This unknown diet set-up improves muscle retention

Chapters:

00:00 Intro

03:30 Calorie distribution

06:26 My Online PT Course

06:50 Anabolic window

08:31 Calorie distribution across days

09:58 Conclusion

Transcript:

Historians often say that the views of a society developed in a pendulum like fashion. We go from one extreme to the next. Of course the earth is flat. Are you crazy? Of course the earth is round. Are you crazy? We see this in the stock market and we also see it in fitness. Some 15 years ago the prevailing consensus was that you have to eat six meals a day and you have to eat right before a workout and right after a workout. If you didn’t run home to the locker room to slam down a protein shake, you would have wasted all the gains of your workout. That view turned out to be false. But from that view we have gone to the next extreme that nutrient timing doesn’t matter. “Nutrient timing is dead” seems to be the prevailing consensus in evidence based fitness. The truth, however, is probably somewhere in the middle.

If you logically think about it for a moment, the idea that nutrient timing doesn’t matter makes no sense. What if you only eat once per month? Do you think you can have one meal per month and then make gains for the rest of the month? Of course not. Well, how about one per week? Probably not. How about one per day? Maybe still not. So clearly we’re talking about a degree. The degree to which nutrient timing matters. What had happened in evidence based fitness is that people have taken the studies that show that immediate pre- and post-workout protein provision, like a protein shake, directly before and after your workouts is not always necessary.

They’ve taken that knowledge and applied it to nutrient timing as a whole. But nutrition timing has a lot more to it. And even the idea of post-workout and pre-workout nutrient provision is not completely without merit. My favorite line of research for this is actually studies in which researchers had people consume post-workout protein shakes, but they didn’t end up with a higher total daily protein intake compared to the control group. In some of these studies we even saw that the control group ended up with a slightly higher protein intake than the group that was supposed to add protein as a post-workout protein shake. And we see in some of these studies that the groups with the added post-workout protein shake, despite not having a higher total daily protein intake, did make better gains, providing quite clear evidence that it must have been the timing of the protein, rather than the total amount.

Now for those that have seen my videos on protein intake, that’s also why I’m skeptical of studies on protein intake that did not control for the timing of the protein intake. Now, I’m not arguing we go back to running to the locker room to slam down your protein shake, otherwise you have no gains. That turned out to be completely flawed. The majority of research shows that it’s not, for one, the timing of the protein intake, but when the nutrients are in your blood. Your muscles, don’t care about when you consume the protein. What matters is when the amino acids are in the blood. So you want hyper amino acidemia around the time of your workout to fuel maximum muscle protein synthesis. That doesn’t mean you have to consume it right before or after the workout, it could be consumed multiple hours before, as long as the amino acids are in the blood at the time that they are useful for the body.

Based on this total literature, what I recommend to my clients and students is that you should sandwich your workout within a five hour inter-meal window. This means that you should have no more than five hours pass between the pre- and the post-workout meal, and you can workout any time in between that. Within those constraints, depending on what exactly, how much you consume in each meal, you’re probably going to get the same gains regardless of the timing. What is probably not ideal is having a long period of fasting after a workout. Then you have no protein provision at all to fuel the process of muscle growth, muscle protein synthesis, that makes your muscles adapt and get bigger. And a new scientific review takes this line of thinking one step further. They extend it to energy intake, not just protein intake, and they say that the distribution across the day should roughly match requirements.

Concretely, they systematically reviewed the effects of energy distribution across the day in athletes on their resulting body composition. They concluded: “The available evidence suggests that athletes should have an energy intake that dynamically matches requirement (i.e., the portion of the day when energy expenditure is higher should be matched with higher energy intake) to avoid prolonged periods of energy restriction.” Now, I will say that this review is quite weak in terms of evidence. Review heavily relies on observational research, essentially just finding that athletes that do this, that match their energy intake roughly with their expenditure, seem to have better body compositions than people that don’t, but they don’t have interventions with randomized controlled trials and control groups showing that actually adjusting your energy intake like this improves your gains. So I would say that this evidence is quite weak, but there is some other evidence that matches with this and I do think it’s plausible, it makes intuitive sense, at least.

So one of the interventions that they didn’t include in their review because the participants weren’t athletes, but they were lifters doing full body workouts three times a week Is by Keim et al. from 1997. It’s a study that’s no longer talked about, but actually provides quite compelling evidence in favor of nutrient timing mattering. Basically what the researchers did is that they had a group of female lifters perform six weeks of strength training with most of their energy early in the day and six weeks with the same macronutrient total intakes with most of the energy later in the day.

So they had four meals 15%, 15%, 35, 35% or 35, 35, 15, 15%. Basically, most of the energy intake early in the day or most of the energy intake later in the day. Same individuals in a metabolic ward, very importantly. So all energy consumption was completely controlled. They knew exactly what the subjects were eating and this is a massive, massive strength because most of the research, as anyone who was done research in nutritional sciences can show you that it’s very annoying, that it’s very hard to get most of your subjects to actually do what you want them to do.

