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In Steady State vs. interval training: Summing up Part 1, I started to put together some of the information I’m blogging about by making a point about the types of problems I’m seeing in practice with the pro-interval myopia. Simply: given that a majority of trainees train more frequently than 3X/week, once they have been convinced that intervals are the only way to train, problems start. They end up trying to do intervals at every session, in addition to a heavy weight training load for the legs and they blow up.

But thats’ not the only problem I’m seeing and, today, I want to take another side-trip to look at the three distinct parts of what is currently being given to trainees in terms of how they should be training.

In a recent commercial fat loss product I listened to (yes, I have to read everything, even the stuff I know will be garbage) pretty much every interviewee’s answers can be summed up as

• Intervals are best for fat loss
• Metabolic weight training is the best for fat loss
• Low-carb diets are best for fat loss

With the standard spurious arguments given for each.

What’s going on here, why are these three things coming up again and again and what’s the problem with what’s being recommended?

Simply, the problem I see is that people are taking a number of isolated data points (e.g. individual studies looking at only one thing) and assuming that, if they put all of those concepts together, thing will work even better. This is even assuming that the study results in question are actually saying what people say they are saying. Let me look at that quickly first.

For example, the superiority of intervals is usually based on the supposed afterburn/EPOC, an idea that research into EPOC shows is irrelevant. And even looking at the (non-diet controlled) studies comparing intervals to steady state, the results are hardly anything to write home about. Half a kilogram more fat over 20 weeks, a pound over 12 weeks, whatever. Yeah, you’ll be ripped by 2032 at that rate. Do intervals have advantages over steady state in some ways? Yes. But steady state has its own set of advantages (not the least of which that it can be done daily which interval can’t, or rather shouldn’t).

Both are simply tools with their own sets of pros and cons.

The one study suggesting a massive caloric expenditure from metabolic weight training has never been replicated and, while metabolic weight training may have other advantages (such as glycogen depletion, etc.) it also has limitations (not the least of which is that it’s an inferior way to maintain muscle mass on a diet). To say that metabolic weight training is de-facto superior is simplistically dumb and completely incorrect. All types of weight training are simply tools with their own sets of pros and cons and should be used accordingly.

I don’t want to get into detail on the lowcarb thing just yet, that could be another entire series of blog posts, especially with the low-carb retards coming out of the woodworks after the publication of Gary Taube’s book “Good calories, Bad Calories” (I’ll do a detailed review when I get a chance). Sufficed to say that while low-carb diets may have their advantages, they aren’t magic. At least one study have suggested exactly zero advantage over lowered carbohydrate but non-ketogenic diet when calories are controlled. Low-carb diets are simply one tool with its own sets of pros and cons.

The studies that low-carb advocates always like to cite are invariably not calorie controlled. And while the subjects may report that they are eating the same amount, this is unlikely to be the case. If low-carb diets have an advantage, it’s that most people spontaneously eat less. The only metabolic advantage is that, people on lowcarb diets are eating less calories.

But for the sake of argument, let’s just assume that all three of the statements above are actually true, at least when studied in isolation. Let’s assume that intervals are superior to steady state, that metabolic weight training is best for fat loss and low-carb diets are superior for fat loss. At least by themselves.

What happens when you throw them all together?

In this case, some bad things. Because while glycogen depletion can improve fat loss (a point I made over 10 years ago in The Ketogenic Diet and used for a specific goal in the Ultimate Diet 2.0, even if everybody is only now jumping on that bandwagon), the simple fact is that high-intensity training can NOT be sustained in the long-term without dietary carbohydrate. Eventually glycogen gets depleted, performance falls off and folks overtrain.

Yet now we have people trying to remove all carbohydrates from their diet, while doing glycogen depleting metabolic weight training while trying to add glycogen depleting interval work three or more times per day. Because we have a bunch of gurus who took several isolated data points (of potentially limited validity in the first place), threw them in the training program blender and vomited out some real stupidity.

And that’s where the problem is coming in. It’s a training load that almost nobody could survive with adequate dietary carbohydrates (recall, as I’ve mentioned previously and the link at the front of this blog post clearly shows, most athletes don’t do intervals more than twice per week yet the average trainee thinks that doing them every day is a good idea) and folks are trying to maintain that for weeks on end without any carbs.

Which isn’t to say that elements of each of the above data points can’t be used, just that they need to be applied and properly.

Does metabolic weight training have its role? Absolutely. I used depletion work at the start of the UD2 cycle to deplete glycogen and improve fat oxidation and offered it as a possible way of generating a certain hormonal response in the Stubborn Fat Solution for Protocols 3 and 4.

