Fitness, metabolism and building muscle

Mickk

Ok first of all I'm no expert and I have never studied any of this, it's just from personal experience. I am a real hard gainer, my metabolism in through the roof and even with eating 6000-7000 kcals a day I stalled at about 15 stone, my body up regulated my metabolism and my body just got hotter (walking around in middle of winter in tee-shirts ect.). I've never done any cardio training before because I'm always lean and didn't have a reason to but for the last 8 months I've been playing sport and started doing some cardio. What I found at the start was that I ran out of muscle sugars really quickly (cold sweat and getting the shakes) and obviously I got fitter over time so it took much longer to run out of muscle sugars. What I also found was that as I got fitter that it became easier to put on muscle.

So what I am asking is does your body become a more efficient and less wasteful of calories (turning them into heat) if you become fitter or how does fitness work? Eg when I go to do an hour of cardio I might have 2000 kcals in my system and now my body makes it last an hour verses 15 minutes when I started. Does this mean that my daily resting calorie need is now lower because my body has down regulated my metabolism in order to use calories more efficiently because it's expecting to have to do cardio? So now when I eat 6000 kcals a day I only need 5000kcals to function so I store the other thousand?

Lantus

You have all the classic syptoms of an ectomorph, hard gainer, thin frame, getting hot, I'm going to guess you suffer from insomnia as well possibly?

Basically the body gets really good at doing repetative tasks. So running or cycling 30 mins a day for months on end your body gets very effective and efficient at doing the same type of exercise and will burn less calories as a result. It's why fitness instructors who do a lot of classes wont always be the 'perfect' sape because their bodies have adapted so well.

In terms of gaining muscle mass a search of ectomorph training should get you started in the right direction. Rests, food, sleep and food ratios can all be varied to ensure you get the results you want. Frank Zane was a classic ectomorph and was one o the best bodybuilders there was.

As your body naturally burns fat you dont actually need to do that much cardio, once or twice a week and not that intense I would suggest.

Obviously the quality of what your eating is paramount. 6000kcal of chippers and sweets ain't going to cut it.... (but appreicate that just eating that much is really hard, not to mention expensive?!?)

rubadub

Mickk wrote: »

eating 6000-7000 kcals a day I stalled at about 15 stone,

This is an interesting read about people stalling at massive calorie intakes.
http://junkfoodscience.blogspot.com/2008/10/first-law-of-thermodynamics-in-real.html

Some quotes

Dr. Sims first tried to make university students fat by having them deliberately eat two to three times their normal caloric intakes. Over 3 to 5 months, try as they might, the students were only able to increase their weights by 10-12% and couldn’t gain more.

Groups of “equally dedicated volunteers at the Vermont State Prison” signed up, committed to eating as much as they could for 200 days to try to get fat. Far from being easy, it wasn’t. In fact, most of the men found it so extremely difficult that many considered dropping out. Forcing themselves to eat so much became so unpleasant a few even barfed after breakfast. “Most of them developed an aversion to breakfast,” wrote Dr. Sims. Virtually all of them at least doubled the amount of food they usually ate and simultaneously reduced their activity, and many were eating as much as 9,000 to 10,000 kcal/day he said. Still, only twenty men managed to gain 20 to 25% of their weight with great difficulty and the others couldn’t, even though they were consuming more calories than the others, wrote Dr. Sims.

Once the prisoners had gained weight, their metabolisms had increased by 50%. The men who were able to reach their goal weight found that they could only maintain their weight gain by continuing to overeat — on average ten times more than theoretically should have been necessary for their new size.

In study after study, the Rockefeller University researchers found that each person has a weight range of about 10-20 pounds that their body naturally gravitates to.

BrianD3

Interesting, rubadub. The heaviest I ever managed to get to was around 13.75 stone, I was stalled at that and was stuffing my face (with a lot of it junk food) to maintain it. Eating when I felt full, "supplementing" with Big Macs, peanut butter mixed with ice cream, Nutella with hazelnuts mixed in, cakes, huge Chinese takeaways, drinking olive oil etc. Although my visible bodyfat remained low when I got my cholesterol tested it was somewhat elevated so I decide to end this eating regime, it was making me feel sick anyway. So I went back to "normal" eating, weight fell off initially, 1.5 stone went in less than a month then I started to stabilise.