Just received a message alert from AM 640 Radio (local Toronto station) that read:

“Mark McGwire admits using steroids when he broke baseball’s home run record in 1998. Sent 3:13pm

Makes for an interesting prelude to the Olympic games.

BP

False Advertising or just perpetuating a myth?

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“Always start beginners with body weight exercises”

Sounds good in theory…However something just dawned on me…

More precisely, something nearly crushed me.

I was just in my basement doing a workout consisting mostly of weighted pushups.

I had about 100 pounds of chain wrapped around me and I was struggling to get ten good solid reps.

Then it dawned on me – I weight 175 pounds, with the chain I weigh 275 pounds.

So this crushing feeling I have of BARELY making it to ten reps on my third set..this would be what simple BODY WEIGHT push-ups would feel like to a man or women who weighs 275 pounds.

SO WHY WOULD YOU EVER START AN OBESE PERSON ON BODY WEIGHT EXERCISES?

Just doesn’t make sense to me.

A good guideline but NOT a rule

I’m OK with average weight or slightly heavy people starting with body weight work, but use some common sense.

If you are more than 50 or so pounds over your ideal weight and just starting into wieght training…maybe start with dumbbells.

BP

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I thought you might enjoy the conversation I had over the holidays. Great questions from Andrew who really helped me spell out my theories on muscle building.

BP

………

Hey Brad, I’m a big lover of Eat Stop Eat, and a massive proponent of many of your thoughts and theories, so don’t take any of this as confrontational or second guessing in nature, I just wondered which variables you would manipulate in order to gain LBM most effectively whilst following the ESE lifestyle?

Correct me if I’m wrong but I’m sure I’ve seen you comment that you don’t believe eating much above your BMR is necessary, neither is excessive protein intake or mega dosing your peri-workout nutrition. So I guess my real question is, if you HAD TO gain say 5-10lbs of skeletal muscle as quickly as possible, naturally, and assuming you’re already training using a program with built in progressive overload, which nutritional variables would you tweak? Would love to know exactly how you would go about it. Thanks for reading, and have a great New Year!

Great Question! If I had to gain 5-10 pounds of Skeletal muscle as quickly as possible, I’d be screwed. I’m 32 and have been training for over 15 years. Without drugs, I’m not putting on another ten pounds of skeletal muscle. Another ten pounds would put me well above the normal range for my height. Now, I can put on 10 pounds of lean mass…I could do that in an hour or two…add ten pounds to my bench/squat/deadlift/clean…I could do that too..maybe over the course of a year, but ten pounds of actual muscle, not happening.

B

OK, apologies. Allow me to rephrase the question if you will. What if you were 21, 180 lbs @ 5′9” and had all the time in the world to eat, sleep and train? How would you then optimally add actual muscle, whilst adhering (possibly the wrong word, I don’t even see ESE as something you need to adhere to, it’s so easy!) to Eat Stop Eat?

Ah…Ok that’s way more fun.

I’d do stuff you can do for high volume, that is taxing on the big muscles and that doesn’t break you down. I would workout in the gym 2-3 times a week working the muscles but not blowing myself apart. But that wouldn’t be the big stuff, the big stuff would be 2 times a week outside with a couple of buddies doing a combination of sled dragging and farmers walks. Each session would be two to three hours long. The goal wouldn’t be to burn out, or to be a sweaty mess, but just to do lots of work.

At 21 I wouldn’t rule out ‘eating big’ since their is probably still some juvenile muscle growth going on…but I would still ‘temper’ it with Eat Stop Eat.

I’m still not convinced that a 5?9? frame can add 10 more pounds of straight muscle (depending on how long you’ve been training for), but based on my experience this would be how I’d try to get there.

Thanks for the response. Great advice, much appreciated!

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Building more Muscle.

Considering some of the things happening in the news today, I thought this was timely. Biggest mistake we make with regards to building muscle is false expectations of what is actually possible.

Hi Brad!

I read almost every article u wrote, and your view is very impressive.
But I have 1 question (maybe off topic, sorry)
You say the amount of protein is not so important, the quality of the food is not so important (ok avoid crap), 2-3 workout per week is enough to keep or build muscle.
What is then the mistake what most of the average  gym rat make?
Ok we can see some real life example like you, but every competitive bodybuilder use (or they lie) the old method (6-8 meals, lot of protein above 300 grams, lot of training, cardio everyday) and not only for the end of the preparation, but from the beginning.

