No doubt, see my stacks are PHAT, this is what it's about - PHAT workouts to get stacked

I'm content to not write anything more in this article as I finally worked a line from Illmatic into a title. If you're unaware, Illmatic is probably the greatest album ever. This particular line is from track 9, Represent (that is what the track is called, I'm not ending my sentences with 'represent' and a raised fist quite yet).

Pictured: Not me.

You are now probably wondering what PHAT is; according to Urban Dictionary and 90s black people, it is both a synonym for cool and an acronym for 'Pretty Hot And Tempting'. According to myself and various jacked dudes (the most eminent of whom is Layne Norton, who is probably to thank for popularising the system), it is also a acronym for 'Power-Hypertrophy Adaptive Training'. In practice this means it is a training system with the dual aim of building maximal strength whilst developing size.

This is Google Image's idea of 'PHAT'. I approve.

Without further adieu here are 2 sample programmes:

Strength Bias PHAT programme

Day 1: Pulling Strength (Deadlift 5 sets x 3-5 reps, Hamstring movement 3 x 6-8, Row variant 3 x 6-8, Chin/Pull-up/Machine Pull-down 3 x 6-8)
Day 2: Pushing Strength (Bench Press variant 5 x 3-5, Overhead Press variant 3 x 6-8, High Incline Press or Behind Neck Press 3 x 6-8, Dip or Close Grip Bench 3 x 6-8)
Day 3: Squat Strength and Accessories (Back Squat 5 x 3-5, Front Squat or Leg Press 3 x 6-8, Calves 3 x 6-8, Abs 3 x 6-8, Shrugs 3 x 6-8)

Day 4: Rest

Day 5: 'Torso' hypertrophy and dynamic effort [DE] (DE Bench Press 5 x 3 (for DE work, use ~50% of 1 rep max), DE Chin or Row 5 x 3, Bench variant 3 x 12-15, Chin 3 x 12-15, Overhead Press variant 3 x 12-15, Row variant 3 x 12-15, Face Pull or Upright Row 3 x 12-15, Dip or Close Grip Bench 3 x 12-15)
Day 6: Legs and Arms hypertrophy and DE (DE Squat or Deadlift 5 x 3, Squat or Leg Press 3 x 12-15, Romanian or Stiff-Leg Deadlift 3 x 12-15, Hamstring Curl 3 x 12-15, Calves 3 x 12-15, Curl variant 3 x 12-15, Tricep Extension variant 3 x 12-15)
Day 7: Rest


Hypertrophy Bias PHAT Programme

Day 1: Upper Body Strength (Bench Press variant 4 x 3-5, Barbell Row variant 4 x 3-5, Overhead Press variant 3 x 6-8, Chins/Pull-ups/Machine Pull-down 3 x 6-8)
Day 2: Lower Body Strength (Back Squats 5 x 3-5, Deadlifts 3 x 3-5, Front Squats 3 x 6-8, Hamstring movement 3 x 6-8)

Day 3: Rest

Day 4: Back and Shoulder Hypertrophy and DE (DE Chin or Row 5 x 3, Chin/Pull-up/Machine Pull-down 3 x 12-15, Row variant 3 x 12-15, Overhead Press variant 3x 12-15, Face Pull or Upright Row 3 x 12-15, Lateral Raise 3 x 12-15, Shrug 3 x 12-15)
Day 5: Legs Hypertrophy and DE (DE Squat or Deadlift 5 x 3, Squat or Leg Press 3 x 12-15, Romanian or Stiff-Leg Deadlift 3 x 12-15, Hamstring Curl 3 x 12-15, Leg Extension 3 x 12-15, Calves 5 x 12-15)
Day 6: Chest and Arms Hypertrophy and DE (DE Bench Press 5 x 3, Incline Press 3 x 12-15, Close Grip Bench Press or Dip 3 x 12-15, DB or Cable Fly (vary angles) 5 x 12-15, Barbell or EZ Bar Curl variant 3 x 12-15, Tricep Extension variant 3 x 12-15, Dumbell Curl variant 3 x 12-15)
Day 7: Rest

