Category: Making Muscle

This category covers things that relate to building lean muscle mass. It can include nutrition, rest and recovery, movement, and neurological functioning.

The Opportunity Cost Of Not Trying To Be Healthy

Opportunity cost is defined as the cost of an alternative that must be forgone in order to pursue a certain action. For example, the opportunity cost of spending all of your money on a nice car having no money for food, a house, entertainment, gas for the car, etc…. It’s a fairly straight forward concept and can be used in many areas to describe the costs of making a particular decision.

Ill-health is usually measured in relation to disease such that the opportunity cost of getting sick is measured as lost years of life. We cannot disagree with this measurement as something like a terminal diagnosis of cancer does shorten ones life expectancy but it doesn’t capture the full opportunity cost of ill-health which is that of lost quality of life.

When considering the opportunity cost of obesity, we need to consider a multitude of factors. Obese people tend to spend more money on food, fuel, and clothing, so there is a financial cost. They also tend to have fewer options when it comes to clothing and fashion, so there is a style and creative expression cost. Many obese people report a sense of alienation, ostracization and general anxiety when in public, so there is a psychological cost.

The psychological cost can have a wide scope – some people report a loss of confidence that causes them to limit their risk exposure so they don’t take the chances that may lead them towards a more complete experience of life. They may limit their dating options, job opportunities, vacation experiences and their general sense of being in control of their own life. Compounding these are the obese behaviors that one may display such as emotional eating, eating disorders and escapist actions such as substance abuse, abusive relationships and compulsiveness in other areas.

One does not have to be obese to experience the negative opportunity cost. Many people experience a boost in confidence when they lower their body fat, increase their level of lean muscle mass or increase their strength. This confidence can be leveraged in many ways to expose the individual to a variety of new stimuli or situations that improve the quality of life – participation in sports, seeking out different companionship partners, visiting new places, etc…

When viewed in this light, the opportunity cost of not being as healthy and fit as possible is very expensive. At best it comes down to living a life that isn’t of as high a quality as it could be and at worst it comes down to living a life of isolation and fear. When positioned against the amount of nutrition and exercise effort needed to improve ones health to a confidence inspiring level it doesn’t make much sense to avoid the putting in the work.

When making the decision about enrolling yourself in a life transformation program, consider both the cost of NOT doing it and benefit OF doing it.

Are You Coachable?

Successful people behave in successful ways. The role of any great coach is to help their clients modify their behavior. When we build upon the assumption that people are born perfect, removing the patterns or behaviors that don’t work is the fastest way to restore a clients life to a state of full potential. For this reason, clients MUST be coachable. Below it a list of 5 characteristics that make someone coachable.

Willingness to accept that they need guidance. People need the help from other people and those who are humble are open to the idea that they can’t do everything on their on. They are clear to the fact that their limitations ARE the reason why they have sat down with a coach. This isn’t the thought “I’m going to hear what they can do for me” it’s the belief “I’m going to find out what isn’t working for me and change it.”

Being open and willing to doing something, and lots of it. Those looking for big changes KNOW that they need to do things. What needs to be done isn’t going to be the same for everyone, but doing new things, and doing them a lot, IS a criteria for change. Those who are committed to unfamiliar or unreasonable actions are coachable because coaches ask people to do things that their clients are not doing. They have to because their clients either don’t know what to do or don’t do what they need to.

Having clear goals in mind. Today is the starting point, call it point “A”. Your goals are the end point, point “B”. The area between A and B represent the work and behaviors that need to occur. Without knowing too much about someone, a coach has a clear understanding of point A. But point B is personal to the client and it is impossible to achieve unless they create it. It is the top of the mountain, the finish line, the destination, and it must be clearly defined by the client to the coach in-order for the coaching partnership to be effective and transformative.

A willingness to let someone else control their behavior. Giving-up control can be scary, but when you are looking to achieve that which is impossible for you to achieve on your own, you NEED to let someone else drive your body / mind. There is a leap of faith involved with this, but if you could have done it yourself you would have done it already. Engage and hire the best people you can afford and do what they tell you to do.

Confidence in yourself that you can start and maintain the behaviors needed to move you towards your goals. If knowledge or wisdom was all that was needed, everyone would have the life they wanted, but these things are just pieces of the puzzle. What is most important is an understanding that your life will only change if you know that it is possible to change. Any belief that things can only be as they are will render the coaching relationship ineffective as it helps keep someone stuck in their current way of being. Knowing that things can and will change when the effort is put in will empower the client and coach and create the transformation in behaviors that are needed to create success.

