The Mythical "Recomp"

[Chris McBride]

Another example:
Let's say a guy ends up his LP at 220lbs bodyweight. He started around 170 and went from 12% to 20% BF (I hope my numbers are realistic)

They are not.

I'm curious what's unrealistic about these numbers. This hypothetical male put on 50 lbs. during LP (not uncommon), 23.6 of which were fat mass and 26.4 of which were lean mass. 52.8% of his weight gain was lean. That doesn't strike me as outlandish for an untrained individual. I'm guessing you think it's too efficient? I only assume that because someone on a trash diet who doesn't eat protein could probably do much worse, so they don't strike me as unrealistically poor results.

Maybe because I'm coming at it from the perspective of a taller lifter, 170 seems severely underweight and might allow for more efficient lean mass gains than a shorter lifter.

[Jordan Feigenbaum]

It is frustrating to me to answer hypotheticals because I think people engaging in them for this topic would be better served by investing the effort pontificating on these questions into training, eating correctly, etc.

How can that be a definition though? The 1st law of TD is not a definition. That can be merely an approximation to make our lives easier.

There is a definition of the first law as stated. I am unsure what is not clear to you. You can take it up with Clausius and Kelvin, though if you are of a science background I encourage you to clarify your position more clearly.

The point of my post is this. Was there any study longer than 16 weeks that looked at trained individuals, on maintenance calories, and their total muscle / fat weight? It seems to me that such study is not really conductible because:

Yes.

1. You can't rigorously control subjects for a long time

Sure you can- it just costs more.

2. You don't know the exact maintenance calories which are likely going to increase if training is done (volume going up).

Sure you do, as you monitor weight changes (which they do in certain studies on weight loss, BMR, and various feeding protocols). You also assume that there is some linear relationship between training volume and daily energy expenditure, but there is not.

3. We probably don't have measurement tools that would be able to measure such small changes in trained individuals so it has to be done for a long time.

Sure we do.

Let's take a more obvious example of a person who is not getting older for 100 years. He is training and increasing volume. He is eating at maintenance calories every day. Maintenance calories likely changes every day for a really small unmeasureable amount but God tells him what his maintenance calories for the day are. God also tells feeds him with perfect macros with accuracy of +-0.001%. In 100 years he will partition his energy stores so that training volume doesn't kill him. Eventually he will die with a slow death because in order to tolerate more volume, he's going to have to be under 4% BF.

What? I'm struggling to understand your angle here.

Now, all this is obviously theoretical and I can feel you are getting annoyed.

Yes, because it kind of seems like we are missing some background info on physiology and training, thus these questions persist.

Also I can see the appeal in making discrete, "more aggressive" changes in calories for fat loss/gain.

Ok.

You don't have to wait for a few years to see a change so it definitely helps with compliance.

what?

I find it hard to believe that when obese untrained individual gets trained and not obese, he loses the power of doing what he did before.

What?

I believe the process is continuous, definitely slows down, but we, the people, make it discrete so we can make our lives easier.

Your belief system is wrong and does not comport with physiological parameters.

Every computer engineer and other engineers / scientists know that most of the things we believe are approximations and most of the things we measure are discrete changes. In training we measure 5lb jumps, not 2.8024 jumps.

Sometimes they are, sometimes they're not.

I'm curious what's unrealistic about these numbers. This hypothetical male put on 50 lbs. during LP (not uncommon) 23.6 of which were fat mass and 26.4 of which were lean mass. 52.8% of his weight gain was lean. That doesn't strike me as outlandish for an untrained individual. I'm guessing you think it's too efficient? I only assume that because someone on a trash diet who doesn't eat protein could probably do much worse, so they don't strike me as unrealistically poor results.

In 3 months that is an unrealistic expectation.

[Tiedemies]

One thing popped into my mind here:
When you say that in the short term it is impossible to separate noise from the actual measurements, I take it you mean that, if you try to have, say "bulk days" and "cut days" instead of longer periodization, you will not be able to measure the effect of the bulk/cut cycle, because the effect is much smaller than random fluctuations in your weight and apparent body composition, and any other measurable quantities you might use to control whether your cut / bulk is actually working.