Obviously intervals have their place for both fat loss and performance and they are used as part of two of the four protocols in the Stubborn Fat Solution and can be used during other diets for various reasons. The main point, and the thing that it’s time for people to realize is that interval training:

• Can’t be done every damn day
• Can’t be done forever without a break

And, of course low-carbohydrate diets have their place (my first book was a 300 page treatise on the technical aspects of low-carbohydrate diets so clearly I feel that they have their place). Again, the first 4 days of the UD2 cycle is low-carbs (prior to a three day very high-carb refeed), and one of the four protocols in the Stubborn Fat Solution is based around the fact that chronic low-carbohydrate diets can help mobilize stubborn body fat.

But that doesn’t mean that low-carb diets are magically de facto superior for fat loss or anything else. Especially if people want or need to perform a good bit of high-intensity training. Carbs will be required in that situation, whether they are consumed daily or during some type of cyclical diet is less relevant than the fact that they will be required at some point.

Essentially, if you want to completely remove carbs from your diet, the amount of high-intensity training of any sort will have to be reduced. And if you want to do a lot of high-intensity training, you will need carbs in your diet. Either diet determines the training or training determines the diet. But trying to do both often causes major problems.

Are you getting my point here? Not only have people completely lost their minds with the pro-interval rhetoric (developing training loads that no athlete would consider doing), it ends up being combined with two other variables that end up making the problem worse.

The body can only handle so much heavy training, which is why most of the training that most athletes do is low-intensity. Yet we have a situation, and I know I sound like a fucking broken record, where people are trying to sustain training loads that are simply inhuman in the first place. They want to add too many interval sessions to too much heavy weight training AND do it under conditions of both severe carbohydrate and caloric restriction.

And, at long last, the series finishes with Steady State vs. Interval Training: A Conclusion

Reviewing basic physiology

On a day to day basis, your body has certain nutrient requirements, a topic which is discussed in detail elsewhere in this book. As described in those chapters, those nutrient requirements are generally related to how much you weigh (or how much lean body mass you have). There are a few exceptions, places where the requirements for a given nutrient are absolute which I’ll mention when necessary.

For example, at any given moment, nearly all of the tissues in your body are utilizing some amount of protein for various processes. Your liver, your kidneys, your muscles, your fat cells, your gut are all using protein for protein synthesis and energy needs. Meaning that the more of those tissues you have, the more protein you need; the less of those tissues you have the less protein that you need.

The same goes for carbohydrate and fat. Your body is using energy at some rate (set by your metabolic rate which is fundamentally related to your body mass but also determined by factors such as hormones, the temperature and other factors) and that means providing energy at some level related to bodyweight. Since carbohydrate and fat are your body’s primary energy yielding nutrients, that means that they are required in some amount related to bodyweight. In addition, fat is being used for other structural processes and is going to be required in some amounts relative to bodyweight as well. And although those values may change (based on activity and other factors such as genetics, age, etc.), they are still going to change relative to your bodyweight. Some numerical examples:

The RDA for protein is set at 0.8 g protein/kg body weight (0.36 g/lb) while dieters may need as much as 1.5 g/kg (0.68 g/lb) to avoid excessive protein loss. Endurance athletes need protein at roughly 1.2-1.4 g protein/kg (0.54-0.63 g/lb) and weight trainers may need 1.6-1.8 g protein/kg (0.72-0.81 g/lb). Most bodybuilders use 1 g/lb as a rough estimate and this isn’t too far off from the value of 0.8 g/lb.

So someone who weighs 200 lbs and is sedentary needs about 72 grams of protein per day; if they were dieting, they’d need at least 136 g/day; if they are an endurance athlete, they need between 108-126 grams of protein per day; if they are weight training, they may need 144-164 grams of protein per day. Note, at this point, that I’ve said nothing about percentages.

And while there’s no true requirement for carbohydrates, studies show that maintaining daily endurance performance may take 5 g carbohydrates/kg (2.2 g/lb); glycogen supercompensation requires amounts on the order of 10 g carbohydrates/kg (4.5 g/lb).

For the most part, fat intakes in relation to bodyweight haven’t really been determined, and most research still simplistically talks in terms of percentages. A minimal intake of 3-6 grams of linolenic acid, and 1-2 grams of linoleic acid has been suggested to avoid deficiency syndromes. As discussed elsewhere, whether this represents an optimal amount in terms of health or body recomposition is debatable. Even then, it seems impossible that some fixed amount of either linoleic acid or alpha-linolenic acid would apply to everyone regardless of bodyweight.