Good and great coaches are only as good as their clients; it all comes down to the client and their ability to be coachable.

Do You Behave In A Goal Achieving Way?

Goals are, simply put, future ways of being.

In almost every case the only thing you need to do in order to achieve a goal is to put in STRATEGIC, CONSISTENT, SUSTAINED and INTENSE work for a period of time. The truth is, it isn’t that challenging to achieve almost anything you want in life so long as you are willing to be dedicated to the cause.

Of these element of successful goal achieving behavior – strategic, consistent, sustained and intensity – the one that seems to cause most people the biggest challenge is the strategic work. Many people do not do the right things to achieve their goals as quickly as humanly possible. In essence, their behaviors do not match their goals so they are slow in moving towards being all that they can be. Well, lets rephrase that, their actions do not match their stated goals. In all likelihood their actions are making real some aspect of themselves that isn’t entirely known to them, but which plays a major role in determining who they are and what they become.

A previous article mentioned the dissonance between thoughts and goals, and how goals that are created based on a previous way of being tend not to yield results that reflect the possibilities of a new way of being. To build on that phenomenon, another layer of awareness needs to be added to the creation of an optimized you.

Goals that are based on existing behaviors are ineffective at creating life-altering transformations. Someone is less likely to feel a powerful drive when they create them or feel a massive sense of accomplishment when they achieve them. These goals are more likely to be achieved simply because the individual is already behaving in a way that will make them a reality. They reflect the reasonable and the possible; which is fine if you want more of the same, or a slightly improved version of the same.

But when you are looking to achieve the new, the unfamiliar or the seemingly impossible, you CANNOT reference your present behavior because your present behavior is NOT working for you – if it was, you would already be moving towards achieving.

Some of the new strategic work behaviors that are needed to achieve the new body transformation goals include your eating habits – do you eat breakfast everyday and does it contain multiple sources of protein, do you eat an abundance of green leafy vegetables, do you plan your meals and make them ahead of time, do you plan your shopping trips to the grocery store or market, do you schedule your celebration meals to tap into hormonal fluctuations based on caloric and macro-nutrient manipulation, do you participate in any compulsive eating behaviors, do you use targeted supplements? Also critical are new movement habits – do you workout at least 4 times per week, do you perform strength training to help improve lean body mass, do you use effective programs that are repeatable and based on scientific principles, do you get enough relaxation and sleep?

There are very few unknowns when it comes to health, fitness and wellness; it is safe to say that NOTHING is random. The results are predictable. It can be said with certainty that if you behave in a goal achieving way you will be achieving your goals. But first you must clearly define what your goals are so you know EXACTLY how to behave.

Ab Recruitment, Women And Cuing

Rachel once said to me “if you really want to do your female clients a favor teach them how to set their properly and get them to be able to do it at any time.” She explained what was involved with it and I imagined a can of beans with Kegels setting the pelvic floor at the bottom, drawing the stomach in to set the obliques, tightening the front and then push out against them with the transverse abdominis to set the diaphragm, and letting the lower back contract as needed to make a strong and stable cylinder.

It takes practice to gain control of each step but it’s doable. My female clients did comment that it felt better, that they liked the tightness in the ab area and that they felt more stable doing whatever movement. I came up with cues to help keep the thought present in their mind so they would always has their core set or be a few seconds away from it. It works great. Well, it works great when people hear what I am saying.

Sometimes people hear something else. I’m not sure what it was they were hearing but it was something that didn’t come across well. With my cycling classes, I throw out a lot of general coaching cues to no one in particular – chest up, shoulders back – it’s just there to remind people that these things are important and to keep doing them or get back to doing them. With personal training any general cue can be taken to be a specific cue, as it should be under most circumstances. If I say chest up it means the chest is down or it is beginning to drop. I can see that it is dropping. The issue with the “keep the abs tight” or “are your abs on?” cues is that they are reminder cues only because I can’t tell most of the time if someone is doing a Kegel when they do DB press.

The break down occurs when I don’t accurately explain and continue to remind the client that I can’t see what is happening inside their bodies and can only see the breakdowns. If they believe that I am saying they are not engaging the core when I cue generally about it, and they are engaging it, their is a shift in focus over to something completely unrelated; which is “why is he saying it then, what could does he mean?”

This occurs more with intelligent female clients than any other group with the only exception being intelligent female athletes who try to fix everything and seek out specific clarification when they are not clear on what I have said. Males tend not to say “but I am contracting my core” and just keep doing it. To avoid this pitfall, I must explain that I am giving general coaching to keep their mind on the goal and not specific coaching given that I cannot experience what is going on in their insides.

