Christian's Blog

I'll admit this title is a bit outrageous but will become clearer as I go along. One day I was researching for any evidence of people who had achieved outstanding increases in lean muscle mass when it dawned on me...the local high school!

You: WHAT??

Me: Who puts on more muscle and size faster than a teenager going through puberty? Think about it! Nobody!

So, I ask the ridiculous follow-up question, "What can teenage boys teach us about getting huge fast?" The answers will surprise you since they can't tell you a single thing about hypertrophy 1, rep maxes, burnout sets, or how to isolate a given muscle group.

So, why the heck do I mention them? Well, It isn't uncommon for teenagers to put on the same amount of muscle in a summer that it takes an adult male 2-4 consistent years to achieve. See where I'm going with this? If we can pick out some of the things they do differently than the rest of the world, then we might be able to replicate their once in a lifetime growth spurt phenomenon.

Playing at Tri Games on campus.

Case Study Time!

So what do they do differently?

1. They eat like MACHINES.
2. They have favorable increases in 'male hormones.'
3. They are usually active.

I know what you're thinking... DUH! But, last time I checked my 'goods' already dropped and my voice doesn't squeak like a mouse! So this case study warrants a further breakdown on how to grow like a teenager...again!

Observation 1: Eat Like Machines

There's a reason why every mother of a teenage boy has a story about doubling her food bills, mysteriously 'disappearing' food items from the pantry, and never having any milk left in the fridge. Teenagers are growing and that growth is accompanied by lots of food.

Guiding Teenager Principle To Body Building:
If you want to get bigger you have to EAT for a BIGGER YOU. Want to Gain 10 lbs? Eat for a person 10lbs bigger than you! 

My Twist on Optimizing this Principle:
While increasing your food sounds easy, it's not. It takes a few days (on average 5) of feeling 'uncomfortably' full before your digestive enzymes, stomach acid, and gut flora adapt to the increase in caloric intake. Once they do, you will become a food-processing machine. However, make sure you keep it low carb, higher fat/protein to optimize how much insulin your body secretes and therefore how much muscle/fat you pack on.

When I gained 20 lbs of muscle and lost 7 lbs of fat during my one-month experiment, I ate 60% fat, 23% protein, 17% carbs. While the ratios don't have to be exact, the simple rule is the more carbs, the fatter you'll get. The more protein and fat, the more muscle you'll put on. It's not much more complicated than that.

Observation 2: Favorable Increases in 'Male Hormones'

When teenagers go through puberty their hypothalamus produces GnRH (gonadotrophin-releasing hormones), which triggers the anterior pituitary to release LH (luteinizing hormone), which then travels in the blood and tells the cells in the testes (males) to produce testosterone via the Leydig cells. In some studies they've recorded puberty levels of testosterone surge 50x higher than the minute amounts pre-puberty. The effects of testosterone, such as increased lean muscle mass, increased bone density and decreased fat mass are largely responsible for the incredible growth many male teenagers experience. Other hormones such as growth hormone, IGF-1 (insulin like growth factor 1), and DHEA also elevate in this phase of development and no doubt play a role as well.

Guiding Teenager Principle To Body Building:

To get bigger, you should optimize (and likely increase) your testosterone levels. Think that's impossible? Read on.

My Twist on Optimizing this Principle:
DISCLAIMER: First of all you should to go to your doctor and get your blood tested. Messing with hormone levels can be a serious thing and if you have a medical condition you should discuss it with your doctor.

Luckily, I don't recommend doing anything crazy like steroid injections or topical creams. My testosterone levels started at 615 and after a month plummeted to 298. Hardly someone you should take advice from! However, I was overeating flax seed oil, thinking the omega 3s would increase protein synthesis and decrease recovery time as a number of reputable studies suggest. Little did I realize the estrogenic effects of flax have been grossly under reported. Three weeks of no flax and the recommendations below later: I doubled my testosterone back to 612. Happy days for my manhood.

• DIET: I recommend getting off your low fat diet and getting onto a high fat diet. Grossly oversimplifying that recommendation, remember hormones are made from fat and cholesterol and without exogenous intake of them it's harder to increase your endogenous production of vital hormones. Does that mean you'll get heart disease chasing increased muscle tone? As long as you aren't eating high-sugar/starch junk the whole time... no.
• SLEEP: A number of studies have shown getting good sleep and more importantly falling asleep before midnight as ways of increasing growth hormone production.
• SUPPLEMENTS: I took cod liver oil (vitamin A & D), grass fed butter (vitamin K), almonds (vitamin E), zinc, and selenium. Zinc and Selenium are instrumental in their co-factor responsibilities for biosynthesis of hormones. Also, the fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E, and K taken together have been shown to have favorable anabolic effects on the body. Vitamin D, many people don't realize, is actually a hormone - a cancer-preventive one at that.

