What To Do About Injuries

Here’s the next episode of the UNCENSORED Podcasts Season 2.

Today’s topic:  What To Do About Injuries

Images showing hand in a bandage with a thumbs up

The key to being able to stay physically active long term is to 1) not get injured, and 2) learn to manage injuries properly.

 

Today John and Brad will talk about the main philosophy of the Adonis Workout being to remain physically active most of your life.  It is to be able to weight train all your life without injury if possible.  On your menu of goals should be “Am I able to do this injury free?  Or at least with minimal injury?”

Some people are genetically more durable, more athletic, and have a special kind of connection between mind and body.  Most of us are not gifted the way pro athletes are.  The key to being able to stay physically active long term is to 1) not get injured, and 2) learn to manage injuries properly.

Be careful not to let your goals get hijacked by younger or genetically gifted trainers.  Your age and your “training age” come into play for what is right for you.  Just because a young or gifted trainer knows something well and is (or was) good at something does not mean it’s good for you.   You have to consider whether or not it’s right for you given your age,”training age”, and genetic abilities.

John will tell you about what to do to work around an injury and how to avoid over use injuries.  A big part of the Adonis design is to avoid over use injuries by constantly changing up the routines.  John said that working out and making progress for even one year injury free is a pretty big win.

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Fitness Trends 2013

Here’s the next episode of the UNCENSORED Podcasts Season 2.

Today’s topic: Fitness Trends 2013

 

Regardless of what is coming for the rest of 2013 you can be sure it's all be done before

Regardless of what is coming for the rest of 2013 you can be sure it’s all been done before.

 

Fitness Trends 2013

Everything that’s old is new again, and this is always true in diet and fitness. Every trend you’ve seen in the past 10 years has already come to a rise and fallen decades earlier.

The low carb fad that hit in the 1990’s is at least the 3rd time low carb came into vogue. The low fat push in the 1950’s and 60’s had it’s first push 60 years before that.

Even fasting has been promoted as a healthy way to eat and stave off disease and sickness as far back as the late 1800’s.

Believe it or not protein was even regarded as an evil nutrient that should be eaten in very limited quantities. And conversely you can find information promoting very high protein diets in the 1800’s as well.

When it comes to strength training we’ve seen the recent popularity of self proclaimed ‘functional’ training such as cross fit. Traditional bodybuilding has faded and might be due for a resurgence.

Regardless of what is coming for the rest of 2013 you can be sure it’s all be done before.

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Muscle Is Forever

Here’s the next episode of the UNCENSORED Podcasts Season 2.

Today’s topic:  Muscle is Forever

Muscle Is Forever!

Muscle Is Forever!

 

The term “building muscle” is the most common term we hear when referring to an increase in muscle size. This however is not the most accurate way of imagining how a muscle actually increases it’s size. A better way to think of it is inflating and deflating a balloon, and increasing the ‘rubber’ of the balloon.

From there it gets a little more complex with the incorporation of muscle specific stem cells called “satellite cells”.

In todays podcast we review the claims of an interesting self experiment done by Nate Green who gained 20lbs of lean mass in only 28 days. We determine that it’s more correct to say that he actually ‘re-inflated’ the same 20lbs of muscle mass he used to have…and that it’s perfectly normal to expect to do this for anyone who has previously been 20lbs larger.

Fact is that once you’ve built the muscle you can always get it back even after years of taking time off. And it comes back FAST!

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Build Muscle From Just 52 Grams of Protein Powder: Interview with Calvin Chen

Calvin Chen is one of the younger guys who entered the Adonis Index Contest. He placed 5th in the transformation class.

Apart from Mike, who was interviewed last week and was focusing mostly on fat loss, Calvin needed to build muscle and that’s exactly what he did.

12 weeks is a very short period of time to build muscle. Calvin had the advantage of juvenile muscle growth.

You can check it yourself, here are his before and after pictures.

 

Calvin - Adonis Index Transformation Front

Calvin obviously put on some muscle. Just check out his arms and shoulders.

 

Calvin - Adonis Index Transformation Side

Calvin's side shot.

 

Calvin - Adonis Index Transformation Back

Look at Calvin's back, this is a pretty big difference after just 12 weeks.


It’s obvious that Calvin has built bigger shoulders, this is because Adonis Index Workouts are focused on building upper body width.

