The Muscle Prof Academy

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The muscle professor academy is going to discuss a study/topic everyday and give a take home message culminating in several cool lessons. At the end of the week I will discuss live on periscope and take your questions!

This weeks theme is intermittent fasting! Here is lesson 1: Dieting can be rough, especially if you are restricting all the time. One alternative is to calorie cycle. Alternate day Intermittent fasting occurs when you lower calories to 25 % of needs every
other day. It is the most extreme way to calorie cycle. As you can see in this study, alternating very low calorie days with normal calorie days resulted in a large amount of fat loss, with minimal muscle loss, which was supported also in Ramadan studies. While we clearly need more studies in trained, very lean individuals it does show that alternate day intermittent fasting may be a viable tool for fat loss. Tomorrow we answer the question: Do you need a calorie deficit for intermittent fasting to be successful?

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Lesson two of this week is the effects of time restricted feeding on fat loss. As you can see restricting your eating period to 9 hours a day can make a big impact on body comp and fat loss. What's cool about this study is that they lost just as much fat when taking the weekends off and not time restricting ! Once again, we need more data in bodybuilders but that's why our lab is doing this study this semester !

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Welcome to day 3 of the academy! One of the major questions we have received is do you need a calorie deficit to lose fat on intermittent fasting. In this study bodybuilders completed 29 days of intermittent fasting. For the trial the bodybuilders maintained their training volume and intensity, and they were placed at maintenance calories. As you can see there was a trend for body fat lost. However it was not significant. Based on rodent studies where subjects ate clea
n and at maintenance calories over 20 weeks it is possible that this non significant fat loss could become important for body composition latter on. But the take home message is that if you want to optimize intermittent fasting, especially in the short term you will likely need to at least slightly restrict calories. Study by Trabelsi, Khaled, et al. J Int Soc Sports Nutr 10.1 (2013): 23.

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A major concern for people starting IF is being super hungry . However this study shows that while you may be hungry at the start this soon goes away so that you aren't really preoccupied with food during the intermittent fasting period after a few weeks! This is what allows people to reduce calories and not suffer the way you typically do when calorie restricting the whole day .

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Lesson one of this week is the effects of HIIT (high intensity interval training) and its benefits on FAT LOSS.


This was a study where woman ages 18-30 were divided into one of three groups; high intensity, low intensity, or control. The high intensity group completed 5-20 minutes of cycling sprints for 15 weeks. The low intensity group completed 20-40 minutes of steady state (60% of heart rate max) cycling for the same 15 weeks. As you can see from the graph the high intens
ity group lost MORE body fat. Also, during this study the participants diets were not controlled.

What we can conclude from this is that repeated high intensity sprints with periods of rest may be beneficial over low intensity cardio if your goal is fat loss.
A sample HIIT protocol would be 30 seconds of sprints at maximal effort with 60 seconds of recovery at a very low intensity, then repeat for 5-7 rounds. You could also experiment with different variations of sprint/rest times to optimize your fat loss efforts!

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Lesson two of the Muscle Professor Academy this week is the effects of giant sets on metabolism. Giant sets are a group of exercises that target a similar muscle group combined in a circuit with no to minimal rest in between each exercise.

In this study the researchers looked at the 22 participants metabolism prior to, 1 day after, and 2 days after a bout of giant set exercises. As you can see from the graph the participants metabolism was elevated up to 2 days after the training.

What we can conclude from this study is that giant sets may be highly beneficial if your goal is fat loss because they elevate the metabolism to such a high degree.
CITATION: Schuenke, et al. European Journal of Applied Physiology 86.5 (2002): 411-417.

