Water and Bodybuilding

                                WATER

The human body is about 60 percent water in adult males and about 70 percent in adult females. Muscles themselves are about 70 percent water, in bodybuilding it must be between 70 to 75 percent.

That alone tells you how important staying hydrated is to maintaining optimal levels of health and body function. Your body’s ability to digest, transport, and absorb nutrients from food depends upon proper fluid intake, and staying hydrated helps prevent injuries in the gym by cushioning joints and other soft-tissue areas.

As you can see, when your body is dehydrated, just about every physiological process is negatively affected.

To avoid dehydration, the Institute of Medicine reported in 2004 that women should consume about 91 ounces of water—or three-quarters of a gallon—per day, and men should consume about 125 ounces per day (a gallon is 128 ounces).

Now, keep in mind that those numbers include the water found in food, which accounts for about 20 percent of the water in the average person’s diet.

I’ve been drinking 1 to 2 gallons of water per day for years now, which is more than the Institute of Medicine’s baseline recommendation, but I sweat a fair amount when I exercise and I live in Florida, which means even more fluid loss through sweating.

Make sure the water you drink every day is filtered and not straight from the tap. While some people assume that tap water is clean enough to drink regularly, research has shown that it is becoming more and more contaminated with all kinds of pollutants, including bacteria, pharmaceuticals, heavy metals, and various types of poisonous chemicals.

Many people are already aware of this and stick to bottled water, but this isn’t a great solution. Not only is it expensive, but research has also shown that bottled water is chock full of chemicals. One study examined 18 different bottled waters from 13 different companies and found more than 24,000 chemicals present, including endocrine disruptors.

Martin Wagner, a scientist at Goethe University Frankfurt’s Department of Aquatic Ecotoxicology, had this to say:

“Bottled water had a higher contamination of chemicals than glass bottles. There are many compounds in bottled water that we don’t want to have there. Part is leaching from the plastic bottles, lids or contamination of the well.”

This is why I recommend investing in an effective water filtration device and why I stick to filtered water myself.

THE 4 SCIENTIFIC LAWS OF HEALTHY FAT LOSS

THE 4 SCIENTIFIC LAWS OF HEALTHY FAT LOSS

For me, life is continuously being hungry. The meaning of life is not simply to exist, to survive, but to move ahead, to go up, to achieve, to conquer.

— ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER


Evolution has taught the body that having fat means being able to survive the times when food is scarce. Many thousands of years ago, when our ancestors were roaming the wilderness, they often journeyed for days without food, and their fat stores were all that kept them alive.

Starving, they would finally kill an animal and feast, and their bodies knew to prepare for the next bout of starvation by storing excess energy as fat, as it was literally a matter of life and death.

This genetic programming is still in us. When you restrict your calories for fat-loss purposes, your body reduces its total fat stores to stay alive, but it also slows down its basal metabolic rate to conserve energy.

If you restrict your calories too severely or for too long, this metabolic downregulation, or “metabolic adaptation,” as it’s often called, can become quite severe, and the basal metabolic rate can plunge to surprisingly low levels.

This mechanism is why “calorie counting” seems to not work for some people. It has nothing to do with hormone problems or eating too many carbs or anything other than the fact that the energy out part of the equation is impaired. Their bodies aren’t burning nearly as much energy as they should be.

This is only the beginning of the problems with the “crash” approach to dieting, however, that has you enduring severe calorie deficits for extended periods:

• You lose a lot of muscle, which not only leads to the dreaded “skinny fat” look, but it also impairs bone health and increases the overall risk of disease.

• Your testosterone levels plummet and cortisol levels skyrocket, which not only makes you feel horrible but also accelerates muscle loss.

• Your energy levels take a nosedive, you struggle with intense food cravings every day, and you become mentally clouded and even depressed.

Fortunately, you can fix the metabolic adaptation and all the other negative effects of low-calorie dieting by slowly increasing food intake over time and thus bringing your basal metabolic rate back to a healthy level.