Observation 3: They are Usually Active

This is the easiest of all of the principles to understand. Teenagers are usually extremely active despite numerous eyewitness accounts of Mountain Dew fueled Halo 2 all-nighters. Between sports, friends, and chasing girls without a game plan, teenage boys get enough exercise to support their growth spurts. 

Guiding Teenager Principle To Body Building:
Get exercise. Duh! 

My Twist on Optimizing this Principle:
After reading plenty of research, 'broscience,' and my own experiences, I can confidently conclude that you can do more to optimize your lean mass growth than simply exercising.

What is the best type of exercise for inducing teenager-like growth? High Intensity, Short Duration Workouts. This will increase both a hormonal and neurologic adaptation that studies have shown to increase testosterone levels and muscle mass better than longer duration 75% of max type workouts. In other words, do 1-2 sets of 4 multi-joint exercises (squat, bench, etc.) with the heaviest weights you can lift. After that go home, eat, rest, and repeat.

Hope you enjoyed it!
- CC

Manipulating Evolutionary Biology For Immortality and Body Redesign Part 2: Intermittent Fasting

What is Intermittent Fasting?

Intermittent Fasting (IF) is a modified version of the calorie restriction diet that seeks to capitalize on the physiological benefits of human deprivation and survival mechanism. More accurately, what happens to the body when it episodically does not get food and how it responds following the fasted state with that of a well fed state. A true IF consisted of about 14 to18 hour fasts and sometimes an occasional full day or alternating day fast protocol. The benefits owe their success to the human body's ability to adapt to a variety of situations in order to survive in homeostasis. This is the reason you switch up your gym routine every month or so, because we adapt incredibly efficiently and we want to shock the system to keep it (the body) on its heels. 

Research

A recent article in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition  gives a great overview of these benefits, which include decreases in blood pressure, reduction in oxidative damage to lipids, protein and DNA, improvement in insulin sensitivity and glucose uptake, as well as decreases in fat mass. It also suggested higher Superoxide dismutase levels and higher resistance to oxidative stress. Remember in Part 1, oxidative stress = bad = possible shorter life.

My Experience

Intermittent Fasting, it appears, works! Although the research isn't absolute and probably will never be considering no drug companies stand to make money on it and therefore won't back it! The preliminary research results are hard to argue with and better yet, many people (including myself) have experimented with Intermittent Fasting (IF) for our own personal escapades. Does it work? Well, I ate 4200 calories a day for 30 days and dropped by body fat percentage 15.7% to 10.3%. I allotted one (rarely two) IF days a week. Yea, I'd say it works. Besides, even if it only had a small impact, it's not that hard to do and is essentially free, so the question begs: Why not?

Evolutionary Biology vs. Broscience

For those trying to gain muscle, common 'broscience' has been to never have an empty stomach or risk withering away your hard-earned iron. Your body says otherwise. Furthermore, studies have refined that it's not the total calorie consumption but rather the EPISODIC DEPRIVATION that accounts for intermittent fasting's success. Taking the big picture, one can understand this by tying in the built-in survival mechanisms in your body. When you were a caveman, you didn't always have a supermarket on the corner with fresh eggs and hearty protein for your post-workout meal. Often times you went hunting and didn't kill anything. Instead of immediately breaking down muscle for fuel, your body adapts and uses fat, a higher energy molecule than a carb. It also up regulates growth hormone secretion and insulin sensitivity so that when you DO get that prey, your body is in an advantageous hormonal position to induce growth and repair of your muscles so that momentary risk in survival won't happen as easily next time. With that and a host of other favorable effects like those mentioned before in the study, it's fun to see how you can manipulate an evolutionary adaptation of physiology to redesign your body in the modern world.

What Does a Typical Day Look Like?

IF rules state a 14-18 hour fast is optimal to induce positive results without blending in starvation and catabolic states. I take the middle road, 16 hours. What does that look like? Once or twice a week I finish my dinner at 6pm and don't eat again for 16 hours. That's noon the next day. I essentially skip breakfast and then eat my normal calories for the rest of the day. Overfeeding and losing weight? Welcome to utopia. :)

Living Longer?

I believe we have a two-fold mechanism for longevity. First, during periods of fasting the body is better able to repair and heal, which aids the organism. Secondly, you do get a slight reduction in calories (without the fear of losing muscle) and resistance to oxidative stress, which means less chance of DNA and telomere damage and a premature aging process! Long live randomly skipping breakfast twice a week!

