Put straight, what we know of physiology simply doesn’t support the AD as anything but a dieting strategy. It’s an easy an effective way to curb intake and play the supercompensation game.
Resistance training will only ever be fueled by carbohydrate. Whether those carbs come from converted/excess protein or from glycogen “spared” from a carb-up, carbs will be the only fuel source.
I messed with the AD and the problem is it’s illogical given the biochemical demands of our body. Most of the citations in the book are based off of rat studies and have little to no bearing on human physiology given the wide disparity in genetic timelines. A day for a rat is equivalent, roughly, to a human year. You can see where the issue begins to confound itself.
Not to say that utilizing a low-carb strategy isn’t effective, but fundamentally, we’re talking calories. Eat in excess, gain weight. Eat in deficit, lose weight. I do think typical bodybuilder diet demands are too high on the carbs, low on the fat, and DiPasquale plays the “either/or” game in his book, ignoring the middle.
If you’re on the juice, your heightened absorptive state allows you to put to use and store those carbs as glycogen a hell of a lot more efficiently than a natural.
Far more efficient, for those with a poor partitioning ratio or severe insulin resistant, would be matching demand and need. Put your carbs closest to your workout and low-carb the rest of the time. What I don’t like about the AD is the broad, sweeping strokes made for fats. Saturated fats are fine and dandy, but in high amounts, can still promote insulin resistance and interfere with the carb ups on the weekend.
Given current data, an aggressive targeted ketogenic diet with weekly refeeds around workouts would be a far more prudent strategy (and arguably more effective). It’s en vogue, right now, to be all about the glutamine/creatine/BCAA/cow lung (kidding!) cocktail for workout nutrition.
It’s also an easy way to take money from your pocket book given the supplements. BCAAs actually generate twice the amount of glucose as an equivalent number of carbohydrates. Bet ya didn’t know that.
Anyway, I think low-carbing has it’s place but really, you can hedge any body composition concerns with aggressive nutrient timing. As much as this diet is hailed as being the “golden age” way of eating, those guys ate like “normal” people when not in contest season.
If you read Arnold’s Encyclopedia… (a must, I think for a lot of people on this site as I feel much of the Internet has become disassociated with much of the culture of bodybuilding) he discusses ketosis and low-carb diets recommending you stay just out of ketosis. Current research shows there is no real advantage going below 50g of active carbohydrate a day, and staying above that level prevents gluconeogenesis from occurring.
A’ite, I’m out folks.
