Article 1
Utter the word ‘bodybuilding’ to anyone and the first picture that flashes in their mind is of a bunch of beefy guys sweating in the gym lifting heavy weights as they groan and grunt like bulls.
When I pick up an entertainment or fitness magazine nowadays I am pained to see the pathetic training routines to which the reader is exposed. Women, for example, are made to believe that curling a pair of one pound pink dumbbells and pressing their fingertips on their desktops is about to give them a body like Claudia Schiffer’s. Please! These routines, of their very nature, can only produce illusory results.
If bodybuilding is one of the most scientific sports practiced, it is also one of the most misunderstood. If I am to teach you anything about weight training and bodybuilding, well, it had better be something revolutionary: training styles you’ve never known before and workouts that take the minimum time but give the best results!
My knowledge has come from countless hours spent training and experimenting in the gym not to forget from reading and researching hundreds of articles and books written by the best bodybuilders worldwide.
Consider this for starters. One in every two women over the age of fifty will probably suffer from an osteoporosis (bone degeneration) related fracture. Bone density is the second test of how young a person is after his or her age. And what is the most effective method of increasing bone density? – Heavy weight training! Sounds interesting?
Along with osteoporosis, the most common syndrome creeping on both men and women who have crossed their mid-thirties is muscle atrophy (muscle loss). A muscle is active tissue and consumes calories even when at rest. Muscle loss leads to a calorie surplus which results in a slow fat gain in both middle aged men and women even though their calorie consumption has remained the same for years! In other words, muscle loss results in your getting weaker and fatter as you continue to grow older.
Again, the only way to prevent and reverse the process of muscle atrophy and fat gain is to train with heavy weights. And when I mean ‘heavy’, I don’t mean selecting the biggest hulk in the gym and trying to repeat your exercises with the weights that he has just lifted. ‘Heavy’ is a relative term and means only what is heavy for you. What is ‘heavy’ for an eighty year old grandma would no doubt only be ‘feather light’ to a twenty year old bodybuilder.
In my subsequent columns, I will take you through the most honest and time efficient workouts that you will have ever come across. Oh yeah, and did I forget to mention that you will need only fifteen to twenty minutes of training twice or thrice a week? I am about to unleash the training program that will give you the most ‘bang for the buck’. Be your goals muscle gain, fat loss, or just general fitness, you will know exactly what you need to do to give you your desired results.
Article 2
For some trainees, to gain weight seems an impossible task. Popularly known as ‘hard gainers’, they are individuals who have an ectomorph body type – thin and long bones, narrow shoulders, and a very high metabolism. Ectomorphs usually seem to eat all they want but are never able to gain even an ounce of weight in return. Why would someone want to change a body like that! Only the skinny ectomorph knows!
Most people of this class feel they look too thin and too weak. Some just want to gain a little weight hoping that will make them look better; others are hell-bent on building a body rippling with strong muscles.
At this point I would like to make it clear that there are only two types of weight gain: one comes from increasing muscle with weight training and is what gives the proper shape and symmetry to the body; the other is only FAT gain which shows in all the wrong places and is a result of lack of exercise and poor eating habits.
If your goal is weight gain it should always be of the first kind. Never should you try to gain fat no matter how thin your body. Fat, though crucial to survival, will anyway find its way even onto the thinnest of physiques. The minimum percentages of body fat required will be maintained by the body even in starvation conditions since the body always views fat resources as more precious than muscle!
Now let’s crank out some basic muscle building principles.
Muscle growth occurs with resistance training. It is the body’s adaptation to the stimulus from lifting weight it is not used to. Let us assume a trainee is able to lift a weight of ten kilos in one hand comfortably. The body is under no strain with this weight and will have no need to grow so long as the trainee continues lifting weights every time that are not more than ten kilos.
Suppose, however, the trainee should try lifting twelve kilos: the body immediately senses a strain. It realises it wasn’t strong enough to deal with the additional two kilos and it goes into a panic. This panic is because the body now feels that it could either fall sick or get injured from the new stress. It will therefore immediately spur muscle growth in the corresponding arm muscles.
For one thing, the body always prefers to be one step ahead. With the trainee lifting twelve kilos, his/her body will be ready the next time for fourteen kilos.
Another way of increasing muscle is to lift the same amount of weight for a larger number of repetitions each time. So, say, if the trainee lifts twelve kilos six times the first time, but increases it to eight times the next time, he/she will still continue gaining muscle. But this is only upto a point, since repetitions above twelve will result in endurance training rather than muscle building. It is therefore necessary to keep increasing the weight that you lift in small amounts frequently.
