Everyone wants to enjoy the holidays. Even the most hardcore bodybuilding competitor and fitness model wants to be able to let loose, spend time with their families and to be an absolute glutton while the occasion calls for it. All the months of hard work and long hours in the gym busting your ass can be undone in a week of bad decisions. Binge eating and being a couch potato for an entire week can really reverse a lot of hard-earned results. It may be a scary thought to unleash the beast and to eat whatever you want during the holidays, but there might just be a solution to preventing all the pigging out from screwing up your plans. Hell--theoretically, you could even utilize this week to make some gains if you do it right. The solution is called “supercompensation.”
Bodybuilders and long distance runners have known about this method for a very long time, and have actually used it to achieve some amazing results in their respective competitive sports. The theory and the science behind the application is extremely simple and it may even leave you questioning why you have never thought of this in the first place. The steps in the process are what make this an ideal thing to try around holiday time, as it actually can turn all the over-eating and indulgence into a positive thing. Here’s how it works…
By now you should all know about ATP, creatine phosphate, glycogen stores, and how they all work with your muscles to fuel your body’s activities. ATP, or Adenosine Triphosphate, is the currency of energy that powers the functions in your cells. Creatine phosphate is a molecule that floats in your bloodstream and is stored in muscle tissues. It is converted into ATP in extremely quick fashion to provide ATP once the original stores run out. Glycogen is the stored form of glucose (the sugar that your body uses to provide energy once it has burned through its very limited sources of ATP) and subsequently creatine phosphate. Glycogen is stored in your liver and in your muscle tissues in order to provide quick transmission of glucose to the necessary cells in your muscles. It can be broken down fairly quickly through a process called glycolosis and can be used to provide short bursts of additional ATP to your muscles to prolong their functioning at higher intensities. Unfortunately, to the chagrin of elite athletes from the world over, even your glycogen stores are limited. If we had larger stores of glycogen, we would have far more potential to expend energy and could have longer workouts and produce far greater results. The average human body can store roughly 500 grams of carbohydrates, which equates to roughly 2,000 calories of glucose for use to provide energy. Sixteen hundred calories are stored in muscle glycogen, 400 in the liver, and roughly 20 calories are floating through your bloodstream in free-floating glucose at any given time. As we have discussed in previous articles, once you get over around 85 percent intensity, your body relies almost completely on glucose as an energy source instead of fat. We have also discussed the fact that your body likes stability and homeostasis and will adapt to training stimuli to prevent itself from breaking down (running out of energy). This is where supercompensation comes in.
After a long run or a grueling workout, you are probably ravenous and craving carbs. This is your body’s way of telling you that you need to replenish your glycogen stores. In order to prevent you from hitting your ceiling as quickly, your body will allow itself to store additional for a very limited time before gradually returning back to its baseline levels. If you can take advantage of these scenarios and windows, you can actually utilize a carb-filled holiday feast to get ripped and primed for future workouts like never before. Supercompensation will fill your glycogen stores past their original capacity. Also--since every gram of carbohydrates is stored with 2.6 grams of water, your muscles will be pumped beyond anything you’ve ever seen before. At that point, it is simply a matter of shedding the water weight to expose large, full and defined muscles you didn’t think were possible.
Supercompensation is done in steps. You need to be at a moderately high fitness level, so it is good to be well trained and coming off a moderately rigorous training cycle a couple weeks before the holidays. You will want to accompany the next short high-intensity training cycle leading up to the holidays with a low-carb diet to make sure that you are fully depleting your glycogen stores, causing the stress reaction from your body. A series of high intensity workouts over less than a week’s time should be sufficient to properly use up the glycogen in your body. Your body will also take as much of the carbs from those gnarly holiday meals as possible and push it back into your muscles and liver to get your body back into training condition. This may sound too good to be true, but the science makes it theoretically possible to not only avoid missing a beat in your training, but to use the holidays to catapult your training to the next level.
Some Words of Caution
- Make sure not to overtrain. You do want to deplete your glycogen stores, but if you start becoming sluggish during the last week’s workouts, call it quits for the day. This is a tell-tale sign that your body is struggling to come up with the proper energy to fuel your muscles, and is probably dipping into your fat stores. While this may seem like a good thing, it isn’t if the goal is to supercompensate at the end of the week. It can result in overtraining. The symptoms will resemble depression, so keep an eye out for it. If you hit that overtraining level, you won’t see the supercompensation effect. Your body will simply shut down and set your training off for the foreseeable future.
- Drink plenty of water with your carbohydrates. When taking in massive amounts of carbs, your body will want to store water with them. If you aren’t hydrating properly, your body will pull this from other sources and it is best not to thicken up your blood by forcing your body to pull water from it. The excess stored water and associated weight can be eliminated quickly with a high intensity workout. The water will enter your intercellular spaces to help with hydration and be lost in sweat and breath, so it isn’t something to stress about.
- By “low-carb diets,” I mean avoid them like anthrax. If you are depleting your glycogen stores properly over that week, your body will soak up any carb it even smells trying to replenish those stores. Getting a few won’t kill the effect completely, but it could reduce it slightly. Avoiding them altogether (if you can) is the better choice.
- Make sure your intensity levels are high enough! If you aren’t working in the 85 percent and up range, your body will still be able to use fat for a fuel source and you might not completely deplete the glycogen stores. Your body also won’t have to adapt to as severe of a training stimulus and you might not even see the supercompensation effect. If this is the case, a vast majority of those carbs will be stored as fat. There is definitely a sweet spot that you should aim for with this.
Usually the holidays are your worst enemy and include weeks of torture and temptation to stray from your diet and workout regimen. Use supercompensation to make the holidays your friend. It will allow you to have your cake and eat it too!
Resources:
Gambetta, Vernon. "Defining Supercompensation Training." Humankinetics.com. Human Kinetics. Web. 19 Dec. 2011. <http://www.humankinetics.com/excerpts/excerpts/defining-supercompensation-train
Shea, Jason, CSCS, PES. "Fatigue, Recovery & Supercompensation." Teamunify.com. Web. <http://www.teamunify.com/cseksc/__doc__/Shea_FatigueRecoverySupercompensation-2.pdf>.
Cordain, Loren, Ph.D, Friel, Joe, M.S. The Paleo Diet For Athletes. USA: Holtzbrink Publishing, 2005.
Peter Bauman – Peter is a chef first and personal trainer second, with a background in the biological sciences and degree in psychology from UC Berkeley. He takes the tactics that work with elite athletes at California Strength—one of the leading athletic training facilities in the country—and helps to apply them to the lives of the Average Joe to get results.