Which is better workout plan ?

You’re asking some good questions;

I need a way to control my appetite.
I need to find a way to stay focused.
What keeps other people on track?
What is other peoples motivation?
What stops other people from snacking?
How do other people pick the right foods?

These are questions that would, and indeed have, taken up whole books, so don’t expect the full answer right here

I’m going to start with a question all of my own, ‘How long will it be before your life settles back down again?’

If you were doing all that good stuff before you might well just find it easy to start doing it again when you settle down. 

On another note, when you sleep less, your appetite can either go up, or down, depending on your constitution. I would guess that yours goes up. Just like mine. The less sleep I get the more food I need. Once your sleep gets more balanced you will find it easier to regain control. How difficult do you think it is to have a sense of control when you are tired and stressed?

It seems the way to increase YOUR motivation will be to find out how to reorganise your life, so that your stress decreases, and you get more sleep. Less stress = more energy, more sleep = more energy.

Focus on ways of decreasing how stressed you are, and find ways to get more rest. If you can’t do the latter, you may want to focus more on decreasing stress!

For what it’s worth here are some answers to your stated questions:

I need a way to control my appetite.

*Focus on eating foods that give YOU energy, make you satisfied, and then focus on how they feel when you are eating them.

I need to find a way to stay focused.

*Decrease stress levels through meditation, self hypnosis, yoga, tai chi and other forms of exercise. Less stress = more energy = more focus.
Find ways to keep reminding yourself about WHY you are doing your weightloss. For example, look at a pic you want to look like, spend time every day visualising what you want etc.

What keeps other people on track?

*Working on and toward achieving their goals. See anything by Brain Tracy or Michael Neill for good info on how to do this.

What is other peoples motivation?

Knowing what they want, being clear about how they want to get it, letting go of the need to have their goal, making their unconscious mind work toward their goal (get this last one right and the others become a doddle).

What stops other people from snacking?

*Eating when they are hungry for food, not when they are hungry for feelings. No amount of food will satisfy an emotional hunger. Also making sure that they are eating food that is right for them, healthy food is all about the food that will balance YOUR body chemistry, not what some nutritional doctrine says. Practice asking your body what it really wants, and it will tell you. But you have to practice it!

How do other people pick the right foods? 

By knowing what their body wants, then finding a way to get it. Spending time listening to their body, building a relationship, if you like, so that relationship can be a mutually fulfilling one.

Hope this helps,
For any more questions email me, bulkupfast@googlemail.com
George
www.bulkupfast.com

Here’s what Michael Neill wrote about goal setting (he is pretty much the best person out there when it comes to making success fun)

1. We want what we want, whether or not we think we can get it.
One of the things we are constantly taught in traditional goal-setting is to set “realistic” and “achievable” goals. Among the many problems with this idea is the fact that by the time we’ve made our goals realistic and achievable, they often bear little resemblance to what it was that we
originally wanted. 

When in doubt, I always coach people to go for what they want, not what they think they can get. After all, in the words of author Barry Neil Kaufman,

“All dreams appear impossible until someone makes them happen.”

2. There are elements of almost any goal that are outside of our control.
For years, I was reluctant to acknowledge that anything was outside my control. And in fact, working with shamanic techniques from courses like the Silva Mind Control Method, I learned that I could attain a slight but noticeable degree of control over everything from the weather to the reactions of a Brazilian woman named Constanze (a long story and nowhere near as interesting as it sounds . 

The problem is that not only does it takes so much effort and energy to try and control the universe that there’s very little energy left to enjoy it, but as even the most anally retentive control freak will tell you, “Stuff Happens”. Letting go of our desire to control the universe brings freedom, energy, and ironically a giant increase in our ability to impact the universe.

3. We can, through our attitudes and actions, increase or decrease the probability of our getting what we want.
Probability-based Goal Getting allows us to evaluate our potential attitudes and actions against two very simple metrics:

a. Is this within my control?

b. Will this increase or decrease the likelihood (probability) of my getting what I want, either now or in the future?

