Contest Preparation: Boiling it Down for the Natural Bodybuilders – Part 2

2009 January 10

By Matt

Back in part one, I talked about why natural bodybuilders can’t always follow the advice handed down from drug-using competitors. There’s no ethical or moral judgment involved, but there are very real physiological concerns for a natural that can be minimized or eliminated in drug users.

If you want to do your best as a natural, you need to be aware of these differences. In the first section I covered strength training needs and common misconceptions. In this section, I want to talk about conditioning, aka cardio, and nutritional factors.

Conditioning

Conditioning is a wide term that I’m using to encompass any kind of activity done for the purposes of ‘getting in shape’ – your ability to be active and to stay active over time. Most people associate this with steady-state aerobic exercise, whether it’s running for a couple of miles or just spending an hour or two on the treadmill.

Indeed, the staple of the bodybuilder’s arsenal is spending 1-3 hours a day on the treadmill. This no doubt came from the 1980s, when exercise research was almost exclusively focused on aerobic training. It’s also compounded by the drug factor. When you’ve got no concerns about losing muscle, and your metabolic rate is already significantly increased, spending a few hours on the treadmill is the quickest way to get the fat off. This isn’t necessarily true for the naturals.

Much like strength training, conditioning has different degrees of intensity and difficulty. Aerobic steady-state work is the lowest level. In this state, your body is actively using oxygen to burn (oxidize) fat for energy. The problem is, aerobic oxidation is only ‘fast enough’ for low-intensity exercise. The more difficult the exercise becomes, the more rapidly your body will need energy.

That’s where the anaerobic pathways enter the picture. Instead of using oxygen to burn fat, your body resorts to other, faster methods. Anaerobic (‘without oxygen’) metabolism can support much higher intensities of work, but the trade-off is that you’ve only got so much fuel to go around. This puts a limit on the length of any anaerobic activity.

You’ve certainly felt this happen. The burning you feel in your muscles during a set of 20 reps, or the burning in your legs when you climb a long flight of stairs, is a direct result of anaerobic glycolysis – the breakdown of sugar for energy. Glycolysis can occur both with and without oxygen, depending on how difficult the exercise is.

This is where it gets interesting. While it might seem at first glance that aerobic exercise is superior, since it uses fat for fuel, that’s not necessarily the case. For one, you’re never using any one fuel source exclusively; even a brisk walk will involve some degree of anaerobic activity. It’s a matter of dominance.

The biggest thing is the long-term effect of anaerobic metabolism. What we notice is that while ‘hard exercise’ will burn sugars during the activity, fat oxidation is actually increased after the fact for as much as 24 hours. There’s a lot of biochemical reasons for this, but let it suffice to say that your body is concerned about maintaining energy balance. When you deplete glycogen (the stored sugar in your muscles), the body is interested in getting that glycogen back, so it makes that a priority.

Since it’s trying to conserve its supplies, the muscle won’t actually use glycogen for fuel; it relies on fat. This increases muscle insulin sensitivity – blood sugars will be more readily absorbed by the muscle. Further, it’s been observed that fat oxidation stays high even if you eat carbs.

Obviously there’s a rationale for using higher intensity conditioning in your routine if you’re interested in getting very lean. This is the source of the current High-Intensity Interval (or Intermittent) Training (HIIT) fad. For the purposes of this article, HIIT, interval training, and high-intensity cardio are more-or-less interchangeable. There are finer differences in all three terms, but just consider it anything that achieves the effects I just described.

Hours of low-intensity cardio

On the one hand, the pro-HIIT crowd has some good points. There’s a case to be made for using high-intensity conditioning methods. The gist of it is that to trigger changes, you have to force the body to change; this mandates some kind of high-effort work on your part.

As explained, low-intensity cardio works for drug-users because they have advantages. If you don’t have those advantages, you can’t expect to just sit on the treadmill for 2-3 hours a day and get shredded. Correction: you can, but don’t expect to keep any muscle in the process.

In large amounts, aerobic exercise is directly counterproductive for any kind of anaerobic adaptations – and that includes hanging on to your muscle tissue. While going for a 30 minute walk three times a week isn’t going to hurt you, spending 2-3 hours a day on the treadmill most certainly can if you’re a natural competitor.

In practice, large amounts of aerobic exercises are going to burn off muscle just as easily as fat – and this can only be made worse if you’re one of those that switched over completely to high-rep pump/depletion training. In that case, you’ve got no signal to change your body composition.

You may lose weight, but you won’t really affect your body fat percentage or your overall appearance. The comparison is always made to endurance athletes. This is only partially valid, because there’s more than just the exercise that goes into how they look (i.e., you don’t want to haul around a ton of body mass if you’re running or cycling ultra-long distances), but it is something to think about.

