An Interview with Jeff Volek,Ph.D.,R.D. How Men Can Lose Weight While Building Muscle Through Exercise and Smart NutritionAtkins interviewed Jeff Volek, PhD, RD, exercise and nutrition researcher, fitness expert and co-author of the recently released Mens Health TNT Diet: The Explosive New Plan to Blast Fat, Build Muscle and Get Healthy in 12 Weeks. The book contends that, with the right diet and the right exercise program, men can simultaneously lose weight and build muscle masswithout spending 15 hours a week in the gym. We chatted with Jeff about the TNT program, its applicability to women and some of his findings over a decades worth of research on diet and exercise. Can you describe the key tenets of the book?In the book, were not just promoting weight loss. Were promoting the idea of trading your fat for muscle; of actually shifting the tissues around. To achieve this, we took the two most potent lifestyle modifications for fat loss and muscle building and combined them. We also tweaked the program based on our prior research and personal experience to achieve maximal benefit. The two core tenets we address are low carbohydrate eating to stimulate fat burning and resistance training to stimulate muscle growth. I have studied each of these lifestyle approaches independently over the last 10 years, but never together. In brief, we have shown that low carbohydrate diets consistently result in greater fat loss than any other diet program, and that resistance exercise results in greater muscle growth than any other exercise program.There is a lot of emphasis on weight loss, however, if you look at most weight loss diets its very difficult to simultaneously lose significant amounts of body fat and gain lean body mass at the same time. Why? Because youre breaking down one tissue and building another. Thats a rather difficult physiological effect to achieve.So, we thought, the way to prevent that is to combine low carb with weight training. To prove this, we performed a study combining a low-carbohydrate diet with weight training. The hypothesis was that restricting carbohydrates in combination with resistance training would promote the greatest fat loss while actually building muscle tissue. And thats exactly what we found. In fact the results exceeded my expectations. We had multiple subjects lose 15-20 pounds of fat while gaining 5-10 pounds of lean body mass.What mechanism makes it possible for the body to build mass and lose mass at the same time? Theres a concept called nutrient partitioning. Basically, its the process of diverting nutrients away from fat storage and toward muscle building. Historically, its been used in animal research. For example, in the agricultural context, you want to efficiently grow cattle and to make them leaner and make them have less fat while feeding them less food. If you can partition nutrients away from fat and toward lean muscle, you could simultaneously lose body fat and preserve and even build muscle. For most guys, thats sort of the Holy Grail in terms of what theyre trying to achieve with their body composition. The idea that were interested in studying is, How can we do this through normal lifestyle modificationthrough dietary means and exercise? In fact, thats what my research has focused on for the last decade: Trying to optimize body compositionand health as well. Your book is addressed to men. Do these concepts apply to women as well? Certainly women can benefit from doing what were proposing in this book, which is mainly following a low-carbohydrate diet and performing weight training. For example, if they can preserve and tone muscle while losing fat they will look and feel better and, pound for pound, theyll be burning more calories. Theres a lot of mythology that women will build big muscles and look manly if they lift weights, but it really doesnt happen at all. They dont have the hormonal systems that men domainly testosteroneso even if they train like body builders, they just will not build large muscles through natural means. Why focus on weight training rather than aerobic exercise? Theyre really two very different stimuli. The body adapts to these two modes of exercise very differently. Thats why you dont see really muscular runners, because running isnt a really potent stimulus to cause muscle growth, whereas weight lifters tend to have bigger muscles. Aerobic and endurance training really focus more on the heart and the circulation and the respiratory systems. Basically, youre improving your cardio-respiratory capacity. By contrast, strength training is really focused on skeletal muscle, and not so much on the heart and your vasculature. Resistance exercise provides a potent stimulus for the muscles to grow, called muscle hypertrophy. The whole basis of weight training is to overload the musclesto expose them to loads that you dont experience in a normal days activity. As a result, they adapt and get stronger. Our book focuses on the latest science of resistance training for building muscle tissue, which surprisingly does not take much time at all. In fact training too much can result in the opposite effect you are after. Whats the idea behind total body training? Most people dont have endless time to work out. So the overriding philosophy we had in designing the training program was to make it efficient. We assumed that most people could only work out for a limited time each week, so we wanted them to get the most bang for their buck in terms of time in the gym. The way to do that is to do whole body workouts. It shouldnt take more than 45 minutes for a workout. And training the most amount of muscle you can in a given workout has been shown to be the most efficient way to create a muscle-building stimulus. Youve already mentioned the importance of a low-carbohydrate diet to the weight loss part of the program. How do proteins contribute to the plan? One critical concept thats important is protein synthesis. In order to maintain your protein status in your bodymainly your skeletal muscleyou need to be in a positive protein balance. At all times youre constantly breaking down and synthesizing protein. So if youre breaking down protein at the same rate youre building protein, youll be in protein balance. But if you exercise and measure protein balance after you work out, youll be in negative protein balance unless you eat some protein. So, in order to build muscle mass, we recommend eating a little protein after exercise. Theres also evidence that consuming protein before exercise has an even greater effect. The idea is that you eat protein to get some of the amino