www.bodybuildingweb.net/blog/anabolic-burst-cycling-of-diet-exercise-abcde/
www.mindandmuscle.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=4967
I’m going to try this calorie cycling, 12 days well over maintenance followed by 12 days at maintenance or below and perhaps repeat the cycle.
Have used something similar a while back and it helped with bulking.
Look at the stats in the second links study, truly amazing gains.
A dude in one of the links you posted writes:
“Most of the people that tried it mainly reported that they got smaller and fatter.”
It also linked to:
[quote]big balls wrote:
www.bodybuildingweb.net/blog/anabolic-burst-cycling-of-diet-exercise-abcde/
www.mindandmuscle.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=4967
I’m going to try this calorie cycling, 12 days well over maintenance followed by 12 days at maintenance or below and perhaps repeat the cycle.
Have used something similar a while back and it helped with bulking.
Look at the stats in the second links study, truly amazing gains.[/quote]
I’ve only heard bad things about ABCDE. Alot of people lose too much mass on the cutting phase while putting on too much fat in the bulking phase.
that approach just seems foolish. You give your body 12 days of a surplus so it says “Ok I guess I’ll grow some more muscle” then all of the sudden you cut back for 2 weeks and your body says “Oh shit!! What the fuck just happened?!?! ABORT MUSCLE GROWTH!!! ABORT!!”
If you have ever seen the movie Osmosis Jones, you know this dialogue is actually occurring within your body.
[quote]Itchy wrote:
I’ve only heard bad things about ABCDE. Alot of people lose too much mass on the cutting phase while putting on too much fat in the bulking phase.[/quote]
I tried that back when I was…16 or so. Went from cut to fat in about a week. Of course, it was probably stupid of me to jump DIRECTLY into the bulking portion right after a severe Calorie deficit.
I don’t like these plans that focus on changing intakes to bulk/but during such short time frames. I don’t believe the body works in a perfectly linear fashion so that a simply Calorie deficit during ONE day can lead to fat loss, or vice versa. I think 12 days is just too short to rotate between Calorie intakes.
It is shown that, in the case of Calorie deficits and fasting, as time INCREASES, resting glucose levels and insulin decrease, and glucagon increases, with glucagon reaching substantially high levels at something like the 30 day mark, while insulin and glucose become very low.
That particular study was done with fasting animals but I believe the human body works in a similar way, in that hormone levels and enzymes take a little while to become upregulated/downregulated and that constant fluctutation between over and undereating prevents optimal progress towards gaining OR cutting.
It may not be entirely true, but I’ve noticed that while trying to achieve fat loss, things seem to move very slowly for the first few weeks and then its as if I wake up and in the course of one day am noticeably leaner, and from that point forward progress is extremely rapid and I feel more adjusted to the diet.
Sorry for the long winded and possibly inaccurate post.
The general concept is not terrible but the instructed specific method is.
Too extreme at both ends.
Gaining fat faster than optimal, which is a pretty modest rate, is counterproductive because it eats up too high a fraction of the time dieting and/or mandates dieting too severely if not pushing that fraction so high.
ABCDE non-brilliantly manages to combine both disadvantages: wasting (with regard to muscle gain) no less than 50% of the time, AND being too severe in the dieting in the dieting weeks.
[quote]NewDamage wrote:
Itchy wrote:
I’ve only heard bad things about ABCDE. Alot of people lose too much mass on the cutting phase while putting on too much fat in the bulking phase.
I tried that back when I was…16 or so. Went from cut to fat in about a week. Of course, it was probably stupid of me to jump DIRECTLY into the bulking portion right after a severe Calorie deficit.
I don’t like these plans that focus on changing intakes to bulk/but during such short time frames. I don’t believe the body works in a perfectly linear fashion so that a simply Calorie deficit during ONE day can lead to fat loss, or vice versa. I think 12 days is just too short to rotate between Calorie intakes…[/quote]
Agree.
[quote]
It is shown that, in the case of Calorie deficits and fasting, as time INCREASES, resting glucose levels and insulin decrease, and glucagon increases, with glucagon reaching substantially high levels at something like the 30 day mark, while insulin and glucose become very low.
.[/quote]
Interesting.
[quote]
It may not be entirely true, but I’ve noticed that while trying to achieve fat loss, things seem to move very slowly for the first few weeks and then its as if I wake up and in the course of one day am noticeably leaner, and from that point forward progress is extremely rapid and I feel more adjusted to the diet.
quote]
I’ve noticed the same thing . It’s as if one day, a switch is flipped, and progress becomes observable daily.
Everyone is different of course but I did this diet with great sucess. I was around 19 at the time though with a fast metabolism. I had a lot of trouble putting on size after a few years of lifting. This diet really helped me. I did 3 full cycles in a row (3 months).
Every time, i lost 15 lbs on the cut and gained 20 on the bulk.
The magic here is in the extreme cut. You have to get your body into a starvation mode so when you begin to bulk all your hormones go crazy. It was the hardest diet i ever did. I think i had like 1200 cals for the cut. My strength would plummet and i would loose mass on the cut but every single time, by the end of the second week of the bulk i was stronger then ever. It makes complete sense to me how beggining with the bulk instead of the cut could be pretty ugly. Cals were really high if i remember.
It really worked for me. Put 15 lbs on me in 3 months. It wasn’t fat. I was slightly bulkier after. body fat % went up a bit but gained a good amount of lean mass.
AS often as one sees “loose fat,” I think this is the first I’ve seen “loose mass.”
Don’t know why this is.
(Not a spelling flame, but an observation I find amusing.)
On your results, I think you are correct in considering your age at the time as a key factor.
[quote]Bill Roberts wrote:
AS often as one sees “loose fat,” I think this is the first I’ve seen “loose mass.”
Don’t know why this is.
(Not a spelling flame, but an observation I find amusing.)
On your results, I think you are correct in considering your age at the time as a key factor.[/quote]
Ha! Thanks for the correction Bill. I am the worst speller ever. I have auto spell check on all my emails at work before they go out. I butcher the English language here on the forums with my spelling. However, spell check would not of saved me this time considering that “loose” is a word. Ah well.
I tried it in 2003.
Not good.