The Sickening Truth About Our Health System

Australia has what is formally described as a conservative health system. Its most basic philosophy is that no citizen should employ any intervention that might risk their health. And on the surface of it, this seems perfectly reasonable... until you consider the real meaning.

‘Health’ is defined as “the absence of disease”. Technically and medically, there is no such thing as healthier than disease free! You can look terrible, feel terrible and function terribly, yet still be medically ‘healthy’. If you have no measurable clinical markers out of the established range, you are as healthy as can be!

The literal meanings of other words used in discussing health are equally important. An 'intervention' is simply any deliberate action to improve a situation. A 'risk' is the possibility of something unpleasant or unwelcome happening. 'Disease' is defined by any clinical measurement outside an established range that is based on what the majority of the population measures! (And when you consider that the majority of the population is likely to die of heart disease, cancer or diabetes, it's somewhat baffling that they would be made the yardstick of health)!

With these definitions in mind, now reconsider the meaning of citizens not undertaking interventions that might risk health? The literal translation of this philosophy becomes:

Citizens are not to deliberately do anything to improve their health; particularly if there is any possibility of comparing less favourably with average people (who are likely to die of a major disease).

So despite the best original intentions of our conservative health system, the application has resulted in something scarily different. The institutionalisation of rank mediocrity and predictable, major disease is definitely not what you and I mean when we talk about health! But as far as the health system is concerned, it is. And as far as the health system is concerned:

• Whatever is practiced by the majority becomes the ‘standard’ of normal ‘health’, irrespective of how predictable the negative effect on wellbeing is.
• Anything you do for the purpose of bettering your health is considered an intervention that 'risks' health. But if the same action is completely uninformed, unintentional and unmeasured, then thats OK (it's only an intervention if it's deliberate).
• Anything that benefits physical performance, body composition, energy, mental performance and/or general well-being is irrelevant and unnecessary to health because the simple absence of disease IS health!
• Health practitioners should prevent citizens from taking any deliberate action to affects their health in any way! If a person has a disease, then medication is the treatment.
• The 'healthy' ranges for clinical markers are revised occasionally to better reflect the state of the majority of the population, even when it is well established that the majority of the population are more unwell than before (eg BMI and male estrogen)!
• Regardless of how terrible you look, feel or function, there is no appropriate course of action if your health measures are within the range kept by the rest of the population. If you are particularly upset about this then you might be considered to have a mental health problem for which anti-depressants are the treatment!
• Regardless of how good you look, feel or function, any measure of health that doesn't agree with the typical measures of the majority of the rest of the population is considered a disease.

So when health professionals advise of a course of action for your health, they are often NOT talking about something that will contribute positively to anything you consider desirable or indicative of good health. They are talking about complying with a state of rank mediocrity established by the majority. In many cases, what health professionals advise for your health can significantly reduce what you and I would consider 'health'. Their advice is designed to reduce your wellbeing, body composition and future health to the level of the 'average' person!

So if you ever wondered why the advice provided by health experts was so often so hypocritical or just downright unhealthy, this is why! Virtually all of the advice you hear is tainted by this warped perspective! It pervades everything from the safety and labelling of the foods to the treatments and advice your doctor offers when you are sick.

When you understand the above and listen more literally to what you hear and read (when it comes to health advice and warnings) you will get the real meaning. And if you aspire to anything better than mediocrity for yourself, what you hear will disgust you even more than it intrinsically should anyway!

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 'Diet' Word Everybody Hates

It is popular these days to hate the concept of going on a 'diet'. Its slightly ironic given that whatever you eat IS your diet!

The only difference between following a measured diet versus not, is whether you are informed or ignorant. Either way, its a diet. How you feel about the word doesn't change the fact that you cannot avoid doing it. Even not eating is a 'diet'.

The great benefit of being ignorant about your diet is that you can blame bad luck (or genetics; which amounts to the same thing) for your sub-par body and go-nowhere training.

But if you follow a diet thats planned, suddenly you take responsiblity for the resulting body that you present to the World! And for a lot of people, thats an extremely distressing thought! Its much easier to join the mantra of the masses who claim that their fat, diseased bodies happened TO them rather than as a result of their own bad choices!

Ignorance might feel like an escape from the responsibility of your diet. But its not. And just because most planned diets out there are stupid, doesn't mean that planning your diet is stupid! Whether you deliberately follow a stupid diet or unintentionally have a diet thats stupid, either way you have a stupid diet! One way you know what was stupid; the other way you are ignorant AND stupid! But either way you are responsible for your the body (and "lifestyle diseases") that result.

