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by
Dr. Hussman

Chapter One : Basics

Hi everyone! The goal of this page is to help you to transform your physique by walking you step-by-step through everything you need to know about exercise physiology and nutrition. I know that a lot of you have "tried everything" (as I had), and because there are so many approaches that have failed you, there's a real risk that you'll quit again and again if you don't see results immediately, or if you don't fully understand why your fitness program should work. Worse, there may be some missing pieces in your program, particularly if you have hidden issues such as insulin resistance. My hope is that this information will help you to stay on track - to turn effort into results - and to reach your goal. The first thing I can tell you is that the information on this site WILL work for you! The exercise information is based on solid research and principles of exercise physiology, and the fat loss information is very different from popular weight-loss approaches (Atkins, Stillman, etc) which can be restrictive, unnatural, slow, frequently ineffective, and highly unbalanced. The key to an effective fitness program is to work with your body. If you aren't careful about the changes you throw at your body, you risk completely unintended consequences such as muscle loss. As you'll see, a good fitness program isn't accidental. All the pieces are on this page, in exact detail. They're specific, and they're crucial. An integrated combination of aerobic exercise, cross-training, interval training, resistance training, adequate protein intake, balanced low-glycemic nutrition, targeted caloric deficits, sufficient water, basic record-keeping, specific goals, and adequate rest really is the single best way to improve fitness fast, and to reduce some very serious health risks. So if your current program is not working for you, for any reason, we've got to add the missing pieces to make it work. Period.

Now, before you start feeling overwhelmed, rest assured that there are appropriate ways to include these in your program, regardless of your age, gender or level of fitness. Women who do resistance training don't "bulk up." Muscle is far more compact than fat. In females, resistance training makes the muscles toned, slender and shapely - not bulky - and significantly reduces the risk of osteoporosis. When conducted at a proper level, this type of training can also cause profound increases in the strength of older individuals. The key is starting at the proper level. If you're extremely out of shape, a "wind sprint" for you may initially be simply walking up a hill. That will improve. Of course, if just thinking about getting up off the couch is your wind sprint ("Whew! Hand me a towel!"), well, we've got some work to do. In any case, remember - no gasping allowed.

A quick word of CRUCIAL ADVICE. While this site discusses both muscle gain and fat loss, I know from thousands of notes that fat loss is important to most of you. If your goal is to lose fat, you absolutely must follow a written daily nutrition plan that takes in fewer calories per day than you burn, and that keeps your blood sugar stable throughout the day. You can get great results without being hungry - even on fairly few calories - IF you take those calories in through small, regular, high quality portions that don't spike or exhaust your blood sugar. If you don't do the nutrition right, it will not matter how much or how effectively you exercise. Please, please take this point seriously. The key to fat loss is burning more calories than you take in, day after day after day, and keeping your blood sugar stable. You have to write down every meal in advance. If you lose sight of these basic truths, you'll waste a lot of time. There's lots of good information about this in the sections entitled How Calories Work, and Unleash the Secret Weapon.

OK. Let's go through the components individually. On the exercise front, most effective way to get fit is to include a specific variety of exercises in your program. Physiologist Covert Bailey calls these the "four food groups of exercise", and they include 1) aerobic exercise, 2) cross-training, 3) interval training or "wind sprints" (no gasping allowed!), and 4) resistance training or "weight lifting."

With regard to what you eat, the key to fitness is balanced nutrition and stable blood sugar. Balanced nutrition means eating protein (preferably about 1 gram per pound of lean body weight if you're weight training), "clean" carbohydrates, and yes, even some fat. A number of studies have emphasized the role of calcium, particularly dairy calcium, in promoting fat loss and muscle retention. So if possible, include a couple of servings of skim milk or Light & Fit (low fat, no added sugar) yogurt in your plan. The sugar that you see listed in dairy products is lactose, which is fine in moderation. If you're lactose intolerant, take a calcium supplement like Citracal.

The key is choosing which foods to eat, and how much, in order to fuel your metabolism, promote muscle strength, and maximize fat burning. Ideally, you should eat 5-6 relatively small meals a day, balanced between high-quality protein and "low glycemic" carbohydrate (more about this in the "metabolism" and "nutrition" sections). I'm not talking about multi-course meals, and you really shouldn't be eating more than a little bit of "maintenance food" later in the evening, so this isn't a license to snack either. If you cup one hand completely over the other, the correct amount of protein or carbohydrate will fit inside. The goal is to keep a constant nutrient stream and stable blood sugar throughout the day. This kind of nutrition plan maximizes both muscle recovery and fat loss. Again, if your main goal is fat loss, you have to frequently remind yourself that balanced, frequent meals will not help you unless they're also carefully limited in size.