Changes To Eating For Fatloss Optimal Health

The approach to eating is very simple and it doesn’t require that you change much about the way you eat. In fact, you’ll probably like it get because I ask you to eat more and change a few things about the way you currently eat.

Knowledge, Nutrition, Protein, Timing, Hydration, Recovery

Step one – keep a detailed food journal for 7 days. It should include the time of each feeding, what the meal consisted of, the number of hours of sleep you get each night and the amount and type of fluids you drink.

The purpose of this is to give you and your coach a good idea of what you are eating and your eating habits.

Step two – eat 3 green leafy salads each day before your larger meals. This will be made up of LOTS of dark green vegetables such as spinach, green and red leaf lettuce, asparagus, broccoli along with other garden vegetables like mushrooms, peppers, celery, etc… Avoid carrots and other root vegetables and corn and other field vegetables. Eat these salads at least 15 minutes before you eat your meal along with a 1-2 glasses of water.

The purpose of this is to make sure you are getting sufficient vitamins and nutrients in your diet as poor nutrition is NOT just about eating the wrong things and is often about not eating some of the right things. Also, the vegetables and water before your meal will decrease the amount of food that you eat.

Step three – eat more protein at each feeding – around 0.65-1 gram per pound of body weight each day.

The purpose of eating more protein stems from the fact that protein is used in almost every body process, it requires more energy to process, and it supplies very little energy to the body.

Step four – eat smaller meals every 2.5-3 hours.

The purpose of eating small meals more consistently is to supply your body with nutrient and energy BEFORE the body runs out of them as this promotes fat metabolism.

Step five – drink 2-4 liters of water per day and more when you are exercising / sweating.

The purpose of drinking this much water is that it is somewhat filling and it helps the body function at an optimal level.

Step six – reduce the amount of stress you experience and get sufficient amounts of deep sleep each night.

The purpose of reducing stress and getting enough sleep each night is that they allow the body to recover more completely as stress impairs recovery and a lack of sleep is very stressful to the body.

That’s it, that is all there is to it. I have come up with this approach through years of working with hundreds of people and seeing / hearing most of them claim that it is too hard to eat for optimal health. While I haven’t found this to be the case, the fact remains that many do so the approach needed to change. Frankly, it someone has a tough time eating a few salads before they eat their normal food they don’t really want to change. The same goes for not eating a little more protein and eating more consistently throughout the day.  If these things seem like too much work are you really all that unhappy with the way you look and feel?

Human Beings – Make Your Engine Bigger, Burn More Fuel

Trainers and strength coaches like to talk to other trainers and strength coaches and talk about their wisdom. Each of us have had 1000’s of experiences with clients, worked with 100’s and likely drawn some great conclusions about what is going on with people.

Here is my statement today: IF a women has the same amount of muscle as a man, she will burn approximately the same amount of calories as he would if he was to perform the same activity at the same intensity. I’m sure there’s some reason why the word approximately is essential for making the statement true, but by in large, doing the same amount of work will require the same amount of energy. In fact, the definition of work and any formula I’ve seen for it does make this factual statement / conclusion.

What are the practical implications of this?

If you want to burn more fuel you need to build a bigger engine. The bigger engine will move a bigger load which, by definition, will boost work capacity and therefore increase energy consumption. Even if you keep the weight the same, the increase in the size of the engine will translate into great energy expenditure. So building muscle is critical for helping someone get and remain lean.

The faster / harder you work an engine, the less efficient it becomes. Walking is a fairly efficient way for humans to move, sprinting is profoundly wasteful. Short intervals of fast intense work will burn more energy than steady state work, and this is why most coaches will encourage their clients to participate in interval work BEFORE they encourage them to do the steady state work.

To keep a big engine, you need to prove to the body that it need to remain that big. If you don’t use it, the body gets rid of it quickly because it requires energy to maintain and use. Always keep in mind that the body will get rid of EVERYTHING and ANYTHING that requires energy but which isn’t getting used. It doesn’t take much stimulation to hold onto muscle mass so long as you are eating enough protein and food in general.

What does this mean?

Most women are going to have to perform extra movement to make up for the energy NOT used to power or maintain the bigger muscles.

Women will be better served by building muscle before shifting their focus onto fat loss. Men can approach it from either direction and still enjoy success.

Protein is of more importance to women during the initial training phases and especially during the fat loss phase.

