Archives for October 2011

Al’s Fat Loss Journey: Math Doesn’t Lie

Al Sandoval placed FIRST in the Adonis Index Contest in the transformation category. Al found a way to lose fat that he put on in the last 20 years. At the end of 12 weeks he managed to beat everybody else and win the whole transformation contest.

Take a look at what it took to win the fifth Adonis Index Contest:

 

Al Sandoval - Adonis Index Contest Transformation Photos

Al's back looks really good, his back muscles are starting to show up. And he finally god rid of the love handles or how he calls them the hate handles.

Al Sandoval - Adonis Index Contest Transformation Pictures

Al's front pictures. He is obviously very satisfied with his transformation. Well, who wouldn't be, he got in a great shape.

 

Al is somebody who was used to follow the conventional fitness advice. However, after his wife Naomi got in shape with the Venus Index all the proof he needed was right in front of him and he could no longer say that what she says doesn’t work. She proved him that what he was doing was not working and that she knew what to do to get in shape.

His Lean Wife Showed Him How Fat Loss Really Works

She showed him that what he hears in the gym and on TV is not really true. And he could not really argue with her since she got in shape and he still looked the same.

His wife made him to be honest with himself. Al would always carb up before the workout and that was what he believed would help him lose fat and build muscle. After his wife told him that is not true, he asked what he should do instead. The answer was something that he didn’t want to hear. From the fat loss stand point it all got down to diet.

He was scared of dieting. He didn’t know what being in deficit means, he also didn’t know what this would mean in the gym. Would it mean that he won’t probably be able to hit the same weights in the gym that he normally does? That would not be so much fun anymore, would it?

Well, it came down to what he truly wanted and losing fat won.

Losing fat may be simple, but is definitely not easy to do. And once you gain some fat, you have to diet otherwise you will carry it for the rest of your life. There is no accidental fat loss. If you were slowly gaining fat for the past 20 years it will obviously take some effort. This is was exactly were al was before the contest.

Once his wife started coaching him and he was doing what she told him, his body was slowly transforming and he was getting in shape.

His wife Naomi who already had this handled introduced him to intermittent fasting by simply telling him to skip breakfast, lunch and eat only dinner. Because she was always cooking for him, she made sure he had a low calories dinner after each fast. This way he had only several hundred calories each day he would fast.

Then he would throw in few maintenance days just to keep sane during the whole 12 weeks.

So there were basically three types of days he was cycling during the week:

  1. Maintenance days
  2. Fasting days
  3. Low calorie days

Then for the past 10 days he was drinking a gallon of water each day and eating only tuna and sweet potatoes.

12 weeks of dieting is tough and most people won’t do that. However, it is worth noting that most people are not in good shape and will probably never look like Al.

He started following the Adonis Index Workout and found out that it is all based on math and science and since those two don’t lie it must be true. And after 12 weeks of following this approach that also seemed most logical he arrived as a winner in the Adonis Index Contest. The only problem he encountered was that the dieting was so hard that Al had to stop working out three days before taking the photo shoot, because he just didn’t have enough energy for it.

Now he doesn’t care what other people in the gym are telling him about bulking up and carbing up, because it all comes down to how you look and since he looks ten times better than his buddies he choose to stay away from their influence and do what he knows works even though it goes against what everybody else is saying.

Once Al took those pictures he was surprised how good he looks and that he finally got rid of his love handles or how he calls them the hate handles. Because even though we don’t see our backs much often, other people do. And know like Al said he can enter the room looking good and leave the room looking good as well.