If you are looking at this and thinking "What the bloody ef does any of this mean?" then this programme is not for you. This is not a beginner programme; you have to know your way around the gym. You don't have to be the most jacked and tanned guy there, but you should have good form on all the basic movements. Preferably you should at least a year or so of training under your belt, as this programme may well require some tweaking to personal needs, it is good to know how your body reacts to certain stimuli. For example, for me personally, I deal with high volume squatting and pulling pretty well; high volume pressing, on the other hand causes my dodgy right shoulder to hurt like hell and as such causes me to hate everyone and everything around me. Time spent training hard lets you learn ways in which you can and can't push your body and as such it would be prudent to amass some of that knowledge before taking on this programme.

I didn't know what to put here, so tits.

You will also notice that not every exercise is a set-in-stone prescription, many are broad movement guidelines. This means you will need both the knowledge of weight training movements to breakdown the exercises that may fit these guidelines and also the knowledge of self to know which of the applicable movements suits you best. For example where I have written 'Row variant' there are a lot of exercises which fit the billing - 45 degree barbell rows, Pendlay rows, Yates Rows, Cable rows, Meadows rows, Dumbell Rows - knowing which exercise works well for you (whether that is in terms of maximum weight lifted or feeling maximum contraction and pump in the target muscle, depending on day) is up to you. So feel free to play around, stick to the principles and basic structure, but don't be afraid to change things a bit to suit your preferences; maybe you don't like Close Grip Bench or Dips and would rather do JM presses? They are a great exercise so go for it. Maybe you hate front squats? Firstly you are stupid and I hate you, but you might put in Olympic style back squats or narrow stance leg press instead. Learning what does and doesn't work for you is an important and underrated factor (and one I'll probably write an article on sometime). However, there is one caveat: if you suck at something and deep down you know it is important, don't skip it on the pretence that it doesn't work for you; if you can only do 2 pull ups it's probably because you're weak and/or fat, embrace the suck, work hard and get better.

Neither fat nor weak.

Even for those that know what they are doing, there does need to be some further clarification and guidelines. On the strength days (that is Days 1-2/3) you want to have long rest periods, usually around 3 minutes, enough to make sure you can exert near maximum effort on each set, especially for the first exercise in each workout. For these days, the weight that you move for the first exercise is of primary importance, you want to be aiming to beat your numbers from the previous week in each session.

Matt Kroc didn't get this huge from lifting baby weights

On hypertrophy days (Days 2/3-6), shorter rests are required, both because shorter rests are optimal for maximal hypertrophy stimulus and because otherwise, the workouts would take a fucking age; 90 seconds or so is a good guideline. Consequently, the weight that you move is not of the utmost importance, you should be aiming for stimulation of the muscles and 'the pump'. At the very least, this will make you look really good in the gym so you can eye-fuck yourself in the mirror and hold on to the hope that maybe, just maybe, an attractive member of the opposite sex is also doing an eye-fucking on you. Converse to my usual recommendations, on these days where the focus is work volume and pump for a targeted muscle group, machines are fine. I know, I know, this goes against everything I usually preach and I need to wash my filthy mouth out; however, there is a time and place for almost everything, and this is one of the very few times or places for the use of machines, if you so wish. Supersetting exercises, preferably from opposing muscle groups might also be a good idea as it can lead to a large decrease in the time in the gym necessary to get your required lifting volume in. If you find the workouts are still taking longer than you would really like, even with honest short rest periods and supersetting, drop the dynamic effort work first and perform a pure pump style workout.

The pump: it's as satisfying as coming, at least according to Arnold.

