Training secrets for size and strength gains (for naturals)
1. If you are natural, you must get stronger to get bigger. If, over time, you are not adding weight to the bar, you are not growing.
2. Training a body part less than 2X/week will not give you optimal gains. An upper/lower split done Mon/Tue/Thu/Fri is close to optimal for most. Full body twice a week can work very well. Once every 5th day is the least frequently I would ever recommend a natural train. You'll get less sore training more frequently and you'll grow better. Save once/week body part training for pro bodybuilders (read: steroid users) and the genetically elite.
3. When in doubt, do less volume, not more. You don't need a zillion sets to stimulate hypertrophy, the bullshit written in the magazines to the contrary. If you can't get it done in 4-8 hard sets (sometimes less, rarely more) you need to quit training like a pussy in the gym. I had a friend who sold supplements one time who kept asking me to design him a product that would really work. I told him to make a supplement that would make people work hard in the gym and watch their diets. He thought I was joking.
4. Generally, basic compound exercises are best but isolation stuff has its place. Same for the machines versus free weights 'argument': both have their place. Anybody who tell you that you MUST do a certain exercise is arguing from an emotional stance, not a physiological one.
5. If you think you can gain muscle without eating sufficient food or calories, you should quit bodybuilding and take up something easier, like golf. You can't magically make muscle out of nothing, you need calories and protein to grow. If you can't buckle down to eat enough on a consistent basis, you won't grow an ounce of muscle. And spare me the excuses that you're not hungry or your schedule won't allow it. It's about priorities, eat more or stay skinny.
6. Most hard gainers train like idiots and don't eat enough.
7. Diets should be based around whole foods first, supplements second. Red meat is a great source of zinc, iron, B12 and protein. Not to mention who knows how many other trace nutrients that are involved in optimal human physiology. Eat it every day. Every time you hear about a new magic compound, 99 times out of 100 it's found in some whole food that you're probably not eating. Eat whole foods with a shit pile of veggies every day.
8. There is no singular best protein, each one has pros and cons. Generally, I think casein is better for dieting, whey for around workouts, whole proteins the rest of the time. You can't beat milk (and the dairy calcium has benefits on body fat). I think mixing proteins at a given meal is a good idea to eliminate any shortcomings of one. I think food combining (or protein rotation) is a lot of hippy holistic bullshit.
Dieting secrets for fat loss:
1. You can't magically lose weight unless you eat less or burn more calories with activity. Not unless you take drugs and those either make you eat less or burn more anyhow.
2. Don't bitch about how much you hate dieting or exercise. You can either change your diet and activity patterns, or you can stay fat. Those are your two options, except for drugs.
3. The key to losing weight and keeping it off is the following
a. Change your eating habits: so that you're eating less
b. Change your activity patterns: so that you're expending more calories
c. Repeat: Keep doing this over a long period of time.
d. Forever: Newsflash, you don't EVER get to go back to your old eating habits unless you want to get fat again. To maintain weight loss means maintaining at least part of the changes you made to a and b.
4. All diet books, no matter what line of bullshit they sell you, are working in terms of a-d. Cutting all of the carbohydrates out of your diet will generally make you eat less, so will cutting out all of the fat, so do diets that change your eating habits in one fashion or another. Some books go the activity route. At the end of the day, even if they tell you that you don't have to eat less to lose weight, they will trick you into doing it one way or another.
Note: My job, as diet book author, is to turn a-d into a 300 page book. Most diet books do it with 150 pages of recipes.
Everything else that you may come across, including my various gibberings in my books, are just details on the above. But at a fundamental level, until you are dealing with that 1% of 1% of trainees (elite athletes, bodybuilders trying to get to 5% body fat without muscle loss), those secrets are about all you need to know.
The equation is this:
Ass busting work + consistency + time = results.
Burn that into your head and quit looking for quick fixes and secrets, because they don't exist.
Written by Lyle McDonald
