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Poliquin Blog


Zac Rhyne
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I have been doing this a long time and notice the same. I throw in a refeed every couple days and it feels great. Performance never suffers and that's with 6-8 hours training a day.

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I have been doing this a long time and notice the same. I throw in a refeed every couple days and it feels great. Performance never suffers and that's with 6-8 hours training a day.

 

that doesn't sound like the same thing...

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Joshua Naterman

Part I)

 

These gymnasts are not high intensity anaerobic endurance athletes.

 

Gymnastic practices have been measured for MET levels and the average MET level is around 4. I had the opportunity to sit in on Coach's practices for a day, and I didn't see any activity levels that would be hard to adapt to without lots of carbs. The WODs, I would say, are somewhat different, but the vast majority of the practice is spent on skill work and we're talking about repeated short bouts of work. The relative intensity (compared to what the athletes CAN do) is pretty low for the most part, which is pretty much what you want for high volume skill practice.

 

Additionally, keep something in mind: The studied athletes were performing test exercise that were insanely easy for them. Dips? For professional gymnasts? Come on. That's an endurance test. Pull ups? Really? For national team athletes? Endurance. All the other tests were on single power movements, aside from 15s of repeated jumps, which wasn't even explained OR included in test-retest reliability ratings... hmm. If you read page 6 of the study, you'll see that the trend is that performance was actually worse after the ketogenic period and better after the western diet period. Go look at the numbers for yourselves:

 

http://www.jissn.com/content/pdf/1550-2783-9-34.pdf

 

Of course there's not going to be much of a difference: They aren't trained for endurance exercise, so it's not like their initial test is going to reflect the level of muscle glycogen: It's going to reflect low levels of glycolytic enzymes. Their training didn't change, and power training (during the CrP system) isn't going to be significantly impacted. We don't know what the impact was on, say, a rings routine or a pommel routine, but I wouldn't be terribly surprised if there was little to no impact.

 

 

Why is that important, right? Well, when you're low carb you carry a lot less water subcutaneously. That has a dramatic effect on skinfolds, and I'm reading the full text once again right now and I see nothing that suggests they either did OR did not, but based on the way the study is written it is slightly more probable that they did not, because they transitioned immediately from ketogenic to western diet.

 

The athletes also consumed a literal laundry list of herbal extracts, which are also used (You guessed it already, I bet) for fat loss. It's right there in the study. Weight loss aid. "Hormonal regulation." They also had dandelion extracts in fairly large amounts, which is a diuretic. I am wondering if you guys are seeing the confounds yet.

 

http://www.jissn.com/content/pdf/1550-2783-9-34.pdf

 

There it is again, go ahead and read pages 3 and 4.

 

Moreover, they were given caffeine as both guarana and straight coffee extract for the first two weeks. Fat loss supplements, anyone? Of course they were used for neural stimulation while the athletes adjusted to the low carb, high fat diet, but we can't ignore the effects of caffeine on fatty acid metabolism.

 

Taking all of this into consideration, and, adding the facts that skinfold measurements have a lot of built-in error, as well as the fact that the sample size was so small that it has zero statistical value, the study results are effectively worthless.

 

Poliquin has not given the gymnast study results a fair review. Far from it. There was a time when he would have analyzed things publicly the way I just did, but it appears that time is gone.

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Joshua Naterman

I have been doing this a long time and notice the same. I throw in a refeed every couple days and it feels great. Performance never suffers and that's with 6-8 hours training a day.

Don't forget that you're also getting more carbs after your workouts, at least according to what you have told me.

 

What you are doing is 100% different than what is happening in that study. You may not realize that, but it is.

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Joshua Naterman

 

Part II) The energy deficit study review

 

Note: I have been unable to find the text of the energy deficit article. If anyone has it or knows how to find it, please let me know. I can't say much about the details regarding this particular study without it.

 

Having said that, consider this:

 

The energy deficit study, which simply introduced a small energy deficit, allowed simultaneous muscle gain of 2.1% WHILE losing a total of 5% bodyweight. Now, muscle mass is not lean mass but only one type of lean mass, but the two terms are often referred to interchangeably. I need to know whether Poliquin is talking about lean mass or specifically the muscle portion.

 

Anyhow, that's a fairly significant result that is actually better for an athlete than what happened with the gymnasts. Additionally, their performance improved in statistically significant amounts (7-12% depending on parameter). That's a huge difference compared to the gymnast study, which claimed that all performances were nonsignificantly different.

 

If you look at the trends in numbers on page 6 of the gymnast study, you'll see that similar percentage range improvements are seen in the western diet period in most areas. Just use your calculator, or mental math, and ask yourself the % improvement for going from 37 push ups to 43.5 push ups vs. going from 36 to 38.8. The larger percentage gain is in the higher carb group, IN the gymnast study. Surprise. 