Since the word "meal" frequently makes people think of a large plate of food, or several courses, I'm going to call these things rations.

Adequate water intake is also important to support your metabolism. There is no exact figure, but 8-12 glasses a day is widely agreed upon (more if you tend to lose a lot of water due to perspiration or hot weather).

In addition, you should absolutely add an occasional fibrous vegetable to your rations (preferably a low calorie "water" vegetable like lettuce, cucumber, carrots, or steamed broccoli, which you can have in fairly significant amounts), or low-fat soups made from vegetables. In fact, if fat loss is one of your major goals, your success will be largely determined by your willingness to choose unprocessed foods like vegetables, fruits and whole grains. Again, there's more about this in the Nutrition section.

These two components - proper exercise and proper nutrition - take advantage of the body's ability to adapt. It's variety of exercise and periodic intensity that forces your metabolic rate higher, and the frequent rations that keep it there and provide the nutrients to recover. The frequent rations reduce your body's tendency to defend its fat stores. The variety of exercises is also important, because the body perceives a certain amount of variety as more intense than the same workout day after day (in fact, alternating between two different aerobic exercises on different days may offer additional cross-training benefits). In the weight training, it is the stress and tension on the muscle fibers (not the duration of exercise) that stimulates muscle growth. Go slow (at least 2 seconds) when you lower that weight.

Proper exercise sessions are not simply "workouts" - they are training sessions. Your goal is to reach for a new personal best. Your willingness to reach for progressive improvement is what drives your body to adapt. For the best results, you really have to maintain a daily workout routine. If you give your body too much time to rest and recover, the pressure to adapt is lost. If you try to do a fitness program half-way, you won't get half the results - and you may get next to nothing.

It's also going to be important to set reasonable goals and keep some very basic progress records. Your goals should include inspiring and specific details about how you want to look in 12 or 15 weeks. You should also set short-term objectives that answer questions like "What is my goal for this workout?" Finally, you're going to do just a little bit of record-keeping, to make sure that you're constantly moving toward a higher "personal best", and to keep track of exactly what you're eating.

A note about sleep. If you try to transform your physique while depriving yourself of sleep, you're working against yourself. Sleep deprivation substantially increases a hormone called cortisol (see the section on metabolism) and will increase your appetite for junk carbohydrates, reduce your metabolic activity during waking hours, and get in the way of muscle growth. Ideally, find a way to get 8 and preferably 9 hours of sleep a night during the main "transformation" part of your program. I know, I know, that means that you have to change your schedule some. But you've got to understand that your body is the way it is right now because that's how it has adapted to the lifestyle you're living. If you want to change your body, you've also got to change that lifestyle. Your physique won't transform in a vacuum. Your body will change when you find more constructive ways to adapt to your circumstances. And that includes getting enough sleep.

So those are the essential components to a good fitness program - you have to include a variety of exercises in your program, experience periodic intensity every day, and follow it up with frequent, carefully limited, high-quality nutrition, simple record-keeping, and sufficient rest.

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Chapter Two : Where energy comes from

Now some specifics. Don't give up on me here. This section is short, but important.

If you really want to understand how exercise produces changes in your body, it helps to know a little bit of biology. It will help you to understand exactly what you are trying to achieve in your workouts. Your body gets its energy from a molecule called ATP (adenosine triphosphate), which has three "phosphate groups" in it. When you pop one of those phosphate groups off, ATP gives off energy like a little Chinese firecracker, and is converted to ADP (adenosine diphosphate). The body then turns the ADP back into ATP, using fat or sugar (little chains of glucose called "glycogen") for the energy needed to put that third phosphate group back on.

There are four ways that the body gets the energy to put that phosphate group back on, and they vary by speed, and by whether they burn oxygen or not.

Explosive Force - The ATP-CP System: By far the fastest way to get that third phosphate group is to grab it off of a molecule called "creatine phosphate" or CP. When you are doing very explosive exercise for 10-30 seconds, such as an all-out sprint, the burst of energy is delivered by the ATP-CP system. Fast, doesn't require oxygen, but extremely limited to short periods of explosive force.

ADP + Creatine phosphate (CP) ==> ATP + Creatine Sugar Burning - Step 1 (Anaerobic Glycolysis): The next fastest method of getting energy is to turn a sugar molecule into lactic acid. This doesn't require oxygen either. This system is effective for vigorous exercise of between 1-3 minutes in duration. When the intensity of the exercise requires more energy than what can be burned with the oxygen you are breathing, your body starts "partially" burning glucose anaerobically (without oxygen). This is the system you want to be using during "wind sprints". This is a system that has to be trained in order to get fast results, but again, this system can be used only for a limited period. As lactic acid builds up in your muscles, you start to feel them "burn". If you go beyond a few minutes of this, the acidity of the muscle tissue increases and the muscles start to have difficulty generating meaningful amounts of energy.

