Skiploading

A 5:15am start this morning. Bleary eyed and very sleepy I had to stumble to the kitchen and ingest caffeine to get any sense of purpose or desire to make the gym, but I guess thats commitment for you. Decided to walk to the gym and hit 40 mins steady state cardio (heart rate around 130bpm) and then an abs circuit of 4 different moves for 2 repetitive circuits. Abs nice and sore job done. 

As today is my dreaded carb free day there was no pwo (post work out) shake. Just a walk home to prep/cook all my food for today and to shower up. Today’s meals looks like this: 

7:15am – ¾ scoop of whey and 5g BCAAs mixed with 200ml egg whites and a spoon of coffee and omega oil blended with ice to make a mocha frappacino. 2 rashers smoked lean bacon medallions, 3 whole eggs 
10:00am – 200g chicken breast marinaded in a little nandos lemon and herb peri peri sauce. 10g greens powder. 25g beef jerkey (from grass fed beef).
13:00am – 50g whey mixed with 25g natural almond butter and a little water – this makes what I like to call protein sludge .
15:30 – 250ml egg whites mixed with 25g whey and 5g BCAA. 1 tea spoon of cashew butter.
18:15 – 300g Sirloin steak trimmed of fat and a 1 cup part cooked broccoli (to ensure vits and minerals aren't boiled out)
21:00 – 300ml egg whites mixed with 1 scoop whey and 5g BCAA blended with ice to make frappacino . 1 heaped tea spoon of natural chunky peanut butter

The above is about 2200kcals (400 less than a workout day)

Water intake through the day, and every day for my diet, is likely to be 7 litres. 2 litres of which consumed during training. I’ll elaborate on the high water intake at a later date.

Tomorrow is the only true day off from training, its also Skipload day (hooooray!!!).

Skiploading is probably going to blow your mind a little so the following is a brief overview and a slightly adapted version of an article I wrote and that was published for Fit Mag last year.

A serious cut, for the most part, is energy sapping, mentally draining, and can feel all too much like self torture. I’d therefore, like to introduce you to a way of cutting that I have found to be revolutionary.

Last year I decided to cut in a different way and in this write up I’d like to provide you with the overall concept of this method of cutting/dieting and my findings so far. SKIPLOADING – this is the brainchild of Ken Skip Hill, and started life as simple shit-loading. Shitloading is the term given to a massive binge-out pre-bodybuilding contest to increase fullness in the muscles and give a full hard look on stage (along with water and sodium manipulation). More often than not the aim on a strict cut is to only use shitloading pre-contest, but as your will fails many find that they lose the ability to say ‘no’ to what they are craving and end up going into a massive binge-out (shitload) at the end of a long week of depletion or calorie restriction. This happened to Ken Hill, and he realised that even by stuffing crap like doughnuts down his neck one day a week that he could lose the weight he put on, and more by the following week…. And look better, harder and leaner. SKIPLOADING is basically the evolution of this process through Ken Hills own trial and error by both himself and the many athletes and competitors he has gotten into contest shape.

Lets face it. If you have to diet and lose weight you want to do it the easiest possible way you can right? Skiploading satisfies that attitude because you essentially break your diet down into 7 day cycles whereby you are never more than 6 days away from food heaven. So why do you need to skipload at all? Well, dieting involves creating a calorific deficit either by a reduction in calories or additional calorific expenditure (exercise) or in most cases both. As you diet your metabolism slows down and your leptin levels drop. Leptin allows you to release fat for energy and you want to keep your metabolic rate as high as possible as this will promote fat loss (the more calories you burn at rest the less of a calorie deficit you will require). Therefore dieting is, to a certain extent slightly counterproductive over long periods of time. Further to this the body is a clever thing and sooner or later will adapt to your diet and stall progress. Ultimately the point at which your metabolism slows down to match your calorific intake and/or your body adapts will be where your progress stalls. In a normal diet this is where you would either expend more calories or consume less. Often you can perform this several times over until you are either consuming too little, or exercising too much. At this point your body will eventually go into starvation mode. Starvation mode is bad news because this is where muscle will be burned for fuel. Yes you’ll lose weight, but also muscle and you’ll therefore get softer and smaller. Again we want to avoid this because you want to cut up to the lowest body fat percentage possible, whilst maintaining as much lean body mass (LBM) as possible. This is where skiploading comes into the equation as it solves all issues. It allows you to supercharge your metabolism, to the point where you may break into a sweat as you eat, and will increase your leptin levels. The huge calorific surplus every 7 days will stop your body adapting to any kind of diet. You’ll end up bigger and harder than ever before and it will be easier than ever to achieve it.