So diet adherence is a big problem, all coaches can tell you this as well. Client adherence is always an issue and it’s a really big part of coaching. In studies, if people don’t actually do the diet set up that you want them to do, of course that’s completely undermines the whole study. And a metabolic ward is a huge advantage in this regard. And in this study the women trained after breakfast. So that the most of the energy intake in this period of the day with the workout also here and then very little energy intake in the post-workout meals, or they had relatively little energy intake beforehand. And then most of the energy intake in the post-workout periods between the workout and bedtime.

The researchers found that muscle retention was significantly better when the women had most of their energy intake in the second part of the day, as opposed to the first part of the day. Fat loss was similar, but due to the better muscle retention, in fact, no significant muscle loss in the group that has most of their protein and energy intake in the later part of the day, they had a slightly bigger change in body fat percentage. So overall nutrient partitioning was decidedly better in the PM pattern where they get most of their energy intake later in the day.

It makes intuitive sense to me that you want most energy and especially protein intake in the later part of the day, in between the workout and bed time. This is when you’re in the anabolic window. Now research has conclusively shown that the anabolic glory hole theory is not true. Anabolic window is not some 1 hour period where you have to slam down a shake, and then that’s where you get your gains, it’s the whole process of muscle growth. And in untrained individuals this process can last multiple days. So nutrient timing is probably completely irrelevant for untrained individuals. However, as you get more trained, research has shown that the anabolic window decreases in length, which makes sense. You don’t gain as much muscle anymore after workout so the whole process of muscle growth concludes more quickly.

Trained individuals also suffer less muscle damage and generally recover faster from a given workout, which all aligns with the idea that, as a trained individual, the period afterwards in which you grow is not as long. You can probably extend this with higher training volumes, but it makes sense that a big part of the peak in muscle protein synthesis after a workout occurs sometime between the workout and bed time that day. Especially if you train earlier in the day. So probably that period in between the workout and bed time, that period when muscle protein synthesis is significantly elevated, that’s when you want to get a significant part of your total daily energy and protein intake in. You at least want to distribute your calories somewhat evenly across the day, and maybe even back load some of the calories towards this period. Now I will reiterate that the scientific evidence that calorie distribution across the day or protein distribution across the day matters a lot is not very strong.

Significant limitations of the study by Keim et al. included a small sample size, partially offset by having a crossover design and using bioelectrical impedance analysis to measure body composition. They had good equipment for this, but it’s not the gold standard to measure body composition. And we can also extend this line of thinking across days. Does it make sense to have more energy on training days, for example, than on rest days. Well most people actually do the opposite. In my conversations with students, I’ve noticed that most students are not aware that when you consume the same energy intake every day of the week as many people do, you might actually be bulking on your rest days and cutting on your training days, which intuitively might not be ideal.

For example, if your energy expenditure on rest days is 2500 calories, you have a 500 calorie higher energy expenditure on your training days, you go into an energy deficit of 10% and you consume the same energy intake across the week. This is a pretty common scenario, I think. In that scenario your average energy intake will be 2507 calories and your average expenditure will be 2786 calories, meaning you are indeed, on average in a 10% energy deficit. But in individual days you have 2500 calorie energy expenditure on your rest days, and you are consuming 2507 calories, which means you are technically in a slight energy surplus on your rest days, whereas on your training days you are in deficit. And that might not be ideal according to this new systematic review. And I think that intuitively makes sense.

The training day is logically the period in which it’s more likely that the additional energy intake will foster muscle growth and muscular recovery, as opposed to the rest day, at least if most of the training day is the post-workout period in which you are recovering. If you trained very late in the day it might actually make more sense to have more energy intake on the rest day afterwards.

So does this matter? Well, there’s very little research and it’s also very hard, based on the research that we have, to make firm conclusions about this because of the problems of dietary adherence. Any effect on energy or protein timing is generally less than the effect of the total intake. Although we’ve seen some of the studies I mentioned earlier that found that the timing mattered even when total intake did not change, or in some cases even when the total protein intake was higher the protein timing group still has better results. So it’s possible for timing to matter, but in most cases I would say that if you have three meals a day, you distribute your calories roughly equally across a day, you fulfill that rule that your workout is somewhere between a five hour window between two meals the effects of additional protein or energy timing are going to be marginal and only relevant for well trained individuals.

Still, I think for maximum gains, it makes sense that you want to roughly align your energy and your protein intake along with the requirements over time. So you want to roughly synchronize your protein intake with the anabolic window, the protein synthesis that your body is capable of, and you want energy intake to roughly correspond with energy expenditure. This is not a big deal, but it might help optimize your nutrient partitioning for those advanced individuals that are looking to squeeze out every bit of muscle gain that they can.

I hope this helps you set up your diets to meet your goals. If you like this type of evidence based content I’d be honored if you like and subscribe.