 

Lean body mass dropped during the ketogenic portion but went up during the Western diet. How they determined muscle gain of less than 1%

 

The gymnasts in the Italian study only lost 2.8% of body mass as fat in 4 weeks. To lose the equivalent 5% body mass as fat it would have taken 7-8 weeks, and that still might not have been equivalent to the energy deficit study! Why? Because the athletes in the energy deficit study also gained 2.1% muscle mass (or lean mass, who knows?). At the very least, that is going to be another .8 kgs of fat that has to be lost to be equivalent, which is at least one more week but probably closer to 2 weeks according to the percentage breakdown. So, even with all those supplements AND the "special effects" of ketosis, there was at best zero weekly difference in fat loss and what might actually have been slightly LESS fat loss during the ketogenic study.

 

That's assuming that the fat loss during the ketogenic period was even really mostly fat loss, which it may or may not have been. Allow me to explain.

 

The real question, to me, is this: Did they let the athletes eat high levels of carbs for 3 days before taking body fat measurements?

You see, muscle went but lean mass went down, according to them. That means that they lost water, which means that at least 1.1 kg of the weight loss was just water loss and not fat.

 

Compare that to the energy balance study, where we know there was no water loss because everyone had plenty of carbs, and you should see a huge difference in true fat loss!

 

Hell, you can even see that if you adjust the lean mass loss by subtracting the water loss from the claimed fat loss, which is the only other place it can be subtracted from since they claim that muscle was GAINED. You can't lose any weight from muscle tissue if you've claimed you gained muscle, and lean mass is muscle + water + bones + connective tissue.

 

We can safely say they didn't lose muscle, bones, or connective tissue according to the study, which means one of two things:

 

1) You adjust the fat loss by 1.1 kg, which means the gymnasts only actually lost 0.8 kg of fat instead of 1.9 of fat, which destroys statistical significance and means they actually lost fat at half the rate of the energy deficit study or less

 

2) You say that the measurements taken in the gymnast study are complete garbage and the whole study has to be thrown out because there is clearly a ton of error from systematic things like water content in the skin, time of day, supplement status, etc etc.

 

Whichever way you go, in the fat loss department the better results came from the energy deficit study.

 

So, you have to ask yourself why in hell Poliquin thought it was a good idea to say that the best way to go was going low carb instead of simply maintaining a SMALL energy deficit!!! 

 

The science Poliquin references is clearly in opposition to his conclusion. 

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Can you guys see where I am coming from?

 

Absolutely. Though this is very likely not Poliquin writing, it looks like newer marketing staff. He's used ghost writers for quite some time (Kim Goss being the original) as his personal writing tends to be atrocious. I liked the pre-brand/pre-public Poliquin, but I take most things now from him with a grain of salt.

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Don't forget that you're also getting more carbs after your workouts, at least according to what you have told me.

 

What you are doing is 100% different than what is happening in that study. You may not realize that, but it is.

I was doing that and it worked quite well! Though now I am trying a fat based shake like Ido had written about before. I am looking to compare. I think for the health markers I am looking for, it will work quite well.

 

 

that doesn't sound like the same thing...

At one point, I went zero carb and ketogenic similar to this study. Performance still didn't drop until I wanted to do interval training work. Gymnastics was totally fine.

 

Poliquin seems to believe in keeping insulin low in most cases. Considering it is the aging hormone, I think there is more to be learned about it and a good point in this study. Even after workouts.

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when my body goes into ketosis, i think initially its water weight, or at least thats what ive been told. Then i usually go on atkins or something for a while and slowly up the carbs

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Joshua Naterman

I was doing that and it worked quite well! Though now I am trying a fat based shake like Ido had written about before. I am looking to compare. I think for the health markers I am looking for, it will work quite well.

 

 

At one point, I went zero carb and ketogenic similar to this study. Performance still didn't drop until I wanted to do interval training work. Gymnastics was totally fine.

 

Poliquin seems to believe in keeping insulin low in most cases. Considering it is the aging hormone, I think there is more to be learned about it and a good point in this study. Even after workouts.

I have no trouble believing that gymnastics works fine, honestly. It just isn't a high intensity anaerobic endurance sport, so as long as you have enough glycogen to power the t-tubules and SR, which I'm quite sure are the top priorities with intramuscular glycogen distribution (not a random comment, this is based on research that shows these, along with mitochondria, are where the glycogen granules are preferentially found), things should be fine. 

 

A dynamic day WOD like we see fairly often here would be more challenging for a low carb person than someone getting more carbs, but that's a case of specific conditioning vs direct strength training.

 

The insulin comment is interesting, because it also happens to be what seems to directly prevent muscle damage post-workout. You don't always want insulin to be low.

 

Having said that, fasting insulin levels should be low for sure.

 

There's actually excellent research on endurance athletes, who are clearly on a completely different end of the athletic spectrum than most people here, that shows fasting insulin levels dropped by 30-ish% when their diets were changed from 45-50% carbs to 55-60% carbs. Dropped from 6 umol/L to 4.4.

