Archive for 2009

Do you think pro­fes­sional ath­letes and pro­fes­sional strength train­ing coaches read body­build­ing mag­a­zines? If so, it is prob­a­bly only for humor and to see what kind of hype their ath­letes are being exposed to. Do you think high qual­ity, world– class ath­letes and coaches fol­low the advice found in these mag­a­zines? And if THEY don’t, WHY THE HECK WOULD YOU! Even though these mag­a­zines may have inspired mil­lions, they have done a bet­ter job at mis­lead­ing millions.

It’s unbe­liev­able how many young guys think they need cre­a­tine and a whole list of other sup­ple­ments; think they need to ‘split’ their work­outs into ‘body parts’ and are try­ing to build mus­cle in an over trained and under­nour­ished state…and then won­der, ‘Why can’t I gain weight?’ They have no idea that these pro­grams don’t work with­out drugs. These are DRUG rou­tines and drug rou­tines don’t work for nat­ural guys. Period.

The mod­ern main­stream body­build­ing mag­a­zines at the news­stands (and even main­stream male and female fit­ness mag­a­zines are guilty) are really just ‘mus­cle comic books’ writ­ten at a 6th grade level. They glo­rify drug-using ‘body­builders’ and por­tray them as the pic­ture of health. They clev­erly com­bine two or three rehashed arti­cles, a lot of pic­tures, gim­micks, sex and hype to sell this hype to millions.

And what do porn-like photo sec­tions have to do with a mus­cle– build­ing mag­a­zine? The pub­lish­ers of some of these mag­a­zines beat the hell out of this mar­ket­ing tac­tic, with par­tially nude women with their rears hang­ing out of thongs. It would be nice if men could pick up a body­build­ing mag­a­zine to learn some qual­ity infor­ma­tion and not end up get­ting an erection!

Sup­ple­ment com­pa­nies have always been a part of fit­ness pub­li­ca­tions (although it was not as bla­tant in the past) and now mar­keters are the writ­ers and the prod­uct is no longer a mag­a­zine but rather bot­tles of pills and pro­tein pow­ders etc. I would say almost 70% of the arti­cles in mag­a­zines have a mar­ket­ing pur­pose and it’s even hard to tell these days what is an ad and what is a legit­i­mate article.

Bot­tom line, there are too many rich sup­ple­ment com­pa­nies and too many frus­trated weightlifters who are not gain­ing the size and strength they deserve.

The ‘mus­cle pump’ is described as when you put your mus­cles under an extended period of con­stant ten­sion. As your mus­cles stretch and con­tract they become gorged with blood that makes them feel tighter and fuller.

Get­ting a mus­cle pump is not nec­es­sar­ily what causes the mus­cle to grow. Doing 100 reps with a light weight will cre­ate a huge pump – but does this make a mus­cle grow? Of course not! Dis­tance run­ners get a pump in their legs when they sprint uphill and do they get big mus­cles? Heck, no!

Most body­builders swear by the ‘pump’ and preach that you are shut­tling more nutri­ents into the mus­cle – but is that what is really hap­pen­ing? Sure it feels great, like Arnold says in the unfor­get­table scene in Pump­ing Iron, but all that is occur­ring is a ‘back-up’ of blood. The blood is ‘stuck’ inside the mus­cle, which cre­ates that much wor­shiped tight and full look.

The blood that’s backed up into the mus­cle has hit a dead end and has nowhere to go. If you had fresh, new blood, that would be great, but unfor­tu­nately you just have old, stale blood get­ting ready for a snooze. That will NOT help you gain weight or build mus­cle mass! The pump that is built up by the blood in your mus­cles will usu­ally occur after you repeat set after set, which results in the famous ‘burn­ing’ sen­sa­tion known as lac­tic acid. Lac­tic acid forms in the absence of oxy­gen. Lac­tic acid is a WASTE prod­uct and does NOTHING to build mus­cle weight.

Now if you are lift­ing extremely heavy weights and achiev­ing a pump, then this is a very good indi­ca­tion that you are mak­ing the mus­cle fibers work fully. I would only use the pump as an indi­ca­tor to reveal how well you are ‘tar­get­ing’ the work­ing mus­cle, not as a guide to mark your success.

Here are some con­tro­ver­sial ques­tions I want to dis­cuss con­cern­ing so called instinct train­ing.

Do pro­fes­sional ath­letes and teams prac­tice instinc­tively? Do com­pet­i­tive long-distance ath­letes train with­out their stop­watch? Of course not! So why would some­one try­ing to build mus­cle employ an inef­fec­tive and unproven tool that can lead you astray?

Build­ing mus­cle is based on improv­ing the inten­sity of the work­out pro­gres­sively each ses­sion. So why com­pli­cate things by fol­low­ing this ‘inner com­pass’ that has never been sci­en­tif­i­cally ver­i­fied to work?