Attitudes and actions that will generally increase our chances of getting what we want include:
* Prepare, prepare, prepare 
* Taking regular action
* Enjoying the process for its own sake

Attitudes and actions that will generally decrease our chances of getting what we want include:
* “What’s the point in trying? It’s never worked before.”
* Doing something once and then moving on to the next thing
* Punishing yourself when you don’t behave or when things don’t work out as you’d hoped

If your job was no longer to “make things happen” but rather to do everything you can to increase the likelihood of it happening, how might this change your approach to goals?

Today’s Experiment:
You can do this one of your current goals or you can start from scratch.
Adapt the experiment to suit your situation…

1. What is it that you really want?

2. Which elements of that are entirely up to you? Which elements are
dependent on people or things outside your control?

3. What are some attitudes or “working premises” you could adopt to make it
more likely that you will get what you want? What are some attitudes or
“working premises” it might be useful to let go of?

4. Create an initial action list based on those things within your control
that would make it more likely for you to succeed. As new ideas come up,
ask yourself:

a. Is this within my control? (if not, look for what aspect or element of
it is within your control)

b. Will this increase the likelihood of my getting what I want, either now
or in the future?

Have fun, learn heaps, and remember – applying what you’ve learned today
will have a profound impact on your future… probably!

More importantly, when was the last time you asked yourself if this was right for your bodybuilding goals?

What do I mean by right?

Let’s go back to basics here; what’s the goal of your weight training?

To put on new muscle. Even if you are on a cutting phase, you are always wanting to get bigger, although you may talk about it like you are wanting to ‘preserve’ muscle, the whole point of bodybuilding is to put on muscle.

So the question should become; ‘what do you need to do to stimulate new muscle growth?’

Work harder than you did last time. Quite simple. Or is it?

What does harder mean though?

Think of it like a threshold, a fence you have to jump over. Every session you need to make the fence that little bit higher. The great thing about this is that there are three ways to make the fence higher;

1, Do heavier weights (with the same reps and sets)
2, Do more sets (with the same weight and reps)
3, Do more reps (up to a limit, with the same weight and sets).

So which do you choose to do?

Surely any will do? And that’s right when we just want to make the fence higher, but we also have another consideration;
You want to conserve as much energy as possible, so that your energy can be used to recover. Remember, you don’t grow when you are in the gym, you grow when you are resting. Exercise is the stimulus that forces your body to ADAPT. That adaptation only occurs when you are resting.

So which of the three will cause the needed jump in fence height, but also conserve energy most effectively?

An increase in weight. Both of the other options cost considerably more energy. Especially increasing your sets.

Think of each set as your fence; each time you jump over your fence, you are hitting that threshold. Your body recognises the need for adaptation. What happens when you jump over it again?

Does your body try to adapt more? No, it just costs more energy.

That’s one of the reasons why the orginal programme designed by Richard works so well. The volume is actually quite low. Leaving you lots of energy to recover with.

So an interesting question to ask now is ‘how many working sets do you need to do to reach threshold?’

One, and only one. You only have to jump over the fence once, after all. That’s why you’ll see lots of pro bodybuilders doing multiple sets, getting heavier and going lower on the reps, they are just making sure that they get over the fence. But it is a highly costly and flawed method, they don’t really know where the fence is! It’s a method from the old school, before we really knew what it took to build muscle. It’s a scatter gun approach; shoot as many times as possible in the hope that one hits the target. (we should also note that pro bodybuilders take lots and lots of steroids which make them much more reslient and capable of dealing with that type of stress. It still doesn’t mean that its the most effective method though!)

So finally we end with this question; ‘how much harder do I have to work out to jump over my fence?’

About 5%, according to research. I am going to leave it to you (for the moment) to work out just how to apply this to your workouts, because when you do, you will programme in muscle gain, simple.

Happy calculating!

George

I sure have. It’s the holy grail of bodybuilding and working out (for most people).

How close are you to getting a six pack?

And, more importantly, are you getting closer to having a six pack?

This last couple of weeks I have been doing a little experiment in body restructuring. It goes a little like this;

I have a good working relationship with a guy called Alex (http://re-creation.org.uk). He is a myofascial release therapist and Acupuncturist of the highest quality. We worked together a while back when I rented some therapy space off him for my Hypnotherapy business. He has the type of hands you really want to feel on a physical therapist. What does this mean?

