar at all?

But consider what happened in this study, the subjects were told by the researchers to go off their diet; in essence, the break was part of the diet. And they didn’t blow up, didn’t gain a ton of weight, and had no problem going right back onto the diet.

I suspect that that was the key difference and why the study failed so miserably: control.  Psychologically, feeling like the break is now under your control, or that it’s part of your overall plan, makes it far easier to not feel like the diet is completely blown and get back on the diet when things settle down.

Understand what I’m getting at?  Tangentially, and this is discussed in the book, while many seem to flexibly diet sort of intuitively, many don’t seem able to do this.  For them I recommend what I confusingly call structured flexible dieting.  Basically, planning the timing of the strategies described in the book.  Basically, it puts the dieter in control of the diet, rather than the diet controlling the dieter.  Which is what I think a big part of the study described above was about.

So that’s what a full diet break is, the next topic to address is what the purpose is.

There are actually a number of good reasons to take a full diet break, both behavioral and physiological.  I want to look at both.

Why Take a Full Diet Break: Physiological Reasons

The physiological stuff is the stuff I talk about all the time here on the site, on the forum and elsewhere.  When folks diet and lose weight/fat, the body adjusts metabolic rate downwards.  While a majority of this is simply due to weighing less (smaller bodies burn fewer calories), there is also an adaptive component, a greater decrease in metabolic rate than would be predicted due to changes in things like leptin, insulin, thyroid hormones, etc.

By moving to roughly maintenance for a couple of weeks, many of those hormones are given time to recover.  Thyroid hormones come back up, as does leptin.  This is a big part of the reason for the recommendation to raise carbs to 100-150 grams per day as a minimum.

Thyroid hormones are distinctly sensitive to carbohydrate intake as are leptin levels (especially in the short-term).  Just raising calories but keeping the diet very low carb doesn’t accomplish everything hormonally I want the full diet break to do.

This is also the rationale behind the duration, thyroid hormones and the effects that they exert aren’t immediate.  It may take 7 days of eating at maintenance for thyroid levels to come back to normal, but you need at least another week to get many of their effects to max out.  So in answer to the question “Can I make the break shorter?”, the answer is “No.”  I know that everyone wants to GET LEAN NOW but unless you are a contest dieting bodybuilder or figure chick and there’s no real-time constraint, what’s the hurry?

There are other effects as well.  Hormones like testosterone often go down during dieting and female hormones can be whacked out too.  Cortisol generally goes up when you diet and raising calories and carbs helps shut that off for a bit.

I’d note in this regards that many find that, after a period of hard dieting, they often keep leaning out into the first week of a planned break.   As I discussed in the article Of Whooshes and Squishy Fat, some of it may simply be dropping water.

But some of it does seem to be true fat loss.  People keep bugging me for the mechanism and my current best-answer is “Magic!”.  At some point, I might throw out some of my theories on it.  Not today.

As well, for leaner individuals, even if they do everything ‘right’, there is often a loss of performance or muscle mass during a diet.  The two weeks with raised calories gives them the capacity to train a bit more and recover what they’ve lost before moving into the next stage of dieting.

Finally, the idea has been thrown out there that stabilizing at a given (reduced) body weight or body fat might give the body a better chance of accepting that new weight as ‘normal’ and adjusting setpoint.  Frankly, I’ve never seen anything to support that in the literature.  It’d be lovely but I tend to doubt that’s how it works.  I’m just mentioning it for completeness.

Why Take a Full Diet Break: Psychological Reasons

Of course, there aren’t only physiological reasons for using the full diet break concept, for many dieters (especially heavier, since the adaptation issues tend to be less) the main benefit may be psychological.  Frankly, this is something that I feel that many lean diet/obesity experts often can’t really comprehend, the types of psychological stress that dieting can engender for people with a lot of weight to lose.

Tangentially, since I’m just in that kind of mood, I see the same thing in a lot of the popular ‘Do body weight metabolic training to lose fat’ manuals.  The exercise are always demonstrated by skinny fit people.  I want to see some of these coaches have an unfit individual at 300 pounds do a t-push up on 1-arm.  But I’m really off-topic now.

Anyhow, say that you are someone who is extremely overweight, perhaps you have 50-100 pound of weight to lose (or more).  Going by the standard recommendations of 1-2 pounds per week, that means that you are realistically looking at 25-50 weeks of dieting.  And let’s face it, no matter what diet you are on, that means some period of feeling hungry, deprived, etc.  There’s just no getting around it.

For people with more weight to lose, the time frames may even be extended beyond that.

Now, I want everyone to stop and think about that for a second, the amount of mental stress that that tends to create from the get-go.  Is it any wonder that some people never bother starting?

Put differently, if I told you that you had to be miserable and feel deprived and hungry for the next 1-2 years, would you bother?  Probably not.

But what if, instead of facing that huge mountain, you knew that you only had to go say, 10-12 weeks of dieting before getting a break for 2 weeks where you could eat relatively ‘normally’ (note: this does NOT mean returning to your old horrible eating habits) before starting the next phase of active weight loss?

Suddenly, that might seem a whole hell of a lot more doable.  And if you’re using the other concepts of free meals (relatively ‘normal’ non-diet meals eaten once or twice a week) and refeeds (periods of deliberate high-carbohydrate overfeeding) during the periods of active dieting, it may be that you’re never having to feel like you’re full-blown dieting for more than 4-5 days before you get a small break.

Does that scan for folks?  We’ve moved from “You have to be hungry and miserable for the next 365 days straight” to “You will get a break of some sort from your diet at least once a week and perhaps more.”

Let me put this in a slightly different context: it would be a rare coach indeed who would expect their athletes to work at 100% 7 days/week, 4 weeks a month, 12 months a year.  Athletes have light days, perhaps one day off per week, perhaps every 4th week with reduced loading, they usually take 2 weeks completely off every year.  Sure, some of this is to allow physiological adaptation but some of it is psychological; you can’t maintain that intensity every day of your life without burning out.

So why should a dieter expect (or be expected) to do exactly that?

Anyhow, those are some of the psychological benefits behind the full-diet break. For people with extended periods of dieting ahead of them, in addition to any other benefits, it breaks the periods of active dieting into much more manageable chunks.

Instead of expecting these seemingly never-ending periods of extended dieting, there is at least some light at the end of the tunnel. That’s in addition to putting the control of when the breaks happen rather than having the person lose control because the break is forced upon them, they can plan it themselves.

On that note, one topic I go into in a bit of detail in A Guide to Flexible Dieting is whether the full break should be planned or unplanned.  In that context, one of the more powerful uses of the full diet break is that it can be used in situations (such as the holidays, or vacation) when someone knows that they won’t be able to really stick to their diet.

In those sorts of uncontrolled situations, I find that people tend to feel a real sense of loss of control and they can go off their diet never to return. The full diet break can simply be planned around those time periods and suddenly the control has been returned to the dieter.  They can do their best damage control knowing that, if anything, the 10-14 day period (or whatever) is finite and won’t do that much damage, returning to their diet when it’s over.

Summing Up

So that’s the basics of the full diet break. Of course there is more to it discussed in the book but I’m running long-again.  How often to take a break is a big issue and fundamentally depends on the person’s body fat.  Contrary to what most think, leaner individuals should take diet breaks MORE often than fatter because the adaptive aspects of dieting are greater.

Proving once again that I’m just retreading others who came before me, Dan Duchaine recommended 4 weeks of dieting before 2 weeks of raised calories and then 4 more weeks of dieting as part of a 10 week contest diet.  I’m a bit more flexible (get it) than that, a leaner individual might go 4-6 weeks before taking a full diet break, someone who is much fatter might go 12 weeks.  Folks in the middle go somewhere in-between.

I’d note that I even think that contest dieters should use full diet breaks although this requires not only being lean enough when they start but also giving themselves sufficient time to include the break AND still have time to get lean enough.  Most dieters start to late and end up not being able to take a diet break but I believe that their diets would work better if they did.

Of course, there’s more information than this that I don’t have time to cover.  It’s all in the book and I’d only finish by saying that I wish more people would take full diet breaks.  It’s a concept that tends to be counterintuitive (how does going off a diet make it work better) but in my experience and with what the research says, it works.

People tend to fixate on short-term results (as noted above they want to BE LEAN NOW) but for most applications, long-term adherence is far more important.  In the big scheme of things, what is two weeks not losing fat if, not only does the break mean you lose fat MORE effectively (because you’ve normalized hormones) but you increase your odds of long-term success by not being so psychologically stressed all the time.

That’s what the full diet break is all about.

In Becoming an Expert - Deliberate Practice Part 1, I introduced some concepts related to the development of expertise and a theory called deliberate practice as developed by a researcher named Anders Ericsson.

In Part 1, I looked at some of the things that seem to determine expertise and primarily focused on the issues of time involvement and the quantity of practice and how the increasing amounts of practice that are typically undertaken by those who actually achieve expert performance leads to massive (but NOT exponential) increases in total time.

I also made the point point, that in the real world, simply putting in your time (e.g. 10 years or 10,000 or so hours) is no guarantee of anything related to the development of expertise.  You can find folks who have lifted weights or performed a sport for the requisite time who still don’t have a skill level that would be even remotely called expert.

And that’s because any old practice doesn’t seem to be sufficient.  The second part of Ericsson’s model and the part I want to focus on today is what type of practice seems to be related to the eventual development of expertise in a given domain.  I’ll finish up by looking at some criticisms of some of Ericsson’s ideas to answer the question “Can everyone become an expert?” and then try to reach some kind of actual point.

