Serious Strength Training

Precontest Phase

When you get to your precontest phase, you won't have to make many changes: You will be doing the same thing you have been doing for the previous several weeks in the cutting phase. You will go off the higher-fat, high-protein diet and carb up to dramatically increase the glycogen and water inside the muscle cells. You want the cells swollen and big, but you want to cut off the carbohydrates before you begin to store extracellular water or fat and smooth out.

The metabolic diet's 5-day, 2-day week is almost like getting in shape for a contest every week. In the weekend carbohydrate-loading part of the diet, you will find out exactly how many hours you can load up on carbohydrate before you begin to smooth out and lose your contest look.

One of the many advantages of this diet is that if men or women want to enter a lot of contests, they can manipulate their diet so they never get much above their ideal body-fat percent levels during the muscle definition phase. By doing so, the athletes don't have huge gains in body fat, allowing them to drop to contest level in just 2 or 3 weeks.

You generally want to go into the precontest phase of diet and training about 16 weeks before a major contest. Because you already know what you need to do from previous weekends on the diet, you will be doing only some fine-tuning by lowering and increasing calories a bit as needed. You shouldn't be doing anything much out of the ordinary.

By the final 6 to 8 weeks before the contest, you should look fairly close to how you want to appear on stage. With this diet you can control exactly where you're at each week. After the weekend carbohydrate-loading portion of your diet, you should be looking great on Monday—ready to hit the gym hard with the high glycogen levels, muscle swelling, and other benefits derived from a well-honed weekend diet strategy.

You can go through the precontest phase in preparation for several contests a year as long as you keep your fat levels low; yet we suggest that you go through the precontest phase no more than four times a year. That means, obviously, a maximum of four contests a year. More than this will probably prevent you from going back into the mass phase and using it properly.

You must build up lean body mass to some extent between contests, which means you will gain a bit of fat. You will still be bulking up and cutting down—but it won't be like on other diets, where you gain so much body fat that by the time you lose it you're no better off than when you started.

Be Consistent Before Competition

Two things bodybuilders do to sabotage themselves before contests is to panic or try something new. Both of these scenarios can be disastrous. Bodybuilders who find themselves too fat may begin doing aerobic exercise, thinking it will get the extra body fat off. Doing about half an hour of aerobic activity certainly will not harm you as you will burn more free fatty acids. But people sometimes begin to panic and overdo it. They start doing 3 to 4 hours a day of aerobic activity to burn off the fat; but all they do is exhaust energy stores so that their bodies start using muscle tissue for energy.

Some people start pigging out to build mass as they go into superaerobic mode, thinking that aerobics will make up for the fat buildup. It doesn't work. Increasing calories and aerobics will most probably just increase catabolic activity in your body. Aerobics, while burning fat, can also destroy muscle. Even if it doesn't do appreciable damage, it will still limit to some degree the amount of muscle you can put on. As a rule, the fewer calories you take in and the more time you allow yourself to lose the body fat, the less aerobics you will need to do, and the more lean body mass you will retain. Allow yourself time to lose extra body fat and gauge yourself effectively as you move toward a contest.

Other bodybuilders decide to try something new just before a competition, looking to get that final edge. But this is a mistake. They may start with the sodium-depletion or sodium-loading trick. They try all sorts of things they've never tried before, and all of a sudden they end up wondering how it was that they were looking so great and now look so bad. Don't shock your system before a contest. Make a smooth landing into it. Don't throw everything away by trying to get the extra edge through a crazy stunt. Do nothing out of the ordinary, and certainly do not panic.

Stop Training One to Two Weeks Out

Stop training 1 to 2 weeks before the contest. That's pretty standard wherever you go. Our advice is to do your last heavy training session 10 days before the contest to give your muscles maximum time to recuperate and achieve maximum growth. Don't worry about maintaining muscle mass and tone. Your posing will take care of that and also give you some aerobic activity. Posing should, of course, be continued throughout this entire period with the exception of the day before the contest.

But although you shut down heavy training 10 days or so before a contest, this is the only time you should back off. Cutting back in training at any other time in the process limits the effectiveness of the diet and your ultimate growth. Diet and training work hand in hand. Exercise complements the metabolic diet. Hormonal changes caused by exercise result in increased activity of the enzyme lipoprotein lipase (LPL) in the muscle, which in turn increases breakdown of free fatty acids and decreases fat buildup.

Identify Your Best Day

As you conduct carbohydrate loading on the weekends, you will learn how many hours into the process that you look your very best. As suggested, you can further refine that time by experimenting with the types of food you eat, allowing you to precisely dial in that time when you're at your best. This information is vital when the contest arrives because you will eventually discover a day of the week when you're in top form. All the water you gained during your carbohydrate load is gone, and you have just the right balance between muscle glycogen and water. You also feel great. Everyone's system works differently, and there are wide differences among athletes. The goal is to find the right day for you, that day each week—Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, whatever—when you are consistently at your best.

Most contests occur on Saturday. Suppose you look your best on Wednesday of each week. Your goal then is to basically make the Saturday of your contest like a Wednesday. Because you look your best 3 days after your carbohydrate load, you should complete a carbohydrate load 3 days—in this case, on Tuesday and Wednesday—before the contest. On Saturday, 3 days later, you will look your best.

Note that the weekend before the contest, you won't carb up as usual. To carb up on the weekend and repeat the process 2 or 3 days later may well spill you back over to a carbohydrate-burning metabolism and smooth you out for that Saturday contest. Rather, skip your carbohydrate load the weekend before a contest. That way you will be on the high-protein, higher-fat part of the metabolic diet for 8 straight days, from the Monday 2 weeks before the contest to the Tuesday before the contest. Then begin your precontest carbohydrate load so you will hit the contest just right.

This is one area where the metabolic diet has a big advantage over the competition. Athletes on a high-carbohydrate diet are basically always loading up on carbohydrate foods, so it's difficult for them to manipulate their diets so their bodies respond well to carbohydrate loading before the contest. What often happens is they get off the high-carbohydrate diet for 3 days at the beginning of the week before a competition and go low carbohydrate for 72 hours; then they again load up on carbohydrate foods in an attempt to hit the contest right. The problem is, they really don't know how their bodies are going to react. Everything could work out well, or they could experience a complete disaster. With the metabolic diet, you know the exact hour when you look your best. Because your body goes through the cycle every week, it has become predictable and consistent. You know precisely what to expect since you won't be doing anything different from what you have done in the preceding months.

Three Basic Laws of Strength Training and Bodybuilding

The training principles just discussed provide a loose guideline for general training. There are also three laws of strength training that must be adhered to if an athlete is to proceed injury free to a more comprehensive, rigorous training program. Entry-level bodybuilders and strength athletes often begin training programs without being aware of the strain they will encounter and without understanding the progression or training methodology behind the program. These are usually the people who tend to seek advice from seasoned athletes (who may not be qualified to give it) and who, consequently, find themselves out of their league and on a collision course with injury. Adherence to the following training laws will ensure the proper anatomical adaptation of a young or untrained body before subjecting it to the rigors of strength training.

Law 1: Before Developing Muscle Strength, Develop Joint Flexibility

Most strength training exercises, especially those employing free weights, use the whole range of motion around major joints. In some exercises, the weight of the barbell compresses the joints to such a degree that, if the person does not have good flexibility, strain and pain can result.

Consider deep squats: During a deep squat, compression of the knee joints may cause an inflexible athlete a lot of pain or even injury. Also, in the deep-squat position, a lack of good ankle flexibility forces the person to stay on the balls of the feet and toes, rather than on the flat of the foot where a good base of support and balance is ensured. Development of ankle flexibility (i.e., dorsiflexion, or bringing the toes toward the shin) is essential for all strength trainers but especially for entry-level athletes (Bompa, Di Pasquale, and Cornacchia 2003).

Good flexibility can greatly reduce or eliminate the incidence of injuries (Fredrick and Fredrick 2006). Flexibility aids in the elasticity of the muscles and provides a wider range of motion in the joints. Unfortunately, research on this subject has produced mixed reviews, causing athletes at all levels to neglect stretching programs. Regular stretching creates several essential training benefits, such as improved flexibility, reduced muscle soreness, good muscular and joint mobility, and greater efficiency in muscular movements and fluidity of motion (Nelson and Kokkonen 2007).

Law 2: Before Developing Muscle Strength, Develop the Tendons

The rate of gain in muscle strength always has the potential to exceed the rate at which tendons and ligaments can adapt to higher tensions. It is crucial that the tendons and ligaments have time to adapt, but because many people lack a long-term vision, they prematurely use heavy loads to develop specific muscle groups without strengthening the support systems of those muscles. It's like building a house on the sand—it may look good for a little while, but at high tide the whole thing is destroyed. Build your body on a rock-solid foundation, and this will not happen to you.

Tendons and ligaments are trainable and can actually increase in diameter as a result of proper anatomical adaptation training (see chapter 12), which increases their ability to withstand tension and wear. This training is accomplished via a low-load program for the first 1 to 2 years of training. Shortcuts are not the answer to achieving a well-developed, injury-free body. Patience will ultimately pay off.

Law 3: Before Developing the Limbs, Develop the Body's Core

It is true that big arms, shoulders, and legs are impressive, and a lot of training must be dedicated to these areas. Yet the trunk is the link between these areas, and the limbs can only be as strong as the trunk. The trunk has an abundance of abdominal and back muscles: Bundles that run in different directions surround the core of the body with a tight and powerful support system. A poorly developed trunk represents a weak support system for the hard-working arms and legs. So in spite of temptations in this direction, an entry-level training program must not revolve around the legs, arms, and shoulders. The focus must first be on strengthening the core area of the body—the muscles of the abdomen, lower back, and spinal column.

Back muscles consist of long and short muscles that run along the vertebral column. They work together as a unit, with the rotators and diagonal muscles, to perform many movements. Abdominal muscles run lengthwise (rectus abdominis), crosswise (transversus abdominis), and diagonally (abdominal obliques), enabling the trunk to bend forward and sideways, to rotate, and to twist. Since the abdominal muscles play important roles in many exercises, weakness in this area can severely limit the effectiveness of many strength actions.

Physical Benefits of the Metabolic Diet

One of the advantages of the metabolic diet is an increase in lean body mass without the use of anabolic steroids. The diet does many of the same things hormonally that steroids do, only naturally and without the risks. Another advantage of the metabolic diet is the ability to decrease body fat without sacrificing lean mass.

Decrease Body Fat Without Sacrificing Lean Mass Unlike the high-carbohydrate diet, when you gain weight on the metabolic diet much less of it is body fat and much more of it is muscle. We have found that eating fat doesn't lead to becoming fat. In fact, high dietary fat is instrumental in increasing lipolysis, or the breakdown of fat, and the resulting loss of body fat. Furthermore, the bodybuilder will maintain more lean body mass during the cutting phase of a diet.

On a high-carbohydrate diet, if you exercise correctly and do everything else right, you will find that when you lose weight about 60 percent of it is fat and 40 percent is muscle. You may get down to your optimal weight and be ripped, but you are much smaller than you could be. On the metabolic diet, those percentages go way down to 90 percent fat and 10 percent muscle during cutting. With the high-fat diet, you get down to the weight you want but find yourself maintaining a lot more lean body mass. You are bigger and stronger.

Feel Stronger While Losing Body Fat This stands to reason. Strength is proportional to muscle mass. When you are on a high-carbohydrate diet, sacrificing lean mass to get cut, you are obviously going to feel weaker. Because the metabolic diet cycles in a carbohydrate-loading phase every week to stimulate insulin production and trigger growth, you also do not find yourself getting into the psychological doldrums caused by following one diet all the way through each week. There is a variety in your diet, and this will help you be more energetic and committed than you'd be on the high-carbohydrate diet.

Maximize the Effects of Endogenous Anabolic Hormones The metabolic diet maximizes the serum levels of testosterone (even in women) (Goldin et al. 1994), growth hormone, and insulin to promote growth and to help firm up and shape your body as you shed fat. It basically conditions your hormonal system to create an endogenous (natural) anabolic (growth producing) environment. You will be surprised at how quickly you will be able to sculpt the body you want as these hormones work together.

The maximization of the three hormones is one of the most remarkable effects of the metabolic diet. Many hormones are reactive to others. For instance, as insulin goes up, growth hormone may decrease. If insulin decreases, growth hormone will increase. The two hormones generally do not work well together, but they can. During and after a workout, it is important to understand that the body decreases in serum testosterone and growth hormone. The metabolic diet attempts to maximize the effect of the three anabolic hormones for 24 hours because contrary to popular belief, you get stronger and form muscle not only after a workout but, if done correctly, during a workout as well. If you can increase both hormones, you will get a better anabolic effect than with an increase in one hormone alone. At the cellular level, the anabolic hormones must be elevated to drive amino acids into the cells for protein formation. The metabolic diet, the weekly cycling it incorporates (carbohydrate-loading phase) to stimulate insulin production, and the utilization of supplements such as Exersol (see www.MetabolicDiet.com) will optimize protein synthesis and maximize growth.

Chapter 8 recommends supplements you can use with the metabolic diet that will help increase insulin sensitivity, testosterone, growth hormone, and insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1) as needed. Your approach to supplements and exercise will be largely determined by how far you want to go in remaking your body. Whatever your goals, you will find the metabolic diet an effective tool in taking the weight off, keeping it off, and making your body look its best.

Increase Strength People on the metabolic diet often find their strength increasing as they are losing weight and body fat. Most bodybuilders find this amazing. They know that when they lose weight, they are also losing muscle and strength. But with the metabolic diet they're losing less muscle, and that, in combination with the fact their bodies are working in an anabolic environment, makes them stronger. They cannot believe it as they watch the fat melt away while their strength increases at the same time.

Decrease Catabolic Activity The metabolic diet results in lower levels of cortisol, a hormone secreted by the adrenal glands that breaks down muscle (catabolism) and uses it for energy. Certain supplements can be added to the diet (see chapter 8) to further decrease muscle breakdown during and after a workout while increasing insulin and growth hormone levels at critical times to promote an anabolic effect. Put simply, you will be breaking down less muscle while adding more.

Precontest Phase

When you get to your precontest phase, you won't have to make many changes: You will be doing the same thing you have been doing for the previous several weeks in the cutting phase. You will go off the higher-fat, high-protein diet and carb up to dramatically increase the glycogen and water inside the muscle cells. You want the cells swollen and big, but you want to cut off the carbohydrates before you begin to store extracellular water or fat and smooth out.

The metabolic diet's 5-day, 2-day week is almost like getting in shape for a contest every week. In the weekend carbohydrate-loading part of the diet, you will find out exactly how many hours you can load up on carbohydrate before you begin to smooth out and lose your contest look.

One of the many advantages of this diet is that if men or women want to enter a lot of contests, they can manipulate their diet so they never get much above their ideal body-fat percent levels during the muscle definition phase. By doing so, the athletes don't have huge gains in body fat, allowing them to drop to contest level in just 2 or 3 weeks.

You generally want to go into the precontest phase of diet and training about 16 weeks before a major contest. Because you already know what you need to do from previous weekends on the diet, you will be doing only some fine-tuning by lowering and increasing calories a bit as needed. You shouldn't be doing anything much out of the ordinary.

By the final 6 to 8 weeks before the contest, you should look fairly close to how you want to appear on stage. With this diet you can control exactly where you're at each week. After the weekend carbohydrate-loading portion of your diet, you should be looking great on Monday—ready to hit the gym hard with the high glycogen levels, muscle swelling, and other benefits derived from a well-honed weekend diet strategy.

You can go through the precontest phase in preparation for several contests a year as long as you keep your fat levels low; yet we suggest that you go through the precontest phase no more than four times a year. That means, obviously, a maximum of four contests a year. More than this will probably prevent you from going back into the mass phase and using it properly.

