INTRODUCTION
Bodybuilding is full of wishful exercise and diet myths borne of our innate need to feel in control of our circumstances. None of us wants to accept that our short biceps, fat bums, narrow clavicles, or toothpick calves can’t be improved. Even if we accept that we might be unable to achieve perfection, we still need to believe we can neutralise our aesthetic weaknesses.
This article is a mixture of good and bad news for those of you training to ‘shape’ your body rather than just build size. The good news is that you do have massive control over your overall shape. Even better news is that those changes that you can make can be made quite quickly.
But the bad news is that just about everything you’ve read or been told about ‘shape training’ is probably untrue. Worse than that, following the popular ‘shape training’ advice will probably ensure that you fail to achieve the shape you could have otherwise. Read on if you want to know what works and what doesn’t.
FOUNDATIONS
Before we even begin discussing dietary, chemical and exercise interventions for shaping muscles, something must be said about your base structure; your skeleton.
Your skeleton is the frame upon which all your muscles attach. Without some sort of violent surgical procedure (or pre-pubertal genetic manipulation) you are not going to be able to change your skeletal structure and therefore your overall shape is set before you even start training.
MUSCLE ATTACHMENTS
Where and how your muscles attach to your skeleton is another fixed, structural quality that profoundly affects your shape. In fact, it is your muscle attachments that ultimately determine the shapes of each and every muscle in your body. The tissue in between the attachments can only get bigger or smaller.
Using the thighs as an example, whether you are ever going to have an outer thigh ‘sweep’ like Capriese Murray or Lenda Murray depends upon where your outer thigh muscle (Vastus Lateralis) attaches at the hip* and knee* as well as the size and shape of your hips and femur.
Whether you will ever have an inner-thigh region that appears full and round from the knee to the groin like Jon Davie depends significantly upon where the Gracilis, Sartorius and Adductor Longus attach (among others). If your Gracilis attaches closer to the front of your knee and your Sartorius attaches further around your hip toward your groin then you are likely to be forever frustrated with a thin, bowed looking lower thigh similar to Greg Kovacs (though probably not quite as big). And all the hip adducting exercises in the world won’t change that.
In the case of your arm, if you have ‘short biceps’ like Luke Wood (where there seems to be a large gap between your bicep and forearm) then you will always have short biceps. You cannot build muscle where there is only tendon. So if you get a big burn and pump in the bicep tendon from those preacher curls you read would build your ‘lower biceps’, that’s actually an injury!
The depth of separations between muscles is also largely determined by their attachments. If the muscle attachments create wide, flat muscles with significant overlaps then your separations will never be particularly deep. And all the peak-contraction, isolation exercises in the world will be unable to ‘carve’ out any separations.
So subtle differences in the attachment points of different people’s muscles profoundly affect the ultimate visual impression made by their physiques. And short of surgical detachment and reattachment, there is nothing you can do about what your genetics gave you. You just have to work with them.
But before you hang up your training belt and quit bodybuilding forever, consider that Ronnie Coleman, Dorian Yates and Lee Haney have all been widely criticised for their poor abdominal muscles’ shape and structure among other faults. Yet these 3 men have collectively held the Worlds greatest bodybuilding title for over 20 years!
So just because your structure isn’t perfect doesn’t mean it can’t be totally awesome. Just be realistic about what you hope to look like.
MUSCLE TYPES?
There is no tissue in the body known as ‘bulk’. Neither is there a type of muscle known as ‘toned muscle’. Muscle is only muscle. How hard, soft, separated, cut, vascular or ‘toned’ it looks is a function mainly of how much fat covers it.
Front row Rugby forwards don’t have ‘bulk’ – they have a lot of muscle covered in a lot of fat. They might not be fat by comparison to the slobs in the pub watching them play but the reason they don’t look hard and defined is because they are fat.
So you cannot ‘build bulk’; there is no such thing. Neither can you develop a bulky physique as a result of exercise choice. But you can cover your muscle with a layer of fat giving the ‘bulky’ appearance of front row rugby players.
Similarly, you cannot build ‘cut’ or ‘separated’ muscles as opposed from building bigger muscles with obviously deeper gaps between them. But you can reduce your muscle blurring body fat to see the cuts and separations already between your muscles.
LOGICAL ADAPTATIONS
Muscle growth occurs as a logical adaptation to extremely stressful levels of muscular tension; otherwise known as stinking heavy weights!
Muscle exists to exert the forces necessary to create movement. Different types of exercise – stressful movement – will stimulate different adaptations within the muscle. But these adaptations will always relate to the functional force generating capacity of the muscle; either making the muscle able to apply force longer, faster, through a greater range of movement or just produce more peak force.
