The P-ratio is the amount of LBM you gain in a bulk relative to total gains.
Or when cutting, the amount of LBM you lose relative to total losses.
It's a rarity to have a negative ratio. There are 2 possibilities in that case:
1 to lose LBM but gain fat which sucks royally, though it has happened to me, but only with minimal totals
2 to gain LBM but lose fat which is awesome! This also has happened, but once again only with minimal fat loss.
This is all measured by averaging 30 daily Omron BIA readings .. anything less than 30d is total crap, esp for females on a cycle, since hormones influence water retention so much.
There are a few interesting articles from Lyle McDonald on this topic:
Calorie Partitioning: Part 1 | BodyRecomposition - The Home of Lyle McDonald
Initial Body Fat and Body Composition Changes | BodyRecomposition - The Home of Lyle McDonald
These are the crucial paragraphs
Quote:
A more recent idea making the rounds in bodybuilding nutrition is that, prior to trying to gain lean body mass, people should diet down first. This reasoning is based on a variety of data that has examined the changes in body composition that occur when you overfeed either thin or fat individuals (see for example, Reference 2 or just about anything Gilbert Forbes has written over the past 30 years).
A Primer on the P-Ratio
The above recommendation is based on a lot of data on something called the P-ratio (which stands for partitioning ratio) which essentially represents the proportion of protein (LBM) you gain relative to the total weight you gain (this isn’t the technical definition of P-ratio, by the way, I’m just trying to simplify it a bit).
Now, a lot of factors control P-ratio including genetics, hormones, diet and training (to a smaller degree than you’d expect) and probably some I’m forgetting (3). But by and large, the primary predictor of P-ratio is starting body fat percentage. Basically, your starting body fat percentage predicts the great majority of what you will lose/gain when you diet/overfeed (4).
So, when you diet, the fatter you are, the less LBM (and more fat) you will lose. Conversely, the leaner you are, the more LBM and less fat you will tend to lose when you diet. This makes sense in evolutionary terms, the more fat you have to lose, the more your body can lose without having to burn off muscle tissue; the leaner you get, the less fat you have and the more muscle you end up losing. Anyone who’s dieted naturally to sub 10% body fat levels knows this to be true: the leaner you get, the more muscle mass you tend to lose.
So what about overfeeding and gaining weight? Well, in general, the same holds but in reverse: leaner individuals will tend to gain more LBM and less fat and fatter individuals will tend to gain more fat and less LBM. This actually makes sense when you think about it. The fat individual loses a lot of fat/a little LBM when they diet and gains a lot of fat and little LBM when they overfeed while the leaner individual does the opposite. P-ratio appears to be constant going in both directions. That is, P-ratio appears to be constant for a given individual (5).
|
For me, P-ratio when losing seems to be a fairly constant 30% nearly no matter what I'm doing.. big culprit seems to be cortisol. I'm taking PS-100 (phospatidylserine) apart from krill oil (another phospholipid) and am hoping it makes a difference.
PS: Jane, I'd not yet seen the sig