 

Here is the take away for all guys who are frustrated and are hitting the wall and really want to lose fat:

  • The step number one is being honest with yourself and facing your current situation, 99% of the journey is the mental shift, the rest is easy
  • Frustration comes from not getting results by following the wrong approach (ex.: Bulking up myth for muscle building)
  • In order to lose fat you need to create a caloric deficit through diet, while cardio and workouts will help you lose fat, you can’t out train a bad diet
  • Accept that it is okay to be light and that being heavy just means fat, muscles won’t show up if they are covered by fat
  • Focus on simple math – how many calories you burn and how big of a deficit you need to create in order to strip fat
  • Math doesn’t lie, if you want to lose pound of fat a week, you need to create a deficit of about 4000 calories a week
  • Don’t calculate someone else’s calories, calculate yours – your BMR
  • Complex approach like spreading out your meals into 6 and carbing up before your workouts is not going to help you lose fat

 

Listen to the interview here:

Bodyfat Isn’t Just Stored Energy, It’s An Endocrine Tissue

Bodyfat, adipose tissue, subcutaneous fat, brown fat, white fat, healthy fat sick fat, belly fat, visceral fat, gut fat, butt fat, arm fat, back fat, thigh fat, cellulite… just plain ol’ FAT!

There is more than just fat in a fat cell

As you might have guessed this podcast is about bodyfat. Specifically, we’re going to talk about what it is and how it’s regulated. In the past, bodyfat was thought to simply be a storage tissue for excess energy. It was assumed to be relatively inert and simply sit there holding energy in the form of fat for future use when calorie intake isn’t sufficient.

Over the past 20 years, this view has changed and now researchers know that bodyfat is a dynamic and metabolically active tissue that plays multiple roles in our daily functioning.

Your bodyfat is capable of producing various hormones, and converting hormones into different forms. It also produces inflammatory cytokines and other messenger molecules that act as signals to the rest of your body. The total amount of bodyfat you have will change how it communicates and acts on the rest of your body.

All of these recent discoveries have led researchers to re-categorize bodyfat as an endocrine tissue.

An endocrine tissue is a tissue in your body that secretes hormones as messengers to signal function for the rest of the body. And it’s now clear that bodyfat is more than just stored energy, it’s in fact an endocrine tissue.

Understanding bodyfat from the perspective of endocrine tissue as well as energy storage will give you more insight into it’s purpose and it’s regulation.

In this podcast, you’ll learn how and why things change in your body depending on how much fat you are carrying and what this means from a diet and nutrition standpoint.

John

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He Could Eat Hamburger for Dinner and Still Lose 18 Pounds of Fat

Nick Yarbrough placed second in the Adonis Index Contest in the Open category. Nick’s after pictures are incredible. You would not guess that he is only 21 years old. His muscles really show in these photos and he is living proof that with effort comes great results.

Take a look at what it takes to place 2nd in the Open category:

Nick Yarbrough - Adonis Index Contest Transformation Pictures

You would say that Nick was in a pretty good shape even in his before pictures. However, he had to lose about 18 pounds of fat and water to get from a pretty good shape into an amazing shape.

 

Nick Yarbrough - Adonis Index Contest Transformation Pictures

Nick has achieved an amazing condition.

Nick has been working out for some time now. He played football and started lifting weights when he was 15. But because he played football, his workouts were based mostly on improving his performance and gaining strength and not on improving his physical look.

All he wanted was to get bigger. So Nick started working out 3-4 times per week. That would not be so bad if he had a good workout. Unfortunately his workouts were anything but good. When he was in a gym he would just do random lifts and not really plan ahead. One day he would go to the gym and do bench press, a few curls, some rows and go home. Next day he would do some squats and maybe bench press one more time and once he go tired he would go home.

After a year of eating ‘like hell’ he gained 25 pounds and went to up to 190 pounds. At the end he achieved his goal, he got bigger. But not in a way that he liked. He thought at 190 pounds he’d be big and ripped, not big and fat (his own words).

After a while he found the Adonis Index and just out of curiosity calculated his own Adonis Index ratio. The ideal ratio of your shoulders to your waist aka Adonis Index is exactly 1.618. Nick said that he expected to be around 1.5 or at least 1.4. Well long story short his real indicator of how good shape he was in was much lower, it was 1.2. Despite the fact that he worked out and had some muscle mass on his shoulders, his Adonis index ratio was still incredibly low, this was due to the fact that he carried a lot of fat around his waist. Finding this was tough. He couldn’t believe that he had to lose that much fat to get in shape.