Like all adaptations, the bodies response to weight training stresses will be the least required to get the job done. Despite what many bodybuilding writers will make it sound like, the body is not interested in making extravagant, extraneous changes to muscle form and structure for the purpose of improving our external aesthetic form. Unfortunately, the psychological stress of possessing a subjectively unattractive body does not induce positive physical adaptations in muscle.
You cannot build ‘thigh sweep’ or peaked biceps or wide pecs if you weren’t born with the structural potential (the combination of skeletal structure and muscular attachments) to do so. And if you were born with great structure then you can still only increase the overall size of the muscle in the areas you already have it.
SHAPING VS MASS BUILDING EXERCISES
While the basic compound exercises such as squats, deadlifts, rows, and presses are often described as ‘mass builders’, many other exercises are touted as ‘shaping’ exercises. Shaping exercises apparently train their respective muscles from different ‘angles’ thereby allowing you to change the shape of your muscles. Nonsense!
A more correct categorisation for weight training exercises would be ‘potent’ and ‘impotent’. An exercises’ effectiveness or potency can be measured by how comparatively quickly body composition changes (muscle gains) are made. And in all cases you will find a basic ‘mass builder’ outperforms a ‘shaping’ exercise.
The simple fact is that an exercises ability to stimulate muscle growth is the sole determining factor as to whether it can positively affect your body composition (ratio of fat to muscle) and therefore your shape. That means that even if you are a bodyshaper you should be doing heavy deadlifts and presses to look your shapliest.
The inefficiency of shaping exercises for developing muscle is well recognised even by those who recommend their employment in a training program. As such, it is frequently recommended in bodybuilding literature that a trainer should build mass with ‘mass building exercises’ before later trying to shape it with ‘shaping movements’. The inference is that once a quantity of muscle tissue has been developed for functional reasons, the body will then happily disassemble and reassemble the muscle proteins with an all new shape; extending or reducing attachments, adding partial-length fibres where there were none previously and disproportionately thickening sections of muscle for no functional purpose whatsoever. And all of this will apparently happen in response to an exercise that is incapable of developing the muscle from the start.
Though we might wish the body was aesthetically generous and functionally schizophrenic in response to otherwise impotent, ineffective exercises, it isn’t. Adaptations to exercise are logical and functional. And while unnatural positioning of your feet during Hack Machine Squats might eventually require a new cruciate ligament, it is unlikely to require a kilo of functionally useless, partial length muscle fibres added to the outside portion of your thigh (Vastus Lateralis)!
TRUTH ABOUT SHAPING EXERCISES
Shaping exercises tend to fall into 2 categories: single joint isolation exercises and regular compound movements done with an abnormal body position.
Single joint isolation movements fit the category of ‘impotent’ exercises described above. By nature, isolation exercises require lighter loads than compound movements for the same muscle. And by nature, isolating a muscle means that the lighter load being used is applied to much less musculature.
Isolation exercises usually hurt like hell! You can achieve a very intense, isolated burn unlike that felt from compound movements. They FEEL as though they are working the muscle very hard. And they are. The problem is that they do not provide a particularly intense systemic stress and therefore the adaptive response is minimal. No matter how hard you feel you are training with isolation exercises, the inherent stress is light; i.e. not intense.
Using abnormal body positions on compound movements – like pointing your toes in or out while squatting – to train a different aspect of a muscle is simply dangerous. If it was possible to work the outer thigh at the expense of the inner thigh during squats, for example, then the knee joint would have to be subjected to enormous sheering and rotational stresses that would inevitably lead to chronic injury.
Similarly, changing a compound exercise so that far less weight can be lifted does not make the exercise more effective or intense. By definition, a lighter weight means that a movement it is less intense, less effective and typically damaging to the joints. That burn you feel in your outer pecs during bench presses to the neck is likely to be a nerve impingement in the acromion complex or a strain to one or all of the rotator cuff muscles. And there is going to be little stimulus for pec growth when you halve the weight stress that the torso normally accommodates.
TRUTH ABOUT MASS BUILDING EXERCISES
The basic ‘mass building’ exercises are the most effective, efficient exercises you can use. They apply the greatest load stress upon the body thereby inducing the most significant adaptive, muscle growth response. These exercises include squats, deadlifts, rows, bench presses, seated or standing presses – basically any multi-joint compound movement.
Mass builders won’t make you ‘massive’, ‘bulky’ or ‘blocky’. That myth comes from the fact that big, bulky, blocky looking people with wide hips tend to be very good at lifting big weights on basic compound exercises.
But, as explained above, your structure has already been set by your genetics. If you are big and blocky then the use of light, ineffective exercises is not going to make you small and/or shapely.
