The definition phase is the moment in which the results of the volume phase are revealed, so it is important to know how to correctly plan this process.

Diet, training and rest are especially important at this point, because poor planning can stop your progress in one go.

Diet in the definition phase: this is what you should do

Although the rest of the factors that we have discussed are important, diet is probably the most decisive factor, since achieving results with training without a good diet is very difficult.

For example, eating 700 calories is relatively easy. In fact, this can be done in as little as 10 minutes. However, burning the same amount of calories in exercise is much more complicated and takes longer.

In the definition phase, the caloric volume of the diet decreases compared to the volume phase.

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This means that the foods that we should prioritize are the low-calorie foods within the foods we consume.

As you can imagine, these foods are fruits and vegetables, not refined flours or sugars.

Strategies such as eating large amounts of fiber and protein at the same meal (for example, lettuce fiber and tuna protein in the same salad) can also help you feel fuller to achieve a negative caloric balance.

One of the best ways to promote muscle mass retention in this cutting stage is through a high protein intake. As a reference, you can take into account being above 1.8 grams per kilogram of body weight.

Physical activity: the most important ally

Another very effective stimulus to maintain muscle mass during a caloric deficit is physical activity, especially strength training.

It’s true that strength training consumes fewer calories per unit of time than cardio training, but in the long run, prioritizing strength training provides a better body composition advantage.

Published on Unplash by Andrew “Donovan” Valdivia

Does this mean I have to strength train without cardio? . You can combine cardio and strength for best results, but you should never allow aerobic exercise to be an excuse to avoid strength training.

Cardio has many benefits for our physical condition and health, including the improvement of the maximum volume of oxygen, and mitochondrial biosynthesis. These effects should not be underestimated, in any case you must work hard with the weights to maintain the muscle mass gained during the bulking phase.

Break: The Great Forgotten

In the definition stage, a calorie deficit occurs. This increases the chance of getting tired sooner.

If lack of calories is a prerequisite for fat loss, what else do I need to do? Simple, you have to prioritize rest.

At this stage, it’s perfectly normal to feel tired and need more sleep. In that case, you should take a break and set aside a weekend day to relax or get more sleep. Try to go to bed a little earlier on weekdays…

Poor rest can result in increased caloric intake throughout the day, as well as poor performance, as our body is literally telling the brain that it hasn’t recovered and is looking for other ways to get energy.

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Another important point is to take advantage of sleep time, since the quality of sleep over the quantity is a relevant factor.

In this case, you can resort to sleep improvement strategies such as avoiding light sources in the room, following a regular sleep schedule, and keeping the room cool and quiet.

The last ally that you can use to improve sleep is melatonin. Melatonin, found in supplement form, can significantly improve sleep quality and increase sleep time.

If you don’t already know Fitenium is a free, mobile, video-based social network for athletes who train strength or bodyweight exercises. At Fitenium users can follow their performance, compete and get discounts in nutrition and sports equipment stores. Download it here.

Surely you would have read many websites and 1000’s of publications to read what to do to gain muscle, and perhaps most importantly, eat enough daily protein for each individual. Training to gain muscle mass is a requirement.

In this post, we will discuss the importance of training to gain muscle mass, in order to clarify the most important concepts that must be taken into account if you are interested in “growth”. However, we must remember that a diet must always cover our needs (100% diet and 100% training), without it, no matter how well you train, you will not get results.

First, to gain muscle mass, it does NOT only affect the number of repetitions, series, weight to move, periodicity method, macro, meso or microcycles, nor the exercises or routines you do.

Certainly the best thing to do to build muscle is obviously to perform core exercises. These multi-joint exercises involve working on multiple joints at the same time, thus mobilizing many fibers per iteration.

Published on Unplash by Nathan Dumlao

Well this is true. As a rule, and for most people, basic strength exercises will build more muscle than any other exercise, and should be included in your routine. However, not everyone uses the basics to get results.

For example, some people do squats and don’t gain size. Squats are great movements, but they often focus too much on the hips instead of the legs. Or people who don’t stretch their chest enough with a bench press.

In these cases, you need to use an alternate move that gives you better results, but this should only be done if the basics don’t work. In general, alternative movements should not be an excuse to avoid hard work.

Several times a week

For optimal growth, each muscle group should be trained several times a week. Most people believe that the more volume you train with each workout, the more your muscle mass will grow and the more sets/reps you will do in your daily life.

Published on Unplash by Isaac Wendland

Doing 20-30 sets against a muscle group or going to muscle failure is a mistake. It’s a big mistake to use a series of descending orders, supersets, breaks/pauses, etc. in the same routine to fully exhaust that muscle group. Obviously, this method does not allow you to train that group 2-3 times a week.

It is not the amount of work in the group that matters, but the frequency of training.

The important thing is not to do too much volume for a particular group in each training session. Therefore, you cannot train more than one day a week.

