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DEXA Results from Slow Bulking and Muscle Imbalance Correction Training

November 21, 2012 by

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

Today’s topics: Body Composition Analysis – DEXA Results

You can use DEXA scan to track down effectiveness of your training and diet.

From season one of uncensored podcasts you already know how you can use DEXA to track your progress.

But did you know that it’s also a very useful tool for experimenting with your body?

Check out how John and Brad used DEXA scan to measure effectiveness of the things they were trying in the last couple of weeks. Each of them tried a different thing.

John’s Experiment – Muscle Imbalance Correction Training

As you may already know know John can’t do barbell bench press, because off his shoulder issue. The last time he got his DEXA the results were astonishing, on his right side there was almost 2 pounds less lean mass (shoulder and arm). That’s a pretty big difference, it was obvious that the right side was significantly weaker and less developed.

Because of this, he decided to try to bring the right side back to normal, so both of his shoulders and arms would be balanced.

Now this is tricky, because if you just do barbell based exercises, one arm will work harder than the other and you will only make the problem worse.

So how would you go about it?

And how do you track such is small difference?

You can’t even go just by feeling and strength, you need to get another DEXA done to confirm the results.

John decided to create a specialized plan for himself and get another DEXA scan done at the end of this test to see what he could do about this.

As it turned out, you really can affect one side of your body and bring your lagging part back to normal to balance them out.

Surprisingly the answer wasn’t more weight, but more work and better muscle activation – as John shares in today’s episode, he had to take more time to warm up the right side to achieve the same activation throughout his regular workout.

Listen to the podcast for more information on this experiment.

Brad’s Experiment – Slow Bulking

As Brad confesses in today’s episode, he really wanted for bulking to work and I mean who doesn’t, eating more for more muscles? Sounds like a bodybuilder’s dream.

Well, the reality is different and rather boring.

In the past Brad has tried every way you could think of (and more) to make bulking work. He tried the standard 6 meals a day, 300 grams of protein, cheat days and even cheat weeks with 10 000 calorie intake and no result at all…well he did gain fat, but that’s not what he was really after.

So, it’s safe to say that bulking doesn’t work.

Then a couple months ago he thought about another way of trying bulking. He realized that each time he would try it, it would be a very quick process, never slow. So he decided to go about bulking up slowly, just a couple hundred calories here and there, he didn’t change his workouts, recorded everything and did a DEXA scan after the experiment was after.

If you wanna find out about the whole process and more importantly the results, go down and listen to the podcast.

In today’s UNCENSORED training, you will also discover:

  • How to prepare the muscles that you have hard time activating for the workout
  • How can you bring up a lagging part back up to balance it with the rest of the body if lifting heavier doesn’t help
  • What is slow bulking  and whether it can work for you
  • How you can get your goals hijacked with focusing on strength gains
  • Why it’s important to stop chasing weight at some point and what’s more important when the goal is muscle growth
  • How if you are not careful “body building” can turn into weight lifting and power lifting and why this is dangerous to your physique goals
  • Is there a relationship between being well trained at a certain movement/exercise and looking good? (The answer to this might surprise you)
  • How DEXA can help you see clearly through fitness disbeliefs and help you discover what truly works for your body and what’s just BS you should avoid

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Filed Under: Food, Muscle Building, Podcasts, Uncensored Podcasts S02 Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Eat for “Flavor” & The 6 Step Recovery Method from Orthorexia

September 19, 2012 by

Here’s the second part of this month’s UNCENSORED Podcasts Season 2 on Orthorexia.

Check out the first part here: The Side Effect of Modern Society and Even Scientists Can’t Escape

What we covered in the first part:

  • We’ve talked about how certain foods can completely mess up your personality and social identity
  • You learned why people in the fitness industry feel superiority over you because of their diet choices
  • You discovered why you should bother tracking and testing things related to nutrition and not just training
  • You learned about the connection between people suffering from orthorexia and drug addicts
  • You also discovered what’s really in the root of the search for healthy eating and if that goal is really achievable
  • You learned that orthorexia is a marketing driven eating disorder and that the food and fitness industry are making billions just from people getting fatter every year

Let Go of the Good Food/Bad Food Belief

You need to learn to let go of the good food, bad food belief and dump all the bad food lists. And instead start focusing on the foods that taste good, are filling and make you feel great.