Heavy mass building exercises are the most efficient for maximising your natural muscular shape. And when it comes down to it, maximising what you’ve been structurally handed is all you can do anyway.
Heavy, compound exercises actually enable you to carry the greatest possible lean mass at any given body size. In other words, they are the best exercises for making you as lean and muscular as you need. If you don’t want excessive size, don’t worry; excessive size doesn’t tend to happen by accident. Besides which, your size is a function of how much you eat. How strong you are only determines how much of you is muscle.
QUANTIFICATION: THE REAL ISSUE
Consider how much muscle you can expect to gain in a year of focussed mass building. The late Mike Mentzer based his exercise calculations on expecting no more than 5kilos of new muscle per year. Pro bodybuilder Dexter Jackson says not to expect more than 2.5kg per year. And some Natural Bodybuilding ‘experts’ have publicly recommended lowering your expectations to 1-2kg per year.
Whatever quantity of muscle you expect to gain in a year of focussed mass building, it will be several multiples more than you could expect to gain in a year of focussed ‘shaping’ training. In short, you can expect to gain pretty close to nothing in an entire year of training with ‘shaping’ exercises.
And if virtually no net gain is the best possible result from using supposed ‘shaping’ exercises for a year, how much change can you expect to the shape of your physique? We already established above that the notion of a muscle structurally reconstructing itself for no functional purpose is absurd as well as technically impossible. If there is any possibility of any change being made to a physique with exactly the same quantity of muscle, on the same skeleton, with the same muscle attachments, then that change will be totally imperceptible.
Yet if you’d focussed on supposed mass building you could have achieved a significant improvement in your muscle mass and therefore your body composition and your shape.
CONCLUSION
Through effective, hard, heavy weight training and strict dieting you can sculpt yourself an amazing body with fantastic shape. But you cannot change the structural shape of your body.
As such, regardless of your specific goals and structural weaknesses an exercise program for bodybuilding/shaping should always be focussed on heavy weights using basic compound movements.
Other than to train through injury, recover from a period of overtraining or successful overreaching, ‘shaping’ movements are never required or effective. They can be fun for something different to do when you are bored but otherwise supposed ‘shaping’ movements do not shape your muscles.
* (technically correct terminology abandoned in favour of spatially and communicatively superior options)
Visit www.BiologicLabs.com.au for Body Recompositioning diets, training programs, strength coaching, supplements and hormone balancing. Extreme fat loss and muscle development that Personal Trainers and Fitness gyms cannot achieve.
Tuesday, 19 October 2010
Wednesday, 13 October 2010
Training Sets, Reps & Days vs. Weights
If you look at the majority of weight training programs they talk about sets, reps and exercises. They talk about heart rate and duration. They talk about ‘feel’ and ‘burn’. But never do they seem to give more than a passing mention about weight! And yet the WEIGHT being lifted is the entire point of WEIGHT Training. If you do not progress in the amount of weight you can lift then your training failed. Period. Nothing left to discuss. If training wasn’t about weight then they’d call it Rep Training or Set Training or something other than Weight Training!
To prove the point, consider a massive Professional Bodybuilders program from a magazine and consider what he does that you cannot?
Apparently he does 10-12 reps per set. Taking weight out of the equation, do you have any problem doing 10-12 reps of any exercise? No matter who you are or how out of shape you are, you CAN do 10-12 reps of an exercise IF the weight is light enough.
Mr Pro does 4 SETS of each exercise. Once again, whoever you are, you are capable of doing 4 sets of any exercise so long as the weight is light enough.
Mr Pro trains 6 days per week for 1-2 hours at a time, always works to ‘feel’ the burn and squeeze the muscles etc etc. All of which every healthy human is capable of doing IF weight is taken out of the equation!
So you are CAPABLE of doing everything that even a Professional Bodybuilder does in terms of sets, reps and hours in the gym. So training to do all those sets and reps and hours is not developing any ability you do not already have. And if your body isn't changing to develop any new physical ability then you can be absolutely sure it won't have changed physically either! Which leaves the ONLY thing that a professional Bodybuilder can do that you cannot do which is lift HUGE WEIGHTS on all those sets and reps!
Now, these days, you might not see Mr Lazy Pro lift huge weights in the videos and they might not choose to lift huge weights for much of the year. We all know how Pro Bodybuilders build their muscles these days and it doesn’t require working particularly hard. But despite what they lift, the issue is that Mr Pro is CAPABLE of lifting much, MUCH more than you on everything he does. In fact, even lazy Pros often train lazily with hundreds of kilos more than you can lift when straining with all of your effort! And if you could get as strong as Mr Pro by training light and lazy then you’d probably be as big as Mr Pro and you wouldn’t be reading this!