Hey Wood,

The average gym rat makes the mistake of thinking they can get ’steroid-like’ growth without taking steroids, plain and simple.

I don’t think bodybuilders lie when they say they eat 8 meals a day, protein above 300 grams, lots of training and Cardio. I think this is 100% true.

I’ll even admit that this might be the right way to do things when you are on 3 grams of test a week, combined with some GH and Insulin, plus maybe a little Clenbuterol.

And, I’ll also admit that there is a possibility that even the non-bodybuilder-guys who use a “small amount of drugs” like cover models (and I suspect even before and after models), might benefit from eating this way.

I’m no expert when it come to drugs and the way they alter nutrient needs.

But for normal, non-drug using adult human beings it is your genetics combined with your training that determines how much muscle you can add, your protein intake and food quality has very little to do with it. They still plays a role mind you, just not the role that advertisers would make you think.

Bottom line: You can NOT get drug like effects from powdered protein.

BP

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In case you haven’t noticed, the human body has a basic shape.

By and large we are all roughly related in how we look.

If I put a person, a gorilla and a hippopotamus together in a room, chances are you would easily pick out the human.

If I was abducted by aliens right now, and was forced to describe the male part of the human race, this is what I would say:

They average about 5′10″ in height, with about 148 pounds of lean mass. At any given height they can vary greatly in weight, but this is due to their ability to store energy in the form of fat mass.

If I was asked to explain further I would say this:

Their height is normally distributed with a standard deviation of about 3 inches. This means that 95% of all men fall somewhere between 5′4″ and 6′4″ in height.

At any given height their lean mass is also fairly normally distributed with a standard deviation of about 7 pounds. Meaning, an extremely athletic healthy male can have about 14 pounds more lean mass than the average, and a man can be about 14 pounds less than the average before we begin to worry about them being in a disease state.

(or imagine the picture a 6 year old child would draw if they were asked to draw a man or a woman…it would probably be pretty obvious and pretty average looking, not too fat and not too skinny)

In other words, our physiology, much like everything else about the human body, is VERY tightly regulated. Everything is interconnected.

Yes, there are some anomalies that somehow have more muscle than anyone else, just like there are some men who are 7 feet tall. But these are very very rare cases (About 2.5% of the population).

For the most part you and I are limited in how much muscle we can add, based on the fact that we are all human beings. There are checks and balances EVERYWHERE in our bodies.

And this is for GOOD reason.

Here is something that people selling exercise programs with claims like “Add 60 pounds of muscle in 6 weeks” don’t want you to think about.

Many of the things that can cause your muscle to grow beyond its normal limits are also connected to higher than average rates of cancer.

After all, cancer is by definition, uncontrolled growth.

• Chronic high testosterone? Correlated with Increased Cancer risk.
• Chronic high insulin? Correlated with Increased Cancer risk.
• Chronic high Growth Hormone? Correlated with increased Cancer risk.
• Chronic high IGF-1? Correlated with increased Cancer risk.

The point of all this is – You are human. So be happy with your build, work towards increasing your muscle mass and decreasing your fat mass, but have REALISTIC EXPECTATIONS.

From my findings, an adult human male can expect to gain about 14 pounds of muscle through strength training, for a female its closer to 6. After that any muscle growth is extremely slow.

If you want more muscle and are willing to go the pharmaceutical route to get it, just be aware that there may be long term health ramifications.

If you want more muscle and are NOT willing to go the pharmaceutical route, and are upset about your lack of progress remember – there are good reasons why you are limited in your ability to grow.

Eat less and move more. Try your best to build muscle while keeping your body fat low, and remember you are human. This means you are probably not going to be 250 pounds and 5% body fat any time in your life unless you are also about 6′10″ tall.

BP

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I do not think that we will progress in our understanding of the science behind muscle growth until we begin to openly discuss the use of anabolic steroids.

As far I am concerned there is only 1 thing that has shown a clear, reproducible dose-response relationship with muscle size in humans (other than height).

It’s not protein or calories. It’s not even workout length, weight lifted or even Growth Hormone.