It’s important to remember that this article provides a basic overview of skiploading and how you can make it work for you, and that Ken Hill tailors loads to his individual clients (who pay $thousands) and learns from, and adapts their loads and diet on a weekly basis to hone in on the desired end result. In my opinion skiploading works best if you are on a moderate-low carb diet. It is also very effective if you are using something along the lines of a Keto diet. Most of the available information I have found on skiploading is from people on low carb (for the sake of argument sub 150g carbs per day) diets. According to Skip’s longevity DVD and Seminar it will work regardless of if you have a high carb vs low carb diet, cutting or bulking so do bare this in mind. 

The best day to skipload is usually Saturday or Sunday. Mainly because most people are off work on these days, and most people tend not to train on these days. These days do not have to be set in stone – just pick a day you are not at work and don’t train. Its best to be at home on a skip-load as it allows you easier access to food and as the load can cause some flatulence issues which isn’t great if you’re out in public places. The idea behind not training is to ensure that you are not using the load to fuel or recover from immediate exercise. This is to ensure that you can maximise glycogen replenishment and retention. Eating an excess of calories (which you definitely will during a skipload!) will also significantly rev your metabolism. If you train you will dip into these additional calories, potentially reducing the metabolic kick in the face your load will provide to your body whilst at the same time altering the way your body will want to use the excess of carbohydrates. 

The principles behind skiploading:

• Weigh yourself before your skipload (upon waking is best) 
• Start with a 6 hour window of Skiploading. Usually it’s best to go from Breakfast and time 6 hours. When 6 hours are up go back to your normal diet • Eat high carb foods- the higher the GI the better, but make sure its low fat. Yes that’s sugary foods such as pancakes in syrup, malt loaf covered in jam, jelly sweets, marshmallows, kids cereals, sorbet, white bread etc. The skies the limit here. 
• Keep water intake to a minimum! This is important because the carbs will act like a sponge in your stomach and drinking water at your normal levels will make you feel very bloated, full and uncomfortable. 
• No dairy (it slows down digestion). If you opt for kids cereals then mix them with a protein shake (be warned coco pops mixed with chocolate whey shake and chocolate syrup = chocolate overload!) 
• Eat your carbs, do not drink them. This means no fruit juice drinks or bottles of fizzy pop. 
• Use your hunger as a guide as to when to eat. If you are hungry eat. Don’t stick to set meal times as you normally would – think about the load as a 6hour graze. If you are full don’t eat again until you are hungry. 
• PERSONAL PREFERENCE – Start on high GI carbs and taper onto more savory or starchy carbs such as low fat baked crisps, low fat oven chips, potatoes, pasta, low fat pizza (pizza express is particularly good) etc. You will find that there is only so much sugar you can eat before you feel terrible (although over time you will significantly increase your tolerance). You can increase the GI of more savoury foods by dipping them in BBQ sauce, ketchup, syrup, jam or sprinkling sugar onto them etc. 
• Ingest protein at the usual 2-3 hour intervals you would on a normal day or with each meal if they fall near these times. The carbs will shuttle the protein straight into your muscles at a quickened rate and the huge spike in insulin will aid with muscle growth/repair if protein is available as a resource. 

Your skipload will add instant next day weight to the scales, but fear not, it’s only going to be water weight or the weight of food still in your guts. Expect to put on anything from 1-10lbs depending on just how much you can eat.

Your job every morning following the load is to stand on the scales and check your weight. You are aiming to baseline (return to the same weight as before your skipload) by Wednesday mornings weigh-in. If you baseline early then add 2 hours onto the following weeks load. You may baseline as late as Friday, and this can be scary and a bit demoralising, but you should still lose weight by the following Saturday. If you lose no weight you need to knock off 1 hour the following week. If you gain weight you need to knock off 2 hours. Women (oh yes this works for ladies too!) please bear in mind you need to log your hormonal weight fluctations or be aware of them prior to starting as you will retain and excrete water at different rates throughout your monthly menstrual cycle due to the role estrogen plays with water retention).