Once you can lift similar maximum weights to those your favourite pro is CAPABLE of lifting then you’ll probably find you can lazily play around for 4 sets of 4 exercises with big weights too. And you’ll probably be about the same size (give or take the Synthol lumps in your arms, delts and calves). Of course, by that stage you probably won’t bother with 4 sets of 4 exercises because you will have realised that such training is just stupid, inefficient, ineffective and not even slightly related to the desired result you want from your training!
Visit www.BiologicLabs.com.au for Body Recompositioning diets, training programs, strength coaching, supplements and hormone balancing. Extreme fat loss and muscle development that Personal Trainers and Fitness gyms cannot achieve.
To prove the point, consider a massive Professional Bodybuilders program from a magazine and consider what he does that you cannot?
Apparently he does 10-12 reps per set. Taking weight out of the equation, do you have any problem doing 10-12 reps of any exercise? No matter who you are or how out of shape you are, you CAN do 10-12 reps of an exercise IF the weight is light enough.
Mr Pro does 4 SETS of each exercise. Once again, whoever you are, you are capable of doing 4 sets of any exercise so long as the weight is light enough.
Mr Pro trains 6 days per week for 1-2 hours at a time, always works to ‘feel’ the burn and squeeze the muscles etc etc. All of which every healthy human is capable of doing IF weight is taken out of the equation!
So you are CAPABLE of doing everything that even a Professional Bodybuilder does in terms of sets, reps and hours in the gym. So training to do all those sets and reps and hours is not developing any ability you do not already have. And if your body isn't changing to develop any new physical ability then you can be absolutely sure it won't have changed physically either! Which leaves the ONLY thing that a professional Bodybuilder can do that you cannot do which is lift HUGE WEIGHTS on all those sets and reps!
Now, these days, you might not see Mr Lazy Pro lift huge weights in the videos and they might not choose to lift huge weights for much of the year. We all know how Pro Bodybuilders build their muscles these days and it doesn’t require working particularly hard. But despite what they lift, the issue is that Mr Pro is CAPABLE of lifting much, MUCH more than you on everything he does. In fact, even lazy Pros often train lazily with hundreds of kilos more than you can lift when straining with all of your effort! And if you could get as strong as Mr Pro by training light and lazy then you’d probably be as big as Mr Pro and you wouldn’t be reading this!
Once you can lift similar maximum weights to those your favourite pro is CAPABLE of lifting then you’ll probably find you can lazily play around for 4 sets of 4 exercises with big weights too. And you’ll probably be about the same size (give or take the Synthol lumps in your arms, delts and calves). Of course, by that stage you probably won’t bother with 4 sets of 4 exercises because you will have realised that such training is just stupid, inefficient, ineffective and not even slightly related to the desired result you want from your training!
Visit www.BiologicLabs.com.au for Body Recompositioning diets, training programs, strength coaching, supplements and hormone balancing. Extreme fat loss and muscle development that Personal Trainers and Fitness gyms cannot achieve.
Muscles = Strength = Weights. Duh!
I was at the supermarket the other day when I saw a little girl point at me and say to her mother “look at that strong man, mommy”. The little girl couldn’t have been more than 5 years old and yet she seemed to ‘get it’ more than the vast majority of weight trainers.
The “form” your body takes is a reflection of what your body can do. I really don’t know what part of that people find so hard to understand or believe? I have muscles because muscles are required to lift the weights I lift. Substantially stronger people than me tend to have substantially bigger muscles. Substantially weaker people tend to have substantially smaller muscles. The measure of a muscle is its strength. That’s just what a muscle does. And I just cannot figure out when the world lost sight of this fact?
If you want more muscles, you need to get much stronger; probably by lifting heavy stuff. If you want less fat then you need to stop eating tasty rubbish, start eating clean protein foods and train for more muscle; probably by lifting heavy stuff. If you want to look exactly like a ripped, elite rock climber then you need to become an ELITE rock climber. If you want to look more like a skinny, sick, malnourished endurance athlete then you need to exercise for hours and hours and hours, everyday and become an elite endurance athlete! If you want the ‘heroin chic’ look in womens fashion magazines then you probably need to develop a proper heroin addiction. And if you only go half-way with the work required for any of these ‘looks’ then you’ll probably only get half the look!
Yet weight trainers and bodybuilders obsess over exercise ‘technique’ instead of weight; pre-workout supplements instead of food; ‘feeling’ muscles work rather than making muscles ‘do’; and spending hours slothing along on treadmills to ‘burn fat’ instead of powering through workouts to become a REAL strength athlete. As a result the vast majority of trainers are failing to achieve any significant body composition changes. For all their science and ‘feelings’ and technique, trainers are failing to LOOK like strong, muscular athletes because they aren't training to become strong, muscular athletes! Its like training to race Supercars and focussing on steering angles, apexes, wheel camber, tyre selection, throttle modulation and everything else EXCEPT going faster. Its just an obvious waste of time!
