Strength and Physique

"Hello, I saw on www.bodybuilding.com you were a personal trainer. I only have one quick question! I need to lose 20 pounds, but I prefer lifting since I am a big guy. Is there any way to get bigger muscles while getting rid of the gut? There must be some way? I am 5′11 and weigh 245, but I know what your thinking. And yes I do sound fat as hell, but that’s not the case. Everyone I ask think I weigh 220-225. I am generally muscular and stocky. I just need to get rid of the layer of fat on top of my muscles. Any way possible? Should I maybe do cardio before or after a workout? I am down for any advice you might have!

"Thanks and have a great day!"
-EM

My Answer: Everybody wants to lose the fat, but only with weights. Can it be done? Yes, it can be done. But if you’re weight training and not losing the fat, then there is something (or several things) missing from your workout routine. Your current weight training program isn’t getting you ripped, because:

1) you’re not dieting
2) you’re not doing the right type of cardio, if any
3) you’re still lifting for strength and mass, but you’re not lifting in a way to get you ripped

You can’t just lift weights the way you’ve always been lifting them and expect a different result. If you’ve been lifting to get big, then no wonder you’ve got a gut. Your strength training program has to be designed specific to your goal, which is fat loss. Chapter 14 of Strength and Physique, V1 goes over 7 different strength training strategies to lose fat while lifting weights.

Now as far cardio, it’s better to do it after your workout. A properly designed strength training workout can stimulate more fat loss when you do cardio after. If you do cardio before, then you’ll just be tired for your workout.

How you eat sometimes reflects upon how you are as a person and whether you exercise control over your decisions and your situations. Do you control the things that happen in your life, or do you allow yourself to meander and drift into bad situations? Do you allow someone else to control and dictate what your choices are?

The best way to avoid making bad food choices in a restaurant is to avoid eating in a restaurant. Don’t eat out more than 2 times a week. That goes for takeout too. Control what you eat and pack your lunches for work, so you don’t put yourself in a situation where you are tempted to make bad choices.

But you gotta live life, and that means eating out with friends and family. I’ll be honest with you, I don’t put any restrictions on myself when I eat out. The whole point of eating out with friends and family should be to enjoy yourselves. Just make the experience a little more special by eating out only twice a week instead of everyday. You can still exercise damage control and not be a prude when you eat out though:

1) No drinks other than water.
2) When given this choice, choose salads over soups.
3) Never order an individual dessert. However, your friends will sabotage you by saying, "Hey you want to split a dessert?" That’s OK, but never intitiate the dessert ordering.
4) Same thing goes for appetizers. Do not initiate the ordering of appetizers. But your jolly friend may want to "share" some appetizers, so that’s OK.

Strength and Physique V1 available on Amazon.com

I was at Barnes and Noble again, and I was flipping through a book on mixed martial arts. The name of the book escapes me, but I was reading how Randy Couture eats an "alkaline diet." Essentially, it is a diet of vegetables, fruits, nuts and beans, but no meat or grains. If you know of Randy Couture, then you know he is a big strong fella with excellent conditioning.

I’ve written about my experience with vegetarianism before. I’m still on a flexible pesco-vegetarian diet, which is a fish and vegetables diet with meat and starches on occasion. Since that last post, my conclusions are still the same:

- Vegetarianism is great for conditioning. My endurance is much better on a pesco-vegetarian diet, and I don’t do any cardio. I believe that cardiovascular health is much more dependent on diet than exercise.

- You give up size and muscle density as a vegetarian. Big muscular vegetarians were big and strong before they took the meat out of their diet.

I found that my genes are geared for fish and veggies after reading the book "The Genotype Diet." This book goes over 6 distinct genotypes, each with different dietary needs. The concept is that you must eat right for your genotype, otherwise you’ll encounter health problems and weight gain.

At first I thought genotypes would run along racial and ethnic lines, but this is not the case. The genotypes came about from thousands of years of evolution. Some people are geared to eat a hunter’s diet, some are geared for a gatherer’s diet, and so on and so forth. Even though my wife and I are of the same ethnicity, she and I have completely different genotypes.

If you subscribe to the genotype diets, then this is the one major difficulty: you may find it harder to cook and eat in a family or group situation, because you’ll likely have more than one genotype. What my wife and I ended up doing was creating a list of common foods we could both eat and a common list of foods we were to avoid. Although the Genotype Diet has made things more complicated, it has also made my dietary decisions much clearer.

Strength and Physique V1 available on Amazon.com

"I have one short question: I work out 3 times a week in a gym. 3 times, because I just don’t have more time. My days are full, so I would like to ask you for advice on how to plan workouts and workout cycles to get the most out of it? I have been working out for 2 years now, but I just can’t find a good system for a 3 day workout. My goal is to get as much muscle as possible but not big mass. So I always follow my diet, and I am careful not to get too much fat. But finding a good 3 day system is always hard for me, so please if you have any advice for me, help me!"

-RoLe

My Answer: Jeez, don’t be so needy Ro. Anyway, if you only have 3 days a week, then do full body workouts 3 days a week. Each has to be a different workout, however, with different exercises and different rep schemes. Here, give this a shot. Cycle through these rep ranges throughout the week:

Workout #1: 8-10 reps
Workout #2: 6-8 reps
Workout #3: 4-6 reps

For each workout, just do one exercise per body part. Rotate your exercises from workout to workout. You newbies want to do everything in one workout, when you should spread everything out over the course of a week. If you’re really interested in program design, then buy my book. It has a couple chapters on program design, split routines and exercise selection.