But this is all sort of tangential to my point which is that nutrient requirements are related to your bodyweight or lean body mass.

Why is this a problem?

So why is this a problem? When someone puts protein, carb, or fat requirements in terms of percentages only for a diet setup, it doesn’t necessarily have any relevance to what that person actually needs. For example, it’s not uncommon to see diets for bodybuilders set up with 25-30% protein. Others take a more conservative 15% and use that across the board for athletes or general intake. But what do those percentages actually mean? Obviously nothing unless you also know how many calories that person is eating.

Let’s use our 200 lb example individual above and look at his protein intake. Let’s split the middle value for weight training and say he actually needs 150 g/day of protein and put him at two different caloric extremes: 1000 cal/day (a starvation diet) vs. 10,000 calories/day (Parillo style). Let’s set protein at 30% which most would say is sufficient (or excessive depending on who you’re talking to).

1000 cal/day at 30% yields 300 calories from protein, or 75 grams of protein. He’d need 60% protein on 1000 cal/day to get 150 grams of protein per dya. 10,000 cal/day at 30% yields 3000 calories from protein, or 750 grams of protein. Although both diets are 30% protein, the first is half of what our guy actually needs (75 g/day vs. 150 g/day); the second diet has 5 times as much protein as he actually needs. Yes, these are extreme examples and deliberately chosen that way. But they point out that the percentage itself has no relevance whatsoever to what our guy’s actual requirements are.

Now, the typical counter-response to what I wrote above is that the percentage values are assumed to be based on some fairly average caloric intake. That is, if we were to put our 200 lb guy (150 g/protein required per day) on a more ‘average’ 2400 cal/day (12 cal/lb) and 30% protein, he will come out with a protein intake of 2400 * 0.3 = 800 cal from protein yielding 200 grams/day or 1 gram per pound. Yes, a little higher than the 150 g/day but not excessively so. And that’s fine, percentage based diets are going to be roughly valid within a certain caloric range. The problem is that isn’t always how they are applied and that’s certainly not how the percentages are typically interpreted.

More problems: interpretation and usage

It’s quite common to see statements of “Such and such is a high-fat diet and hence bad.” or “High-protein diets are bad”, things of that nature. Most commonly, those statements are based on the percentages of a given nutrient in a diet. For example, diets containing 30% or less total calories from fat are generally considered ‘low-fat’ while, by definition, higher fat intakes are considered high-fat. But this can be terribly misleading as well as misused. Here’s an example.

Let’s say we have a person who’s currently eating 2000 calories of which 150 grams (600 calories) are protein, 176 grams (707 calories) are carbs, and 77 grams (693 calories) of fat. Using the math from the last chapter, this yields a diet that is 30% protein, 35% carbohydrate, and 35% fat. Most would refer to this as a high-fat diet and deem it bad because it contains 35% fat calories. They would probably also call it ‘low-carbohydrate’ and ‘high-protein’ based on the percentages.

Ok, so let’s say we add 200 grams (800 calories) of carbohydrates (let’s use table sugar just because) to the diet without changing anything else. Total calories now go to 2800 and the percentage of calories from fat drops 35% to 25% (protein drops from 30% to 21%, carbs increase from 35% to 53%), even though the total fat intake in grams hasn’t changed. By typical naming conventions a ‘high-fat’ diet has now magically become a ‘low-fat’ diet and nobody will have a problem with the protein or carbohydrate intake, based on the percentages. Of course, total fat intake in grams didn’t change. Neither has protein intake in grams. All we did was skew the percentages by adding 200 grams of table sugar to the diet. And I don’t think anybody would argue that adding 200 grams of table sugar to this diet is particularly healthy. Yet many clueless folks would automatically assume or claim that the second diet (25% fat) is healthier than the first (35% fat) because it’s a ‘low-fat’ diet even though both diets contain the same number of grams of fat.

On a related note, many food companies will use this strategy as well. By simply adding table sugar to a food, to increase the caloric content, they can drive the percentage of calories from fat downwards below 30% and call it a low-fat food. You can make vegetable oil (100% fat calories at 14 grams fat/140 calories) a low-fat food if you add enough table sugar to it. Does that make it healthy because it’s now ‘low-fat’? Obviously not. Or perhaps not so obviously because some folks fixate so hard on the percentages that they miss the forest for the trees.