While all these things may (or may not) play a role, the only thing that has a clear dose response relationship is testosterone.

We know some athletes use it. We know some recreational lifters use it. We know some fitness models use it. We even know that some h0llywood celebrities use it. (I’m saying ’some’ to keep me out of trouble).

We also know that for various reasons a large percentage of these people lie about using it.

This skews all of our data.

Because people lie about using steroids we have no idea what the natural limitations of the human body are. It is a GIANT confounding variable in the study of exercise and muscle growth.

For instance:

Eating high amounts of protein has been a giant let down for most people, so why is it still be touted as a muscle builder? Well, maybe protein works differently for guys and girls who are on 2,500 mg of Testosterone per week.

Eating big? A great way to make you fat. UNLESS…more calories may actually mean more muscle when you are using D-bol and Trenbolone.

It always kills me when I hear big guys (typically power lifters) tell little guys that the key to getting big is to eat McDonalds 8 times a day. For some reason they leave out the side order of Anadrol.

Without mentioning the steroids, the ‘prescription’ for getting huge muscles is also the exact same prescription for becoming an obese North American.

Now, I’m not advocating steroid use, but what I am saying is that to truly start to understand what causes muscle growth, we need everyone to be open about steroid use.

This is why most fitness magazines are useless, as are most fitness websites. Having people tell you about their awesome new workout that helped them put on 30 pounds of muscle without telling you about their new steroid stack that went along with the workout is just useless information.

As is ‘muscle building advice’ from guys who have been the exact same weight for the last 5 years.

The bottom line is that we are not nearly as far along in understanding muscle growth as we would like to believe, and we are not going to move forward until steroids are openly discussed.

BP

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Haven’t heard of it yet?

Don’t worry, you will.

Invictus is a new movie that is coming out soon that stars Matt Damon and Morgan Freeman.

So why does it get it’s own workout? Well Matt Damon plays Francois Pienaar, the Captain of South Africa’s Rugby team in the early to mid 1990’s. And, at minute 0:57 of the trailer for Invictus, you see Matt with his shirt off for about 1.5 seconds.

Sounds silly but this is the equation:

Male Hollywood Celebrity Appears “Jacked” in a movie = On-line Hysteria over “How he did it”.

Think the Christian Bale Batman Workout, the Gerard Butler 300 Workout, or the Hugh Jackman Wolverine workout.

It works every time, without fail. Hollywood Celeb gets jacked, someone tries to cash in.

So I’m going to Preempt everyone with this one:

I know EXACTLY how Matt Damon got in shape for this movie…It’s the exact same way Hugh Jackman got in shape, which is the exact same way Gerard Butler got in shape and the same way Christian Bale gets in shape.

They dedicated themselves to Hard work and some form of resistance training.

We should all realize by now that there IS NO SECRET.

It doesn’t matter if you are lifting giant rocks, kettle bells, dumbbells or small barnyard animals.

It’s the hard work that gets the results, not the trendy tools.

Matt, Gerard, Christian, they are no different then you or me…well, other than the lifestyle and money part.

They work hard, they stay dedicated and consistent and they get results. It’s not some secret new workout of the start that until now was kept secret…It’s hard work.

So there you go… If you want to look like a Movie Star, the secret is hard work.

The trick to it all? Next time you are in the gym imagine there is a 10 million dollar movie role on the line. You get in shape, you get the role.

BP

PS- you can see the trailer here ==> http://www.apple.com/trailers/wb/invictus/

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I spend a lot of my time reviewing research. Enough time that I can tell you that there are definitely GREAT research papers, and then there are HORRIBLE ones that make you scratch your head trying to figure out how they ever were published in the first place.

Truthfully there are many more papers that seem to fall in the horrible category the truth is, even the worst paper ever published still has some value.

There is no such thing as research with absolutely no value.

While these seems like a typical ‘Pilon ramble’ let me assure you…we’re talking about bodybuilding.

You see for some reason, over the last decade we decided that bodybuilding is dumb, useless, and a complete waste of time.

We junked bodybuilding and replaced it with functional training, sports specific training and the like.

We threw out bodybuilding before we completely understood it.

And just like research papers, there is no such thing as a completely useless type of exercise.