This is of course not in dispute. But; let us go back to the idea that a person does a cycle that *is* long enough to be meaningful, say 3 months gaining weight, 2 months losing. (Just a ball park, it could be any other numbers) and carefully measures their calorie intake and weight gain/loss and fat gain/loss. This is reasonable to an extent, I would say.

Now, taking those daily calories and exercise patterns and the like, adjusting for some compensation for now being at a somewhat different weight/BF, the person shortens the cycle to the extent that noise makes it impossible to control for *single* cycle changes, say, to a weekly cycle where you "cut" over the weekend. What I think you are saying is, it is not realistic to expect this to work and that one of the major reasons is the inability to invoke the sacred and almighty nuance, because you lack of proper control signal (the effect of a single cycle and and how you should adjust your variables accordingly). Is this a correct interpretation of the reasoning you proposed?

Just trying to see if I understand your reasoning.

[Jordan Feigenbaum]

Did you read the thread, Tiedemies?

[whale]

There is a definition of the first law as stated. I am unsure what is not clear to you. You can take it up with Clausius and Kelvin, though if you are of a science background I encourage you to clarify your position more clearly.

Well, semantics. The first law is not a definition but an axiom. A what you're saying is not a definition and probably not an axiom since it doesn't necessarily comport with the first law.

You also assume that there is some linear relationship between training volume and daily energy expenditure, but there is not.

Not the volume but training advancement. Training advancement is kinda logarithmical, increase in calories is also kinda logarithmical therefore it is kinda a linear relationship. At novice stage we increase the calories a lot. The surplus slowly goes down as you train, no?

missing some background info on physiology

Could be.

You don't have to wait for a few years to see a change so it definitely helps with compliance.

Let's say you have 220 guy who wants to recomp, you'd cut his weight to 220-x, then bulk to 220 again. That is more appealing then staying at 220 and getting stronger with increasing volume since your changes are visible in short amount of time.

I find it hard to believe that when obese untrained individual gets trained and not obese, he loses the power of doing what he did before.

You said multiple times that untrained obese individuals are able to lose fat and gain muscle at the same time. I find it hard to believe that mechanism magically stops.

I have a quote I like which is relevant. Also kinda describes your thinking because you rarely answer with yes or no without spicing it with some nuance.

And just as all sorts of realms when one deals with messy, complicated problems
that you need to think about in some wildly interacting way, we all have a strategy
that we come up with. A strategy to make things easier -- which is that we think in
categories. We take things that are continua, and we break them into categories. And we
label those categories. We do that in various settings because it can be EXTREMELY
useful.

[Tiedemies]

Did you read the thread, Tiedemies?

I most certainly did. In my question, I was reffering to what you said earliers:
[QUOTE] The main thing is you're not able to separate noise from the signal with regards to meaningful changes with respect to lean body mass gain and fat mass loss, respectively. [\QUOTE]

Look, I am not trying to nitpick hear: I am asking this from the point of view of control theory (I'll skip the actual mathematics here): Is the reasoning here that if you shorten the cycle too much, you will not be able to gather the information deeded to adjust your diet from cycle to cycle, due to the lack of proper information?

Signal and noise are a problem from the point of view of finding the proper values for the controllable variables, which would be diet and (to an extent) training. In longer cycles the changes in "baseline" are large enough to be significantly larger than the noise (day to day changes due to whatever uncontrollable things), but as the cycles get shorter, the signal gets lost in the noise. If daily fluctuations in weight (water etc) is about (e.g., mutatis mutandis, etc) 1kg, then you need cycles where the baseline effect is at least a couple of times larger than this to be able to get even a ball-park idea of how you're progressing and into what direction. The larger the changes in baseline (LBM/Fat mass, for example) are, the easier it is to know where you've been going between measurements.

Now, even if you had a good guesstimate, say, of the sort of diet you'd put your client on for some number of weeks, then you monitor their progression between some two (or more) points in time. They go on a surplus from day 1 until you see that their waist is bigger, they look fluffier and they are quite a bit heavier and stronger -- all to the extent that we can absolutely say that any noise in this is negligible. Then, from this second day (some weeks or even months in the future), they go on a deficit to get their waist smaller and their weight down a little, until again, you see a measurable change that you deem is large enough to merit going on another cycle, for example. In between these three dates, i.e., inside the cycle, you invoke nuance, which cannot really be generalized here. But to do even that, you need data points not too close (so, not measuring your waist or weighing yourself two times a day and drawing conclusions). Even if your original estimates were "correct", making the cycles shorter is infeasible as you will not be able to have any meaningful data from between the beginning and the end of the cycle. So, no nuance to invoke. Of course there are *other reasons* shorter cycles may not work as well, I but I am simply trying to understand the reasoning behind the signal/noise-argument.

