Getting Shredded Isn’t Easy and It Can Ruin You Forever

Yup, the title is a little alarmist and click-bait-y, I’ll take it. I want to talk about something that I haven’t seen the fitness industry really talk all that much about, or it’s just in passing as this casual disclaimer near the end of the article.

We’re going to be doing more and more articles and videos on the how’s and why’s of getting leaner, but I’d feel irresponsible if I didn’t issue this warning about a mental health cost that I have seen time and time again when people start getting truly lean/shredded for the first time ever.

The closest thing I’ve seen to anyone talking about what the cost of achieving the shredded 6-pack look, especially if you’re not genetically predisposed to carry a very small amount of body fat, was Precision Nutrition’s article “the cost of getting lean” where they basically talk about the time investment and social cost that different types of physiques take to achieve and maintain. Some other articles have whether correctly or incorrectly focused on the “metabolic damage” created by extreme diet practices, however, all these previously mentioned effects are reversible. Your metabolic rate can recover, you can recover your social life, and you can reduce the time cost that you expend on your fitness goals, but the way you see yourself may change forever.

You’ve probably heard the term “body dysmorphia” before and not thought much of it, not taken it seriously, or thought it could never happen to you. For those of you who haven’t heard of body dysmorphia, it’s a mental disorder where your own body image no longer lines up with objective reality, and an almost guaranteed way to get it is to push yourself to an unsustainable level of leanness – you are likely to view yourself as “fat” at any visibly higher body fat percentage than you were at your most shredded.

I’ve seen this plague almost every person who competes in bodybuilding/physique oriented competitions, and in professional and amateur models. I’ve seen it turn into anorexia, bulimia, and clinically disordered eating, and severe malnutrition and lasting health issues. Having had many interactions on many levels with people who have severe body dysmorphia, you can truly tell you’re dealing with someone who can no longer connect with reality in regards to their own body image. I’ve also experienced this effect myself, going sub 10% bodyfat multiple times over my training career. Anecdotally it seems the more of your self image and value that you place on your aesthetics, the more likely you are to succumb to mental health struggles and image shift that comes along with getting shredded

To give you an idea I’m currently sitting somewhere around 12-13% body fat, I have 4 abs all the time and 6 plus oblique lines if flexing, lower ab veins, and fairly high full body vascularity in good lighting; however, if I look at myself in the mirror, my mind immediately compares my physique to when I was 5-8% lower body fat, and recognizes my current physique as “fat and out of shape”. I am fortunate that I’m in a sport where my success is predicated on my performance, not on my aesthetics, and I am able to place a very low mental importance on this subconscious assessment of my own physique but I’d be remiss if I said it wasn’t there.

I’m not telling you not to pursue your physique goals, even if they are ambitious, but I am cautioning to not go into this process blindly thinking “it won’t happen to me”. It’s far better to be proactive vs reactive in this regard, to really examine your reasons why you want to push your body, and whether the pursuit of an unsustainable physique will have a net positive or negative effect on your health and happiness.

If you’re already here, meaning you’ve already succumb to the effects of body dysmorphia, and you’re starting to modify your behaviour in a self-sabotaging way, there is help, and you can overcome it. I will leave this article on a positive note that pretty much everyone I’ve seen get to the point where they can admit they have a problem, and seek professional help, have been able to reconcile their body image issues and live a healthy life.

Do You Do This at the Gym? Use Reverse Pyramiding To Fix This Common Gain Killing Mistake

How many times have you seen this in your gym:

• Guy walks up to bench
• Adds 45lbs per side
• Does 10-15 reps
• Adds 25lbs per side
• Does 8-12 reps, and only has 2-3 in the tank at this weight
• Removes 25lb plate and adds 45lb plate, now at 225lbs
• Does a glorified seizure on the bench and then racks the bar in frustration
• Complains that he can never break the 225lb barrier

His real problem? The way he warmed up; it’s called traditional pyramiding, and in my opinion, it sucks. Enter reverse pyramiding to the rescue. The biggest problem was that our reference person induced way too much fatigue in the warm ups to 225 and told his nervous system to be conservative with its output, because it needed to perform multiple low intensity contractions. Keep in mind your nervous system is kind of like Usain Bolt, it has a HUGE amount of potential to kick ass, but it’s lazy, and doesn’t want to work unless you force it to. If you have the strength to do 185×12 then you have the strength to bench 225, but not if you fatigue yourself first and fail to prime the nervous system for what you want it to do. Below I’m going to explain how to warm up to actually getting a real rep or more at 225 if you already have the strength to do so. Please keep in mind this can be scaled to any number you want 315, 405, 495 etc. and applies to all other lifts as well.