Do you really think your body can deci­pher between the inten­sity of 9 reps with 225 lbs in 30 sec­onds and 13 reps with 185 lbs in 45 sec­onds? Of course not! Aside from hear­ing your mus­cles yelling at you to stop when the going gets tough, can you really inter­pret which was more intense? It is one thing to train instinc­tively dur­ing a set and squeeze out an extra few reps because you’re feel­ing really good today. But I do not advice “wing­ing” your entire work­out and throw­ing some ran­dom exer­cises together and train­ing until you “feel” like it’s enough.

How do you mon­i­tor your progress? How do you know if you’re gain­ing or los­ing over­all strength? How do you know what the pur­pose of the work­out is? Every work­out you per­form should be based on “out doing” your pre­vi­ous work­out and lead­ing to an end result. My work­out plans are based on ‘rea­son’ and sim­ple for­mu­las to mea­sure your inten­sity — not poorly defined instincts.

Let’s be hon­est. When was the last time your strength really went up? Has your strength aver­aged at least a 5% increase from week to week or even month to month?

If you are like most trainees, you got stuck at the same weights after the first few months of your first ever expo­sure to body­build­ing. If not – con­grat­u­la­tions, I applaud you and you are doing some­thing right. I’m also con­fi­dent in say­ing that you made the major­ity of your mus­cu­lar gains in the first few months that you began lift­ing prop­erly. Is it safe to say that your mus­cu­lar gains lev­eled off at about the same time your strength gains lev­eled off? Coin­ci­dence? Hardly!  Consistency

Your mus­cu­lar size is ALMOST (there are many other fac­tors we do not have time to dis­cuss here) a direct cor­re­la­tion to your mus­cle strength. Have you ever seen some­one who can bench press, squat or dead lift a few hun­dred pounds with a small physique. Very, very rarely!

Mus­cle size and strength are rel­a­tive to each other. The stronger your mus­cles become the big­ger they will be become and vice versa. Fol­low a pro­gram that pri­or­i­tizes improv­ing your strength con­sis­tently and trust that mass will follow!

If you are pump­ing MASSIVE amounts of ana­bolic steroids into your veins to ARTIFICIALLY increase testos­terone lev­els, then stop reading!

How­ever, if you are a drug-free trainee, what you DO need is every sin­gle secret that will pro­vide the level of sup­port nec­es­sary to opti­mize T-levels safely and naturally!

There are too many tips and tricks to dis­cuss here, but I would like to share a few of the most com­mon tricks to keep your T-levels ele­vated and not dropped to that of the guys in the ‘arts and crafts’ club!

Train­ing too long, lack­ing true inten­sity, not tar­get­ing your legs, high stress lev­els, not enough monoun­sat­u­rated fats and train­ing at the wrong time of day, amongst many other pit­falls, can lead T-levels to drop so low that ‘Cap­tain Willy’ will go on per­ma­nent vacation.

Sup­ple­ments will NOT stim­u­late mus­cle growth – exer­cise will.

Assum­ing your train­ing, nutri­tion, lifestyle and sleep habits are oper­at­ing on the opti­mal end of the spec­trum, intro­duc­ing sup­ple­ments will MAYBE, AT BEST, make a 5–10% dif­fer­ence. You will be more suc­cess­ful tak­ing your fit­ness to the next level by work­ing on your train­ing, nutri­tion and sleep first. It will also be eas­ier on your wal­let! Pow­ders are noth­ing more than crushed up food and loaded with arti­fi­cial fla­vor­ing and lots of chem­i­cals to pre­serve their shelf life. Shakes are cer­tainly con­ve­nient and may assist you in reach­ing your goal calo­ries, but do not ever kid your­self that they will have the same ana­bolic effect as food.

Dump­ing chem­i­cals, arti­fi­cial col­ors, fla­vor­ing, sug­ars, sweet­en­ers and preser­v­a­tives into your body basi­cally turns it into a toxic waste dump! And did you know that this toxic waste loves to attach itself to your fat stores, mak­ing it even harder to get rid of body fat? And can you imag­ine how much harder it will be to build mas­sive mus­cle in a toxic envi­ron­ment? What goes in must come out! Put garbage in and garbage will come out in the form of decreased energy, slow recov­ery, poor appetite, poor sleep and poor atti­tude – all ele­ments crit­i­cal for mus­cle building.

When was the last time an ath­lete won, or a medal was won, or a team won on pills, pow­ders and shakes? Never!

The stress must be heavy enough to exceed the nor­mal thresh­old of your mus­cles. Train­ing with weights at your 60–80% 1 Rep Max (RM) will not stim­u­late NEW mus­cle growth.

In other words, if you sim­ply want to have the abil­ity to lift weights to ‘fail­ure’ using 60–80% of your 1 Rep Max, then keep doing this because your mus­cles will accom­mo­date this spe­cific stress. Your mus­cles will not grow larger than they must to accom­mo­date this one spe­cific stress.