This is the basis of all weight training. If you desire to gain weight, remember you have to keep lifting heavier weights with every new workout. In fact, if your goal is to gain muscle, then no two workouts should ever be the same. Remember ‘if you do what you always did, you will get what you always got!’
Article 3.
When training for muscle growth a good diet is the most important factor to be considered. Actually, contrary to public perception, muscle growth only occurs outside the gym, that too, when it is backed by a good nutrition plan. In reality, most muscle growth takes place when you sleep!
Supposing you had a Ferrari, would you fill the fuel tank with sand and expect it to speed? What you eat is what you become.
When I started training with weights, I never paid any attention to my diet. I lifted heavy and trained up to three hours solid, thrice a week. For the first two months I made reasonable gains (naturally, considering my body wasn’t used to weight training). But after those two months, I stood at the same weight for the next two years. I deduced that this lack of improvement was a result of not training hard enough, so I started training harder only to find myself getting weaker!
Then one day I chanced upon an article on the Internet which simply said ‘Eat’.
I decided to try out the advice and in two months on a heavy diet I had gained ten kilos. Granted that it wasn’t all muscle – though I ate plenty of good food, I also ate processed food out often. Of the ten kilos, eight might have been pure muscle. The sudden change in my physique, however, sent shock waves through my buddies in the gym. Most thought I was juiced up on steroids.
But enough said about myself – I will now explain what exactly you need to do to gain the maximum muscle possible.
First, consider that every human body has a maintenance calorie value. This is the energy requirement of a human body to maintain its daily life processes of breathing, thinking, walking, wear and tear. etc.
Let us consider that the average maintenance caloric requirements are around 2500 calories. (The figure is very variable and changes depending on physique types, life-style etc.) At this value, no muscle growth would occur and the weight of a person would remain constant.
In order to produce muscle growth the body requires an additional 500 calories above its daily maintenance value per day. In the above example, that would add to a value of 3000 calories.
Five hundred calories extra a day adds to about 3500 calories surplus a week which is approximately the amount of calories needed to produce one pound of muscle per week.
For calculating one’s maintenance caloric value there are a number of formulas which take into consideration age, height, body weight, fat percentage etc. I, however, find it easier to run the following test when training for weight gain:
If my food intake produces a corresponding one to two pound weight increase per week (with weight training), I know my diet plan is at its optimum. If I don’t manage to gain a pound a week, I know my food intake is inadequate. So I bump it up by eating a little more or adding one extra meal daily for the following week.
I never allow myself to gain more than two pounds a week, knowing that an increase of more than two pounds will only mean fat accumulation along with muscle.
Article 4
When I train in the gym I find many of the people supposedly ‘working out’ having absolutely no clue as to what they are doing. If you observe carefully the next time in the gym you will find this prototype
This guy (or girl) will usually do a few odd hops for a warm up, then shuffle to the dumbbell rack, pick up a dumbbell and curl disinterestedly. Before his muscles have begun to feel the strain of the weight in his hands, he will have placed the weight back in the rack. Now, with a forehead dry as the Gobi desert in the afternoon, the same guy will saunter towards a shoulder press machine, stick the pin somewhere high in the stack and dispassionately move the handle up and down.
Chances are that this guy/girl is you!
Remember the most important thing you need to have when you enter a gym is a plan. Without one you could be firing blanks at a target in the dark holding the gun at your hip. You won’t hit anything.
When I began training, I worked out without a plan for quite some time before I realized I was spinning wheels in the same place. At the end of many months of training, I didn’t have a clue where I was; forget about whether I had improved at all.
But with a simple self-written plan I made such drastic improvements that I soon outgrew my gym and had to actually switch to a new one! What exactly is this plan I am referring to?
It is a simple sheet of paper on which you will begin by writing all the exercises you perform in the left hand margin. Next, you will draw columns in front of this margin, each one representing one week.
Beginning with week one, against each exercise performed, you will write the heaviest weight you used for this exercise and the maximum number of reps you were able to complete with it.
For example, if in Week 1, in the third set of your bench press exercise you were able to lift a total of 50 kilos four times, then the entry in your sheet of paper should look like this:
Week 1 Week 2 Week 3
Bench Press 50 x 4What is the purpose of this exercise you might wonder? Week 2 will provide you with the answer. When you perform the bench press again during Week 2, compare the figures you’ve just entered with those under Week 1.