There are things to be learned from bodybuildling.

Good things.

**Before I go any further I need to be clear..there is next to NO research on bodybuilding.

Everything you read on line or in magazines is nothing more than theories and conjecture.

What I’m about to write is no different – these are my theories on bodybuiding.**

Body building and weight training are NOT the same thing – they are close cousins maybe, but they are not interchangeable.

Weight training involved using your muscles to move a weight.

In power-lifting the goal is to move as much weight as possible. In Olympic lifting the goal is to perfect moving a weight through a certain ‘movement’ as efficiently as possible.

In bodybuilding the goal is to contract your muscles using weight to add some resistance.

Similar but very different.

In fact, while things like Olympic lifting and Power-lifting are definitely ‘weight training’ I am starting to think that body building is ‘muscle training’.

Again – similar, but very different.

I think the difference lies in the mental approach.

Here’s an example.

Stand up and let your arms hang at your sides.

Now, with your arms still hanging flex your biceps as tightly as possible (don’t curl your arms yet, just leave them hanging but flexed).

Keeping that same intense level of flex, slowly curl your arm up at the elbow until its fully curled – concentrating on the flex the entire way.

Pause for a second or two at the top then while keeping your bicep flex, slowly lower your arm back down.

That is a bodybuildling bicep curl.

Now imagine this same degree of concentration while holding a weight.

You are using weight to resist the contraction, but the mindset is all about the contraction and not the weight.

Using this technique, a guy that can curl 60 pound dumbbells for sets of 6-8 may only be able to curl 40-45’s before he has to break his concentration on the contraction and start thinking about moving the weight.

From my experience, you can lift a helluva lot more thinking about the weight then when you are thinking about the muscle…but if you want to make a muscle bigger..then there may be something in this approach.

My random speculation -

In the muscles that grow well for you..I bet you really ‘feel’ the exercises that you normally choose.

For the muscles that don’t grow well for you…I bet you really ‘feel’ the weight.

For me, I feel the contraction in my chest every time I do bench press or dumbbell press.

But shoulder press, I feel the weight moving. I’m strong on this lift, but I just don’t ‘feel’ it in my shoulders.

Coincidentally, my chest is much more developed then my shoulders.

(like I said, we’re theorizing here)

So, if the feel is important, then what do bodybuilders do right?

1) They pick exercises that they feel in the muscles they want to work.

2) They do things like ‘preexhaust’ a muscle to ‘help’ it feel an exericise.

3) They concentrate on the muscle in question during the workout.

All of these techniques are things we through way in favor of becoming Olympic lifting /power-lifting /functional training/athletic training wannabees (not meant to be derogatory, just saying..)

But, if your goal is simply to grow a specific muscle, or group of muscles in order to change the way your body looks, then there may be something we can learn from the way a bodybuilder approaches ‘working a muscle’.

In the end, the answer to losing weight will be to eat less, and the answer to building muscle is working out ‘more’ but this may be one little step towards a better definition of ‘more’.

BP

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3 guys sign up for a research study on the muscle building effects of weight training.

None of them have ever lifted weights before, and all three are between the ages of 20 and 21.

At the start of the study they weighed between 130 and 143 pounds (light by North American Standards)

Guy A – 130 pounds
Guy B – 138 pounds
Guy C – 143 pounds

For their given age and weight, each guy has about normal to slightly below average levels of lean body mass (I’m assuming the guys were between 5′6″ and 5′8″).

Guy A – LBM = 121 pounds (about 10% BF)
Guy B – LBM = 118 pounds (about 10% BF)
Guy C – LBM = 132 pounds (about 7.5% BF)

These numbers also make each guy exceptionally lean.

For their given age and weight, each guy has lower than expected levels of skeletal muscle mass. (We would expect about 50% of LBM to be skeletal Muscle).

Guy A -45 pounds Skeletal Muscle (about 37% of LBM!!!) Expected would be about 60 pounds.
Guy B – 43 pounds Skeletal Muscle (about 36% of LBM!!!) Expected would be about 59 pounds.
Guy C – 55 pounds Skeletal Muscle (about 41% of LBM!!!) Expected would be about 66 pounds.

Each guys bench press max confirms that this is their first time weight training.