If you get to a point where you are loading all day on Saturday from waking to going to bed (and this will happen the leaner and more depleted you get) then you may wish to bring your load forward to a few hours of Friday night – this should help you eat more as you can fill up on Friday night and wake up hungry on Saturday morning. 

They key benefit to skiploading for me is that it works – plain and simple. I don’t care about the science or lack of science behind it, I don’t care that nobody has published a study on it or that it’s a bit left field from the norm and gets some bodybuilders knickers in a twist. Whilst you continue to get leaner you also have the added benefit of retaining strength due to glycogen replenishment and retention which is fantastic as cuts usually involve a loss of strength. Using a Saturday load as an example; on any training days Sunday – Wednesday you may even get stronger! 

I have also found skiploading helps me maintain my focus – mainly in part because I know that come Saturday I can go mad on sugary foods. Coincidentally I have also found that I do not crave carbs until the load weight has dropped off – which is great because Sunday – Wednesday keeping diet on point is effortless. 

There are some negatives with skiploading so it’s only right of me to bring these up so you can decide if this is something that may work for you. The load itself could potentially pose health concerns for 3 reasons;

1 – Holding excess water is not good for the heart. However, I have yet to read of anybody that has put on excessive water weight and held it for longer than 3-4 days. Long term water retention is bad, in the short term not such an issue in this writers opinion. Many anabolic steroid users hold water weight in excess of 7lbs for prolonged periods of time (up to 20 weeks) without causing heart or health problems.
2 – Such a large volume of high GI carbs will cause a massive insulin spike. Insulin has been linked to cancer growth and cholesterol deposits. I think this is only problematic if you have cancer or genes that make you high risk of getting cancer. If you are healthy with no family history of cancer (ie your mum had cancer and her mum had the same cancer type of thing) there is nothing to worry about in my opinion. 
3- Skiploading can be very addictive. After weeks of skiploading your body adapts and realizes that at a certain depleted state you are going to be ingesting high gi carbs. This means that you get extreme cravings for carbs. I’ve experienced this and its completely unreal – the moment you get to a depleted level all you can think about is carbs and before you even know what you are doing you’ve gone out got a load of food and have waded your way through 3 boxes of jaffa cakes, pancakes, a jar of jam and some weight watchers cake bars (yes I have been there and done it!!) 

A lot of bodybuilders who poo-poo skiploading seem to focus in on the first 2 key factors, but will, ironically run anabolic steroids, npp, clen, t3 or ECA in their own contest preparation – all of which pose more potential health risks than eating sugary food. I think a lot of these guys are set in their ways and think that dieting has to be torturous and hard. 

You can download skips longevity DVD for free from his own Intense Muscle website. The important chapters, should you not wish to download them all, are the 2 for the Seminar and the skiploading addendum which is an add on to the seminar. Having done this twice now on a bulk and a cut I can share some interesting thoughts…. This works 100%. Interestingly after you’ve done about 8-12 weeks you can “listen to your body” in that your body will dictate to you when it needs to reefed. At one point previously I found myself moving from a load every 7 days to 5 days because my body was telling me to reefed. At this stage I stopped losing weight and body fat, but was not gaining any weight or body fat either. My bodies way of forcing equilibrium if you like. 

Typical macro break down for a skipload day (based on 6 hours) for me is likely to be 300g PRO, 1000g CHO, 40g Fat = 5560kcals. 

In my opinion you can add an extra 200-300g of carbs to the above for every additional 2 hours added. I have done the shop for the morning, and to give you an idea of my skip load on the menu for the first 6 hours of tomorrow will be: Coco Pops & Rice Krispies, pancakes and syrup, white bread toast with strawberry jam, jelly babies, weight watchers cake bars, jaffa cakes, Jamaican ginger cake, white baguette, pop chips, sorbet, ben and jerries frozen yoghurt, kellogs square bars 

For me the above pans out to be 7am-1pm with meals at 3pm, 6pm, 9pm being back on normal diet terms. Also d-day in terms of scales tomorrow. Hoping for a 1lb loss. Have definately dropped 1% or so of fat this week as top 2 abs making a reappearance.