ADP + glucose ==> ATP + pyruvic acid (which converts to lactate if not burned with oxygen) Sugar Burning - Step 2 (Aerobic Glycolysis): This is the next system, and for all practical purposes is the one you use most often when exercising. Once glucose has been converted to lactate anaerobically (without oxygen), the body then burns the lactate using oxygen to create more ATP.

ADP + lactate + oxygen ==> ATP + water + carbon dioxide Fat Burning (Aerobic Lipolysis): This is by far the slowest system. It is, in fact, too slow to contribute extensively to energy production during exercise (in fact, if you ever deplete your glycogen stores so much that the body has to rely on lipolysis for its energy, your muscle movement slows down dramatically). In order to mobilize fat, a "triglyceride" has to be broken down into fatty acids, bound to proteins, and other time-consuming feats. The good news, is that lipid (fat) metabolism is the main way that your glycogen stores are replenished after exercise. That's why it can be useful to work out in the morning on an empty stomach and wait about an hour after your workout before eating - your glycogen stores are more depleted by the end of your workout and you burn more fat afterward.

Fat + oxygen + ADP ==> ATP + water + carbon dioxide

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Chapter three : Workouts

Now that you know where the energy comes from, let's see how to train each of these systems.Humans are at the top of the food chain because of their remarkable ability to adapt, and a proper exercise program should provide the precise amount of stimulation to trigger those adaptations. Your exercise program should train every one of your energy systems. As a result, your aerobic capacity will improve, your lactate tolerance will increase, and your metabolism will stay revved up all day long. And that's the key to fast fitness - you want to maintain a persistently high level of metabolic activity every day. Athletes who incorporate periodic high-intensity intervals into their workouts show much greater performance gains than those who use long-duration, low intensity training. There's no scientific evidence that multiple training sessions or very long daily workouts improve performance more than a single well-structured session. In competitive swimmers, subjects that trained for 3-4 hours a day, 5-6 days a week actually lost muscular strength and speed, compared to those that trained just 1-1.5 hours a day. If you're trying to gain muscle, intensity of muscle contraction is much more important than duration, and anything more than an hour of intensity will exhaust your glycogen and creatine phosphate stores, which you'll experience as muscle fatigue. And while aerobic training is essential, excessive aerobic workouts (more than about 45 minutes) reduce the ability of the muscles to recover and grow. So longer aerobic sessions come at the cost of less muscle growth.

Here's why you need muscle. Much less than half of your "lean weight" (scale weight minus fat) is active, skeletal muscle. But that muscle accounts for the majority of the energy you use daily. A pound of pure muscle burns up to about 50 calories a day (though less at sedentary activity levels). To put that in perspective, a pound of fat is 3500 calories. The more lean muscle you have, the easier it is to burn fat. Suppose somebody goes on a restrictive or unbalanced fad diet such as Atkins, does nothing to preserve muscle tissue, and loses 10 pounds of muscle (which is not unusual), some fat, and a lot of water. They may look at the scale and think that's progress. But as soon as they go off the diet, the water will rapidly return and the scale will shoot higher. Worse, they'll find that a caloric intake that used to keep their weight constant may now cause them to gain as much as a pound of fat a week. The less muscle mass you have, the harder it is to lose weight and keep it off. So even if your goal is purely fat loss, you've got to keep up the strength training so that your lean mass at least stays constant.

Here's why you need aerobics. Exercise has two functions: one is to trigger metabolic adaptation, and the other is to do mechanical work. Both expend a lot of energy, and if you want to burn a lot of fat, you want to take advantage of both. The short-duration, high intensity stuff triggers adaptation (muscle gain, enzyme changes, cellular reorganization, lactate tolerance, cardiovascular improvement). You burn fat afterward in order to replace muscle glycogen. The longer duration, lower intensity aerobic activity (breathing deeply but still "conversational") allows you to create an energy demand that burns fat then and there. If you include both types, without overtraining (see below), you're going to lose fat fast.

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Chapter Four : Aerobics + Wind Sprints = Improved Fitness + Afterburn

The most effective type of cardiovascular exercise is known as "High Intensity Interval Training" (HIIT). This involves a combination of aerobic exercise, and higher intensity "wind sprints." There are several variations of HIIT, but all involve alternating between moderate and high intensity for intervals anywhere between 30 seconds and 5 minutes each. Start by warming up for 2-3 minutes. Following your warmup, you move to a moderate level of intensity. At this point, you should be "conversational" - breathing deeply and rhythmically, but still able to carry on a broken conversation. The majority of your energy here is coming from aerobic metabolism (burning glycogen and fat using oxygen). Don't lean on the bars. Keep a good posture, with your shoulder blades pulled very slightly toward each other. Mentally picture your muscles working deeply, not just at the surface. Try to recruit as much muscle activity as possible from your arms, legs, back and buttocks (without looking like a dork).