This might also be a good place to throw in a quick description on what exactly dynamic effort work is to those that think 'the Westside Method' is one of Tupac's early albums. Dynamic effort work, as popularised by Louis Simmons et al. at Westside Barbell Club, refers to lifting significantly sub-maximal weights with as much speed and acceleration as is possible. Many, many articles have been written on the whys and hows of DE training, but to summarise and greatly simplify: the point of throwing around weights that are much lighter than you could lift is to increase your rate of maximal force production, that is, your power output. Adding in dynamic effort work will lead to increased power which will in turn allow you to lift greater weights in the long run.

He may be fat these days, but you will never be 'two tomahawks on your chest' cool.

Finally, know that this programme is not for the lazy and half arsed, the stressed out and short on time or the tiny-eating, "I just want to tone up" girly men. If you want to get the most from this programme you need to commit, hit it hard in the gym, rest and recover well when out of the gym and make sure you are getting sufficient amounts of quality calories. If you fulfil these criteria then this programme is the unabashed balls for packing size on your frame and getting you stronger than a black guy on PCP.

How do you make a hormone? - Part 3: Growth hormone and IGF-1

Back with the third instalment of this series with new information on all the great things your hormones do and the the same shitty joke as the last two articles.

This one has taken me a while for a couple of reasons, first I thought I'd do a surface skimming article that didn't really say a whole lot, then, being a perfectionist tool, I refused to let myself do that and endeavoured to research deeper. Upon doing this I realised I was in way over my head in terms of endocrinic knowledge and decided to revert to the originally planned, superficial, easy-reading article. At this point the perfectionist tool side of me chirped up again and I lost approximately 9 days of my life learning about growth hormone, the functioning of the HPTA axis, exogenous HGH use, general PED use, AAS, SARMs, Myostatin Inhibitors, SERMs, peptides and any and all other science shit that gets people huge.

That's science. Trust him, he's a Doctor.

In short, I nerded. I nerded really hard. Now my head is full of loads of information ranging from the mundane to the really quite exciting, from the legal and advisable to the shady to the down right scary. Now, armed with these masses of information, I feel equipped to write a magnum opus, DC's War and Peace on natural and chemical hormone optimisation, a work more seminal to the development of the human race than the The Bible, The Qur'an, The Bhagavat-Gita, On The Origin of Species, Principia Mathematica, Relativity: Special and General Theory, Nuts magazine and the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle comics, all rolled into one. That, however, is not what you will be getting here; what you are getting will in fact be a brief skim over the topic at hand, hopefully with a few little funnies and some inappropriate photos thrown in for good measure. Shall we?

Human growth hormone (usually just called HGH, but also known as somatotropin or somatropin; I'll probably be using different names as my mind meanders) is a 191-amino acid long single chain peptide that is secreted mainly by your pituitary gland. It gets released in 'pulses' every 3 to 5 hours when the pituitary is stimulated by growth hormone-releasing hormone which is in turn released from your hypothalamus.  As implied by the name, it is responsible for the growth and regeneration of your body's cells, as well as promoting the breakdown of fat. Without HGH you would never get jacked and tanned, which of course would be devastating, but it's also important for your brain, bones, regulating your metabolism, stimulating your immune system and other stuff that doesn't really matter as much as good looking muscles.

Obligatory picture of good looking person to somehow prove my point

When it comes to muscle building, it isn't HGH itself which gets the magic done; GH is only active in your blood stream for a matter of minutes before your liver sucks it all up and spits out a bunch of 'growth factors'. Of these, insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1) is the star. It's like Nicole Scherzinger to the Pussycat Dolls; it does all the important stuff that actually matters, the others just dance around in the background looking pretty. IGF-1 is anabolic as hell, so goes ahead and does it thing: making your muscles big and making your life better.

Seriously, can anyone name any of them?