Don’t get me wrong. Your body will adapt mus­cu­larly, neu­ro­log­i­cally and struc­turally to this spe­cific stress – but it will stop and end there. Even if you are increas­ing reps and sets, the mus­cles will grow min­i­mally, but there will be NO suf­fi­cient rea­son for them to grow fur­ther because you are still within your nat­ural threshold.

So if you want to gain 2–5 pounds of mus­cle a year, keep fol­low­ing con­ven­tional train­ing pro­grams because they are not made for extra­or­di­nary gains. I did not gain 41 pounds of mus­cle over the course of six months by accident!

So how does sleep relate to the phe­nom­e­non of build­ing big mus­cles? The num­ber one rea­son get­ting enough sleep is so impor­tant is because Growth Hor­mone lev­els rise 30–45 min­utes after falling asleep, and a higher qual­ity of sleep releases Testos­terone. If you are more than a recre­ational weight lifter whose trips to the gym include more moti­va­tion than to pick up the cute recep­tion­ist, I would sug­gest the opti­mal 8 hours. How­ever, this is a very indi­vid­u­al­is­tic mea­sure and as low as 6 hours can be ade­quate for some.

Also, it is rumored that every hour of sleep you get before mid­night has the equiv­a­lent affect of 2 hours sleep. So if you go to bed at 10 pm and wake up 6 am, you will feel as if you have just slept 10 hours (not the actual 8 hours). I have to admit that I have expe­ri­enced higher qual­ity sleep going to bed earlier.

Take advan­tage of power naps – they are not for wimps. Pro­fes­sional body­builders take them reg­u­larly in the course of a day so there is some­thing to be said for them. 20-minute naps in the mid­dle of the day are said to be the equiv­a­lent of a 2-hour sleep. Again, try it out and see for your­self. Naps are extremely ben­e­fi­cial if you did not sleep the night before. Remem­ber, your mus­cles grow when you rest – this is the time between weight-training ses­sions. Sleep is the best oppor­tu­nity to let your mus­cles rest. Sleep is a pow­er­ful tool that costs you nothing!

I know you have heard it before but I will say it again – if you are not eat­ing enough calo­ries, you will NEVER gain weight, no mat­ter what you do. THERE IS NO WAY AROUND IT! Even if you have the per­fect train­ing rou­tine, you will never grow unless you pro­vide your body with the proper nutri­ents. It’s like say­ing you want to build a house but you don’t have enough bricks, cement or wood. It will be impos­si­ble to build that house. It’s like try­ing to buy a $100,000 house and you only have $50,000. It’s going to be down­right impos­si­ble. Long story short – if you are not grow­ing, there could be two problems:

1. You have not applied energy bal­ance (energy in ver­sus energy out) prop­erly. It is a lot trick­ier than sim­ply mul­ti­ply­ing your body weight by a fac­tor of 18–22 as most authors sug­gest. This fac­tor neglects your unique rest­ing meta­bolic rate, your unique cost of daily activ­ity, your unique cost of exer­cise activ­ity and the ther­mic effect of food.
2. You com­bine the wrong food at the wrong times. Obvi­ously eat­ing 3000 calo­ries of chips and Dori­tos is not as effec­tive as eat­ing 3000 calo­ries of high qual­ity carbs, fats and proteins.

There are also a few crit­i­cal win­dows in the day when you must con­sume the major­ity of your nutri­ents to max­i­mize mus­cle growth. If you wish to ensure that your mus­cles have enough fuel to sup­port your work­outs, train intensely, recover from work­out to work­out and, let’s not for­get, grow NEW mus­cle, you have to keep track of what you are eat­ing every day. There is no way around it. This is the num­ber one rea­son why skinny guys never gain weight or why any­body, for that mat­ter, will not make the qual­ity gains that they so des­per­ately strive for.

Over­train­ing is a result of train­ing too fre­quently and/or too long. Don’t take a micro­scope to the def­i­n­i­tion. Over­train­ing is as sim­ple as that – over­train­ing. It is a result of one of the following:

• Train­ing too fre­quently or in excess.
• Train­ing too long.
• Inad­e­quate recovery.

Main­stream body­build­ing lit­er­a­ture and sci­ence have tra­di­tion­ally focused on the symp­toms rather than on the pre­ven­tion of them. You often read arti­cles on ‘over­train­ing syn­drome’ and ‘planned over­train­ing’. This is unnec­es­sary. If you are in con­trol of the train­ing and recov­ery process, if you train for pre­de­ter­mined peri­ods and recover in pre­de­ter­mined ways, then you don’t need to know any­thing about ‘over­train­ing syn­dromes’! This online mus­cle build­ing course does not talk about ‘over­train­ing syn­dromes’, but teaches advanced recov­ery meth­ods to take charge of your train­ing and accel­er­ate your abil­ity to recu­per­ate and train again.