Primer 52: The Program

Improving your body is full of catch-22 situations: To build a lot of muscle you need to eat a lot, but that means you’ll likely gain some fat, too. To lose a lot of fat you need a caloric deficit, which often negatively affects your training and can even lead to muscle and strength loss. Training heavy will get you stronger and can make you more muscular, but it can drain you and abuse your joints and tendons. You can build muscle by doing lighter work that’s easier on the nervous system and your joints, but you might lose strength in the process. It’s also hard to mix and match the various ways you like to train, like sprinting, recreational sport, strength work, hypertrophy work, conditioning, etc. And it’s even harder trying to eat for the type of training you’re doing or have done. All of the preceding is why Paul Carter and I developed a nutrition/training approach called “Primer 52.” It is in fact similar to The 5/2 Fat Loss Diet for Lifters devised by TC Luoma that uses two days of very aggressive caloric restriction and 5 days of maintenance or even surplus eating. Primer 52, however, takes the idea further, focusing on fundamentals of advanced biochemistry and a specific combination of training and nutrition. The program is revolutionary in that it allows you do anything and everything you want to do as far as reshaping your body, either through increasing muscle, losing fat, or both. You literally eradicate all those catch-22s. But before I lay out the specifics of Primer 52, I first need to list the three muscle growth factors (MGF) that are essential to muscle growth, along with explaining the value of caloric deficits and how we can easily manipulate mTOR and AMPK. MGF 1 – You Don’t Need a Caloric Surplus to Build Muscle Yes, you read that right. The “evidence-based” coaches will want to destroy me, but I have science to back me up when I say that you don’t need extra calories to build muscle. In fact, a caloric surplus isn’t even a main variable when it comes to building muscle. It’s only indirectly involved. A couple of years ago, Dr. Stuart Phillips and a group of capable scientists from McMaster’s University recruited two groups of 20 men. Both groups were assigned a diet that gave them a 40% caloric deficit per day over 4 weeks. (All of their meals were given to them, so it was well controlled.) One group had a daily protein intake of 1.2g/kg (0.54g per pound, so about 108 grams for a 200-pound man) and the second group received about twice as much protein, or 2.4g/kg (1.1g per pound, so about 220 grams for a 200-pound man). All of the men lifted 4 days a week and did sprints 2 days a week. After 4 weeks, both groups lost a significant amount of fat (around 3.5kg or 7.7 pounds). The low protein group lost a small amount of muscle while the high protein group actually GAINED some muscle. (1) Clearly, protein is the nutritional key necessary for muscle growth, and not a calorie surplus. MGF 2 – You Need Sufficient Energy to Build Muscle This factor may at first sound like it contradicts what I just wrote about not needing a caloric surplus to build muscle, but it doesn’t. Hear me out. To build muscle you do need fuel. Constructing new muscle requires energy. You need 3 calories to synthesize 1g of protein, to be exact. There are 220g of protein in 1kg (2.2lbs) of muscle, so at the very least you’ll need 660 calories to synthesize enough protein to build a kilo of muscle. But in reality it’s much higher than that because of the daily protein turnover (you break down and rebuild muscle tissue constantly). And the more you train, the higher that turnover is. While the exact number isn’t that important, it’s safe to say that you’ll need at least 1000 calories to fuel the process of building a kilo of muscle. Again, this sounds like I’m saying you need a caloric surplus to build muscle, but you don’t. If you need more energy than you have consumed, you’ll simply dip into your reserves (stored body fat or glycogen). It’s the same thing with building muscle. If you need energy to fuel the process but you’re in a deficit, you’ll use stored energy to get the job done. This is also why the leaner you are, the harder it is to build muscle while being in a deficit. Fatter individuals have a lot more reserves and there’s no threat to your survival if you use that stored energy to fuel muscle growth. MGF 3 – You Need to Actually Stimulate Protein Synthesis It’s not enough to have sufficient protein available to build muscle and the energy to fuel the process. If you don’t trigger an increase in muscle protein synthesis, you won’t build muscle. And this is where the caloric surplus plays a role, albeit indirectly, by increasing both insulin (which happens if you eat more carbs and proteins) and IGF-1 (the liver needs insulin and growth hormone to release IGF-1). Raising insulin is important because it both decreases muscle protein breakdown and stimulates protein synthesis by increasing mTOR.
Origin: Primer 52: The Program