It’s a mind shift and a whole different perception, especially if you have been exposed to the mainstream fitness media for the last couple of decades.

Ask yourself this question: ” What do I like to eat?” And eat exactly that!

A lot of people will be thinking that this statement means you can eat burgers and ice cream all day long. Well, that’s not true. Nobody can do go on a diet like that and that’s a pretty boring lifestyle to have.

There are lots of food choices, if chicken with broccoli and chocolate with ice cream are the only meals you know you are limiting yourself and preventing yourself from tasting some amazing foods that are also rich in nutrients.

Get a variety in your diet and start experimenting with different cuisines. Just ask yourself, what exotic meal you haven’t tried yet?

Believe it or not, there are other foods and meals outside the “healthy” recommended by fitness media and “unhealthy junk food” like chocolate or burgers. There are a lot of other options and they can be very tasty.

Today John Barban and Brad Pilon will show you how to switch  from good/bad thinking into “eating what I really like and what makes me feel good” and “what would be the best and most tasty option for me?“.

If you’ve heard the first podcast and you’ve read so far then you understand what’s the point of it, but you may still be unsure of the whole process, so before you listen to today’s episode where John and Brad discuss this in great detail, let’s look over the steps you can take to recover from Orthorexia and start eating for flavor:

  1. Realize that any health message is a marketing message
  2. Understand that you won’t cheat death, and especially not by choosing different foods
  3. Create new food lists, but assign them different meanings (e.g. rank them by flavor)
  4. Make a list of foods that makes you bloated or that you are allergic to
  5. Evaluate every food on those lists based on how much you enjoy it, how many calories it contains etc.
  6. [you will have to listen to the interview for this one :)]
There is a lot of choice outside the traditional healthy and unhealthy lists AKA good foods/bad foods. European and Asian cuisines are very rich in different flavors and tastes, just start experimenting. Today we are going to give you the permission to do that and explain you why it’s beneficial and how to go about it.

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Filed Under: Fat Loss, Food, health, Podcasts, Uncensored Podcasts S02 Tagged With: , ,

What Supplements Should You Take to Help You Achieve Your Health & Fitness Goals?

August 15, 2012 by

Here’s the second part of this month’s UNCENSORED Podcasts Season 2.

The topic?

Supplements.

Here’s what you discovered in the first part (link to the 1st part here):

  • What a supplement is, how the industry got started, and what it has evolved into
  • What is the definition of supplements in various countries and why it matters
  • How important supplements are
  • What’s the lifecycle of a supplement product
  • How the process of putting new supplements on the market works
  • How come government regulators have no control of what’s on the market
  • What ingredients are added into supplements are useless and serve just as marketing

“Will These Supplements Help Me?”

Often times guys on the Internet and in our community ask us “What supplements should I take?” or “Will this supplement help me?”.

Should you take those? Are they worth the money? How will you track the results? Or will you just go by the “feeling”?

The issue is that it’s impossible to answer those type of questions.

If you want an accurate answer that can actually help you (not the generic crap found on the web) with your fitness goals, you need to get clear on what is it you really want and what do you expect out of the supplements.

Another thing that will determine what supplements to use and how much of it we will recommend you taking is your budget, how much money can you spend on supplements? 50 bucks? Or 1000 bucks? That’s a pretty big difference. Somebody who is a sponsored athlete or works in a supplement lab will have different options than a college student.

For example a question “Will this product give me the body I want?”or “Can this product do what I want it to do?” is way better and gets to the point of what you really expect from it.

But even those two questions aren’t perfect, when you start thinking about it, you’ll soon find out that it’s not that easy to figure out the right question (after you listen to the podcast, try to come up with a good one and share it in the community so others can comment on it).

This is just one way of looking at it, another way would be to take a different approach and actually set your goals first and then try to match the right product to that desired outcome.

However, in this case you will find a pretty nasty barrier.

And that’s the fact that supplements contain a lot of ingredient that will have absolutely zero effect on your body.

When you look into each product you will see a bunch of stuff you have never heard about, but almost always there will be one big ingredient that’s usually responsible for all the results. In many cases it will be creatine, or caffeine, depends on the supplement.

Why is that?

Well, the top selling supplements are exactly the same as ten years ago and they will most likely be same as the best selling supplements ten years from now.