But the real goal is to prevent it altogether, and that’s what we’re going to focus on in this chapter: the laws of healthy fat loss that, when followed, allow for consistent weight reduction without major metabolic slowing or muscle loss.

THE FIRST LAW OF HEALTHY FAT LOSS

EAT LESS ENERGY THAN YOU BURN TO LOSE FAT

As you now know, fat loss is just a science of numbers. No matter what anyone tells you, getting ripped boils down to nothing more than making a simple mathematical formula work for you: energy consumed versus energy expended.

Contrary to much of the mainstream advice these days, it doesn’t matter what you eat. If your metabolism is healthy and you set your calorie intake correctly—if you maintain a moderate calorie deficit by eating a bit less energy than you burn every day—you will lose weight.

Don’t believe me?

Professor Mark Haub from Kansas State University conducted a weight-loss study on himself in 2010.
He started the study at 211 pounds and 33.4 percent body fat (overweight). He calculated that he would need to eat about 1,800 calories per day to lose weight without starving himself.

He followed this protocol for two months and lost 27 pounds, but here’s the kicker: while he did have one protein shake and a couple of servings of vegetables each day, two-thirds of his daily calories came from Twinkies, Little Debbies, Doritos, sugary cereals, and Oreos—a “convenience store diet,” as he called it. And he not only lost the weight, but his “bad” cholesterol, or LDL, dropped 20 percent and his “good” cholesterol, or HDL, increased 20 percent.

Of course, Haub doesn’t recommend this diet, but he did it to prove a point. When it comes to fat loss, calories are king.

This is nothing new in the scientific study of weight loss and energy balance. Metabolic research on human calorie expenditure stretches back nearly a century, and by now, the entire physiology is fully understood.

A fantastic review of the subject can be found in a paper published by researchers at the University of Lausanne, in case you want to dive into the (fairly complicated) details.

As you also know, healthy fat loss isn’t as simple as drastically cutting your calories and starving yourself. Eventually the muscle loss, metabolic slowdown, and other undesirable effects become too much. Finally, after you can’t take the misery anymore, you’ll likely go in the other direction, dramatically increasing calorie intake by bingeing and gorging on everything in sight for days or weeks, and wind up back where you began.

In fact, you can end up even worse off. This vicious cycle has been shown to result in rapid fat storage, often beyond prediet body fat levels.
In other words, people end up fatter than when they started dieting in the first place.

So the bottom line is this: you will need to watch your calories to effectively lose weight. You’ll have to stay disciplined and forego the snacks and goodies not worked into your meal plans. You’ll probably have to deal with some hunger now and then.

But, if you do it right, you can get absolutely shredded without losing muscle…or even while gaining muscle (yes, this can be done—more on that later).

THE SECOND LAW OF HEALTHY FAT LOSS

USE MACRONUTRIENTS PROPERLY TO OPTIMIZE YOUR BODY COMPOSITION

As I mentioned earlier, while a “calorie is a calorie” for weight-loss purposes alone, a calorie is not a calorie when it comes to optimizing body composition. What you eat matters very little if you’re just trying to see the number go down on the scale, but it matters very much if you’re trying to lose fat and not muscle.

If you eat too little protein while restricting calories for weight loss, you’ll lose more muscle than you would if you had eaten an adequate amount.

If you eat too few carbohydrates while in a calorie deficit, your training will suffer, your muscle repair will be impaired, and your hormone profile will become more catabolic.

If you eat too little dietary fat, you can experience a significant drop-off in testosterone levels and other undesirable effects.

As you can see, if you want your weight-loss regimen to be maximally effective, you want to restrict your calories but also eat enough protein and carbohydrate to preserve muscle mass and performance and enough dietary fat to maintain healthy hormone levels as well as general health. Adequate dietary fats are necessary to maintain healthy skin and hair, insulate body organs against shock, regulate body temperature, and promote healthy cell function.

While that sounds complicated, it’s not. In fact, it’s probably the simplest way of going about dieting, and you’ll learn all about it later in this book.