Near the end of the "aerobic" portion, you raise your intensity enough to bump you out of your "comfort range". This is still aerobic, but more challenging. Finally, you add a periodic "wind sprint" which, by definition, should get you somewhat winded. If at the end of your wind sprint, you feel that you could continue on at that level of effort for a good while, it's not quite intense enough.

A WORD OF CAUTION HERE: While you are trying to hit new personal bests and strive for progressive improvement, wind sprints do not require extreme exertion. For very unfit individuals, a "sprint" may simply be walking up a hill. The key is to push enough to get somewhat winded. No gasping as if you've just been held underwater. If you are just starting a fitness program, you really should have a physician look you over, especially if you have high blood pressure or any family history of heart disease or stroke. Again, the goal is not extreme or painful exertion! Take this seriously, because especially in individuals with hidden problems, gasping your way to cardiopulmonary stress can be life-threatening. Just try to hit a new personal best, preferably with enough effort that you feel a burn in the muscle and have to catch your breath.

At this level of effort, your energy demands are above what can be produced aerobically, and you are challenging your anaerobic systems - right at the threshold where lactate starts accumulating. Near the end of your wind sprint, you'll probably start feeling a burn in your muscles.

After your wind sprint, you drop back down to a moderate level of intensity and do it again. Notice that's a moderate level. You don't drop to a snail's pace or stop altogether (harder than it sounds). This is important. After you challenge your lactate threshold, you want to move down to a level that is still a reasonable effort - it's called "active recovery". That active recovery phase produces tremendous improvement in your metabolism, because your body is forced to recover from the wind sprint while still working. Then you do it all again.

Try not to "tighten up" during your wind sprint. Focus on your out-breath (the in-breath will take care of itself). Relax into it, smile, and visualize yourself as a swift animal or a well-oiled motor. You'll get more power, and you'll reduce the cardiovascular resistance that way. The last 20 seconds of your sprint may seem like forever. They do for me. By the end of your last sprint, you're toast, so you drop down to a "cooldown" level. Keep moving and get your breath back to a fully conversational level before stopping. The intensity you've experienced will have you burning a lot of calories for even hours after the workout - something you don't get from long, low intensity aerobics. This kind of interval training contributes greatly to your aerobic performance, and has also been found to improve the neurological pathways your body uses for recruiting muscle fibers.

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Chapter Five : Cross-training + Muscle Confusion = Continual Progress

Cross-training basically means using a variety of exercises to achieve your goals. As Charles Poliquin says, "A training system is only as good as the time it takes you to adapt to it." Your body is very good at adapting to stress, and if you give it the same set of exercises every time, it will become very efficient at those exercises, and the pressure to adapt will diminish.

One of the best ways to kick-start your results from a plateau is to add a new aerobic exercise to your week. You can also add a different aerobic exercise on alternate workouts (e.g. treadmill one day and stationary bike two days later). My main cardio exercises are Nordic Track and Schwinn Airdyne (both which require coordinated upper/lower body movement). Jumping rope is another excellent cross-training exercise. When the weather is good, I include outdoor running along a trail with a few steep hills.

Again, even holding the level of effort constant, variety is perceived as more intense, so in your weight training, you should occasionally vary the speed of your repetitions, and the amount of rest between them. Changing your weight routine once every 4 weeks is also effective - even changes as small as switching from the flat dumbbell press to the incline dumbbell press for the chest, or switching from side raises to the overhead dumbbell press for shoulders. You'll feel it the next day. Don't change your lifting routine every week, because you want to develop "neuromuscular coordination". But do toss in something to keep those muscles confused about every 4 weeks. Your body will be forced to adapt.

The reason for varying both the weight and number of repetitions for each set is that you are trying to train two sets of muscle fibers, generally called "fast-twitch" and "slow-twitch". The fast-twitch guys have more force and size, relying more heavily on the ATP-CP and anaerobic energy systems. You train them with low-rep, high-weight sets where time under tension is as little as 20 seconds per set. For variety, some lifters include high-weight sets of just 1-2 reps in some exercises (which you can insert after your set of 6 if you use a spotter and are careful about your form). Strictly speaking, those very low reps (1-4) do not put the muscle under tension long enough to cause much of the micro-damage that leads to muscle growth, but they do improve neural coordination and build strength in general. So they can be helpful, indirectly, by allowing you to recruit more motor units and lift heavier in your other sets. The slow twitch guys are the endurance fibers and the fat burners. You train those with high-rep, lower-weight sets, where time under tension is still only about 45-70 seconds per set.

