thenaturalone’s BodyBlog

Training with light weight and doing high reps will get you more defined. This is one myth that will just never die. Gaining muscular definition has mainly to do with your diet and not anything to do with using light weight and doing high repetitions with it. If anything, training with heavier weights is the most important way to gain muscle density and achieve a harder, more defined look on a restricted calorie diet. The reason being is that your body doesn’t  want to keep any extra muscle on it’s frame because it’s just higher maintenance for your body to keep up with. For every extra pound of muscle you have on your body, your entire endorcine system including your heart, liver, kidney’s pancreas and gall bladder must work harder in order to support each additional pound of muscle that it has so your body will try to quickly let muscle mass go in order to maintain it’s equalibrium. You cant really blame your body because think about it, would you rather pay the heat and electric bill for a one story 1400 square foot house or would you rather pay it for a two story 2200 square foot house? Of course you would rather pay for the energy being used by the one story 1400 square foot house. It’s no different with your body. It doesn’t want to pay the energy bill for the extra active tissue (muscle). Now how does this relate to training with heavy vs. light weights? Your body will lose extra muscle if it has no reason to keep it. If your body is put under heavy weight loads, say heavy sets of 4-6 reps, then your body will retain that extra muscle to compensate for the heavy weight load that it knows it will be subject to. If you use light weight and high reps all the time then your body doesn’t need the extra muscle to move light weights that it can handle for 15-20 reps so your body will let that extra muscle slip. Now with muscle being active tissue that burns calories 24/7, it would make sense that when you lose muscle your metabolism will slow down and therefore be counter productive to trying to obtain a nice hard, defined physique. The leanest I ever was for a competition getting down to 4% bodyfat, I did so by lifting very heavy weights and despite the fact that I had lost 60 lbs for this contest, I didn’t lose hardly any strength. I hope this information can be helpful to those who have been sold on that rumor that light weight and high reps are better for hardness and definition. 

The biggest myth in bodybuilding, and there’s alot of people out there that tell me they believe this to be true, is that there’s no such thing as overtraining, only undereating! Ok, so if this really is true then why not just train hard for 10 hours a day, 7 days a week, and consume about 10,000 calories per day, and do this for 6 months straight and get your IFBB pro card and achieve Mr. Olympia status in less than a year? I remember there was a guy at the gym ounce that asked me how he could lose more body fat and that he was training on weights 3-4 times per week and doing cardio 3 times per week but still couldn’t lose enough body fat to have any abdominal muscles show. He was at the time taking in 4000 calories per day. My response to him was that was eating way too much, especially for a guy that weighed 240 lbs with a 38 inch waist on a 5′10" frame. He seemed dumbfounded when I suggested that he cut his calories down to around 2500 per day and he would see much better progress. He said he would think about it. The next week I saw him at the gym again and he came up to me all exited that he had spoken with an NPC pro bodybuilder that told him that the reason why he wasn’t losing fat wasn’t because he was eating too much, but that he was eating too little and that if he consumed 10,000 calories per day and put about 10 more hours per week in weight training that this would some how stimulate huge muscle gains which would really stimulate his metabolism and he was gonna get huge and shredded he explained to me. I told him there’s no way this was gonna work, it would only make him super fat. He told me this guy was a pro and he knew what he was talking about and he was going to enthusiasticaly follow his advice. I told him he’d be sorry. A month went by and I hadn’t seen this guy around until one day I saw him come walking in the gym looking as fat and depressed as ever and I asked him how his new fat loss plan was coming along and he told me he gained an additional 25 pounds of fat, brought his waist up to a 44", and had severve tendonitis in both shoulders from over training and had use these exercise bands to train because the weights hurt too bad now. The only workout he got that night was soaking in the hot tub. You see the biochemical resources that the body uses to recover and grow are strictly limited. Force feeding the body with massive amounts of food will not speed this process at all it will only make you fat. The body can only process food, and utilize nutrients so fast. This is a time consuming process that happens little by little and though it’s true that extra nutients such as protein are needed for bodybuilders who train hard, it’s ridiculous to think that it’s necessary to force feed yourself 10,000 calories in a day and gain any benefit. No bodybuilder needs 10,000 calories a day, I dont care how big he is! I currently weigh 213 lbs and I’m very active and train hard and heavy, and I can still put on muscle and make gains taking in between 2300-2400 calories per day. And yes some supplements can help you utilize nutrients better but to a lesser extent. The body’s recovery that takes place among the basic nutrients is not a fast process no matter how much you eat or how much you train.

It has always been a common practice to reach for a bottle of ibuprofen, tylenol or naproxen when we get a headache or have other pains in our body due to inflammation. These over the counter drugs may give us temporary relief from pain and or inflammation, however, if your trying to build muscle these drugs can be your worst enemy! This is why: When you train hard and feel soreness in your muscles or if you have an injury like a strained muscle for example, the reason why you feel pain is due to hormones that are released in your body when your body has been subjected to some sort of physical stress or injury. These hormones are called prostaglandins. Prostaglandins are actually cell signaling hormones that are released when we’ve trained hard or have been injured and play a vital role in our body’s ability to activate protein synthesis, recover, heal, and grow. Prostaglandins, when released, trigger the necessary biological functions to put our body’s in an anabolic state, and stimulate nitrogen retention , protein synthesis , growth and repair. The problem is that when we take those over the counter pain killers, though they do provide pain relief, they do so by reducing the level of prostaglandins in the body which reduces inflammation, but also stops protein synthesis and or muscle growth dead in it’s tracks. If post workout soreness and or pain is bearable then do your best to cope with it so you get the most out your bodybuilding. If the pain is so extreme that it’s killing you to the point that you cant sleep at night then that’s a different story. In such a case you may have to break down and take pain killers but don’t expect much muscle growth if any at all. Only you can decide for yourself if it’s absolutely necessary to take pain medications. Hopefully this information can help some of you out. Best of luck to all! 

In addition to long term goals such as reducing bodyfat by another 6% or trying to increase your bench by 50 lbs, you should have short term goals at each workout. Having goals for each workout gets you focused and exited about training. You should never go into a workout and still figuring out what your going to do. Instead, know exactly what your going to do before you get started as well as what you want to accomplish. Goals increase focus and determination. Training is not the place to be lost and aimless. Be sure to keep a workout journal and record every exercise, every weight, and every rep so that way when you go to repeat those same exercises again you can look back to see what you did the last time and strive to break those old records from the last time you performed those same exercises.