Muscle Ventures Podcasts

[Important update:  As Nancy mentions on her blog, she annnounced her upcoming bodybuilding competition in this podcast.  Stupidly, I forgot to include it in the following notes.]

In this podcast (Quicktime ipod compatible, 30MB; Google streaming flash video), Nancy Arnold and I (Bud) go over our rather disastrous 1 RM performance two weeks into the low carb phase of the anabolic (metabolic) diet.  As we've described elsewhere, the metabolic diet begins with a two week period of carb depletion at 30g carbohydrates per day.  I was attempting these on the last day of carb depletion.  Nancy had completed her induction a week earlier and was at the end of a 5 day short carb depletion phase.

DiPasquale, the creator of the metabolic diet notes that it takes a while before the body becomes efficient at burning fat for fuel instead of carbs.  My personal experience with low carb diets is that I typically need carbs to help with explosive power.  However, once I get in steady state, the level of carbs I typically need to achieve this power is quite low, typically on the order of 50 to 100 grams of carbs per day.  One thing that attracted me to this diet was the fact that it made allowance for adding in carbs at key times.  That had not kicked in by the time we were doing 1RMs.

Our 1RM performacne was disastrous.  We went down on all measures, not even completing the squat.  That was quite disappointing because we had done a reasonable job in our last cycle that mixed hypertrophy with max strength training.  Personally, I expected to go up a little at least in bench.  Had I done the measurements today (after my first two day carb load), I think the outcome would have been different.

We will soon be publishing some interviews with Troy Garver, General Manager of Gold's Gym in Ann Arbor, in which he remarks that trial and error involves some error.  I think we can chalk up these measurements to some error.

Additional Links

• Jason Paris provided us with this method for measuring 1RMs.