Hamstrings – Cyclist Do Not Neglect Them

The one piece of advice I would give to someone concerning strength training and cycling would be to learn how to fire the hamstrings correctly and to train them to be as strong as possible. The reason for this is because the back side mechanics of an effective cycling stroke is not an intuitive or practiced motion like the quad dominated front portion. The role of the hamstring is also very complex in that it needs to contract isometrically to add tension for knee stability, then contract concentrically to aid in both hip extension and knee flexion. There’s a lot going there and it can take a while to make the whole thing feel normal and powerful.

Step One – Feel them working while you are on the bike. There is nothing like an indoor bike when it comes to discovering your hamstrings. Set the bike up as normal, clip in or strap yourself to the pedals and ride for 5 minutes to warm-up the body. Once you are ready to work, release one of your legs and put the free foot on the cross bar just above the crank. Correct your posture, engage your abs and start pedaling paying particular attention to your crank speed. You want to feel like you are powering the entire time vs. just as you press down at the top. It may be helpful to think about making a “J” shape with the ball of your foot from 5 o’clock to 9 o’clock (as the foot moves down, back and up). It will be a lot easier to feel them working if your core is tight and you are stable on the saddle. Do this for a few minutes then switch to the other leg. After 2 or 3 sets of 2-3 minutes, clip in with both feet and focus on making the speed more even. Do this 2-3 times per week for 4-6 weeks and you’ll notice a huge improvement in your power output.

Step Two – You need to train your hamstrings be strong during the isometric and concentric phase of hip extension and strong during the concentric phase of knee flexion. They are mostly isolated when they are trained as knee flexors, so keep the rep range here between 6-12 and focus on a quick concentric contraction. When they are trained as hip extensors (stiff leg / Romain dead lifts, good mornings, back extension, kettle bell swings, battle ropes) the contraction should be quick and the rep range should be higher between 10-25. When they are trained eccentrically (glute ham raises) the lengthening motion should be between 4-8 seconds and the rep range between 4-8.

Step Three – You need to understand how and when the hamstrings generate the most power and work with that. Given that the hamstrings play a key role for knee stability with sprinting they tend to be made up of a high percentage of fast twitch fiber. They are also not very active as we break inertia – meaning we get very little out of them in terms of force production with slow concentric contractions. However, as they begin to contract more quickly, they start to contribute more output. So, as with training, when you are on the bike you need to contract them as quickly as possible and this is only going to happen when you are cranking at a minimum RPM – about 65-70. At this speed, your legs are moving quickly enough for the hamstrings to contract with sufficient speed to drive considerable force to the pedals. Anything slower than this and they lose much of their efficiency and output.

Once you have become proficient at recruiting the hamstrings with the pedal stroke, you may find that your riding improves by switching focus from the quads to the hamstrings, particularly after cresting a hill, accelerating and sitting in the saddle as your quads tend to be more active during standing hill climbs and they will benefit from the recovery that a shift in work onto the hamstrings brings.

Regardless of what you do with the new awareness, your riding will improve dramatically once you begin to use your hamstrings when you cycling, and your performance will improve dramatically once you start to train your hamstrings with the specific goal of getting stronger.

How I Have Excelled With My Clients

Looking back about 3 years on my training, I can now see a few ways that I have provided my clients with excellent service. This is the follow-up post to How I Have Not Served My Clients Adequately. Below is a list of 5 things I regard as having been the right things to do:

1) Established the importance of following and recording effective, sensible and sustainable eating behaviors. With body composition, food is key. Good quality whole food, eaten in small amounts every few hours will do more for your appearance than anything else you will do. That’s all there is to looking and feeling amazing. You stay on track by recording what you eat and reviewing this with someone else every few days who asks you to explain and justify your actions.

2) Trained the mid and low traps, along with the rotator cuff muscles to improve shoulder stability and posture. They may be stronger than they need to be, but their shoulders are drawn back and down, so now only my most athletic and strong clients make any reference to neck pain – which is muscle pain associated with lifting or performance. Also, all of my clients report no or a big reduction in shoulder pain; which is fantastic given that there are 3 clients who came to me with chronic shoulder pain being a key area to address.

3) Taught my clients to work almost as hard as they can. All of us have an upper limit when it comes to how hard we can work but very few of us know just how hard that is. Most clients underestimate their upper limit and pull back the intensity prematurely. After repeated efforts, we begin to drive harder and harder, because our fitness improves and because we realize that we can drive harder. Eventually the client finds this upper limit without external motivation and at this point they become trainee or an athlete, no longer a client.

4) Being present and engaging. We share the moment of working out. They know that while I may not be suffering with them, I’m well aware of what is happening with their bodies and we work together to get the most out of it. I firmly believe that you raise the performance of a client when you engage and keep them in the present moment. If that means I need to challenge them on what is going on in their mind when we are training, I go at them about that. I want and they need their bodies to do as many things correct as they can, so emptying the stress tank before training can go a long way in freeing-up mental energy to focus on form and breathing.