You don't have a whole lot of this magic HGH juice circulating in your body post-puberty (which if you remember, was a time when a lot of things grew a lot and was generally fun for all involved); 20-something men have around 5 nanograms per millilitre of blood between pulses and women have about twice that amount because something to do with having children (sometimes I'm bad at science) and levels only decrease as you age. Anyway, they are average person levels. Who wants to be average? Not me, and hopefully not you, so lets look at how we can supercharge our growth levels, and by extension IGF-1, levels.

"The worst thing I can be is the same as everybody else. I'd hate that." - Arnold. Enough said.

As I said before, growth is released in pulses; the largest and most predictable of these pulses occurs about an hour after you hit the hay, with further pulses through your sleep accounting for over 50% of total release. This leads to our first strategy for optimising HGH release. Sleep. Sleep long enough and sleep well. Cutting your sleep short or having your sleep disturbed means you are likely missing out on these growth pulses and all the benefits that come with them. Learn to develop your own bedtime routine to help you relax and get quality sleep, humans tend to respond well to learned patterns, whatever it is, glass of milk, little meditate, rub one out...

Put your issues in some tissues.

Intense exercise is a factor we can easily control, which signals the body to release HGH. The exact nature of the exercise you are partaking in will affect how your GH levels respond. As is almost unanimously the case, hitting the weights is the best option here, with heavy lifting using compound movements (those which involve multiple muscle groups) shown to spike GH. If we are going for absolute optimal hormone manipulation, it appears that pump style training consisting of lower rest periods (in the region of 30-60 seconds) and reps in the 10-15 range leads to larger GH spikes. There is also evidence that supplements which help induce the pump (and are likely included in your standard pre-workout formula) such as arginine, betaine and taurine, will facilitate a larger GH response to exercise (and also probably give you spontaneous erections).

I thought a picture of Frank McGrath's ridiculous forearm pump was more appropriate than a picture of a boner.

There is some good news here for the cardio lovers too, aerobic training, when done right, can lead to GH releases, which lead to a healthier and better looking you. What constitutes 'done right'? Studies suggest that performing exercise above the lactate threshold for at least 10 minutes leads to the largest HGH releases, but long duration, steady state, hamster-in-a-wheel type cardio can actually decrease GH levels. In practice, this means that HIIT is potentially a smart way to go, as is just hopping on a piece of cardio equipment and going balls-to-the-wall for 10-15 minutes then getting out of there.

Somewhat counter-intuitively, fasting can increase the frequency and amplitude of GH pulses. It may seem a bit strange that after not eating, your body releases a hormone to make you grow, but when we remember that HGH also stimulates the break down of fat and reduces liver uptake of glucose (preventing you passing out from super low blood sugar), this makes a little more evolutionary sense. So if we use controlled fasts (which luckily for you, I've written all about here) we can reap the gains of all natural boosts in GH.

In a way hand-in-hand with the last point; studies have shown that hyperglycaemia (high-blood sugar) severely blunts your natural GH pulses. This means (as has been mentioned many times before), stuffing your face with carbs all day is a poor, poor idea from a hormonal optimisation standpoint, and as such a body composition standpoint, and as such a getting laid standpoint. Carbs aren't the devil, but a constant, sustained intake of carbs does you absolutely no favours. As such, carb intake should be controlled and preferably targeted around the time of your workouts.

Lastly, don't be fat. This one again. Fat people have lower circulating GH and weaker GH pulses. I'm not trying to be mean, biology just doesn't like fat people and seems intent on really kicking them when they're down. For any readers wishing to lose weight, this is a good place to start.

Twins may be one of the best songs ever, but Big Pun and Fat Joe should only set an example of impeccable flow, not body type (or fashion sense).

There we have it, another article on the board; I hope you enjoyed it. My apologies if you didn't, or if you thought this was a little too similar to the last. In truth, some minor nuances aside, most hormonal optimisation boils down to things that we already think of as 'healthy'. Eat well, exercise, sleep. Get lean, get jacked, get tanned, get money.

How do you make a hormone? - Part 2: Testosterone

See Part 1 for the hilarious punchline and discussions on the role of leptin in your body and the importance of controlling it.

