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The simplest observation in the gym last week reminded me of the most fundamental principles in using weight training for fitness. I had worked my chest pretty hard with a continuous series of giant sets whereby my chest was hit over and over with very little time to rest. When I finished, I immediately started a hamstring session by taking a couple of dumbbells off the rack and doing a set of stiff-legged dead lifts. As I finished and started to cross the gym I noticed that my breathing was elevated enough that a little voice(which I ignored) began to tell me that I should wait a little before doing the set of leg curls I was intent upon doing.
Then it ocurred to me: I had worked my chest with relatively heavy sets in rapid fire order and I had stimulated less of a breathing response in all of that than in one set of stiff-legged deadlifts. The principle is clear. Big muscles condition the body.
Yet,walk into the neighborhood gym and pause to watch what's going on in the weight training area. There may well be a fair number of people there and virtually none are working legs. I will futher speculate that of those working few are working on any kind of back movements.I remind you that the two biggest muscle groups in the body are legs and back. Much of what is done in the weight area,however, revolves around the smallest muscles.
Arms,of course,and chest absolutely dominate the training of most people.Men trainers often fall into the big arms and big bench press mentality discussed in NMF before. If I wanted to hold a picnic in my gym and spread out the goodies on a blanket where I would be out of the way of the training population I would choose the squat cage.I would be a little bit more of a nuisance if I picniced amidst the back machines, but not much.
Women are not normally to be found doing squats or anything else that trains legs unless its the leg extension machine. Hamstrings? I can't remember a women in my gym working a stiff legged deadlift. They will use the leg curl if its near the other machines. Women working back? A rarity.
This is crucial for a new trainer to understand: If you are going to condition the heart and lungs, you can do it with weight and the best way to do that is to focus your workouts on the largest muscle groups.That means that legs and back are integral to your workouts and never shortchanged compared to the more popular body parts. Your servant, as always.
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Today I set out my assumptions before I enter into the text of my argument. I assume that a maturing female does not want to carry around bodyfat that she doesn't need to carry around. I assume that she would like to be of an ideal scale weight and yet maintain a feminine shape. I assume that she does not want to appear bulky in her clothing whether she is carrying any extra bodyfat or not. I assume that a diet-exercise program which leaves a woman lighter on the scale but lacking her feminine shape would not exactly please her even though she might be overjoyed with a desired weight loss.
Is there a way for women to remove bodyfat and still keep a pleasing shape. Is there a Goldilocks fitness program that removes and keeps off fat and does not strip away shape or add muscle that can easily be taken for fat when it is beneath clothing? If you have read my last couple of posts you know that I don't think intense dieting or dieting intense cardio like running or hour long elliptical sessions are the method. They destroy muscle and less muscle means less shape and less caloric demand.
Obviously, a Goldilocks fitness program must remove fat and retain shape by keeping the body just right-not bulky and not stringy. That is not an easy task but it can be done by someone willing to dedicate some time to it(and, more than time, energy).
Goldilocks consists of a diet whose effect is a caloric deficit of a few hundred calories a day. If you think you burn about 2000 calories a day, I would think 400 or 20% would be a reasonable target. This is a slow loss diet because slow retards the body's response to caloric deficiency: tearing down muscle. It is also just enough to be difficult to maintain. The body's response will be to ramp up hunger. You will be able to do it though. And at that rate you have a good chance to lose a goodly amount of fat.
In addition to this slow diet I suggest that a women pursue weight training with everything she has. That means no more silly woman-training, like doing a thousand reps with a two pound weight-to avoid bulk. No, you are going to work like men do-as heavy as you can and as often as you can. You are trying to burn calories and keep your muscle and thereby your shape. If you do not work all out you will be sending a puny signal to your body that you are not really intent on change. If you go all out your body will know that it cannot get rid of your muscles in response to the diet. Your actions will constantly tell it that it not only needs the muscles it has but also could really use some more.
