I’m going to do a 2 week cycle of mag 10 followed by tribex/M. I really don’t want to put on a lot of extra fat. will i still get gains if i continue with my normal healthy diet and maybe up my protein 25-50gs. currently i eat 3-4 small meals a day + 40gs of protein shake.
You’ll probably make gains, but not enough to really make it worth it. While, “the more you eat, the more you’ll grow” is only true to a certain extent, it might be relevant in this case. To minimize fat gain, maybe stay about 800kcal above maintenance, and keep the carbs and fat seperate from one another. Have your p + f meals later in the day (maybe last two meals) and then just eat clean.
if you eat REALLY big you will probably gain at least 20 pounds… 5 or so will be fat. if you eat small you will probably only gain 5 pounds. do you really want to waste 100 bucks just because you didnt want to diet afterwards?
While it may not occur every day of the
cycle, it is not unusual for the body to be able, for brief periods, to gain one lb LBM
per day and sometimes even more than this has been achieved.
Since marginal feed efficiency (the percentage of extra protein above maintenance taken in that actually gets made into muscle protein) must be much less than 100%, and let’s guess 50% as an estimation, this requires roughly 200 grams per day more protein than your maintenance, to be able to support such growth if the body is going to do it that day. Besides such reasoning, it’s an observation that when protein is increased less than this, gains are reduced, whereas a larger increase than this does not seem to give noticeably if at all more gains.
Increasing protein by just 25-50 grams per day
over maintenance (assuming you’re at maintenance) pretty much wastes an androgen cycle that had been intended for gains.
Your post got me wondering about the effect of increasing protein by 200g with only a slight increase in carbs. In the presence of androgens, would the body preferentially choose to use the extra protein for growth as opposed to converted it to glucose/energy? Logic makes me assume that as long as carbs are “adequate,” increased protein is a far more crucial element. However, I don’t recall anyone posting results after going, say, with 400g protein but only 300-350g carbs (and minimal fat). Just curious what your thoughts in this regard would be.
Carbs can be an element restricting growth,
and if someone can handle say 500 g/day of
carbs without fat gain problems (as is generally the case if fat intake is kept low) then this will often give better gains than if carbs are kept lower. But many do make
excellent gains on amounts of carbs like you mentioned, 300-350 g. However, if fat is
fairly low, say 80 g/day, then you have
720 cal from fat, if 400 g/day protein then
1600 cal there, and if 300 g/day carbs then 1200 cal there, so about 3500 cal/day total.
This is usually a little low but sometimes
works well for some users especially over
briefer periods like 2 weeks. (For most, though, the shortfall in calories compared to 4000-4500, for someone around 180-200 lb, reduces gains.)