Mesocycle is a term used to describe training on a month-to-month basis–periods of dedicated training usually lasting between four to eight weeks. The mesocycle is comprised of a series of microcycles, or week-to-week training phases. Mesocycles are strung together to form training macrocycles, which are long-term periods dedicated to progressing toward a particular goal. Mesocycles (or several mesocycles with the same goal sequenced together) are also colloquially known as “blocks” or “phases” of training.
Fractional Synthetic Rate of Muscle Growth (FSR)
FSR generally refers to the rate at which a certain amount of amino acids from dietary protein are incorporated into skeletal muscle. In other words, this describes how much of the protein you eat is used to grow muscle and how fast.
Fractional Breakdown Rate of Muscle Growth (FBR)
FBR generally refers to the rate at which a certain amount of skeletal muscle protein is broken down for use in the body. In other words, this describes how much muscle tissue is lost during periods of insufficient training, insufficient energy availability, or insufficient circulating amino acids and how fast.
Partitioning Ratio
The P-Ratio describes the ratio of fat to muscle gained or lost on a diet. A favorable P-Ratio on a muscle gain phase would mean gaining larger amounts of muscle and very little fat. One of the reasons to periodize diet phases for muscle gain is to maximize the P-Ratio of each gaining phase so that more muscle than fat is gained over the long term.
Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced Lifters
In this book we will define beginners as having around 0 to 3 years of structured lifting experience, intermediates as having roughly 3 to 6 years of experience, and advanced lifters as having 6+ years of experience. These are not precise timelines, but rather serve as a rough guide to classify lifting experience. In general, beginners gain muscle and lose fat more readily than intermediate and advanced lifters. Advanced lifters need more voluminous training to gain even a small amount of muscle compared to less experienced counterparts. While genetics and other factors play a large role in muscle growth responses, the relative differences between levels of experience are consistent. In other words, there may be outlier individuals who gain more muscle as advanced lifters than less genetically inclined beginners, but on average those early in their lifting career will have better responses to training than their more experienced counterparts.
CHAPTER SUMMARY
•Diets to improve performance and body composition can be evaluated based on how they address the diet principles of calorie balance, macronutrient amounts, nutrient timing, food composition, and supplement use and hydration.
•Individual diet principles do not contribute to success equally, and diets that prioritize the less powerful factors are either less effective or doomed to failure.
•Better adherence increases any diet’s effectiveness. Adherence is imperative for success.
CHAPTER 2
Calorie Balance
Any means of achieving a calorie deficit will result in weight loss, and any means of achieving a caloric surplus will result in weight gain. Whether or not that weight change leads to improved body composition depends on other factors, including macronutrient balance, which we will go over in the subsequent chapter. Calorie balance alone can alter weight irrespective of any other diet principles, making it the greatest priority in the diet hierarchy.
CALORIES
In the simplest terms, a calorie is a unit of measurement for energy. In the strictest sense, a calorie (which actually refers to a kilocalorie) is the amount of heat required to raise the temperature of one kilogram of water from 14.5 to 15.5 degrees Celsius. Interesting, but not very helpful when sitting down and deciding what to eat.
In nutrition, calories measure how much energy we get from food to either use or store in our bodies. Calories can be used to jump, run, operate your brain, recover from hard training, repair broken structures, or simply support the energy requirements of normal body function. An individual might use 2,000 calories a day to meet all of their energy needs, including everything from walking over to pick up the telephone to the firing of neurons in the brain to read this very text.
When someone needs 2,000 calories per day to function, but only consumes 1,700, they do not simply stop breathing or lose the ability to walk or think. The body has a back-up plan for when calories are scarce. Our ancestors did not have local grocery stores or refrigeration, so our bodies are adapted to deal with some periods of calorie deficit without extensive damage to health or function. In the previous example, the body can acquire the additional 300 calories it needs to sustain itself by breaking down some of its own tissues (most commonly fat) to release stored energy. There is a tremendous amount of stored energy in your adipose tissue. While your body does burn fats for fuel in the absence of sufficient food, it can also break down other structures, such as the proteins that compose your muscles. A variety of factors determine which of the body’s tissues are broken down for energy and in what amount, but the primary factor deciding whether the body’s structures will be accessed at all is calorie balance. When your body is getting enough food per day to meet all of its energy needs, we call this an isocaloric or eucaloric condition. Isocaloric conditions result in bodyweight maintenance–stable bodyweight over time.
When your body is not getting enough calories per day to meet energy needs, it must break down some of its own tissue for the missing energy. This dietary condition is termed hypocaloric and results in weight loss. If you take in more energy than you need, your body stores much of it as carbohydrate, protein, and fat molecules, with fat being the most common. We call this a hypercaloric condition, and as you may have already guessed, it results in weight gain.
Figure 2.1 On an isocaloric diet, calorie consumption matches the body’s calorie demand. During a hypocaloric diet, fewer calories are being consumed relative to the body’s daily demand (designated by bracket A) On a hypercaloric diet, excess calories are being ingested (designated by bracket B).
CALORIES AND PERFORMANCE
Calorie balance is the most important principle for both body composition change and sport performance. Calorie intake affects sport performance by mediating energy availability, facilitating recovery, and influencing body composition (which indirectly affects performance).
At the onset of exercise, the body accesses a variety of fuel sources. Blood glucose from recent food intake is a readily available fuel source but is tightly regulated (in order to maintain glucose supply to the nervous system and keep you functioning). As exertion continues, non-tissue energy sources (carbohydrate stored as glycogen in your muscles) can continue to provide needed fuel at a rate sufficient to maintain athletic performance. Other glycogen stores in your liver act to moderate blood glucose levels as well. When these liver stores become depleted, blood glucose can drop, leading to bouts of hypoglycemia–clearly not great for sport performance. Glycogen stores are built up in the muscles and liver over time as calories are consumed. If an athlete under-eats for intervals of a week or more, their ability to perform at a high level will degrade substantially, even for less energy-intensive activities.