This part will tackle the manliest of manly man hormones, Testosterone. As much as we think of testosterone as ball power, it is important for the fairer sex as well, so don't stop reading here if you think this article isn't important for you due to your lack of sack.

Testosterone is probably the most well known androgenic steroid hormone and one that mediates a host of processes to do with boners, being horny and other such fun business, but it is responsible for far more than that. How about this for a list of the effects of increasing testosterone: Promotion of muscle size and strength, fat loss, increased bone density, better insulin sensitivity, more energy, elevations of mood and some minor cognitive increases. These are surely attractive effects regardless of gender, furthermore, ladies can rest assured, achieving T levels anything near those that lead to you having a voice like a sub-woofer, a jaw like Brad Pitt and hair appearing in new places is literally impossible naturally.

Don't worry, this isn't going to happen without boat loads of roids. Now where is my eye bleach?

The bio-synthesis of testosterone and the upstream and downstream modes of action and signalling are horrendously complicated, so I will be assuming you don't want to be overwhelmed by heavy science, just as much as I don't want to pretend to understand all of it. So let's move ahead with the practical side; more testosterone means a more muscular, leaner, happier you. Unfortunately, our generation is suffering from a drop in T levels; turns out your Granddad wasn't just more of a man than you because he fought in the war, T levels were actually higher on average back then, with one study showing there has been an average age corrected drop in T levels of 17% over the past 20 years. A portion of this is due to environmental factors that are largely beyond our control (or would cost you a shit load to attempt to rectify) such as air and water contaminants. There are a few things we can do to do bump our T levels back up though; before anyone thinks I'm about to reveal secrets which will unleash your inner hulk and make you irresistible to the opposite sex, bear in mind that natural T increases are always fairly modest, unless your levels are currently in the toilet. The less of the following you currently do, the more positive changes you will notice from implementing them, but being a realist, I feel the need to tell you that feeling like you've just been injected with super soldier serum and are about to become the most annoyingly patriotic of all superheroes is highly unlikely.

Go fix your country's government, you smug prick

Without further adieu, here is a list of things you can and should do to make sure you body's natural testosterone production is optimised and as such, be as lean, jacked and tanned as you can be. (Note: testosterone doesn't make you tanned, but you should be anyway, because who doesn't want to be tanned?)

Lift some heavy-ass weights
I say this so often I'm starting to annoy myself, it's pretty much the unifying theme throughout everything I write, so if you are not lifting (or considering lifting) heavy-ass weights, please leave. Lifting should be focussed on complex lifts which use a large portion of your body's muscles to get the most T bang for you buck and volume should be fairly high to give your body a stimulus to which to adapt. Lifting things in pretty much any fashion has been shown to increase T, but research does indicate that keeping rest intervals fairly short (90-120 seconds) may lead to the largest rise in T levels.

LIGHT WEIGHT!!

Sleep
Sleep is vital to normal hormonal secretions, if you are lacking sleep, your cortisol (a stress response hormone) levels will be high, which has knock on effects, lowering T. Get some good quality sleep for at least 7 hours a night, get huge. Speaking of getting good quality sleep, the next point may help...

Have more sex (alternatively get friendly with yourself more often)
and make it good! We all sort of know testosterone and sex are linked in some way, but people tend to not realise that whoever designed us did us a big favour on this one. Sex, or more specifically orgasms, increase testosterone in both sexes, so you can get the benefits whether playing solo or partnering up. Ignore the stories about boxers not having sex before fights to raise their T levels, if any do in fact do this, they are either misguided or doing it just so they get angry as fuck; the research actually says the opposite, forgoing orgasm leads to a fall in testosterone. I'm not sure students really need more incentive to get to copulating like dirty little rabbits, but there it is. Get laid, get gains.

A helpful visual demonstration

Get tanned (no, really)
I mentioned this in my supplement article; Vitamin D is super important. It positively correlates with testosterone levels in men and women, so either supplement with it or get some sun to make it yourself.