If you want muscles and low bodyfat then you need to train with weights. And if you are going to train with WEIGHTS then don't let anyone fool you: the point is the WEIGHT!
Visit www.BiologicLabs.com.au for Body Recompositioning diets, training programs, strength coaching, supplements and hormone balancing. Extreme fat loss and muscle development that Personal Trainers and Fitness gyms cannot achieve.
The “form” your body takes is a reflection of what your body can do. I really don’t know what part of that people find so hard to understand or believe? I have muscles because muscles are required to lift the weights I lift. Substantially stronger people than me tend to have substantially bigger muscles. Substantially weaker people tend to have substantially smaller muscles. The measure of a muscle is its strength. That’s just what a muscle does. And I just cannot figure out when the world lost sight of this fact?
If you want more muscles, you need to get much stronger; probably by lifting heavy stuff. If you want less fat then you need to stop eating tasty rubbish, start eating clean protein foods and train for more muscle; probably by lifting heavy stuff. If you want to look exactly like a ripped, elite rock climber then you need to become an ELITE rock climber. If you want to look more like a skinny, sick, malnourished endurance athlete then you need to exercise for hours and hours and hours, everyday and become an elite endurance athlete! If you want the ‘heroin chic’ look in womens fashion magazines then you probably need to develop a proper heroin addiction. And if you only go half-way with the work required for any of these ‘looks’ then you’ll probably only get half the look!
Yet weight trainers and bodybuilders obsess over exercise ‘technique’ instead of weight; pre-workout supplements instead of food; ‘feeling’ muscles work rather than making muscles ‘do’; and spending hours slothing along on treadmills to ‘burn fat’ instead of powering through workouts to become a REAL strength athlete. As a result the vast majority of trainers are failing to achieve any significant body composition changes. For all their science and ‘feelings’ and technique, trainers are failing to LOOK like strong, muscular athletes because they aren't training to become strong, muscular athletes! Its like training to race Supercars and focussing on steering angles, apexes, wheel camber, tyre selection, throttle modulation and everything else EXCEPT going faster. Its just an obvious waste of time!
If you want muscles and low bodyfat then you need to train with weights. And if you are going to train with WEIGHTS then don't let anyone fool you: the point is the WEIGHT!
Visit www.BiologicLabs.com.au for Body Recompositioning diets, training programs, strength coaching, supplements and hormone balancing. Extreme fat loss and muscle development that Personal Trainers and Fitness gyms cannot achieve.
FAQ: Building Muscle while Training for Sports/Fighting?
Q: I train for [MMA/Boxing/Kick-Boxing/Rugby/Soccer/AFL etc etc] but I'd like to gain more muscle and have a better looking physique while maintaining my endurance, speed and skills. Do I need to give up my other training to gain the muscle? Or will it be hard to maintain the muscle with my other training?
A: It is very difficult to gain appreciable muscle while also training hard for endurance type activities. Some people can do it; most can't. But even those that can do both still find muscle building is severely slowed by other training.
Stopping any other training to focus on building muscle and strength will enable you to gain the muscle you want. But if you do not gain much muscle or if you only focus on the muscle building for a few weeks before restarting the endurance-y work then you'll probably find you quickly lose the new muscle and go back to exactly where you were before.
The thing is, your body becomes what it needs to become in order to do what you need to do. But when you are doing lots of endurance-y exercise then there is a limit to how big, strong and muscular your body will agree to be. And there isnt a whole lot you can do about what point YOUR body thinks is too much muscle to do your other activity(s).
Almost all men need to focus purely on their strength and muscle training if they ever hope to get past a physique that can do a 120-140kg bench press and 220-240kg-ish deadlift. Strength beyond that level is relatively freakish and requires a very focussed athlete. Some guys can be bigger and stronger than that while also maintaining sports endurance; but its rare, not easy and definitely not guaranteed.
Visit www.BiologicLabs.com.au for Body Recompositioning diets, training programs, strength coaching, supplements and hormone balancing. Extreme fat loss and muscle development that Personal Trainers and Fitness gyms cannot achieve.
A: It is very difficult to gain appreciable muscle while also training hard for endurance type activities. Some people can do it; most can't. But even those that can do both still find muscle building is severely slowed by other training.
Stopping any other training to focus on building muscle and strength will enable you to gain the muscle you want. But if you do not gain much muscle or if you only focus on the muscle building for a few weeks before restarting the endurance-y work then you'll probably find you quickly lose the new muscle and go back to exactly where you were before.