Now suddenly you realize you don’t need a coach or anyone else to tell you if you are improving. If either of the figures (50 kilos or 4 repetitions) has increased, then congratulations, you’re already improving! Continue with the same training program even after you are lifting the whole gym with all the occupants inside it!
What if the figures remained the same or any one of them actually dipped lower than your last record. Then yes, that’s bad news; you haven’t improved or you might actually have gotten weaker. Don’t panic though! Unlike Mr. Shifty Shuffler wandering around the gym in a daze, you at least know exactly where you stand. Now all you have to do is remedy the situation.
If you’ve gotten weaker, it can only mean one of two possibilities: you are training too often and you haven’t yet recovered from your previous workout; or, you simply aren’t eating enough, which brings me to my next topic for discussion – training frequency.But that is the subject of my next column. Till then, train aggressively!
Article 5
How often do you need to weight train? Two to three times a week is all you actually need. Four times is your upper limit. If you are a skinny ectomorph and you’ve been training more than four times a week without results, chances are you are overtraining.
Most coaches advocate a six day per week training schedule. Under this type of a schedule the body is either divided into three parts (chest and triceps, back and biceps, shoulders and legs) with each muscle group trained twice a week, or six parts (each muscle being trained on a separate day and hit only once a week).
Logic among these coaches dictates that only 48 hours are needed for a muscle to recover. The same trainers also believe that after 72 hours of performing an exercise the effects of weight training on that muscle begin to wane away and the muscle slowly begins to revert back to its original strength and size. What a load of nonsense!
Don’t believe me? Train with me on my ‘leg day’ and forget 48 hours, I guarantee you that you won’t walk straight for a week after training day.
Recovery time for a muscle is a very variable figure and depends on a number of factors including diet, genetics, rest, level of the trainee and the intensity with which the muscle was trained.
Besides on a six day schedule even though you may train a particular muscle only once a week, essentially you are still beating up the same body every day!
Yes, ‘beating up’ you heard right. Weight training is a very strenuous form of exercise drawing enormous supplies of energy from the body. A heavy workout might be comparable to fighting in a battle or wrestling with a lion. Your body would need time to recover from a workout like this.
The fact is every time you weight train, your liver, heart, kidneys, brain, adrenal glands and other organs are working overtime to heal the effects of the battle and rebuild your body stronger. You only have one liver, one heart, and only one body. How do you expect to get stronger if you keep sending it to war everyday?
The figures for training frequency vary from person to person. For myself I found that I could make good gains training two to three times a week. For someone else four times may work great.
How do you determine your optimum training frequency? By tracking your progress with the training plan I discussed last issue. What is most important is to know that you are improving.
If you aren’t getting stronger with every new workout or if you keep falling sick and actually get weaker, then take a week off from all training. Eat well, and when you feel good hit the gym again with a vengeance. Only this time when you get back remember to train three days instead of six!
Article 6 How little do you need to train.
One of the reasons why many people are afraid to weight train is because they believe that once you start bodybuilding you have to continue training day after day for the rest of your life. The fear stems from the belief that if muscles are not trained they turn into fat.
I remember when I first started training many of my friends were against me lifting heavy weights.
‘One day Rahul you may not find the time to train and then all your big muscles will turn into sagging fat.’ They’d warn me.Disregarding all their nonsensical advice I’ve actually gone off weight training for months at a time. And while I lost some muscle size during those times not once did I gain an ounce of fat. My muscles always remained as firm and shapely as ever. And the best part was that, when I hit the gym back again after these long breaks, I would grow new muscle at an incredible rate. In two weeks I’d have not only gained back the little muscle I lost, but I’d be setting new personal weight lifting records!
And as far as the idea of ‘muscle turning into fat’ goes, get one thing straight. Muscle is and will always remain muscle. Just as butter cannot be converted into water, muscle cannot turn into fat.
Naturally the reverse i.e. water into butter isn’t possible either. No, there’s no such thing as shaping up fat into muscle. So, don’t ever gain enormous quantities of fat pigging out while convincing yourself that you will carve it all into muscle someday!
In order to gain weight I always you recommend you train 2-4 times a week at the most. Once you’ve built the body you are happy with maintaining it will only require that you train it once a week! If once a week is still too often for you, why, I’ll bargain for once every two weeks! Happy now?
And if you ever need to take a complete break from bodybuilding take one for as long as you desire. Eat in moderation (remember your body will require far less food than when you were training regularly) and you won’t gain a stitch of fat.