You must build up lean body mass to some extent between contests, which means you will gain a bit of fat. You will still be bulking up and cutting down—but it won't be like on other diets, where you gain so much body fat that by the time you lose it you're no better off than when you started.

Be Consistent Before Competition

Two things bodybuilders do to sabotage themselves before contests is to panic or try something new. Both of these scenarios can be disastrous. Bodybuilders who find themselves too fat may begin doing aerobic exercise, thinking it will get the extra body fat off. Doing about half an hour of aerobic activity certainly will not harm you as you will burn more free fatty acids. But people sometimes begin to panic and overdo it. They start doing 3 to 4 hours a day of aerobic activity to burn off the fat; but all they do is exhaust energy stores so that their bodies start using muscle tissue for energy.

Some people start pigging out to build mass as they go into superaerobic mode, thinking that aerobics will make up for the fat buildup. It doesn't work. Increasing calories and aerobics will most probably just increase catabolic activity in your body. Aerobics, while burning fat, can also destroy muscle. Even if it doesn't do appreciable damage, it will still limit to some degree the amount of muscle you can put on. As a rule, the fewer calories you take in and the more time you allow yourself to lose the body fat, the less aerobics you will need to do, and the more lean body mass you will retain. Allow yourself time to lose extra body fat and gauge yourself effectively as you move toward a contest.

Other bodybuilders decide to try something new just before a competition, looking to get that final edge. But this is a mistake. They may start with the sodium-depletion or sodium-loading trick. They try all sorts of things they've never tried before, and all of a sudden they end up wondering how it was that they were looking so great and now look so bad. Don't shock your system before a contest. Make a smooth landing into it. Don't throw everything away by trying to get the extra edge through a crazy stunt. Do nothing out of the ordinary, and certainly do not panic.

Stop Training One to Two Weeks Out

Stop training 1 to 2 weeks before the contest. That's pretty standard wherever you go. Our advice is to do your last heavy training session 10 days before the contest to give your muscles maximum time to recuperate and achieve maximum growth. Don't worry about maintaining muscle mass and tone. Your posing will take care of that and also give you some aerobic activity. Posing should, of course, be continued throughout this entire period with the exception of the day before the contest.

But although you shut down heavy training 10 days or so before a contest, this is the only time you should back off. Cutting back in training at any other time in the process limits the effectiveness of the diet and your ultimate growth. Diet and training work hand in hand. Exercise complements the metabolic diet. Hormonal changes caused by exercise result in increased activity of the enzyme lipoprotein lipase (LPL) in the muscle, which in turn increases breakdown of free fatty acids and decreases fat buildup.

Identify Your Best Day

As you conduct carbohydrate loading on the weekends, you will learn how many hours into the process that you look your very best. As suggested, you can further refine that time by experimenting with the types of food you eat, allowing you to precisely dial in that time when you're at your best. This information is vital when the contest arrives because you will eventually discover a day of the week when you're in top form. All the water you gained during your carbohydrate load is gone, and you have just the right balance between muscle glycogen and water. You also feel great. Everyone's system works differently, and there are wide differences among athletes. The goal is to find the right day for you, that day each week—Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, whatever—when you are consistently at your best.

Most contests occur on Saturday. Suppose you look your best on Wednesday of each week. Your goal then is to basically make the Saturday of your contest like a Wednesday. Because you look your best 3 days after your carbohydrate load, you should complete a carbohydrate load 3 days—in this case, on Tuesday and Wednesday—before the contest. On Saturday, 3 days later, you will look your best.

Note that the weekend before the contest, you won't carb up as usual. To carb up on the weekend and repeat the process 2 or 3 days later may well spill you back over to a carbohydrate-burning metabolism and smooth you out for that Saturday contest. Rather, skip your carbohydrate load the weekend before a contest. That way you will be on the high-protein, higher-fat part of the metabolic diet for 8 straight days, from the Monday 2 weeks before the contest to the Tuesday before the contest. Then begin your precontest carbohydrate load so you will hit the contest just right.

This is one area where the metabolic diet has a big advantage over the competition. Athletes on a high-carbohydrate diet are basically always loading up on carbohydrate foods, so it's difficult for them to manipulate their diets so their bodies respond well to carbohydrate loading before the contest. What often happens is they get off the high-carbohydrate diet for 3 days at the beginning of the week before a competition and go low carbohydrate for 72 hours; then they again load up on carbohydrate foods in an attempt to hit the contest right. The problem is, they really don't know how their bodies are going to react. Everything could work out well, or they could experience a complete disaster. With the metabolic diet, you know the exact hour when you look your best. Because your body goes through the cycle every week, it has become predictable and consistent. You know precisely what to expect since you won't be doing anything different from what you have done in the preceding months.

Three Basic Laws of Strength Training and Bodybuilding

The training principles just discussed provide a loose guideline for general training. There are also three laws of strength training that must be adhered to if an athlete is to proceed injury free to a more comprehensive, rigorous training program. Entry-level bodybuilders and strength athletes often begin training programs without being aware of the strain they will encounter and without understanding the progression or training methodology behind the program. These are usually the people who tend to seek advice from seasoned athletes (who may not be qualified to give it) and who, consequently, find themselves out of their league and on a collision course with injury. Adherence to the following training laws will ensure the proper anatomical adaptation of a young or untrained body before subjecting it to the rigors of strength training.

Law 1: Before Developing Muscle Strength, Develop Joint Flexibility

Most strength training exercises, especially those employing free weights, use the whole range of motion around major joints. In some exercises, the weight of the barbell compresses the joints to such a degree that, if the person does not have good flexibility, strain and pain can result.

Consider deep squats: During a deep squat, compression of the knee joints may cause an inflexible athlete a lot of pain or even injury. Also, in the deep-squat position, a lack of good ankle flexibility forces the person to stay on the balls of the feet and toes, rather than on the flat of the foot where a good base of support and balance is ensured. Development of ankle flexibility (i.e., dorsiflexion, or bringing the toes toward the shin) is essential for all strength trainers but especially for entry-level athletes (Bompa, Di Pasquale, and Cornacchia 2003).

Good flexibility can greatly reduce or eliminate the incidence of injuries (Fredrick and Fredrick 2006). Flexibility aids in the elasticity of the muscles and provides a wider range of motion in the joints. Unfortunately, research on this subject has produced mixed reviews, causing athletes at all levels to neglect stretching programs. Regular stretching creates several essential training benefits, such as improved flexibility, reduced muscle soreness, good muscular and joint mobility, and greater efficiency in muscular movements and fluidity of motion (Nelson and Kokkonen 2007).

Law 2: Before Developing Muscle Strength, Develop the Tendons

The rate of gain in muscle strength always has the potential to exceed the rate at which tendons and ligaments can adapt to higher tensions. It is crucial that the tendons and ligaments have time to adapt, but because many people lack a long-term vision, they prematurely use heavy loads to develop specific muscle groups without strengthening the support systems of those muscles. It's like building a house on the sand—it may look good for a little while, but at high tide the whole thing is destroyed. Build your body on a rock-solid foundation, and this will not happen to you.

Tendons and ligaments are trainable and can actually increase in diameter as a result of proper anatomical adaptation training (see chapter 12), which increases their ability to withstand tension and wear. This training is accomplished via a low-load program for the first 1 to 2 years of training. Shortcuts are not the answer to achieving a well-developed, injury-free body. Patience will ultimately pay off.

Law 3: Before Developing the Limbs, Develop the Body's Core

It is true that big arms, shoulders, and legs are impressive, and a lot of training must be dedicated to these areas. Yet the trunk is the link between these areas, and the limbs can only be as strong as the trunk. The trunk has an abundance of abdominal and back muscles: Bundles that run in different directions surround the core of the body with a tight and powerful support system. A poorly developed trunk represents a weak support system for the hard-working arms and legs. So in spite of temptations in this direction, an entry-level training program must not revolve around the legs, arms, and shoulders. The focus must first be on strengthening the core area of the body—the muscles of the abdomen, lower back, and spinal column.

Back muscles consist of long and short muscles that run along the vertebral column. They work together as a unit, with the rotators and diagonal muscles, to perform many movements. Abdominal muscles run lengthwise (rectus abdominis), crosswise (transversus abdominis), and diagonally (abdominal obliques), enabling the trunk to bend forward and sideways, to rotate, and to twist. Since the abdominal muscles play important roles in many exercises, weakness in this area can severely limit the effectiveness of many strength actions.

Physical Benefits of the Metabolic Diet

One of the advantages of the metabolic diet is an increase in lean body mass without the use of anabolic steroids. The diet does many of the same things hormonally that steroids do, only naturally and without the risks. Another advantage of the metabolic diet is the ability to decrease body fat without sacrificing lean mass.

Decrease Body Fat Without Sacrificing Lean Mass Unlike the high-carbohydrate diet, when you gain weight on the metabolic diet much less of it is body fat and much more of it is muscle. We have found that eating fat doesn't lead to becoming fat. In fact, high dietary fat is instrumental in increasing lipolysis, or the breakdown of fat, and the resulting loss of body fat. Furthermore, the bodybuilder will maintain more lean body mass during the cutting phase of a diet.

On a high-carbohydrate diet, if you exercise correctly and do everything else right, you will find that when you lose weight about 60 percent of it is fat and 40 percent is muscle. You may get down to your optimal weight and be ripped, but you are much smaller than you could be. On the metabolic diet, those percentages go way down to 90 percent fat and 10 percent muscle during cutting. With the high-fat diet, you get down to the weight you want but find yourself maintaining a lot more lean body mass. You are bigger and stronger.

Feel Stronger While Losing Body Fat This stands to reason. Strength is proportional to muscle mass. When you are on a high-carbohydrate diet, sacrificing lean mass to get cut, you are obviously going to feel weaker. Because the metabolic diet cycles in a carbohydrate-loading phase every week to stimulate insulin production and trigger growth, you also do not find yourself getting into the psychological doldrums caused by following one diet all the way through each week. There is a variety in your diet, and this will help you be more energetic and committed than you'd be on the high-carbohydrate diet.

Maximize the Effects of Endogenous Anabolic Hormones The metabolic diet maximizes the serum levels of testosterone (even in women) (Goldin et al. 1994), growth hormone, and insulin to promote growth and to help firm up and shape your body as you shed fat. It basically conditions your hormonal system to create an endogenous (natural) anabolic (growth producing) environment. You will be surprised at how quickly you will be able to sculpt the body you want as these hormones work together.

The maximization of the three hormones is one of the most remarkable effects of the metabolic diet. Many hormones are reactive to others. For instance, as insulin goes up, growth hormone may decrease. If insulin decreases, growth hormone will increase. The two hormones generally do not work well together, but they can. During and after a workout, it is important to understand that the body decreases in serum testosterone and growth hormone. The metabolic diet attempts to maximize the effect of the three anabolic hormones for 24 hours because contrary to popular belief, you get stronger and form muscle not only after a workout but, if done correctly, during a workout as well. If you can increase both hormones, you will get a better anabolic effect than with an increase in one hormone alone. At the cellular level, the anabolic hormones must be elevated to drive amino acids into the cells for protein formation. The metabolic diet, the weekly cycling it incorporates (carbohydrate-loading phase) to stimulate insulin production, and the utilization of supplements such as Exersol (see www.MetabolicDiet.com) will optimize protein synthesis and maximize growth.

Chapter 8 recommends supplements you can use with the metabolic diet that will help increase insulin sensitivity, testosterone, growth hormone, and insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1) as needed. Your approach to supplements and exercise will be largely determined by how far you want to go in remaking your body. Whatever your goals, you will find the metabolic diet an effective tool in taking the weight off, keeping it off, and making your body look its best.

Increase Strength People on the metabolic diet often find their strength increasing as they are losing weight and body fat. Most bodybuilders find this amazing. They know that when they lose weight, they are also losing muscle and strength. But with the metabolic diet they're losing less muscle, and that, in combination with the fact their bodies are working in an anabolic environment, makes them stronger. They cannot believe it as they watch the fat melt away while their strength increases at the same time.

Decrease Catabolic Activity The metabolic diet results in lower levels of cortisol, a hormone secreted by the adrenal glands that breaks down muscle (catabolism) and uses it for energy. Certain supplements can be added to the diet (see chapter 8) to further decrease muscle breakdown during and after a workout while increasing insulin and growth hormone levels at critical times to promote an anabolic effect. Put simply, you will be breaking down less muscle while adding more.

Precontest Phase

When you get to your precontest phase, you won't have to make many changes: You will be doing the same thing you have been doing for the previous several weeks in the cutting phase. You will go off the higher-fat, high-protein diet and carb up to dramatically increase the glycogen and water inside the muscle cells. You want the cells swollen and big, but you want to cut off the carbohydrates before you begin to store extracellular water or fat and smooth out.

The metabolic diet's 5-day, 2-day week is almost like getting in shape for a contest every week. In the weekend carbohydrate-loading part of the diet, you will find out exactly how many hours you can load up on carbohydrate before you begin to smooth out and lose your contest look.

One of the many advantages of this diet is that if men or women want to enter a lot of contests, they can manipulate their diet so they never get much above their ideal body-fat percent levels during the muscle definition phase. By doing so, the athletes don't have huge gains in body fat, allowing them to drop to contest level in just 2 or 3 weeks.

You generally want to go into the precontest phase of diet and training about 16 weeks before a major contest. Because you already know what you need to do from previous weekends on the diet, you will be doing only some fine-tuning by lowering and increasing calories a bit as needed. You shouldn't be doing anything much out of the ordinary.

By the final 6 to 8 weeks before the contest, you should look fairly close to how you want to appear on stage. With this diet you can control exactly where you're at each week. After the weekend carbohydrate-loading portion of your diet, you should be looking great on Monday—ready to hit the gym hard with the high glycogen levels, muscle swelling, and other benefits derived from a well-honed weekend diet strategy.

You can go through the precontest phase in preparation for several contests a year as long as you keep your fat levels low; yet we suggest that you go through the precontest phase no more than four times a year. That means, obviously, a maximum of four contests a year. More than this will probably prevent you from going back into the mass phase and using it properly.

You must build up lean body mass to some extent between contests, which means you will gain a bit of fat. You will still be bulking up and cutting down—but it won't be like on other diets, where you gain so much body fat that by the time you lose it you're no better off than when you started.

Be Consistent Before Competition

Two things bodybuilders do to sabotage themselves before contests is to panic or try something new. Both of these scenarios can be disastrous. Bodybuilders who find themselves too fat may begin doing aerobic exercise, thinking it will get the extra body fat off. Doing about half an hour of aerobic activity certainly will not harm you as you will burn more free fatty acids. But people sometimes begin to panic and overdo it. They start doing 3 to 4 hours a day of aerobic activity to burn off the fat; but all they do is exhaust energy stores so that their bodies start using muscle tissue for energy.

Some people start pigging out to build mass as they go into superaerobic mode, thinking that aerobics will make up for the fat buildup. It doesn't work. Increasing calories and aerobics will most probably just increase catabolic activity in your body. Aerobics, while burning fat, can also destroy muscle. Even if it doesn't do appreciable damage, it will still limit to some degree the amount of muscle you can put on. As a rule, the fewer calories you take in and the more time you allow yourself to lose the body fat, the less aerobics you will need to do, and the more lean body mass you will retain. Allow yourself time to lose extra body fat and gauge yourself effectively as you move toward a contest.

Other bodybuilders decide to try something new just before a competition, looking to get that final edge. But this is a mistake. They may start with the sodium-depletion or sodium-loading trick. They try all sorts of things they've never tried before, and all of a sudden they end up wondering how it was that they were looking so great and now look so bad. Don't shock your system before a contest. Make a smooth landing into it. Don't throw everything away by trying to get the extra edge through a crazy stunt. Do nothing out of the ordinary, and certainly do not panic.