So what is deliberate practice?   That is, since it’s clear that just going through the motions for 10 years doesn’t get it done, what type of practice has to be done to get it done?  The specific type of practice in this case is referred to as deliberate practice and I want to look in some detail at the various aspects that comprise it.

What is Deliberate Practice?

As I mentioned on Tuesday and again above, clearly just practice in general doesn’t get it done and that’s really the more interesting aspect of Ericsson’s model, the idea that the practice must meet certain criteria to have any value towards the development of expert performance.  That’s where the idea of deliberate practice comes into play.

While there is more to the complete model, the primary tenets of deliberate practice according to Ericsson are that deliberate practice

1. Is not inherently enjoyable.
2. Is not play or paid practice.
3. Is relevant to the skill being developed.
4. Is not simply watching the skill being performed.
5. Requires effort and attention from the learner.
6. Often involves activities selected by a coach or teacher to facilitate learning.

I’d note that critics of this model can point to exceptions to nearly each of the above tenets but, on average they do tend to hold when looking at what types of activities expert performers engaged in.   I want to look at each briefly and then I’ll tie it into some training applications.

Tenet 1: Deliberate Practice is Not Inherently Enjoyable

Of all of the factors inherent to deliberate practice, this may be the most contentious and least supported by the data.  But some of this is clearly semantics.

Individuals who want to develop expertise at something will generally allow that deliberate practice is tedious, boring and not so much fun.  A pianist practicing scales or drills or an athlete performing drills to improve some component of their technique will not generally describe such as activities as ‘fun’.

However, they often derive enjoyment from the benefits that occur from the practice.  That is, doing drills and such is not usually enjoyable per se; it’s the benefits to performance that provide the enjoyment (and necessary positive feedback to keep doing it).  So saying that deliberate practice is not inherently enjoyable comes down to how you look at it.

There are other exceptions as well, athletes in team sports have apparently reported that certain types of practice are inherently enjoyable.  As I said above, this is one of the most contentious of all of Ericsson’s original tenets.

Tenet #2: Deliberate Practice is Not Play or Paid Performance

There are actually a couple of aspects to this tenet.  One is that, generally speaking, deliberate practice is not the same as ‘playing the sport’.  This tends to be especially true in team sports where a given situation might only come up once or twice in the context of a specific game.  The odds of athletes improving their ability to handle that situation are unlikely with so few exposures to it are low.

In deliberate practice situations, coaches can set up common patterns (e.g. a blitz in football) and run it over and over within a single practice to give the players a chance to learn how to deal with it.  You could conceptualize a similar situation in becoming an expert at chess.  A given board configuration might only come up ever so rarely, attempting to learn how best to deal with it by playing chess would be inefficient compared to being able to examine it over and over again in a practice situation.

At the same time being able to perform in competition is a critical aspect of expert performance and clearly that is a component of developing expertise.  It simply tends not to be the major form of expert development.

Similarly, one aspect of deliberate practice is that there tends to be/needs to be a strong internal drive to engage in the practice in the first place.  If you have to pay someone to do it, well….

That said, there are exceptions, especially to the first aspect of the tenet, the issue of playing yourself to expertise.  I described one in the comments of Becoming an Expert - Deliberate Practice Part 1 when I talked about Brazilian soccer players.  A group that often develops some amazing athletes without much if any formal input from coaches or family.

Rather, formal coaching is only started after the athletes make a team; development proceeds (seemingly successfully) without it.  One might also look to inner city black dominance in basketball as another (potentially) similar model.

Tenet 3: Is Relevant to the Skill Being Practiced

This tenet should be fairly obvious although it actually has relevance to something I’m going to write about in the future (the argument over specificity vs. variety).  If you want to become a great pianist, you don’t generally spend time practicing the flute.  If you want to become a great football player, you don’t spend time swimming.

For a type of deliberate practice to be beneficial, it needs to be relevant to the skill set of the domain that the person is trying to develop.  Which isn’t to say that someone needs to only practice the activity in question to improve.  There is a continuum of activities that may be relatively more or less relevant to a given activity or domain although, in general, they should all have some relevance to it.

Of course, figuring out what is and isn’t relevant is a big part of the whole game and this is often where a coach or teacher come into play.  I’ll come back to this at the end.

Tenet 4: Deliberate Practice is Not Just Watching the Skill Being Performed

As a generality this is certainly true.  You can watch another expert perform a skill over and over again and clearly you’re not going to magically pick up that skill.  It may be useful in other ways (e.g. analyzing technique or seeing what’s happening at a certain part of the movement), mind you, but not from the framework of deliberate practice per se.  It may be a tool in the toolbox but it won’t make you an expert.

Of course, there is clear evidence that visualization is of benefit but at this point you’ve moved from passive observation to active involvement of the individual.  Which brings me to #4.

Tenet 5: Deliberate Practice Requires Effort and Attention from the Learner

While this one should be obvious, to a great degree I think it’s perhaps the most important of all of the various tenets.  In Part 1 of this article and above I mentioned that it’s easy to find folks who have spent 10 years doing something without much to show for it (from a technical or skill standpoint).  We clearly wouldn’t call them experts.

Much of the difference could probably be put down to focus (in addition to everything else I’ve talked about).

As I mentioned in the article Warming up for the Weight Room Part 1

An additional aspect of warming up is to practice and reinforce good technique and ‘groove’ movement patterns. This tends to be relatively more important for beginners and intermediates but it’s interesting to note that you’ll usually find top level athletes going through basic drills daily as part of their warm up.

It’s also important to note that those same athletes put just as much focus into doing their warm up drills properly as they do during the workout itself.  This is a key aspect that I find is often missed, too many people simply ‘go through the motions’ when they warm up rather than using it as an excellent time to accumulate more perfectly done reps (which is a key aspect of motor learning).

And that’s a huge part of Tenet 4.  Most people, performing any given activity, only put a minor amount of effort or attention into the task.  Usually, they pay some attention when they are first learning the skill, but tend to stop once they have achieved what they consider sufficient proficiency.  At this point they simply go on autopilot.

So consider someone learning to ski for example.  They might pay a lot of attention (especially given the cost of lessons) to getting better initially until they reach a point where they can get around the mountain well enough (in their own mind).  At that point they no longer focus on improving or pay attention to what they are doing: performance improvements taper off rapidly.  The same holds for any activity you care to name: people pay attention to improvement until they reach basic competency and then stop paying attention to improvement; and they stop improving.

Contrast that to the typical elite athlete who has spent years with a literally constant and laser like focus on every aspect of their technique and they do this for years.  Every time one aspect becomes easier or automated, they start working on the next level of proficiency. In some activities, this might mean being able to perform the activity under more adverse situations.  Or they might change their conception of it so that they are forced to continue to focus on what’s happening so that they keep improving.  It’s this type of active focus that is involved in the overall learning and automation process along with mastery.

Or, as was put much more simply by Powerlifting Coach, Guru and Innovator Louie Simmons “Even after 20 years, we are still always working on technique.”  That sums up most experts in most fields, they are always working towards the next level of improvement, always keeping themselves focused on the next skill or ability; that’s what keeps them improving.  I think if there’s as single point to this article series, in terms of improving in terms of training skill, this may be it.

Of course, being able to do that means knowing what next to work on: in some cases, this can be established through self-study or what have you, more often than not, it requires the input from a coach or teacher which is Tenet #6.

Tenet 6: Deliberate Practice Often Involves Activities Selected by a Coach or Teacher to Facilitate Learning

While a great deal of deliberate practice (especially among musicians) is done alone, the simple fact is that in many situations, development of expertise is guided by a teacher, mentor or coach.  There are a number of reassons for this not the least of which is that a good coach can typically guide the development in terms of setting deliberate practice tasks that meet the criteria I mentioned above: being relevant to performance improvement, that aren’t play, and that require attention.

The last one is important, at least one aspect of learning is that the task that is being learned has to be both acheivable (on at least some level) by the performer as well as being enough of a challenge to require attention and focus (and be relevant and improve performance).  Good teachers and coaches have developed progression paradigms that tend to meet both of those requirements.

So while a rank beginner might be given the simplest of drills (think of scales for a pianist or basic positions for an Olympic lifter) as those are mastered and autonomized, gradually increasing demands are made so that the individual not only keeps progressing but has to continue to focus on what they are doing, that being a key to the deliberate practice framework.

I’d note and I’ll come back to this in a  bit that there is a HUGE assumption built into this model.

On a personal note, my own coach (speedskating, remember) has been doing this shit to me for the past 4.5 years.  Every time I think I have some aspect of skating mastered, he’ll give me something new to suck at for a little while, just a slight increase in difficulty or whatever to move me closer to his optimal model of skating technique.  And as soon as I get comfortable with that new addition, he’ll give me something else to suck at for a little while.  I think you get the idea.

Of course, this can backfire is the coach gives the individual something that is so far beyond their current capabilities that they become overwhelmed (or frustrated) and give up.  Proper coaching/teaching requires knowing when the individual is ready (or willing) to work on the next level of improvement.

But again, there is a built in assumption to this and brings me to the near wrap-up for this piece.

Can Everyone Become an Expert?

Reading through this, I may have made it sound that becoming an expert is as simple as performing the right kind of practice for sufficient periods of time.  And there may be an element of truth to that.

Ericsson is often accused of making this claim (and denying the role of innate abilities or genetics) but a closer reading of his actual writing show this not to be the case.  I don’t have space to cover that here, get the book I mentioned in Becoming an Expert - Deliberate Practice Part 1 since it’s dealt with at the end.