High-volume training typically works when people use steroids that increase protein synthesis (so that each workout stimulates more growth for longer periods of time). In this case frequent stimulation with lower intensities per session is required for maximum growth.

Published on Unplash by Charlie Wollborg

separate muscle training

If you feel that your muscles are not really working during the exercise, then it is true that there is not enough stimulation for your muscles to grow to the maximum. In this case you should increase the weight and reduce the number of repetitions. For example, when strength training, you should feel like the correct muscle is working.

It is not necessary to achieve a large amount of fatigue during the session, but after performing the series you should feel the fatigue of the trained group.

You may not have the athletic ability to optimally activate certain muscles during basic movements, so you may want to consider using isolation exercises and learning how to get the most out of them.

When you learn to do muscle contraction correctly, you are more involved in basic (jointed) movements. So doing an isolation exercise on invisible muscles is a future investment in muscle growth.

Therefore, we will first focus on the quality of the contractions and learn how to separate the muscles using isolating work and constant tension. Then, lighten the muscles to induce pre-fatigue and aid isolated movement before executing the compound. This makes it possible to achieve optimal muscle activation.

Cardiovascular exercise

There are many questions about whether to do aerobic exercise. A recent trend is to do HIIT, or high-intensity aerobic exercise, several times a week while trying to gain muscle.

Clearly, improving cardiopulmonary function can be beneficial as it helps increase appetite. Aerobic exercise is great for those who have difficulty eating (remember eating enough is very important): it helps with recovery, maintains cardiovascular health and fitness, and keeps your fat-burning metabolic state active.

However, too much aerobic or strenuous exercise can interfere with increased muscle strength and muscle growth, so plan your aerobic exercise.

Therefore, if your goal is muscle gain, moderate, low-intensity cardio 2-3 days a week for 20-30 minutes is sufficient. Your knees will appreciate not having to endure so much stress in those intense aerobic sessions, and you will achieve better results in terms of muscle hypertrophy.

If you don’t already know Fitenium is a free, mobile, video-based social network for athletes who train strength or bodyweight exercises. At Fitenium users can follow their performance, compete and get discounts in nutrition and sports equipment stores. Download it here.

However, because these measurements are not always accurate, you should use a more reliable method, such as precommetry, if you want to obtain information from specific areas of the body. It is not always possible for an expert to use the lipocaliper to make measurements or immediately measure muscle quality. For this, the Skulpt has come to us, since it allows you to know the quality of your muscles, the proportion of fat and muscle, and they give you advice to improve them.

Skulpt is a mobile-sized device that can measure both muscle mass, fat mass percentage and muscle quality in different parts of the body and provides comprehensive fitness information. The gadget connects to your phone via bluetooth and you can view all your measurement data via the free app for iOS and Android.

What are the advantages over traditional bioimpedance?

Basically, the bioimpedance scale provides a global calculation of fat and muscle mass without taking into account the different parts of the body (generally stores more fat than other areas). In Sculpt, on the other hand, you can move region by region for more precise calculations.

In addition, muscle quality data allows us to check if our muscle mass is balanced, thus avoiding possible injuries caused by muscle imbalance and indicating whether it is necessary to work on any area unilaterally.

Based on all this data, Skulpt also offers us personalized training and nutrition advice so that, although it can never replace the work of a personal trainer or nutritionist, they can be a good complement.

Skulpt costs $99 (around €89 to change) and can be purchased on the official website.

If you don’t already know Fitenium is a free, mobile, video-based social network for athletes who train strength or bodyweight exercises. At Fitenium users can follow their performance, compete and get discounts in nutrition and sports equipment stores. Download it here.

The supplement industry is a multi-billion dollar industry, and in the case of BCAAs (Branched Chain Amino Acids), it is growing on the premise of improving anabolic state by stimulating protein synthesis. Aside from its effect on increasing muscle mass, much has been said about its effect on reducing muscle damage and reducing central fatigue, but how true are these claims?

What is an amino acid?

Second, proteins are macromolecules that are part of every cell in the body and, in addition to producing enzymes, hormones, or neurotransmitters, they are also parts of blood, bone, or muscle.

There are 20 amino acids, 9 of which are essential. This means that the body cannot synthesize large amounts of itself and therefore must be taken from the diet. The rest of the amino acids are known to be non-essential and can be produced in adequate amounts by the body on its own, so there is no need to include them in the diet.

The organism for the synthesis or construction of proteins, whether muscular or of any other type, needs amino acids. A limiting factor in protein synthesis is that the body has sufficient amounts of all the essential amino acids, since the body itself can produce the non-essential amino acids.

BCAAs in particular are part of the essential amino acids and there are three types: leucine, isoleucine and valine. They receive another name due to the peculiarity that they have branched side chains in their structure. The growing popularity of BCAAs in the supplement industry is due to the fact that BCAAs, or rather leucine, have a strong ability to stimulate one of the most important anabolic cell signaling pathways, mTORC1 (a target of rapamycin in mammals). Increasingly complex 1 or mammalian cell targets of rapamycin).