Stop Training One to Two Weeks Out

Stop training 1 to 2 weeks before the contest. That's pretty standard wherever you go. Our advice is to do your last heavy training session 10 days before the contest to give your muscles maximum time to recuperate and achieve maximum growth. Don't worry about maintaining muscle mass and tone. Your posing will take care of that and also give you some aerobic activity. Posing should, of course, be continued throughout this entire period with the exception of the day before the contest.

But although you shut down heavy training 10 days or so before a contest, this is the only time you should back off. Cutting back in training at any other time in the process limits the effectiveness of the diet and your ultimate growth. Diet and training work hand in hand. Exercise complements the metabolic diet. Hormonal changes caused by exercise result in increased activity of the enzyme lipoprotein lipase (LPL) in the muscle, which in turn increases breakdown of free fatty acids and decreases fat buildup.

Identify Your Best Day

As you conduct carbohydrate loading on the weekends, you will learn how many hours into the process that you look your very best. As suggested, you can further refine that time by experimenting with the types of food you eat, allowing you to precisely dial in that time when you're at your best. This information is vital when the contest arrives because you will eventually discover a day of the week when you're in top form. All the water you gained during your carbohydrate load is gone, and you have just the right balance between muscle glycogen and water. You also feel great. Everyone's system works differently, and there are wide differences among athletes. The goal is to find the right day for you, that day each week—Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, whatever—when you are consistently at your best.

Most contests occur on Saturday. Suppose you look your best on Wednesday of each week. Your goal then is to basically make the Saturday of your contest like a Wednesday. Because you look your best 3 days after your carbohydrate load, you should complete a carbohydrate load 3 days—in this case, on Tuesday and Wednesday—before the contest. On Saturday, 3 days later, you will look your best.

Note that the weekend before the contest, you won't carb up as usual. To carb up on the weekend and repeat the process 2 or 3 days later may well spill you back over to a carbohydrate-burning metabolism and smooth you out for that Saturday contest. Rather, skip your carbohydrate load the weekend before a contest. That way you will be on the high-protein, higher-fat part of the metabolic diet for 8 straight days, from the Monday 2 weeks before the contest to the Tuesday before the contest. Then begin your precontest carbohydrate load so you will hit the contest just right.

This is one area where the metabolic diet has a big advantage over the competition. Athletes on a high-carbohydrate diet are basically always loading up on carbohydrate foods, so it's difficult for them to manipulate their diets so their bodies respond well to carbohydrate loading before the contest. What often happens is they get off the high-carbohydrate diet for 3 days at the beginning of the week before a competition and go low carbohydrate for 72 hours; then they again load up on carbohydrate foods in an attempt to hit the contest right. The problem is, they really don't know how their bodies are going to react. Everything could work out well, or they could experience a complete disaster. With the metabolic diet, you know the exact hour when you look your best. Because your body goes through the cycle every week, it has become predictable and consistent. You know precisely what to expect since you won't be doing anything different from what you have done in the preceding months.

Three Basic Laws of Strength Training and Bodybuilding

The training principles just discussed provide a loose guideline for general training. There are also three laws of strength training that must be adhered to if an athlete is to proceed injury free to a more comprehensive, rigorous training program. Entry-level bodybuilders and strength athletes often begin training programs without being aware of the strain they will encounter and without understanding the progression or training methodology behind the program. These are usually the people who tend to seek advice from seasoned athletes (who may not be qualified to give it) and who, consequently, find themselves out of their league and on a collision course with injury. Adherence to the following training laws will ensure the proper anatomical adaptation of a young or untrained body before subjecting it to the rigors of strength training.

Law 1: Before Developing Muscle Strength, Develop Joint Flexibility

Most strength training exercises, especially those employing free weights, use the whole range of motion around major joints. In some exercises, the weight of the barbell compresses the joints to such a degree that, if the person does not have good flexibility, strain and pain can result.

Consider deep squats: During a deep squat, compression of the knee joints may cause an inflexible athlete a lot of pain or even injury. Also, in the deep-squat position, a lack of good ankle flexibility forces the person to stay on the balls of the feet and toes, rather than on the flat of the foot where a good base of support and balance is ensured. Development of ankle flexibility (i.e., dorsiflexion, or bringing the toes toward the shin) is essential for all strength trainers but especially for entry-level athletes (Bompa, Di Pasquale, and Cornacchia 2003).

Good flexibility can greatly reduce or eliminate the incidence of injuries (Fredrick and Fredrick 2006). Flexibility aids in the elasticity of the muscles and provides a wider range of motion in the joints. Unfortunately, research on this subject has produced mixed reviews, causing athletes at all levels to neglect stretching programs. Regular stretching creates several essential training benefits, such as improved flexibility, reduced muscle soreness, good muscular and joint mobility, and greater efficiency in muscular movements and fluidity of motion (Nelson and Kokkonen 2007).

Law 2: Before Developing Muscle Strength, Develop the Tendons

The rate of gain in muscle strength always has the potential to exceed the rate at which tendons and ligaments can adapt to higher tensions. It is crucial that the tendons and ligaments have time to adapt, but because many people lack a long-term vision, they prematurely use heavy loads to develop specific muscle groups without strengthening the support systems of those muscles. It's like building a house on the sand—it may look good for a little while, but at high tide the whole thing is destroyed. Build your body on a rock-solid foundation, and this will not happen to you.

Tendons and ligaments are trainable and can actually increase in diameter as a result of proper anatomical adaptation training (see chapter 12), which increases their ability to withstand tension and wear. This training is accomplished via a low-load program for the first 1 to 2 years of training. Shortcuts are not the answer to achieving a well-developed, injury-free body. Patience will ultimately pay off.

Law 3: Before Developing the Limbs, Develop the Body's Core

It is true that big arms, shoulders, and legs are impressive, and a lot of training must be dedicated to these areas. Yet the trunk is the link between these areas, and the limbs can only be as strong as the trunk. The trunk has an abundance of abdominal and back muscles: Bundles that run in different directions surround the core of the body with a tight and powerful support system. A poorly developed trunk represents a weak support system for the hard-working arms and legs. So in spite of temptations in this direction, an entry-level training program must not revolve around the legs, arms, and shoulders. The focus must first be on strengthening the core area of the body—the muscles of the abdomen, lower back, and spinal column.

Back muscles consist of long and short muscles that run along the vertebral column. They work together as a unit, with the rotators and diagonal muscles, to perform many movements. Abdominal muscles run lengthwise (rectus abdominis), crosswise (transversus abdominis), and diagonally (abdominal obliques), enabling the trunk to bend forward and sideways, to rotate, and to twist. Since the abdominal muscles play important roles in many exercises, weakness in this area can severely limit the effectiveness of many strength actions.

Physical Benefits of the Metabolic Diet

One of the advantages of the metabolic diet is an increase in lean body mass without the use of anabolic steroids. The diet does many of the same things hormonally that steroids do, only naturally and without the risks. Another advantage of the metabolic diet is the ability to decrease body fat without sacrificing lean mass.

Decrease Body Fat Without Sacrificing Lean Mass Unlike the high-carbohydrate diet, when you gain weight on the metabolic diet much less of it is body fat and much more of it is muscle. We have found that eating fat doesn't lead to becoming fat. In fact, high dietary fat is instrumental in increasing lipolysis, or the breakdown of fat, and the resulting loss of body fat. Furthermore, the bodybuilder will maintain more lean body mass during the cutting phase of a diet.

On a high-carbohydrate diet, if you exercise correctly and do everything else right, you will find that when you lose weight about 60 percent of it is fat and 40 percent is muscle. You may get down to your optimal weight and be ripped, but you are much smaller than you could be. On the metabolic diet, those percentages go way down to 90 percent fat and 10 percent muscle during cutting. With the high-fat diet, you get down to the weight you want but find yourself maintaining a lot more lean body mass. You are bigger and stronger.

Feel Stronger While Losing Body Fat This stands to reason. Strength is proportional to muscle mass. When you are on a high-carbohydrate diet, sacrificing lean mass to get cut, you are obviously going to feel weaker. Because the metabolic diet cycles in a carbohydrate-loading phase every week to stimulate insulin production and trigger growth, you also do not find yourself getting into the psychological doldrums caused by following one diet all the way through each week. There is a variety in your diet, and this will help you be more energetic and committed than you'd be on the high-carbohydrate diet.

Maximize the Effects of Endogenous Anabolic Hormones The metabolic diet maximizes the serum levels of testosterone (even in women) (Goldin et al. 1994), growth hormone, and insulin to promote growth and to help firm up and shape your body as you shed fat. It basically conditions your hormonal system to create an endogenous (natural) anabolic (growth producing) environment. You will be surprised at how quickly you will be able to sculpt the body you want as these hormones work together.

The maximization of the three hormones is one of the most remarkable effects of the metabolic diet. Many hormones are reactive to others. For instance, as insulin goes up, growth hormone may decrease. If insulin decreases, growth hormone will increase. The two hormones generally do not work well together, but they can. During and after a workout, it is important to understand that the body decreases in serum testosterone and growth hormone. The metabolic diet attempts to maximize the effect of the three anabolic hormones for 24 hours because contrary to popular belief, you get stronger and form muscle not only after a workout but, if done correctly, during a workout as well. If you can increase both hormones, you will get a better anabolic effect than with an increase in one hormone alone. At the cellular level, the anabolic hormones must be elevated to drive amino acids into the cells for protein formation. The metabolic diet, the weekly cycling it incorporates (carbohydrate-loading phase) to stimulate insulin production, and the utilization of supplements such as Exersol (see www.MetabolicDiet.com) will optimize protein synthesis and maximize growth.

Chapter 8 recommends supplements you can use with the metabolic diet that will help increase insulin sensitivity, testosterone, growth hormone, and insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1) as needed. Your approach to supplements and exercise will be largely determined by how far you want to go in remaking your body. Whatever your goals, you will find the metabolic diet an effective tool in taking the weight off, keeping it off, and making your body look its best.

Increase Strength People on the metabolic diet often find their strength increasing as they are losing weight and body fat. Most bodybuilders find this amazing. They know that when they lose weight, they are also losing muscle and strength. But with the metabolic diet they're losing less muscle, and that, in combination with the fact their bodies are working in an anabolic environment, makes them stronger. They cannot believe it as they watch the fat melt away while their strength increases at the same time.

Decrease Catabolic Activity The metabolic diet results in lower levels of cortisol, a hormone secreted by the adrenal glands that breaks down muscle (catabolism) and uses it for energy. Certain supplements can be added to the diet (see chapter 8) to further decrease muscle breakdown during and after a workout while increasing insulin and growth hormone levels at critical times to promote an anabolic effect. Put simply, you will be breaking down less muscle while adding more.

Precontest Phase

When you get to your precontest phase, you won't have to make many changes: You will be doing the same thing you have been doing for the previous several weeks in the cutting phase. You will go off the higher-fat, high-protein diet and carb up to dramatically increase the glycogen and water inside the muscle cells. You want the cells swollen and big, but you want to cut off the carbohydrates before you begin to store extracellular water or fat and smooth out.

The metabolic diet's 5-day, 2-day week is almost like getting in shape for a contest every week. In the weekend carbohydrate-loading part of the diet, you will find out exactly how many hours you can load up on carbohydrate before you begin to smooth out and lose your contest look.

One of the many advantages of this diet is that if men or women want to enter a lot of contests, they can manipulate their diet so they never get much above their ideal body-fat percent levels during the muscle definition phase. By doing so, the athletes don't have huge gains in body fat, allowing them to drop to contest level in just 2 or 3 weeks.

You generally want to go into the precontest phase of diet and training about 16 weeks before a major contest. Because you already know what you need to do from previous weekends on the diet, you will be doing only some fine-tuning by lowering and increasing calories a bit as needed. You shouldn't be doing anything much out of the ordinary.

By the final 6 to 8 weeks before the contest, you should look fairly close to how you want to appear on stage. With this diet you can control exactly where you're at each week. After the weekend carbohydrate-loading portion of your diet, you should be looking great on Monday—ready to hit the gym hard with the high glycogen levels, muscle swelling, and other benefits derived from a well-honed weekend diet strategy.

You can go through the precontest phase in preparation for several contests a year as long as you keep your fat levels low; yet we suggest that you go through the precontest phase no more than four times a year. That means, obviously, a maximum of four contests a year. More than this will probably prevent you from going back into the mass phase and using it properly.

You must build up lean body mass to some extent between contests, which means you will gain a bit of fat. You will still be bulking up and cutting down—but it won't be like on other diets, where you gain so much body fat that by the time you lose it you're no better off than when you started.

Be Consistent Before Competition

Two things bodybuilders do to sabotage themselves before contests is to panic or try something new. Both of these scenarios can be disastrous. Bodybuilders who find themselves too fat may begin doing aerobic exercise, thinking it will get the extra body fat off. Doing about half an hour of aerobic activity certainly will not harm you as you will burn more free fatty acids. But people sometimes begin to panic and overdo it. They start doing 3 to 4 hours a day of aerobic activity to burn off the fat; but all they do is exhaust energy stores so that their bodies start using muscle tissue for energy.

Some people start pigging out to build mass as they go into superaerobic mode, thinking that aerobics will make up for the fat buildup. It doesn't work. Increasing calories and aerobics will most probably just increase catabolic activity in your body. Aerobics, while burning fat, can also destroy muscle. Even if it doesn't do appreciable damage, it will still limit to some degree the amount of muscle you can put on. As a rule, the fewer calories you take in and the more time you allow yourself to lose the body fat, the less aerobics you will need to do, and the more lean body mass you will retain. Allow yourself time to lose extra body fat and gauge yourself effectively as you move toward a contest.

Other bodybuilders decide to try something new just before a competition, looking to get that final edge. But this is a mistake. They may start with the sodium-depletion or sodium-loading trick. They try all sorts of things they've never tried before, and all of a sudden they end up wondering how it was that they were looking so great and now look so bad. Don't shock your system before a contest. Make a smooth landing into it. Don't throw everything away by trying to get the extra edge through a crazy stunt. Do nothing out of the ordinary, and certainly do not panic.

Stop Training One to Two Weeks Out

Stop training 1 to 2 weeks before the contest. That's pretty standard wherever you go. Our advice is to do your last heavy training session 10 days before the contest to give your muscles maximum time to recuperate and achieve maximum growth. Don't worry about maintaining muscle mass and tone. Your posing will take care of that and also give you some aerobic activity. Posing should, of course, be continued throughout this entire period with the exception of the day before the contest.

But although you shut down heavy training 10 days or so before a contest, this is the only time you should back off. Cutting back in training at any other time in the process limits the effectiveness of the diet and your ultimate growth. Diet and training work hand in hand. Exercise complements the metabolic diet. Hormonal changes caused by exercise result in increased activity of the enzyme lipoprotein lipase (LPL) in the muscle, which in turn increases breakdown of free fatty acids and decreases fat buildup.

Identify Your Best Day

As you conduct carbohydrate loading on the weekends, you will learn how many hours into the process that you look your very best. As suggested, you can further refine that time by experimenting with the types of food you eat, allowing you to precisely dial in that time when you're at your best. This information is vital when the contest arrives because you will eventually discover a day of the week when you're in top form. All the water you gained during your carbohydrate load is gone, and you have just the right balance between muscle glycogen and water. You also feel great. Everyone's system works differently, and there are wide differences among athletes. The goal is to find the right day for you, that day each week—Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, whatever—when you are consistently at your best.

Most contests occur on Saturday. Suppose you look your best on Wednesday of each week. Your goal then is to basically make the Saturday of your contest like a Wednesday. Because you look your best 3 days after your carbohydrate load, you should complete a carbohydrate load 3 days—in this case, on Tuesday and Wednesday—before the contest. On Saturday, 3 days later, you will look your best.