The benefit of following a consistent, planned and measured diet - even if its not a great diet - is that you can make educated, intelligent decisions about how to change it when it doesn't deliver the outcomes you want. It's only if you eat the same things, in the same quantities, everyday, that you remove all other variables and can make a true judgement about the effect of your diet. Then you can adjust it accordingly.

Saying you eat 'healthy' by eating random quantities of random foods at random intervals - sorry, by having 'variety' - doesn't change the fact that when you fail to get the body you want, you have no way of fixing the situation! What should you do differently when you always do something different? You can't do anything! And thats not an opinion or judgement about it; its just a fact.

Plan your diet or don't; either way you are dieting! You cannot escape the word just because you don't like it. And you cannot escape the responsibility of the outcome because you choose to be ignorant!

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.

Body Recomposition vs Fitness

Fitness does not mean 'lean, 'energetic', 'strong', 'toned', 'muscular', 'athletic' or any of the other positive terms people mistake it for. Fitness is nothing more than the absence of general physical malaise. To be 'fit' is to be 'suitably able' to function as a human should. It is, by definition, as physically mediocre as a person should be before they are sick or debilitated.

Body Recomposition is the process of becoming lean, muscular, athletic, toned or whatever other term you prefer for a better body! By definition, Body Recomposition is going BEYOND the mediocrity of 'fitness'. It involves MEASURED sports performance exercise and diet to achieve a MEASURED, desirable, athletic figure or physique of whatever extreme you desire. Whether you are talking about a flat tummy or pro bodybuilding, its all body recomposition; not fitness!

Critically, Body Recomposition involves the methodical measuring and planning that is critical to success in any endeavour. In direct contrast to 'fitness' where the objective is to 'destroy the body you hate', body recomposition is creating the body you want, by design!

Who is Body Recomposition For?

Body Recomposition is for any healthy person who wants a good or great body. But it is only for people who are willing to work harder and eat better in order to be better than average and the best they can be.

Fitness is for every sick to average person to maintain a minimum state of mediocrity. Hence, most Fitness training prescriptions are rehabilitation techniques from Physiotherapy. Unless you were born with an amazing body, things like walking on a treadmill, 'functional training', 'core stability', swiss/bosu balls, Pilates etc do not create great bodies. They aren't designed to. They are designed for 'fitness' mediocrity. As the names suggest, they are literally training techniques for normal human function and nothing more!

Measurement

Body Recompositioning focusses solely on the manipulation of bodily fat, weight and muscularity levels as measured by regular body composition testing. All nutritional and exercise interventions are meticulously measured and planned to achieve specific, measured changes in bodyfat and lean, muscle mass.

By contrast, in 'Fitness', if anything is measured then they are things such as heart rate, oxygen uptake, flexibility and other amorphous qualities that have no relevance to bodyfat and composition.

Nutrition

Body Recompositioning nutrition is measured and planned to achieve predefined, measured body goals. It is precise, prescribed, purposeful “sports nutrition” requiring true discipline and leading to significant, positive physical change.

Fitness professionals are not legally allowed to prescribe diets! The extent they can help is to 'recommend' random 'healthy' food choices and malnourishing starvation for indiscriminate 'weight loss'. Curtin University measured their prescriptions as having a 95% failure rate!

Exercise

Body Recompositioning exercise is measured and planned strength training. Again, everything has a purpose to achieve a specific body outcome. Training targets are designed to parallel muscularity goals. And the training is structured to work synergistically with the sports nutrition program for ultimate fat loss and muscularity.

'Fitness' exercise is deliberately low-intensity, low-risk movements designed to achieve and maintain 'normal' physical capability. Concepts like 'functional training' and 'core stability' are meant literally - they are literally training for normal, non-athletic human function without such maladies as 'back pain'! They have nothing to do with looking like a gymnast or making the abdominal muscles become visible!

Conclusion

'Fitness' involves a variety of varied activities and 'healthy' eating to achieve basic health and wellbeing. With 60% of the Australian population deemed 'overweight' and 'unfit', fitness IS a legitimate need in our society. But it shouldnt be mistaken for meaning anything great. Fitness is literally the minimum physical state a person needs to not be mildly debilitated.

Body recompositioning is for anybody who wants to improve their body beyond the mediocrity of being just 'fit'. It involves the disciplined application of measured strength exercise and sports nutrition to achieve extraordinary improvements in the form and function of the human body.

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.

AOC Bans Sedatives. Training & Competing next?