Cheers,
CC

Manipulating Evolutionary Biology For Immortality and Body Redesign Part 1: Calorie Restriction and Aging

Man has long strived for ways to live forever. From the Fountain of Youth to pharmaceutical drugs to calorie restriction, man has stopped at nothing to achieve the impossible: Living Forever.

So what if I told you there is a way you could increase your lifespan, reduce your risk for chronic diseases, and improve your muscle/fat ratio. Sounds like a late-night infomercial doesn't it! It's not! It's Intermittent Fasting.

Before I delve into what intermittent fasting is (stay tuned for Part 2) we need to understand a few theories and few important concepts about the human body and the aging process. To start, one of the theories on aging and many of the most diabolical chronic disease centers on a concept called oxidative stress. Scientists have identified this wonderful cellular component called a telomere and they have correlated life expectancy with the length of these bad boys. Without going into the complex mechanisms, the basic idea is the longer they are the longer you live. Simple enough? Moving on.

Now wouldn't it be great if you knew what shortened them. Ah ha, we do! ROS! ROS?? Reactive Oxygen Species or 'free radicals' can and do damage these telomeres that guard our cell's DNA and can reduce our lifespan.

The next question you may ask is how do we get rid of these free radicals? Wouldn't we then live forever? Maybe, although it's not quite that simple. Obviously, a diet rich in veggies (antioxidants), quality meats, and no junk is a great way (according to the newest literature) towards living a longer life. The more antioxidants ('killers' of free radicals), the less chance the free radicals have to run wild and damage the telomeres and DNA, and the better chance you have at living longer and healthier! I won't bore you since the literature is LITTERED with research on antioxidants and free radical scavenging for disease prevention and longevity.

Another way around this problem of reducing inevitable oxidative stress revolves around calorie consumption. In order for the food you eat to be broken down and turned into energy (ATP), it must be exposed to oxygen and become oxidized. This is fantastic for the organism since it gets its everyday energy for functions like the Na K pump, muscle contraction, biosynthesis, repair, and numerous other cellular processes. The one major consequence of making ATP is free radicals (superoxide, hydrogen peroxide, hydroxy radicals) are formed and if your diet doesn't have many antioxidants or your body is low on glutathione or CoQ10, then they can freely damage the cell, organelles, and possibly telomere length.

So the conundrum is that this happens every time you eat a calorie of food. You need to eat to stay alive but is eating slowly killing you? In fact, what makes it more interesting is if you graph the species of animals with the slowest metabolic rates (rates of oxidizing food into energy) it is inversely related to lifespan! The Less you Eat the Longer You Live!

SIDE GEEK NOTE: They say your mother's genes determine your lifespan. This old wives' tale is actually partly true in the sense you inherit your mother's mitochondria and mitochondrial DNA (unlike nuclear DNA) is unrepairable, so if free radicals damage that particular DNA that cell suffers. If that happens to enough cells you won't live as long. Sad face. Give Mom a hug.

To Eat or Not To Eat?

So I'm here to tell you about another solution that a group of scientists have looked into for manipulating life expectancy. If you live longer when you eat less... why not eat less? Wow, these doctors are brilliant (DUH! lol). When man is faced with immortality or rationality, what do the movies pick? Immortality. See there is, in fact, a whole society of people willing to chronically cut calories and underfeed their bodies despite their tummy's best attempts at gurgling. Rational? No. But It's for the chance at living forever so wisdom is shot out the window! What became of these studies you ask?

Cut Calories for Longevity = Better in Theory than Practice

Moral of the story here is it's a nice story that when you eat less you'll have less oxidative stress and therefore you'll live longer. The science backs it up. No doubts here. But often what gets lost in translation is the real life application.

The first attempt at this was a study in mice where one control group ate till they were full, and the other group of mice were then given 40% less that the control group. They did this for the life of the mice. The data does show the mice on 40% less calories lived longer. Hurray! We did it! Longer Lives for Everyone. Wait a minute. What happened to those mice? Did they enjoy their longer lives and smile all the way to their cheese laden deathbeds? Not quite. All the mice in the calorie restricted group featured irritability, quickness to anger, inability to procreate, decrease in cognitive abilities, and only reached 50% of the size of the fully fed mice.

Based on numerous animal studies, researchers calculate you could live to 120 years old!....BUT...you'll be pissed off, can't have kids, be about the size of a 10-year-old when full grown, and won't be very smart. Where do I sign? Apparently, that still hasn't stopped a few groups of people to try it out for themselves. Me? I'd rather be well fed and smile for the remainder of my years.