THE THIRD LAW OF HEALTHY FAT LOSS

EAT ON A SCHEDULE THAT WORKS BEST FOR YOU

Most meal timing advice calls for eating multiple small meals per day, and the reason often given is that eating like this will speed up your metabolism and thus help you lose weight faster.

It seems to make sense at first. By putting food in our bodies every few hours, it has to constantly work to break it down, which should speed up our metabolism, right?

Well, kind of…but it doesn’t help with weight loss.

You see, each type of macronutrient (protein, carbohydrate, and fat) requires varying amounts of energy to break down and process. This is known as the thermic effect of food and is the metabolic “boost” that comes with eating.

The magnitude and duration of that boost depends on how much you eat. A small meal causes a small metabolic spike that doesn’t last long, whereas a large meal produces a larger spike that lasts longer.

So the question, then, is whether eating more smaller meals per day increases total energy expenditure over a 24-hour period than fewer larger meals?

Well, in an extensive review of literature, scientists at the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research looked at scores of studies comparing the thermic effect of food in a wide variety of eating patterns, ranging from 1 to 17 meals per day.

In terms of 24-hour energy expenditure, they found no difference between nibbling and gorging. Small meals caused small, short metabolic boosts, and large meals caused larger, longer boosts. By the end of each day, they balanced out in terms of total calories burned.

We can also look to a weight-loss study conducted by researchers from the University of Ontario, which split subjects into two dietary groups: three meals per day and three meals plus three snacks per day, with both in a caloric restriction for weight loss.
After eight weeks, 16 participants completed the study, and researchers found no significant difference in average weight loss, fat loss, or muscle loss.

So eating more, smaller meals doesn’t directly help or hinder fat loss. What about appetite? Can it help there?

A study conducted by scientists at the University of Missouri with 27 overweight/obese men found that after 12 weeks of dieting to lose weight, increasing protein intake improved appetite control, but meal frequency (three vs. six meals per day) had no effect.

Researchers from the University of Kansas investigated the effects of meal frequency and protein intake on perceived appetite, satiety, and hormonal responses in overweight/obese men.
 They found that higher protein intake led to greater feelings of fullness and that eating six meals resulted in lower daily fullness than three meals.

On the other hand, you can find studies that found participants were less satiated on three meals per day and that increasing meal frequency improved their feelings of fullness and made it easier to stick to their diets.

The bottom line is that many variables are involved with the appetite, including psychological ones, and our hunger patterns are established by our regular meal patterns, so it’s usually easiest to work around this, not against it.

This is why clinical evidence shows that both more and fewer meals per day are effective for weight loss and have no inherent drawbacks or advantages in terms of metabolic rate and appetite control.

Let’s now talk about a bogeyman that scares dieters everywhere: late-night eating.

Somehow, many people believe that eating too much food later in the day will accelerate fat storage, so they avoid it all costs, preferring to go hungry for hours on end over shifting meals around to better suit their hunger patterns.

Well, as you now know, fat loss and gain depend wholly on energy balance and have nothing to do with meal timing. This means you get to eat as late as you want. This isn’t just theory, either—it’s been proven in multiple scientific studies.

For example, a study conducted by researchers at the University of Chieti in Italy found that calorie intake in the morning or evening didn’t affect weight loss or body composition parameters.

A study performed by researchers at Vanderbilt University demonstrated interesting results: subjects who normally ate breakfast lost more weight by skipping it and eating the majority of calories at dinner, whereas subjects who normally skipped breakfast lost more weight by eating breakfast every day.
Researchers chalked this up to greater levels of satiety and thus better dietary compliance.

Another study on the matter, this time from researchers at the of University of São Paulo in Brazil, showed that splitting calories into five equal meals per day eaten between 9 AM and 8 PM, eating all calories in the morning, and eating all calories in the evening didn’t affect weight loss parameters or body composition.

I’ve also put this research to the test many times, both in my own meal planning and with people I help and work with, sometimes jamming large portions of our daily calories into late-night dinners, whether out of necessity or choice.