However, he does roughly claim that, in the apparent absence of any massive inherent differences in innate ability, the primary determinant of whether one becomes expert or not is the engagement of deliberate practice.  That is, in comparison of expert to non-expert performers, the primary determinant of succcess among expert performers is the engagement of enormous amounts of deliberate practice.

But does this either:

• Deny the role of innate talent
• Imply that everyone can become an expert given sufficient time and practice

I think some of this comes down to semantics, I suppose and how one defines expertise.  Even the scientists are having issues figuring that out to do the studies and define expert vs. non-expert performance.  Clearly expertise can’t be equated with being the best at something.

For example, consider the top 20 athletes in any sport, all of whom would be expected to have put in at least the requisite 10 years/10,000 hours of practice.  We would tend to say that they are all experts, but clearly only one can be the best.  But again, Ericsson isn’t saying that deliberate practice can make on the best at something, only expert compared to non-experts.

Another issue is one of causation.  Since it’s fundamentally impossible to do a study tracking a couple hundred kids subjected to 10,000 hours of deliberate practice and see if they all become expert, most of the data is retrospective.  That is, expert performers are given questionnaires to determine what they did during their development.

And while the commonality is the engagement in massive amounts of deliberate practice, this only proves that expert performers have all engaged in the same level of practice; it doesn’t prove that anyone who engages in that amount of deliberate performance can become an expert.  That said, intervention studies show that people can vastly improve performance in certain skills (e.g. digit memory) with properly performed practice so there is at least some support for the idea that practice drives improvement.

But it’s worth noting that, outside of the issue above, there may be other, lesser recognized innate differences that are impacting on this.  A question we might ask is who is able (or wants) to engage in the 10 years of deliberate practice necessary to become an expert.  It doesn’t seem far fetched that individuals would differ in their innate desire (on some behavioral, genetic of biological level) to engage in that type of practice.

Clearly, a constraint on the development of expertise is a motivational one; does someone have the inherent temperament to engage in the duration and type of practice (in the absence of any seeming rewards) to become an expert.  That’s in addition to any resource constraints that might exist.  In the literature, a concept called ‘rage to master’ is often spoken in terms of children who show a near obsession with mastering a skill.

That type of personality aspect is likely to occur in all individuals who want to become great at something.  And there is likely to be a huge innate component.  It’s usually safe to say that people who are successful in almost any field are a bit, shall we say, obsessive and driven.  While there may be other factors, at least one reason they succeed is that they put in the time to get better when others have stopped.

Beyond that, what about the issue of innate talent, which is often downplayed in the literature?  Certainly, despite popular claims to the contrary, few if any beginners show any true talent at a given skill, nobody is magically good at something the first time they try (generally speaking).   A lot of that depends on the skill in question, of course but for complex skills, nobody is great at it out of the gate.  At best you see relative differences in the level of suck.

Even supposed child prodigies don’t usually start really producing their best work until they’ve put in a solid decade of practice (there is speculation that autistic idiot savantism is actually just years of obsessional grinding on whatever they happen to get obsessed with although other in the field disagree with this claiming that savant artists show skill at an early level that other children lack).

But consider for example a situation where you have 20 kids exposed to a given activity (say hockey).  Of those 20, perhaps 5 suck at it, 10 are average and 5 seem to show some innate ability (i.e. they are a little better than the other kids).   In all likelihood, the bottom 5 will drop out; a lack of success will keep them from pursing it.  Some of the middle 10 might stick with it but the top 5 are not only likely to get a lot of positive feedback (either from beating their competitors or from family/coaches) but to continue pursuing it.

Basically, there is the potential for some (admittedly slight) innate talent to become part of a feedforwards loop where initial early talent becomes the driver to pursue deliberate practice, which improves performance, which drives them to keep pursuing it.  Again, I think you get the idea.

As well, there may be physical constraints involved in the ability to perform some skills necessary for expertise (one of the assumptions I alluded to in Tenet 6 above).  It’s all good and well to say that with the proper teaching/coaching progression you can take someone from beginner to expert but even that assumes that certain physical characteristics are present (in pursuits such as chess or medicine, there may be a minimum requirement for basic brain power, intelligence of simply memory and while I’m not going to get into the debate over the biology of that, just keep it in mind).

And while many of these can be modulated, not all can.  In some cases, it’s an issue of when the person starts.  Ballet dancers won’t don’t start young enough may never be able to physically achieve certain positions required for top performance.  There may be other physical or genetic limitations that limit what a person can actually accomplish.  If a gymnastic wannabe can’t achieve full side splits because of structural limitations of their hips, that will be a limitation that simply cannot be overcome.

That said, there are also examples where folks overcome a physical limitation by altering technique or what have you to work around it.  Athletes who were lacking in a given skill or capacity can sometimes make up for it by working towards a different strength.

As an example of both, my mother a concert pianist (and teacher) started late and while she certainly achieved expert status with years of grinding practice, physically cannot perform some musical things on the piano (relating to how many keys she can reach from thumb to pinky).  In talking to her about this topic, she mentioned that she gets around this on certain pieces by utilizing a slightly different technique (called redistributing).  Rather than getting both keys with the same hand, she simply uses her other hand.  She has found away around a physical limitation that allows her to perform at the highest level.

None of which really answers the question I started this section with.  There’s clearly no doubt that, given the right settings and types of practice that almost anyone can improve in almost any domain.  Can they become an expert given sufficient time and devotion.  That is perhaps the more interesting question but the harder one to answer so I’ll leave it there.

Summing Up: What is My Damn Point?

I started this article series by quoting Dan John on the topic of training

If it’s important, do it every day; if it’s not important, don’t do it at all. - Dan Gable

I managed to go off on a major tangent (even for me) by looking at the issue of deliberate practice and how it relates to the development of expertise.  But I want to tie it back in to that quote and training.

While cause and effect may be reversed, there is little doubt that a primary commonality among experts across many different domains is the engagement of a lot of practice.  But not any old practice will do, rather a certain type of practice defined by Anders Ericsson as deliberate practice seems to be the commonality among expert performers (with some interesting exceptions).

What are the implications of this for training?  Now, I’m assuming here that anybody reading this has some desire to get good at whatever they are doing.  Perhaps they want a perfect bench, or squat clean, or something else.  I doubt you’re reading this if your only goal is to be ‘ok at something’.

I think Dan John’s quote of Dan Gable’s statement sums much of this and there are really two parts to it.

If improving something is important to your training, performing it more (within limits) not less is probably the way to go.  Consider two trainees, both of whom want to become great bench pressers.  Who is going to improve (technically at least), the guy who benches once per week for 20 reps or the guy who performs 20 reps 4X/week?  I think we’d all agree the latter (again with consideration given to overall loading, etc.).

This is where warmups (how Dan John implements this idea) can be used to great benefit.  Consider someone who wants to get better at the Olympic lifts.  If they were to start every workout with a warmup consisting of some basic barbell complexes including power or squat cleans such that they got 15-20 good reps at the start of every workout (on top of whatever they did in training), imagine how many reps they might achieve over the course of a year compared to someone training the movement once or twice per week without the warmups.  If doesn’t go up exponentially, but it adds up.

The same holds for warm up sets prior to work sets.  This is as good a time as any to practice good technique, get feedback (if you have a training partner) and really focus on what is happening technically or muscularly.  It may only be a handful of reps per workout but again, this adds up over time.  And since you have to to them anyhow, you might as well make them of benefit to long-term improvement.  Don’t just move the bar for 10 quick reps on bench press, focus on where your elbows are, where the bar is hitting, your bar path.  And if there are issues, correct them.  Over time, that type of deliberate practice leads to improvements.

I’d note that this is also the rationale behind systems of training such as Pavel’s Grease the Groove.  There is a huge neural aspect to performance of most skills and performing them frequently (even if submaximally) goes a long way towards improving those neural abilities.  Even if 10 reps per day doesn’t seem like much, over the course of 6-12 months (or more) it adds up significantly.

Of course, as to the second part of this article, which is now far too long, all of this depends on that individual actually paying attention to what they are doing during the warmups.  As I quoted myself on above, I find that most trainees just go through the motions on warmups, they are listening to their MP3 player or watching the hot chicks on the steppers or whatever; what they aren’t doing is focusing on what they are doing.

But, they bitch, drills are boring and not fun and that chick is really hot.

Yes, all true.  But if you want to improve (or eventually become an expert) that’s what you have to do.

If it’s important, do it every day; if it’s not important, don’t do it at all. - Dan Gable

And while he was discussing this quote in a slightly different context (how he programs training for different movement patterns), it gave me the idea for today’s article which is about learning skills and becoming ‘expert’ at something.  Of course, I’ll be focusing on training applications in this article but, as it turns out, the ideas are general enough to apply to a lot of different areas.

To avoid this being too long, I’m going to divide it into two parts.   Today, in Part 1, I want to look briefly at what makes an expert (as opposed to a non-expert performer) as well as being looking briefly one of the primary models of the development of expertise.  On Friday, in Par 2, I’ll look at that model in more detail and tie some of the ideas into training and sport performance.

What Makes an Expert?

It may surprise some readers to realize that there is actually quite a bit of research into the topic of developing expertise.  And I’m not talking solely in terms of motor learning (e.g. how we learn new skills) but rather what separates expert performers from less-expert performers.