She wants the D. Vitamin D.

Make sure you've got the minerals
Specifically Zinc, Magnesium and Selenium (in decreasing order of importance); all are needed for the bio-synthesis of T and are regularly lacking in our diets. You can cover your bases with pills or for more fun can eat loads of red meat (for zinc), seafood (for zinc and selenium), nuts (Brazils are best, for magnesium and selenium) and spinach (for magnesium, zinc and turning you into Popeye).

The candy man can't
Large intakes of simple carbs serve to spike blood sugar (this was covered in part 1), researchers found that the blood sugar spike from 75g of glucose dropped healthy men's T levels by up to 25%. If you're eating cereal for breakfast, a sandwich for lunch and pasta for dinner, your system is being hit with a lot of simple carbs, so your blood sugar is on a rollercoaster ride. In addition to this ruining your insulin and leptin sensitivity, therefore raising your diabetes risk and probably making you fat, it is keeping your T levels suppressed. Not good.

If she offers you some sugar, don't say no

Soy not good
Soy products aren't cool. They contain things called phytoestrogens, which mimic the actions of oestrogen (the female hormone) in your body, which is generally undesirable. Whilst meta-studies are inconclusive on whether soy products truly impact hormonal profile in a meaningful way, there are plenty of studies out there suggesting that they are no good for your T levels, so avoiding them is a good shout. Also most soy products taste damn nasty.

Just eat meat you hippies.

Eat Fat
Even saturates. Yep. Now before you argue, shut up and listen. Low fat, high fibre diets, as recommended by many health professionals that don't actually know a fucking thing, have been shown to drive your T levels into the ground. Whilst intake of saturated fat (think meat), monounsaturated fat (think nuts) and cholesterol (think meat and egg yolks) have all been found to positively correlate with testosterone production. Now don't get this twisted, I'm not telling you to go and drink butter in search of some barely perceptible T boost, I'm just saying low-fat is not a smart way to eat. In general, consume lots of dead animals and you're doing it right.

Don't be fat
Fatties have low T. Don't be fat. Eat right, move, lift, be sexy.

I love you Big, but you're setting a terrible example

Win.
This is good life advice in general, and hopefully not something you need to be told. What you might not know is that T levels will rise when we win a competition or dominance challenge and fall when we lose. Interestingly, this also happens vicariously, so if you're a passionate sports fan and your team keeps losing, your T might also be taking a beating. Man Utd fans might want to change loyalties at this point.

Winning isn't always clean.

That's all for today folks, now go be alpha as fuck.

How do you make a hormone? - Part 1: Leptin

The answer is "Don't pay her", in case you were wondering.

This will hopefully be the first part of a mini series of articles looking at various hormones that impact our health and physique goals, addressing their basic function in a very simplified way and discussing strategies to (naturally) manipulate them in our favour. I should stress the 'simplified' part of the preceding sentence; hormones work together in hugely complex ways that are still being studied, no single hormone operates in a vacuum, but we can still learn a lot looking at them individually. Sounds exciting doesn't it? Yes, it does. Now we begin with the most important hormone that you probably haven't heard of: Leptin.

Don't underestimate this curly little fella

Leptin is primarily synthesised in your white adipose tissue, in case you don't know, that means your wobbly stomach, bingo wings, double chin and jiggly arse. This in itself is pretty interesting as it was only fairly recently that white fat cells were found to be metabolically active, with the prevailing theory up until then being that they were nothing more than an energy store and padding (but I digress). Leptin is also produced by other organs (skeletal muscle, stomach, pituitary gland, liver), but fat is the dominant leptin maker in your body, meaning that circulating leptin levels are proportional to body fat levels.

I was going to put a fat person here, instead I put good looking people. You're welcome.