The result will be a body that is fit without bulk and without muscle loss. Your legs and arms will firm up, your chest will be strong for the task it has(You know what I mean.)Your shoulders will be straight and slighty wider at the same time as your abdomen shrinks. Your hour glass figure will be enhanced.You will also have definition in your body that highlights your fitness.
Now, I know that the religious tenent of femininity says that weights will make you bulky. It is nonsense,but hard to jettison. So,I suggest that you keep an open mind. Start the above diet, go to the gym and train with weights as hard as your fitness level permits, and see what transpires. If you discover that you gain muscular bulk at an Arnold pace, do two things-stop lifting (it will disappear) and write NMF immediately. We will sell your training secrets to men,many of whom really want to bulk up and can't becaus theire muscles just won't grow big like yours.
I suggest that what will really happen is that you will find this Goldilocks system really productive and exciting. You will see good results and you will feel like someone who has the know-how to shape her body. Or you can treadmill until the cows come home and be happy that, although you are still fat, you are not bulky. Your servant, as always.
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We continue to counteract the irrational with the factual today and that is never an easy way to go. The fear that women have of bulk is irrational and even a tiny bit of commonsense will prove that,but it does not mean that the fear will disappear. We make the attempt nevertheless. In this post I intend to challenge the methods used by many dieting women and in the next give my pitch for what will really work long term.
If you are a lady and you are not happy with your shape and/or weight there are a number of routes you can travel to try to change the situation. You can diet down to a few hundred calories a day and you will lose weight for awhile and a goodly portion of this weight will be muscle. That is the way that the body does its business. It shepherds fat and throws aside muscle and, while the starving person continues to weigh less, there is no likelihood that she will be shapely. What we can assume is that once a scale weight goal is reached there will be a period when reality sets in and the starver will have to realize that her reduced muscle mass means futher weight loss will be nearly impossible or that normal calorie consumption will bring about rapid weight gain. Muscles burn calories.
A really sincere dieter may want to spur weight loss by adding some intense cardio work to eat up extra calories. Lets use running as an example. The person who runs in combination with dieting will surely lose weight faster than the sedentary dieter, but this runner will also lose muscle tissue faster than the sitter.The principle is the same:the body rids itself of heavy muscle before it rids itself of fat. Running is so tough on the body that it hurries to get rid of the heaviest component it can do without.That is muscle and muscle burns calories. Stop running and the muscle reduced body will burn fewer caloies than before the running spree. It will be that much easier to gain weight.
Treadmill walking and the elliptical are essentially proxies for running. They are only effective to the extent that they mimic the effect of running on the body. They offer a user friendlier approach to the same objective: lose weight by burning it off. They also have the same effect; they cause the body to jettison its muscle to lighten the load. Because they are less intense than running, these proxies are less effective at tearing down muscle and also at burning up calories.
Finally, a dieter may want to add some kind of free exercise instead of running etc. This is a basically sound idea. Yet a few minutes a day will not really burn that many calories and the kind of long free exercise sessions that will burn a lot of calories will also mimic running and tear down muscle etc. Yes, there will be some moderate firming for awhile, but the more effective the weight loss the less the firming will take hold.
So none of the above strategies is really going to work in the long term. You know someone who dieted or dieted-ran or dieted-treadmilled off a lot of weight and then gained it back. They are living proof that muscle gone is not the way to keep off weight. There is a better way. Your servant, as always.
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Once again we address the issue that according to the latest fitness gadget infomercial strikes fear into the heart of any women who merely contemplates exercise: bulk.
Last time we actually said the “never to be spoken” of women’s fitness: women are getting bulky no matter what they do with exercise. That is the fat truth. The real issue, I think, when women talk about weight training is the fear that they will become covered with skeletal muscle which beneath clothing will look pretty much like fat looks beneath clothing. No women are so stupid as to be actually afraid that they will develop huge arms etc and look like Mr. Olympia
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Myth making never rests and the work of the anti-myth crusader is thus never done. Careful readers will soon recognize the territory into which we enter today as that through which we have trudged before.