For me it means that when he puts his hands on me, I can feel that he is actually tuning into what is going on in my body. I have seen, and had work off, too many ineffective (and sometimes dangerous) physical therapists to trust the majority of people, but Alex is good, very good. It seems rare that you can find a therapist that looks with his hands, not just with his eyes.

Now, I appreciate that the majority of you may not have experienced this type of reaction to a therapist, but I bet you ‘knew’ that someone was either right or wrong. That’s all I do, I just do it with a good range of understanding, vocabulary and ability to make fine distinctions in my body and mind. It goes with the territory of having worked for years as a mindful PT, a body worker and now a mind therapist…

So what, you might be thinking?

Well, what if you could use the services of someone like Alex to re-sculpt your body?

What would it be like to actually help your abs get into the right shape?

What would it be like for your lagging body part to be given the chance to really grow and adapt to all the training you throw at it?

That’s what I have decided to experiment with. I want better abs. I want broader shoulders. I want arms that grow more quickly and more effectively. Don’t you?

That’s all for this brief blog, in the next one I will go into a little detail about how myofascial release works, when massage doesn’t, and I’ll let you know about the results so far (they are interesting, real interesting).

Till then,
Happy pumping, working, burning.
george

Do you even know that this is (probably!) a stupendiously good idea? (regardless of whether you are bodybuilding or losing weight)

I’ll tell you why in the next blog post, this one is about a dangerous situation you may be setting yourself up for; Sugar Cravings.

So there you are, you’ve just finished your latest workout, hopefully you’re feeling good from it (if you’re not, you might need to get your brain working properly for you, see http://www.bulkupfast.com/motivation for how to do this). You go for your post workout shake.  What does it contain?

If it contains sugars, or simple carbohydrates you may be setting yourself up to crave sugar down the line and undo a whole load of your good work.

I won’t go into the idea that sugars are good when used post workout, because they can be, my goal here is to make you aware of the potential downfall of having sugar in your shake, so that you can at least make an (more) educated decision about what you are taking.

Here’s what happens when you take sugar in;

Your body releases insulin into the bloodstream to help shuttle the glucose, released by the digestion of carboydrates, into your bodies cells. This is what you want, after all your cells have just been worked hard, used up a significant portion of their stored energy, and if you want to recover from your exercise and get fitter, stronger and better for next time, you want nutrients to be pumped in there ASAP.

But, and you knew that there was going to be a but, didn’t you?
The very same insulin that helps your glucose into the cells also helps the transmission of amino acids, and especially the heavier, bigger amino acids, into the cells. So?

This leaves the ligher amino acid, Tryptophan, free to make it’s way into the brain and be converted to Serotonin. Serotonin is a ‘feel good’ endorphin. When you finish exercise, your body releases Serotonin so that you feel good, and don’t mind doing it again (evolution has sorted this one for us). But what you are also doing is setting the biochemical environment to be able to get even more Serotonin on the move. All good so far, why should you care if you feel good, or even feel better?

Because, two or three hours down the line, when your insulin levels have dropped, your Serotonin levels are dropping like the weight stack released by a lazy trainer. Low energy, lethargy, tiredness, mood swings even depression (transient, not chronic) are just around the corner. Potentially.

And potentially is just the word. Becuase this seems to happen to some and not others. This makes complete sense, why should we all respond in the same way?  We shouldn’t.  And we don’t. After all, you don’t look like the person sitting next to you, and your body doesn’t have the same shape as anyone elses. This is known as biochemical individuality, and helps explain why some people can do well on the Cyclic Ketogenic Diet, and why others will tank.

So what do you do from here?

Be a test subject. Use two or more different post workout shakes for a week or so and see which makes you feel best, gives you the best sense of lasting energy, makes your emotions most balanced, helps you recover most effectively, allows you to eat a meal soon after your shake AND tastes good!