I’d note that researchers have actually had trouble defining or identifying true expert performance and this has been a difficulty in performing research.  I’m not going to get into this in any detail because I think it’s a bit boring and isn’t really relevant to what I want to talk about.  You can check out the book I mention below if you’re particularly interested.

This research actually dates back to the early 20th century when scientists became interested in things like typing ability and the sending of Morse code; as well, chess has been a perennial area of study.  Early ideas of expertise held that there must be some type of genetic advantage (e.g. better reaction time or finger movement speed for typing) held by expert performers.  For the most part, this idea was not supported.

If nothing else, the simple fact that expertise tends to almost always be domain specific.  That is, being an expert at one task has almost no bearing on the ability to be expert in another task, even if it’s related.  That alone suggests that expertise has less to do with inherent biology and more to do with practicing the specific skill.

Essentially, rather than being due to some biologically relevant advantage among expert performers, the development of expertise came down primarily to practice, practice and more practice (please note my use of the word primarily in this sentence).

More accurately, it came down to the right kind of practice, a topic I’ll come back to in more detail in Part 2.

For example, studies found that faster touch-typists were faster not because they had inherently faster fingers or reaction times.  Rather, over years of practice they got better at looking ahead and moving their fingers to a proper place sooner in anticipation of the next letter.  When those expert typists have their view blocked (so that they can’t look as far ahead), their speed drops to that of the slower typists.  And that skill, the ability to look ahead while typing is one that is simply learned over years of practice.

Chess has been studied extensively in this regards and makes a particularly interesting example for a variety of reasons that I’m not going to go into.  But whereas early ideas held that chess experts were more expert by dint of some inherent mental processing capacity, research failed to bear this out (clearly you have to have the basic intelligence to understand the game).

Rather, over years of study and practice, chess experts developed a couple of inter-related and relevant skills that improved their chess performance.  One of these is something that researchers call chunking information.  On average, the human brain has the ability to store roughly 7 pieces of information in short-term memory which seems to put a limit on what we can remember.

Which brings us to a bit of useless trivia: the inventor of the game Tetris actually developed the game based around this human limit on recalling bits of information.  That is, there’s a reason that there are 7 distinctly shaped pieces in the game, that’s the limit of what the human brain can remember (on average).   Sadly, this bit of trivia has never changed the fact that I suck at Tetris.  But I digress.

In any case, research shows that, with practice, people can remember more than those 7 items by chunking information.  For example, individuals can learn to remember massively long lists of numbers over time and they do it by chunking the information.  So rather than trying to remember hundreds of individual numbers, people learn to relate sequences of numbers together to chunk them (e.g. you might relate the sequence 357 to the gun or 420 to getting stoned or whatever, in one study a runner engaged in a memory study started chunking 4 digit sequences to his running times).  If you can chunk 3 bits of information into one, you gain the ability to remember 21 items of information (7 chunks * 3 bits of information = 21 bits of information).

And this is part of what happens with chess players.  While a non-expert may only remember the position of 7 pieces on a board, the expert, by chunking multiple pieces into patterns can remember far more.  And much of this occurs by constant study of chess positions and the games of others (as well as playing their own games).  By exposing themselves to common positions and patterns of pieces on the board, expert chess players improve their ability to recall patterns of chess pieces.

So rather than remembering only a handful of pieces, expert chess players can remember the positions of far more pieces.  This can be demonstrated by the fact that, while expert chess players show superior recall of standard chess positions (e.g. positions that would occur in a normal game), they are no better than non-experts at recalling random positions (e.g. those that wouldn’t occur in a game setting).

Essentially, over years of practice and study and game-playing (including the study of games of master chess players), expert chess players increase their repertoire of different chess positions, coupled with an improved ability to chunk several pieces into a pattern and they are better able to recognize patterns on the board and how to best play them (based on optimum play of previous players).  But it’s not due to any inherently better ability for memory or some deep-seated intellectual ability to play better chess; it’s simply learned over years of practice.

This same basic pattern holds across a variety of domains including sports (for a semi-readable but technically heavy introduction to the topic, I’d suggest the book Expert Performance in Sports: Advances in Research on Sport Expertise).

Getting a bit ahead of myself, this is likely why coaches of team sports tend to expose their players to a lot of different situations over years of practice; much of ‘becoming good’ at certain sports is being able to recognize a certain pattern of play (e.g. a quarterback recognizes a blitz or what have you) based on something they have seen or been exposed to before.  Tennis players learn to anticipate the other players next shot based on their exposure to specific game situations, the same holds for volleyball.

However, none of the above really says anything about how expertise is developed, it simply supports the idea that a majority of the development of expertise comes down to practice and improvements in the skill set involved in that activity moreso than some inherent genetic ability (of course there may be underlying genetic factors that limit or determine the ability and/or desire to practice or the ultimate level achieved, a topic I’ll come back to in Part 2).

But as I mentioned above, simply ‘practicing’ doesn’t appear to be sufficient or anybody who had spent 10 years doing something would be an expert at it.  Clearly that’s not the case.

Rather, the right kind of practice would seem to be required.  So what’s the right kind of practice?

Anders Ericsson and The Theory of Deliberate Practice

In 1993, a researcher named K. Anders Ericsson published a paper called “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance” (you can click the link to download the original full paper) were he developed a general theoretical framework for the development of expertise by examining the development of expertise across a variety of different domains to see what commonalities arose.

Before looking at some of the specifics of Ericsson’s model in Part 2, I want to discuss some other constraints that are relevant to the development of expertise that will clearly limit what can and cannot be achieved.

One of these is a simple resources constraint, you have to have the ability to actually engage in practice of the skill you want to develop.

That is, if you want to become an Olympic lifter, but have no access to a bar, bumpers to someone to teach the movement, you are likely to have a problem with becoming an expert.  If you want to be a figure skater and have no access to a rink or can’t afford coaching, you may have issues with becoming a great skater.

There is also a time constraint with Ericsson assuming that improvement was related in a monotonic fashion to the amount of practice time put in.   This idea had actually been stated before in terms of the 10-year rule.  That is, on average, from beginning an activity to the development of expertise, it takes roughly 10 years of proper practice or so (in some domains, it may take longer than that).  Others put this in terms of hours with approximately 10,000 hours of practice being required to develop expertise.

In that vein, one commonality among expert performers (compared to non-expert performers) is that they engage in deliberate practice for longer periods than non-expert performers.  And over years, this adds up enormously.  That is, consider someone engaging in 3 hours of practice per day vs. 1 hour of practice per day  and this is done 4 days per week (208 day/year) and how that adds up over years of practice.

Of course, in all likelihood the person trying to become an expert will engage in more than what I described above and the non-expert less.   Someone practicing 3 hours/day 6 days/week (certainly not unheard of in many sports or among musicians) will be increasing their hours of practice significantly compared to someone only doing 1 hour/day three days/week.  In that case, at the 1 year mark, you’re looking at 936 vs. 208 hours of practice.  By 5 years, you’re looking at nearly 5000 hours vs. a mere 1000 hours.

Assuming it takes 10,000 hours of practice to achieve expertise, it’s fairly clear that (within some limits), the person who puts in more hours will get there faster.  In fact, the person doing less may never get there in any realistic time frame (i.e. at 200 hours/year, it would take 50 years to accumulate 10,000 hours).

I am simplifying things a little bit, clearly in many domains (and sport is one of them), there is a limit to how much practice can be done per day (within the limits of mental and physical fatigue).  But, within that limitation, clearly the person who puts in more hours of practice will achieve mastery more quickly (and certainly, examining the habits of expert performers, they do put in more hours of practice than lesser performers).

But this raises a question that I’m going to use to finish up Part 1 and lead into Part 2.  Clearly just going through the motions for 10 years (or 10,000 hours) isn’t sufficient.  You can prove this to yourself by walking into any commercial gym in the world; you can find folks who have spent 10 years lifting weights who still suck at it.  And I don’t mean in terms of weight on the bar but guys who, despite having ‘lifted for 10 years’ still can’t bench or squat with anything approximating proper form.

Why didn’t they become experts by putting in their 10 years?

Because just practice per se doesn’t appear to sufficient.  Rather, the right kind of practice has to be done to improve performance and develop expertise or skill.  That is what Ericsson refers to as ‘deliberate practice’ and I’ll look at the details of his model along with how to apply it to training on Friday in Part 2.

Now, it should go without saying that nobody can really say upfront what someones genetic potential actually is.  Until we live in the world of Gattaca where we can do a full genetic scan and know what it means, nobody can say ahead of time what someone can or can’t achieve.  Well, not unless you look at some pretty ludicrous extremes (you’re not going to see someone at 400 pounds ripped any time soon for example).

And, of course, worrying about such things before you even start training is sort of missing the point in my opinion.  At a fundamental level, trainees should train and eat properly and let the cards fall where they may.  Worrying abut what you might or might not accomplish is putting the cart far before the horse.  But that’s another topic for another day.  And, of course, doesn’t really answer the question in the title of this article.

I’d note that while I do believe trainees should simply get into proper training and not worry up front what they may or may not accomplish, I also believe that there are genetic limits set by underlying biology (again, modulated by behavioral choices and patterns). That’s just reality and recognizing them can save people from a lot of mental anguish about what they think they should be able to or could be able to accomplish if they just worked hard enough.

Which is a long way of introducing the topic of today’s article, what is the maximum amount of muscle that someone can gain over a career of proper lifting and nutrition.  I’m going to look at it from a few different perspectives but I think you’ll find that, on average, they all end up with pretty similar results.