However, if he wanted to get to the golden 1.618, his lifestyle had to change. He committed to his goal and dropped to 175 pounds. After losing that much fat, his shoulder-to-waist ratio of course went up.

After this weight loss transformation he got to a pretty decent shape. Now if he wanted to take it to the next level he would have to undergo a similar transformation. However, he didn’t want to lose more fat, because he was actually afraid of being too light. He thought that he had to just lift harder and muscles will show up…eventually. This lasted for about a year. Then he saw the transformation the other guys made in one of the past Adonis Index contests. After seeing this he decided to diet again and dropped down to 157 pounds. He went back to his high school weight, only this time it was mostly muscle mass not fat mass.

Once he got there he was amazed by how good he looked. He didn’t expect his muscles to be so incredibly defined and still couldn’t believe how light he actually was at the end. His friends think that he is at least 180 pounds. All from the illusion that he created by getting ripped and to a golden Adonis Index ratio.

Nick’s Fat Loss Plan to Get Super Cut

You are probably eager to know what Nick did to get to that super cut shape.

Fat loss is all about calories in and calories out. You need to create a long term caloric deficit to see noticeable results. What varies from person to person is the approach – and how quickly are you going to achieve that deficit. We are all different and what might work for you might not work for Nick.

The way Nick did it was that he split the week into two types of days.

  1. Workout day / Low calorie day
  2. Rest day / Higher calorie day

On the workout day, he wasn’t hungry at all. So this was a low calorie day for him, the day that he would use to create a big deficit. The next day he would rest and eat little bit more, he would use this as a “refill” for the next day, because he wanted to have enough energy for the upcoming workout. What this means is that he ate the night before to feel better during his workout the following day.

Here is an example. If he happened to work out on Monday, he would fast until the workout, do the exercise and go home. Usually he would not be hungry until a couple of hours afterwards, so he would fast for about 20-24 hours every second day. After the fast he would eat a low calorie dinner, some chicken breast or fish, roughly around 1000 to 1500 calories. If he went to work after the workout, he might throw in a protein shake before the dinner.

If Monday was workout and low calorie day, Tuesday would be rest and higher calorie day. On this day he would try to fast as long as he could and then have a big dinner, for example some pasta or a hamburger.

The way he looks at this is that on the day you don’t work out, you eat more, because you are getting ready for the workout. On the other hand workout day is the burn day. This seems like a good idea, because on the day you work out it is easier to control your appetite. You also don’t want to overeat and “spoil” your day, because you already did some work in the gym (no matter how ridiculous this sounds, you probably know this from your own experience, simply put exercise affects your diet). However, on the day you don’t work out, you need to satisfy your appetite and also refill for the next workout to be able to push hard.

Nick took this approach and you saw his great after pictures.

If we look at those two days in total, Nick would burn about 4000 calories and eat only 3000 calories. This is about 45000 calorie deficit in three months, roughly around 12 pounds fat loss. Because Nick was also working out he burnt some extra pounds just from the workouts itself. Nick went through about 50 workouts in those 12 weeks, he burnt another 6 pounds of fat (and water) just by creating a bigger deficit from this physical activity. In total you get almost 18 pounds of fat.

When Nick saw the pictures he was surprised by how 157 pounds looks like, he thought it would look way skinnier. This is a common misconception. It would even seem that being too light is not very manly and that in order to get in shape we would need to give ourselves permission to get light to get lean.

Nick ended up at the weight he was in high school, but obviously the muscle-fat ratio was completely different. This is just proof of how body weight tells nothing about how you look in a mirror.

At the end Nick completely abandoned the concept of eating big to get big. Because you can’t really eat your way up to bigger muscles. First of all, muscle growth is a response that is stimulated by working out not eating (that’s a shame, wouldn’t it be nice to build your chest just by eating more chicken?). Second, there is a limit on how many pounds of muscle you can build, the only difference is how quickly you can do it.

