FUNDAMENTAL #1: STRATEGIC CARB TIMING

Poor carbs. I truly feel bad for ‘em, because no single macronutrient has received such an undeserved bad reputation as carbs over the last decade.

The truth is, if you’re someone with aspirations to improve your physique (I think it’s a pretty safe guess to assume you are if reading this blog), carbs are vital to your success.

We’ll discuss the multiple reasons why throughout this blog. 

But to start off, let’s talk about how thinking deeper about the way you’re timing your carbs can help improve your physique endeavors.

—> Pre-Workout Carbs 

These can have a big impact on whether your training session goes well… or very poorly. 

Now, since the aesthetic result you want is very much a combination of both smart nutrition and productive training… we’ve of course want to do everything possible to ensure you’re well-fueled to perform going into your training session. 

The main reasons pre-workout carbs are helpful for your physique goals:

1. Blood Sugar Regulation: When training for aesthetics like most of our online clients are, your body is literally using carbs (which also = blood sugar) as the primary fuel source for your training.

As you’re depleting your body’s current carb stores in your training, if more carbohydrates aren’t available, many will experience a lower blood sugar “crash” about halfway through their training. 

This of course is counterproductive to the level of performance you need to have in order to get the physique results you want from your training. So just eat some carbs pre-workout. 

2. Kickstarting The Recovery Process: Not only are carbs the primary fuel for your training, they’re also a large part of successfully recovering and growing from a training session. 

Many of the carbs that you eat pre-workout will be readily available for your body to absorb and use post-workout to cement your future progress.

3. Carb Intake Seems To Have A Rapid Performance Improvement Effect: Some interesting research on “carb-rinsing” (swishing a sugary solution around in your mouth before spitting it out) seems to potentially show that sending your brain the signal that it’s just taken in more carbohydrates/energy leads to increased levels of performance. (1)(2)

Ideally, your pre-workout carbs would be from a mix of starch and fruit, which gives you a combo of faster and slower releasing carbs to fuel you through the workout.  

—> Intra-Workout Carbs 

For the same reasons as above, intra-workout carbs can be helpful. But really, as far as peri-workout nutrition goes, these don’t matter too much as long as you nail the pre & post-workout carbs.

A few things to consider with intra-workout carbs: 

1. Digestion: Because you’ll feel bloated and terrible chowing down on bananas and oatmeal between sets of squats… it’s best to keep carbs to a liquid source like Gatorade, highly-branched cyclic dextrin, or dextrose. 

Your body can also only digest so many carbs so quickly. So before you start chugging Gatorade, realize that pacing your intake across the session is probably a good idea. Most will feel best with 20-40g carbs from one of the sources mentioned above, sipped across the course of a workout. 

2. Makes A Lot Of Sense If You Train Early: If you train first thing in the morning, you likely don’t have time to eat and digest a meal before you start training. A partially digested pre-workout meal scarfed down shortly before training will have you feeling sluggish and underperforming.

A scenario like this is where we most often recommend clients implement a liquid intra-workout carb source to take the place/provide the benefits of the pre-workout carbs we talked about earlier.

3. A Good Way To Add More Carbs To Your Day: If you’re in a building phase, and have been struggling to reach your carbohydrate totals, this is a good place to add more (again, via quick digesting liquid carbs), and is another common scenario where we recommend intra-workout carbs to online clients.

—> Post-Workout Carbs 

Post workout is when your “insulin sensitivity” will be the highest.

Basically, your muscles have depleted their glycogen stores (carbohydrate in its stored form), and thus are looking to “soak up” more carbs to replenish said glycogen stores.  

So in essence (even in a calorie surplus/when you’re eating more calories than you’re burning in a day), your body is more likely to shuttle the carbs you take in around your training to your muscles, and less likely to send them to be stored as fat.

For all of the above reasons, we generally recommend that online clients with the goal of improving aesthetics consume ½ – ⅔ of their daily carbohydrate totals peri-workout (pre/intra/post-workout).

FUNDAMENTAL #2: MAKING CARBS A PRIORITY

Most of our clients focused on aesthetics make carbs a priority.  

Look, your body needs protein and fat to stay healthy. So none of this is to downplay the importance of either macro. 

But, as this is a “beyond the basics” blog, I’m going to assume you’re already hitting your protein needs (1-1.5g/lb) and fat needs (.3g/lb+).  

So past this point, eating more carbs will actually provide you an exponential amount of benefits for improving your physique – likely much larger benefits than you’d experience from increasing protein or fat intake instead of carbohydrate intake.

To understand why, you first need to gain a quick understanding of your energy systems…

If you look closely at the energy system that creates energy for the majority of intense activity from ~15-60 seconds (the anaerobic-lactic system), you’ll see that it’s fueled by carbs.  

If your goal is to improve aesthetics, a good amount of your training will be fueled by this energy system. A lower carb approach means that this energy system will essentially be “short on fuel” – your ability to train intensely will suffer. As a result, you’ll struggle achieving the levels of performance & adding the lean muscle needed for the physique you want. 

This is a common mistake made by both women and men, and is exactly why most of our online clients undergoing the physique transformation process are typically following a higher carb approach. 

Not only are carbs your body’s preferred fuel source for training, but they also aid your recovery and ability to build more muscle.  

Carbs stimulate the release of the hormone insulin in your body. Insulin has an inverse relationship with cortisol (the stress hormone), meaning that as insulin increases, cortisol decreases. 