I’d note that most of what I’m going to talk about applies to male lifters, data on females being much more difficult to come by.  Just realize that the average female potential for muscle mass gains is even lower than that in males.

The McDonald Model

I’m not sure if I came up with this idea on my own or stole it from somewhere else (probably a combination of the two) but, in a slightly different context (how quickly can someone gain muscle), I have often thrown out the following values for rates of muscle gain.

Again, these values are for males, females would use roughly half of those values (e.g. 10-12 pounds in the first year of proper training).

Please note that these are averages and make a few assumptions about proper training and nutrition and such.  As well, age will interact with this; older individuals won’t gain as quickly and younger individuals may gain more quickly.  For example, it’s not unheard of for underweight high school kids to gain muscle very rapidly.  But they are usually starting out very underweight and have the natural anabolic steroid cycle called puberty working for them.

Year of training also refers to proper years of training. Someone who has been training poorly for 4 years and gained squat for muscle gains may still have roughly the Year 1 potential when they start training properly.

Now, if you total up those values, you get a gain of roughly 40-50 pounds of total muscle mass over a lifting career although it might take a solid 4+ years of proper training to achieve that.  So if you started with 130 pound of lean body mass (say in high school you were 150 pounds with 12% body fat), you might have the potential to reach a level of 170-180 pounds of lean body mass after 4-5 years of proper training.  At 12% body fat, that would put you at a weight of 190-200 pounds.

Again, that’s a rough average, you might find some who gain a bit more and some who gain a bit less. And there will be other factors that impact on the above numbers (e.g. age, hormones, etc.).

The Alan Aragon Model

In discussing this topic with Alan Aragon, who’s book Girth Control should be read by anyone interested in this topic.  In his monthly Research Review, he addressed the issue of rates of muscle gain a bit differently although the results end up being pretty similar.  He has found that that the following rates of muscle gain are roughly achievable for natural lifters.  Note that this ignores things like creatine loading or temporary glycogen supercompensation which can cause rapid changes in ‘lean body mass’ but don’t represent actual skeletal muscle tissue.

So a 150 pound beginner might be able to gain 1.5-2.25 pounds of muscle per month (18-27 pounds per year).  After a year, he’s now an intermediate at 170 pounds and might be capable of gaining 0.85-1.7 lbs per month (10-20 pounds per year; I’d consider 20 lbs. an exceptional gain).  After another year, he’s an advanced lifter at 180 and might only gain 0.5-1 lb per month (a true 1 lb/month gain in muscle mass for an advanced athlete would be pretty rare).

So he might top out at 190-200 pounds or thereabouts after another year or two of training, at 10% body fat, he’d have 170-180 pounds of lean body mass.  Pretty much identical to my model even if we got there by a slightly different path.

Casey Butt’s Frame Size Model

Of course, both my and Alan’s model for maximum muscle growth are pretty simplified and don’t take into account some of the other factors that can go into determining maximum muscular potential.  One that has been argued to impact on overall size and strength gain potential is frame size, usually assessed by wrist and/or ankle size (or other measurements).

Natural bodybuilder and all-around smart guy Casey Butt has done an exhaustive analysis of top level natural bodybuilders and developed a calculator that will predict maximum muscular potential based on height, ankle and wrist size along with goal body fat percentage.  He’s also written an extensive, math heavy book showing how he came up with his model.  You can find it here.

Casey Butt’s Maximum Muscular Potential Calculator

I’ve run a lifter of different heights with a 7″ wrist and 8.75″ ankle through the calculator to show his predicted body weights (at 10% body fat) and lean body mass.

Of course, variations in ankle and wrist will change the numbers but you can go plug in your own numbers.  I’d note that Casey’s calculations end up being a bit more conservative than mine or Alan’s but they are all at least within shooting distance of one another.  You’d need to be towards the taller end of things to reach the highest levels suggested by my or Alan’s method.

And while some might argue that frame size has nothing to do with this, there is research to support the idea (I’d mention again that Caseys analysis is based on examination of real-world bodybuilders, arguably the group that you’d expect to surpass any supposed limits if it were possible).

At least one study showed that light framed individuals gained less muscle mass compared to heavier framed individuals on the same training program and, at a more basic level, hormones such as testosterone/etc. impact on things like bone growth and frame size.  So there is a biologically potential link between frame size and hormone levels that would contribute to trainability and ultimate gains in muscle mass.

It’s also no accident that top strength athletes typically have large frames and robust joints (or that those with relatively smaller frames tend to be drawn/succeed in endurance sports).  Some of this is simply so they can handle the level of training needed to succeed at their sport; but some of it is probably indicative of overall hormonal status as well.

Martin Berkhan’s Model

Martin Berkhan of Leangains.com has a somewhat simpler model than Casey’s, also based on his observation of top level natural bodybuilding competitors who are contest lean (e.g. 4-5% body fat).

His equation is:

Height in centimeters - 100 = upper limit of weight in kilograms in contest shape.

So take your height in inches and multiply by 2.54, that’s your height in centimeters.  Subtract 100 and that’s your predicted maximum weight in contest shape (which is 5% body fat or less for males) in kilograms.  Multiply that value by 2.2 to get pounds.  So let’s look at body weight at 10% body fat using the same heights I used for Casey’s calculator. I’ve also calculated out lean body mass at 10% body fat.

While not identical, these values are certainly right in line with Casey’s calculator.  I would note that contest lean bodybuilders are often highly dehydrated and may be glycogen depleted and this will tend to lower the measurement of lean body mass.  We might realistically add 5-10 pounds of lean body mass to the above values to account for dehydration/etc.  With that adjustment, they are more or less identical to Casey’s values.

A Final Reality Check

As I noted in the introduction, a lot of lifters get fairly angry or upset over the above types of estimations, assuming that they don’t take into account individual differences in motivation, work ethic, etc.  To that I say nonsense.

Both Casey and Martin’s equations are based on top level natural bodybuilders, the group that you’d expect to surpass such limits if they existed (and who’s dedication and work ethic is pretty hard to question).  Mine and Alan’s are based on years of experience in the field.  If a massive number of exceptions to the above existed, someone would have seen them by now.

Now I think part of this has to do with exceedingly skewed ideas about what’s achievable, a problem driven by pro-bodybuilding.  After seeing a pro-bodybuilder stepping on stage at 260 pounds or more and shredded, the idea that a natural may top out at 180-190 pounds of lean body mass (if that) can be disheartening.

Of course, to the general public, an individual at a lean 180-190 pounds is still pretty enormous.  It’s just that compared to the absurd size of a pro bodybuilder, it seems absolutely tiny.  But it is reality.

People forget that Arnold Schwarzenegger competed at perhaps 230 pounds (assuming 5% body fat, that’s only 220 pounds of lean body mass) and that was with (admittedly low doses) of anabolic steroids in the mixture.

The simple real-world fact, which can be verified by going to any natural bodybuilding show is that you simply don’t see naturals coming into contest shape much above 200 pounds (the exceptions can usually be counted on one hand) and few even achieve that level of size.  It’s always the lighter classes (e.g. 165 lb class) that have the most competitors at natural shows with fewer and fewer coming in at the heavier weights, especially in contest shape.

Now, some guys on stage may weigh more than 200 pounds but they usually aren’t lean enough.  At even 10% body fat, a guy at 220 pounds only has 200 pounds of lean body mass.  By the time you got him contest lean, he’d likely come in with less than that.

Even when people point to large natural strength athletes who might be 270-280 lbs. natural, by the time you figure in 28-30% body fat, that still puts them right back at a maximum lean body mass of 189-196 lbs.  Certainly near the higher end of things but not by that much.

And while many will argue that improvements in training methods and nutrition should change the above values, that simply doesn’t seem to be the case.   Human genetics have not changed and you still don’t see natural bodybuilders or other athletes coming in with more lean body mass than would be predicted by the above models.  They might get there a bit faster but the overall size of natural bodybuilders doesn’t seem to have changed much, if at all, in decades.

To quote from Casey’s site:

Over the years I’ve also received many emails full of unsubstantiated claims, hostile remarks and even personal attacks because of the information presented here. But in that time, though many have told me they’re easily going to surpass these predictions, I haven ‘t received any legitimate, verifiable statistics that significantly exceed the results of the equations presented above …including correspondence with some of today’s top-ranked drug-free bodybuilders upon which the equations were partially based.

I anticipate a similar response in the comments section of this article and I’d just refer you to what Casey wrote above.

I’d finish by only saying that I’m not writing this in an attempt to be negative in any way shape or form, as I noted in the introduction, I would rather see people put their energy into their training and nutrition than worrying ahead of time about what they might or might not accomplish.  And while I certainly wish that everyone reading this is the lone exception to the values calculated above, well…that’s not what an exception is.

At the same time, a failure to recognize that there are genetic limitations can lead people to do some very silly things in terms of their training or diet.  Folks nearing their genetic limits, in an attempt to gain muscle at a rate that simply not achievable will put on enormous amounts of fat in hopes that it will net them a ton of muscle gain.  And that just doesn’t ever end up being the case.

I’d only note in closing that the above calculations also has some real-world implications in terms of diet (e.g. what kind of weekly or daily surplus should be attempted to maximize muscle gain without excessive fat gains) but that will have to wait for a future article.