Note that the weekend before the contest, you won't carb up as usual. To carb up on the weekend and repeat the process 2 or 3 days later may well spill you back over to a carbohydrate-burning metabolism and smooth you out for that Saturday contest. Rather, skip your carbohydrate load the weekend before a contest. That way you will be on the high-protein, higher-fat part of the metabolic diet for 8 straight days, from the Monday 2 weeks before the contest to the Tuesday before the contest. Then begin your precontest carbohydrate load so you will hit the contest just right.

This is one area where the metabolic diet has a big advantage over the competition. Athletes on a high-carbohydrate diet are basically always loading up on carbohydrate foods, so it's difficult for them to manipulate their diets so their bodies respond well to carbohydrate loading before the contest. What often happens is they get off the high-carbohydrate diet for 3 days at the beginning of the week before a competition and go low carbohydrate for 72 hours; then they again load up on carbohydrate foods in an attempt to hit the contest right. The problem is, they really don't know how their bodies are going to react. Everything could work out well, or they could experience a complete disaster. With the metabolic diet, you know the exact hour when you look your best. Because your body goes through the cycle every week, it has become predictable and consistent. You know precisely what to expect since you won't be doing anything different from what you have done in the preceding months.

Three Basic Laws of Strength Training and Bodybuilding

The training principles just discussed provide a loose guideline for general training. There are also three laws of strength training that must be adhered to if an athlete is to proceed injury free to a more comprehensive, rigorous training program. Entry-level bodybuilders and strength athletes often begin training programs without being aware of the strain they will encounter and without understanding the progression or training methodology behind the program. These are usually the people who tend to seek advice from seasoned athletes (who may not be qualified to give it) and who, consequently, find themselves out of their league and on a collision course with injury. Adherence to the following training laws will ensure the proper anatomical adaptation of a young or untrained body before subjecting it to the rigors of strength training.

Law 1: Before Developing Muscle Strength, Develop Joint Flexibility

Most strength training exercises, especially those employing free weights, use the whole range of motion around major joints. In some exercises, the weight of the barbell compresses the joints to such a degree that, if the person does not have good flexibility, strain and pain can result.

Consider deep squats: During a deep squat, compression of the knee joints may cause an inflexible athlete a lot of pain or even injury. Also, in the deep-squat position, a lack of good ankle flexibility forces the person to stay on the balls of the feet and toes, rather than on the flat of the foot where a good base of support and balance is ensured. Development of ankle flexibility (i.e., dorsiflexion, or bringing the toes toward the shin) is essential for all strength trainers but especially for entry-level athletes (Bompa, Di Pasquale, and Cornacchia 2003).

Good flexibility can greatly reduce or eliminate the incidence of injuries (Fredrick and Fredrick 2006). Flexibility aids in the elasticity of the muscles and provides a wider range of motion in the joints. Unfortunately, research on this subject has produced mixed reviews, causing athletes at all levels to neglect stretching programs. Regular stretching creates several essential training benefits, such as improved flexibility, reduced muscle soreness, good muscular and joint mobility, and greater efficiency in muscular movements and fluidity of motion (Nelson and Kokkonen 2007).

Law 2: Before Developing Muscle Strength, Develop the Tendons

The rate of gain in muscle strength always has the potential to exceed the rate at which tendons and ligaments can adapt to higher tensions. It is crucial that the tendons and ligaments have time to adapt, but because many people lack a long-term vision, they prematurely use heavy loads to develop specific muscle groups without strengthening the support systems of those muscles. It's like building a house on the sand—it may look good for a little while, but at high tide the whole thing is destroyed. Build your body on a rock-solid foundation, and this will not happen to you.

Tendons and ligaments are trainable and can actually increase in diameter as a result of proper anatomical adaptation training (see chapter 12), which increases their ability to withstand tension and wear. This training is accomplished via a low-load program for the first 1 to 2 years of training. Shortcuts are not the answer to achieving a well-developed, injury-free body. Patience will ultimately pay off.

Law 3: Before Developing the Limbs, Develop the Body's Core

It is true that big arms, shoulders, and legs are impressive, and a lot of training must be dedicated to these areas. Yet the trunk is the link between these areas, and the limbs can only be as strong as the trunk. The trunk has an abundance of abdominal and back muscles: Bundles that run in different directions surround the core of the body with a tight and powerful support system. A poorly developed trunk represents a weak support system for the hard-working arms and legs. So in spite of temptations in this direction, an entry-level training program must not revolve around the legs, arms, and shoulders. The focus must first be on strengthening the core area of the body—the muscles of the abdomen, lower back, and spinal column.

Back muscles consist of long and short muscles that run along the vertebral column. They work together as a unit, with the rotators and diagonal muscles, to perform many movements. Abdominal muscles run lengthwise (rectus abdominis), crosswise (transversus abdominis), and diagonally (abdominal obliques), enabling the trunk to bend forward and sideways, to rotate, and to twist. Since the abdominal muscles play important roles in many exercises, weakness in this area can severely limit the effectiveness of many strength actions.

Physical Benefits of the Metabolic Diet

One of the advantages of the metabolic diet is an increase in lean body mass without the use of anabolic steroids. The diet does many of the same things hormonally that steroids do, only naturally and without the risks. Another advantage of the metabolic diet is the ability to decrease body fat without sacrificing lean mass.

Decrease Body Fat Without Sacrificing Lean Mass Unlike the high-carbohydrate diet, when you gain weight on the metabolic diet much less of it is body fat and much more of it is muscle. We have found that eating fat doesn't lead to becoming fat. In fact, high dietary fat is instrumental in increasing lipolysis, or the breakdown of fat, and the resulting loss of body fat. Furthermore, the bodybuilder will maintain more lean body mass during the cutting phase of a diet.

On a high-carbohydrate diet, if you exercise correctly and do everything else right, you will find that when you lose weight about 60 percent of it is fat and 40 percent is muscle. You may get down to your optimal weight and be ripped, but you are much smaller than you could be. On the metabolic diet, those percentages go way down to 90 percent fat and 10 percent muscle during cutting. With the high-fat diet, you get down to the weight you want but find yourself maintaining a lot more lean body mass. You are bigger and stronger.

Feel Stronger While Losing Body Fat This stands to reason. Strength is proportional to muscle mass. When you are on a high-carbohydrate diet, sacrificing lean mass to get cut, you are obviously going to feel weaker. Because the metabolic diet cycles in a carbohydrate-loading phase every week to stimulate insulin production and trigger growth, you also do not find yourself getting into the psychological doldrums caused by following one diet all the way through each week. There is a variety in your diet, and this will help you be more energetic and committed than you'd be on the high-carbohydrate diet.

Maximize the Effects of Endogenous Anabolic Hormones The metabolic diet maximizes the serum levels of testosterone (even in women) (Goldin et al. 1994), growth hormone, and insulin to promote growth and to help firm up and shape your body as you shed fat. It basically conditions your hormonal system to create an endogenous (natural) anabolic (growth producing) environment. You will be surprised at how quickly you will be able to sculpt the body you want as these hormones work together.

The maximization of the three hormones is one of the most remarkable effects of the metabolic diet. Many hormones are reactive to others. For instance, as insulin goes up, growth hormone may decrease. If insulin decreases, growth hormone will increase. The two hormones generally do not work well together, but they can. During and after a workout, it is important to understand that the body decreases in serum testosterone and growth hormone. The metabolic diet attempts to maximize the effect of the three anabolic hormones for 24 hours because contrary to popular belief, you get stronger and form muscle not only after a workout but, if done correctly, during a workout as well. If you can increase both hormones, you will get a better anabolic effect than with an increase in one hormone alone. At the cellular level, the anabolic hormones must be elevated to drive amino acids into the cells for protein formation. The metabolic diet, the weekly cycling it incorporates (carbohydrate-loading phase) to stimulate insulin production, and the utilization of supplements such as Exersol (see www.MetabolicDiet.com) will optimize protein synthesis and maximize growth.

Chapter 8 recommends supplements you can use with the metabolic diet that will help increase insulin sensitivity, testosterone, growth hormone, and insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1) as needed. Your approach to supplements and exercise will be largely determined by how far you want to go in remaking your body. Whatever your goals, you will find the metabolic diet an effective tool in taking the weight off, keeping it off, and making your body look its best.

Increase Strength People on the metabolic diet often find their strength increasing as they are losing weight and body fat. Most bodybuilders find this amazing. They know that when they lose weight, they are also losing muscle and strength. But with the metabolic diet they're losing less muscle, and that, in combination with the fact their bodies are working in an anabolic environment, makes them stronger. They cannot believe it as they watch the fat melt away while their strength increases at the same time.

Decrease Catabolic Activity The metabolic diet results in lower levels of cortisol, a hormone secreted by the adrenal glands that breaks down muscle (catabolism) and uses it for energy. Certain supplements can be added to the diet (see chapter 8) to further decrease muscle breakdown during and after a workout while increasing insulin and growth hormone levels at critical times to promote an anabolic effect. Put simply, you will be breaking down less muscle while adding more.

Precontest Phase

When you get to your precontest phase, you won't have to make many changes: You will be doing the same thing you have been doing for the previous several weeks in the cutting phase. You will go off the higher-fat, high-protein diet and carb up to dramatically increase the glycogen and water inside the muscle cells. You want the cells swollen and big, but you want to cut off the carbohydrates before you begin to store extracellular water or fat and smooth out.

The metabolic diet's 5-day, 2-day week is almost like getting in shape for a contest every week. In the weekend carbohydrate-loading part of the diet, you will find out exactly how many hours you can load up on carbohydrate before you begin to smooth out and lose your contest look.

One of the many advantages of this diet is that if men or women want to enter a lot of contests, they can manipulate their diet so they never get much above their ideal body-fat percent levels during the muscle definition phase. By doing so, the athletes don't have huge gains in body fat, allowing them to drop to contest level in just 2 or 3 weeks.

You generally want to go into the precontest phase of diet and training about 16 weeks before a major contest. Because you already know what you need to do from previous weekends on the diet, you will be doing only some fine-tuning by lowering and increasing calories a bit as needed. You shouldn't be doing anything much out of the ordinary.

By the final 6 to 8 weeks before the contest, you should look fairly close to how you want to appear on stage. With this diet you can control exactly where you're at each week. After the weekend carbohydrate-loading portion of your diet, you should be looking great on Monday—ready to hit the gym hard with the high glycogen levels, muscle swelling, and other benefits derived from a well-honed weekend diet strategy.

You can go through the precontest phase in preparation for several contests a year as long as you keep your fat levels low; yet we suggest that you go through the precontest phase no more than four times a year. That means, obviously, a maximum of four contests a year. More than this will probably prevent you from going back into the mass phase and using it properly.

You must build up lean body mass to some extent between contests, which means you will gain a bit of fat. You will still be bulking up and cutting down—but it won't be like on other diets, where you gain so much body fat that by the time you lose it you're no better off than when you started.

Be Consistent Before Competition

Two things bodybuilders do to sabotage themselves before contests is to panic or try something new. Both of these scenarios can be disastrous. Bodybuilders who find themselves too fat may begin doing aerobic exercise, thinking it will get the extra body fat off. Doing about half an hour of aerobic activity certainly will not harm you as you will burn more free fatty acids. But people sometimes begin to panic and overdo it. They start doing 3 to 4 hours a day of aerobic activity to burn off the fat; but all they do is exhaust energy stores so that their bodies start using muscle tissue for energy.

Some people start pigging out to build mass as they go into superaerobic mode, thinking that aerobics will make up for the fat buildup. It doesn't work. Increasing calories and aerobics will most probably just increase catabolic activity in your body. Aerobics, while burning fat, can also destroy muscle. Even if it doesn't do appreciable damage, it will still limit to some degree the amount of muscle you can put on. As a rule, the fewer calories you take in and the more time you allow yourself to lose the body fat, the less aerobics you will need to do, and the more lean body mass you will retain. Allow yourself time to lose extra body fat and gauge yourself effectively as you move toward a contest.

Other bodybuilders decide to try something new just before a competition, looking to get that final edge. But this is a mistake. They may start with the sodium-depletion or sodium-loading trick. They try all sorts of things they've never tried before, and all of a sudden they end up wondering how it was that they were looking so great and now look so bad. Don't shock your system before a contest. Make a smooth landing into it. Don't throw everything away by trying to get the extra edge through a crazy stunt. Do nothing out of the ordinary, and certainly do not panic.

Stop Training One to Two Weeks Out

Stop training 1 to 2 weeks before the contest. That's pretty standard wherever you go. Our advice is to do your last heavy training session 10 days before the contest to give your muscles maximum time to recuperate and achieve maximum growth. Don't worry about maintaining muscle mass and tone. Your posing will take care of that and also give you some aerobic activity. Posing should, of course, be continued throughout this entire period with the exception of the day before the contest.

But although you shut down heavy training 10 days or so before a contest, this is the only time you should back off. Cutting back in training at any other time in the process limits the effectiveness of the diet and your ultimate growth. Diet and training work hand in hand. Exercise complements the metabolic diet. Hormonal changes caused by exercise result in increased activity of the enzyme lipoprotein lipase (LPL) in the muscle, which in turn increases breakdown of free fatty acids and decreases fat buildup.

Identify Your Best Day

As you conduct carbohydrate loading on the weekends, you will learn how many hours into the process that you look your very best. As suggested, you can further refine that time by experimenting with the types of food you eat, allowing you to precisely dial in that time when you're at your best. This information is vital when the contest arrives because you will eventually discover a day of the week when you're in top form. All the water you gained during your carbohydrate load is gone, and you have just the right balance between muscle glycogen and water. You also feel great. Everyone's system works differently, and there are wide differences among athletes. The goal is to find the right day for you, that day each week—Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, whatever—when you are consistently at your best.

Most contests occur on Saturday. Suppose you look your best on Wednesday of each week. Your goal then is to basically make the Saturday of your contest like a Wednesday. Because you look your best 3 days after your carbohydrate load, you should complete a carbohydrate load 3 days—in this case, on Tuesday and Wednesday—before the contest. On Saturday, 3 days later, you will look your best.

Note that the weekend before the contest, you won't carb up as usual. To carb up on the weekend and repeat the process 2 or 3 days later may well spill you back over to a carbohydrate-burning metabolism and smooth you out for that Saturday contest. Rather, skip your carbohydrate load the weekend before a contest. That way you will be on the high-protein, higher-fat part of the metabolic diet for 8 straight days, from the Monday 2 weeks before the contest to the Tuesday before the contest. Then begin your precontest carbohydrate load so you will hit the contest just right.

This is one area where the metabolic diet has a big advantage over the competition. Athletes on a high-carbohydrate diet are basically always loading up on carbohydrate foods, so it's difficult for them to manipulate their diets so their bodies respond well to carbohydrate loading before the contest. What often happens is they get off the high-carbohydrate diet for 3 days at the beginning of the week before a competition and go low carbohydrate for 72 hours; then they again load up on carbohydrate foods in an attempt to hit the contest right. The problem is, they really don't know how their bodies are going to react. Everything could work out well, or they could experience a complete disaster. With the metabolic diet, you know the exact hour when you look your best. Because your body goes through the cycle every week, it has become predictable and consistent. You know precisely what to expect since you won't be doing anything different from what you have done in the preceding months.

Three Basic Laws of Strength Training and Bodybuilding

The training principles just discussed provide a loose guideline for general training. There are also three laws of strength training that must be adhered to if an athlete is to proceed injury free to a more comprehensive, rigorous training program. Entry-level bodybuilders and strength athletes often begin training programs without being aware of the strain they will encounter and without understanding the progression or training methodology behind the program. These are usually the people who tend to seek advice from seasoned athletes (who may not be qualified to give it) and who, consequently, find themselves out of their league and on a collision course with injury. Adherence to the following training laws will ensure the proper anatomical adaptation of a young or untrained body before subjecting it to the rigors of strength training.