acids into your body and your bloodstream before exercise. When you work out, a good portion of your blood volume goes toward the active muscles that are engaged in the exercise, and more of the amino acids you ingested will be delivered to where you want them to go. Based on several research studies that have investigated timing of nutrients with regards to workouts, we recommend that you eat high-quality protein before and after your workout. It doesnt take a lot of protein to get an effect on protein synthesis, so were not providing an excess amount of protein. Ten to 20 grams seems to be the optimal amount. High-quality proteinshave all the essential amino acidsthe ones your body doesnt make. Lower-quality protein sources generally come from plants and are lacking in one of the essential amino acids. Most proteins from animal sources, including dairy and most meatsbeef, chicken and fishall have the essential amino acids, so theyre generally fairly high quality proteins. One of the key ideas in your book is time zone eating. Can you talk a little about that? We tried to create a program thats flexible for people depending on their goalswhether they want to emphasize more fat loss or muscle building or somewhere in between. So while we recommend a low-carbohydrate diet as a core principle, we went a little bit further to refine that. If your goal is really fat loss and not much muscle building, we say stay on the low- carbohydrate dietthe fat burning zonethe entire time. But to meet other goals, were allowing some carbohydrate days within the low-carbohydrate diet. Were really showing people how to cycle back and forth between a low-carbohydrate and higher-carbohydrate diet. Say youre someone whos already reached his ideal body weight and really wants to focus on muscle building. You may opt to carbohydrate load for two days versus one day or no days. This is the muscle-building zone, which is really the carbohydrate zone where youre getting the short-term insulin surge. What youre doing is creating a unique situation where you can actually handle more carbohydrates for a day or two if you precede that with a low-carbohydrate diet. This lets you take advantage of some of the anabolic effects of carbohydrates without seeing some of the adverse effects. So in short, its really cycling back and forth between primarily a low-carbohydrate diet with some carbohydrate days interspersed where youre getting an anabolic burst or boost, so to speak.Then therere the targeted zones around your workout, which are also unique periods where you need to focus particularly on high-quality protein sources where youre getting your essential amino acids.Eating a high-carbohydrate diet even for a day seems counterintuitive. Why recommend it to anyone?As long as youve reached your goal weight and keep the carb surge short-term, you wont necessarily see the negative effects of higher carbohydrate. In fact, the inclusion of one or two higher carbohydrate days a week can create a benefit by stimulating a short-term insulin response that promotes protein synthesis. We dont encourage people to gorge, but simply eat a normal amount of calories emphasizing some of their favorite carbohydrate foods they were restricting on a low carbohydrate diet.Basically, on a low-carbohydrate diet, glycogen levels will be lower. So when you consume carbohydrates, they will be diverted toward muscle glycogen and not toward the liver, where they can contribute to the formation of fat in the body and some of the other problems that you see with excess carbohydrates.It is hard to put an exact number on how much carbohydrate you can eat before the glycogen tank fills up. Thats because you will be burning some of the carbs you eat as energy and some will go toward filling the partially emptied glycogen tank. Muscle and liver glycogen together can store about 500 grams of glycogen. After exercise on a low carbohydrate diet your liver will be pretty much depleted of glycogen and the muscle will be at about 15-50% of capacity. Wed rather you not be forced to counting grams of carbs anyway. If you eat a normal amount of calories and dont exceed two days of high carb eating, then there should be no metabolic problems associated with the increased glucose and insulin that accompany this short-term diet phase.How do you address people who see the TNT plan as just another fad?Were not putting this forth as a short-term solution for their body composition or their health. This is a lifestyle approach that we want people to adopt. The goal is to get people to change their behaviors and adapt this as a lifestyle.----------From The Ultimate Diet 2.0 (Lyle McDonald): Assuming full glycogen depletion somewhere between 12 and 16 g/kg of lean body mass is the magic number here. That works out to approximately 7-8 grams of carbs/lb of lean body mass for the metric impaired. This is over a 24 hour feed.JMC1077 Posted Dec 1, 1:50 PM: This .. is the amount of carbs you can eat before any noticeable spillover is huge. Just keep fat way low. The key Ive found was to push it as high as you can go while continuing to get leaner.You want to be over maintenance but in a depleted state it all goes to the muscles. So there will be [a different] threshold for everyone. Find it.Also You will store 3-4g of water per g of CHO [carbohydrate]. This is why your muscle seem so flat when depleted and so full when you re-feed.This is mentioned briefly in the [TNT Diet] book.According to Lyle McDonalds Body Recomposition web site: A normal non-carb loaded person may store 300-400 grams of muscle glycogen, another 50 or so of liver glycogen and 10 or so in the bloodstream as free glucose. So lets say 350-450 grams of carbohydrate as a rough average. This is the amount necessary to eat to go from zero to full.EDIT 12/23/11: Even if youre adept at storing carbs, theres only so much glycogen that your muscles and liver can store somewhere between 1000 and 2000 Calories in an adult, depending on how big your muscles are and your training status (exercise training can increase the amount of stored glycogen. The Art and Science of Low Carbohydrate Living, Volek & Phinney, page 58.And the Answer is: A moving target. If you assume that to fill your Tank you need to ingest 7 grams of carbohydrates per pound of lean body mass then 150 x 7 = 1,050 grams in a 24 hour period or approximately 4,200 calories of Carbohydates. This produces all of the stored and immediate use glycogen throughout the body. Doesnt really matter since the goal is to keep the tank empty or depleted so that the body turns its focus to buring fat.