f13.net

Article here. (http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080819.wlphelps20/BNStory/lifeMain/home)

I am still absolutely flummoxed by Phelps' need to comsume 12000 calories a day.  I mean, he's a big man and he's pure muscle but wow! We're talking someone who must burn 4000kcal* a day if just being awake and doing day to day stuff. 5 hours exercise will burn the other 8000. 

Running at 6 minute miles for 5 hours will burn that much.  That's phenomenal.


*Using a formula, I reckoned his BMR at ~2100 so I roughly doubled it on account of him being a superhuman.  Most of us would multiply that by 1.1. or 1.2.

12.000 calories is totally impossible on normal food. My friends who train for Iron man style triathlons struggle to get more than 8000 by means of normal food. The body simply cannot convert that much food into energy.

I know professional rowers aim to eat around 10,000 calories. I read a similar article a while back where a reporter decided to follow the diet of the GB rowing squad, he said he gave up at about 11am having already been sick twice from forcing himself to eat so much.

Wonder how this plays into the calorie restriction theory of longevity. 

My other thought was that this guy has to purge in some fashion before getting in the water, his races were spaced so close together that this isn't like carb loading prior to a marathon (ie a single performance).  He might get away with something like an enourmous meal 12-16 hours prior to the race followed by some moderately sized (yet jam packed with calories) meals as he got closer to race time.

My final thought was that the diet is complete bullshit deployed to psych out his opponents and while he might possibly eat that way at times there is no way he was eating all that food during the olympics.

It doesn't sound like the kind of diet you'd eat during periods of competition, more likely it's his training diet.

I must admit that thought had crossed my mind.

I am eager to find out what sort of drug and/or genetic modification regime he is using.

usually the answer to that is: the same ones everyone else is using.

This.

Swimming uses all your damn muscles the whole time you're doing it.  It's not like running where your arms aren't used for more than balance or gymnastics where certain parts rest while you're using others.  It's arms and legs and torso all at once for the duration.  Swimming at that level and as big as he is in height and muscle mass means he's burning a shit ton, particularly since he swims about 6-8 hours a day when training from what I heard. (Hell it might even be more than that.)

The hard part comes when you're done training or competing and you still want to eat a lot out of habit.  That sucks.

No one is arguing that it doesn't take a ton of energy/calories to swim at this level.  The doubt is weather or not you can obsorb those calories fast enough based on this diet.  Your stomach can only absorb so much from 3 fried egg samiches in a given period of time, if you dive into the pool 10 minutes after eating that you wont be setting any records and that much garbage packed into your digestive system is just going to be in the way.

yes carb loading works but fried egg samiches aren't carb loading and after doing it marathon runners don't turn around the morning after a WR marathon then carb load up so they can go out and instantly run another WR marathon.

I was just thinking that when he's in competition eating that much actually slow him down a bit. I don't doubt he needs to eat that much when he's actually swimming, like I said it's not the first time I've read about mere mortals trying to put away the same amount of calories as pro athletes and I'd say rowers and swimmers are among the most calorie intensive simply because both use pretty much the whole body very intensively.

There's a bunch of genetic mutations known to improve athletic ability (most of them discovered from research on Olympic athletes).  They nearly all have the effect of amping up your baseline metabolism so that it takes you more calories just to walk around and breathe.  There was a little kid in Germany who got a double helping of a Myostatin mutation (key to the elasticity of muscle fibers) from his parents (both world-class weightlifters), at 9 he had completely insane muscle development with no real training at all, and was burning 3000-4000 calories a day.

There are others that involve higher red blood cell counts, mutant forms of hemoglobin, etc.  But as I aid, they nearly all increase diet minimums, which kept them from naturally proliferating until they combined into a new super-human that supplanted the rest of us in pre-civilized environments where resistance to starvation was a neccessary survival characteristic.  If Phelps has something like that, or a couple of them, it would account for his diet.

--Dave

I'd like to see you run.  It must be very funny.

One day, though, you should learn about something called "biomechanics".

I heard that cross-country skiiers burn in the region of 14-16,000 calories per day.

I know when I did my phase 2 army training I was eating in excess of 8,500 calories per day (standard 24hr ration pack), and I lost weight over the course of that. I could easily believe that someone whith his level of body musculature will be able to process that much energy.

That's what I think we call "proof by intimidation".

I used to run pretty seriously. So yeah, you do use your arms and core muscles while running. But at the end of a hard 15k, you know what muscles you've really been using.

I could do it.