Law 1: Before Developing Muscle Strength, Develop Joint Flexibility

Most strength training exercises, especially those employing free weights, use the whole range of motion around major joints. In some exercises, the weight of the barbell compresses the joints to such a degree that, if the person does not have good flexibility, strain and pain can result.

Consider deep squats: During a deep squat, compression of the knee joints may cause an inflexible athlete a lot of pain or even injury. Also, in the deep-squat position, a lack of good ankle flexibility forces the person to stay on the balls of the feet and toes, rather than on the flat of the foot where a good base of support and balance is ensured. Development of ankle flexibility (i.e., dorsiflexion, or bringing the toes toward the shin) is essential for all strength trainers but especially for entry-level athletes (Bompa, Di Pasquale, and Cornacchia 2003).

Good flexibility can greatly reduce or eliminate the incidence of injuries (Fredrick and Fredrick 2006). Flexibility aids in the elasticity of the muscles and provides a wider range of motion in the joints. Unfortunately, research on this subject has produced mixed reviews, causing athletes at all levels to neglect stretching programs. Regular stretching creates several essential training benefits, such as improved flexibility, reduced muscle soreness, good muscular and joint mobility, and greater efficiency in muscular movements and fluidity of motion (Nelson and Kokkonen 2007).

Law 2: Before Developing Muscle Strength, Develop the Tendons

The rate of gain in muscle strength always has the potential to exceed the rate at which tendons and ligaments can adapt to higher tensions. It is crucial that the tendons and ligaments have time to adapt, but because many people lack a long-term vision, they prematurely use heavy loads to develop specific muscle groups without strengthening the support systems of those muscles. It's like building a house on the sand—it may look good for a little while, but at high tide the whole thing is destroyed. Build your body on a rock-solid foundation, and this will not happen to you.

Tendons and ligaments are trainable and can actually increase in diameter as a result of proper anatomical adaptation training (see chapter 12), which increases their ability to withstand tension and wear. This training is accomplished via a low-load program for the first 1 to 2 years of training. Shortcuts are not the answer to achieving a well-developed, injury-free body. Patience will ultimately pay off.

Law 3: Before Developing the Limbs, Develop the Body's Core

It is true that big arms, shoulders, and legs are impressive, and a lot of training must be dedicated to these areas. Yet the trunk is the link between these areas, and the limbs can only be as strong as the trunk. The trunk has an abundance of abdominal and back muscles: Bundles that run in different directions surround the core of the body with a tight and powerful support system. A poorly developed trunk represents a weak support system for the hard-working arms and legs. So in spite of temptations in this direction, an entry-level training program must not revolve around the legs, arms, and shoulders. The focus must first be on strengthening the core area of the body—the muscles of the abdomen, lower back, and spinal column.

Back muscles consist of long and short muscles that run along the vertebral column. They work together as a unit, with the rotators and diagonal muscles, to perform many movements. Abdominal muscles run lengthwise (rectus abdominis), crosswise (transversus abdominis), and diagonally (abdominal obliques), enabling the trunk to bend forward and sideways, to rotate, and to twist. Since the abdominal muscles play important roles in many exercises, weakness in this area can severely limit the effectiveness of many strength actions.

Physical Benefits of the Metabolic Diet

One of the advantages of the metabolic diet is an increase in lean body mass without the use of anabolic steroids. The diet does many of the same things hormonally that steroids do, only naturally and without the risks. Another advantage of the metabolic diet is the ability to decrease body fat without sacrificing lean mass.

Decrease Body Fat Without Sacrificing Lean Mass Unlike the high-carbohydrate diet, when you gain weight on the metabolic diet much less of it is body fat and much more of it is muscle. We have found that eating fat doesn't lead to becoming fat. In fact, high dietary fat is instrumental in increasing lipolysis, or the breakdown of fat, and the resulting loss of body fat. Furthermore, the bodybuilder will maintain more lean body mass during the cutting phase of a diet.

On a high-carbohydrate diet, if you exercise correctly and do everything else right, you will find that when you lose weight about 60 percent of it is fat and 40 percent is muscle. You may get down to your optimal weight and be ripped, but you are much smaller than you could be. On the metabolic diet, those percentages go way down to 90 percent fat and 10 percent muscle during cutting. With the high-fat diet, you get down to the weight you want but find yourself maintaining a lot more lean body mass. You are bigger and stronger.

Feel Stronger While Losing Body Fat This stands to reason. Strength is proportional to muscle mass. When you are on a high-carbohydrate diet, sacrificing lean mass to get cut, you are obviously going to feel weaker. Because the metabolic diet cycles in a carbohydrate-loading phase every week to stimulate insulin production and trigger growth, you also do not find yourself getting into the psychological doldrums caused by following one diet all the way through each week. There is a variety in your diet, and this will help you be more energetic and committed than you'd be on the high-carbohydrate diet.

Maximize the Effects of Endogenous Anabolic Hormones The metabolic diet maximizes the serum levels of testosterone (even in women) (Goldin et al. 1994), growth hormone, and insulin to promote growth and to help firm up and shape your body as you shed fat. It basically conditions your hormonal system to create an endogenous (natural) anabolic (growth producing) environment. You will be surprised at how quickly you will be able to sculpt the body you want as these hormones work together.

The maximization of the three hormones is one of the most remarkable effects of the metabolic diet. Many hormones are reactive to others. For instance, as insulin goes up, growth hormone may decrease. If insulin decreases, growth hormone will increase. The two hormones generally do not work well together, but they can. During and after a workout, it is important to understand that the body decreases in serum testosterone and growth hormone. The metabolic diet attempts to maximize the effect of the three anabolic hormones for 24 hours because contrary to popular belief, you get stronger and form muscle not only after a workout but, if done correctly, during a workout as well. If you can increase both hormones, you will get a better anabolic effect than with an increase in one hormone alone. At the cellular level, the anabolic hormones must be elevated to drive amino acids into the cells for protein formation. The metabolic diet, the weekly cycling it incorporates (carbohydrate-loading phase) to stimulate insulin production, and the utilization of supplements such as Exersol (see www.MetabolicDiet.com) will optimize protein synthesis and maximize growth.

Chapter 8 recommends supplements you can use with the metabolic diet that will help increase insulin sensitivity, testosterone, growth hormone, and insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1) as needed. Your approach to supplements and exercise will be largely determined by how far you want to go in remaking your body. Whatever your goals, you will find the metabolic diet an effective tool in taking the weight off, keeping it off, and making your body look its best.

Increase Strength People on the metabolic diet often find their strength increasing as they are losing weight and body fat. Most bodybuilders find this amazing. They know that when they lose weight, they are also losing muscle and strength. But with the metabolic diet they're losing less muscle, and that, in combination with the fact their bodies are working in an anabolic environment, makes them stronger. They cannot believe it as they watch the fat melt away while their strength increases at the same time.

Decrease Catabolic Activity The metabolic diet results in lower levels of cortisol, a hormone secreted by the adrenal glands that breaks down muscle (catabolism) and uses it for energy. Certain supplements can be added to the diet (see chapter 8) to further decrease muscle breakdown during and after a workout while increasing insulin and growth hormone levels at critical times to promote an anabolic effect. Put simply, you will be breaking down less muscle while adding more.

Precontest Phase

When you get to your precontest phase, you won't have to make many changes: You will be doing the same thing you have been doing for the previous several weeks in the cutting phase. You will go off the higher-fat, high-protein diet and carb up to dramatically increase the glycogen and water inside the muscle cells. You want the cells swollen and big, but you want to cut off the carbohydrates before you begin to store extracellular water or fat and smooth out.

The metabolic diet's 5-day, 2-day week is almost like getting in shape for a contest every week. In the weekend carbohydrate-loading part of the diet, you will find out exactly how many hours you can load up on carbohydrate before you begin to smooth out and lose your contest look.

One of the many advantages of this diet is that if men or women want to enter a lot of contests, they can manipulate their diet so they never get much above their ideal body-fat percent levels during the muscle definition phase. By doing so, the athletes don't have huge gains in body fat, allowing them to drop to contest level in just 2 or 3 weeks.

You generally want to go into the precontest phase of diet and training about 16 weeks before a major contest. Because you already know what you need to do from previous weekends on the diet, you will be doing only some fine-tuning by lowering and increasing calories a bit as needed. You shouldn't be doing anything much out of the ordinary.

By the final 6 to 8 weeks before the contest, you should look fairly close to how you want to appear on stage. With this diet you can control exactly where you're at each week. After the weekend carbohydrate-loading portion of your diet, you should be looking great on Monday—ready to hit the gym hard with the high glycogen levels, muscle swelling, and other benefits derived from a well-honed weekend diet strategy.

You can go through the precontest phase in preparation for several contests a year as long as you keep your fat levels low; yet we suggest that you go through the precontest phase no more than four times a year. That means, obviously, a maximum of four contests a year. More than this will probably prevent you from going back into the mass phase and using it properly.

You must build up lean body mass to some extent between contests, which means you will gain a bit of fat. You will still be bulking up and cutting down—but it won't be like on other diets, where you gain so much body fat that by the time you lose it you're no better off than when you started.

Be Consistent Before Competition

Two things bodybuilders do to sabotage themselves before contests is to panic or try something new. Both of these scenarios can be disastrous. Bodybuilders who find themselves too fat may begin doing aerobic exercise, thinking it will get the extra body fat off. Doing about half an hour of aerobic activity certainly will not harm you as you will burn more free fatty acids. But people sometimes begin to panic and overdo it. They start doing 3 to 4 hours a day of aerobic activity to burn off the fat; but all they do is exhaust energy stores so that their bodies start using muscle tissue for energy.

Some people start pigging out to build mass as they go into superaerobic mode, thinking that aerobics will make up for the fat buildup. It doesn't work. Increasing calories and aerobics will most probably just increase catabolic activity in your body. Aerobics, while burning fat, can also destroy muscle. Even if it doesn't do appreciable damage, it will still limit to some degree the amount of muscle you can put on. As a rule, the fewer calories you take in and the more time you allow yourself to lose the body fat, the less aerobics you will need to do, and the more lean body mass you will retain. Allow yourself time to lose extra body fat and gauge yourself effectively as you move toward a contest.

Other bodybuilders decide to try something new just before a competition, looking to get that final edge. But this is a mistake. They may start with the sodium-depletion or sodium-loading trick. They try all sorts of things they've never tried before, and all of a sudden they end up wondering how it was that they were looking so great and now look so bad. Don't shock your system before a contest. Make a smooth landing into it. Don't throw everything away by trying to get the extra edge through a crazy stunt. Do nothing out of the ordinary, and certainly do not panic.

Stop Training One to Two Weeks Out

Stop training 1 to 2 weeks before the contest. That's pretty standard wherever you go. Our advice is to do your last heavy training session 10 days before the contest to give your muscles maximum time to recuperate and achieve maximum growth. Don't worry about maintaining muscle mass and tone. Your posing will take care of that and also give you some aerobic activity. Posing should, of course, be continued throughout this entire period with the exception of the day before the contest.

But although you shut down heavy training 10 days or so before a contest, this is the only time you should back off. Cutting back in training at any other time in the process limits the effectiveness of the diet and your ultimate growth. Diet and training work hand in hand. Exercise complements the metabolic diet. Hormonal changes caused by exercise result in increased activity of the enzyme lipoprotein lipase (LPL) in the muscle, which in turn increases breakdown of free fatty acids and decreases fat buildup.

Identify Your Best Day

As you conduct carbohydrate loading on the weekends, you will learn how many hours into the process that you look your very best. As suggested, you can further refine that time by experimenting with the types of food you eat, allowing you to precisely dial in that time when you're at your best. This information is vital when the contest arrives because you will eventually discover a day of the week when you're in top form. All the water you gained during your carbohydrate load is gone, and you have just the right balance between muscle glycogen and water. You also feel great. Everyone's system works differently, and there are wide differences among athletes. The goal is to find the right day for you, that day each week—Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, whatever—when you are consistently at your best.

Most contests occur on Saturday. Suppose you look your best on Wednesday of each week. Your goal then is to basically make the Saturday of your contest like a Wednesday. Because you look your best 3 days after your carbohydrate load, you should complete a carbohydrate load 3 days—in this case, on Tuesday and Wednesday—before the contest. On Saturday, 3 days later, you will look your best.

Note that the weekend before the contest, you won't carb up as usual. To carb up on the weekend and repeat the process 2 or 3 days later may well spill you back over to a carbohydrate-burning metabolism and smooth you out for that Saturday contest. Rather, skip your carbohydrate load the weekend before a contest. That way you will be on the high-protein, higher-fat part of the metabolic diet for 8 straight days, from the Monday 2 weeks before the contest to the Tuesday before the contest. Then begin your precontest carbohydrate load so you will hit the contest just right.

This is one area where the metabolic diet has a big advantage over the competition. Athletes on a high-carbohydrate diet are basically always loading up on carbohydrate foods, so it's difficult for them to manipulate their diets so their bodies respond well to carbohydrate loading before the contest. What often happens is they get off the high-carbohydrate diet for 3 days at the beginning of the week before a competition and go low carbohydrate for 72 hours; then they again load up on carbohydrate foods in an attempt to hit the contest right. The problem is, they really don't know how their bodies are going to react. Everything could work out well, or they could experience a complete disaster. With the metabolic diet, you know the exact hour when you look your best. Because your body goes through the cycle every week, it has become predictable and consistent. You know precisely what to expect since you won't be doing anything different from what you have done in the preceding months.

Three Basic Laws of Strength Training and Bodybuilding

The training principles just discussed provide a loose guideline for general training. There are also three laws of strength training that must be adhered to if an athlete is to proceed injury free to a more comprehensive, rigorous training program. Entry-level bodybuilders and strength athletes often begin training programs without being aware of the strain they will encounter and without understanding the progression or training methodology behind the program. These are usually the people who tend to seek advice from seasoned athletes (who may not be qualified to give it) and who, consequently, find themselves out of their league and on a collision course with injury. Adherence to the following training laws will ensure the proper anatomical adaptation of a young or untrained body before subjecting it to the rigors of strength training.

Law 1: Before Developing Muscle Strength, Develop Joint Flexibility

Most strength training exercises, especially those employing free weights, use the whole range of motion around major joints. In some exercises, the weight of the barbell compresses the joints to such a degree that, if the person does not have good flexibility, strain and pain can result.

Consider deep squats: During a deep squat, compression of the knee joints may cause an inflexible athlete a lot of pain or even injury. Also, in the deep-squat position, a lack of good ankle flexibility forces the person to stay on the balls of the feet and toes, rather than on the flat of the foot where a good base of support and balance is ensured. Development of ankle flexibility (i.e., dorsiflexion, or bringing the toes toward the shin) is essential for all strength trainers but especially for entry-level athletes (Bompa, Di Pasquale, and Cornacchia 2003).

Good flexibility can greatly reduce or eliminate the incidence of injuries (Fredrick and Fredrick 2006). Flexibility aids in the elasticity of the muscles and provides a wider range of motion in the joints. Unfortunately, research on this subject has produced mixed reviews, causing athletes at all levels to neglect stretching programs. Regular stretching creates several essential training benefits, such as improved flexibility, reduced muscle soreness, good muscular and joint mobility, and greater efficiency in muscular movements and fluidity of motion (Nelson and Kokkonen 2007).

Law 2: Before Developing Muscle Strength, Develop the Tendons

The rate of gain in muscle strength always has the potential to exceed the rate at which tendons and ligaments can adapt to higher tensions. It is crucial that the tendons and ligaments have time to adapt, but because many people lack a long-term vision, they prematurely use heavy loads to develop specific muscle groups without strengthening the support systems of those muscles. It's like building a house on the sand—it may look good for a little while, but at high tide the whole thing is destroyed. Build your body on a rock-solid foundation, and this will not happen to you.