As expected, it made no difference in our results. So long as you stick to your daily numbers, your body will respond just as it should.

While we’re on the subject of late eating, I recommend that you eat 30 to 40 grams of a slow-digesting protein like egg or casein (either from a powder or from a whole-food source like low-fat cottage cheese) thirty minutes before going to bed, as research has shown that this improves muscle recovery due to the increased availability of amino acids for repair while you sleep.

So, the long story short is that you don’t need to be a slave to a rigid meal schedule. Eat as frequently or infrequently as you like, because when you eat has little bearing on your ability to lose fat. Use meal timing as a tool to make your dieting as enjoyable and convenient as possible. This way, you can stick to your diet, which is what matters in the end.

Now, if you’re wondering where to start—with more or fewer meals per day—I recommend that you eat several smaller meals per day (four to six meals per day works well).

In my experience coaching thousands of people, most are like me and prefer the experience of eating more small meals as opposed to fewer large ones. I personally don’t like eating between 800 and 1,000 calories to then feel stuffed for several hours. I much prefer a 400-calorie meal that leaves me satisfied for a few hours, followed by another smaller meal of different food.

If you already know that you don’t want to or can’t eat that frequently, then don’t sweat it. Do whatever will work best for you.

THE FOURTH LAW OF HEALTHY FAT LOSS

USE EXERCISE TO PRESERVE MUSCLE AND ACCELERATE FAT LOSS

You can lose weight by restricting calories without exercising, but adding exercise—both resistance and cardiovascular training—comes with some major benefits.

The addition of resistance training to a calorie deficit preserves muscle and BMR, and it provides a substantial “afterburn” effect.
Adding cardiovascular training burns more energy and thus more fat.

In my opinion, restricting calories for weight loss without also doing some form of resistance training to preserve muscle is just a mistake. It’s going to result in at least mild muscle loss, and this not only isn’t good for looks, but it’s bad for your health too.

Cardio is negotiable. There’s nothing inherently unhealthy or bad about not including it in your weight-loss regimen, but I’ll tell you this: you will only get so far with diet and resistance training alone.

If you’re planning on getting below 10 percent body fat, I can pretty much guarantee that you’re going to need to include some cardio in your routine to get there. Fortunately, however, you won’t have to do nearly as much as most people think

THE 5 BIGGEST FAT LOSS MYTHS AND MISTAKES

THE 5 BIGGEST FAT LOSS MYTHS AND MISTAKES

The road to nowhere is paved with excuses.

—MARK BELL

For thousands of years now, a lean, muscular body has been the gold standard of the male physique.

It was a hallmark of the ancient heroes and gods, and it has remained a revered quality; it has been idolized in pop culture, achieved by few, but coveted by many.

With obesity rates over 35 percent here in America (and steadily rising), it would appear that getting shredded and becoming one of the “physical elite” must require superhuman genetics or a level of knowledge, discipline, and sacrifice beyond what most people are capable of.

Well, this simply isn’t true. The knowledge is easy enough to understand (in fact, you’re learning everything you need to know in this book).

Sure, it requires discipline and some “sacrifice” in that no, you probably don’t have the metabolism to eat a large pizza every day and have a six pack, but here’s the kicker: when you’re training and dieting correctly, you’ll enjoy the lifestyle. You’ll look forward to the gym every day. You’ll never feel starved, you’ll get to eat foods you love, and you won’t suffer from overpowering cravings.

When you find this “sweet spot,” you’ll look and feel better than you ever have before and find it infinitely more pleasurable and valuable than being lazy, fat, and addicted to ice cream and potato chips. When you can get into this “zone,” you can do whatever you want with your body. The results are inevitable; it’s just a matter of time.

Most people never get there though. They either lack the will or desire to get there (they don’t have their “inner game” sorted out), or they lack the know-how required to make it happen, or both.

Well, in this chapter, we’re going to address the five most common myths and mistakes of getting ripped. Like the muscle-building fallacies, these errors have permeated the health and fitness space and mucked things up for millions of people.