It may also be helpful to vary the length of your rest periods from time to time. Always rest for at least 45 seconds between sets (except when you're intentionally doing back-to-back compound sets to exhaust the muscle). The shorter and heavier the set, the longer you should rest. Longer recovery (up to 3 minutes) allows you to use heavier weight and more tension per set, while shorter recovery forces the muscles to improve their glycogen storage ability. Ideally, you should include both.

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Chapter Six : Contraction + Tension = Muscle growth

The same intensity principle applies to the weight training workouts. Weight training is essentially an anaerobic activity, since you expend a very high level of concentrated effort in a succession of short sets. Your ATP-CP system runs like mad during a weight training workout. If you alternate moderate duration, high intensity weight training and aerobic/interval training, you'll develop every energy system in your body, but with workouts that are brief enough that you can do it again and again.

What you're trying to do in weight training is contract the muscle enough to make micro-tears, which then stimulate new growth and repair. In order to do that, you should go relatively slow (never jerk the weight), concentrate on contracting the muscle more than moving the weight, contract the muscle hard at the top of the concentric motion, and keep the muscle under tension during the eccentric (lowering) motion as well. You should use a variety of tempos for the concentric motion; generally about 1 second, occasionally longer, occasionally using "explosive force", but never recruiting momentum. On the eccentric motion, it should generally take you at least 2 seconds to lower the weight, and you should feel some real stress on the muscle as you lower it. Go slow! That's harder than it sounds, but again, the point is to cause micro-tears in the muscle fibers, and you don't get that just by swinging a heavy weight up and letting it drop. Don't lock (fully extend) any joint, as it reduces the stress on the muscle and the resulting benefit. Remember, it is contraction and tension, not how long you work out, or how many exercises you use per body part, that stimulates muscle growth. Not feeling sore? Slow down your eccentric motions! Take 2-4 seconds to lower that weight.

EXHALE. Never hold your breath. Proper breathing is essential to avoid putting undue pressure on your arteries and other blood vessels, or spiking your blood pressure (particularly after the age of 40 or so, or if you have a family history of heart disease or stroke). You can do wind sprints in a way that gets you winded without gasping. You can lift weights in a way that causes micro-tears, repair and growth without ever holding your breath.

Muscles adapt and grow when they are forced (with proper form) to overcome a resistance they have not experienced before. In weight training, that's called the "principle of overload". In every workout, for every exercise, pick at least one of your sets to make your "personal best". Go beyond what you have ever done; either by raising the weight or adding 1-2 extra reps to one of your sets. Then gradually add weight to the other sets in that exercise until you can raise the resistance on the entire sequence. As fitness writer Dave Tuttle notes, "weightlifting is not an endurance sport. It is a peak-intensity sport based on the overload principle. Your muscles grow from the one set when you lift more than you ever did before, and not from the ten sets you did at a weight you have lifted for years."

When you lift weights, you should always warm up with low weight for 12-15 repetitions. After that, you raise the amount of weight and do 2-3 "work sets." There is a wide variety of set/rep patterns available. A "pyramid" sequence raises the weight in each set while lowering the number of repetitions, then reverses, raising the number of repetitions while lowering the amount of weight. A "half-pyramid" does just the first portion of that sequence. A "half pyramid with a pump set" immediately adds a final set of 8-12 repetitions. Advanced lifters sometimes warm up and then do a single set to "total failure" - meaning they can no longer lift nor lower the weight and still stay in good form. This requires a "spotter" to help stabilize the weight at the point of failure, and is extremely dangerous without one. But you can get roughly the same effect if you finish your last set by what I call "lingering in the eccentric" - holding the weight in mid-lowering until you completely exhaust the muscle (don't do this for any exercise where you could not safely drop the weight if you had to).

In any event, work sets should be near "failure" for the concentric or lifting portion of the movement. The last couple of reps should be a challenge, and the last 2 reps of your final set should be a slightly out-of-body experience. Arnold Schwarzenegger describes it as "substituting the feeling of pain with the feeling of pleasure." If you can "rep-out" that last set with more than 12, it's time to add some extra weight. In general, the weight you use for these sets should range from about 70% (for higher rep sets) to about 85% (for lower rep sets) of your single-rep maximum. Always, but particularly on those last reps, be sure that you aren't "recruiting" other muscles to do the work of the one you're trying to focus on. If your hips or back are lifting off the bench, your elbows are flaring out, or you are arching your body one way or another, cut it out! It's a good way to get hurt, and you're taking the stress off the target muscle. Keep your abs tight, shoulder blades pulled slightly toward each other, and your neck and pelvis in a "neutral" position - stable, with the slight curvatures intact.