Tendons and ligaments are trainable and can actually increase in diameter as a result of proper anatomical adaptation training (see chapter 12), which increases their ability to withstand tension and wear. This training is accomplished via a low-load program for the first 1 to 2 years of training. Shortcuts are not the answer to achieving a well-developed, injury-free body. Patience will ultimately pay off.

Law 3: Before Developing the Limbs, Develop the Body's Core

It is true that big arms, shoulders, and legs are impressive, and a lot of training must be dedicated to these areas. Yet the trunk is the link between these areas, and the limbs can only be as strong as the trunk. The trunk has an abundance of abdominal and back muscles: Bundles that run in different directions surround the core of the body with a tight and powerful support system. A poorly developed trunk represents a weak support system for the hard-working arms and legs. So in spite of temptations in this direction, an entry-level training program must not revolve around the legs, arms, and shoulders. The focus must first be on strengthening the core area of the body—the muscles of the abdomen, lower back, and spinal column.

Back muscles consist of long and short muscles that run along the vertebral column. They work together as a unit, with the rotators and diagonal muscles, to perform many movements. Abdominal muscles run lengthwise (rectus abdominis), crosswise (transversus abdominis), and diagonally (abdominal obliques), enabling the trunk to bend forward and sideways, to rotate, and to twist. Since the abdominal muscles play important roles in many exercises, weakness in this area can severely limit the effectiveness of many strength actions.

Physical Benefits of the Metabolic Diet

One of the advantages of the metabolic diet is an increase in lean body mass without the use of anabolic steroids. The diet does many of the same things hormonally that steroids do, only naturally and without the risks. Another advantage of the metabolic diet is the ability to decrease body fat without sacrificing lean mass.

Decrease Body Fat Without Sacrificing Lean Mass Unlike the high-carbohydrate diet, when you gain weight on the metabolic diet much less of it is body fat and much more of it is muscle. We have found that eating fat doesn't lead to becoming fat. In fact, high dietary fat is instrumental in increasing lipolysis, or the breakdown of fat, and the resulting loss of body fat. Furthermore, the bodybuilder will maintain more lean body mass during the cutting phase of a diet.

On a high-carbohydrate diet, if you exercise correctly and do everything else right, you will find that when you lose weight about 60 percent of it is fat and 40 percent is muscle. You may get down to your optimal weight and be ripped, but you are much smaller than you could be. On the metabolic diet, those percentages go way down to 90 percent fat and 10 percent muscle during cutting. With the high-fat diet, you get down to the weight you want but find yourself maintaining a lot more lean body mass. You are bigger and stronger.

Feel Stronger While Losing Body Fat This stands to reason. Strength is proportional to muscle mass. When you are on a high-carbohydrate diet, sacrificing lean mass to get cut, you are obviously going to feel weaker. Because the metabolic diet cycles in a carbohydrate-loading phase every week to stimulate insulin production and trigger growth, you also do not find yourself getting into the psychological doldrums caused by following one diet all the way through each week. There is a variety in your diet, and this will help you be more energetic and committed than you'd be on the high-carbohydrate diet.

Maximize the Effects of Endogenous Anabolic Hormones The metabolic diet maximizes the serum levels of testosterone (even in women) (Goldin et al. 1994), growth hormone, and insulin to promote growth and to help firm up and shape your body as you shed fat. It basically conditions your hormonal system to create an endogenous (natural) anabolic (growth producing) environment. You will be surprised at how quickly you will be able to sculpt the body you want as these hormones work together.

The maximization of the three hormones is one of the most remarkable effects of the metabolic diet. Many hormones are reactive to others. For instance, as insulin goes up, growth hormone may decrease. If insulin decreases, growth hormone will increase. The two hormones generally do not work well together, but they can. During and after a workout, it is important to understand that the body decreases in serum testosterone and growth hormone. The metabolic diet attempts to maximize the effect of the three anabolic hormones for 24 hours because contrary to popular belief, you get stronger and form muscle not only after a workout but, if done correctly, during a workout as well. If you can increase both hormones, you will get a better anabolic effect than with an increase in one hormone alone. At the cellular level, the anabolic hormones must be elevated to drive amino acids into the cells for protein formation. The metabolic diet, the weekly cycling it incorporates (carbohydrate-loading phase) to stimulate insulin production, and the utilization of supplements such as Exersol (see www.MetabolicDiet.com) will optimize protein synthesis and maximize growth.

Chapter 8 recommends supplements you can use with the metabolic diet that will help increase insulin sensitivity, testosterone, growth hormone, and insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1) as needed. Your approach to supplements and exercise will be largely determined by how far you want to go in remaking your body. Whatever your goals, you will find the metabolic diet an effective tool in taking the weight off, keeping it off, and making your body look its best.

Increase Strength People on the metabolic diet often find their strength increasing as they are losing weight and body fat. Most bodybuilders find this amazing. They know that when they lose weight, they are also losing muscle and strength. But with the metabolic diet they're losing less muscle, and that, in combination with the fact their bodies are working in an anabolic environment, makes them stronger. They cannot believe it as they watch the fat melt away while their strength increases at the same time.

Decrease Catabolic Activity The metabolic diet results in lower levels of cortisol, a hormone secreted by the adrenal glands that breaks down muscle (catabolism) and uses it for energy. Certain supplements can be added to the diet (see chapter 8) to further decrease muscle breakdown during and after a workout while increasing insulin and growth hormone levels at critical times to promote an anabolic effect. Put simply, you will be breaking down less muscle while adding more.

Precontest Phase

When you get to your precontest phase, you won't have to make many changes: You will be doing the same thing you have been doing for the previous several weeks in the cutting phase. You will go off the higher-fat, high-protein diet and carb up to dramatically increase the glycogen and water inside the muscle cells. You want the cells swollen and big, but you want to cut off the carbohydrates before you begin to store extracellular water or fat and smooth out.

The metabolic diet's 5-day, 2-day week is almost like getting in shape for a contest every week. In the weekend carbohydrate-loading part of the diet, you will find out exactly how many hours you can load up on carbohydrate before you begin to smooth out and lose your contest look.

One of the many advantages of this diet is that if men or women want to enter a lot of contests, they can manipulate their diet so they never get much above their ideal body-fat percent levels during the muscle definition phase. By doing so, the athletes don't have huge gains in body fat, allowing them to drop to contest level in just 2 or 3 weeks.

You generally want to go into the precontest phase of diet and training about 16 weeks before a major contest. Because you already know what you need to do from previous weekends on the diet, you will be doing only some fine-tuning by lowering and increasing calories a bit as needed. You shouldn't be doing anything much out of the ordinary.

By the final 6 to 8 weeks before the contest, you should look fairly close to how you want to appear on stage. With this diet you can control exactly where you're at each week. After the weekend carbohydrate-loading portion of your diet, you should be looking great on Monday—ready to hit the gym hard with the high glycogen levels, muscle swelling, and other benefits derived from a well-honed weekend diet strategy.

You can go through the precontest phase in preparation for several contests a year as long as you keep your fat levels low; yet we suggest that you go through the precontest phase no more than four times a year. That means, obviously, a maximum of four contests a year. More than this will probably prevent you from going back into the mass phase and using it properly.

You must build up lean body mass to some extent between contests, which means you will gain a bit of fat. You will still be bulking up and cutting down—but it won't be like on other diets, where you gain so much body fat that by the time you lose it you're no better off than when you started.

Be Consistent Before Competition

Two things bodybuilders do to sabotage themselves before contests is to panic or try something new. Both of these scenarios can be disastrous. Bodybuilders who find themselves too fat may begin doing aerobic exercise, thinking it will get the extra body fat off. Doing about half an hour of aerobic activity certainly will not harm you as you will burn more free fatty acids. But people sometimes begin to panic and overdo it. They start doing 3 to 4 hours a day of aerobic activity to burn off the fat; but all they do is exhaust energy stores so that their bodies start using muscle tissue for energy.

Some people start pigging out to build mass as they go into superaerobic mode, thinking that aerobics will make up for the fat buildup. It doesn't work. Increasing calories and aerobics will most probably just increase catabolic activity in your body. Aerobics, while burning fat, can also destroy muscle. Even if it doesn't do appreciable damage, it will still limit to some degree the amount of muscle you can put on. As a rule, the fewer calories you take in and the more time you allow yourself to lose the body fat, the less aerobics you will need to do, and the more lean body mass you will retain. Allow yourself time to lose extra body fat and gauge yourself effectively as you move toward a contest.

Other bodybuilders decide to try something new just before a competition, looking to get that final edge. But this is a mistake. They may start with the sodium-depletion or sodium-loading trick. They try all sorts of things they've never tried before, and all of a sudden they end up wondering how it was that they were looking so great and now look so bad. Don't shock your system before a contest. Make a smooth landing into it. Don't throw everything away by trying to get the extra edge through a crazy stunt. Do nothing out of the ordinary, and certainly do not panic.

Stop Training One to Two Weeks Out

Stop training 1 to 2 weeks before the contest. That's pretty standard wherever you go. Our advice is to do your last heavy training session 10 days before the contest to give your muscles maximum time to recuperate and achieve maximum growth. Don't worry about maintaining muscle mass and tone. Your posing will take care of that and also give you some aerobic activity. Posing should, of course, be continued throughout this entire period with the exception of the day before the contest.

But although you shut down heavy training 10 days or so before a contest, this is the only time you should back off. Cutting back in training at any other time in the process limits the effectiveness of the diet and your ultimate growth. Diet and training work hand in hand. Exercise complements the metabolic diet. Hormonal changes caused by exercise result in increased activity of the enzyme lipoprotein lipase (LPL) in the muscle, which in turn increases breakdown of free fatty acids and decreases fat buildup.

Identify Your Best Day

As you conduct carbohydrate loading on the weekends, you will learn how many hours into the process that you look your very best. As suggested, you can further refine that time by experimenting with the types of food you eat, allowing you to precisely dial in that time when you're at your best. This information is vital when the contest arrives because you will eventually discover a day of the week when you're in top form. All the water you gained during your carbohydrate load is gone, and you have just the right balance between muscle glycogen and water. You also feel great. Everyone's system works differently, and there are wide differences among athletes. The goal is to find the right day for you, that day each week—Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, whatever—when you are consistently at your best.

Most contests occur on Saturday. Suppose you look your best on Wednesday of each week. Your goal then is to basically make the Saturday of your contest like a Wednesday. Because you look your best 3 days after your carbohydrate load, you should complete a carbohydrate load 3 days—in this case, on Tuesday and Wednesday—before the contest. On Saturday, 3 days later, you will look your best.

Note that the weekend before the contest, you won't carb up as usual. To carb up on the weekend and repeat the process 2 or 3 days later may well spill you back over to a carbohydrate-burning metabolism and smooth you out for that Saturday contest. Rather, skip your carbohydrate load the weekend before a contest. That way you will be on the high-protein, higher-fat part of the metabolic diet for 8 straight days, from the Monday 2 weeks before the contest to the Tuesday before the contest. Then begin your precontest carbohydrate load so you will hit the contest just right.

This is one area where the metabolic diet has a big advantage over the competition. Athletes on a high-carbohydrate diet are basically always loading up on carbohydrate foods, so it's difficult for them to manipulate their diets so their bodies respond well to carbohydrate loading before the contest. What often happens is they get off the high-carbohydrate diet for 3 days at the beginning of the week before a competition and go low carbohydrate for 72 hours; then they again load up on carbohydrate foods in an attempt to hit the contest right. The problem is, they really don't know how their bodies are going to react. Everything could work out well, or they could experience a complete disaster. With the metabolic diet, you know the exact hour when you look your best. Because your body goes through the cycle every week, it has become predictable and consistent. You know precisely what to expect since you won't be doing anything different from what you have done in the preceding months.

Three Basic Laws of Strength Training and Bodybuilding

The training principles just discussed provide a loose guideline for general training. There are also three laws of strength training that must be adhered to if an athlete is to proceed injury free to a more comprehensive, rigorous training program. Entry-level bodybuilders and strength athletes often begin training programs without being aware of the strain they will encounter and without understanding the progression or training methodology behind the program. These are usually the people who tend to seek advice from seasoned athletes (who may not be qualified to give it) and who, consequently, find themselves out of their league and on a collision course with injury. Adherence to the following training laws will ensure the proper anatomical adaptation of a young or untrained body before subjecting it to the rigors of strength training.

Law 1: Before Developing Muscle Strength, Develop Joint Flexibility

Most strength training exercises, especially those employing free weights, use the whole range of motion around major joints. In some exercises, the weight of the barbell compresses the joints to such a degree that, if the person does not have good flexibility, strain and pain can result.

Consider deep squats: During a deep squat, compression of the knee joints may cause an inflexible athlete a lot of pain or even injury. Also, in the deep-squat position, a lack of good ankle flexibility forces the person to stay on the balls of the feet and toes, rather than on the flat of the foot where a good base of support and balance is ensured. Development of ankle flexibility (i.e., dorsiflexion, or bringing the toes toward the shin) is essential for all strength trainers but especially for entry-level athletes (Bompa, Di Pasquale, and Cornacchia 2003).

Good flexibility can greatly reduce or eliminate the incidence of injuries (Fredrick and Fredrick 2006). Flexibility aids in the elasticity of the muscles and provides a wider range of motion in the joints. Unfortunately, research on this subject has produced mixed reviews, causing athletes at all levels to neglect stretching programs. Regular stretching creates several essential training benefits, such as improved flexibility, reduced muscle soreness, good muscular and joint mobility, and greater efficiency in muscular movements and fluidity of motion (Nelson and Kokkonen 2007).

Law 2: Before Developing Muscle Strength, Develop the Tendons

The rate of gain in muscle strength always has the potential to exceed the rate at which tendons and ligaments can adapt to higher tensions. It is crucial that the tendons and ligaments have time to adapt, but because many people lack a long-term vision, they prematurely use heavy loads to develop specific muscle groups without strengthening the support systems of those muscles. It's like building a house on the sand—it may look good for a little while, but at high tide the whole thing is destroyed. Build your body on a rock-solid foundation, and this will not happen to you.

Tendons and ligaments are trainable and can actually increase in diameter as a result of proper anatomical adaptation training (see chapter 12), which increases their ability to withstand tension and wear. This training is accomplished via a low-load program for the first 1 to 2 years of training. Shortcuts are not the answer to achieving a well-developed, injury-free body. Patience will ultimately pay off.

Law 3: Before Developing the Limbs, Develop the Body's Core

It is true that big arms, shoulders, and legs are impressive, and a lot of training must be dedicated to these areas. Yet the trunk is the link between these areas, and the limbs can only be as strong as the trunk. The trunk has an abundance of abdominal and back muscles: Bundles that run in different directions surround the core of the body with a tight and powerful support system. A poorly developed trunk represents a weak support system for the hard-working arms and legs. So in spite of temptations in this direction, an entry-level training program must not revolve around the legs, arms, and shoulders. The focus must first be on strengthening the core area of the body—the muscles of the abdomen, lower back, and spinal column.

Back muscles consist of long and short muscles that run along the vertebral column. They work together as a unit, with the rotators and diagonal muscles, to perform many movements. Abdominal muscles run lengthwise (rectus abdominis), crosswise (transversus abdominis), and diagonally (abdominal obliques), enabling the trunk to bend forward and sideways, to rotate, and to twist. Since the abdominal muscles play important roles in many exercises, weakness in this area can severely limit the effectiveness of many strength actions.

Physical Benefits of the Metabolic Diet

One of the advantages of the metabolic diet is an increase in lean body mass without the use of anabolic steroids. The diet does many of the same things hormonally that steroids do, only naturally and without the risks. Another advantage of the metabolic diet is the ability to decrease body fat without sacrificing lean mass.

Decrease Body Fat Without Sacrificing Lean Mass Unlike the high-carbohydrate diet, when you gain weight on the metabolic diet much less of it is body fat and much more of it is muscle. We have found that eating fat doesn't lead to becoming fat. In fact, high dietary fat is instrumental in increasing lipolysis, or the breakdown of fat, and the resulting loss of body fat. Furthermore, the bodybuilder will maintain more lean body mass during the cutting phase of a diet.