Cortisol is a catabolic hormone – it’s primary role is breaking things down for energy. 

Now, while cortisol isn’t “bad” (like all things, it’s very context dependent), spending too much time in a catabolic state will of course hinder your ability to build lean muscle.  

Due to the insulin and cortisol relationship, adding more carbs to your diet can help get your body out of a catabolic state, and recovering better/quicker. 

FUNDAMENTAL #3: PROTEIN DOSING & TIMING

We know that to build muscle, your protein needs are going to be somewhere between .8-1g/lb body weight daily.

You’ll hear a lot of people saying… 

“Total protein intake across the day is all that matters, NOT how often you’re getting protein feedings.” 

 … but let’s use the example of a 150 lb woman pushing to eat 150g protein/day.  

Is she really going to eat all 150g of that in one sitting? Nope.  

Two? Very unlikely.  

So we know that in all of these studies that seem to show the optimal dose of protein, the participants who got great results from these intakes were very likely having to split their protein intake into at least 3+ meals. 

To understand why protein frequency is so important for building muscle, you also need to understand muscle protein balance:

—> Your body turns the protein you eat into muscle through a process called muscle protein synthesis (MPS).  

—> Your body breaks down protein through muscle protein breakdown (MPB). 

The rate of muscle protein synthesis to muscle protein breakdown determines your protein balance.  

—> If more MPS than MPB is occurring (MPS > MPB), you have positive protein balance. You’re building muscle.  

—> If more MPB than MPS is occurring (MPB > MPS), you have negative protein balance. You’re losing muscle protein.  

To build muscle, you need more time in a positive protein balance than negative, or MPS > MPB.

Pretty easy to understand why this is important for building muscle, right? 

So this really ties into something called “The Muscle Full Effect”.

Basically, eating protein triggers an anabolic response (it stimulates muscle protein synthesis, which will potentially lead to muscle growth).

Upon consuming protein, once enough protein is taken in to saturate the muscle, the “muscle full” effect happens: 

1. ~30 mins after consuming an adequate bolus of protein, rate of MPS ~triples. 

2. At ~90 mins, rate of MPS peaks, before returning to baseline levels at ~2 hours.  

This return to MPS baseline occurs regardless of how much protein is still available in your bloodstream. 

So even if you ate all of your protein in one big meal, you would only nutritionally be spiking muscle protein synthesis once in the day… even though you still hit your protein target. 

This is because the amino acid leucine is essentially the “trigger” for MPS. 

Even though you can have plenty of amino acids circulating in your bloodstream, you need a bolus of leucine (a.k.a. a 25g+ dose of quality protein) as the “trigger” to stimulate MPS again.

To prove this point, a study from 2011 had 8 men consume 25g of whey protein:

—> One group consumed their 25g shake immediately.  

—> The other group consumed their shake in ten 2.5g doses over 3 hours. 

The group that consumed all their shake at once saw a 95% increase in MPS, whereas the constant dose group only saw a 42% increase, despite total protein intake being the same. 

This seems to show there is a benefit to hitting your leucine threshold (spikes), rather than just eating one (or a few) big meal(s) when it comes to building muscle.

FUNDAMENTAL #4: UNDERSTANDING PROTEIN QUALITY

Not all protein is created equally.

See, building muscle actually takes more than just eating plenty of protein.  

It’s not just quantity… quality is important as well. 

Because it’s not actually just “protein” that your body needs to build muscle.

It’s the nitrogen and amino acids within said protein that are actually used for muscle recovery and growth.

The problem here? 

Protein sources can have quite a large variance in the amount of said amino acids that are available. 

If you compared 25 grams of protein from Greek Yogurt to 25 grams of protein from broccoli…

The broccoli would have a much different (and in the context of building muscle, worse) amino acid profile (a.k.a. bioavailability) than the Greek Yogurt.  

So although they’re “the same amount of protein”… the actual results you’ll get from consuming X amount of protein can vary quite a bit, depending on the source.

So in general, using animal-based protein sources to get the majority of your protein in is a good rule of thumb. 

That said, if animal-based sources aren’t your thing, you can absolutely still achieve the physique you want (we’ve helped many plant-based clients do just that), you just need to be smart about ensuring you’re getting adequate amounts of the amino acids your body needs.

If the above sounds like you, it’d likely be smart to supplement with:

—> A protein powder: When selecting a plant-based protein powder, realize that many plant-based powders will lower in leucine (again, an essential amino acid for building). That said, many protein powders will have leucine. It’s also a good idea to go with a protein powder from a blend of plant-based sources (e.g. rice + pea protein), because this will provide a more diverse amino acid profile than a single source. 

—> Essential amino acids: Basically, supplementing with the amino acids you’re missing from animal-based sources. 1-3 servings per day combined with hitting your protein intake targets should tick the boxes for most. (Something like this is a good option for supplementation here.)

If you’re in a Building Phase and eating a lot of carbs, chances are you’ll also be getting a decent amount of protein from grains, plants, and the like. 

This is why even though science shows us we probably don’t need more than .8g/lb of protein to add muscle in a building phase (where you’re in a calorie surplus/eating more calories than you’re burning), we’ll still usually recommend clients keep protein in the 1-1.5g/lb range, and will typically bump protein up by another 10g for every 50-100g carbs added.    

Because as we ramp up carbs in a building phase, lower quality protein will start pushing out higher quality protein if we don’t proactively adjust for this. 

FUNDAMENTAL #5: PERIODIZED NUTRITION