When you hit the gym again your muscles will be smaller and possibly weaker from the lack of exercise. But they will still be firm and shapely. They definitely won’t be hanging and sagging about the place as all your senile friends might have warned would happen!
And like I said you’ll make up for the lost muscle in no time. Meanwhile your Central Nervous System will have had a good holiday and your gains now will be speeding twice as fast!
Article 7
How long do you need to train?
When I began training I would spend between two and three hours every session. Two to three hours is a lot of time for an exercise s as intense as weight lifting and how I managed it at the time I don’t quite remember. All I remember is that the long hours left me completely drained and flat. And while my muscles got harder they actually also got smaller. I was once again over training!
Now, when I train, I set my watch to go at forty five minutes. Most often I finish in twenty five. If however my watch goes off while I’m still working a set I won’t even wait to complete it. I’ll rack the weights, pick up my bag, and head for home.
After forty five minutes of training I know that my testosterone levels will have begun to drop. With a plummet in Testosterone, Cortisol (the stress hormone) will have kicked in. And with Cortisol levels soaring, my fat burning efforts will have come to a screeching halt. Instead my body will have begun to catabolise and cannibalize on my own hard earned muscle as a source of fuel; something I definitely don’t need!
As I exit the gym I will literally cry when I think of those overweight ladies and skinny young men who’d have entered the gym when the sun rose but won’t quit killing themselves till the stars start shining.
Everyone thinks that the bodybuilding champs train for hours on end everyday; when the fact is that the champs won’t ever cross an hour per training session. The only way you might exceed that single hour of training is if you take drugs.
Actually, if you train intensely you won’t last forty five minutes! Train twenty reps of breathing squats with me one day and I promise you will be begging me to dismiss you after only three minutes!
Remember when it comes to building muscle it is more important that you lift more weight in the same unit of time.
That means your weight training sessions should be performed with a concentrated effort. Keep a gap of 1-3 minutes between sets. Your rest intervals should only be long enough for you to catch your breath.
Don’t spend your time talking to friends and gym buddies in between sets if your goal is to build muscle and not socialize.Life was meant for living. Don’t waste it in the gym. Enter the gym with the shortest but most effective plan. Get your results as quickly as possible.
And when you build the body of your dreams, use it to enjoy life outside the gym!
Article 8 Free Weights Versus Machines
These days new gyms are popping out by the dozens all over Goa. Most of them have the latest gadgets, chromed dumbbells, and machines for practically every muscle of the human body. Few years ago the only machines around were the Smith Machine and the odd Leg Press Sledge. Today, I wouldn’t be surprised if you even found a cannon-sized contraption in one of the latest gyms that is only designed to flex the little finger and nothing else!
Are all these fancy machines actually an advance over the plain barbell or a dirty green dumbbell seated on a rusty dumbbell rack? The answer is a big ‘No’.
In fact almost every one of these machines has at least one drawback over the free weight exercise it simulates.
Take for example performing the bench press exercise inside a bench machine vis-à-vis pushing two normal dumbbells on an ordinary flat bench. Both work the chest muscles.
But of the two the machine bench press is always much easier to perform. Because in case of the dumbbell bench press a trainee will notice that while he pushes the dumbbells into the air he also has to constantly balance them as they wobble and shake all the way to the top of the press movement. Now the body has to fire additional muscle fibers to only to balance the weight while it is moving upwards. Translated this simply means more muscle stimulated and therefore better growth when compared with the machine bench press.
In addition the balancing act of the dumbbell press ensures that both sides of the body grow symmetrically. Each arm and each side of the chest has to contract individually. If you have a weaker left triceps muscle or a smaller left pectoral it would get corrected and evened out naturally with a dumbbell bench press.
A machine press would do the opposite. Your stronger side would push most of the weight and get stronger, while your weaker side would continue to get weaker and weaker!
Weight training is not rocket science. There are no shortcuts and neither are there any breakthroughs as far as exercise techniques, machines or supplementation are concerned.
Do you really think your bicep knows the difference between lifting a dull green dumbbell or a chromed dumbbell? In the end remember the bicep muscle still contracts in the exact same way lifting a gym weight as it did while lifting a heavy boulder during Stone-age!
But I am not completely against machines. They do have some advantages. For one they are good to perform when you are or recovering from or working around an injury. For another, they provide for some variety.
Don’t however ever completely substitute or sacrifice free weights for machine training. In the end the best muscle building exercises for the chest will always remain the dumbbell bench press, the parallel bar dips, and all the free weights that go with it!