On a high-carbohydrate diet, if you exercise correctly and do everything else right, you will find that when you lose weight about 60 percent of it is fat and 40 percent is muscle. You may get down to your optimal weight and be ripped, but you are much smaller than you could be. On the metabolic diet, those percentages go way down to 90 percent fat and 10 percent muscle during cutting. With the high-fat diet, you get down to the weight you want but find yourself maintaining a lot more lean body mass. You are bigger and stronger.

Feel Stronger While Losing Body Fat This stands to reason. Strength is proportional to muscle mass. When you are on a high-carbohydrate diet, sacrificing lean mass to get cut, you are obviously going to feel weaker. Because the metabolic diet cycles in a carbohydrate-loading phase every week to stimulate insulin production and trigger growth, you also do not find yourself getting into the psychological doldrums caused by following one diet all the way through each week. There is a variety in your diet, and this will help you be more energetic and committed than you'd be on the high-carbohydrate diet.

Maximize the Effects of Endogenous Anabolic Hormones The metabolic diet maximizes the serum levels of testosterone (even in women) (Goldin et al. 1994), growth hormone, and insulin to promote growth and to help firm up and shape your body as you shed fat. It basically conditions your hormonal system to create an endogenous (natural) anabolic (growth producing) environment. You will be surprised at how quickly you will be able to sculpt the body you want as these hormones work together.

The maximization of the three hormones is one of the most remarkable effects of the metabolic diet. Many hormones are reactive to others. For instance, as insulin goes up, growth hormone may decrease. If insulin decreases, growth hormone will increase. The two hormones generally do not work well together, but they can. During and after a workout, it is important to understand that the body decreases in serum testosterone and growth hormone. The metabolic diet attempts to maximize the effect of the three anabolic hormones for 24 hours because contrary to popular belief, you get stronger and form muscle not only after a workout but, if done correctly, during a workout as well. If you can increase both hormones, you will get a better anabolic effect than with an increase in one hormone alone. At the cellular level, the anabolic hormones must be elevated to drive amino acids into the cells for protein formation. The metabolic diet, the weekly cycling it incorporates (carbohydrate-loading phase) to stimulate insulin production, and the utilization of supplements such as Exersol (see www.MetabolicDiet.com) will optimize protein synthesis and maximize growth.

Chapter 8 recommends supplements you can use with the metabolic diet that will help increase insulin sensitivity, testosterone, growth hormone, and insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1) as needed. Your approach to supplements and exercise will be largely determined by how far you want to go in remaking your body. Whatever your goals, you will find the metabolic diet an effective tool in taking the weight off, keeping it off, and making your body look its best.

Increase Strength People on the metabolic diet often find their strength increasing as they are losing weight and body fat. Most bodybuilders find this amazing. They know that when they lose weight, they are also losing muscle and strength. But with the metabolic diet they're losing less muscle, and that, in combination with the fact their bodies are working in an anabolic environment, makes them stronger. They cannot believe it as they watch the fat melt away while their strength increases at the same time.

Decrease Catabolic Activity The metabolic diet results in lower levels of cortisol, a hormone secreted by the adrenal glands that breaks down muscle (catabolism) and uses it for energy. Certain supplements can be added to the diet (see chapter 8) to further decrease muscle breakdown during and after a workout while increasing insulin and growth hormone levels at critical times to promote an anabolic effect. Put simply, you will be breaking down less muscle while adding more.

Precontest Phase

When you get to your precontest phase, you won't have to make many changes: You will be doing the same thing you have been doing for the previous several weeks in the cutting phase. You will go off the higher-fat, high-protein diet and carb up to dramatically increase the glycogen and water inside the muscle cells. You want the cells swollen and big, but you want to cut off the carbohydrates before you begin to store extracellular water or fat and smooth out.

The metabolic diet's 5-day, 2-day week is almost like getting in shape for a contest every week. In the weekend carbohydrate-loading part of the diet, you will find out exactly how many hours you can load up on carbohydrate before you begin to smooth out and lose your contest look.

One of the many advantages of this diet is that if men or women want to enter a lot of contests, they can manipulate their diet so they never get much above their ideal body-fat percent levels during the muscle definition phase. By doing so, the athletes don't have huge gains in body fat, allowing them to drop to contest level in just 2 or 3 weeks.

You generally want to go into the precontest phase of diet and training about 16 weeks before a major contest. Because you already know what you need to do from previous weekends on the diet, you will be doing only some fine-tuning by lowering and increasing calories a bit as needed. You shouldn't be doing anything much out of the ordinary.

By the final 6 to 8 weeks before the contest, you should look fairly close to how you want to appear on stage. With this diet you can control exactly where you're at each week. After the weekend carbohydrate-loading portion of your diet, you should be looking great on Monday—ready to hit the gym hard with the high glycogen levels, muscle swelling, and other benefits derived from a well-honed weekend diet strategy.

You can go through the precontest phase in preparation for several contests a year as long as you keep your fat levels low; yet we suggest that you go through the precontest phase no more than four times a year. That means, obviously, a maximum of four contests a year. More than this will probably prevent you from going back into the mass phase and using it properly.

You must build up lean body mass to some extent between contests, which means you will gain a bit of fat. You will still be bulking up and cutting down—but it won't be like on other diets, where you gain so much body fat that by the time you lose it you're no better off than when you started.

Be Consistent Before Competition

Two things bodybuilders do to sabotage themselves before contests is to panic or try something new. Both of these scenarios can be disastrous. Bodybuilders who find themselves too fat may begin doing aerobic exercise, thinking it will get the extra body fat off. Doing about half an hour of aerobic activity certainly will not harm you as you will burn more free fatty acids. But people sometimes begin to panic and overdo it. They start doing 3 to 4 hours a day of aerobic activity to burn off the fat; but all they do is exhaust energy stores so that their bodies start using muscle tissue for energy.

Some people start pigging out to build mass as they go into superaerobic mode, thinking that aerobics will make up for the fat buildup. It doesn't work. Increasing calories and aerobics will most probably just increase catabolic activity in your body. Aerobics, while burning fat, can also destroy muscle. Even if it doesn't do appreciable damage, it will still limit to some degree the amount of muscle you can put on. As a rule, the fewer calories you take in and the more time you allow yourself to lose the body fat, the less aerobics you will need to do, and the more lean body mass you will retain. Allow yourself time to lose extra body fat and gauge yourself effectively as you move toward a contest.

Other bodybuilders decide to try something new just before a competition, looking to get that final edge. But this is a mistake. They may start with the sodium-depletion or sodium-loading trick. They try all sorts of things they've never tried before, and all of a sudden they end up wondering how it was that they were looking so great and now look so bad. Don't shock your system before a contest. Make a smooth landing into it. Don't throw everything away by trying to get the extra edge through a crazy stunt. Do nothing out of the ordinary, and certainly do not panic.

Stop Training One to Two Weeks Out

Stop training 1 to 2 weeks before the contest. That's pretty standard wherever you go. Our advice is to do your last heavy training session 10 days before the contest to give your muscles maximum time to recuperate and achieve maximum growth. Don't worry about maintaining muscle mass and tone. Your posing will take care of that and also give you some aerobic activity. Posing should, of course, be continued throughout this entire period with the exception of the day before the contest.

But although you shut down heavy training 10 days or so before a contest, this is the only time you should back off. Cutting back in training at any other time in the process limits the effectiveness of the diet and your ultimate growth. Diet and training work hand in hand. Exercise complements the metabolic diet. Hormonal changes caused by exercise result in increased activity of the enzyme lipoprotein lipase (LPL) in the muscle, which in turn increases breakdown of free fatty acids and decreases fat buildup.

Identify Your Best Day

As you conduct carbohydrate loading on the weekends, you will learn how many hours into the process that you look your very best. As suggested, you can further refine that time by experimenting with the types of food you eat, allowing you to precisely dial in that time when you're at your best. This information is vital when the contest arrives because you will eventually discover a day of the week when you're in top form. All the water you gained during your carbohydrate load is gone, and you have just the right balance between muscle glycogen and water. You also feel great. Everyone's system works differently, and there are wide differences among athletes. The goal is to find the right day for you, that day each week—Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, whatever—when you are consistently at your best.

Most contests occur on Saturday. Suppose you look your best on Wednesday of each week. Your goal then is to basically make the Saturday of your contest like a Wednesday. Because you look your best 3 days after your carbohydrate load, you should complete a carbohydrate load 3 days—in this case, on Tuesday and Wednesday—before the contest. On Saturday, 3 days later, you will look your best.

Note that the weekend before the contest, you won't carb up as usual. To carb up on the weekend and repeat the process 2 or 3 days later may well spill you back over to a carbohydrate-burning metabolism and smooth you out for that Saturday contest. Rather, skip your carbohydrate load the weekend before a contest. That way you will be on the high-protein, higher-fat part of the metabolic diet for 8 straight days, from the Monday 2 weeks before the contest to the Tuesday before the contest. Then begin your precontest carbohydrate load so you will hit the contest just right.

This is one area where the metabolic diet has a big advantage over the competition. Athletes on a high-carbohydrate diet are basically always loading up on carbohydrate foods, so it's difficult for them to manipulate their diets so their bodies respond well to carbohydrate loading before the contest. What often happens is they get off the high-carbohydrate diet for 3 days at the beginning of the week before a competition and go low carbohydrate for 72 hours; then they again load up on carbohydrate foods in an attempt to hit the contest right. The problem is, they really don't know how their bodies are going to react. Everything could work out well, or they could experience a complete disaster. With the metabolic diet, you know the exact hour when you look your best. Because your body goes through the cycle every week, it has become predictable and consistent. You know precisely what to expect since you won't be doing anything different from what you have done in the preceding months.

Three Basic Laws of Strength Training and Bodybuilding

The training principles just discussed provide a loose guideline for general training. There are also three laws of strength training that must be adhered to if an athlete is to proceed injury free to a more comprehensive, rigorous training program. Entry-level bodybuilders and strength athletes often begin training programs without being aware of the strain they will encounter and without understanding the progression or training methodology behind the program. These are usually the people who tend to seek advice from seasoned athletes (who may not be qualified to give it) and who, consequently, find themselves out of their league and on a collision course with injury. Adherence to the following training laws will ensure the proper anatomical adaptation of a young or untrained body before subjecting it to the rigors of strength training.

Law 1: Before Developing Muscle Strength, Develop Joint Flexibility

Most strength training exercises, especially those employing free weights, use the whole range of motion around major joints. In some exercises, the weight of the barbell compresses the joints to such a degree that, if the person does not have good flexibility, strain and pain can result.

Consider deep squats: During a deep squat, compression of the knee joints may cause an inflexible athlete a lot of pain or even injury. Also, in the deep-squat position, a lack of good ankle flexibility forces the person to stay on the balls of the feet and toes, rather than on the flat of the foot where a good base of support and balance is ensured. Development of ankle flexibility (i.e., dorsiflexion, or bringing the toes toward the shin) is essential for all strength trainers but especially for entry-level athletes (Bompa, Di Pasquale, and Cornacchia 2003).

Good flexibility can greatly reduce or eliminate the incidence of injuries (Fredrick and Fredrick 2006). Flexibility aids in the elasticity of the muscles and provides a wider range of motion in the joints. Unfortunately, research on this subject has produced mixed reviews, causing athletes at all levels to neglect stretching programs. Regular stretching creates several essential training benefits, such as improved flexibility, reduced muscle soreness, good muscular and joint mobility, and greater efficiency in muscular movements and fluidity of motion (Nelson and Kokkonen 2007).

Law 2: Before Developing Muscle Strength, Develop the Tendons

The rate of gain in muscle strength always has the potential to exceed the rate at which tendons and ligaments can adapt to higher tensions. It is crucial that the tendons and ligaments have time to adapt, but because many people lack a long-term vision, they prematurely use heavy loads to develop specific muscle groups without strengthening the support systems of those muscles. It's like building a house on the sand—it may look good for a little while, but at high tide the whole thing is destroyed. Build your body on a rock-solid foundation, and this will not happen to you.

Tendons and ligaments are trainable and can actually increase in diameter as a result of proper anatomical adaptation training (see chapter 12), which increases their ability to withstand tension and wear. This training is accomplished via a low-load program for the first 1 to 2 years of training. Shortcuts are not the answer to achieving a well-developed, injury-free body. Patience will ultimately pay off.

Law 3: Before Developing the Limbs, Develop the Body's Core

It is true that big arms, shoulders, and legs are impressive, and a lot of training must be dedicated to these areas. Yet the trunk is the link between these areas, and the limbs can only be as strong as the trunk. The trunk has an abundance of abdominal and back muscles: Bundles that run in different directions surround the core of the body with a tight and powerful support system. A poorly developed trunk represents a weak support system for the hard-working arms and legs. So in spite of temptations in this direction, an entry-level training program must not revolve around the legs, arms, and shoulders. The focus must first be on strengthening the core area of the body—the muscles of the abdomen, lower back, and spinal column.

Back muscles consist of long and short muscles that run along the vertebral column. They work together as a unit, with the rotators and diagonal muscles, to perform many movements. Abdominal muscles run lengthwise (rectus abdominis), crosswise (transversus abdominis), and diagonally (abdominal obliques), enabling the trunk to bend forward and sideways, to rotate, and to twist. Since the abdominal muscles play important roles in many exercises, weakness in this area can severely limit the effectiveness of many strength actions.

Physical Benefits of the Metabolic Diet

One of the advantages of the metabolic diet is an increase in lean body mass without the use of anabolic steroids. The diet does many of the same things hormonally that steroids do, only naturally and without the risks. Another advantage of the metabolic diet is the ability to decrease body fat without sacrificing lean mass.

Decrease Body Fat Without Sacrificing Lean Mass Unlike the high-carbohydrate diet, when you gain weight on the metabolic diet much less of it is body fat and much more of it is muscle. We have found that eating fat doesn't lead to becoming fat. In fact, high dietary fat is instrumental in increasing lipolysis, or the breakdown of fat, and the resulting loss of body fat. Furthermore, the bodybuilder will maintain more lean body mass during the cutting phase of a diet.

On a high-carbohydrate diet, if you exercise correctly and do everything else right, you will find that when you lose weight about 60 percent of it is fat and 40 percent is muscle. You may get down to your optimal weight and be ripped, but you are much smaller than you could be. On the metabolic diet, those percentages go way down to 90 percent fat and 10 percent muscle during cutting. With the high-fat diet, you get down to the weight you want but find yourself maintaining a lot more lean body mass. You are bigger and stronger.

Feel Stronger While Losing Body Fat This stands to reason. Strength is proportional to muscle mass. When you are on a high-carbohydrate diet, sacrificing lean mass to get cut, you are obviously going to feel weaker. Because the metabolic diet cycles in a carbohydrate-loading phase every week to stimulate insulin production and trigger growth, you also do not find yourself getting into the psychological doldrums caused by following one diet all the way through each week. There is a variety in your diet, and this will help you be more energetic and committed than you'd be on the high-carbohydrate diet.

Maximize the Effects of Endogenous Anabolic Hormones The metabolic diet maximizes the serum levels of testosterone (even in women) (Goldin et al. 1994), growth hormone, and insulin to promote growth and to help firm up and shape your body as you shed fat. It basically conditions your hormonal system to create an endogenous (natural) anabolic (growth producing) environment. You will be surprised at how quickly you will be able to sculpt the body you want as these hormones work together.

