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I touched on with my previous article, there are many important factors to consider during a mass gaining phase that are often over-looked and a mass gaining phase is rarely given the same attention to detail that a trainee would give their pre-contest diet.
One thing in particular that is often overlooked during a mass gaining phase is the negative impact of a prolonged caloric surplus and increased amounts of carbohydrates. As you may know, during a dieting phase, metabolic and hormonal adaptations occur that negatively impact muscle mass and fat burning potential. These include a reduction in resting testosterone levels, a rise in cortisol levels and the metabolic rate begins to decrease.
These conditions will worsen the longer the diet lasts, the harder you push, and the lower body fat levels become; that is part and parcel of dieting for a contest! However, as well as the obvious negative in increasing body fat levels, there are also hormonal changes that occur during a mass gaining phase that the trainee should be aware of in order to optimise their progress.
A diet break during a mass gaining phase is the process of switching focus from adding mass to reducing body fat for a short period of time, before continuing the mass gaining phase. The duration of the diet break will depend on a number of individually specific factors, but around 4-8 weeks is usually adequate. The diet break serves three main purposes:
1. Brings body fat levels back down so that they are not too high at the end of the offseason.
2. Restores optimal hormonal environment for adding muscle.
3. Restores body fat to low end of the range that is optimal for that individual to add muscle.
The first one is perhaps quite obvious, if you are giving yourself a long offseason, 24 weeks or more in which you are adding say 1.5 lbs. per week to your weight, at the end of the 24 weeks you would be 36 lbs. above your previous stage weight. If you have managed to add 5 lbs. of muscle (an optimistic estimation for natural, experienced trainees) in that time then you still have 31 lbs. of fat left to lose before you are stage ready!
Losing so much body fat would require a long and intense diet, no doubt resulting in a good portion of that 5 lbs. of new muscle being lost in the process. So the first advantage of adding a diet break into the offseason will be to bring your body fat level back down so you are in a better place to start your actually prep diet when the time comes.
As this is a short diet break, no-longer than 8 weeks in duration, is far less intense than a competition diet and results in reduced body fat levels that are still significantly above competition body fat levels, you should not be losing any of the lean mass you have added.
So on to point 2 – hormones: When you finish your competition diet, due to the reduced carbohydrate intake, both muscles cells and fat cells are extremely receptive to insulin. As insulin is responsible for effectively driving nutrients into the cells, this is a great time to add muscle. Of course planning is needed to ensure that you are maximizing the benefits of the increased insulin sensitivity in muscles whilst minimizing the impact of the increased insulin sensitivity in the fat cells.
However, after a while and as carbohydrate intake continues to increase throughout the offseason, the muscle cells become less sensitive to the effects of insulin. This will result in an increase in the amount of body fat being added relative to the amount of muscle being gained. So another great benefit of the diet break is that it will restore the insulin sensitivity in the muscle tissue.
As body fat levels continue to increase, hormone levels will also be negatively impacted, much in the same way they are towards the end of your contest diet. Like when body fat levels become extremely low, as they get too high, circulating testosterone levels may be reduced and estrogen levels will increase. The adipose tissue is full of aromatose which is responsible for the conversion of testosterone into estrogen and hence, higher body fat levels means more aromatose, resulting in higher levels of estrogen.
In addition to lower testosterone levels, higher body fat levels have also been linked to lower growth hormone levels. So to optimize your hormonal environment for adding muscle it is important to keep those body fat levels in check!
Point 3 is perhaps largely linked to individual specific hormonal levels in that different trainees have different set points with regards to body fat levels where their ability to gain muscle is optimized. A certain degree of experience with the trainee, monitoring their progress will be needed to find the body fat range that appears to be best for them to optimize gains. But generally, someone with a more ectomorphic physique who finds it easier to stay lean will maximize their ability to add muscle at lower body fat levels than a mesomorph.
A trainee with more of an endomorphic physique may make the most progress at still higher body fat levels than the mesomorph, but they are also likely to find it harder to lose body fat when it comes to dieting. So this will also need to be considered when planning the body fat range at which that trainee wishes to stay within during their offseason.
I like to compare this type of diet break to effectively hitting the “pause button” in your offseason. Then, when you resume you do so with more room to manoeuvre from a body fat standpoint and with an improved hormonal environment for adding muscle.
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