Let’s dispel them once and for all so that they can’t block your path to achieving the lean, muscular body that you desire.

MYTH & MISTAKE #1

WATCHING CALORIC INTAKE IS UNNECESSARY

If I had a penny for every person I’ve spoken with who wanted to lose weight but didn’t want to have to count calories…well, you know the rest.

This is about as logical as wanting to drive across the state without paying attention to the gas tank. Could you do it? Maybe. But it’s going to be a lot trickier and more stressful than it should be.

Now, I won’t be too hard on these people because they often don’t even know what a calorie is. They just don’t want to be bothered with having to count something or worry about whether they can “afford” one food or another, and I can understand that.

Here’s the truth, though: whether you want to call it “counting” calories, meal planning, or something else, to effectively lose fat, you have to regulate your food intake.

You see, the metabolism is an energy system and operates according to the laws of energy. Losing fat requires that you keep your body burning more energy than you’re feeding it, and the energy potential of food is measured in calories.

Chances are this isn’t news to you, but I want to quickly review the physiology of fat loss just in case you’re not convinced that fat loss boils down to the mathematics of energy consumed versus energy burned.

The underlying scientific principle at work is energy balance, which refers to the amount of energy you burn every day versus the amount you give your body via food.

According to the laws of physics underlying this principle, if you give your body a bit more energy than it burns every day, a portion of the excess energy is stored as body fat, and thus you gain weight slowly. If you give your body a bit less energy than it burns every day, it will tap into fat stores to get the additional energy it needs, leaving you a bit lighter.

You see, any given time, your body requires a certain amount of glucose in the blood to stay alive. This is vital fuel that every cell in the body uses to operate, and certain organs like the brain are real glucose hogs.

When you eat food, you give your body a relatively large amount of energy (calories) in a short period. Glucose levels rise far above what is needed to maintain life, and instead of “throwing away” or burning off all excess energy, a portion is stored as body fat for later use.

Scientifically speaking, when your body is absorbing nutrients eaten and storing fat, it’s in the “postprandial” state (post meaning “after” and prandial meaning “having to do with a meal”). This “fed” state is when the body is in “fat storage mode.”

Once the body has finished absorbing the glucose and other nutrients from the food (amino acids and fatty acids), it then enters the “postabsorptive” state (“after absorption”), wherein it must turn to its fat stores for energy. This “fasted” state is when the body is in “fat burning mode.”

Your body flips between “fed” and “fasted” states every day, storing fat from the food you eat and then burning it once there’s nothing left to use from the meals. Here’s a simple graph that depicts this cycle:



The lighter portions are the periods where your body has excess energy because you ate. The darker portions are the periods when the body has no energy left from food and thus has to burn fat to stay alive. As you can see, we burn quite a bit of fat when we sleep.

If the lighter and darker portions balance out every day—if you store just as much fat as you burn—your weight stays the same. If you store more fat than you burn (by overeating), you get fatter. And if you burn more fat than you store, you get leaner.

This is the fundamental mechanism underlying fat storage and fat loss, and it takes precedence over anything related to insulin or any other hormones or physiological functions.

Simply put, you can’t get fatter unless you feed your body more energy than it burns, and you can’t get leaner unless you feed it less energy than it burns.

Contrary to (currently) popular belief, it doesn’t many how many carbohydrates you eat or how high your insulin levels are throughout the day. Energy balance is the first law of thermodynamics at work: fat stores can’t be increased without the provision of excess energy, nor can they be reduced without the restriction of energy.

That’s why research has shown that so long as they’re eating less energy than they’re burning, people lose fat equally well on high-carbohydrate or low-carbohydrate diets.

The bottom line is that the types of foods you eat have little to do with losing or gaining weight. In this regard, a calorie is a calorie. That isn’t to say that you should eat nothing but junk food to lose weight, however. What you eat does matter when we’re talking about maintaining optimal body composition. If you want to lose fat and not muscle, a calorie is not a calorie, but we’ll talk more about that later.