The thing is, your body becomes what it needs to become in order to do what you need to do. But when you are doing lots of endurance-y exercise then there is a limit to how big, strong and muscular your body will agree to be. And there isnt a whole lot you can do about what point YOUR body thinks is too much muscle to do your other activity(s).
Almost all men need to focus purely on their strength and muscle training if they ever hope to get past a physique that can do a 120-140kg bench press and 220-240kg-ish deadlift. Strength beyond that level is relatively freakish and requires a very focussed athlete. Some guys can be bigger and stronger than that while also maintaining sports endurance; but its rare, not easy and definitely not guaranteed.
Visit www.BiologicLabs.com.au for Body Recompositioning diets, training programs, strength coaching, supplements and hormone balancing. Extreme fat loss and muscle development that Personal Trainers and Fitness gyms cannot achieve.
Saturday, 9 October 2010
When Stupidly Bad is Good
Recently a client introduced me to the disgraceful Velocity Diet plan on t-nation.com.
The jist of the diet is you stop eating food and consume only their supplements. Every now and then you have an "HSM" (healthy solid meal - gotta have an acronym or its not scientific, ya know?). But for all week, everyday, its just supplements.
The supplements make a diet that is 60% protein, 15% carbs and 25% fats and VERY low calorie. A 120kg man is prescribed just 1800 calories per day (plus 330 extra calories on training days). It is absolute malnourishing starvation!
This is a terrible diet on more levels than I can be bothered commenting on. One major issue I have is that, for whatever reason, supplements - regardless of how technically brilliant they have been formulated to be - never, ever deliver the same training, strength, health or body composition outcomes as real food. I know it shouldn't be this way when you look at the basic numbers. But it just is. It probably has to do with the fact that you are still drinking a bunch of wierd, colours, flavours, sweeteners and other non-nutritious poisons that have no place in going into the body.
But while I would never, ever prescribe such a terrible, awful, malnourishing diet to any client I would ever work with, the Velocity Diet is actually the best possible diet for a LOT of people. The reason? They can't screw it up!
The fact is, most people couldnt eat a diet much worse than they do if they deliberately tried. I am shocked by how bad most peoples diets are. And most people screw up even the most basic diet instructions. You tell them to eat chicken and they get the fake turkey from the deli. You tell them to eat rice and they eat pasta with cheese sauce. And they actually think these compromises are OK!? A 100% supplement diet is the only diet that they will not and cannot screw up.
And by virtue of being the only diet people cannot screw up, the Velocity Diet - like the worst diet I've ever seen: the Tony Ferguson Diet - is the best diet for many people.
Its so sad!
Visit www.BiologicLabs.com.au for Body Recompositioning diets, training programs, strength coaching, supplements and hormone balancing. Extreme fat loss and muscle development that Personal Trainers and Fitness gyms cannot achieve.
The jist of the diet is you stop eating food and consume only their supplements. Every now and then you have an "HSM" (healthy solid meal - gotta have an acronym or its not scientific, ya know?). But for all week, everyday, its just supplements.
The supplements make a diet that is 60% protein, 15% carbs and 25% fats and VERY low calorie. A 120kg man is prescribed just 1800 calories per day (plus 330 extra calories on training days). It is absolute malnourishing starvation!
This is a terrible diet on more levels than I can be bothered commenting on. One major issue I have is that, for whatever reason, supplements - regardless of how technically brilliant they have been formulated to be - never, ever deliver the same training, strength, health or body composition outcomes as real food. I know it shouldn't be this way when you look at the basic numbers. But it just is. It probably has to do with the fact that you are still drinking a bunch of wierd, colours, flavours, sweeteners and other non-nutritious poisons that have no place in going into the body.
But while I would never, ever prescribe such a terrible, awful, malnourishing diet to any client I would ever work with, the Velocity Diet is actually the best possible diet for a LOT of people. The reason? They can't screw it up!
The fact is, most people couldnt eat a diet much worse than they do if they deliberately tried. I am shocked by how bad most peoples diets are. And most people screw up even the most basic diet instructions. You tell them to eat chicken and they get the fake turkey from the deli. You tell them to eat rice and they eat pasta with cheese sauce. And they actually think these compromises are OK!? A 100% supplement diet is the only diet that they will not and cannot screw up.
And by virtue of being the only diet people cannot screw up, the Velocity Diet - like the worst diet I've ever seen: the Tony Ferguson Diet - is the best diet for many people.
Its so sad!
Visit www.BiologicLabs.com.au for Body Recompositioning diets, training programs, strength coaching, supplements and hormone balancing. Extreme fat loss and muscle development that Personal Trainers and Fitness gyms cannot achieve.
