thenaturalone’s BodyBlog

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.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 8th, 2008 at 6:54 pm and is filed under Training. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.