Calorie Cycling: Faking Your Body Out

The idea of calorie cycling is to change the calorie intake in relation to training activity, i.e., on a training day, against the background of increased energy expenditure, the amount of carbohydrates (energy) increases, and on the day of rest, it decreases accordingly.

At first glance, a very sensible idea, but there are nuances.

The sense of calorie cycling

So, when gaining muscle mass, this approach will not work as efficiently as when having a slightly somewhat excessive calorie content, because enough energy will be obtained for a quality workout, but not for protein synthesis. Let us remind you that to build 1 gram of muscle requires about 6 kcal of additional energy, and especially this process is active in the first 36 hours.

But, who forces us to subtract all 300-400 training calories from the total calorie on the day of rest from iron? It would be wise to leave a small excess of 150-200 kcal, which will provide energy to the construction and will not lead to significant fat accumulation.

What about weight loss

With a calorie deficit, calorie cycling strategy, according to scientists, does not have serious advantages in fat burning over the method of even nutrition. But in their experiments, they took the total weekly calorie content, for example, 14,000 and simply distributed it according to activity, i.e., today I spend less and therefore eat less, but they were all the same 14,000 kcal.

It is clear that such a method is convenient in psychological terms, but it is unlikely to significantly accelerate fat burning, but if you manipulate calories from day to day, not tied to a weekly one, then such a strategy is very workable.

Additionally, see this article if you don’t know what to eat before a morning workout.

What is more, we’ve prepared an analysis of a similar body faking strategy – set-point.