LEVEL 4 - NUTRIENT TIMING & FREQUENCY (Part 3) Multi-Day Refeeds & Carb Cycling Flashcards
What are the benefits of multi-day refeeds?
As you get leaner, deeper into your diet, and experience your body pushing back harder and harder, the potential utility of multi-day refeeds, or more frequent 24 hour refeeds increases.
Multi-day refeeds have the potential for reversing metabolic adaptation to a degree, they can also result in a superior body composition at the end of your diet than if you had just dieted straight through.
Who should use multi-day refeeds?
Once you are below ~12% body fat if you are a male or ~20% body fat if you are a female, it would be a good idea to consider implementing multi-day refeeds.
How do you implement multi-day refeeds?
The easiest method is to simply have 2 refeed days in a row each week. You would implement this in the same exact way I explained for single day refeeds, except instead of spreading your deficit over 6 days, you would spread it over 5. Another way to implement multi-day refeeds is to have 3 days spread across the week as desired that are at maintenance. Once again, you would have only 4 days to spread the de cit over if you were to use this approach.
Other ways to implement refeeds?
I’m not suggesting that 2 refeeds in a row, or 3 refeeds spread out over the week are the only or best ways to do it. Rather, these are just simple straightforward ways to do it. We don’t have enough information to say what is optimal for most people, and even if we did, there would surely be a lot of individual variation.
The general conclusions we can make from the available research is that there is a strong rationale for refeeding the leaner you get, and the leaner you get the more frequent refeeds should occur.
What about having higher calorie intakes on training days and lower intakes on off days?
If you get to the point in a diet where you are lean enough (~12% body fat or lower for men, 20% or lower for women) to start implementing multiple refeed days per week, there will be a larger disparity between your low days and high days. Using the same example as before but with 3 weekly refeeds, if the goal is to lose 1.5 lbs (~0.7 kg) per week (requiring a 5250 kcal deficit per week), your low days would be ~1300 kcal lower than your refeeds. This is a large deficit and could potentially impact training.
To offset this potential effect, it’s not a bad idea to think about strategically placing your refeeds relative to your training days. However, placing them on the same day only makes sense if you train in the evening. Complete glycogen (your stored carbohydrate) resynthesis after exercise can take up to 24 hours. So if you train in the morning or afternoon, you may not be getting the full bene ts of a refeed if it is done on the same day that you train. So, if you are implementing three weekly refeeds, place them the day before your three highest-volume training days if you train in the afternoon or morning, or, place them on the same day if you train in the evening.
The premise of altering caloric intake on training versus non training days is likely unnecessary outside of the circumstances described above where you have a large energy disparity between low and refeed days and a high number of refeeds per week.The reason it is unnecessary, is that the di erence in caloric expenditure on a training day (resistance training) versus an o day is quite small.
Finally, I would point out that adaptation from training does not occur only on the day of training; rather, adaptation is a continual process� So, while I don’t have any evidence to cite, I would avoid setting calories too low on o days as well� While some have argued for this approach to limit fat gain in the o season, it could also potentially limit muscle gain if it interfered with recovery� However, this would only be a concern with a large disparity in calorie intakes; small variations are unlikely to have any impact in my opinion�
What is the best meal frequency?
Consume somewhere between 3 to 6 meals per day in most cases. But that said, if you have previously found success with slightly more or less meals than this, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. If you do ne on 2 meals per day or 7 meals per day, feel free to stick with it. There are plenty of high level competitive bodybuilders who have found a great deal of success following very high meal frequencies (6 to 8 meals per day), and likewise there are many folks who have followed an intermittent fasting approach to eating who have had personal or competitive success eating 2 meals per day (usually involving skipping breakfast) with only whey protein or BCAA prior to training.