L Davidsen et. al. Impact of the menstrual cycle on determinants of energy balance: a putative role in weight loss attempts. International Journal of Obesity (2007) 31, 887-890

Abstract: Women’s weight and body composition is significantly influenced by the female sex-steroid hormones. Levels of these hormones fluctuate in a defined manner throughout the menstrual cycle and interact to modulate energy homeostasis. This paper reviews the scientific literature on the relationship between hormonal changes across the menstrual cycle and components of energy balance, with the aim of clarifying whether this influences weight loss in women. In the luteal phase of the menstrual cycle it appears that women’s energy intake and energy expenditure are increased and they experience more frequent cravings for foods, particularly those high in carbohydrate and fat, than during the follicular phase. This suggests that the potential of the underlying physiology related to each phase of the menstrual cycle may be worth considering as an element in strategies to optimize weight loss. Studies are needed to assess the weight loss outcome of tailoring dietary recommendations and the degree of energy restriction to each menstrual phase throughout a weight management program, taking these preliminary findings into account.

Background

Compared to men, women get the short end of the stick in almost everything related to body composition. Their bodies fight back harder, they lose both weight and fat slower (even given an identical intervention), they gain muscle more slowly, etc.  Then again, they do get that whole multiple orgasm thing so there is at least some good that comes along with the bad.

In any case, there are a lot of potential reasons for things to be this way and it’s been theorized that the importance of women in keeping humanity alive (by raising children) during famines is a huge part of the gender discrepancy.  For example, women are more likely to be in the super-obese category and far more likely to survive famines than men.   While even men’s bodies fight back, the simple fact is that women’s pretty much always fight back more.

Of course, the biggest potential impact on all of this is hormones which differ drastically between men and women. It’s been known for a while that women’s fuel utilization changes during their menstrual cycle, as does appetite and potentially energy expenditure.

In this vein, it’s been suggested that dieting (and training) might or should be modified during the menstrual cycle to match up physiologically with what is going on in a woman’s body; I’ll come back to this a bit below.

That’s what today’s research review is about, a look at how things such as energy intake, appetite, energy expenditure and body weight change throughout a woman’s cycle, as well the impact of birth control is briefly examined along with some issues related to PMS and food cravings.

The Paper

The first section of the paper is simply a review of the hormonal changes which occur during a normal menstrual cycle. Although there is variability, the typical woman’s full cycle is 28 days (this is an average) which is typically divided up into 4 distinct phases. With menstruation taken as day 1, we can define early follicular phase (day 1-4), late follicular (days 5-11), periovulation (day 12-15), and luteal phase (days 16-28).

A number of hormones change during the cycle but the two that I’m going to focus on are estrogen and progesterone. During the early follicular phase, both estrogen and progesterone are relatively low. Estrogen (estradiol in the graphic below) shows a peak in the late follicular phase followed by a drop.  Progesterone starts a slow increase through ovulation and both estrogen/progesterone peak in the middle of the luteal phase before returning to baseline.

The paper notes that body temperature typically goes up after ovulation (for example, some women try to use changes in body temperature to predict fertility), remains high during the luteal phase before returning to baseline at or after the start of menstruation.

This pattern of hormonal change between estrogen (estradiol) and progesterone is shown in the graphic below.  Estradiol is the blue line, progesterone the black line.  You needn’t worry about the green and red lines (LH and FSH respectively) within the context of today’s research review.

Click to view a larger version

The paper then examined research on energy (food) intake during different parts of the menstrual cycle.  In animals, energy intake is reduced at ovulation (when estrogen peaks) and increases after ovulation when progesterone is peaking; this has long been interpreted as indicating that progesterone drove food intake.

Research in humans has generally borne out that pattern, higher energy intakes during the luteal phase and lower intakes during the follicular phase; the increase in food intake has generally been reported to be between 90-500 calories day.

It’s interesting to note that some research suggests that it is falling estrogen rather than increasing progesterone that drives hunger.  As I discussed in the research review on Crosstalk Between Estrogen and Leptin Signalling in the Hypothalamus, estrogen appears to either improve leptin signalling in the brain or send a leptin-like signal to the brain directly; falling estrogen would reduce overall signalling which would tend to facilitate hunger.

Of course, there is also some reason to think that it’s a combination effect of estrogen and progesterone that is having the overall effect.   Given everything that’s changing at once, it is often difficult to determine exactly which hormone (or how they are interacting) is having a specific effect.

Tangentially, the paper mentions that estrogens might play an important role for weight and fat loss loss through inhibition of food intake.  I’d also mention that a good bit of data suggests that estrogen is actually lipolytic, helping to mobilize fatty acids during aerobic activities.  In fact, if you inject men with estrogen, they will mobilize fatty acids more effectively as well.

It’s actually even more complicated than this and estrogen can be seen to be having both positive and negative effects on fat loss (and regional fat loss).  I discuss this in more detail in The Stubborn Fat Solution; sufficed to say that idea that ‘estrogen is bad’ in terms of fat loss is a simplistically incorrect one.

I bring this up for a couple of reasons. It’s interesting to note that with increasing fat loss, estrogen levels typically drop, this is probably part of what drives hunger in women as they get leaner (I’d note that falling estrogen certainly doesn’t seem to make lower body fat mobilization any easier for female dieters which I think throws a major wrench in the idea that estrogen is responsible for women’s hip/thigh fat).

As well, there is an idea that comes up among some female dieters of wanting to ‘banish estrogen’ for a variety of reasons (whether fat loss or otherwise).  Given that estrogen may be doing many beneficial things in terms of fat loss, this idea is probably going to do more harm than good.  I’d also mention that low estrogen causes major problems with bone density, trying to get rid of it will cause major problems down the road.

Finally, the paper notes that some of the drive for appetite may be mediated by changes in blood glucose homeostasis.  Empirically, some women seem to be more prone to hypoglycemia during certain phases of the menstrual cycle and falling blood sugar can stimulate hunger.  Ensuring that blood glucose levels stay stable might be extremely beneficial during those periods.  For example, consuming moderate amounts of fruit during that part of the cycle (to ensure that there is always some liver glycogen to be released to maintain blood glucose) would be a useful strategy.

The next part of the paper examines changes in macronutrient intake, food cravings and PMS. Studies, as usual, are inconsistent showing variously increases in carb, fat and protein intake during the luteal phase. Some of this may simply be related to being hungrier in general with no clear increase in desire for a specific nutrient.

Some research has indicated that the increase in carbohydrate intake is due to a specific craving although, with chocolate (a combination of carbs, fat and other micronutrients) being the most craved item, other possibilities exist.  Cravings for a sugar/fat combo or something else entirely may be functioning here.

Alternately, the issue could simply be one of a magnesium deficiency; some research indicates that magnesium supplements help with PMS related cravings and chocolate tends to be high in magnesium; women may simply be self-medicating an important micronutrient.  In this vein, many females report that their cravings are ameliorated if not eliminated when they are supplementing magnesium (e.g. 400 mg of magnesium citrate at bedtime, which can also help with sleep).

Next, the paper looks at the impact of menstrual cycle on energy expenditure (this brings us back to the increased body temperature I noted above). The major increase in energy expenditure occurs also during the luteal phase (when hunger is increased) with increases of 2.5-11.5% having been reported.

It’s important to note that this only amounts to a daily increase in energy expenditure of 90-280 calories per day. That would be contrasted to the potential increase in food intake of 90-500 calories. That is, while energy expenditure is up during the luteal phase, so is appetite; increases in energy intake can easily overwhelm the small increase in energy output if food intake isn’t controlled.

The increase in metabolic rate is thought to be primarily related to the increasing progesterone levels. So while increasing progesterone may not be driving the increased appetite, it may be stimulating metabolic rate slightly during the luteal phase.

Next, the study examined the impact of birth control pills on body weight, first pointing out that there a number of different types of birth control containing synthetic estrogen, progesterone or possibly both.  I mention this because, given the differences in each of the hormones (and their interactions), it becomes fairly inaccurate to talk about the ‘effects of birth control’ on any of this; different types are likely to have different effects and this can vary depending on the woman as well.

Studies have examined the impact of birth control on energy intake and several find an increase in both total energy intake and fat intake; others have found no effect.  With limited research it’s hard to tell if this is an issue of different types of birth control or possibly individual variance.  Empirically women seem to respond extremely differently to birth control.  Some go crazy, some get suicidal, some gain weight, some don’t, etc. etc.

Of course, the same can be said for female responses to the menstrual cycle in general; some have crippling PMS and out of control hunger, others are hit at most mildly or notice almost nothing at all.  Differences in hormone levels, sensitivity, etc. all contribute to the mystery that is woman.

As far as energy expenditure, while one study showed a small increase in basal metabolic rate of 5% with birth control intake, others have found no effect. Again, type of pill and individual variance is probably at play here (e.g. you might expect progesterone dominant pills to have the biggest impact on metabolic rate).

Looking at body weight, most studies have apparently reported no substantial change in body weight with birth control pills although many show a trend towards increased body weight. One exception is Depo-Provera injections which are associated with weight gain.

Finally the paper looks at potential implications for dieting and weight loss. The paper argues that considering which phase of the menstrual cycle the female in when starting a diet may be important. They argue that starting the diet premenstrually when hunger and food cravings are most intense may be a bad idea, just from an adherence standpoint.

Instead, starting a diet following menstruation or in the late follicular phase when food cravings and hunger are less may make compliance easier. They also suggest that increasing total energy intake 5-8 days before menstruation (when hunger/energy expenditure are at their highest) may prevent a suboptimal caloric intake (which can make folks lethargic) and help with long term adherence to a diet.  While I doubt most females would be willing to break their diet 5-8 days out of every month, at least raising calories slightly to avoid loss of control due to out of control hunger might be a worthwhile consideration.

