Lemme grab some of that knowledge too
So,
1.When you talk about carb ups,do you just take a day where you eat everything in sight,eat just one huge meal or just up the carbs and aim for a small carolie surplus on that day?
2.What protein intake do you suggest?
Man if you’re ever doing a competition in the south gimme a holler and I’d be super down to do it with you, or be your handler if you don’t already have one. Not that I know shit about being a handler lol
Haha- I lift raw but if I ever need a handler to squeeze into a squat suit I’ll hit you up, thanks
Shit I meant for moral support. You’re on your own dressing yourself 
nooooo. It depends on a few factors, the most notable of which being how lean you are, but for the most part when people are carbing up they drop their fats waaaaaaay down on that day. This stops you from hitting ludicrous calorie numbers and doing more harm than good.
When you’re carbing up you’re trying to do two things: stoke your metabolism by getting your leptin levels back up and refill glycogen. Leptin’s a hormone that basically tells your body it’s cool to burn fat (there’s obviously way more to it than that), but if you under-eat for ages your leptin levels get low and your body starts to panic and puts the brakes on fat burning to try and keep you alive longer. A big ole carb up gets your leptin levels back up, and gets you burning fat again. The refilling glycogen is fairly self-explanatory.
So you don’t need a shitload of calories, just a shitload of carbs. You’ll get into a calorie surplus anyway from the carb-up, but there’s no need to add a load of extra fat calories on top of that.
1g of protein per lb of your bodyweight is likely more than enough, and it’s not necessary to go any higher (or even as high as that, most likely) unless you are going for an extreme calorie deficit.
Lyle MacDonald (or is it McDonald? I can never remember) goes into detail about protein requirements in The Rapid Fat Loss Handbook which is a great read even if you don’t want to do the (frankly - horrible) diet.
Lyle’s pretty much the most unbiased, scientific dude around along with Alan Aragon in terms of nutrition advice. He’s kind of a dick though so if you check out his forum be prepared for that.
For a proper and efficient carb up day, or “refeed”, a standard protocol is twice as many carbs as you typically get, protein is lowered to 1g per pound, and fats are kept minimal to non existent (I get mine from Flameout on those days.) We lower protein because carbs are muscle sparing in nature and lowering protein to ~1g per pound of bodyweight ensures you leave more room for carbs but still get enough protein to maintain, and we lower fats because having higher fats and carbs in the blood at the same time has a greater potential to store body fat. Don’t be afraid of higher GI carbs like bagels, pasta, rice, potato, etc., the point of the high day is to tell your body everything is ok, get those carbs in and fire up the metabolism.
IMO this is the best way to do a refeed day. A “cheat day” or “cheat meal” where you eat whatever you want has a significant potential for added body fat because you’re not used to all those calories, and you’re more likely to store body fat from something like pizza or cheeseburgers all day than pasta and meat sauce or a bagel. Some will say you’ll only store fat if you go way over calories, but my thoughts are why risk it. Plus, on a refeed day faster digesting carbs are ideal, so slowing them down with fats might not be optimal. On a tough low carb diet, I love me a good refeed day! In my last weeks of contest prep I was seriously depleted, and adding a properly executed weekly refeed got the progress moving again.
As I just posted this I saw @Yogi1s response, awesome info as always. Really looking forward to seeing this guy after the T-Nation contest!
you don’t have any dietary fat at all? Jesus that must be rough. Was this all the way through your prep or just at the end?[quote=“robstein, post:46, topic:221758”]
Really looking forward to seeing this guy after the T-Nation contest!
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haha, so many of you are going to be completely underwhelmed! I’m really not a very big dude at all
These detailed responses were so amazing that they got me wanting to cut now,but I love the strength and size gains at the moment
Thanks guys
Ah this was just on the one weekly refeed day. Some incidental fats from Finibar and the Flameout. I have found though that I can maintain leanness and make better progress with higher carbs, moderate protein and lower fats. On a typical day now I get 250g carbs, 180g protein and 45g fat. Low days I’ll get about 60g fat. During my prep I’ll be keeping fats at the same level, enough for the health benefits but not too much.
sorry, I wasn’t clear. What I meant was: did you have no fats on all of your refeed days, or did you drop them down as you got further into the cut?
Gotchya, the fats were actually fairly high initially on my high days, around 65g and ~325g carbs, those days started at 3200 cals. I was still losing weight, as the prep continued we eventually moved to keto, taking carbs out totally. Once I stopped keto and went back to carb cycling after the first show, we slowly added some carbs back in, but progress was stalling. Once we got to about 4 weeks out and starting adding the refeeds, that’s when we started no dietary fats on refeed days. I still had a “high day” at the time, but we bumped up the carbs more and took out the fats to turn them into a more standard refeed. Those days got the progress moving again, the last month we really figured out what works best for me, which can only be done with trial and error. So, this year I’ll start with no dietary fats on the high days from the start.
cool, thanks for that. I haven’t really decided on a definite course of action but I’m thinking that for the first month or two I’m going to do weekly cheat meals rather than refeeds, as I’ll still be eating 150g or so grams of carbs a day at first. When I drop the carbs down to <100g a day it’ll be a once a week, zero-fat, high-carb refeed methinks.
Or maybe not. I’ll obviously be fine-tuning it as I go.
Update: spent the last few weeks increasing my calories from 2200/day to 2600/day and have done so without gaining any weight. Sitting around 224 right now. I took @robstein advice and slowly upped my carbs while keeping protein and fats in check. I am prepping for that meet. 9 weeks out currently, aiming for bench only as I work through a minor back injury. With the way things are going, it looks like I am in line for a comfortable cut to the 220’s.
Hey man. Can we get an update on how the cut ended up? As I guy who is looking to drop a weight class of two myself, I’m curious what your training looked like while dieting down and how it affected your numbers