This article in the Australian shows how sporting/Olympic committees continue to expand their definition of 'unfair advantage' and protecting athletes health. 

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/sport/london-games/aoc-bans-use-of-sedatives/story-e6frgdg6-1226415616599

The AOC/IOC/WADA/ASADA are all fine to ignore that Olympic level sport IS a health risk. Athletes get injuries! Its part of every game. But thats OK. Running til you shit blood? Thats fine. Jumping until their is no cartilage left in your knee? Sweet. Throwing until you need a shoulder replacement? Thats what replacements are for. But taking a pill that millions of regular people all over the world take to get to sleep so your body might actually recover from the brutality of overtraining? That makes you such an horrendously dangerous risk to yourself and you need to be banned and publicly and financially ruined!

When it comes to drugs, usually the issue is that the drugs artificially boost performance providing an unfair advantage. But drugs that put you to sleep??? These agencies are fine to ignore that some athletes are provided with the advantage of millions of dollars worth of facilities, doctors, trainers, therapists, nutritionists and specialised training devices. Apparently thats NOT an unfair advantage. But popping a sleeping pill? You dirty scum!!! 

So the AOC has reinterpreted its mandate to protect the well-being of competing athletes to meaning they are now the self-appointed, active carers of every competitive athlete! And as could be expected by such a politically motivated group, delivering care to athletes is done in the same manner as the Gestapo cared for citizens in Nazi Germany: breaking into their rooms to search for things like prescribed sleeping pills so they can bring a crushing end to the athletes career, terminate their sponsorships, savage their future and publicly shame and ruin them. But all in concern for their well-being, of course.

The interesting question is, how much further are they going to reach into peoples lives? I mean, they've banned glycerol which is a common ingredient in bakery foods! So now are they going to broaden that to cover ALL bakery foods because pies and muffins arent very good for you? So could that include bread? Are there going to be night raids on athletes pantries to see whether the foods in the house conform to the AOC's opinion of what is 'healthy'? Non-organic flour? Career OVER!!! 

And what of training? Are they going to spy on athletes to see how hard they are training and if they breach some arbitrary level, ban them for training too hard or too much? Lots of injuries happen in training. Surely if you are so concerned with the athletes health then imposing your wrath upon them to prevent them training too hard is logical?

And what of the competition itself? This is where athletes really push the boundaries. Surely they should be stopped from putting in too much effort, running too fast, jumping too high or throwing too far? These things are all a bigger risk to their health than a doctor prescribed sleeping pill for a person who can't sleep!!!

Think thats being ridiculous? Remember this whole anti-drug movement really started with relatively obscure prescription drugs that could be heavily abused to dramatically improve performance and visibly turned women into men! It was the visible transformations that outraged the fickle public prompting a response. That has somehow now extended to include cake ingredients and drugs that do the very opposite of boosting performance - they put you to sleep!!! The article in the Australian even intimates that Grant Hackett LOST because of sleeping pills! 

Is sport really safer and better because we have a self-appointed Athlete Gestapo running around trying to destroy athletes careers and reputations under the guise of protecting them from doing things that make them lose??? How much further is it going to go before someone recognises how idiotic this is? Because I cannot think of anything more stupid than banning athletes over cake ingredients and sleeping pills?

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.

Carving in Muscle Separations

(NOTE: Please excuse the bro-sciency-ness of this. PubMed is a little light on research into carving in muscle separations... probably because the whole concept is extremely bro-ish!)

One of the most idiotic and misunderstood myths in body transformation training is that of exercises or techniques for 'carving in muscle separations'.

This is not to say that there aren't ways to improve the visible separations between muscles. There are. But you need to understand what is happening if you hope to achieve the desired outcome and not just waste massive amounts of time and effort... like so many do!


START WITH THE BASICS
Before I get to the guts of this blog, I must make mention of the two most important factors in visually pronounced muscle separations:
1) fat - the number one reason people fail to display the definition and separation they would like between their muscles is that they are simply too fat!
2) genetics - some people have muscles that appear deeply and distinctly separated; others just don't. That said, the vast majority of people who blame their genetics are simply fat... and usually lazy and lacking the 'personal responsibility' gene!

YOU ARE PROBABLY JUST FAT
In all but the absolute most extreme cases, if you cannot clearly see your muscular separations it is probably because you have too much bodyfat! Even competitive bodybuilders who say they are "holding water", 9 times out of 10 are just too fat!

Do not underestimate how lean you need to be for clear definition! It does not matter how lean you FEEL or THINK you are, nor how lean your Trainer has measured you (assuming your Trainer even does measurements), its probably simply not enough. And just because you don't know how to get any leaner doesn't mean you aren't still too fat!