Friday, 1 October 2010
Why Personal Trainers Fail at Body Recompositioning
The following is a rant I wrote at the old Biologic Labs site.
WHAT YOU WANT
When you go to a gym or Personal Trainer your goal is pretty obvious: you want a better body! If you’d wanted to be a boxer, you would’ve gone to a boxing studio. If you’d wanted to be a runner, you would’ve joined a mate who liked running. And if you’d wanted to learn to balance on a large, colourful ball, you would’ve joined the circus! But you went to the gym/trainer because you never cared what kind of athlete you actually were, you just wanted to look (more) like one!
WHAT YOU NEED
The solution to how to look like an athlete was obvious back in High School. Remember the kids with the athletic, muscular physiques? They were always the ones with the athletic ability! Genetics be damned! It doesn’t matter WHY they were good athletes; the point is that the physique always came with ability!
Even when you were 10 years old you could’ve figured out, for example, that if you wanted to look like someone who can sprint 100 meters in 10 seconds then you probably need to be able to sprint 100m in 10seconds! Granted, not all elite 100m sprinters look exactly the same... but they do all tend to have a certain ‘look’! Its a similar look to elite rock climbers, gymnasts and elite athletes in any other sporting activity requiring an extremely high power-to-weight ratio. They are all really muscular!
At Biologic Labs we recognise that to achieve the athletic physique you want you need to develop the appropriate athletic ability! Thats the mathematical and philosophical basis of our Body Recompositioning Equation. And because weight training is the only infinitely adjustable, measurable and predictable strength sport, we can even predict exactly what weights you need to become capable of lifting in order to have the exact bodyfat percentage that you want. When you see our math you will realise its actually painfully obvious!
WHAT YOU GET
Yet when you go to a Personal Trainer and, for example, show them a picture of your desired elite sprinters body, you won’t get such a direct answer. Instead, they’ll talk to you about ‘core stability’ and ‘flexibility’ and ‘rectus abdominus’ and ‘heart rate’ and ‘vastus lateralis’ and ‘technique’ and ‘motivation’ and basically try to drown you in about 500 gallons of BS without ever even mentioning the sole determining factor in you achieving your goal: you need to become an elite sprinter (or as strong as one at the same bodyweight).
And then, if you let them, you’ll get given the same generic routine most trainers give to ALL their other clients. It will basically be a condensed 5th Grade PE lesson complete with stretching and calisthenics stolen from a 1980‘s Richard Simmons video followed by a bunch of ‘Retirement Village’ rehabilitation exercise. There’ll be some pulling on an oversized rubber band, lying hunched on a ball squeezing your bladder and, finally, leaning against a wall in a sitting position, but, wait for it... without a chair! Because thats gonna create a super hardcore athlete! Do you “Feel the burn”? Its actually your life, sanity and money being sucked into a black-hole, never to be reimbursed.
Of course, with a personal trainer in a gym you might also get a splattering of half-assed weights machine exercises with REALLY light weights! Heavy weights are dangerous, you see. Really Dangerous! Nothing like the safe sports such as Netball or Rugby where you run as fast as you can, leap through the air, land sideways on one foot while rotating quickly and, off balance, try to pass the ball before getting hit by a neanderthal traveling slightly faster than an express train. Knee and shoulder reconstructions? They only happen to people who lift those dangerous, heavy weights, obviously!
Anyway, lets say you argue and do not accept that the trainer gives you the generic garbage that they themselves would never, ever do (because they know its utterly useless, time wasting junk). What if instead you insist upon training like a sprinter to be a sprinter? Well then the trainer will give you a training program akin to the advice you might get from a retarded person copying the sprinters they saw in the background of the Olympics telecast. You’ll probably have to embarrass yourself in a public park by doing an incredibly gay, high-knee-kick run. Then, like a dog on a leash, you’ll get tied to your trainer with an oversized rubber band and have to try to run away. You’ll probably have to run up and down some stairs. And you might even get to run around the park with a parachute tied to you. And in fairness these are all things real sprinters do. The only difference is that your program doesn’t include the actual sprinting... or the stopwatch timing your sprints... or the expert guidance of a person who actually sprints... or the 5-6 days per week regime of a real sprinter... or anyway of making or measuring any sort of quantifiable progress toward your very specific goal of becoming an elite sprinter!
You’ll get your heart rate measured; but not your sprint times. You’ll get your VO2 Max measured; but not your speed. You’ll get your training session times measured to the nano-second; but not your workload. In fact, the trainer will jerk you around with every irrelevant measure that you never asked for (flexibility, heart rate, VO2 Max etc) and NOTHING relevant to the goal you actually stated at the start.