"Hi there,

"I came across your article on Bodybuilding.com, and it appealed to me: cutting fat while maintaining my gains (or improving on them) is exactly what I was looking for. Having tried the workout, it seems to be just right. I enjoy the full body aspect and approve of the flexibility. That said, a quick question: I find the barbell hang clean to front squat to be very awkward. It may be that I have a poor range of motion/flexibility in my arms and shoulders, but I’m not able to rest the bar on my torso following the hang clean. Is it supposed to be held in the air still? That left me feeling unbalanced. This said, is there an alternate circuit that you would recommend?”

Thanks in advance for your help!
-Phillip McMullen

My Answer: Glad you like the program, Phil. No the bar is not held but rests in your hands on top of the front of your shoulders when you squat down. Not everybody has the flexibility to do the front squat with a clean grip, so if you can’t do them, then substitute clean and jerks instead. High rep clean and jerks have been used by old time bodybuilders for rapid muscle gain, similar to 20 rep squats. Ironman Magazine editor Peary Rader wrote of a lifter who

“used the clean and jerk as an exercise in a weight gaining experiment… He went on this program of clean and jerks… with all the poundage he could use correctly for the required number of reps (about 15 to 20). He immediately began gaining weight very rapidly and was amazed that the practice of this one lift or exercise could have such a profound effect on his body. Subsequently others of us have made similar experiments with this lift and found that it not only was a good weight gaining medium but also developed strength, endurance, speed, and timing that nothing else could give us. We also found it to be the toughest workout we have ever had.”

Strength and Physique V1 available on Amazon.com

So I’m sure a lot of you know from reading my previous posts that I’m on a flexible pesco-vegetarian diet. All this means is that I mainly eat fish, vegetables, fruits, nuts, yogurt and eggs, but I eat meats on occasion (usually when I eat out). Flexitarianism is interesting, because it means you eat meat infrequently and sporadically; in my case, social occasions. This is a much better way of absorbing and utilizing your protein intake, because your body is designed to take in protein and calories in large "pulses."

Think of it this way, our genes have not changed that much since our hunter-gatherer days. Our ancestors ate vegetation, fruits, nuts and roots in lieu of the big kill. Tribes spent a lot of time and energy on hunting parties to get animal protein, so when they got a kill, the whole tribe celebrated with a huge feast. Everyone gorged on as much protein as they could, because you didn’t know when the next kill would come.

Our bodies were designed for protein pulsing as opposed to eating large amounts of protein all the time. Other predatory animals such as the big cats show the same design. Lions and tigers don’t eat antelopes, zebras and water buffalos all day. They have to catch the damn critters, and that takes a lot of work. So they can go for a long while without protein (days) and then when they find an easy kill, they go for it.

Now this is not the best bodybuilding diet. I only tell you of this particular diet I follow for entertainment/educational purposes. In the past, I followed a typical high calorie/high meal frequency bodybuilding diet, and I always felt enslaved by it. I always had to eat. But now I eat less, and I have much more freedom to do whatever I want.

Here’s what I do regularly do: throughout the work day I eat vegetarian (nuts, yogurt, fruits, salads, etc.) and when I come home for dinner, my wife and I typically eat fish and some green vegetables. So the work week is mainly pesco-vegetarian. When the weekend comes, my wife and I will eat out, and we eat whatever the hell we feel like. This method is a simple form of not just protein pulsing, but calorie cycling as well.

I go over effective dieting principles in my book Strength and Physique, V1 available on Amazon.com.

I thought I’d put the word out on the latest issue of Planet Muscle, which has a shoulder training article of mine. The article features some of the more effective deltoid exercises. Pick up a copy of the August/September issue the next time you’re at the supermarket or bookstore.

I get asked if I train women. I certainly do train women, and in fact, my very best client happens to be a woman who gets asked all sorts of things at the gym: “How long did it take for you to get that rockin’ bod?”

“What exercise does that work?”
“How’d you learn to do pull-ups?”

Strength training for women involves the same training parameters for fat loss, but with slightly different exercises. In other words, if they’re looking to lose fat and get toned, then they will follow the same set, rep and exercise sequencing a guy would follow on a fat loss program. The only difference would be the exercise selection, since women are looking to develop and/or minimize body parts different from men.

For example, men generally are looking to develop one of these body types: V-taper (classical bodybuilder), a T-shape (fitness model), an X-type (modern bodybuilder) or an A-type (athletic). Women, on the other hand, generally look to keep an hour glass figure. A lot of women have a pear shape, which is characterized by a disproportionate amount of fat around the thighs, hips and butt. This is a sign of excess estrogen. In fact where your fat is distributed tells a lot about your hormonal profile.

There are other female body types aside from the pear shape, but this is usually the client I have worked with most often over the years. For most women, I do not recommend back squats or lunges, as this tends to build their asses and thicken their thighs even further. I usually avoid exercises that develop their traps and focus instead on exercises that develop their delts. Widening the shoulders a bit helps to counterbalance the excessively wide hips of a pear shaped woman.

Strength and Physique V1 available on Amazon.com

So I got asked a question on how one could drop weight in a relatively short period of time. This question came from a guy who wanted to make weight for the police academy. Wrestlers and boxers do this all the time, but I generally don’t recommend this for long term fat loss. BUT, if you must drop weight for a weigh in, then here’s a technique you can use in addition to strict dieting and strength training. If you want to workout at home and have a stationary bike or any other cardio machine in front of a TV, then do this:

Watch your favorite show and do some steady state cardio on your machine. Then during commercials, you get off the machine and do 50-100 pushups during the break. Once the commercial break is over, get back on the machine. Do this for the length of the show, whether it’s a half hour or a full hour.

This is a nice no brainer technique for cardio, because you can zone out and watch TV.

By the way, Strength and Physique, V1 is available on Amazon.com with some revisions and some added material.  Check it out: Strength and Physique V1