TL;DR - Everybody has a different metabolic structure, and for some people struggling with cutting BF down to a low % and maintaining muscle, timing your carb intake can be a great way to burn BF and actually make awesome gains

I'd rather this be more of a discussion and answer questions, but here's background on me.

Former college football player, lifelong athlete, yet still never had a fully visible 6' pack. Since high school I've fluctuated between 180 and 205 (pre-season weight), definitely have some trouble keeping weight on, but more trouble getting final lines of definition to get shredded

Basically, I was never focused on the aesthetic aspect of strength training and was only focused on pure athleticism. As a result, I wasn't focused so much on whether or not I had a perfect BF%, but rather was always making sure I had enough bulk (I played Strong safety and needed to be able to lay the boom) and pure strength/speed/explosiveness.

Because of this imperative, I was doing 90% explosive and olympic lifts, but very little development work on - as my old coach used to say - the glamour muscles. Don't get me wrong, I still had definition, I was strong, and I looked good. My senior year at 205, I was max benching 275 for 4, squatting ~400 for 1, and could clean 225 for about 5x (by far my best lift). Despite this, after the season, I didn't look THAT good by my standards, and so I started doing a ton of research. I had always ate clean, pretty close to the diet outlined by many here (lots of whole grains, lean proteins, brown rice, veggies, etc) with obviously a ton of beer - it was college after all.

So, as I'm researching, I found a program that I really liked and made sense to me called visual impact muscle building by Rusty Moore. Great book, and a great program for people who are new to lifting or who want to get a fuller understanding of how to build muscle for aesthetics. Anyway, doing that program I started to see results, and after the 6 months I looked pretty good, but there was still that hump of definition I just couldn't get over.

So fast forward and I'm learning about insulin and its role in fat gain and muscle building and I stumbled across John Kiefer's carb backloading. I will say immediately that I was a skeptic at first, but holy hell. It did the trick. The basic gist of it is to start the day with IF, keep your carb intake (and corresponding insulin levels) very low during the day via only eating protein, fat, and green veggies, and then lift your dick off. After the lift is the fun part. At this point you get to slam high GI carbs and protein. No bullshit, it actually worked for me. After three years out of college, I now bench 300+ & squat ~500 for reps. Best of all, I'm still at about 185, but I look like I'm probably 195.

Anyway, the point was just to bring the idea up as different things work for different people, and this worked for me to get to the next level without steroids (you would get HUGE if you used them and did this I expect).

I wanted to open this more as a dialogue to talk about the principles behind CBL, people who have had success/not success doing it, and answer any questions that there might be.