 

I don't know if any studies have been performed on strength athletes and this parameter, so all I can say about us (in a short post) is that we definitely want a large pile of carbs after the workout. Beyond that, eating our veggies with our meals and having some slow-digesting carbs alongside is pretty much the way to go in terms of making sure our hormones are optimized for strength and leanness.

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Joshua Naterman

I don't know how complete of a case study you are running, but in the interest of at least trying to help you make fairly objectively meaningful observations:

 

If you compare high intensity interval performances with high fat vs high carbs, try and make sure you're staying very low-carb for at least a week beforehand avoid confusing the source of performance or lack thereof.

 

If you're getting the carbs other times, as opposed to immediately PWO, the glycogen replenishment will most likely be very similar, so I would suggest making sure that total carbs are tracked and that you stay low carb.

 

As a final comparison, a similar period of 5-6g carbs/kg BW should be followed for the same length of time, and performance should be tracked as well. At least... if you want to have a really solid basis for comparison of your body's performance. 

 

Moderate carbs(2-3 g/kg) vs low carbs (50g per day or less) isn't going to show anywhere near as big of a difference as the 5-7g /kg bw vs say 50g per day, at least according to the research I'm familiar with.

 

I don't think you'll see an enormous difference anywhere besides interval performance, especially if you're looking for maximal strength performance and not high reps to failure, but it will be interesting to hear what your personal experience is.

 

If you're using coconut oil, you should see a pretty solid increase in HDL over a 2-3 month period.

 

Also, if you're comparing body fat you will need to make sure you eat a high carb diet for 2-3 days before you take skinfolds, both before and after. If not, the skinfolds are meaningless because they do not reflect your hydration status. All tables are written with the assumption that there is no shortage of water in the skin, and that's exactly what happens when we stay low carbs for any length of time.

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"is that we definitely want a large pile of carbs after the workout. Beyond that, eating our veggies with our meals and having some slow-digesting carbs alongside is pretty much the way to go in terms of making sure our hormones are optimized for strength and leanness."

 

Interesting.

 

How about translating this to me for something like Olympic Weightlifting. Lately, there was a thread on Pendlays forum about body fat composition of American lifters vs others in the world, dieting and I know another lifter, Rob Blackwell out of CalStrength was talking about weighing 4kg heavier than 85 and having to drop weight.

 

Basically, right now my training has sucked for awhile. Pretty much ever since I sprained my wrists though I've been back to lifting for awhile. Sleep and diet are hit and miss as they related to work and budget. Should be better after this Holiday job (that pays really well and could let me just train till June with occasional work if I cared to).

 

Weight has fluctuated as well due to stress but that's my own cop-out of just stress eating and not sleeping because of my own personal issues. Back to around 77kg but would be nice to drop back towards 73-74 to 69 (by Spring). It's hard to get concerned with it right with all the factors like a crazy retail schedule, transit there and back, eating enough to train and getting to train and personal stress from personal crap.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Joshua Naterman

I'm sorry Blair, I'm not sure what you are asking. Maybe stuff got lost in the empty quotes, but I'm just not sure what you are looking for. Could you be more specific?

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Peter Sbirakos

I read the study as well and it simply doesn't make any kind of sense. The confounding factors such as the herbal supplements to my mind make the study invalid. It's almost as if the authors understand the dangers that ketosis presents and thus try to mitigate it: "Oh, let's try and avoid this issue of homeostatic imbalance (by ketosis) by getting the athletes to consume these ergogenic aids".

Glucose is the energy source for the brain, other nerve cells and for developing red blood cells. The issue and danger of ketosis is that when there are depleted glycogen stores by not consuming carbohydrates , what happens is that proteins are broken down to fuel these cells. This is known as gluconeogenesis - and is not desirable. When consuming adequate dietary carbohydrate, the role of CHO is known as protein sparing action - this is good because protein is not broken down. So if the brain cannot meet its energy needs, fat takes an alternate pathway by combining together (fat fragments). These combined fat fragments are known as ketone bodies and provide an alternate fuel source during starvation. They accumulate in the blood causing ketosis and this condition disturbs the bodies acid-base balance.

Diets were designed for obese individuals and will work provided they are adhered too. The issue as to whether they are healthy or not is beside the point. Athletes on the other hand require different energy needs to meet the energy requirements for their sport ie aerobic, anaerobic (AT-PC, Glycolosis) or combinations of these and to recommend any one undergo ketosis as an ergogenic aid for their sport displays a profound lack of understanding of nutrition and at most a danger to the individual. Sometimes studies are conducted for the simple sake of getting names on a paper and this I think is sad for science.

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  • 2 months later...
Larry Roseman
Joshua Naterman

I love this community. Thank you FiN!!!

 

Slower reduction was better all around. They were within 2-3 weeks of achieving significance in the 40m sprint as well, judging by the trend. and overall study length.

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