The main roles of leptin are the regulation of appetite, fat mass and energy expenditure. When leptin is sufficiently high, your appetite is in line with your ideal calorie intake and your metabolism hums along nicely. If leptin levels drop, things get a lot less fun as your appetite will shoot through the roof, cravings hit hard and and your body hits the brakes on your metabolism. Researchers have performed experiments on rats where they cause a mutation to the leptin producing gene so no leptin is secreted. The result was rats that never stopped eating and turned into hilarious little blobs, furthermore, their immune systems were depressed and their cholesterol, triglyceride and insulin levels were off the the charts (that's bad). So now you have probably realised that having low leptin is tantamount to having AIDS, possibly worse; the good news is that this terrible affliction is reversible. That's low leptin, not AIDS; I'm not a miracle worker.

Obese furry animals, unlike obese humans, are actually quite cute.

If you have been eating at (or slightly above) your hypothetical total daily energy expenditure (TDEE) number of calories for an extended period of time, the good news is that your leptin levels are likely fine. However, when undergoing caloric restriction you will find that you create a deficit, fat loss occurs quickly at first, but then leptin levels fall, fat loss gradually slows and then grinds to a halt. This, along with an increase in appetite spells doom for your diet. This makes perfect sense as an evolutionary survival mechanism; when there was no guarantee of food, a prolonged drop in caloric intake could mean the start of a famine so it would not be desirable for the human body to burn through all it's energy stores at a rapid pace. Rather they are conserved (so metabolism and thus fat oxidation rate drops) and signals are sent for the body to gather energy (so cravings for calorific foods hit). The problem these days is that us western world lot have it easy, we are generally too fat and looking at lean out and calorific food is everywhere; when we try to diet and leptin falls, the metabolism slowing is undesirable and the cravings are all-too-easy to succumb to.

Low leptin usually ends in a face full of delicious calorific crap

Through these mechanisms leptin maintains a steady fat mass in humans; the existence of a bodyfat 'set-point' (a body fat percentage which each individual gravitates towards, which generally requires a fair amount of effort to move from) has long been observed in the fitness community. This is because when your fat levels drop below your set point your metabolism falls and hunger increases, so without a strong diet strategy and/or a dose of man-the-fuck-up your body fat creeps back up. Conversely when you decide that abs are for gays, the 'power look' is cool and that Nutella and banana sandwiches are better than female attention (yes, that was my summer), your body fat levels increase along with leptin. This means your metabolism takes a step up and your appetite is blunted, bringing your weight back down (to 92 kg for-fucking-ever).

The food of Gods

If you are thinking that the answer to getting lean is a case of getting your leptin as high as possible, think again. Remember that leptin levels correlate with body fat, so obese people have sky high leptin levels; generally whatever is going on with obese people, we want to avoid. If you are constantly eating a large surplus, you will end up with similarly sky high leptin levels which can lead to your feedback system getting all sorts of messed up, with the currently believed mechanism being one of leptin resistance. This means your leptin receptors get desensitized, so the leptin that is secreted doesn't effectively deliver the message that you are 'fuelled' meaning you can be stuffing your face, but as your feedback system is broken, your body essentially 'lets' you keep eating and doesn't increase metabolism or blunt appetite sufficiently (as would occur in an individual with a fully functioning leptin receptors).

So, as is almost always the case with hormones, balance is what we are after. Fortunately for you fantastic readers, scientists and fitness experts have a pretty good idea of how best to achieve this balance:

A fine example of someone not being fat.

1. Don't be fat.
   This is generally good advice for life but specifically in the scope of leptin, being fat means very high leptin levels, which likely means leptin resistance and a screwed up feedback system, keeping you fat. Leptin resistance will decrease with loss of body fat and exercise, so these should be a priority (as they should be anyway if you are fat).
2. Perform high intensity training
   Heavy weights are the preference here, but high intensity cardio such as sprints, circuits, short-distance swimming, combat sport training etc. all also work. The key is intensity, this leads to a release of growth hormone, which has been shown to regulate leptin levels (as well as have a whole host of other positive effects which will be addressed in a future article).
3. Get sufficient sleep
   At least 6 hours, preferable 8. Sleep is important for the optimal function of pretty much every hormone. Studies show that a lack of sleep leads to leptin falling below optimal levels, stimulating appetite and reducing metabolic rate.
   