Eating Your Cake, Too

This brings me to my final tease. What if you could get all the longevity benefits of a Calorie Restriction (CR) diet without all the fuss and side effects? We may just have found a way. It's rooted in evolutionary biology, the will to survive, and it's called intermittent fasting!

Part 2 will explain how to incorporate it into your life!

What is Self-Experimentation?

Self-Experimentation is the unique act of single-subject scientific experimentation where the experimenter hypothesizes and performs the experiment on him or herself. In this article I want to show the value of self-experimentation as a tool to improve your life, without sacrificing your safety. One of my long-term goals is to level the playing field of well-funded modern research and speed up the time it takes the average person to get cutting-edge information that will meaningfully impact their lives. 

Story Time

Take John Paul Stapp. He was known by many as the fastest man on earth. When John started his research back in 1947, most physicians believed that the body could withstand 18g of thrust before suffering fatal trauma. John Stapp shattered this belief and proved the body could withstand 40g of thrust--in one daring test. 

How did he do it? Like any reasonable man would. Jumped in a rocket sled, revved it up to 421 mph, and preceded to slam on the brakes! (Johnny Knoxville would have been proud!) Remarkably, he survived and through his continued testing and research he suffered two broken wrists, retinal hemorrhaging, and broken ribs. Was he sent to the loony bin? No. He changed his field and helped science understand how the body reacts to extreme forces--research that has undoubtedly saved human lives.

Human history is full of these jaw-dropping stories with everything from a doctor catheterizing his own right arm to men creating their own vaccines against snakebites by injecting themselves with pure venom from several species of mambas and cobras. While those examples are of the extreme variety, and I highly disapprove you trying those sorts of things, you don't in fact need to put your life on the line to self-experiment and improve your life. There are many examples, including my own, where you don't necessarily accept the 'status quo' and decide to modify things in a responsible, yet fun way.

My Experience

I was in middle school the first time I came home to my Mom complaining of horrible stomach aches. She thought I had a 'bug' and asked how long I had been having them. I replied, "for a while." Not one to settle for a vague answer from her children, Mom repeated, "How long is a while?" With a shrug I replied, "a couple months?" The answer caught her off-guard as she tried to hide her shocked face by going to the fridge to flatten some ginger ale, the only thing that seemed to settle my stomach those days. (I hated soda, so flat was the only way it was going down).

My mom, fortunately for my future career, was ahead of her time as far as nutritional awareness goes. Instead of giving me the nasty pink stomach syrup or chalky antacids or the usual modern medicine band-aid approach, she brainstormed much like any natural doctor would, "Why do you think that's happening?" "Are any of your friends getting sick?" "Did you eat something different?" The answers weren't so clear at first and thus a few weeks went by.

Given it was around 10 years ago, I couldn't recall how Mom arrived at the conclusion that I might be lactose intolerant. I think it was because I used to tell her I loved getting cheeseburgers for my school lunches! See, somehow she must have noticed a correlation between when she packed my lunch (no dairy / no stomach complaints) and when she gave me a special treat (let me buy school lunch / stomach aches). Sherlock Holmes would have been proud!

Given the nutritional status of school lunches (horrendous) we could not completely show I was lactose intolerant from that finding in my 'history.' Plus, when I went to my pediatrician he said it was normal to have stomach aches (whaaat?) and I was probably just working through a bug. (For months??)

Alas, there was only one thing left to do! Self-experiment! I cut out dairy (with help from mom of course) and any source of lactose from my diet and noticed an IMMEDIATE reduction in stomach aches from an average of once daily to once every other week. Not a perfect cure, but then again (when mom wasn't looking) my diet wasn't exactly perfect either! That, my friends, was my first real-life experience in how foods can affect human performance, and more importantly, taught me the valuable lesson of "you are what you eat."   

I quietly fostered a level of curiosity about the human body for years while tracking and completing self-experiments on noticeable changes in my weight, muscle, acne, sleep cycles, gallstones, digestive issues, energy levels, and immunity to name a few. I mainly did it by challenging commonly held belief systems and modified and attempted to optimize everything in my diet, lifestyle, sleeping habits, supplements, detoxing, etc.

While I've had plenty of setbacks--thinking whole grains were good for me (they're not), and believing multi-week juice fasting was the cure for anything (I turned orange for 2 days!)--I've also had plenty of successes (gained 20 lbs of muscle in 30 days, cleared most of my acne naturally, eliminated my gallstones without surgery, no longer have stomach aches, went a year without getting a cold).

Enjoying part of the weekend with NUHS friends.