In comparison, the anaerobic exercise does create preferential effects on fat metabolism, and it does avoid some of the negative side-effects of aerobic exercise. If you want to actually create changes in body composition, you need to have some amount of higher-intensity exercise in your routine.

Too much high-intensity cardio

However the pendulum swings both ways. Now people hear that high-intensity cardio is good, so they start doing nothing but interval training four days a week, on top of a significant weight-training workout.

This is arguably worse than sitting on the treadmill. High intensity exercise of any kind represents a major stress on your body, and in that sense HIIT is not fundamentally different than a weight-training session. It requires fuel and it requires recovery time. Keep that up for too long and all manner of arcane chemical voodoo happens that will put your body into a state of full-time inflammation. Inflammation is bad; it impacts recovery, it impacts fat metabolism and appetite, and it will ultimately impact your mood and quality of life. In a bad way.

This is of course another call for moderation: some is good, but that doesn’t mean you have to go overboard.

Just the same way that marathon runners are used to ‘prove’ that endurance training makes you skinny, sprinters are always trotted out to display how super-awesome that interval training is.

Here’s the thing about sprinters: they do aerobic exercise too, and in fact most of their training is not high intensity. If you want to bring that comparison out, you might consider that a sprinter may only do a few ‘speed’ sessions, which are very short high-speed runs with very long rest times. The majority of their actual conditioning work will be either low-intensity work or only moderately-difficult intervals called tempo runs.

In other words, while high-intensity stuff is important, you can’t simply rely on it exclusively. You have to account for recovery times, and for your strength workouts. However you can use low-intensity exercise and non-maximal tempo runs to get activity without blasting yourself to pieces.

The thing that people always forget about aerobic or steady-state exercise is that you don’t have to just sit there for hours at a time. There’s no reason you can increase the difficulty somewhat, enough to make it a little challenging and get you breathing a little harder. It’s not a matter of either spending 2 hours walking or maximal 400m runs that get your heart rate over 200bpm. There is a middle ground, and most of your time should be spent there.

Trying to get in shape

This is somewhat similar to what happens when you push too hard to get stronger on a diet. Your body has to adapt to endurance exercise, too, and when you push it past current limits, it takes resources – meaning calories and nutrients – to make that happen.

Guess what you’re lacking while dieting?

When you start a diet and go from 3-4 lifting sessions and little (if any) cardio to full-bore 3-5 lifting sessions and 3-7 cardio sessions, guess what you’ve just done?

You’ve just sent a major signal for adaptation while simultaneously depriving your body of nutrients.

A big part of the “don’t do so much cardio” suggestion comes from this. There’s a big, big difference in maintaining an amount of work that your body’s used to, as opposed to trying to make your body acclimatize to an amount of work you’re not used to.

If you take somebody that’s already very in shape, with a good work capacity and cardiovascular fitness, and put them on that kind of cardio regimen, they might be just fine. After all, they’ve got the experience and his/her body is already adapted to that work load.

Take somebody without that conditioning background and put him/her on the exact same program, and you’ll have a crash in a few weeks. The solution here is the same as before: do enough to create changes and enough to be challenging. Your goal with cardio is to burn off calories; you’re not trying to get ready for a marathon. Trying to push yourself to a new level of fitness is going to require calories that you simply can’t spare. Keep the cardio in its place.

Reliance on activity over diet

Like it or not, you have to diet in order to see major changes in how you look. This is easily demonstrated with any athlete that doesn’t watch his/her diet – unless they’re handling truly amazing amounts of daily activity, what you’ll find is that there’s just no impetus for the body to be lean.

And I’m not talking about going for an hourly jog every day, either. The guys I’m talking about are the ones spending the better part of an 8 hour day doing some kind of activity. Since I’d imagine most of you have full-time jobs, or at least family/friend obligations, this just isn’t feasible. Getting in 1000 calories of activity will take a lot of work; not eating 1000 calories is easy in comparison.

From an athlete’s viewpoint, it’s not terribly relevant as long as they can perform. The relationship between body fat levels and fitness is something of a myth. There is something to it, as body fat obviously can’t be too high, but being in stage condition isn’t exactly going to help anyone’s performance, either. As much as it’s nice to imagine that the guy with bulging veins and a six-pack is an amazing athlete, the reality is that he’s probably so tired and carb-depleted that he barely wants to stand up. The athlete eats to fuel his/her training, with appearance as a secondary concern at best.

The would-be bodybuilder, however, is presumably eating to look good on stage. This means that there must be a compromise between diet and exercise – and diet is going to win that battle just out of practicality. The exercise has to adapt to the diet, not the other way around. If you do too much activity, especially challenging activity, the body is going to demand payment. Too much, too often, and you burn out.

The goal is a balance point. Enough activity to keep the process going, but not so much that you have to out-eat whatever calorie burn you create.

Up next: Part 3 – Diet and Nutrition

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