Of course, it’s also easy to look at that from the other direction; in theory at least, keeping calories controlled during periods when energy expenditure is up (for hormonal reasons) might generate superior fat loss.  Of course, that also means keeping calories controlled when hunger is at its worst.  Life, she is full of compromises.

The paper also argues that as chocolate is seemingly irreplaceable due to cravings, small amounts of dark chocolate should be allowed to improve dietary adherence. Interestingly, I first read that idea in an older book called Why Women Need Chocolate which was an interesting look at the idea of biologically driven food cravings.

I’d note again that many females note that these types of cravings are almost eliminated if they supplement with magnesium so I’m not sure that the idea that chocolate is irreplaceable is exactly true.  Of course, dark cocoa has a lot of health benefits anyhow and there are certainly worth things for a female to consume.

However, given that I wrote a book called A Guide to Flexible Dieting arguing that allowing food flexibility can improve adherence,  I think there is a lot of logic in their argument in a general sense. At the end of the day, better to allow a small controlled amount of chocolate than feel deprived and end up eating the entire bag.  An extra 100 calories is always better than an extra 1000 calories in the long-term.

The same goes for the increased hunger that occurs when estrogen levels drop in the late follicular phase; if allowing a few hundred extra calories acutely avoids a massive loss of control, that would seem beneficial in the long-term.

Summing Up

So that’s a look at some of the things that can occur (good and bad) in terms of food intake, energy expenditure during the menstrual cycle.  It should be obvious that massive changes in hormones, including the interactions between estrogen and progesterone drive a great deal of processes that can impact on a woman’s food intake, energy expenditure and, of course, body weight.

I’d note again that the above processes tend to be exceedingly variable between women and while generalizations can be made from studies, women may need to track things like body temperature, weight and appetite through a couple of months to get an idea of how their bodies respond. Body temperature can be tracked as can things such as training capacity (some women find it very difficult to train effectively during certain periods of their cycle), appetite, etc.

In periods when hunger is off the map and/or blood glucose seems to keep crashing, increasing food intake slightly (and including moderate fruit) may be beneficial.  For those women able to keep food intake under control during the part of the cycle when body temperature is up, increased fat loss may be possible.

Supplementing with various nutrients such as magnesium and fish oils seems to help with PMS symptoms and may help with food cravings during particularly difficult periods. Alternately, that may be a good time to include free meals or refeeds as discussed in A Guide to Flexible Dieting; rather than trying to fight the body’s tendencies (and losing control completely), finding ways to work with them may be better in terms of long-term results.  Allowing controlled amounts of craved foods tends to help avoid problems with guilt and eating the whole box.  Just keep it controlled.

I’d note, in concluding, that other more involved strategies have been suggested from time to time.  Things like synchronizing the intake of carbs or fats with different parts of the cycle (e.g. eating relatively more carbs when carb metabolism is dominant and less when fat metabolism is dominant) have been suggested.  I’m not sure, practically, how well they’ve panned out but if anybody has any experience with the idea, I’d love to hear about it in the comments section.

Answer: Dieting in general tends to lower serotonin in the brain and this can cause depression in susceptible people.  Interestingly, this effect seems to be more likely to occur in women than men (women being more susceptible to depression in general).  In my experience, low carbohydrate/higher proteins diets tend to be even worse in this regards for reasons I’ll explain now.

First and foremost, nutrient intake per se affects the production of neurotransmitters with the effects being both direct and indirect.

In a very direct way, specific amino acids are the precursors for specific neurotransmitters in the brain.  Tryptophan is a precursor for serotonin in the brain and the amino acid tyrosine (as well as phenylalanine which converts into tyrosine in the body) is the precursor for dopamine (and subsequently adrenaline/noradrenaline).

As an extreme example of this, researchers will sometimes use something called acute tryptophan depletion (accomplished by providing an amino acid solution containing all of the amino acids except tryptophan) to drastically lower brain levels of serotonin.  This is used to test various things but, among other things, it tends to cause acute depression in those who are susceptible.   However, this is a pretty extreme type of intervention, decreasing blood tryptophan levels massively (by about 80%); in dieting, tryptophan levels only drop by about 10%.

As usual, it gets more complicated.  The different amino acids have different transporters in the body and some amino acids use the same transporter; this means that different amino acid can compete for transport.

Specifically relevant to this topic is the fact that both the branched chain amino acids (BCAAS), tyrosine and phenylalanine and tryptophan all use a transporter called the Large Neutral Amino Acid (LNAA) transporter.  Again, this means that they compete for transport, meaning that levels of the different amino acids can affect the transport of the other. Which means that the relative amounts of the different amino acids will impact on how much is getting into a specific tissue in the body; in this case the brain.

If there is a large amount of tryptophan relative to the other LNAA, there will be greater serotonin production in the brain; if there is less tryptophan relative to the other LNAA, there will be less tryptophan transport into the brain and impaired serotonin production.

This brings us to one potential problem with higher protein intakes per se: most dietary proteins contain a lot more LNAA than they do tryptophan.  One exception is a derivative of whey called alpha-lactalbumin which has the highest tryptophan content of any dietary protein; recent studies have found that consumption of this protein can increase the ratio of tryptophan to the LNAA in the bloodstream, increasing brain serotonin synthesis.  For comparison, while most dietary proteins may ony contain about 2 grams of tryptophan per 100 grams, alpha-lactalbumin contains nearly 5 grams of tryptophan per 100 grams.

As well, there is an interaction with the carbohydrate intake of the diet.  Diets very high in carbohydrates and low in protein are known to raise plasma tryptophan and serotonin levels (which is probably why such diets make some people sleepy and dopey).  It’s worth mentioning that unless dietary protein is taken to exceedingly low levels (below 5% of total calories), the real-world impact of high-carbohydrates and low-protein isn’t that massive in terms of its effect on serotonin levels in the brain.

However this may explain why some people who are prone to depression tend to crave low-protein/high-carbohydrate foods at certain times (stress, seasonal affective disorder), they are trying to self-medicate themselves and improve serotonin levels.

In any case, let me explain why carbohydrates can impact on all of this since this will help clear up why lowering carbohydrates can cause problems.

The reason is this, the uptake of some of the LNAA (especially the branched chain amino acids) are insulin sensitive; for example, when insulin levels go up, blood levels of the BCAA go down.  This shifts the tryptophan:LNAA ratio towards tryptophan such that more gets transported into the brain, potentially increasing serotonin production.

The corollary to that is that when carbohydrates are reduced (and high quality dietary protein is increased), there is the potential for serotonin levels to be reduced. Between the increased intake of LNAA from most high-quality proteins, decreased clearance of them due to reduced insulin levels and the overall effect of dieting in general on plasma tryptophan levels, this all adds up to problems for people at risk for depression.

Which is a long way of answering your question with a resounding yes.

Both dieting in general and low carbohydrate/higher protein diets in specific can cause issues with depression in susceptible people.  I do find it a bit surprising that what I consider fairly moderate intakes of both protein and carbohydrates are causing you to experience this but some of it may depend on the depths of depression you experienced (e.g. your genetic susceptibility).

It may also explain why it takes a good 2-3 months for your symptoms to show up, a very low carbohydrate (e.g. 100 grams per day or less) and/or higher protein diet would probably cause things to go south that much faster.

Ok, so that’s what’s going on, what are the solutions?  I wouldn’t tend to generally recommend lowering dietary protein and increasing carbohydrates (higher protein diets having a number of benefits in terms of weight and fat loss) but, depending on the specifics of your situation (e.g. training, etc.) that might be one option.

Assuming it isn’t, here are some things to consider:

1. Add the protein I mentioned above, alpha-lactalbumin to your daily protein intake.  High in tryptophan, it will help support serotonin synthesis.  Consuming some near bedtime might help with sleep, taking it at other times throughout the day may help with overall mood.  In this context, I’d note that having a relatively higher carb/lower protein meal at dinner time may help with some of the sleep issues.

2. Consider supplementing with 5-hydroxytryptophan.  5-HTP is another precursor to serotonin in the brain that many have used to deal with depression and sleep problems. Doses seem to vary significantly but 50-100 mg taken up to three times daily may be worth considering to keep serotonin levels from falling while dieting.

3. Given that your symptoms only show up after 2-3 months of dieting, I’d strongly suggest taking a full diet break (discussed in detail in A Guide to Flexible Dieting) between periods of active dieting.  Basically, perhaps every 2 months, take 2 weeks to raise calories and carbohydrates to restore brain serotonin levels back to normal. Then you can enter another phase of active dieting, stopping before the depression really sets in to take another full diet break.  I think you get the idea.

I hope that helps and good luck.

However, something I haven’t looked at may be a much more fundamental question which is this: why do people want to change their body composition?  That is, what reasons (good or bad) might people have for wanting to change their body composition in the first place.  That’s the topic of this piece.

While the overall goal of body recomposition typically means losing fat and/or gaining muscle there are some situations where gaining fat or losing muscle may also be desired.  I’ll look at each topic below.

Why Do People Want to Lose Fat?

At any given time, some ludicrous percentage of the population is trying to lose weight and/or fat.  I’d note that if you’re unclear on the distinction, you should really read What Does Body Composition Mean? before you go any further.  As I noted above, the motivations or reasons for this goal can vary significantly depending on the population you’re looking at.