The only thing that I wonder about is why he sticks to the three square meals format. I was under the impression that most sports players, fitness types shifted towards more meals, but with a more moderate calories intake at each, in order to process food more efficiently.

I know lots of guides on losing weight or training say to do this but I don't know if there's any actual scientific evidence to support doing that.

O rite.. I forgot the part of running where you push yourself thu tha air n stuff. 

Hurk.   :awesome_for_real:

No, I don't run seriously.  I swam from 8-19 and my knees are shit so there is no running for me now.  I know when I ran while still training swimming it was much much easier on everything but my legs.

I wish I could swim better. I'd like to do triathlons but I don't swim regularly and I'm not particularly keen on cycling. I can do the running bit though (these days it's mostly things like mountain marathons, multi-terrain events and adventure racing). Obviously you don't use your arms as much as in swimming and yeah, it helps with balance but the biomechanics thing - the harder you pump your arms, the quicker your legs go. Seriously. Helps with that last sprint for the line on a long race even when your legs are knackered. Try it. (Apart from you, Merusk, because shit knees are shit and I totally sympathise.)

I'm still surprised by his diet too in this day of sports and nutritional science. You'd have thought he'd have a team of nutritionists to hand but he seems to have gone the Alf Tupper (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alf_Tupper) route.

As long as he isn't just drinking soda and eating candy for his calories he'll get all the nutrients his body needs so it doesn't really matter what he's shoveling down as long as it has a passing resemblence to "food". And in fact it's better for him to eat the stuff us regular people are told to avoid like fats cause those are more calorie "dense" (9 calories per gram vs 4 for carbs and protein) so he doesn't have to eat as much. If he tried to eat 10K calories in, say, leafy green vegetables his stomach would explode from all the undigestable fiber.

Yeah, it's amazing how actually living a really, really active lifestyle makes the food that nature designed us to really want to eat healthy again, provided it's not all hugely processed.

The only proven evidence that supports this demonstrates that more frequent meals causes fewer peaks and valleys in blood glucose.  For some athletes this is beneficial.  It also maintains a more even metabolic rate, but I don't think it has any meaningful effect on daily BMR. 

This thread sounds like it's heading into MMO-type min/maxing.

I would argue that this is the origin of min/maxing. Which makes it all the more ironic.

Mountain marathon runners are seriously into their min/maxing when it comes to the weight of kit they carry.  I've heard of people who drill holes in the handles of their toothbrush just to save a few extra grams. Food is the biggest consideration because people generally go for carb rich food but don't want to carry a lot even though they're going to be on the move for 8-12 hours a day.

I've never really min/maxed in MMOs but I have found myself in a supermarket comparing packets of cous-cous and dried pasta to work out which is greater calorie density.

I totally agree.  I think he inflated those numbers by 2 or 3 times.  I've seen bodybuilders, powerlifters, and "world's strongest men" (who were probably all juicing) throwing those caloric numbers around, but Phelps is just way too lean for me to believe he consumes that much.

Also, the author of the article is WAY overestimating the amount of calories his exercises are burning.

Muscle mass???  The dude is tall, but he's FREAKING SKINNY.  There's not much muscle on his frame at all, and if there were, he probably wouldn't be a world record holder.

I'd say "fuck carbs" and carry sticks of butter or bota bags of olive oil, or something like that.

It's all muscle.  You go for strength, not bulk as a swimmer so you don't look like Ahnold.  He's what people call "Wirey"  Or are you saying Bruce Lee was a mucleless fucker, too?

Phelps also doesn't do the "sprint" events (50m Freestyle, etc.) so he doesn't have the sheer muscle mass of those kinds of swimmers.

Oh, I totally understand that, but looking at what he's carrying, I find it hard to believe he requires that many calories.

Bruce Lee had WAY, WAY more muscle than Phelps carries.  I don't have pictures hand, but from memory, Lee carried less fat as well.

Swimming at a world-best training level would burn off 1000+ calories an hour, easy (swimming at an "amateur" pace burns off 800+ an hour). 6 hours in the pool a day means 6000K calories just from swimming. If he requires 4000 calories just lying in bed all day (except for eating) to keep from losing weight that easily takes him above 10K calories a day.

4000 calories a day for being in the infirmery is on the incredibly high side.  If you figure that the average, mobile, male requires approximately 2000, you are just a bit off.

From a quick search, some Navy sites say that guys in BUD/S need 3,500-4,000 cals.  These guys aren't training for athletic performance, but training to NEVER QUIT!  Olympic athletes aren't getting pounded into the ground like BUD/S guys are.  Oly athletes get back off days, because you can't train to the max everyday and see increased performance, whereas the guys in BUD/S training are getting their WILL tested. 