Happy post workout shaking.
George

And yet, it has been the focus of my attention for the last few weeks, both theoretically and practically. I’ve been on a cutting cycle, and I’ve been experiementing with it (for those of you not up on bodybuilding lingo, this means I have been on a fat loss cycle).

Essentially, what I have been doing is a fairly standard Cyclical Ketogenic Diet. For those who don’t know much about this type of diet, it’s very simple;

You spend 5 or 6 days eating next to no carbs, then really go on  a carb load for 24-36 hours. The basic idea is that as you are not eating carbs, your body has no choice but to fund it’s need for energy from fat, and as you will not be eating as many calories as normal,  some of that fat MUST come from those stores in your body. The proponents of this bodybuilding diet say that lots of fat comes off. Indeed a quick search around the internet will show a huge debate about the efficacy of this diet, very little of which, I believe, has got quite the right idea.

It’s essentially a simple fat loss plan, but it also has some interesting, and pretty sound, science behind it.

I had also never tried it before, so I thought I’d give it a go. What were my impressions?

Before I tell you those, do you remember that I am always on the lookout for ways that we can all improve on what others tell us to do, or what science, or the ‘right’ way of doing things say?

Well, what happened with this style of eating was that my beliefs about training, diet and life in general were reinforced. You simply can’t ignore individuality.

What about that feedback then?

I have lost fat, that’s for sure (although I won’t know how much until I meet my mate Ric – www.fighting4fitness.co.uk- and use his Bodyfat scales to find out where I’m at). But boy has it been a battle, albeit one I have enjoyed.

The battle was almost purely a personal one, but it is one that I know lots of others have fought. It ranged around two key points:

1/ Training hard enough to satisfy my personal training goals.
2/ Getting bored with the food options.

I am going to focus on these two points in this blog post, and then in the next one I will look a little more closely at how I might change this to suit my needs next time (which will be in two weeks).

Most who have tried this diet are in the bodybuilding field, and as such are using as part of a plan designed around being as muscular as possible, whilst also having very little bodyfat. For this goal, this diet might well work for the majority of people with only a small amount of tinkering (of course, the question is, ‘what type of tinkering?’), but for those who also have outside bodybuilding goals, such as training to keep fit for mountain biking, like me, there is a real challenge to face here. It’s this; when you do this diet, you hit rock bottom muscle energy. You get to a point where you simply have very little, or no stored muscle energy.

For those of you without any training in biochemistry or physiology, this means your muscles don’t have the fuel to run on that they are used to. Your muscles run most effectively on a mix of three types of fuel, but the one that gets depleted in this diet is the one that you use most of during training. Especially the type of training I love doing.

During my two weeks of fat loss I like to get my body burning excess fat by doing cardio. As much cardio as possible. In the last two weeks I have done no less than 10 cardio sessions. Add 4 weights sessions and a daily cycle to work, that adds up to quite a lot of energy for my muscles to produce.

Now, that wouldn’t be too bad if most of those cardio sessions are like the ones done by Ronnie Coleman during his Mr Olympia preparation, very low intensity treadmill walking, 2 hours a day no less. It is no co-incidence that he was also doing a Cyclical Keto Diet during this time.

But the majority of my cardio sessions are not low intensity, quite the opposite, I like doing high intensity interval training (HIIT). This is for three reasons;

1, I like to train with intensity, I get bored of plugging away at a road or set of pedals.
2, It burns lots and lots of calories, not just when you are working out, but also when you are recovering from the beating you have just given yourself.
3, It is quite specific to the type of sport I want to be good at; Mountain Biking (which is essentially a stop/start activity, just like HIIT).

Where’s the problem, you might be thinking?

When you ain’t got much energy, you can’t train hard.

What happens when you try?

You collapse. Just like I did on three separate occasions.

Ok, so it wasn’t quite a total ‘fall to the floor holding your hand to your forehead’ kind of collapse. But it was the type where I had to sit down with my post workout shake for 20mins before I could trust my legs to take my weight. A serious case of shaky legs and dizzy head.

So, what did I do?

You might also ask why I had to get to that stage three times before I decided to change what was happening. Well, I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t being soft, and I wanted to give my body time to adapt to the physiology of the diet. It didn’t, and I wasn’t. I needed to adapt the diet to me. What a great idea.