Your resistance-training routines should include at least one multi-joint "foundation" exercise. For chest and arms, the barbell bench press is excellent, because it requires balance and recruitment of numerous muscle groups. A closer grip focuses on the arms. A wider grip focuses on the chest. Cable pulldowns are a good choice for the upper back. For lower body, squats or leg presses are excellent, but be very careful about proper form. Early on, a leather weight belt is a great investment to protect your lower back on vertical exercises like squats. But gradually reduce your use, in order to encourage back and abdominal strength. You don't have to be a hero either. I can't emphasize enough that resistance training gets results when you achieve powerful muscle contraction. That depends more on form and focus than on poundage. Pushing a lot of weight in poor form just gets you injured. Muscle soreness is a great sign. So is a good "burn" during your last few reps. But joint pain or severe shooting pain is an urgent warning that your form is poor or your poundage is excessive.

Some tips from Arnold Schwarzenegger:

"From the very start you should look on soreness as a positive, as a sign of building, of growth.
"Use the time on your way to the gym to outline some immediate goals for yourself, to decide what you want to accomplish in this particular workout session. Don't just go to the gym and say, 'Oh no, another workout.' Your attitude should be: 'Okay, this is another training session, and today instead of a 100-pound bench press I'll do 105 pounds. I feel stronger today; I can do it.'
"You should set goals for yourself that make you eager to go in and do bench presses, or squats, or barbell curls. Have a definite reason for wanting to do bench presses. Not just because you want to look better next year. That is a long-range goal, which is very important - but you should also be setting little short-range goals all the time. For example, tell yourself that tomorrow you want to get a good pump in the pectoral muscles. Or, yesterday you saw a picture of a bodybuilder whose waist was 29 inches, and you would like to have really good abdominals, so today you'll do more repetitions: by next Monday you ought to be a half inch smaller in the waist. These little goals are fantastic. They've helped me a lot."

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Chapter Seven : Proper form is essential

Free weights are generally very safe. Check with your physician first, of course, to be sure what level of intensity is appropriate for you. If you're over 40 or have a family history of heart disease or stroke, please don't skip that advice. The most significant danger in weight lifting is improperly executed leg exercises. Deadlifts have the greatest shearing force on the lower back. I prefer leg curls for that reason. Leg extensions can also stress the knee if poundage is too high, so you should do them after your legs are "pre-exhausted". For foundation work, I like squats in proper form, or super-slow leg presses. Push from the heels, focus on straightening the knees, and come just short of locking the knees at the top. That allows you to achieve the same stress with lower poundage. On the eccentric (downward) movement, don't let those knees travel over the toes. Look forward, not down, and do not relax at the bottom of a squat, which can cause excessive stress to the connective tissue of the knees. When you pick something heavy up, you should usually bend at the knees, keep your lower spine relatively straight, and lift with your leg muscles, rather than bending at the hips and straining your lower back. Never lift and twist at the same time. When doing bench work, don't let your elbows move much below the bench, which can strain the shoulders. Exhale.

There is a whole list of metabolic benefits from the combination of aerobics, wind-sprints, cross training and resistance training. These including improved aerobic capacity, higher lactate tolerance, greater capillary density, increased fat-burning enzymes and transfer agents, expansion of muscle glycogen stores, and increase in mitochondria (the parts of the cell that produce energy). But the bottom line is that you'll feel great. Muscle building is challenging, so you should plan extra sleep, especially in the first few weeks of your program. You may also feel a very strong need for a nap in the afternoon or early evening, which you should take (up to 20 minutes), in order to lower your susceptibility to colds and improve your recovery. A 10-20 minute period of relaxed, slow, deep breathing is also a good time to visualize your goals.

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Chapter Eight : Your raging metabolism


Let's talk about your metabolism. Yeah, I know it's too slow. No doubt, you've got the fat gene too. Probably from both sides. I'm kidding, of course, but it's amazing how many people talk quite authoritatively about their metabolism being slow without actually knowing what metabolism is, or what they can do about it.

There are three components to your metabolic rate:

1. Base Metabolic Rate or BMR. This is the amount of energy your body would use simply by lying around in bed all day. You increase your BMR by building more muscle, which is metabolically active. You'll find a calculator to estimate your BMR in the "How calories work" section below.
2. Unrestricted Physical Activity or UPA. This is the amount of energy your body uses during daily activity. You increase UPA through exercise, and also by doing physical activity throughout the day (take a walk, take the stairs, choose a more distant parking spot).
3. Thermal Effect of Food or TEF. This is basically the second law of thermodynamics at work - converting energy from one form to another is never 100% efficient. So eating typically throws off a modest amount of energy as heat. You increase TEF by eating small, frequent rations containing mostly protein and carbohydrate. Unfortunately, since the body stores excess dietary fat directly as body fat, there is no need to convert it, so eating fat generates virtually no thermic effect at all. Now, don't kid yourself that eating more food is a way of burning calories. But for a given "budget" of calories you eat in a given day, it's better to spread those calories out across several small rations containing protein and carbohydrate, rather than blowing the budget on a couple of larger or higher fat meals.