Using the same starting diet from above, say we decide to take all of the carbohydrates out of the same diet. Now it contains 150 grams of protein (600 calories), zero grams of carbs, and 77 grams of fat (693 calories) and 1293 total calories. Now it contains 46% protein and 54% fat. Most would call this a high-protein, high-fat diet and go into an apoplectic fit even though it contains the exact same number of grams of protein and fat as the previous diet. By simply changing the total carb and caloric content, we can skew the percentages. But we haven’t changed a damn thing in terms of absolute protein or fat intake.

Or an even more extreme example, let’s say we decide to move this guy to nothing but protein (as in my Rapid Fat Loss Handbook). Now he’s eating nothing but 150 grams of protein per day. That’s a 100% protein diet, which most would call ‘high-protein’. First they’d freak out, then they’d tell you that his kidneys are going to fall out of his ass. Except that it contains no more and no less protein than the previously two described diets; once again, by manipulating the total caloric content of the diets we’ve changed the percentages even if we really haven’t changed the gram intake.

On that note, this is a common criticism of ‘low-carbohydrate’ and/or ‘ketogenic diets’. Most will call them high-protein and/or high-fat because the percentage of total calories from protein and fat is very high. But this can be misleading because ketogenic diets are also commonly low in total calories. Studies typically show that total protein and fat intake change very little when people move to ketogenic diets. Rather, total calorie and carbohydrate content come down, and the percentage from fat and protein go up. Nitwit diet critics will look at the high fat percentage and condemn the diet, without looking at the actual gram intake.

Another example: one of the popularly referenced studies by lower-carbohydrate diet advocates refers to a group of athletes given only 40% of total calories from carbohydrates, who are able to maintain performance. This is frequently used (by low-carbohydrate diet proponents) to argue that a diet of 40% carbs is sufficient and/or that ‘high-carb’ diets are unnecessary. Here’s the problem: because of the extremely high total caloric intake in these athletes, 40% of total calories still yielded in excess of 400 grams of carbohydrates per day (a far cry from the 150-200 grams/day you might get on a typical lowered-carb diet). So even though it was ‘low-carbohydrate’ by percentage standards, it was still high-carbohydrate relative to their bodyweight needs. Even at only 40% total calories, they still got close to the 5 g/kg value listed above needed to sustain glycogen stores. Once again, the percentage had absolutely no relevance to the actual gram intake.

And, finally, here’s a rather humorous example from my college days. At some point or another, during a nutrition class, a professor of mine had made the rather common statement that “As long as you don’t eat foods with more than 30% total fat calories, you will be fine” something to that effect. It seemed like a logical extension of trying to get total fat intake below 30%: make sure no individual food contains more than 30% fat calories and you should be safe. At some later date, I took him a cookie recipe of mine that contained approximately 20 calories/cookie and 1 gram of fat (the cookies were mostly air, with a little sugar and some chocolate chips). My professor bristled, because these cookies contained nearly 50% of calories from fat (9 calories out of a total 20). Well, yeah, but they still only contained 1 gram of fat/cookie. ONE GRAM. A cookie that was 200 calories and 30% fat (70 calories) would contain 8 grams of fat even though it’s below the magical 30% cutoff point. Yet he would have considered the second a better food choice based on just the percentage even though it had 10 times as many calories and 8 grams of fat vs. 1. Go figure.

Making my point

Looking simply at the percentages of a given nutrient contained within a diet or food can lead people down entirely incorrect paths. Whether it’s in setting up a diet, on intrepreting a given diet, looking at the percentages alone is a mistake. A 15% protein diet might contain too much protein if calories are absurdly high, and far too little protein if the calories are very low. And a diet which contains ‘only’ 40% carbohydrate may contain more than enough actual carbohydrates by grams as long as the total caloric intake is high enough. A diet which was considered ‘high-fat’ by percentage can be made ‘low-fat’ by simply adding carbohydrates/calories/sugar to the diet but that’s not necessarily improving anything.

As I pointed out early in this chapter and elsewhere, daily nutrient requirements are (generally) based on bodyweight, not the percentage of that nutrient in a diet. If someone requires, say, 1 gram of protein per pound of bodyweight, they need 1 gram per pound whether it represents 10%, 50% or 100% of their total calories. If someone needs 5 g/kg of carbs to maintain performance, that’s what they need whether it’s 40% of their total calories or 60% of their total calories. If they need X grams of fat (X not really having been established at this point except for minimal essential fatty acid requirements), they need X grams no matter the percentage. Are we clear now on the different between percentages and total grams? I certainly hope so.