I just find it hard to believe that Phelps needs 3 times their caloric requirement.

And I'd say no. And then I'd have to explain why but I can't be arsed and you'll tell me it was meant to be in green text, so "no" will have to do.


For lying in a bed all day, an average man with his stats will need ~2100 for weight maintainance alone (using Harris-Benedict formula). If he had a desk job and a pretty sedentary lifestyle, he'd need about 2300kcal - 2500kcal a day.  An average man with his stats and a reasonably active lifestyle will need 3000 a day just for weight maintenance. Phelp's daily requirement could easily be in the region of 4000Kcal a day just to maintain weight once you take into consideration calories needed for muscle growth and muscle repair. 1000kCal/hr of training could possibly be well short of the mark but will do as a figure.  So Trippy's numbers are well within reason without stretching the bounds - apart from the perhaps the lying in bed all day.

Keep in mind that the average man also has ~15 to ~20 (in theory, anyway) of body fat which will also be used as energy stores.  Phelps is estimated to have about 8% body fat so has none to spare for that.

Yeah it would be, so he would have to walk around a bit (more than just getting up to eat food). But if you look at your typical "calories per day" calculator and you plug in his weight and height and level of activity and you easily get over 4K for the calories he would need to just maintain his body weight.

But if you are laying in bed all day (BMR), you don't need calories for muscle growth and repair.  And I don't care what his body fat is, because we were talking about maintaining weight.  He's 6'3" and about 200 lbs.  His BMR is about 2000 k/cals (2,125).

If I was lying in bed all day then yes, that's more or less exactly what I need. But we're not talking about me, or you or an average man. We're talking about Michael Phelps who is most definitely not an average man.  He's an Olympic swimmer. He trains for 6 hours a day. His calorie requirement for maintaining his weight is going to be higher than the average man. If he stops training and stops swimming and becomes like you or me then yeah, sure, 2000Kcals a day will cut it but if, next week, he rests up for a day after getting back from Beijing and just lies in bed doing nothing, he will probably still burn more calories than the average office worker will do during their normal day. I agree, I think 4000 a day is pushing it but 2500-3000? Yeah, easily.

You, him, whoever.  If you are laying in bed, then you are bedridden.  I think it was Trippy who started the whole thing by saying 4,000 k/cals in bed.

Who it is makes a big difference. As does their body composition. As does their lifestyle. As does their training regime.

That body fat percentage you don't care about? Two people of same height and weight with 10% difference in body fat are going to have a BMR difference of 100-150Kcal a day. Why? Because muscle burns about three times more kCal per pound than fat does.

Training for a 100 minutes one day means that the next day, your metabolism can be up to 10% above it's basic level. That's another 200Kcal right there on just 100 minutes of exercise.  Not even a regular exercise regime - just one day. 30 minutes of exercise will raise your BMR above normal levels for up to two days.*

So without even trying and without even considering a regular 6 hour Olympic training regime or the physiology and body composition of the world's fastest swimmer, we've just added 300+ calories to that BMR of 2100.

*Sources available on request

Not for long.  Use it or lose it.  If you aren't training, your body is going to catabolize that muscle tissue, and save the fat for when it's really necessary.

Have you seen the studies done on astronauts and how quickly they become de-conditioned?  Same thing happens if you lay in bed all day.

I don't there was any suggestion that if Phelps lay around in bed for the rest of his life he'd maintain his super duper metabolism. The argument was, besides his training with his body the way it is he'd be consuming 4,000kcal (or 2.5-3 on the more conservative estimate) even if he was just lying in bed for the rest of the day. Saying that if he stopped training then this would no longer be the case is arguing... I don't even know what against whom. It's a totally different discussion.

There wasn't (at least by me) but I like how this debate is still going on :awesome_for_real:

Did you even read the post I was responding to?

Look back at your post, it's just a general reply.  You don't quote any specific post, so I don't have a reference to which one you mean.

I don't quote the post right above mine if I'm replying to it. Just like I didn't quote your post and yet you somehow knew who I was responding to.

k, so you were responding to my post.  No, he does not need 4,000 k/cal to lay in bed all day. Try 2,000.

Did you not see my correction?

Edit: NM don't respond I'm through talking about this with you. You are just arguing for the sake of arguing and are fucking wasting my time.

You mean, that's not what the internet's for?  :why_so_serious:

I think we're being successfully trolled and I feel ashamed to have been caught up in it.