Metabolism includes two groups of chemical reactions in the body:

• Anabolism - which is creation or "building up", and
• Catabolism - which is destruction or "breaking down"

There are a lot of people who simplistically believe that you can't build muscle and burn fat at the same time, since building muscle is anabolic and burning fat is catabolic. This is wrong, but it's wrong in an interesting way. Clearly, you can't be anabolic and catabolic at full-throttle in the same instant, but you can certainly affect your body's ability to accomplish both during the day.

There are dozens of chemicals and hormones involved in regulating metabolism, but for practical purposes, two that you have the ability to do much about. They are insulin and cortisol.

Insulin is one of the main anabolic hormones in the body. The only way that glucose (sugar) can get into the cells to be used as energy is for it to be accompanied by a little insulin guy. Insulin does two things: it says "Hey, we've got sugar in the bloodstream here. Stop burning fat so that we can get rid of this stuff first." And then the insulin helps to transport the sugar into the cells.

So insulin is "anabolic". It helps the muscle cells to get fed. Well, muscle cells and fat cells. If your muscle glycogen stores are full, insulin feeds your fat cells instead. If you spike your insulin higher by eating a significant amount of simple carbohydrates (such as sugar) when your energy stores are full, the excess carbs are converted to fat and escorted to your hips. The insulin then causes a subsequent plunge in blood glucose, often followed by fatigue. Brain cells can't store glucose, so that plunge in blood glucose can also cause dizziness. So, too much sugar and you may find yourself saying "I'm fat because I'm tired, and I'm tired because I'm fat." Bottom line: insulin is triggered by the consumption of simple carbohydrates. Except when you want to intentionally spike your insulin levels, you should choose carbohydrates that trigger a minimal release of insulin. These are called low-glycemic carbohydrates.

Low glycemic carbs are generally ones that are digested slowly. Think "unprocessed". Carbs that are detached from fiber are digested much more rapidly and cause that spike in blood glucose. Lack of fiber is also by far the most common cause of irregularity. Here are a few examples of low & high glycemic foods:

Low glycemic: apples, oranges, pears, plums, grapes, bananas (firm), grapefruit and other whole, low-sugar fresh fruits, oatmeal, brown rice, "Converted" rice, spaghetti and egg fettuccine (surprisingly), whole-wheat pasta, bran cereal, barley, bulgur, basmati, Kashi and other whole grains, beans, peas (esp. chick and black-eyed), lentils, whole corn, sweet potato, yams, milk (preferably low-fat), partial-protein carbohydrates such as yogurt and soy, and even "sugar" in the form of fructose (found in fruits) or lactose (found in dairy products), but not as glucose or maltose.

High glycemic: fruit juice, white bread, most "wheat" bread (which is usually just white bread with a little fiber added), white rice, baked white potato, bagels, croissants, pretzels, graham crackers, vanilla wafers, waffles, corn chips, cornflakes, cake, jelly beans, sugary drinks, Gatorade, beer. Note that high glycemic foods are often either white or highly processed.

IMPORTANT: When you eat a portion of carbohydrates, the overall glycemic effect depends on how much of that food you eat. Rutabaga has twice the glycemic index of apples, for example. But you're still better off eating 10 grams of carbohydrate as Rutabaga than eating 30 grams of carbohydrate as apples. Always remember that portion size matters as much as the glycemic index does. As another example, I encourage people to eat carrots, even though carrots have a high glycemic index. You'd simply have to eat a bunch of carrots just to have the same glycemic impact as a single piece of white bread. So remember - portion size matters. If you let your portions get out of control, nothing will help you.

Cortisol is one of the main catabolic hormones in the body. It is responsible for triggering the breakdown of protein (such as muscle tissue) into building blocks called amino acids. It also inhibits glucose from getting into the cells, causing a further wasting of muscle. Cortisol is also a "junk food" hormone: high levels of cortisol generally trigger a strong craving for high carbohydrate snacks. Several things raise your level of cortisol - lack of food, lack of sleep, prolonged high-intensity or high-impact exercise, and weight lifting. This is why your workouts should generally not exceed about an hour. Bottom line: cortisol is triggered by several forms of stress, and your job is to shut it down.