 

Here is the take away for guys who are interested in building more muscle and losing those last few pounds and getting ripped like Nick:

  • You never know how you will look like after you finally lose the fat and get lighter. And if you don’t like it, you can always eat your way up (that is the easy part)
  • Building muscle takes time, so be patient, you just have to stick to your workout
  • Don’t do the whole bulk up thing, muscles are built in the gym not in the kitchen
  • Don’t listen to what other people they say about diet, do what you know works – creating a caloric deficit for fat loss
  • If this is what you wanna do then do it, no excuses
  • You already have six pack abs, but they may just covered by fat. Getting rid of that fat is all about diet

 

Listen to the interview here:

The Truth About Dietary Fat: You Can’t Learn This From a Label

Dietary fat is one of the least understood macro nutrients but it’s also the one that many people are the most afraid of. Over the past 50 years researchers have learned a great deal about dietary fat but there are still just as many unanswered questions.

If you’ve done any casual health and fitness reading you’ve probably come to some of these conclusions:

Is this good or bad?

Saturated fat is bad

Trans fats are REALLY bad

Monounsaturated fats are good

Poly unsaturated fats are REALLY good

From there you’ve likely heard about fish oils, “omega” fats, and even the difference between Omega 6 and Omega 3 fats…if you’re really advanced in your understand of the Omega 3 fats you’ll also understand that there are different forms of “omega” fats and that only specific forms provide the purported health benefits of lowering cholesterol, raising HDL, and lowering triglycerides and LDL. You might even know what the specific essential fatty acids are that provide the health benefit that are basis of Omega 3 claims namely DHA (Docospentanoic Acid) and EPA (Eicosapentanoic acid).

Even if you understand all of this information, the real question is how do you go about eating food on a daily basis and how do you choose where the fat will appear in your diet. Do you treat food as food and simply eat a sensible a varied mixed diet, or do you treat your food like a drug that needs to be dosed, and specifically dose your fat based on it’s chemical composition?

Many people do the latter. We search for food items that a a specific contest of poly unsaturated fatty acids. We’ll choose olive oil over other forms of oil, butter over margarine, margarine over butter…neither? Fish Oil tablets, salmon for its fatty acid content, flax seed oil because it has ‘omega 3’s’, coconut oil or milk because it’s supposed to have good fat.

Do all of these considerations actually amount to any real benefit of it’s it much ado about nothing?

Developing a grounded view of food as food (and potentially medicine) but NOT as a drug is the key component to understanding what to do about dietary fat.

In today’s uncensored podcast, we’ll discuss everything you need to know about dietary fat and how to have clear view of how much mind space and plate space it should take up in your life and your diet.

John

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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?

 

Adonis Index: The Shape of an Athlete

Building your body into it’s best shape is also going to build it into a high performance shape. Many top level athletes have a distinct body shape that is determined by the sport they play. More specifically the type of training they do starts to shape their bodies into it’s overall form that makes them recognizable as an athlete of their chosen sport.

The Adonis Index ratio is not meant to be a sport performance look but rather it falls inline with research on what is the best looking body…but it also happens to be a body that fits inline with the look and shape of some of the top power athletes in North America, namely professional football players.

Football is a unique sport because it has players of widely varying sizes all on the field at the same time. It’s quite common to find offensive linemen as tall as 6’8 and in excess of 350lbs in weight as well as defensive backs around 5’9 and 170lbs…and every size in between.

Various professional athletes will have a specific and recognizable form that is dictated by their degree of fat mass and muscle mass.

Taken from Mens Health. Each athlete is comparably lean but with varying degrees of muscle mass, starting with a distance runner, NHL hockey player, UFC figher and NFL linebacker.

The look and size you end up at will also be dictated by your fat mass, muscle mass, and the specific size of each muscle group.

In today’s podcast, we talk about the specific size and strength of some of these athletes and how their measurements fit inline with the Adonis Index ratio. Make no mistake, a body at the golden ratio is also a high performance powerful body.

John

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