Gain Fresh New Muscle By Eating No Protein

By Wesley McDermott

Think it’s impossible to make muscle with no protein?  By manipulating your protein intake you CAN GAIN FOUR TO 5 POUNDS
OF NEW MUSCLE IN ONLY TEN DAYS!

If you’ve read my previous articles, you’ll already know that protein intake is vital for building muscle mass, after all muscle tissue is made of protein.  Makes it impossible to gain new muscle without eating it then, right?  Wrong!  But to understand why its wrong, we need to look at a technique that is used by endurance athletes.  The technique is known as carb-loading and, in simple terms, this technique forces the body to store more glycogen than normal in the muscle fibers.  These increased stores mean that athletes go on for longer, that is, they experience greater endurance.  This occurrence is known as supercompensation, and its existence is extremely well documented.

To carb-load, you first need to eliminate carbs from the diet over a period of several days, whilst you continue to train as hard as usual.  After that, you reduce your training and, at the same time, eat large amounts of carbs.  What this does is forces the muscles to store carbohydrates, in the form of glycogen.  As usual, when the body has been kept short of something, it hungrily takes in all the carbs it can get, just in case it never gets any carbs again. It’s been found that this technique can, and does, result in one-and-a-half times the normal amount of glycogen being stored.

Now, if you then, translate this to muscle building and the body’s need for protein, the same science applies – reduce protein intake for a day, continue training, eat lots of protein – the muscles will suck up all the protein they can get.  Unlike glycogen, however, which is immediately expended as energy, your body will hang on to the extra protein by building muscle – muscle is where most of the body’s protein is stored.

Now, I’m going to tell you exactly how to do this but you must remember that I am not a doctor or a medical practitioner of any kind and you should always consult your doctor before making any radical changes to your diet.

There are three phases in this technique – the lead-up phase, protein deprivation phase, and the supercompensation phase.  The phases are no good on their own, you have to use them together to get results.

Lead-Up Phase

This is how you manipulate your training and diet for several days before you start depriving you body of protein.  I first came across it several years ago, when I read some work by Leo Costa Junior of Optimum Training Systems.  He had noticed that farmers in Bulgaria rotated the diet of their livestock to improve the amount and quality of the meat they would produce.  When he applied what he had observed to humans, the results were astonishing.

Okay, there are a couple of methods you can use in the Lead-Up phase.  The first way is to continue eating your normal diet and doing your normal training and then, a day or two before the protein deprivation day, take a day or two off training.

The second method revolves around restricting your carb-intake (if you’ve never done this before, its best to check it out with your doctor first). 

During the three days before your protein deprivation day, keep your carb intake reduced at around 30 to 50 grams per day, but keep everything else as normal.  Doing this will force your body to use fat and protein to make energy, thereby making your body desperate to renew its protein stores.  So when you supercompensate they will greedily suck up all the protein you throw at them.

The Protein Deprivation Day

Today, you will eat fruit and nothing else – completely eliminating protein and fat from your diet.  This forces your body to use up its protein stores, leaving it desperate for more supplies.

Eat as much fruit as you want – apples, oranges, pears, strawberries, bananas – anything, as long as its fruit.  Your body will start to use the reserves in its free amino acid pool, aka the muscles.  A side benefit is that fruit is very cleansing to the body and you may well find that your digestive system is more efficient.

On the all fruit day, you must ensure that you drink plenty of water to keep yourself hydrated and, if you workout, drink fruit juice or eat a lot of fruit immediately you complete your training session.  Your body will be offloading loads of toxins and you need to help flush them out of your system.

As far as training is concerned you can either:

Supercompensation

The bit you’ve been waiting for!

On your first day, start the day with a protein shake and ensure that every meal today has a high protein content – try to manage at least 1 gram of protein for each gram of your bodyweight.  So, if you weigh 200lbs, you should aim to eat 200 grams of protein, more if you can manage it.

Over the next three to five days, continue with high protein meals. Your body is sucking up all the protein you can give it, and you need to maximize this.

Don’t forget that to turn all that protein into muscle fiber, you need to train.  Not only that, you need to train HARD and HEAVY.  Do your basic exercises as before in sets of 6 to 8 reps.

Now, here’s the clever bit!  Not only is your body supercompensating with proteins, its doing it with carbs as well!  This means that you’ll achieve even greater muscle growth.

It works like this:  when you eat carbs, your body secretes insulin to assist storage.  That’s insulin’s job you see, it helps your body to store fat, carbs, and protein.  So be depriving your body of carbs over a few days, it becomes sensitized to carbs and insulin.  The net result is that, because of its deprivation over the past few days, your body is screaming out for protein and, because of the carb deprivation, it has insulin in abundance to store that protein.  Result – fast new muscle growth.

Conclusion

By understanding how your body works, you can manipulate it to do some amazing things and, with the techniques in this article, you will be able to add pounds of muscle over a period of a few days.