   
   
   
4. Don't regularly eat fuck tonnes of simple carbs
   Smashing your fat face full of carby goodies is fun. I have experienced this. However, this leads to a big spike in blood sugar, which leads to a big spike in insulin, which leads to a rise in leptin. Do this regularly enough and you start becoming leptin resistant, not to mention insulin resistant, which is the fast road to type II diabetes. Not good.
5. When dieting to reduce body fat, implement re-feeds
   Leptin levels dropping are an unavoidable side effect of dieting, what we need to do is limit the extent of this drop as much as possible. This is best achieved with periodic re-feeds; these are planned increases in calories (coming predominately from glucosidic carbs) which serves to bump leptin levels up significantly. How often and how large in magnitude these should be depends on a variety of factors including how lean you currently are, how large your caloric deficit and how long said deficit has been running. The leaner you are, the bigger your deficit and the longer you have been running a deficit, the more often and calorific your re-feeds should be. Blanket prescriptions, as usual, are very handwavey. You can choose to refeed at set intervals, for example doubling your carb intake on one day per 7-10 days; alternatively you can track your weight loss, appetite and general feelings then refeed more intensely when you see weight loss stalling, appetite increasing and lethargy setting in.
   
   You may be thinking that refeeds present a sort of '3 steps forward, 1 step back' approach; in a way they do, in a way they don't. It is true that the refeeds days in and of themselves are not causing fat loss, however without them, calories would have to be cut more and more to see fat loss results, leaving you absolutely starved with a metabolism in the toilet. This is why crash dieting can lead to big weight gain after people lose a lot of weight through crash dieting. Their leptin levels are bottomed out, as is their metabolism and they are craving every delicious food under the sun. They then let themselves free on these foods and end up gaining all the weight back, regular with more. If you have got yourself into a mess like this, the answer is reverse dieting. You need to slowly add calories back in week by week to bring your leptin levels and metabolic rate back up without inducing a large amount of rebound fat gain.
   
   As all this has been a bit approximate, I'll give an example of a few hypothetical situations:
   A 6' 2.5'' 92kg, fairly lean, moderately attractive, large nosed gentleman wishes to lose fat. His TDEE is almost bang on 3000 calories, so he (smartly) decides on a 15% calorie deficit and eats 2550 calories a day. Hypothetically, 30% of these calories come from carbs, so he is eating 190g of carbs a day. He can either plan to have a day where he eats 380g carbs once every 7-10 days to keep his leptin levels high, or when he feels that fat loss is stalling and appetite is ramping up, he can have a couple of days where he eats 380g carbs, then go right back to eating at a deficit. If this hypothetical male wasn't such a geek who liked reading about human physiology, he might be clueless as to the workings of the leptin system, so when his fat loss stalls he cuts calories, then fat loss stalls again so he cuts calories again and so on. Before he knows it he is eating 1800 calories a day with no fat loss to show for it and feel like shit. To get out of this mess, he should slowly add calories back into his diet, for example eating 1850 calories a day for the next 3-5 days, then 1900 for a few days after that and so on until he is back up around his calculated TDEE for his weight and fat percentage. When he reaches this ideal amount of calories, he should eat at this level for at least 2-3 weeks to fully allow his metabolism to 'recover', then in future he shouldn't diet like such a retard and should read some science first. 

Take heed, hypothetical male.

So that's leptin. It's your friend, until it's your enemy. Like most things hormonal, it's a matter of balance, too low is bad, too high is also bad. Keep it in that happy middle ground; love your leptin and your leptin will love you, or at the very least it won't fuck you over.