Dear Lyle,
My name is Kirk. I’m a 29 year old amateur. kickboxer. I suffered a nerve injury and wasn’t able to train. In this time I put on a lot of weight and have not been able to take it off. I, like yourself have been lean but not as lean as I would like. I was just wondering if I could use this diet and if so, what are the specifics of this diet.
My first question would be if you are able to train now. The particulars of the Bodyopus diet require that you be able (at least) to weight train three days per week. If not, the diet won’t work for you. In a similar vein, any fat loss effort not accompanied by exercise results in the loss of muscle tissue which is unacceptable. So if your injury is still preventing you from training, you will need to wait to start your diet.
Now if you are able to train, there are a few specific implications of the cyclical ketogenic diet (CKD) in terms of performance. Weight training/bodybuilding is not that highly performance oriented as many other sports (that should get me some hate mail). Yes it’s technical but other sports have far more technical requirements. From that standpoint, high intensity activity (i.e. kickboxing) and skill work should only be done when you have carbs in your system. Put differently, a low carb diet can NOT sustain high intensity activity. That is why the CKD has a carb-loading period, to refill muscle glycogen stores to sustain high intensity exercise.
So any type of kickboxing practice (assuming you are able to do it) will need to be done either during the carb-up or in the 2 days right afterwards. The other days of the week, your performance will be terrible on anything other than low intensity activity (i.e. running, walking, low intensity conditioning).
So here’s the basic gist of the diet.
Lowcarb phase: during this phase, you are allowed no more than 30 grams of carbs per day. And less is probably better. Calories should be set at 12-13 calories per pound of bodyweight. Protein is set at 0.8 grams per pound of bodyweight and fat makes up the rest.
Carb-up phase: during this phase, carbs should make up 70% of your total calories or roughly 10 grams of carbs/kilogram of lean body mass. In practice this can work out to 600 grams of carbs or more. Protein should be a little less than 1 gram/pound of bodyweight and fat should be kept low-ish.
The week typically looks like this:
Mon: no carbs, high intensity training (typically weights but could be kickboxing for you)
Tue: no carbs, high intensity training
Note: you will need to work on both your upper and lower body on Monday and Tuesday to deplete muscle glycogen. So either weight train a split routine or do both upper and lower body kickboxing drills.
Wed/Thu: no carbs, low intensity training only. So if you do any kind of running as part of your training, this is the day to do it.
Fri: no carbs during until your workout. This workout should also be high intensity to finish depleting muscle glycogen. Again, most do weights but you could do an intense kickboxing workout. Start your carb-up phase right after this workout.
Saturday: continue carbing up until bedtime. Typically most people don’t train during the carb-up but this is another day you could do high intensity training.
Sunday: back to no carbs. Since you’re carb-loaded you can do high intensity training but realize that it will affect your Mon/Tue workouts if you’re lifting weights on those days.
About the author
Lyle McDonald+ is the author of the Ketogenic Diet as well as the Rapid Fat Loss Handbook and the Guide to Flexible Dieting. He has been interested in all aspects of human performance physiology since becoming involved in competitive sports as a teenager. Pursuing a degree in Physiological Sciences from UCLA, he has devoted nearly 20 years of his life to studying human physiology and the science, art and practice of human performance, muscle gain, fat loss and body recomposition.