Parting Words

My journey is still developing and while the story has a much longer (and sometimes comical) tale I will leave you with this: If there is something in your life that you'd like to change/improve/eliminate, I encourage you to do some research. The internet has allowed for the transaction of information in ways never known to the human race and has leveled the playing field for the average Joes unable to afford 'personal coaches,' 'expensive treatments' and the like. If you have a problem, there's always a solution, and usually someone has already figured it out. Find like-minded people and figure out how they got their results. You might just learn a neat trick that will help you change your body (and your life) for the better!

"All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better." --Ralph Waldo Emerson

Cheers,
Christian 

1 month. 20lbs. 6hrs. No drugs. 

It was Tuesday afternoon, about 3 o'clock, my stomach was gurgling and the anxiety of waiting was killing me. Beep, beep, beeeep indicated the bioelectric impedance machine had finally begun to print out my results. 

"Oh my god. I've never seen these numbers before. Wow!" exclaimed the intern in charge of the machine. She was standing next to my intern comparing my before-and-after results of a lifting experiment that I engineered for the last month. I unhooked the cables, rushed over, and peered over their shoulders to see the two numbers that made me grin from ear-to-ear. 164 and 10.3%, I had done it! 

"Congratulations buddy" my intern proclaimed as he realized that my ridiculous goal was just achieved despite practically nobody thinking it was possible and academia saying it was theoretically impossible.  

My Goal 

I wanted to test out if it was possible to gain 20 lbs. of muscle in 30 days with no drugs or crazy lifting supplements (like Creatine, NO xplode, etc.) and do it by eating 4,500 calories a day and only lifting every 3 or 4 days for a total of 8 workouts and about 6 hours of TOTAL gym time. The rest of the time I'd be eating and resting… I was putting the second law of thermodynamics and protein synthesis (among others) to the test.  

Experimental Preparations

I thought it was possible and I had found a few people who had similar results, but they used Creatine and expensive body enhancing supplements that by athletic standards were perfectly legal and fine, but I wanted to change it up and do it the natural way. 

I basically ate between 3,400-5,000 (4,100 avg.) calories per day on an anti-inflammatory diet. I hypothesized this would not only help me heal and recover faster, but would also stress my body the least and give it the most nutrient dense calories possible so that it would have adequate "building blocks" to reset my neurologic system and pack on muscle without putting a sweet tire of fat around my waist and butt!

My actual gym time, which was .0083% of the hours that month (6/720), was spent just trashing my muscles to complete failure in 4 multi-joint exercises. I first completed a really heavy isometric hold-to-failure and after a 3 min. rest I completed a 7 reps-to-failure set of that same exercise focusing on 4 seconds up and 4 seconds down to optimize my "Time under Tension" around what the current literature deemed to be optimal for muscle hypertrophy.

There were a few odd and end extra things like taking an adrenal supporting herb that I had researched because in the simplest terms possible, Stress = Anti-Growth. Ironically, the reason for such a long wait between exercises was the little known fact that gym rats often plateau because they've burnt out their adrenals and nervous system and haven't let them recover. In real life examples, it's the reason why you can't lift as much when you try to bench after doing heavy squats. It's not because somehow you used your upper body during the leg lift; it's because you used a lot of neural input into your neuromuscular junctions and your body needs time to reboot. As for the adrenals, they control cortisol and DHEA and blood sugar among other things. If you don't control those hormones you will have an increased chance of putting on fat instead of muscle and you will be tired a lot. 

I laugh because most lifters will say, "Today is Upper Body and Wednesday is Lower Body." In real life, "Every Gym Day is Organ Day." You don't just tax part of your body when you lift; you need to account for that and rest extra days when needed. I upped my lifts EVERY single time I went to the gym. I averaged about 35% increases in my lifts (ex. Lat Pulldown 135-180 lbs.) in one month. I attribute that to eating A LOT and resting 3 days between lifts. Why go to the gym every day when you can get better results every 4 days?

In addition to all of these steps I also made sure I took before pictures, before measurements of all of my limbs and body parts, and before blood tests of cholesterol, vitamin D, and testosterone. 

My Results

Wait, WHAT?? 

Yes, you read that correctly, I managed to gain 20 lbs. of lean muscle doing almost nothing but studying for my classes, eating 2.5x my resting metabolic rate, and lost 5% body fat.  

The game has changed, my friends; I just have to figure out how exactly lol. Next week, I'll have my before and after blood tests to report and some more information. 

Quote of the Day

"You see things; and you say "Why?" But I dream things that never were; and I say "Why not?" -- George Bernard Shaw 

Enjoy The Short Week!