Hey Cy, I have a few questions for you regarding Steroid Dieting. Well, first off, here’s my current situation. 6’1, 239 lbs, 20% bodyfat. I wanna drop my bodyfat down quick, mainly because I want to bulk up again, but I wanna do it the right way while putting on quality LBM instead of a mix of LBM and Bodyfat. I was going to devote the next 16 weeks of my training to cutting down my bodyfat, but I read your article Steroid Dieting and thought, shit, maybe I could do this a little bit faster. Here’s the plan of attack I came up with. I wanted to follow Steroid Dieting for the next 6 weeks. I was going to do the Ripped, Rugged and Dense Routine, and throw CT’s Running Man program in 3 days a week. I also figured since I’m going to be on Androgens, to do an additional 20-30 minutes of low-moderate intensity cardio after every workout. I was thinking about 2 weeks of Mag 10, followed by 2 weeks of 4 AD-EC, followed by 2 more weeks of Mag 10. During the weeks I’m on Mag 10, I was going to have caloric intake at 8xLBM, and 10xLBM when on 4 AD-EC. Am I somewhat on target here with calories, the way I’m cycling the androgens, etc. I have read up alot of stuff here on T-Mag, and have been educating myself as much as I can about training, nutrition, etc. Just for some background, I’m 23, been lifting since my senior year in high school. For Supplements, I’m also using Low Carb Grow, Hot Rox, Surge, and regular creatine mixed in with the Surge. I’m on my 3rd week of Hot Rox, happy with the results so far. Calories for the past 3 weeks have been at 2,300, 300 grams of protein, 170-175 grams of carbs, and 50 grams of fat. Also, I was going to incorporate carb refeeds into the program, starting at once every seven days. Any suggestions and constructive criticism is definitely wanted, not just from Cy, but anyone else. I feel like I’m pretty on base, but I’d love to hear any training/nutrition suggestions you guys have. There are alot of knowledgable people on this forum, and I’d love to learn from them. Thanks for your time everyone.
-Greg
P.S. Just so I don’t get flamed, I’ve noticed that those people not posting goals are not well received. My goal is to get down to around 10 % bodyfat as soon as possible, maintain for about 4-6 weeks, Then do 2-3 cycles of Mag 10 plan for success. I’d love to gain as much LBM as possible, while not going over 15% bodyfat. Thanks guys!
sounds like you have a pretty good plan. however i dont think the extra slow pace cardio will be necessary. just because your on mag10 doesnt mean you cant overtrain.
P-Dog, sounds good to me, I hate slow paced cardio as it is. Thanks for the advice.
-Greg
I’m doing something similar however in order to avoid cardio I was going to double-split my workouts and keep the volume reasonable to hopefully burn some extra calories and speed up my metabolism more than once per day. Something like 2 on, 1 off or maybe 3 on 1 off with 2 off every couple of weeks. My calories are going to be pretty low and my gauge for muscle loss will be strength loss. I don’t think I’m so worried about endurance here because my diet is going to be low-carb most of the time, just max strength on my heaviest lifts. I figure as long as I don’t notice a strength problem I should be holding on to my muscle. My last bulking cycle went fantastic and I know I have a harder time losing fat than gaining muscle (partly do to dedication and discipline relative to diet).
Good luck with your program.
Thanks D-Lo
-Greg
bump
You may need to PM Cy and ask him to stop by and reply to your post. He’s a busy guy, not often on the board.
Looks like you’ve done a ton of reading and reasearch and put together a pretty solid plan. The one thing I’d like to see you do is pick up calories on days you do work out. Specifically Surge and starchy carbs. Specifically PWO.
One way to reduce your BF percentage is to lose BF. The other way to eat in such a way that you put on muscle (with scale weight not going up). So eat those carbs PWO Go ahead and eat at 8 time LBM, but jack it up PWO.
As a general rule, it’s a good idea to separate weight training and cardio. Doing so is less catabolic and will give you two metabolic kicks in the butt.
Good luck to you!!!
Nova, I hope you don’t mind that I threw this out on the board, as it’s a great question, one that can’t be repeated often enough (especially since we have a lot of newbies).
Hey Terry, I kept looking for the when to carb up thread, but I can’t find it. If you know where it is, can you help me out? Thanks for your advice and your time, I appreciate it.
Okay. What we’re talking about is sometimes referred to as a carb up, a cheat meal (or cheat afternoon) or even a refeed. Refeeds, or whatever you want to call them, are highly individual, meaning there’s a lot of ways you can conduct one and people tend to respond better (or worse) to different approaches.
The highlights? Try to keep fat as low as possible while jacking up carbs as high as possible. As a bare minimum, I’d recommend one refeed per week, about 6 hours, following a cardio or weight lifting session. Eat all you want, as much as you want, everything you’ve been dreaming of (that’s not fatty, like pizza or Krispy Kreme donuts). Sugar, spaghetti, anything carb-y. Your stomach will be the limiting factor. Eat until you have a smile on your face or until you lie groaning, moaning on the couch.
Refeeds boost leptin levels, upregulate thyroid production and of course help psychologically with compliance. Dropping calories as low as you’re planning on dropping them tends to really slow you’re metabolism down if you don’t do refeeds.
Okay. Now you know what to search for. There’s great info on the forum and in the articles, both.
Any other questions, don’t hesitate to ask.
I dunno, terry. I’m a big Berardi fan and since he came out with an article about the benefits of following your weight training with cardio, I’ve been kind of sold on it. Performing 20 minutes of cardio in a glycogen depleted state post workout to continue fat burning makes sense to me. I can’t imagine the same 20 minutes being as effective by itself. But I’m open for opinions.
Hey, MT, thanks for sharing that!!! The beauty (and value) of T-Mag is that there are so many ways to approach things. Our authors/contributors take different/opposing positions on things. We argue/debate things on the forum, which only benefits the many that read the forum as they struggle through trying to find an approach that will help them achieve the body of their dreams.
Since we’re all biochemically unique, it’s fun to experiment, to try different approaches and see what our body responds best to. I’ve long been a fan of longer-duration, moderate intensity fasted-stated cardio, which is not that different from what you’re doing and what JB believes in.
While I would never try to dissuade you from doing anything that seems to be working for you, my thoughts on the subject are that lifting weights does use up blood sugar and glcogen, at which point cortisol levels start to rise (the reason for keeping weight lifting sessions to an hour or less (ideal)).
Cortisol breaks down muscle so that certain amino acids can be converted to glucose (for the brain). Taking Surge causes an insulin spike (and a resulting cortisol drop). Unfortunately, it also kicks you out of fat burning mode. If you were to then do cardio, blood sugar, not stored fat, is fueling your work.
If you didn’t take Surge, you’re probably talking about a weight lifting + cardio session that goes beyond an hour, with ever increasing cortisol levels and muscle breakdown. I feel that the negatives start to outweight the positives at that point.
Thus my reason for recommending that cardio and weight lifting sessions be kept separate. Once again, two short sessions result in two metabolic kicks in the butt and lower/more acceptable cortisol levels.
What do you think, MY? Anyone else want to jump in on this one?