There is just a couple of items that are packaged in a thousand different ways.

The product isn’t what’s different, they are roughly the same, it’s the marketing around it that makes all the difference.

Supplement companies fight a difficult challenge and that’s pointing out the ingredient.

Nobody gets excited about plain Creatine monohydrate anymore, simply because it’s been around a while. So, they have to sell some “enhanced version” of creatine to pump up the sales.

It has nothing to do with finding some new amazing and proven ingredient that nobody has ever heard about and adding it to the current product, it’s just a simple desire to sell more products.

Today John Barban and Brad Pilon will reveal more information about the supplement industry and also coach you on how to ask the right question and how to find supplements that will help you with:

a) Building Muscle

b) Losing Fat

c) Improving Health

d) Boosting Energy

In today’s UNCENSORED training, you will also discover:
  • How to approach weight loss supplements and what do they really help with (hint: they are not burning your belly fat)
  • What are the realistic expectations for using the supplements that are on the market
  • What supplements companies are should be trustworthy (bigger or smaller? Why??)
  • How the Natural Standards Database (you have access to it in the immersion account through cockpit) can help you pick supplements
  • Step by step how to intelligently choose and test supplements
  • What side effects really are and how it applies to you when you take supplements (or drugs)
  • Pilon’s sneaky techniques he used to sell supplements in the past

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Filed Under: Podcasts, Supplements, Uncensored Podcasts S02 Tagged With: , , , ,

Can You Go Past Your Genetic Ideal with More Protein?

July 18, 2012 by

Here’s the second part of this month’s UNCENSORED Podcasts Season 2.

Here’s what you discovered in the first part (link to the 1st part here):

  • What’s catch up growth
  • What’s the disinhibition/inhibition model and how does  it apply to muscle growth
  • How taking drugs basically means adding another engine to your car (body) meaning what bodybuilders do, doesn’t apply to your case in any way
  • That fitness media completely loses touch with scientific research
  • You can’t stimulate your body to grow more than it’s designed to, you can only remove inhibitors to allow your body to keep growing to its full ideal
  • Different inhibitors that are preventing your muscle from growing
  • That almost every single image you see of bodybuilders is enhanced, but after a while you’ve gotten used to it and started thinking of it as your genetic ideal

What Role Do Protein and Amino Acids Play in Muscle Growth?

It’s generally accepted that higher amino acid intake allows for muscle synthesis in the otherwise fasted state, but…

Can higher protein intake stimulate more muscle growth?

…the truth is, you can’t eat your way to muscle growth.

That’s just not going to happen.

In reality your goal should be to hit an adequate amount, in both calories and protein. Everyone thinks the key is in some sort of excess, but that’s the “stimulation model” forced at you by fitness media.

You have to realize that everybody has an energetic reserve. In fact a large person can go days without eating and still not have it affect the metabolic processes in his body.

It’s no the deficit itself that’s the determinant, but the ability to handle it, which depends on the amount of the reserve. In other words, the leaner you are the more and more frequently you will eat.

…And what if you try to eat more?

Well, in a nutshell your body deals with excess by burning it, storing it or by getting rid of it.

So, let’s say you buy a weight gainer product and you try to dose your way up to bigger muscles.

Well, once you listen to todays podcast you’ll understand that you’re consciously investing in storing these excess calories as fat! That sucks, doesn’t it?

But that’s pretty much what the food and supplement companies are selling you. You are paying to be fat, how crazy is that?

Now that applies mostly to excess calories, but too much protein works almost the same. Most guys think you have to take a protein shake five times a day and even in the middle of the night, because your “body is starving“, right?

The truth is that your body is pretty well-designed and it handles excess protein in a smart way – it stores it as a reserve and uses it during your fasted state.

There is a sweet spot to every biological process. You can also imagine each process as a spectrum. On the left side you have a malnourished, 14 year-old marathon runner and on the right side you have the wanna be bodybuilder who is mega dosing calories and protein, but he is just getting fat. Both are extremes, you want to be in the middle, eat enough protein and calories to maintain what you have and build even more muscle while losing all the fat and getting ripped.

One of the keys to understanding how all this works is realizing that your body is not static, it’s dynamic.

Your body is breaking down and building things up every day – you are not built of the same stuff as you were a year ago.

Just like your bank account, something goes in, something goes out, so over time it may look the similar, but it’s never the exact same money.