Calvin is a college student, so he doesn’t have much of a training background yet. Before he found the Adonis Index, he started like most young guys. He was lifting some dumbbells at home, he didn’t have any good program to follow, he did everything just learning from fitness magazines. He trained only his bicep, triceps and chest.

This is probably one of the most common mistakes – not having a proper workout program to follow. If you look around yourself in the gym, you will see that most of the guys don’t look that good and don’t have a quality plan at all. Obviously this training is good only if you want to lift something…anything, but if you want to actually see any change in muscle mass, you have to take a different approach.

What you need is this, a workout program that:

  • Is designed to help you achieve your goals (performance OR look)
  • Has variety of reps and sets
  • Has fixed rest periods (This makes a big difference as far as intensity goes.)
  • Requires mostly free weights (dumbbells and barbells)
  • If the purpose is to look better, it should focus more on your shoulders and back rather than arms and legs.

During the 12 weeks Calvin did the most difficult task – build muscle. It’s easy to strip off the fat in 12 weeks, but to build muscle? Not so much. Usually you will see only little change in muscle growth in such a short period of time. Building muscles takes years of dedicated training. Calvin’s advantage was through his juvenile muscle growth. If you are his age (19) and you are not yet working out, you should start as soon as possible, because this is when you can get the best gains. This is as close to a steroid effect as you can naturally get. A lot of older guys beat themselves up, because they started late, the difference in the possible physique if you start young is huge.

Average Protein Intake Was Enough

Nowadays almost every guy is obsessed with protein intake. It seems that we are so affected by advertisements that we feel something Brad Pilon calls protein guilt. It’s really hard to avoid this. Most of the guys try to eat as much meat, eggs and protein foods as possible and supplement it with protein shakes on top of that. But is this really necessary?

Calvin views protein intake differently. He was following Pilon’s advice from the book How Much Protein. He didn’t watch or track his protein intake, the only thing he knew exactly is that he took 52 grams of protein powder each day and that’s it. Based on his diet, his protein intake was around 80-100 grams, which goes against the conventional wisdom of eating 150-200 grams a day to build muscle.

Calvin didn’t even worry about calorie intake. To prevent from gaining fat, he was eating mostly fruits and vegetables and regularly fasting.

Not exactly something you would find in a fitness magazine.

And all this obviously worked for him. He gained several pounds of muscle, and is no longer called skinny and is definitely on the right track.

Here is the take away for skinny guys who are interested in gaining more muscles in a short period of time:

  1. If you don’t have the experience don’t create your own workouts based on advice from fitness magazines and bodybuilding forums, find a professional workout program that is designed to help you achieve your goals
  2. Be consistent with your workouts
  3. Focus on your lifting form rather than lifting as heavy as possible with crappy technique
  4. Push hard, don’t be afraid of doing the hard work
  5. Follow the workout as it is written, if it says do 10 reps, pick the weights that you will be able to do only 10 reps with perfect form
  6. Take creatine every day, protein supplement might also help a bit
  7. Don’t worry about the protein intake so much, if you get about 80-100 grams a day, it’s enough. Focus on the training because that is what will force your muscles to grow

Here are few questions that you will get answers to during the interview:

  • How fast can I expect my muscles to grow?
  • How would I know if I plateaued on muscle growth?
  • How many years I have before muscle growth slows down?
  • If you don’t eat enough protein what will happen to the muscle?
  • How can weight training help my body become more efficient at protein consumption?
  • Do I have to count calories every day?

 

How an Adonis Index Workout is Designed

At a glance, most workouts look very similar, with a bunch of numbers and words on a page. But if you take a closer look, there is much more than meets the eye to a well designed workout.

Some of the elements that should be in a well designed workout program include:

-Macro, meso, and micro-cycled periodized intensity volume and frequency.

-Balance stimulus throughout all major muscle groups.

-Progressive overload.

-Periodic overreaching to overcome plateaus in strength.

-Combination of strength, hypertrophy and strength endurance training.

-Specific rest intervals and exercise ogranization.

There are other components, but these are some of the major ones and in today’s podcast, we’ll explain how and why we put them into the Adonis Index Workouts.

John

p.s. This discussion not only applies to the core Adonis Index Workout, but all of the other workouts in the AI curriculum as well.

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