So, with that out of the way, let’s get back to calorie counting. What people usually dislike most about it isn’t the counting but the trying to figure out what to eat while on the run every day or what to buy when rushing through the grocery store.

When you have a 30-minute window for lunch and run to the nearest restaurant, you don’t want to have to load an app and try to estimate calories. You want to just order something that sounds healthy and hope for the best.

Unfortunately, these quick, “healthy” meals have hundreds more calories than you might think. Repeat that for dinner, with a few random snacks thrown in for good measure, and you’ve simply eaten too much to reduce your total fat mass. You’ll have stored just as much, if not more, fat as you burned, and your weight will remain the same or go up accordingly.

So the real problem isn’t counting calories but failing to make and follow a meal plan that allows you to eat foods you like while ensuring that you burn more fat than you store over time.

Sure, it’s easier to just heat up a big plate of leftovers or grab some fast food for lunch and carry on with your day, but that convenience comes with a price: little or no weight loss.

MYTH & MISTAKE #2

DO CARDIO AND YOU’LL LOSE FAT

Every day, I see overweight people grinding away on the cardio machines. And week after week goes by with them looking the same.

They are under the false impression that grinding away on an elliptical machine or stationary bike will somehow flip a magical fat-loss switch in the body. Well, as you now know, that’s not how it works.

Cardio can enhance fat loss in two ways—burning calories and speeding up your metabolic rate—but that’s it.

And since I’ve brought it up, let’s talk briefly about the “metabolic rate.” Your body burns a certain number of calories regardless of any physical activity, and this is called your basal metabolic rate (BMR). Your total daily energy expenditure (TDEE) for a day would be your BMR plus the energy expended during any physical activities.

When your metabolism is said to “speed up” or “slow down,” what this means is that your basal metabolic rate has gone up or down. That is, your body is burning more or fewer calories while at rest.

Cardio, especially a variety I recommend called high-intensity interval cardio (HIIT), can increase your basal metabolic rate through what’s known as the “afterburn effect.” While that sounds fancy and is often used in sketchy marketing pitches for sketchy products, it’s simple: your body continues burning additional energy after you exercise.

But here’s the thing with cardio: if you don’t also eat correctly, that nightly run or bike ride won’t save you.

Let’s say you’re trying to lose weight and have unwittingly eaten 600 calories more than your body has burned for the day. You go jogging for 30 minutes at night, which burns about 300 calories, with maybe another hundred calories burned from the “afterburn” effect.

You’re still 200 calories over your expenditure, and that means no reduction in total fat stores for the day—and maybe even an increase.

You could continue like this for years and never get lean; instead, you could slowly get fatter. This is the most common reason why people simply “can’t lose weight no matter what they do.”

MYTH & MISTAKE #3

CHASING FAD DIETS

The Atkins Diet. The South Beach Diet. The Paleo Diet. The HCG Diet (this one makes me cringe). The Hollywood Diet. The Body Type Diet.

It seems like a new fad diet pops up every month or two. I can’t keep up these days.

While not all “latest and greatest” diets are bad (Paleo is unnecessarily restrictive but quite healthy, for example), the sheer abundance of fad diets being touted by ripped models and actors is confusing people as to what the “right way” to lose weight is (and understandably so).

The result is that many people jump from diet to diet, failing to get the results they desire. And they buy into some pretty stupid stuff simply because they don’t understand the physiology of the metabolism and of fat loss like you now do. Or they don’t want to accept it.

Regardless, the rules are the rules, and no fancy diets or snake oil supplements will help you get around them.

As the old saying goes, the best diet is the one you can follow, and as you’ll see, a flexible, balanced approach to eating is by far the most enjoyable and thus the most effective. Once you experience this for yourself, you’ll fully realize how asinine many of the fad diets taking gyms by storm are.

MYTH & MISTAKE #4

DOING TONS OF REPS GETS YOU SHREDDED

Many “gurus” recommend that you follow a high-rep, low-weight routine to “shred up,” but this is the complete opposite of what you want to do.