In today’s UNCENSORED training, you will discover and learn:

  • What’s the genetic ideal and genetic ideal shape for you and if you can go beyond it
  • What role does protein play and what you need to do to remove protein intake as an inhibitor
  • The answer to whether extra protein intake helps with muscle building
  • What happens when you get from the adequate intake spectrum below to the low levels of caloric and protein intake or on the other hand to high levels of excessive intake
  • What are your only ways of affecting the shape of your body
  • How the environment you live in translates into your ability to get in shape
  • What body are you capable of building when you remove all of the inhibitors
  • What’s novel stimulus and how it relates to muscle growth
  • What’s the difference in muscle gains and strength gains
  • If small forearms are preventing you from making your arms bigger
  • How a calf injury can mean shoulder pain and inability to work out properly
  • Revealing an argument why you should fast to remove yet another inhibitor
  • Whether working out and or running is removing an inhibitor, introducing new inhibitor or accelerating your growth (hint: it’s not the one you think)
  • How to look at your life with a new mindset and target all the inhibitors and remove them

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Filed Under: Sage Advice Tagged With: , , , , ,

Eliminate Inhibitors and Muscle Growth Will Be The Default State of Your Body

July 4, 2012 by

Welcome to Season 2 of our UNCENSORED Podcasts!

What really is muscle growth? Do you think it has been studied and understood by scientists?

In the bodybuilding community, there is a strong belief that we don’t have any research on muscle growth and muscle building.

That’s not true.

There are a ton of papers on this subject, the results are just not what we would like them to be, that’s why it’s usually brushed under the table.

A New Way of Thinking about Muscle Growth

We’ve always been lead to believe that you need to “boost your muscle growth”, find ways to eat more protein, more calories, basically do everything you can to stimulate your muscles to grow even more.

The only issue with this approach is that you can’t do it, because it’s impossible without the use of drugs.

Today, Barban and Pilon will show you how the typical approach, as explained by others who focus on bro-science in this industry, is completely the opposite to how your body REALLY works.

To explain this in simple terms, let’s imagine your body works like a car and you are the driver. In this case, you would have one foot on the gas and the other one on the brake. However, in this case, you can’t press your foot further down on the gas pedal: you already are crashing the floor with it.

What you need to do is something else – you need to completely remove the other foot from the brake. Because once you get your other foot off the brake, the car starts going forward. To complete the analogy, your body starts growing.

So instead of trying to “force” your muscles to grow, you just need to remove the inhibitors that are preventing you from reaching your golden body shape.

The minute you are born, you start growing, but let’s take away juvenile muscle growth and even steroid induced growth from this to make things really simple.

Now, you may be saying, if this is true then why don’t I already have a 20 inch bicep, right?

Well, here’s how this works. Your body has a predefined way of growth, so if you are supposed to be 190 pounds at 6’1” it will try to get there by default and it will ALWAYS try getting there until you are 190 and 6’1”.

If your body isn’t where it should be yet, then it’s not because you haven’t done enough to boost the growth, yet it’s rather because you haven’t removed the things that are preventing your body from growing the way it wants.

Let me repeat: Your body wants to grow, however there are roadblocks called inhibitors that are preventing it from growing.

These inhibitors can be nutritional, environmental and even mental. There are also genetic inhibitors that keep the body from uncontrolled or unchecked growth, which like it or not is not something you would want. (ex: a tumor or cancer is an example of uncontrolled or unchecked growth)

So some inhibitors have to be there.

In essense, what you can do is find a way to remove some of them, so your body can reach it’s full potential.

In today’s UNCENSORED training, you will discover and learn:

  • Why removing inhibitors is a way to go to build more muscle
  • How many calories you need to eat to build 5 pounds of muscle a month
  • Some of the inhibitors that are preventing your body from growing
  • Why studies on rats are completely irrelevant when making a point about human body
  • Why ‘extra’ protein will not help you build muscle
  • The reason behind “How I gained 30 pounds with this workout” marketing stories and why they’re all likely true, and also to be expected
  • More insights from the Disinhibition theory of muscle growth that makes most fitness marketing seem outdated
  • Why running marathons might be detrimental to muscle growth

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Filed Under: Muscle Building, Uncensored Podcasts S02 Tagged With: , , , ,
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