How I did that is the story for the next blog…

He is shown (and talks about) doing a split routine. He does it as follows:
Shoulders,
Back and Biceps,
Chest and Triceps,
Legs.

All normal looking, you might think. But is he really doing a split?

Look more closely and you will see that he is cheating on nearly all his exercises. Especially his upper body ones.

So?

Well, as I was watching it, I thought to myself ‘what’s he training for here?’

He’s in a cutting phase, three weeks out from competition, he wants to burn as many calories from fat as possible, whilst maintaining as much muscle mass as possible.

Now, take yourself into the gym, imagine doing bent over lat raises (for your rear delts, supposedly), but with each rep done by swinging your back upwards on the lifting phase and dropping it under control on the lowering phase. Is this going to work just your rear delts?

Hell no.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I know that when you do bent lateral raises you are going to work triceps (keeping your arm as straight as possible), you are going to work traps to stabilise the shoulders, and your medial delts are going to assist your rear delts. But that is a whole different experience to throwing your whole body around in attempting to lift as heavy a weight as possible.

It becomes a whole body exercise!

Please bear in mind there is no judgement coming from me about whether this is right or wrong. I mean, just look at his physique, he’s massive and he’s ripped, he’s doing a whole load of stuff right for him.

What’s relevant here is to wonder what the effect is from doing a split routine that works the whole body each session…

It’s gonna burn a whole lot of calories. Helpful when you need to cut the fat.

It’s going to give his muscles a repeated stimulus. Exactly what you need when you want to maintain as much muscle mass as possible. (my thoughts here go to some of Bryan Haycocks writings about frequency of muscle stimulus, see http://www.hypertrophy-specific.com/hst_index.html for more very sensible writing about how to gain mass)

Those are some distinct benefits to him.

That doesn’t mean they are certain to benefit you in the same way though. Not at all.
After all, he is a pro bodybuilder. That means he’s on a tankful of steroids.  It also means he’s got his diet TOTALLY dialled. It means he has spent years getting his body to the point where it can take the stress he throws at it. It means that he goes to see a physical therapist, a massage therapist and an osteopath EVERY WEEK. It means he has found a way that is right FOR HIM. This guys life is totally oriented toward more muscle and less fat. Is yours?

I would put good money on the average Joe getting wiped out by doing this type of workout and diet combo.

Makes you wonder how else you could construct a workout in a way that’s right for you…

Until next time.

George

I then walked out into the gym and felt a little tight in my left hip. No probs, I  thought, I’ll just make sure that I notice if it is sore during my workout.

I proceeded to do my intervals on the spin bike, feeling fine, working hard, burning calories, dripping sweat. All good.

Until I started to stretch after my workout. Then it felt sore. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t the stretching that was doing the damage, it was already sore whilst stretching.

By the time I walked back to work and started the ascent of the stairs, I was in pain, not huge pain, but enough to make me walk up one step at a time, rather than galloping up, or even two at a time like I normally do.

As the day wore on it got more stiff, more sore and more resistant to moving. Sitting still in a chair was fine, but getting up to standing was harsh. By the time I went to bed I was seriously hampered in my movement, so much so that I couldn’t actually get out of bed by sitting up, as I found to  my dismay when I went to go to the bathroom. I had to roll out of bed sideways and onto the floor. How pathetic.

So, next day, did I rest?
Did I give my muscles the time to recover and heal?

Did I hell. I worked out again. Fortunately it was a weights day and I took the opportunity to drive to the gym, as opposed to my regular 4 mile cycle. How was it when I went to bed?

More pain.

What is the way out of this?

I decided that I knew enough about injuries to self-diagnose (15 years of studying, qualifications and hands on experience might help there) and knew that the muscle I had injured was either gluteus minimus or tensor fascia lata, either way they do pretty much the same functional job of stabilising the hip. This meant that as long as I fixed the hip at both ends I should be ok. I was on a cardio week and needed to be burning calories, which, for me, means lots of cycling. What was the one thing that hurt the most?

