Here's the Plan

"Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell."

-Edward Abbey

Let's get malignant.


The plan I'm going to adhere to for the forseeable future is outlined in Tim Ferriss's book The 4-Hour Body. It's somewhat pretentiously named "Occam's Protocol", after Occam's Razor. The plan tries to use what we know about the physiology of muscle gain to ensure that whatever effort I put into this will have a measurable effect, and to also ensure that I don't waste time and effort doing things that are only slightly effective. 

At some point, you're gonna start beating a dead horse. A really buff, dead horse.

The key to getting into the high-slope region at all is triggering a hormonal balance that favors muscle growth. Every part of the plan will either contribute to a favorable hormone balance, or leverage it to direct resources to muscle tissue. In general, I want to use exercise and supplements to increase levels of testosterone and GLUT-4. Once those levels are higher than the average person's, overfeeding should just result in muscle growth and very minimal, if any, fat gain.


Supplements
I'll be taking five supplements over the course of this experiment:

• Vitamin D: 3000 I.U. per day. 
• Several studies have shown a dramatic increase in free testosterone levels in individuals given between 3000 I.U. and  7000 I.U. Vitamin D per day. The current RDA (recommended daily allowance) is 400 I.U., but many now think this is underestimated. More research needs to be done for the RDA, but the testosterone increasing evidence is pretty solid at this point. I've been taking this amount of D for a few months now, and that will be kept constant.
• Glutamine: 80 grams per day for the first five days.
• Glutamine is an amino acid that's required in large quantities for rebuilding muscle, but enough glutamine for that should be present in a high-protein diet. Tim suggests this much glutamine for a different reason, though: most people with my build won't be able to absorb as much food as is required by the plan, because all that food causes stress on the intestinal walls. Some research has shown that eating free glutamine in huge amounts helps the intestinal walls repair themselves. I'm a little skeptical of this part, but glutamine is cheap so I'll give it a shot.
• Alpha-lipoic acid: 100-300mg, after each whole food meal
• Abbreviated ALA, is an amino acid and potent antioxidant that regenerates vitamins C and E, and has a few other all-around health benefits supported by studies, including reversing liver disease. I'll be using it to recruit GLUT-4 to the surface of muscle cells, which is supposed to trigger the muscle cells to start intake of nutrients. Testosterone and GLUT-4 together seem to open the nutrient absorption channels on muscle cells and close them on fat cells, which is perfect.
• Creatine: 10 grams per day
• Creatine is a high-density energy reserve for muscle cells. It improves endurance for nearly anything, but can also increase the volume of each muscle cell. At first, this is just water volume, but over some time the cell manufactures more mitochondria and ribosomes and stores more glucose to fill the volume, resulting in a much more useful muscle cell.
• BSN N.O.-XPLODE: One scoop before each gym session or recreational sport
• This stuff is freaking wonderful. My cardiovascular system is shit because of years of nicotine abuse. I thought that once I quit I would need to do cardio often for years before I resembled a normal person, and at first I was right. Then I had half a scoop of N.O.-XPLODE. It has 50 or so ingredients: some cause systemic increases in nitric oxide (dilates ALL the blood vessels) and some are more targeted (Lesser Periwinkle increases blood flow to the brain and spinal cord). One scoop makes me feel like superman for about an hour or so, but it seems to be causing a lasting improvement in my cardio performance even when I don't take it. In any case, this stuff is totally worth the obnoxious price tag.

Tim suggests taking one more supplement: Cissus Quadrangularis. This stuff actually shows promise in the clinical studies I've read, but it's fucking expensive. If I have difficulty repairing my muscle tissue after workouts, I'll drop some cash on a few-day supply and see if it works for me.


Exercise:
Tim's analysis of workout patterns suggests that the guys who spend every day or 5-6 hours a week at the gym aren't just wasting they're time; they're actually actively stopping their muscles from repairing themselves, stopping growth in its tracks. 


Whether this is true or not would take an immense amount of science to determine, so I'm going to just follow Tim's plan in Occam's Protocol and record the results. If I find a similar collection of data from somebody doing a more traditional routine, I'd love to compare the two, but there are simply too many variables at play here.


I'll be alternating two different workouts: A and B. Each workout should take less than 30 minutes of total time at the gym to complete, and the frequency of gym sessions will start at 3 per week and decrease down to less than two per week.


Workout A: Arms and Back

• Close-grip supinated pulldown (Palms facing you)
• At least 7 reps, (5/5) cadence
• Seated machine shoulder press
• At least 7 reps, (5/5)

Workout B: Legs and Chest

• Slight-incline machine bench press
• at least 7 reps, (5/5)
• Leg press
• At least 10 reps, (5/5)
• stationary bike
• 3 minutes at 85+ rpm, just to prevent soreness

The trick is to do only one set of each and fail completely before stopping. (5/5) cadence means 5 counts up, 5 counts down. This means my muscles should be contracted constantly for at least one minute, and after that minute I shouldn't be able to perform a another single rep for at least an hour or so. 

5/5 cadence is important because it maximizes the Time Under Tension. The idea is that the more time under tension your body sees, the bigger the hormonal response is. Absolute failure is important because it physically damages the muscle tissue; when the muscles start repairing themselves, they'll rebuild to handle more stress than what broke them. Also, overfeeding will result in less fat gain if the body sees it needs to repair something instead.

Here's my schedule: 

2-day rest periods between exercises at first (the exception being halloween... no repair will happen that weekend). Once two of each workout are done, start resting 3 days. Once progress stalls (can't plan for that until it happens), increase to 4 days.

Next post will cover the fun part: Diet.