This was meant to be only semi-serious, of course.

[Dalton Clark]

This is just an observation that I have made while on my own short weight loss period while beginning a 4 day intermediate program. I have been steadily losing weight at a rate of either 3.4 or 3.5 pounds per 12 days. This is roughly 2 pounds per week. However, after a single day of an additional 500 or so calories and more sodium than I typically eat, my weight went from 215.8 pounds to 218.4 pounds. Obviously I did not gain 2.6 pounds in one day, but this clearly illustrates what Dr. Feigenbaum is referring to when he mentions 'noise' on the signal. The signal being what your body weight is doing excluding transients ('water weight'). I provided a stimulus for my body to retain fluids by eating more carbohydrates and sodium than I normally do which added a lot of extraneous information to what the scale was telling me. As long as you eat consistently, these fluctuations occur infrequently. However, if you do mini-cycles of cutting and bulking, you are contributing 'noise' via the following: mass of food in the GI tract, potentially different frequency and timing of bowel movements, and mass of fluid retained. In short, if you show a 2.6 pound increase by going from a consistent 'cutting' diet to a 'bulking' diet, you have no way of determining whether you gained muscle mass, lost fat, or really much of anything. There may be some incorrect science in here. I am sure Dr. Feigenbaum will correct me, but I wanted to try and 'dumb this down' since it really isn't a complicated concept. You can only compare one weight measurement to another weight measurement and draw a conclusion about fat loss/muscle gain if those measurements were taken under the same circumstances.

[Jordan Feigenbaum]

Well, semantics. The first law is not a definition but an axiom.

No. You are misunderstanding. There is a definition of the first law of thermodynamics, which is not an axiom....but a truth that has not been falsified in vivo. What I stated was the definition of the law. Again, you can take it up with the two dead guys if you have an issue with it.

A what you're saying is not a definition and probably not an axiom since it doesn't necessarily comport with the first law.

???

Not the volume but training advancement. Training advancement is kinda logarithmical, increase in calories is also kinda logarithmical therefore it is kinda a linear relationship. At novice stage we increase the calories a lot. The surplus slowly goes down as you train, no?

Not at all, quite the opposite in fact, though I don't think it's logarithmical. Then again, the connection to this caloric increase being necessary with training probably needs to have multiple caveats given with it.

Let's say you have 220 guy who wants to recomp, you'd cut his weight to 220-x, then bulk to 220 again.

I probably wouldn't do that without more information. If I have a guy who is 220 and wants to lose body fat (and is a good candidate for doing so)- I'll do that via a sustained caloric deficit. After this is completed, let's assume he wants to gain muscle... we will then need to be in a net caloric surplus. In all situations, he will be losing or gaining both body fat and LBM- though we can alter the percentage of each somewhat with modifiable inputs like diet, training prescription, supplements, drugs, etc.

For a guy who starts off at 220 and 20% BF for instance who wants to be 220 and 15%, I'd probably end up losing some body fat first (if not a novice) and then overshooting 220 on the way up. Then cutting again to 220.

That is more appealing then staying at 220 and getting stronger with increasing volume since your changes are visible in short amount of time.

If someone is completely untrained and 220 and they start training w/ their diet at calorie maintenance, I would predict their waist and body fat decrease at the same time their LBM increases, which may be more motivating actually....

If they are not a novice or do not respond terribly well to training, well, you may be right.

You said multiple times that untrained obese individuals are able to lose fat and gain muscle at the same time. I find it hard to believe that mechanism magically stops.

It does as the response to training becomes less robust and the person gets closer to the goal weight/body comp, etc. It's just not possible to micromanage the way that is suggested in order to produce a better outcome. I do not doubt that some muscle protein changes occur during dieting, but the net effect of the calorie deficit over a long enough time where the signal is clear enough to interpret is a loss of LBM.