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I see that there are many questions about the study design from my previous post yesterday on Giant Sets. This infographic gives more insight to the study and the protocol is explained in more detail below.
The specific study protocol included 7 participants performing 4 sets of bench press, power clean, and squat until failure. Most of the participants performed 8-12 repetitions and if they performed more than 10 repetitions for any exercise the weight was increased the next round. The weight used was ~70-80% of the 1 rep max of the subject performing the lift(s). The participants were allowed 2 minutes rest between each round. Metabolic measures were taken a 3 different time points throughout the day prior to, directly after, 1 day after, and 2 days after the bout of resistance training

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This is a study we did in our lab took well trained college hockey players who were around 18 to 20 years of age. We placed them in a high intensity sprinting group or a low intensity cardio group. The sprinting group did 4 to 10, 10 to 30 second sprints. The low intensity group performed 45-60 minutes of steady state cardio at 65 % of their heart rate max twice weekly. As expected, we found that long duration cardio decreased muscle size. On the other hand, sprinting actuall
y increased muscle size. This suggests that sprinting can actually be anabolic and get you shredded at the same time! The take home message for the academy is sprinting will likely not interfere with muscle gains, and in fact can be anabolic. However, this means that you need to treat sprinting in a way like a resistance training bout. If you do too many sessions it can also cause overreaching. So use it wisely!

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Day four of the ‪#‎
muscleprofessoracademy‬ is the effects of heavy, muscle damaging exercise on insulin sensitivity. Many people perform intense, muscle damaging workouts in an attempt to justify a cheat meal or higher carbohydrate meal. Their goal is to drive nutrients towards muscle and away from fat.
However a study by Dr. Del Aquila (2000) found that muscle damage actually hurts insulin sensitivity. This means you wont drive the high amounts of nutrients as you hoped towards muscle. Thus, instead of heavy training adopt more
metabolic training consisting of higher reps, short rest period lengths (30-90 seconds), and even use supersets or giant sets!

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Do you Need to Carb up on a ketogenic diet? The answer is NO! In this study 22 elite athletes on either a high carb diet (50 % of calories) or a ketogenic diet (Carbs only 5-10 % of calories) performed a long duration endurance event meant to deplete muscle carbohydrate stores (glycogen). After exercise subjects in the keto group received a high fat low carb shake, while the carb group received a high carb, low fat drink. As you can see muscle glycogen / carb stores were the same in both groups at the beginning. And amazingly the low carb athletes replenished carb stores equally as fast as the high carb group following exercise! This brings into question the need to carb up on the weekends when ketogenic dieting.

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Day two of the Muscle Professor Academy is looking at ketogenic dieting and muscle protein synthesis. A common misconception is that carbohydrates are needed to stimulate muscle protein synthesis (building of muscle).

We did the first study ever to look at protein synthesis in muscle following resistance training. In this study we had two groups of participants that consisted of 6 weeks of calorie matched high carb or very low carb ketogenic groups. After 6 weeks we did a resistance training bout and looked at muscle protein synthesis. As you can see in the graph, both groups increased protein synthesis to the same extent!

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Day three of the Muscle Professor Academy is ketogenic dieting versus low carbohydrate dieting.

In this classic study overweight College males were placed on 3 low carb diets (30, 60 and 100 grams daily) consisting of 1800 calories daily, with protein and calories controlled. Body fat was lowest in the 30 gram carb group, which corresponded to the greatest level of ketosis. Low carb vs ketogenic diets can have vastly different effects on fat mass. Most people think a ketogenic diet is really a low carb, high protein diet. However, to truly get into ketosis you need a VERY high fat (75 %), very low carb diet (5 %).

Young, et al (1971). The American Jof clinical nutrition, 24(3), 290-296./

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What does it mean to be keto-adapted? Keto adaptation occurs when your body switches from carbohydrates to fat and ketones as its primary source of fuel. This means that instead of carbohydrates, specifically glucose, feeding the body fat is broken down into alternative fuel sources to replace the need for carbohydrates.

In this study we see that athletes that are keto-adapted have a much higher fat utilization than athletes that are adapted to a higher carbohydrate diet. This is beneficial because carbohydrate storage (glycogen) may be depleted much quicker than fat storage. Therefore, athletes that are adapted to using fat as fuel have the ability to perform exercise for much longer without needing to refuel as frequently.

Volek, Jeff S., et al. "Metabolic characteristics of keto-adapted ultra-endurance runners." Metabolism 65.3 (2016): 100-110.

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Week four of month one of the Muscle Professor Academy will cover the topic of supplements for fat loss. We will specifically be discussing targets for fat loss, berberine, glucomannan, and caffeine.