A recent glimpse at an infomercial assured me that the lies women are told about fitness go on and on. A contrivance of some type appeared on my TV that made the claim that it could offer a ten minute fix to the fitness of women everywhere. The absurdity of that alone should have been enough to set off warning lights in the NMF command center,but this commercial went further. Amidst the scenes of blissful ladies doing what appeared to be simple(but thoroughly effective?!) exercises with blissful smiles on their faces there appeared a new angle-at least to me.Our infobabe guide suddenly appeared amidst a bevy of profoundly fatless,yet shapely professional models. They all assured the viewer in succession that they used the ten minute miracle and that with it they had no worries about falling beneath the spectre that was claimed to stalk any woman who apparently even passes over the threshold of the weight area of a gym-bulking up
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I suggest that in almost every endeavor those that are failures are those that cannot or will not come to an understanding with time focus. In the United States the great mass of people are unprepared to retire because they cannot view money in terms of its long term potential to enrich them. They spend it for the now. A trip down the street seems to indicate that the same attitude prevails when it comes to fitness. Putting fitness ahead of short term,immediate pleasures is the central component in a fit body and most do not do it. The fit are a class akin to the self-made rich-rare, misunderstood, and envied.
The essential reality of fitness is that it is an intense exercise in personal discipline. When you are home ruminating on the merits of the sofa as a device of pleasure, it does not make any difference how much you know about training. NMF is here out of a desire to help you get into shape and be fitter.Take a look at the archives and you will see tens of entries about how to train. These have no relevance to the the person who cannot manifest the necessary discipline to apply them
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In the United States a cottage industry has grown up around the analysis of self-made millionaires. Since most of us are likely to be millionaires of the self-made variety, this research has attracted a fair number of readers. For our purposes-fitness-this literature yields a whole bag full of useful principles. Today I mention just one.
Students of self-made millionaires have discovered a direct correlation between the length of the time perspective of the individual and the amount of wealth he/she is able to ultimately accumulate.Simply put, those who projected their goals and focus farthest out into the future ended up with the most money. That simply means that when short term satisfaction comes into conflict with longer term goals the former wins.It also means that when relatively longer term satisfactions come into conflict with even longer term satisfactions the longest term wins
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September 25th 2007 11:06
The training of shoulders is the topic for this edition. I find shoulder training the most taxing training of all the training I have done. There is no body part that is more trained than the shoulders and the price of over training them is chronic pain. It is the spectre of this training induced pain around which I organize my work.
It is easy to do too much for shoulders. You can do bent over dumbbell flyes, for instance, to build the rear deltoid muscle. The problem is that the rear deltoid is stimulated heavily when training back in rowing movements.You can do front raises with dumbbells to build the front deltoid, but the front deltoid is heavily stimulated when you do your bench presses and chest flyes. My point? You are asking for trouble,if you pile on work with the above movements
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September 22nd 2007 12:14
Being the most important does not mean that a concept is the most apparent.In weight training,where the constant temptation is to make it easier, the most important element is the rep. All else is an elaboration. If your workout is not a series of focuses on each and every rep, you will ultimately be expending more energy for less results.If you fly into the gym and push your way through a bunch of sets that do not have a focus on each and every rep the amount of wasted potential is immense.
There has always existed a fundamental dispute in bodybuilding theory between the high number of sets crowd and a smaller coterie of those who favored a small number of sets to the most intense failure that can be produced. Both positions have something to offer. Each can be turned into something that is unproductive
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September 18th 2007 11:06
This trip I would like to engage in a little thinking. Specifically I would like to speculate about what aging might look like, if we were to continue to work out for the decades that reach toward the century mark.
First, what we can expect if we do not continue to train. The excess weight is a no-brainer. As the metabolism slows by the decade few of us will find the wherewithal to limit our caloric intake to anywhere near what it will have to be to maintain a weight to within tens of percentage points of our youth. There is a growing body of informed speculation that radical restriction of calories will result in the significant extension of lifespan. How many are affording themselves of this opportunity to live a number of extra year? And to live them in a thin body
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Comment by JohnR
on Weight Training's Continuum
No Myth Fitness