The most effective solution to keep muscle and keep lean
It’s a fact that an intake of too many carbs will make you fat and too few will make you tired. So what is the answer? How can I lose body fat effectively while holding on to muscle?
Answer: Carb Rotation
Many people tend to go on low-carb diets in an effort to reduce body fat levels, often ending up burning all the muscle mass they’ve spent so hard gaining. More often than not they also tend to balloon when they revert back to their old eating habits. The key to shrinking your ‘gut’ successfully and bringing your body fat percentage down to single digits for men or the early teens for women is to to use the Sixpacknow Strategy – Carb Rotation. To make it simple, eat different amount of carbs on certain training/non training days. Diet is just like working out, if you workout the same day in, day out, you’ll plateau and this is exactly the same with your diet. To eliminate body fat you must keep confusing your metabolism and this is exactly what carb rotation will do. By changing the amount of carbs you consume on a day to day basis, you are in effect creating an uncertainty that boosts your metabolic rate.
You should be aware that the main purpose of carbohydrates is to provide energy and when performing exercise your body begins by burning these carbs, not fat, it always turns to carbs first. So effectively, the more carbs you eat, the less fat you’ll burn. That doesn’t mean to say you should completely eliminate carbs, on the contrary, a lack of carbs will leave you feeling very sluggish, especially when working out and you will find it hard to maintain a level of deprivation. It’s very much a double edged sword, if you eat lots of carbs you’ll keep your muscle size and strength, but won’t lose body fat. On the other hand, if you drastically reduce carb intake you’ll deplete hard earned muscle, so the answer is to rotate your carb intake, by eating a higher amount of carbs on training days and a lower intake on cardio days or non training days. The benefits of cycling carbs allows you to burn body fat whilst also maintaining and increasing muscle size, so you can have the best of both worlds.
On the days you eat a lower amount of carbs your body will tap into your fat stores for energy and on days you intake more carbs you will be refuelling your muscles and increasing energy stores for your weights sessions. On low carb days it is essential to increase protein intake by a good 30-50g, but at the same time keeping calorie intake low. Remember you should not intake more calories than you are burning on low carb days. To eliminate body fat effectively you should aim to burn off more from your cardio sessions than you will be consuming in the day.
For the High/Carb plan to be successful you need to be strict, this doesn’t mean you need to count carbs, gram for gram, definately not. The idea is to just keep your intake low on non weight training/cardio days and increase consumption on weights days.
So how many carbs should I eat?
Low Carb Days – as low as 0.5g – 0.8g per pound of bodyweight
(4 calories in 1g of carbs)
High Carb Days – approx 1-1.5g per pound of bodyweight
Exact amounts will be given in your Personalized Diet
More information on Carb Rotation can be found here