• Bar 2 sets of 5 reps, 30s rest, first set is slow and controlled grooving the perfect rep 5 times. The second set takes that pattern and adds velocity, telling your brain that it will need the fast twitch fibers activated in the coming sets
• 95 x 5 reps, regular rep speed, re-groove the pattern
• 135 x 5 reps, fast rep speed, stimulate the central nervous system
• 185 x 3 reps,  regular rep speed, prime the nervous system for heavier weight
• 205×1 whether it moves quickly or slowly, you must intend to move it quickly – the intention is just as important as the actual bar speed for recruiting fast twitch muscle fibers
• 225x however many reps you can/want to do, if you want to use other methods afterwards, leave a rep or two in the tank
• Do a sweet victory dance.

Now that you’ve hit the weight that you’ve always dreamed of, you have options. You can take advantage of the post activation potentiation effect – or PAP in most journal entries, which is like a fancy way of saying you’ve revved your internal engine and now it’s ready to kick more ass than if you started it cold. So now you can go back down the pyramid in a bunch of creative ways. Here are just a couple options:

Muscle Building:

• 185 for 1-3 sets of max reps, rest 60-90s per set, use the same grip or change it each set (wide, narrow, close)
• 135 for 1 set of max reps, use your weakest grip

Option 2

• 205 with the rest pause method (3 sets to failure with 30s rest between sets) rest 2mins
• 185 with the rest pause method (3 sets to failure with 30s rest between sets)

Option 3

• Cluster 5×5 at 200-210 finished in as little time as possible

Strength:

• Calculate your new 1 rep max

Each bullet is an option, all with full rest

•  4-6 singles between 93-97%
• 3×3 at 88-91%
• 5×2 at 90-95%
• Wait until next week and do 3,2,1 waves starting at 85% for 3 reps and add 5lbs do 2 reps, add 5lbs and do 1 rep, then add add 5lbs to your 3 rep set and restart the wave. Do 3-4 waves depending on feel. Note: if you’re above 300lbs in any lift, use 10lb jumps.

Athleticism and Rate of Force Development:

• Calculate your new 1 rep max

Each Bullet is an option

• 6×3 at 55-65%
• 5×2 at 75% contrasted with an explosive lift under 40% or medicine ball throw
• 3-5 sets of Bench press throws in the smith machine with 30-35% (don’t count the bar in the smith machine)
• 4-6 sets of plyometric pushup variations 1-3 reps per set

This is just the tip of the iceberg, there are honestly 30-50 more options for each category that I could have listed, but the point is you can use the PAP effect to improve output in any of those categories, just be sure not to burn yourself out and work up to a 1 rep max every week. As a very general rule, don’t train at or over 90% of a 1 rep max for more than 3 weeks in a row, more advanced athletes should stick to 2 weeks (by advanced I mean you bench press at least 1.7x your own bodyweight) and the extremely advanced athletes can break the rules in very specific scenarios, but if you’re there you already know that.

 

 

 

 

The 9 Best Tips To Improve Your Fitness

This article started as a question: “knowing what you do now, what would you do differently?”. So thinking back, these are the things I wish I knew, or reminded myself of when I was starting to change from just working out for the hell of it, to goal oriented training. It doesn’t matter if you’re an athlete after a record, competing in your first bodybuilding show, or looking to shed a couple pounds for summer, you can find something that applies to you and your training.  These tips are the 9 most effective training tips that I’ve compiled over 10 years of training myself and hundreds of others. Some of my more avid readers will notice some crossover between this article and the “6 things I’ve learned about life and training from 1.5 years and counting of rehabilitation” but I think the fact that some of those have cracked my top 9 shows just how important some of those lessons have been. Here they are in no particular order

1. Know Your Personality

I know I said no particular order but this may be the most important tip on this list. Are you one of those personality types that needs a kick in the ass to get out the door? Do you skip a training session just because your training partner cancelled? Or do you train through sickness and injury, staying a slave to your program because it’s written for 5 days a week; you have a broken arm, but it’s bench press day? Do you think you cannot skip a day because you’ll instantaneously shrink and your whole program will be ruined? Take a hard look in the mirror and figure out what side of the fence you sit on, and act accordingly.

One of the best quotes I’ve ever heard that puts this into perspective was “I spent the first 3 years of my training career learning to be consistent and never miss a workout, I spent the next 30 years learning to listen to my body and back off when needed” – wish I knew the author, but I’m pretty sure it came from the Dan John and Pavel Tsatsouline Book, Easy Strength.

2. Keep a Training Journal 

I’ve written entire articles on the importance of keeping a training journal, so I won’t go overboard here, but I will hammer this one point: How do you know if you’re objectively improving and not just fluctuating up and down? Did you do 300lbs for 10 reps or 12 reps last week? Was your spotter yelling “it’s all you!” with a death grip on the barbell? Maybe that was the week before? You have to write it down to be sure.