BCAAs and protein synthesis

First of all, it must be said that most of the work observing the positive effects of BCAAs on protein synthesis is done in rodents. The procedures and doses used in these studies are not applicable to humans due to differences in physiologic and cellular signaling pathways.

However, in humans, the administration of BCAAs, whose leucine content is the main cause, can stimulate protein synthesis, but it is known that the administration of the remaining essential amino acids is necessary to optimize the response. Being done. In the cited study, the response in protein synthesis when BCAAs were administered was 50% lower than when whey or casein protein was administered. BCAAs increased protein synthesis by 22%, but not as much as complete protein.

All this can be explained because the body needs all the essential amino acids to build muscle protein. Even large doses of BCAAs cannot increase protein synthesis beyond a certain point due to one or more restricted amino acids. It is not enough to support this process.

In English, the concept of limited or speed-limited amino acid provides a large amount of BCAAs and limits the remaining essential amino acid. The quality of synthesis is not due to the contribution of BCAAs but to an insufficient contribution of essential amino acids. It is also necessary that the duration of the dwellings be high. It’s cool, but more for building a house:

In any case, the bottom line is that building muscle requires better protein synthesis than breaking it down, and to trigger long-lasting protein synthesis, not just the three essential amino acids, but the whole gamut. It is required.

BCAA and mTORC1 anabolic signaling pathways

As mentioned above, BCAAs stimulate mTORC1, one of the most important anabolic cell signaling pathways, due to their leucine content. Protein synthesis and cell signaling are not the same, but both are necessary with strength training to trigger muscle growth.

This needs to be explained, as many believe that flipping a ‘switch’ in the mTOR pathway is enough to trigger muscle growth, but this is not the case. In that case, you don’t even need to train.

To explain the relationship between protein synthesis and cellular signal transmission, we must compare it to the work of the building, and to the beginning of all work that can be done. It may be called: mason, electrician, carpenter or pipe builder… but when they arrive, they are assembled. They discover that everyone has a bag of tools, a handful of cables and pipes, and they all understand it. What is needed (transmission of cell signals) to build the building (protein synthesis) contains only a small amount of that substance (the remaining essential amino acids). Sin BCAA)

In summary, BCAAs can stimulate the mTOR pathway but not maximize protein synthesis either in size or duration.

Maximize muscle protein synthesis (MPS)

What effect do BCAAs have on muscle recovery?

Another benefit that results from BCAAs is the positive impact on training recovery due to the attenuation of muscle damage. In fact, the scientific community has not yet agreed on this issue. Some studies look at these effects and others do not.

A recent study found that BCAAs reduced myalgia after intense eccentric training, but these effects were negligible if the protocol was repeated on a diet containing at least 1.2 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight. Era. Here you can see how important your total daily protein intake is to your BCAA intake.

In another 2010 study, BCAAs reduced muscle soreness in untrained men who participated in the study after taking 14 grams of BCAAs daily for 3 days post-workout, but with no change in muscle function. It was observed that this was not the case.

However, the International Association for Sports Nutrition (ISSN) needs further study to see if BCAAs are supplements that can improve post-workout recovery, especially in high-protein diet situations. There is.

How do BCAAs affect fatigue in endurance aerobic sports?

These fatty acids are transported by the protein carrier albumin and can also transport tryptophan. This competition between fatty acids and tryptophan leaves more free tryptophan in the blood that travels to the brain, crosses the blood-brain barrier, and increases the synthesis of serotonin, a neurotransmitter that increases fatigue.

A transporter is required for tryptophan to cross the blood-brain barrier. This transporter is the same transporter that BCAAs use to cross this barrier, so increased BCAA consumption competes with tryptophan, many of which cross the blood-brain barrier and cause fatigue. It’s supposed to go away.

However, to date, this hypothesis has not been proven, because there is only one old study from 1998 that observed better performance when taking BCAAs.

So should you take a BCAA?

In fact, if your diet already provides enough protein, it’s not necessary. It’s relatively common for us to cover these amounts for protein amounts of 1.5 to 2.5 grams per kilogram of body weight, depending on the person, physical activity, and goal, and it’s easy for most people.

However, if you want to get BCAAs, it is important that these are accompanied by the remaining essential amino acids if your goal is to gain muscle mass.

If you’re an endurance athlete and think it’s worth trying to reduce fatigue, your typical intake is about 20 grams of BCAAs and at least 2-10 grams of leucine. The time of consumption can be before, during or after training.

BCAA supplements are usually sold in a 2:1:1 or 4:1:1 ratio and there is always more leucine present. A 2:1:1 supplement is sufficient. More leucine than we have seen so far does not produce additional effects.