Got Built?

Some of you have been training for a little while now – possibly using a full body workout like Basically, Training or some other routine and you’re ready to move into something with a little more variety – but without being overly involved.

Filled with optimism and keen to advance your training you google “exercise routines” – and your head promptly explodes.

There really is a lot of crap out there – usually with tag-lines extolling the virtues of “switching it up” or “muscle-confusion” – so let me save you some time and offer you a better alternative for your next workout plan.

My friend Patrick Ward of Optimum Sports Performance is a is a Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist (CSCS) through the National Strength and Conditioning Association (NSCA) and holds a Masters degree in Exercise Science.  Patrick posted the following workout on his blog, and I liked it so much I asked him if I could post it here.

He very kindly obliged.

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Fat loss is a funny little beast.

When you’re VERY fat, your body will drop fat easily (honest!) as soon as you do ANTYHING that lowers calories and incorporates some sort of exercise.

Thing is, it doesn’t work the same way from start to finish.

This is the part where you’ll hear the rep-counters say things like “you have to trick your body” or “confuse your muscles” … when in fact your body will neither be tricked nor confused. It will simply respond to the stimulus provided. If YOU are tricked and confused by the nonsense these bozos try to sell you, you’ll spend a lot of money and work WAY too hard trying to get the results you seek. Don’t know about you, but I’m too cheap and lazy to spend money and effort for sub-par results that wear me out and starve me to death. (more…)

Every diet works for at least one person, right?

I mean, you’d at least HOPE this was the case. You’d hope that for every diet book published, the method produced results for the person who wrote it – and it sometimes seems that every person who has somehow won the battle of the bulge has a book with which to offer us salvation.

Thing is, sometimes a method works in spite of what we do, and not because of what we do.

We’re all different.
Aren’t we? Different I mean? Well, sort-of. What unites us all is the calorie. The sad fact of the matter is that irritating little truth, the conservation of mass. You can’t gain weight unless you consume more food than you require, and you can’t lose it unless you consume less food than you require. Even if you keep your intake the same, if you burn more than you consume, you’re going to lose weight, no matter how metabolically challenged you are.

So we’re all the same then.
Well, sort-of. One noteworthy difference between us all is comfort.

Surprised? Nobody ever mentioned that part? They should – because if you aren’t comfortable, you will NOT stick to a reducing diet. This is the part where people who find that magical combination of foodstuffs and timing that keeps hunger at bay think they have “The Way”.

One of the most contentious of these comfort-food based diets is the Atkins diet. Now I’m not hating on Atkins – that diet gave me my life back. After those first few days of the “Atkins flu”, for the first time in my life, I felt comfortable, fed – and the weight FELL off me, at least initially. It stayed off, too – effortlessly – getting me from “obese” to “healthy lean”. But it did not get me ripped, and I could not understand why.

It took me a very long time to come around to the idea that if there is, indeed, an metabolic advantage to ketosis, it is slight at best, I finally had to accept The Great Unified Theory of Weight Loss: I ate less food on Atkins, and that’s why I lost weight.

So how come it didn’t keep going? (more…)