Prudent protein: it's too important to waste

Growing up in the sport, I heard from some of the big guys in the gym that in order to be their size, I'd need to ingest outrageous quantities of food. They were big, so I believed them, but I've since come to the conclusion that you don't need to completely stuff your gut every two hours and eat 20,000 calories a day to become a monster.

The reason I believe this is from application. I've never been able to eat a huge amount of food at one sitting.

Every time I've gone out to eat with my buddies after training, they always eat double the amount I could eat. The fact is I just couldn't stuff that volume in my stomach, regardless of how hard I tried.

At first, it stressed me out. I'd look at the guys doing this and think, Man, you're going to be so huge and I'm going to be small. I'd get discouraged and think I didn't have what it takes, but at the end of the year, after we had dieted and were in a contest, I'd end up with 20 pounds more than any of them.

It took two or three times for this to sink in, but I eventually came to realize that it's not solely the amount you eat. It's the assimilation of that food, which, in turn, is partially a function of being consistent, as well as meticulous, about how you eat and how often, on a daily basis.

A lot of guys take the overload approach to extremes. They're apostolates of the "more is better" doctrine and think they can force their bodies to assimilate protein by giving them more than they need. Instead, they should be working at the margin of the body's protein assimilation, experimenting with marginal increases to find the precise point of optimal growth. They are thus "allowing" their bodies to grow, rather than smothering them with gross excess.

Think of an engine: if you put too much gas in a cylinder, it floods. It won't start, it runs rough, it backfires and it's sluggish. If you back off the gas pedal just a tad, though, you get more efficiency and power out of it. That's common sense, but the protein principle has become wildly skewed because there's so much pressure to get big. A 180-pound kid opens the magazines and immediately wants to put on 80 pounds so he can compete with Kevin Levrone. That's a lot of pressure, and it pushes him to extreme and counterproductive measures.

I'd recommend using the offseason to experiment with how your body grows. Try ingesting 40 grams (g) of protein with 50 g of carbohydrates. Then, try it with 70, 80 or 90 g of protein and 100 g of carbs. Give yourself 21 days on each program, then compare the definitive difference--I'm talking muscle growth, not just weight. You'll probably be surprised at how little your body requires to produce the same amount of muscle, and that it's actually other factors that really make the difference. Those things include consistency of training, consistency of rest, supplements--creatine, glutamine, branched-chain amino acids--and all the nutrients your body utilizes, as well as the efficiently assimilated quantities and proportions of food.

Don't get me wrong; protein is very important in my nutrition, but intake can actually be at the low end during my growth stages. It used to be common for me to ingest 500-600 g of protein a day, but I ended up so full that I had little room for carbohydrates. What I've learned is that protein is the wood that's used to build the house, but carbohydrates are the carpenters. If you don't have enough carpenters to put the wood together, the house won't go up, no matter how much wood you have.

I've found that raising my carbohydrate level is actually more productive for me than raising my protein level; in fact, protein, for me, can be as low as 250 g daily in the offseason. I tell that to people, and they think I'm crazy, but it works for me. Every year, I end up bigger than everybody else. What's happening is that I'm assimilating more protein than they are, even though I'm at 250 g and they're at 550. Furthermore, by not being a protein glutton, I'm competing as a 260-pound super heavyweight, but I have the midsection of a middleweight, with no abdominal distention whatsoever.

One of the greatest benefits of prudent protein consumption is that my offseason eating doesn't change much from precontest, other than I'll occasionally have some junk food. I don't go from eating 6,000 calories to 20,000 calories and suddenly grow a huge amount of muscle. For the 2004 USA, I started my precontest diet weighing 266 pounds, only six pounds above my competing weight, so I ended up growing into my diet. In other words, I was virtually there before I started. Just think of how easy--and most important, enjoyable--that makes this business of bodybuilding.

RELATED ARTICLE: RED MEAT

I come from Oklahoma, so red meat to me is like candy. I love red meat, but its negatives are more waste and a more labored process of breaking it down in the body, which can impede digestion, thereby facilitating constipation and distention. For precontest, I've become a real fan of lean chicken and turkey breast. In prep for the 2004 USA, I removed, for the first time, all steak from my diet and found that my body became a lot more efficient. I use 93%, not 99%, fat-free turkey breast; I believe that the extra little bit of fat enhances digestion and also that the body's cells and joints need it.

BY CHRIS COOK

2004 NPC USA SUPER-HEAVYWEIGHT CHAMPION

PHOTOGRAPHY BY CHRIS LUND

COPYRIGHT 2004 Weider Publications
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group