The maximization of the three hormones is one of the most remarkable effects of the metabolic diet. Many hormones are reactive to others. For instance, as insulin goes up, growth hormone may decrease. If insulin decreases, growth hormone will increase. The two hormones generally do not work well together, but they can. During and after a workout, it is important to understand that the body decreases in serum testosterone and growth hormone. The metabolic diet attempts to maximize the effect of the three anabolic hormones for 24 hours because contrary to popular belief, you get stronger and form muscle not only after a workout but, if done correctly, during a workout as well. If you can increase both hormones, you will get a better anabolic effect than with an increase in one hormone alone. At the cellular level, the anabolic hormones must be elevated to drive amino acids into the cells for protein formation. The metabolic diet, the weekly cycling it incorporates (carbohydrate-loading phase) to stimulate insulin production, and the utilization of supplements such as Exersol (see www.MetabolicDiet.com) will optimize protein synthesis and maximize growth.

Chapter 8 recommends supplements you can use with the metabolic diet that will help increase insulin sensitivity, testosterone, growth hormone, and insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1) as needed. Your approach to supplements and exercise will be largely determined by how far you want to go in remaking your body. Whatever your goals, you will find the metabolic diet an effective tool in taking the weight off, keeping it off, and making your body look its best.

Increase Strength People on the metabolic diet often find their strength increasing as they are losing weight and body fat. Most bodybuilders find this amazing. They know that when they lose weight, they are also losing muscle and strength. But with the metabolic diet they're losing less muscle, and that, in combination with the fact their bodies are working in an anabolic environment, makes them stronger. They cannot believe it as they watch the fat melt away while their strength increases at the same time.

Decrease Catabolic Activity The metabolic diet results in lower levels of cortisol, a hormone secreted by the adrenal glands that breaks down muscle (catabolism) and uses it for energy. Certain supplements can be added to the diet (see chapter 8) to further decrease muscle breakdown during and after a workout while increasing insulin and growth hormone levels at critical times to promote an anabolic effect. Put simply, you will be breaking down less muscle while adding more.

Precontest Phase

When you get to your precontest phase, you won't have to make many changes: You will be doing the same thing you have been doing for the previous several weeks in the cutting phase. You will go off the higher-fat, high-protein diet and carb up to dramatically increase the glycogen and water inside the muscle cells. You want the cells swollen and big, but you want to cut off the carbohydrates before you begin to store extracellular water or fat and smooth out.

The metabolic diet's 5-day, 2-day week is almost like getting in shape for a contest every week. In the weekend carbohydrate-loading part of the diet, you will find out exactly how many hours you can load up on carbohydrate before you begin to smooth out and lose your contest look.

One of the many advantages of this diet is that if men or women want to enter a lot of contests, they can manipulate their diet so they never get much above their ideal body-fat percent levels during the muscle definition phase. By doing so, the athletes don't have huge gains in body fat, allowing them to drop to contest level in just 2 or 3 weeks.

You generally want to go into the precontest phase of diet and training about 16 weeks before a major contest. Because you already know what you need to do from previous weekends on the diet, you will be doing only some fine-tuning by lowering and increasing calories a bit as needed. You shouldn't be doing anything much out of the ordinary.

By the final 6 to 8 weeks before the contest, you should look fairly close to how you want to appear on stage. With this diet you can control exactly where you're at each week. After the weekend carbohydrate-loading portion of your diet, you should be looking great on Monday—ready to hit the gym hard with the high glycogen levels, muscle swelling, and other benefits derived from a well-honed weekend diet strategy.

You can go through the precontest phase in preparation for several contests a year as long as you keep your fat levels low; yet we suggest that you go through the precontest phase no more than four times a year. That means, obviously, a maximum of four contests a year. More than this will probably prevent you from going back into the mass phase and using it properly.

You must build up lean body mass to some extent between contests, which means you will gain a bit of fat. You will still be bulking up and cutting down—but it won't be like on other diets, where you gain so much body fat that by the time you lose it you're no better off than when you started.

Be Consistent Before Competition

Two things bodybuilders do to sabotage themselves before contests is to panic or try something new. Both of these scenarios can be disastrous. Bodybuilders who find themselves too fat may begin doing aerobic exercise, thinking it will get the extra body fat off. Doing about half an hour of aerobic activity certainly will not harm you as you will burn more free fatty acids. But people sometimes begin to panic and overdo it. They start doing 3 to 4 hours a day of aerobic activity to burn off the fat; but all they do is exhaust energy stores so that their bodies start using muscle tissue for energy.

Some people start pigging out to build mass as they go into superaerobic mode, thinking that aerobics will make up for the fat buildup. It doesn't work. Increasing calories and aerobics will most probably just increase catabolic activity in your body. Aerobics, while burning fat, can also destroy muscle. Even if it doesn't do appreciable damage, it will still limit to some degree the amount of muscle you can put on. As a rule, the fewer calories you take in and the more time you allow yourself to lose the body fat, the less aerobics you will need to do, and the more lean body mass you will retain. Allow yourself time to lose extra body fat and gauge yourself effectively as you move toward a contest.

Other bodybuilders decide to try something new just before a competition, looking to get that final edge. But this is a mistake. They may start with the sodium-depletion or sodium-loading trick. They try all sorts of things they've never tried before, and all of a sudden they end up wondering how it was that they were looking so great and now look so bad. Don't shock your system before a contest. Make a smooth landing into it. Don't throw everything away by trying to get the extra edge through a crazy stunt. Do nothing out of the ordinary, and certainly do not panic.

Stop Training One to Two Weeks Out

Stop training 1 to 2 weeks before the contest. That's pretty standard wherever you go. Our advice is to do your last heavy training session 10 days before the contest to give your muscles maximum time to recuperate and achieve maximum growth. Don't worry about maintaining muscle mass and tone. Your posing will take care of that and also give you some aerobic activity. Posing should, of course, be continued throughout this entire period with the exception of the day before the contest.

But although you shut down heavy training 10 days or so before a contest, this is the only time you should back off. Cutting back in training at any other time in the process limits the effectiveness of the diet and your ultimate growth. Diet and training work hand in hand. Exercise complements the metabolic diet. Hormonal changes caused by exercise result in increased activity of the enzyme lipoprotein lipase (LPL) in the muscle, which in turn increases breakdown of free fatty acids and decreases fat buildup.

Identify Your Best Day

As you conduct carbohydrate loading on the weekends, you will learn how many hours into the process that you look your very best. As suggested, you can further refine that time by experimenting with the types of food you eat, allowing you to precisely dial in that time when you're at your best. This information is vital when the contest arrives because you will eventually discover a day of the week when you're in top form. All the water you gained during your carbohydrate load is gone, and you have just the right balance between muscle glycogen and water. You also feel great. Everyone's system works differently, and there are wide differences among athletes. The goal is to find the right day for you, that day each week—Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, whatever—when you are consistently at your best.

Most contests occur on Saturday. Suppose you look your best on Wednesday of each week. Your goal then is to basically make the Saturday of your contest like a Wednesday. Because you look your best 3 days after your carbohydrate load, you should complete a carbohydrate load 3 days—in this case, on Tuesday and Wednesday—before the contest. On Saturday, 3 days later, you will look your best.

Note that the weekend before the contest, you won't carb up as usual. To carb up on the weekend and repeat the process 2 or 3 days later may well spill you back over to a carbohydrate-burning metabolism and smooth you out for that Saturday contest. Rather, skip your carbohydrate load the weekend before a contest. That way you will be on the high-protein, higher-fat part of the metabolic diet for 8 straight days, from the Monday 2 weeks before the contest to the Tuesday before the contest. Then begin your precontest carbohydrate load so you will hit the contest just right.

This is one area where the metabolic diet has a big advantage over the competition. Athletes on a high-carbohydrate diet are basically always loading up on carbohydrate foods, so it's difficult for them to manipulate their diets so their bodies respond well to carbohydrate loading before the contest. What often happens is they get off the high-carbohydrate diet for 3 days at the beginning of the week before a competition and go low carbohydrate for 72 hours; then they again load up on carbohydrate foods in an attempt to hit the contest right. The problem is, they really don't know how their bodies are going to react. Everything could work out well, or they could experience a complete disaster. With the metabolic diet, you know the exact hour when you look your best. Because your body goes through the cycle every week, it has become predictable and consistent. You know precisely what to expect since you won't be doing anything different from what you have done in the preceding months.

Three Basic Laws of Strength Training and Bodybuilding

The training principles just discussed provide a loose guideline for general training. There are also three laws of strength training that must be adhered to if an athlete is to proceed injury free to a more comprehensive, rigorous training program. Entry-level bodybuilders and strength athletes often begin training programs without being aware of the strain they will encounter and without understanding the progression or training methodology behind the program. These are usually the people who tend to seek advice from seasoned athletes (who may not be qualified to give it) and who, consequently, find themselves out of their league and on a collision course with injury. Adherence to the following training laws will ensure the proper anatomical adaptation of a young or untrained body before subjecting it to the rigors of strength training.

Law 1: Before Developing Muscle Strength, Develop Joint Flexibility

Most strength training exercises, especially those employing free weights, use the whole range of motion around major joints. In some exercises, the weight of the barbell compresses the joints to such a degree that, if the person does not have good flexibility, strain and pain can result.

Consider deep squats: During a deep squat, compression of the knee joints may cause an inflexible athlete a lot of pain or even injury. Also, in the deep-squat position, a lack of good ankle flexibility forces the person to stay on the balls of the feet and toes, rather than on the flat of the foot where a good base of support and balance is ensured. Development of ankle flexibility (i.e., dorsiflexion, or bringing the toes toward the shin) is essential for all strength trainers but especially for entry-level athletes (Bompa, Di Pasquale, and Cornacchia 2003).

Good flexibility can greatly reduce or eliminate the incidence of injuries (Fredrick and Fredrick 2006). Flexibility aids in the elasticity of the muscles and provides a wider range of motion in the joints. Unfortunately, research on this subject has produced mixed reviews, causing athletes at all levels to neglect stretching programs. Regular stretching creates several essential training benefits, such as improved flexibility, reduced muscle soreness, good muscular and joint mobility, and greater efficiency in muscular movements and fluidity of motion (Nelson and Kokkonen 2007).

Law 2: Before Developing Muscle Strength, Develop the Tendons

The rate of gain in muscle strength always has the potential to exceed the rate at which tendons and ligaments can adapt to higher tensions. It is crucial that the tendons and ligaments have time to adapt, but because many people lack a long-term vision, they prematurely use heavy loads to develop specific muscle groups without strengthening the support systems of those muscles. It's like building a house on the sand—it may look good for a little while, but at high tide the whole thing is destroyed. Build your body on a rock-solid foundation, and this will not happen to you.

Tendons and ligaments are trainable and can actually increase in diameter as a result of proper anatomical adaptation training (see chapter 12), which increases their ability to withstand tension and wear. This training is accomplished via a low-load program for the first 1 to 2 years of training. Shortcuts are not the answer to achieving a well-developed, injury-free body. Patience will ultimately pay off.

Law 3: Before Developing the Limbs, Develop the Body's Core

It is true that big arms, shoulders, and legs are impressive, and a lot of training must be dedicated to these areas. Yet the trunk is the link between these areas, and the limbs can only be as strong as the trunk. The trunk has an abundance of abdominal and back muscles: Bundles that run in different directions surround the core of the body with a tight and powerful support system. A poorly developed trunk represents a weak support system for the hard-working arms and legs. So in spite of temptations in this direction, an entry-level training program must not revolve around the legs, arms, and shoulders. The focus must first be on strengthening the core area of the body—the muscles of the abdomen, lower back, and spinal column.

Back muscles consist of long and short muscles that run along the vertebral column. They work together as a unit, with the rotators and diagonal muscles, to perform many movements. Abdominal muscles run lengthwise (rectus abdominis), crosswise (transversus abdominis), and diagonally (abdominal obliques), enabling the trunk to bend forward and sideways, to rotate, and to twist. Since the abdominal muscles play important roles in many exercises, weakness in this area can severely limit the effectiveness of many strength actions.

Physical Benefits of the Metabolic Diet

One of the advantages of the metabolic diet is an increase in lean body mass without the use of anabolic steroids. The diet does many of the same things hormonally that steroids do, only naturally and without the risks. Another advantage of the metabolic diet is the ability to decrease body fat without sacrificing lean mass.

Decrease Body Fat Without Sacrificing Lean Mass Unlike the high-carbohydrate diet, when you gain weight on the metabolic diet much less of it is body fat and much more of it is muscle. We have found that eating fat doesn't lead to becoming fat. In fact, high dietary fat is instrumental in increasing lipolysis, or the breakdown of fat, and the resulting loss of body fat. Furthermore, the bodybuilder will maintain more lean body mass during the cutting phase of a diet.

On a high-carbohydrate diet, if you exercise correctly and do everything else right, you will find that when you lose weight about 60 percent of it is fat and 40 percent is muscle. You may get down to your optimal weight and be ripped, but you are much smaller than you could be. On the metabolic diet, those percentages go way down to 90 percent fat and 10 percent muscle during cutting. With the high-fat diet, you get down to the weight you want but find yourself maintaining a lot more lean body mass. You are bigger and stronger.

Feel Stronger While Losing Body Fat This stands to reason. Strength is proportional to muscle mass. When you are on a high-carbohydrate diet, sacrificing lean mass to get cut, you are obviously going to feel weaker. Because the metabolic diet cycles in a carbohydrate-loading phase every week to stimulate insulin production and trigger growth, you also do not find yourself getting into the psychological doldrums caused by following one diet all the way through each week. There is a variety in your diet, and this will help you be more energetic and committed than you'd be on the high-carbohydrate diet.

Maximize the Effects of Endogenous Anabolic Hormones The metabolic diet maximizes the serum levels of testosterone (even in women) (Goldin et al. 1994), growth hormone, and insulin to promote growth and to help firm up and shape your body as you shed fat. It basically conditions your hormonal system to create an endogenous (natural) anabolic (growth producing) environment. You will be surprised at how quickly you will be able to sculpt the body you want as these hormones work together.

The maximization of the three hormones is one of the most remarkable effects of the metabolic diet. Many hormones are reactive to others. For instance, as insulin goes up, growth hormone may decrease. If insulin decreases, growth hormone will increase. The two hormones generally do not work well together, but they can. During and after a workout, it is important to understand that the body decreases in serum testosterone and growth hormone. The metabolic diet attempts to maximize the effect of the three anabolic hormones for 24 hours because contrary to popular belief, you get stronger and form muscle not only after a workout but, if done correctly, during a workout as well. If you can increase both hormones, you will get a better anabolic effect than with an increase in one hormone alone. At the cellular level, the anabolic hormones must be elevated to drive amino acids into the cells for protein formation. The metabolic diet, the weekly cycling it incorporates (carbohydrate-loading phase) to stimulate insulin production, and the utilization of supplements such as Exersol (see www.MetabolicDiet.com) will optimize protein synthesis and maximize growth.

Chapter 8 recommends supplements you can use with the metabolic diet that will help increase insulin sensitivity, testosterone, growth hormone, and insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1) as needed. Your approach to supplements and exercise will be largely determined by how far you want to go in remaking your body. Whatever your goals, you will find the metabolic diet an effective tool in taking the weight off, keeping it off, and making your body look its best.

Increase Strength People on the metabolic diet often find their strength increasing as they are losing weight and body fat. Most bodybuilders find this amazing. They know that when they lose weight, they are also losing muscle and strength. But with the metabolic diet they're losing less muscle, and that, in combination with the fact their bodies are working in an anabolic environment, makes them stronger. They cannot believe it as they watch the fat melt away while their strength increases at the same time.

Decrease Catabolic Activity The metabolic diet results in lower levels of cortisol, a hormone secreted by the adrenal glands that breaks down muscle (catabolism) and uses it for energy. Certain supplements can be added to the diet (see chapter 8) to further decrease muscle breakdown during and after a workout while increasing insulin and growth hormone levels at critical times to promote an anabolic effect. Put simply, you will be breaking down less muscle while adding more.