And people wonder why they fail to look like any sort of athlete when Personal Trainers do not train their clients to become any sort of athlete?
WHAT YOU WANT
When you go to a gym or Personal Trainer your goal is pretty obvious: you want a better body! If you’d wanted to be a boxer, you would’ve gone to a boxing studio. If you’d wanted to be a runner, you would’ve joined a mate who liked running. And if you’d wanted to learn to balance on a large, colourful ball, you would’ve joined the circus! But you went to the gym/trainer because you never cared what kind of athlete you actually were, you just wanted to look (more) like one!
WHAT YOU NEED
The solution to how to look like an athlete was obvious back in High School. Remember the kids with the athletic, muscular physiques? They were always the ones with the athletic ability! Genetics be damned! It doesn’t matter WHY they were good athletes; the point is that the physique always came with ability!
Even when you were 10 years old you could’ve figured out, for example, that if you wanted to look like someone who can sprint 100 meters in 10 seconds then you probably need to be able to sprint 100m in 10seconds! Granted, not all elite 100m sprinters look exactly the same... but they do all tend to have a certain ‘look’! Its a similar look to elite rock climbers, gymnasts and elite athletes in any other sporting activity requiring an extremely high power-to-weight ratio. They are all really muscular!
At Biologic Labs we recognise that to achieve the athletic physique you want you need to develop the appropriate athletic ability! Thats the mathematical and philosophical basis of our Body Recompositioning Equation. And because weight training is the only infinitely adjustable, measurable and predictable strength sport, we can even predict exactly what weights you need to become capable of lifting in order to have the exact bodyfat percentage that you want. When you see our math you will realise its actually painfully obvious!
WHAT YOU GET
Yet when you go to a Personal Trainer and, for example, show them a picture of your desired elite sprinters body, you won’t get such a direct answer. Instead, they’ll talk to you about ‘core stability’ and ‘flexibility’ and ‘rectus abdominus’ and ‘heart rate’ and ‘vastus lateralis’ and ‘technique’ and ‘motivation’ and basically try to drown you in about 500 gallons of BS without ever even mentioning the sole determining factor in you achieving your goal: you need to become an elite sprinter (or as strong as one at the same bodyweight).
And then, if you let them, you’ll get given the same generic routine most trainers give to ALL their other clients. It will basically be a condensed 5th Grade PE lesson complete with stretching and calisthenics stolen from a 1980‘s Richard Simmons video followed by a bunch of ‘Retirement Village’ rehabilitation exercise. There’ll be some pulling on an oversized rubber band, lying hunched on a ball squeezing your bladder and, finally, leaning against a wall in a sitting position, but, wait for it... without a chair! Because thats gonna create a super hardcore athlete! Do you “Feel the burn”? Its actually your life, sanity and money being sucked into a black-hole, never to be reimbursed.
Of course, with a personal trainer in a gym you might also get a splattering of half-assed weights machine exercises with REALLY light weights! Heavy weights are dangerous, you see. Really Dangerous! Nothing like the safe sports such as Netball or Rugby where you run as fast as you can, leap through the air, land sideways on one foot while rotating quickly and, off balance, try to pass the ball before getting hit by a neanderthal traveling slightly faster than an express train. Knee and shoulder reconstructions? They only happen to people who lift those dangerous, heavy weights, obviously!
Anyway, lets say you argue and do not accept that the trainer gives you the generic garbage that they themselves would never, ever do (because they know its utterly useless, time wasting junk). What if instead you insist upon training like a sprinter to be a sprinter? Well then the trainer will give you a training program akin to the advice you might get from a retarded person copying the sprinters they saw in the background of the Olympics telecast. You’ll probably have to embarrass yourself in a public park by doing an incredibly gay, high-knee-kick run. Then, like a dog on a leash, you’ll get tied to your trainer with an oversized rubber band and have to try to run away. You’ll probably have to run up and down some stairs. And you might even get to run around the park with a parachute tied to you. And in fairness these are all things real sprinters do. The only difference is that your program doesn’t include the actual sprinting... or the stopwatch timing your sprints... or the expert guidance of a person who actually sprints... or the 5-6 days per week regime of a real sprinter... or anyway of making or measuring any sort of quantifiable progress toward your very specific goal of becoming an elite sprinter!
You’ll get your heart rate measured; but not your sprint times. You’ll get your VO2 Max measured; but not your speed. You’ll get your training session times measured to the nano-second; but not your workload. In fact, the trainer will jerk you around with every irrelevant measure that you never asked for (flexibility, heart rate, VO2 Max etc) and NOTHING relevant to the goal you actually stated at the start.
And people wonder why they fail to look like any sort of athlete when Personal Trainers do not train their clients to become any sort of athlete?
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