Guy A – 95 pounds
Guy B – 90 pounds
Guy C – 130 pounds

So, these three guys who are light by North American Standards, with incredibly low levels of Body Fat and incredibly low levels of Skeletal muscle mass start a weight training program consisting of 3 workouts a week for 4 months.

Their workout program looked like this:

Squats 3 sets of 8-12 reps
Leg Extensions 3 sets of 8-12 reps
Hamstring Curls 3 sets of 8-12 reps
Bench Press 3 sets of 8-12 reps
Lat Pull downs 3 sets of 8-12 reps

As they progressed through their workouts their weights were increased to make sure they failed on each set within the 8-12 rep range.

At the end of the four month period all three guys increased their body weight and Lean Body Mass by about 5.5 pounds…which is pretty close to the average found in most research trials studying weight training for this length of time.

Now, here is where things get a little quirky.

These numbers seemed plausible, given the fact that these 3 men were underweight, under-muscled and new to weigh training.

But what doesn’t make sense is the following…Two of these guys gained MORE muscle then they did Lean Body Mass!

Guy A gained 9 pounds of muscle while only gaining 4.5 pounds of LBM.
Guy B gained 11 pounds of muscle while only gaining 4.5 pounds of LBM.
Guy C gained 7.7 pounds of muscle while gaining 7.7 pounds of LBM.

So, even with their impressive gains in muscle, their muscle mass is still below where it should be (50% of lean body mass) and somewhere along the way two of them lost around 5 pounds of LBM…liver removed maybe?

Bottom line – you have to be skeptical of muscle building research. Obviously this group of 3 guys are not a good subset of the rest of the population. Specifically, they are probably not a good representation of you or I.

They are were their early twenties, were very light,  were very lean, and had very little muscle mass at the start of this research study. Their workout was far form extraordinary but they did manage to gain almost exactly the amount of weight, LBM and strength that we would expect from a 4 month long supervised workout program.

Despite this their was obviously some discrepancy in the measures of skeletal muscle mass…this discrepancy either caused

A) Exceptionally low measurements of skeletal muscle at the beginning of the study.

B) Exceptionally high measurement of skeletal muscle at the end of the study.

The only other possible scenario is that two of the subjects somehow lost between 5-6 pounds of LBM somewhere during the weight training process.

Obviously…something is up.

But this is extremely important, and is a great example of why you need to ANALYZE every study that you read.

Otherwise, you could quickly go over the abstract of this study and say that “Research proves that full body weight training 3 times per week can cause you to gain up to 11 pounds of pure muscle in 4 months!”

BP

PS – Interestingly, this study was performed by the same people who are finding amazing muscle gaining results from ‘blood flow occlusion training”…makes you wonder.

PPS – There is one last thing missing from this study..has to do with the small number of subjects…something that would be next to impossible to calculate with only three subjects….Can you guess?

Abe T. Br J Sports Med, 2003.

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A quick good news / not so good news post today about building muscle and fasting.

The Good news – Research shows (once again) that even 72 hours of fasting (way longer than I recommend) does not change whole body protein turnover or measures of protein oxidation (you’re not losing muscle).

The not so good news news – The same research also shows that that massive doses of insulin and amino acids after a fast are no more anabolic then they are in the fed state. In other words fasting didn’t some how turn you into a muscle building monster.

Bottom line – Eat Stop Eat is supported by EVEN more research showing it’s a great way to lose fat without losing muscle! You’re not losing massive muscle when you are fasting and you are not building massive amounts of new muscle because you are coming out of a fast (there’s no magic muscle building effects from the post-fast period).

This is an important part of the Eat Stop Eat philosophy.

Once you complete your 24 hour fast, simply pretend the fast never happened. Don’t do any special post-fast rituals, don’t over eat, don’t make some special amino acid/protein cocktail.

Just resume eating as you would have on any other normal day.

The point of Eat Stop Eat is to take a break from food, and then go back to doing what you were doing before you took your break.

As soon as you start coming up with special ways to eat and things to do at the end of your fast you’re complicating things and missing the point of the simplicity of Eat Stop Eat.

Finally, as always…it’s the way you workout that decides if you are building muscle, and the way you eat that decides if you are losing fat.

BP

(Gjedsted et al, 2009)

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