It’s probably safe to say that bodybuilders and other physique athletes are the ones who are at least the most visible in terms of their extreme levels of fat loss; they are often the most successful as well.  While their goals are often also vanity driven, the simple fact is that reducing body fat to an appropriate level is required for competition purposes.  In the case of bodybuilding, this can often reducing body fat to what are unhealthy levels.

A male may reach 3-4% body fat on competition day, females have been measured in the single digits as well although few will maintain those levels for very long. This does some nasty things to hormones and women can do real damage to their health if they try to maintain that level for extended periods. As noted, most don’t but some try.

Figure and fitness has become more relaxed in recent years with higher body fat levels and ’softer’ looks being the goal.  But fat loss is usually a primary goal for these types of individuals (it’s not a stretch to say that they are professional dieters).

Even bodybuilders with no interest in stepping on stage typically wants to keep their body fat levels low enough to have some definition (to be ‘buff’) in the common parlance; this is often accompanied with a desire to gain muscle mass.  These folks don’t typically like to hear that body fat often has to increase to some degree to make optimal gains in muscle mass.

Female physique types, who are usually less interested in massive muscles in the first place (there are exceptions, females who want to be massive and/or beastly strong) and tend to be more concerned about just looking good.

Performance athletes frequently want to drop fat (or sometimes just weight) to either improve performance or simply make it into a specific weight class.  Clearly, in some cases, losing fat and/or weight helps performance by increasing the strength/power to weight ratio. Endurance athletes tend to benefit from being lighter because the less mass they have to move against gravity, the faster they go.  There are occasional exceptions (heavyweight rowers come to mind).

However, taken to extremes, dropping too much weight or fat can cause performance to plummet.  Whether this is due to the reduced weight/fat per se or simply the effort (excessive + dietary restriction) required to make it happen is difficult to determine and probably both contribute.

For sports performance, there is usually an optimal level of bodyfat but optimal isn’t the same as minimal.  Many athletes get confused about the distinction.

Many weight class athletes will dehydrate (sometimes severely) to make a lower weight class and there are some horror stories associated with this if it’s done incorrectly.  There have been some deaths associated with this practice and severe dehydration is no joking matter.  If nothing else, dehydration past about the 2% of total weight level tends to hurt performance.  Which won’t stop athletes in these sports from doing it if necessary.

Mild dehydration generally only requires a couple of days of low-carb, protein only diets and caffeine and is usually reasonably well-tolerated.  More extreme levels of dehydration can require prescription diuretics and near death experiences; what a lot of people don’t hear about is the IV fluids used to rehydrate these athletes after they get off the scale.

Returning to physique athletes, bodybuilders often dehydrate themselves to improve appearance, to look more ‘cut’; by reducing the water underneath the skin, muscle definition is improved.  Stories of problems with heavy-duty diuretics, ranging from cramping to passing out and death, are out there.

Of course, not everyone wants to lose fat for athletic, performance or bodybuilding reasons.  While many will pay at least lip service to the idea of losing weight or fat for health reasons, let’s face up to the facts: the grand majority of people who pursue fat loss do it for vanity driven reasons.  Put bluntly: they want to look better naked.  Which isn’t necessarily a bad goal, mind you, but let’s at least be honest about it.

Related to this, some people tie in their sense of self-confidence with their physique; when they’re lean they’re confident, when they’re not, they’re not. Others are doing it to meet some societally driven idea of ‘perfection’ or ‘beauty’.  I’ll leave argument over that to the sociologists.

It’s worth mentioning that while this used to apply primarily to women, there are an increasing number of men showing issues with eating disorders and other unhealthy eating and training habits (including a massive increase in elective plastic surgery for men).  At one point it was thought that eating disorders only occurred in men but this is clearly not the case.  Both anorexia and bulimia are potentially fatal.

Of course, some individuals want, have to or need to lose fat/weight for health reasons.  High blood cholesterol, high blood pressure, Syndrome X (aka Type II diabetes), arthritis, etc. are all often positively impacted by even moderate amounts of weight loss.  Research suggests that as little as a 10% weight loss (e.g. 20 lbs for a 200 lb person, 30 lbs for a 300 lb person) can drastically improve health parameters.

Why Do People Want to Gain Fat?

It’s interesting to note that in many non-modern cultures, fatness is not the social negative that it tends to be in the Western world.  Women are frequently moved into fattening tents prior to marriage, and one culture even has a ritual fattening period that signals a boy’s growth into a man.  I’d note that there’s no real trick to this: they accomplish this fattening by making the victims eat a lot and sit on their butts all day.

It’s probably fair to say that in most Western cultures, it’d be a little unusual for someone to specifically want to gain fat; there are always exceptions.   Here are a few.

For some athletes (especially female) increasing bodyfat may actually be healthier for them in the long-term.    Studies show that women’s hormones (and men’s for the record) can be severely disrupted under certain conditions (usually the combination of a low body fat and excessive caloric restriction) and this can cause bone loss and other problems at a very early age.  Studies of female gymnasts have found bone densities similar to that seen in severe osteoporosis in old women.  This is not a good thing.

For other athletes, such as a football lineman or a sumo wrestler, the quality of weight gained may not be as critical as just being a walking human wall.  Carrying extra fat may actually be beneficial since it can provide some protection against the other large men who are going to be running into you at high speeds with violence on their mind.

Of course, gaining fat for the sake of gaining fat is almost always a poor idea health-wise (and there has been an alarming increase in death at a young age among athletes in sports where the body weight requirements keep going up and up and up), unless someone was unhealthily lean in the first place.

But sports performance and optimal health aren’t always compatible.  If being 350-400 lbs (with 40% body fat) is required to be a pro football lineman and make the big bucks, so be it.  I’d note that taking the fat off after they retire is often a real problem for these types of athletes.  They tend to be so used to eating everything in sight that the idea of not doing so is a very rough change to make.

Finally, sometimes non-athletic individuals need to gain weight or fat as well. Although relatively more rare, some individuals are unhealthily underweight or underfat. I’m not talking about the anorexic eating disorder types (who need to be medically supervised during their weight gain) but folks who simply can’t seem to gain enough weight to be healthy, energetic and vigorous.  This tends to be a small percentage of the population but anybody who reads this site regularly knows that I’m all about completeness.

Why Do People Want to Gain Muscle?

The same individuals who typically want to reduce fat for either cosmetic or performance reasons frequently want to gain muscle mass for the very same reasons. Bodybuilders may need (or simply want) to gain muscle mass to improve their size and overall shape. This may be overall size increases or just increases in specific muscle groups for reasons of symmetry and balance.

Performance athletes may find that performance increases with more muscle and strength although how much of each depends strongly on the type of sport.  Many athletes (e.g. sprinters) have to balance out the requirement for strength and power with carrying too much body weight.  It is often a fine balance.  Other sports aren’t quite as demanding for that balance and if more muscle mass leads to more strength and power, performance often goes up.

For some athletes (especially endurance), too much muscle mass is a hindrance and will slow them down beyond a certain point.  Heavyweight rowers tend to be an odd exception since their weight is supported by the boat.  As with body fat, optimal levels of muscle mass, enough for efficient performance, but not so much that it slows the athlete down is the goal for these athletes.

There are also athletes who can’t gain too much muscle because of aesthetic requirements of their sport (i.e. gymnastics and figure skating).

Even the general public is often interested in some amount of muscle mass gain in this day and age.  Like fat loss, most of this tends to be driven by cosmetic reasons. Males want to ‘be buff’ and females are finding that even small amounts of muscle mass drastically improve their appearance.

Of course, there can also be health benefits to gaining muscle mass.  Massive amounts of research is focusing on the muscle loss that can occur with aging and finding ways to improve muscle mass (usually through training and nutritional intervention) in an increasingly aging population is key is important for both health and functional reasons (e.g. being able to carry your own groceries or get up out a chair without help).

Of course, in extreme situations such as wasting (cancer, AIDS, etc.) maintaining muscle mass is of equal health importance.  As it turns out, the loss of too much muscle mass will cause death and finding ways to slow or stop the loss of muscle that occurs is of huge importance.

Why Do People Want to Lose Muscle?

Possibly even more rare are the situations where someone wants to lose muscle.  Frequently these are ex-athletes who have no desire to maintain their muscle mass once their competitive days are over.

More commonly are athletes for whom losing muscle mass may actually improve performance.  Generally these tend to be endurance athletes who, for some reason, gained excessive amounts of muscle mass (either deliberately or through involvement in another sport) often in non-functional muscles.

A big upper body is typically a hindrance for an athlete such as a road cyclist since it’s just dead weight to be hauled around the course.  Losing it may improve performance.

In this vein, there is a story that is often told about Lance Armstrong who, after losing a large amount of weight (including some upper body muscle mass) due to his bout with cancer, was a much better cyclist because of it.  In this case, losing non-functional muscle could only improve his power to weight ratio.

Finally, as I noted in Weight Training for Fat Loss Part 1, extremely obese individuals often gain some lean body mass (some of which is muscle) in the process of becoming obese.  Most obesity experts expect, and don’t necessarily mind, that that ‘extra’ lean body mass is lost when weight is lost.  In fact, up to 25% of the total weight lost may come from lean body mass without anybody getting too concerned in that situation.

Then I took a quick look at the two major ‘types’ of resistance training that are often recommended during dieting: metabolic type weight training (higher rep/short rest interval) and heavy weight training (lower repetition/longer rest interval).  While both have their pros and cons in terms of how they can impact on the overall goal of dieting, my basic conclusion was that if you had to pick one type of training to perform on a diet, it should be heavy training.  I w