Rihad's log

My interpretation is nothing more than a logical summation of various facts, each of which has relevant support studies that I'm too lazy to quote right now:
  • Body tends to use more of the ingested food when being fed rather than stored supplies (liver glycogen, fat, lean tissue)
  • When food supply is (intentionally or not) low body notices the low concentration of blood glucose and tends to switch to using more of the stored supplies to keep the blood glucose at a stable level
  • In doing so, more growth hormone is secreted to promote fat burning & lean tissue retention
  • Resistance exercise also has its anabolic & anti-catabolic effects due to the enhanced muscle protein synthesis.
These processes don't really have to take many days, weeks or months. It's a matter of hours.
OK, you can call this pure conjecture, but what isn't? Rules of physiology aren't engraved on an ancient stone, and even if they were, some ancient dude like us wrote them there.
 
Some more pics from yesterday, BW 62-ish kg (137 lb).
20140816-62kg-1.jpg 20140816-62kg-2.jpg 20140816-62kg-3.jpg

I think I'll start a slow recomposing bulk up until 65 kg (143 lb). On workout days while eating at a surplus I can add up to several hundred grams to my BW no problem, so all I have to do is slowly increase my caloric intake on rest days, so the difference would end up slowly increasing my bodyweight. It'd better be some quality weight gained, hence some small deficit on non-workout days will still be necessary.
 
What's your expected time-frame for gaining x-hundred gms LBM ? (I assume we aren't counting glycogen storage).
 
Jester said:
What's your expected time-frame for gaining x-hundred gms LBM ? (I assume we aren't counting glycogen storage).
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Why not? It is part of LBM, the larger part at that. It's very easy to bulk up 3 kg in a matter of days. That will be lean tissue together with fat according to current p-ratio (frankly, the less fat you already have the easier it is to bulk on quality mass up to a point). It will probably take me much more time than that to gain more quality mass through gains interspersed with cuts. That said, I ate a whole 30cm thick crust pizza during my last meal yesterday and today gained exactly half a kilo of the glycogen storage dreaded by you with virtually non-existent waist gains :)
 
The reason I personally would not count it (unless I weighed and measured myself at full-glycogen [as best as one can know this] first) is because they aren't a did-I-gain-yes/no variable. You're going to get a glycogen refill, then when you exercise, you're going to lose it, get it back later and so on.

Frankly, there's little point in counting that as an 'LBM' gain because you're always going to have it depending on fasted/fed state and most recent exercise. I'm about 1.5kgs heavier on Monday morning than I am on Saturday morning (and that's pre-Saturday workout). But I don't delude myself into thinking that I'm gaining/losing that 1.5kgs over those periods. It's just glycogen-full vs glycogen depletion.

Count it/don't count it, I was merely trying to confirm whether you're referring to actual tissue growth, or energy storage.
 
We can't simply disregard energy/water storage because muscle is 70% water. That's why bodybuilding type routines using lower loads at higher reps hypertrophy muscles more than higher load/lower rep training alone - they deplete glycogen stores which get super-compensated later on. Anyway it isn't transient bodyweight spikes I'm after, but a steady increase in quality mass. We can't really differentiate whether it's contractile muscle fibers and/or "water" being gained (which together comprise the LBM, really). But at the very least both *should* be targeted in our training for maximal size gains. Strength gains can be seen as an indicator that contractile tissue might be growing. But it isn't the whole muscle. Volume-wise water is much more appealing.
 
This is why you should only weigh yourself once per week on the same day and at the same time each week (i.e. every Saturday morning at 8:00 am when you wake up right after you take a leak). If your workout and feeding schedule stays the same week in and week out then that one weekly weigh-in will tell you exactly what your "trend" in weight gain/loss is.
 
Bulldog, agreed, but daily weigh-ins don't hinder my ability to assess the trend, I realize that daily fluctuations don't mean much, and try to look at it from a bigger perspective, like you said, weeks or months.
 
HST_Rihad said:
We can't simply disregard energy/water storage because muscle is 70% water. That's why bodybuilding type routines using lower loads at higher reps hypertrophy muscles more than higher load/lower rep training alone - they deplete glycogen stores which get super-compensated later on. Anyway it isn't transient bodyweight spikes I'm after, but a steady increase in quality mass. We can't really differentiate whether it's contractile muscle fibers and/or "water" being gained (which together comprise the LBM, really). But at the very least both *should* be targeted in our training for maximal size gains. Strength gains can be seen as an indicator that contractile tissue might be growing. But it isn't the whole muscle. Volume-wise water is much more appealing.
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Who said disregard it?

My point was clearly that glycogen+water increases are always going to happen when you combine exercise, hydration and calories, so why bother counting them as 'gains' ? Any idiot can get a full muscle from the combination of those three things - cardio will do that FFS. You also don't need to 'target' them. I mean, you can, but it's pointless.
 
Cardio or not, that's what muscle mass is. You can't pick what's being added to (contractile elements' size/number or water-assisted "volume") - both are seen as lean tissue. Also you're hardly in a position to claim you aren't carrying *lots of* glycogen/water/fat storage given your bodyweight with regard to your height and natural status (well, you're not *claiming* it, but it looks like you think you're somehow immune from any water size gains when overfed, which simply can't be true).

Measurement fluctuations are a bit too early to make sense of, but today's BW is 62.9kg, waist 74.7cm, both going up but in differing proportions (much less for waist).
 
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Of course I'm not immune, I just don't get excited by gains at the end of a week. Gains on a monthly basis, or at least (as a minimum) every 2-3 weeks is a more accurate indicator.

You're still missing what I'm saying; you're going to get those regardless, so why hang your hat on it? Saying you gained a couple hundred gms in a week is essentially meaningless if it's the difference between being fasted and fed. I've already told you I often vary by 2.5kgs over a week. That variance is just irrelevant for whether you're looking at fiber growth or not. It's easy to get more glycogen and water in your muscles. And if you stop providing the stimulus, those stores will reduce down very quickly.

End goal weight? Roughly?
 
Sure thing it gets lost when you don't eat that much or quit training, our bodyweight/size is a function of how much we eat. But bodyweight fluctuations depending on how full our bowels are isn't what I'm after - it's the gradual weight increase. Part of it is lean tissue, part of it is fat, there's no way around that but to combine bulking with fasting cycles. Intermittent fasting is essentially a self-contained bulk/cut within a short timespan - you're anabolic some of the hours, cutting on others (and hopefully retaining most of the functional contractile elements thanks to elevated MPS). Resistance exercise is meant to shift the flow of nutrients slightly towards muscle as opposed to fat thanks to increased post-exercise insulin sensitivity (and vice versa, less muscle lost during deficit).

Short term end goal is 65kg. I realize I can't keep adding BW indefinitely and keep those upper two ab rows visible. I still have some fat I'd like to get rid of, using this metabolic reset and bodyweight gain to make it easier to lose the fat.
 
Not sure where you're headed with your discussion of IF.

Simple point (again) is that counting glycogen-water mass as 'gains' is irrelevant. Tissue contains water, sure. Somewhere between 65 and 75%. But you'll always be able to get glycogen-water(-salt) 'gains', so why bother including them.

65kg seems quite minor, TBH. I'd have thought 68-70 is a better short-term goal (depending on what you define as short-term, I suppose
 
The weight gained is part of LBM so what you're essentially asking is why bother counting LBM gains. This goes along with increases in contractile fibers facilitated by enough nutrients.

68-70kg will be the second step :) That will most likely be around the max I'd ever want to be at and still look reasonably lean (height in cm - 100) provided I'm close to my genetic limits which I'm definitely still not.
 
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