Cycling! So I set about doing a routine of cross trainer and stepper, neither of which hurt particularly. So, 1 hour later, way in excess of 600 calories burned, and cooling down, how did my hip feel?

Just as painful as the first time. Oh dear. I was going to have to rest. Properly. What did this mean?

Stopping entirely?

No chance. Rest is all relative. Doing upper body weights didn’t hurt. So I did more of them. Normally I would not advise this, as the time that I am doing my cardio, is the time that my upper body is recovering from the beatings it took during the preceeding two weeks. This meant that I was tired doing my weights, so I kept the intensity low, I kept the volume low, but I kept the quality high. I did no more than 5 reps, I did them slow and I only worked till the point I couldn’t focus 100% on the movement.

Knowing that the work I had done on my upper body would affect my next gaining cycle, I decided to go a bit easier than my regular gaining routine and did a single body part per day for the first week of the two week gain, and this week I have been back at it, hitting it hard, feeling good, putting weight on, getting stronger. Enjoying myself.

I’m now onto Charles Staley’s EDT programme, with a couple of modifications, to fit in with the principles behind Bryan Haycocks Hypertrophy Specific Training, but that can hold over to another post…

How’s the hip, I hear you ask?

Great, back to normal. I went for a good long bike ride over the weekend, lots of knarly downhill work, followed by even more hard hill climbing to get back to to the top. (I went to Wharncliffe for those who want to know)

Let’s get something straight: This guy is massive, he’s totally ripped, and he’s hugely strong.

Ok, no surprises there. Why did I feel the need to say that then?

Because, whenever I watch a video like this I see one thing happening:

I see some poor sucker saying ‘well, gee, if that’s how Ronnie trains, and he is truly huge, then that’s how I should train.’

And why is that a problem?

Let me answer that with another question;

Have you trained as long as Ronnie Coleman?

How about another one?

Have you had the training advice, nutritional support, physical therapy and contest preparation that Ronnie Coleman had?

Enough? No, another;

Do you have the genetics of Ronnie Coleman?

And one final one;

Do you take the amount of steroids he does?

Those are some pretty heavy questions for you to consider, and whilst you do, let me tell you what the biggest thing I learnt from this vid:

He trains in a way that suits him.

But, in no way does that mean you should train like that!

Now, here’s a thing. It also doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t!!

How do you make any sense of that?

One thing I am always banging on about is that you should train (and eat, and motivate yourself) the way that is best for you. Just you, because there is only one you.

If you read over my articles on this site, you will see that this is what I practice, this is what I teach and this is what I preach.

And there is one big reason that I do this, but before I tell you about that let me tell you how I got there.

When I started down the path of training knowledge I read everything I could about training, nutrition, health, the mind, emotions, therapy, and everything else in between.
I remember the day that I read the book ‘The Metabolic Typing Diet’ by William Wolcott. In this book Wolcott says something that is almost nutritional heresy. He says that high fat diets work. He also says that low fat diets work. He also says that high protein diets work. How can all of those conflicting statements be true?

They can be true because there is no one truth. There is only an individual truth, for each individual. So for some people a high fat diet is ‘truth’, for others is different. When I read that I felt liberated. I no longer had to try and conform to the ‘one size fits all’ notion that pervades our society. I was free to experiment, free to try out ways that were considered unorthodox. And you know what that freedom gave me?

Flexibility. Not just in my body,  obviously, but in my mind. Flexibility to realise that I don’t need to know ‘the right answer’, ‘the truth’, to work with someone. It meant I was then able to be flexible enough to go with the fact that one persons body would want to do (and need to do) heavy weights to feel like it had a good workout, to deliver results, and another persons body would need to do an almost entirely cardio workout to get the very same results. What do you think this might mean for your training and diet?

What it meant for me was that I could suddenly work with a whole lot more people, because I wasn’t stuck on dogmatic beliefs of right and wrong. I simply prepared to deal with the person in front of me and ask ‘how can I find out what is right for them?’

So how can you find out what is right for you?

Read on, come back here regularly, and read the rest of the articles I have put up here, and be open to YOUR OWN ADVICE. You might also want to have a look at the products in our store…)