[QUOTE=Tiedemies;1649561]I most certainly did. In my question, I was reffering to what you said earliers:

Look, I am not trying to nitpick hear: I am asking this from the point of view of control theory (I'll skip the actual mathematics here): Is the reasoning here that if you shorten the cycle too much, you will not be able to gather the information deeded to adjust your diet from cycle to cycle, due to the lack of proper information?

The information gathered is neither accurate nor precise enough to guide management when taken over very short cycles. Imagine using radiolabeled protein isotopes being steadily infused into your body to determine net muscle protein accretion (or loss), doubly labeled water for fat loss along with a DEXA scan every 4 hours, whilst living in an indirect calorimeter. Every 4 hours you gathered all this data, but what would you do with it? You couldn't do anything with it because the short term changes in these variables are not meaningful with respect to clinical outcomes (the clinic in this case being the gym). So, you need longer periods of data collection to come up with a suitable management strategy.

Is the optimal time interval 5 days? 6 days? 7 days? More? Less. Well.....I don't know exactly and I'd expect this has a lot to do with the individual and the particular context this question is being applied to.

I think that anything less than a week's worth of data is really hard to interpret meaningfully.

[whale]

What you said is a simplified definition of the law, but the law is not a definition. Anyways, doesn't matter. Thank for your time.

Okay, Whale.

[Robert Santana]

Jordan-

You have had several podcasts/interviews recently where you have mentioned that, a few rare exceptions notwithstanding, it is impossible to gain muscle and lose fat at the same time. I have a question regarding how close together appreciable muscle gain and fat loss can occur.

Let's say we have a trainee that will gain 1 lb per week eating an amount of calories we'll label Intake A. He will lose 1 lb per week eating another amount of calories we'll label Intake B. Let's assume he gains weight at a ratio of 75% lean mass and 25% fat and that he loses weight at a ratio of 75% fat and 25% lean mass. I am not sure those are reasonable numbers, but it will work for the purposes of this question.

Our trainee eats Intake A for 6 weeks. He gains 6 lbs during this time, 4.5 lbs lean mass and 1.5 lbs fat. Then he eats Intake B for 6 weeks. He loses 6 lbs during this time, 4.5 lbs fat and 1.5 lbs lean mass. At the end of this 12 weeks, he has thus gained 3 lbs lean mass and lost 3 lbs of fat. He has "recomped."

To the question (finally). If the trainee instead ate Intake A one day and Intake B the next, alternating everyday for 12 weeks, could the same results be expected? I doubt it, but I don't really know why not. What is the physiological base for it? Assuming this would not work, how short could the "gaining" and "losing" time frames be and still be effective? A week? Two weeks? Just curious what accounts for this.

Thanks, hope you're doing well,

Rick

I just got caught up on this thread and i'd like to take a fresh jab at this question. I'm inline with Jordan that no this will not work. Why? Quite simple:

Increases in muscular body weight are driven primarily by training. In other words you cannot gain muscle mass unless you are accumulating more work over time. Back to our stress-recovery-adaptation cycle. if you do not continue to stress the body over time, muscle cannot be gained. Eventually we are unable to create more stress and/or recover more aka we hit our genetic ceilings. This is all theoretical and difficult to measure though. So just laying out the foundation for all this. Training = muscle mass

Now what happens when we don't eat enough to match the demands of our training? We cannot recover from the stress. So if you eat at surplus or maintenance one day, in a deficit the next and continue alternating this, the real question becomes: are you in a net surplus, deficit, or maintenance week-to-week. If the answer is deficit, you will find out quickly when you are unable to hit PRs (whether they be rep PRs, weight PRs, or volume PRs). So now we have the absence of an overload event. No overload = no gains.

So in short, in the absence of being an obese or extremely underweight novice the two are unlikely to happen simultaneously. What i will say is that the further you climb towards your genetic ceiling, the smaller the weight changes need to be on mass/cut phases IF your goal is to gain muscle. This is becuase the amount of lean tissue accrued each mass cycle is going to become smaller and smaller due to level of advancement (i.e an advanced male bodybuilder is likely gaining fractions of a lb of muscle per year and thus doesn't need to change his weight that much) If your goal is to lift as much as possible, these cycles may need to be bigger to allow for some extra "padding" (for lack of a better word) that allows us to lift more.