There are several strategies for shutting down cortisol. First, it's essential to eat regularly and get enough sleep. Second, take Vitamin C (about 500-1000 mg is effective), and glutamine, which is the main ingredient of CytoVol. Both quite safe. Vitamin C is not "fat soluble" - your body doesn't store it for long, so anything your body doesn't need is just flushed out. There's increasing evidence that availability of the "branched-chain" amino acid Leucine, closely following a workout, can kick-start new muscle synthesis.

In general, you'll maximize your fat loss if you wait about an hour after your workouts before eating. The exception, in my view, is when you smell ammonia. Ammonia is essentially nitrogen, and that sensation after a workout is a signal that you've raised your cortisol levels enough to trigger the breakdown of amino acids by the liver (gluconeogenesis). When the body needs energy, it metabolizes glycogen, then fat, then protein. If one isn't fast enough, it goes down the list. But if it's going to feed on protein, you want it to go after something other than muscle tissue. So if you smell ammonia, you should have a protein and carbohydrate containing supplement immediately after your workout, preferably along with a protein stimulating supplement such as L-Leucine (whey protein is about 20-25% Leucine).

A few additional reasons to avoid spiking insulin except after a weight-training workout. About one in four people are insulin resistant, meaning that the pancreas has to pump out a lot more of the stuff in order to be effective. That excessive insulin reduces the ability of the body to burn fat as energy even after the glucose is cleared. Insulin resistance also typically leads to an increase in "visceral fat" around the organs, particularly in the abdomen, and increases the risk of coronary disease. By keeping your carbohydrates low-glycemic and your portion sizes in control, you reduce the need for this excessive output of insulin, and you keep your fat-burning in high gear.

Insulin resistance is more common if you have diabetes in your family, or if your diet has been high in sugar, high glycemic carbs, and saturated fats. My vote for worst food in the world: funnel cake (called "elephant ears" in the Midwest): white flour dough, deep fried in lard, covered with powdered sugar. If you ever find yourself standing in line for this stuff, just skip on over and stand in the line to get your head examined.

Fortunately, one excellent fact is that exercise itself improves insulin sensitivity. Also, you'll significantly improve your fat loss if you concentrate on eating low glycemic carbs in your rations. A few supplements are known to improve insulin sensitivity: alpha lipoic acid (ALA), green tea extract, and chromium picolinate. All are available at any GNC. Normal dosages (read the label on whatever brand you pick) are sufficient. Since they change the responsiveness to insulin, diabetics who are insulin-dependent should use these only under a doctor's supervision.

Timing your supplements (optional)

If you want to maximize both muscle gain and fat loss, it helps to get your insulin and cortisol under control. The following schedule is optional, not essential. But if you're the kind of person who wants everything exact, here's my advice on timing your supplements (obviously, this schedule assumes that your insulin regulation is not impaired by diabetes, in which case you should follow the routine prescribed by your physician). I mention some supplements below. Most everything you want to know about them is in the Supplements section further down on this page.

• In the morning: Take 500-1000 mg of Vitamin C. Objective: Shut down cortisol levels without triggering significant insulin release.
• Immediately after workouts: If you're using glutamine, L-Leucine, or supplements containing Leucine metabolites such as HMB, these should be taken immediately after your workout. And take another 500-1000 mg of Vitamin C. If you smell ammonia (basically nitrogen, and a signal that your cortisol levels are high enough to trigger protein breakdown), you should take a protein and carbohydrate containing supplement immediately. In general, however, the most appropriate protein to take immediately is simply a gram of L-Leucine (I use the Source Naturals brand available through www.iherb.com ). Objective: Shut down cortisol if necessary, and take protein-building supplements when they are most readily taken up by muscle.
• About 60 minutes after workouts: Drink a supplement shake or other quickly digested supplement containing both protein and simple carbohydrates. If you're having a solid meal, this is the one meal that should definitely contain at least some higher glycemic carbohydrates. Any supplements containing high-glycemic carbohydrates (such as Phosphagen HP or RiboForce) should be taken within 60 minutes of weight-training. Objective: Shut down cortisol hard, spike insulin after weight training, and trigger muscle synthesis.
• In every meal except the post-workout meal, consume protein and low-glycemic carbohydrates, particularly if your main goal is fat loss. Use vegetables or low-calorie fruits to provide fiber and satisfy hunger. Drink water frequently to support metabolism. Objective: maintain a stable nutrient stream, keeping both insulin and cortisol in check.
• As the last ration of the night before you go to sleep, have 500-1000 mg of Vitamin C, a small serving of cottage cheese (slowly digested and high in glutamine content to reduce cortisol levels), and a green apple or pear (both very low glycemic), and a supplement containing glutamine. Objective: Reduce cortisol, provide a slowly digested nutrient flow without elevating insulin.