The reality is that your body is “primed” for muscle loss when you’re in a calorie deficit, and by focusing exclusively on muscle endurance (higher-rep ranges), you’ll set yourself up for rapid strength loss, with the potential for significant muscle loss as well

The key to preserving strength and muscle while losing weight is to lift heavy weights. The goal is to continue progressively overloading your muscles, which ensures protein synthesis rates remain elevated enough to prevent muscle loss.

There are fat-loss benefits to heavy weightlifting as well.

A study published by Greek sports scientists found that men who trained with heavy weights (80 to 85 percent of 1RM) increased their metabolic rates over the following three days, burning hundreds more calories than the men who trained with lighter weights (45 to 65 percent of 1RM).

Yes, hundreds more calories. That’s significant.

And if you want to really score extra calories burned, focus on compound lifts like squats and deadlifts, because these are the types of lifts that burn the most post-workout calories.

The bottom line is getting that shredded look is just a matter of having a fair amount of muscle and a low amount of body fat—and nothing else. There aren’t any special exercises that “bring out the striations,” and burning your muscles out with tons of reps does nothing to improve your overall look.

MYTH & MISTAKE #5

TRYING TO “SPOT REDUCE” FAT

Pick up just about any fitness magazine, and you’ll find workouts for getting a six pack, slimming the thighs, getting rid of love handles, and the like.

I wish it were that simple.

While research has shown that training a muscle results in increased levels of blood flow and lipolysis (the breakdown of fat cells into usable energy) in the area, it’s not in a large enough quantity to matter.

The reality is that training the muscles of a certain area of your body burns calories and can result in muscle growth, both of which certainly can aid in fat loss, but it doesn’t directly burn the fat covering them to any significant degree.

You see, fat loss occurs in a whole-body fashion. You create the proper internal weight loss environment (a calorie deficit), and your body reduces fat stores all over the body, with certain areas reducing faster than others.

You can do all the crunches you want, but you’ll never have a six pack until you’ve adequately reduced your overall body fat percentage, and that’s more a function of proper dieting than anything else.

Ironically, if you want an area of your body to be leaner, training the muscles without also ensuring you’re reducing your body fat percentage will only aggravate the problem. The muscles will grow but the layer of fat will remain, which will only result in the area looking bigger and puffier.

I often run into this with women who get into weightlifting without also addressing their body fat percentage. This is why many women believe weightlifting makes them “bulky.” They started weightlifting to look lean, toned, and athletic, not to have even more trouble fitting into their clothes.

This is why I often repeat a simple rule of thumb: the more muscle you build, the leaner you have to be to avoid looking big and bulky. A woman who has built an appreciable amount of muscle (one or more years of weightlifting) will want to stay at or under 20 percent body fat to maintain the “athletic” look of toned arms, a tight stomach, shapely legs, a big butt, etc. For us guys, we need to stay at or under 10 percent for the look we’re usually after: fully visible abs, small waist, vascularity, “dense”-looking muscles, etc.

Now, we all have our “fat spots” that plague us, and that’s just genetics for you. Some guys I know store every last pound in their hips, while others are fortunate to have their fat accumulate more in their chest, shoulders, and arms more so than their waistline.

Rest assured, however, that you can lose as much fat all over your body as you want, and you can get as shredded as you want; you’ll just have to be patient and let your body lean out in the way it’s programmed to.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Like building muscle, many people approach fat loss completely wrong and thus fail to achieve their weight goals.

But, just like building muscle, the laws of healthy fat loss are very simple and incredibly effective. Carry on to learn the laws and how to put them to work for you.

HOW TO DO YOUR WORKOUTS

HOW TO DO YOUR WORKOUTS

You want to do the exercises one at a time, in the order given.

So you start with the first exercise and do your warm-up sets, followed by your 3 heavy sets (with the proper rest in between each, of course), and then move on to the next exercise on the list, and so forth, like this:

Exercise 1: Set 1

Rest

Exercise 1: Set 2

Rest

Exercise 1: Set 3

Rest

Exercise 2: Set 1

Rest

And so on.