3. Don’t Overreact to the Natural Highs and Lows

You will have good weeks, you will have bad weeks; you will add 20lbs to a lift in a month, and you will go backwards in another. You’ll wake up cut and dry one morning and the next day you’ll feel bloated and fat. Your 40y time will go up and down. Natural up and downs are part of the process, and for some reason the body tends to adapt in wave like cycles. Two bad workouts in a row doesn’t mean your program is shit, you’re shit, and everything needs to change, and two excellent workouts in a row doesn’t mean you’ve found the holy grail of training and now every single workout going forward will be a cornucopia of rainbows and angelic harp music leading to 1million Instagram followers and multiple world records. If you chart your progress, it should look something like a well performing stock; take a birds eye view of your training and make sure you’re trending in the right direction and don’t pay too much attention to the small fluctuations up and down.

4. Educate Yourself

I heard L-Arginine is good for nitric oxide production, no wait that’s only in alpha-ketoglutarate formation, no, now arginine doesn’t help with nitric oxide production it’s other nitrates that raise blood levels. Why is nitric oxide important again? It’s for pumps right? But I read somewhere that the pump doesn’t actually build any muscle, so do I even need this? Some other article says it doesn’t build muscle on its own but it helps you recover from strenuous exercise….

Man, it can get really confusing, and even more confusing when someone’s trying to sell you something. Your bullshit filter is your biggest ally in your quest to improve your fitness, and it can be tough to know where to start. My personal recommendation is to stick with one source of information at the start, and once you have a foundation, then you can start branching out and expanding your knowledge base, which leads me to my next point

5. Keep an Open Mind and Positive Mind

I used to hate CrossFit; there, I said it, and with many of the gyms I still do. The inventors of CrossFit pretty much piss on 60 years of strength and conditioning research, know it, and market it with a smile. They take the highlight reel from every effective training modality and makes a watered down fast food version that they sell as the cure to cancer and sadness for everyone. BUT what I should have been thinking is: hey, looks like a lot people don’t want to specialize, like varied and fun training methods, and are interested in community-based fitness, and there has to be a way we can give it to them without the glaring errors in programming and injury risk. Also due to the popularity of CrossFit, some of the industry’s most brilliant minds turned their collective heads towards fixing some of the more significant shortcomings, new studies are being conducted, and with all the people experimenting with variants of concurrent training, we just might learn something that we can apply elsewhere. If you keep an open and positive mind you will learn so much more than if you shut yourself into a training cult.

6. Ask for Help

Never let your pride get in the way of getting better. I may be guiltier than most on this, but I’m working on it, and every time I beat the instinct to just do everything myself, I always come out better for it. Even just bouncing ideas off someone else and hearing yourself think out loud can do wonders. Suck it up and ask for help when you need it; you will be happy you did

7. Thinking you need X piece of equipment to achieve your goals

I am admittedly an equipment whore and am extremely picky about type of equipment I buy and put in the gym, but that being said I pulled my first ever 500lb deadlift with nothing more than a barbell and a set of dumbbells, a squat rack and an adjustable bench. If you have those basic items you have everything you need to train an elite athlete, compete in a bodybuilding show, lose 20lbs of fat, gain 20lbs of muscle, get faster, improve general or specific endurance, etc. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking your progress would be 10x better if you just had X piece of equipment, it may help, or make something easier, but it’s never an excuse for lack of progress.

8. Even if you want to excel at many things, focus on one or two things at a time

“Check out my Sheiko style routine that I modified using the rest-pause method and intraset stretching, I’ve added tabata intervals to keep the fat at bay and fat burner for extra support. I’m also going to take creatine this cycle to maximize my mass gains and add in aerobic work for recovery, and sprints because I’ve heard they can alter the fast to slow twitch muscle fiber ratio. I’m also thinking about integrating peripheral heart action or bioenergetic sequencing to really optimize this training cycle, and on top of that I’ve got this new diet all set up” – Great. I don’t know what would be worse, if it worked or if it failed miserably. If you try everything at once, chances are it won’t work the way you intended, and even if you have some mild success, how are you going to repeat it? Was it the volume? The intensity? The specialized methods? The supplements? Would you have gotten better results by using the same routine with one specialized method? What caused the greatest interference effect? Can you sustain this workload forever, (you can’t), how will you change it to progress?. If your plan doesn’t work and you start running yourself into the wall, chances are you scrap everything and try the next super combo that you read about on X website and likely run into equally disastrous results. Focus on one or two things at a time, evaluate the effectiveness of the methods, and sequence them in a logical order. I’d check that article out even if you’re not even remotely into CrossFit

There you have it, the best 8 tips for improving your fitness. As I look back on the list now that all 8 relate to the mental/congitive/emotional side of the training equation, and the more and more people I train, the more confident I am that the mind is the single most important factor in determining their success. Win the battle of the mind and you will crush your fitness goals, and you just might find that the iron teaches you something about yourself in the process.