5) Providing good value for their money. People come back to train because they believe that their money is being spent wisely. You do this by delivering what you have agreed to deliver in a caring and fun way. You do this by being honest with people and getting them to question their motives and actions. And when we are not able to get the results the client is looking for, I tell them and we reevaluate the training relationship. Accepting when you don’t have the answers or when your solutions are not working helps to keep the trust alive and, while it may cost me clients, it helps to generate referrals.

5 Traits For Successful Body Composition Change

Having worked with hundreds of people over the last decade, I have had the opportunity to observe their progress and to get an idea what qualities are needed in order from someone to make a dramatic change to their body composition. Below are the 5 characteristics shared by those who make the most positive changes.

1) They are independently motivated. Being self reliant is more important than anything else when it comes to body composition changes. If you are able to train, cook and shop on your own, you are going to be much more successful in the long run because you are actually creating new and sustainable behavioral patterns. When you lean on another person to be your training partner, chief or to hold you accountable to YOUR goal, you are shifting some of the responsibility onto the other person. This can work, but you run the risk of creating conditional success or dependency.

2) They give-up their notions of what they know and follow instructions. Given their independence, if they knew how to do it they would be doing it. The sooner people shut their mouths, listen and act, the sooner their bodies change. Body composition changes are not complicated 98% of the time but people tend to make them more complicated (possible to ensure their failure). It’s about eating real food, exercising intelligently and doing both consistently for an extended period of time.

3) They see themselves as the cause of their problems and do not blame others for the state of their life. If it’s someone else’s problem get them to fix it. But you control your body so if you are an adult and you don’t like the way it looks that’s your fault. Blame other people if you like, but they aren’t going to make you lean and muscular. If you want to change your body change your body. Crappy or toxic friends are one thing, but you are the one who gives in to their negative influence and makes their problem your problem.

4) They are able to focus their attention onto the experience of change in order to improve their body awareness. Food makes you feel something, so does exercise. Changing your thoughts about food feels like something. Change feels different and it’s important to gain awareness into what that is. You can feel your blood sugar level changing, you can identify the difference between actual hunger and psychological hunger, you can get feel and contract almost every muscle on your body. You can feel all of this once you identify what each thing feels like and then practice feeling.

5) They accept suffering as a part of the change process. If you have body fat to drop there is a very good chance it didn’t get there through exercise and sound eating. Accepting that you now have to pay for the party is critical in embracing the suffering that going without is. It can be hard and that sucks, but being lazy and eating too much was easy, so the pendulum swings.

Possess these qualities and there’s a good chance that you have already taken control of your life and your body. If these characteristics don’t sound like you, start changing the way you act to embody them. You only have your extra body fat to lose!

Training With A Partner – Who’s Helping Who?

The term “averaging” is used a lot in performance coaching because, as social beings, we tend to spend a lot of time with other people and we being to take on some of their characteristics. Averaging is when two people shift an aspect of their behavior so as to become more like the other person. For example, if someone is a 4 in passion and the other person is a 6 in passion, chances are that they will average each other to a 5 or if a non-cursing person hangs out with people who curse all the time, there is a very good chance that they will end up cursing.

“You are the average of your 5 closest friends” is something that I will say to people who are trying to make positive behavioral changes people tend to mimic the people they are close to.

When it comes to training partners, I notice the same thing a lot of the time, particularly when it comes to training partners of the opposite sex. Undoubtedly, after some period of time, the stronger of the two will begin to get weaker, perform less efficiently and, in general, begin to slide backwards. The less advanced trainee will average-up, almost like they are robbing the strength / talent of their training partner. In almost every case, the relationship is parasitic and the weaker will stifle the progress of the stronger. It will seem like win:win, but it tends to be win:lose.

So if you are training with someone else, take a long hard look at what is happening and make sure that your progress isn’t being hampered by your well intentioned efforts to help someone else and if you are advancing quickly, make sure you aren’t burning the potential of your partner. If your gains are coming at the cost of someone else, you are just borrowing them and they aren’t really your gains; they’ll disappear when the other person figures out how the interaction is actually hurting them and makes the decision to work independently or with someone who will average them up.

Again, there is nothing wrong with any of this and it doesn’t always happen, just make sure you know the direction of the positive influence and that both parties are aware and agree to it. You can waste a lot of time if you are the stronger or if you are the weaker you can end up injured because you pushed past any reasonable limit.