THE “SECRET” TO A PROPER WARM-UP ROUTINE

What if I told you that with one simple technique you could immediately increase your strength on every lift while also reducing the risk of injury?

Well, you can, and the “secret” lies in how you warm up each muscle group before hitting the heavy weights.

Warm up incorrectly, and you can reduce your strength and set yourself up for muscle strains or worse. Here’s an example of an ineffective warm-up routine:

Put 135 pounds on the bar and do about 10 to 15 reps. Rest a few minutes and then go to 185 pounds for 12 reps. After another short rest, go up to 205 pounds for 8 reps, which is done to failure. A few minutes later, it’s 4 to 6 reps with 225 pounds, followed by a longer rest and finally a monumental struggle with 275 pounds for 2 reps.

What’s the problem here? Well, by the time you get to the heavy, muscle-building sets, you’re so fatigued from what you’ve already done that you can’t handle the heavy stuff nearly as well you should be able to. This leads to subpar workouts that fail to overload the muscles adequately and thus produce lackluster results over time.

Another common warm-up mistake is doing too little. Many guys are anxious to start loading the plates and thus only do one light warm-up set before hitting the heavy stuff. This can lead to muscle strains, joint impingements, or worse.

Warm up correctly, however, and you will find that you can tap into your maximum strength without increasing the risk of injury. This helps you maximally overload your muscles without having to worry about getting hurt, which in turn safely stimulates the maximum amount of muscle growth.

A proper warm-up routine has two simple goals: to introduce blood into the muscles to be trained and to progressively acclimate them to heavy weight without causing fatigue. You want your muscles fresh and ready for the heavy sets—the muscle-building sets—and not burned out from too much warm-up work.

Here’s how you do it:

First Set:

In your first warm-up set, you want to do 12 reps with about 50 percent of your heavy, 4- to 6-rep set weight and then rest for 1 minute. This set should feel very light and easy.

For instance, if you did 3 sets of 5 reps with 225 pounds on the bench last week, you would start your warm-up with about 110 pounds and do 12 reps, followed by 1 minute of rest.

Second Set:

In your second warm-up set, you use the same weight as the first and do 10 reps, this time at a little faster pace. Then rest for 1 minute.

Third Set:

Your third warm-up set is 4 reps with about 70 percent of your heavy weight, and it should be done at a moderate pace.

This set and the following one are done to acclimate your muscles to the heavy weights that are about to come. Once again, you follow this set with a 1-minute rest.

With a working set weight of 225, this would be about 155 to 160 pounds.

Fourth Set:

The fourth warm-up set is the final one, and it’s simple: 1 rep with about 90 percent of your heavy weight. Rest 2 to 3 minutes after this final warm-up set.

This would be about 200 pounds if your heavy weight were 225.

Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Sets:

These are your working sets performed in the 4- to 6-rep range with about 85 percent of your 1RM.

Moving on to the Next Exercise:

Generally speaking, you don’t need to perform more warm-up sets in a workout beyond the four laid out above. For instance, if you start your workout with the flat bench press and then move to the incline press, you don’t have to do a new round of warm-up sets.

That said, I do like to do a 10- to 12-rep warm-up when moving on to an exercise that targets muscles that aren’t sufficiently warmed up. For example, when I’m moving from shoulder presses to side or rear raises, I like to do a 10- to 12-rep warm-up set on the raise as I find the medial and posterior delts aren’t always ready for heavy weight after pressing.

WARMING UP ON ARMS DAY

When warming up for an Arms Day, I like to do a warm-up set for biceps immediately followed by a warm-up set for triceps, followed by a 60-second rest.

I don’t superset my heavy sets like this, but as we’re not trying to lift as much weight as possible while warming up, we don’t lose anything by doing it here.

THE BOTTOM LINE

The bottom line is that warming up correctly is an important part of training with heavy weight and building muscle. Trust me—it’s worth spending your first 10 minutes warming up instead of just rushing into the heavy lifting.