Everybody possesses the same distinct muscles. Those muscles ARE separate from one another! They are each wrapped in their own fascial sheath. What MOSTLY hides them from external view is the water, fat and skin on top! Typically the fat is the most significant factor. It literally 'blankets' the muscles and fills in the 'gaps'. Mostly...

ADVANCED MUSCLE SEPARATIONS - THE PROBLEM
Despite the above, at the more advanced levels of bodybuilding muscle size becomes a factor. More specifically, the current state of an enlarged muscle can be a factor that REDUCES the visible separations between the muscles.

Let me give a crude illustration of the issue. Imagine two, 1/2-inflated balloons inside a glass box. The box is fractionally too small in all directions for the two balloons so they are lightly squashed together and against the glass on all sides.

Now imagine inflating the balloons. With nowhere else to go, the balloons will expand into the empty space between each other and the walls of the glass box, reducing the gaps between them. As you keep inflating the balloons they press tighter and tighter together until, eventually, they form 2 almost-perfect cubes with almost no separation between them.

This balloon analogy is not dissimilar to what happens with muscles within their own fascias. When bodybuilders use food, training and supplements (and drugs) to force-fill their muscles with glycogen, fluid and other substrates, the muscles expand - like the balloons in the box - to completely fill their fascial sheaths. The muscles can press together so tightly that the visible separations between them reduce significantly.

This is why pro-bodybuilders can often be seen with extraordinarily low bodyfat, paper-thin skin, their bodies covered in veins, and yet completely lacking deep muscular separations. It is also why separations in leg muscles often completely disappear with a big leg 'pump' and why legs are famous for having reduced separation and definition for days after heavy squats and leg presses. Blame inflammation or fluid, much of it is WITHIN the muscular compartment.

ADVANCED MUSCLE SEPARATIONS - THE SOLUTION
The simple remedy to this state is for the muscles to SHRINK... a bit! For most of us, shrinking muscles is quite simple:
1) Don't train. Easy. Most lean bodybuilders know that their legs (in particular) are more separated and defined after 10+ days of not training them. They are also measurably smaller.
2) Do ineffective training. This is where the concept that leg extensions with light weights and lots of 'squeezing' and 'flexing' the muscles comes from. There is little inflammatory response, absolutely no stimulation to maintain strength/muscle plus a wasting of glycogen and, when dieting, the muscles shrink measurably. The very fact that this sort of training is INEFFECTIVE for muscular development is the reason it is effective for separations!
3) Do HIIT or more intense 'cardio'. If you feel a burn, glycogen is likely being burned and the muscles shrink. Even better, taking peak-strength-performance trained muscles and suddenly training them for endurance is the best way to cause maximum muscle loss! At some point there will be a benefit to muscular separation. Too much endurance exercise (combined with the typical starvation diets of many bodybuilders these days) can result in so much muscle shrinkage and depletion that the muscles wind up appearing soft and flabby.

The bottom line is, to genuinely "carve in separations", muscle shrinkage is what is happening! Hopefully in understanding this you can choose more wisely WHEN to utilise such techniques. If you are getting ready for a bodybuilding competition, using the stepper and light leg extensions 16 weeks out from your contest is probably not ideal. 2-4 weeks out - assuming your low bodyfat didn't solve the problem anyway - is more appropriate.

FINAL WORDS ON FAT LOSS & SEPARATIONS
Justifying almost every training or diet concept these days are massively overcomplicated (and incomplete) explanations of biochemical processes within the body. As interesting as they are, basing your actions on your hopeful guesses about something you cannot measure and cannot affect is a certain way to be wrong and probably fail!

1) If you have too much fat obscuring your muscles, you need to lose that fat with effective diet and weight training for body recomposition. Measure your body composition, measure your goal and train and diet to achieve those numbers. You cannot BS the basic math of body composition just because you learn some interesting new facts about biochemistry!

2) If you have uneven fat distribution then thats just how it is. There are some long-term drug options that can help. But shy of this extreme, you are not going to change your bodyfat distribution with any form or amount of exercise, diet or supplement. Despite all the convincing biochemical theories of what is going on, the fact is it just doesnt happen!

3) If you are talking about muscle separation then the above is what you are talking about. So next time you read that stupid chest training article in Flex magazine that says to do bench press for mass and then cable crossovers for separations, now you know why you shouldn't! You cannot achieve these 2 contradictory results simultaneously!!!


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.