7 reasons why you are still weak or fat

From TC Luoma | 11/26/15

Source: https://www.t-nation.com/training/8-reasons-youre-still-weak-or-fat

Here's what you need to know...

1. There's no excuse for still being weak after several years of training. Solve this problem by thinking again about your tendency to do certain exercises.
2. If you're still trying to lose the same 10 kilos you wanted to lose the first day you walked into the gym, then it could be that you're eating the wrong way. "Six small meals a day" doesn't work for everyone.
3. If you're still lean, then your idea of training nutrition is probably 10 years old and your definition of recovery days needs an overhaul too.

It's not too late

If you think you're training hard and eating right but are still weak or fat, it's time to change your approach.

Here are seven things you're probably doing that are the reason you're not seeing results.

1. steroids have misled you about a basic training principle

For those not suckling at the teat of the goddess Steroida, hypertrophy is not a localized process, but a systemic one.

For the most part, muscle growth occurs under the condition of sufficient stimulus throughout your body, not just in one spot. For this reason, work that stresses the entire body - placing a heavy weight on your spine that the whole body must support - will produce more muscle growth in your biceps than training the biceps directly.

In other words, heavy deadlifts with a trap bar will do more to bulk up your arms than performing curls.

A popular rule of thumb in the weight training world is that to build 2.5 inches of arm circumference, you need to build about 15 pounds of muscle, and that's a lot.

If this wasn't the case, you'd see guys who train nothing but biceps walking around like reverse T-Rex guys with huge arms and scrawny, puny bodies as a result of their training. But that's not the case.

A biceps specific training program will certainly build some mass on the arms as long as you do everything else right, but the results would generally pale in comparison to the results you would achieve if you were to perform a program that focused more on deadlifts or another full body exercise.

Likewise, a biceps specific program would help if you were doing the big exercises at the same time but needed a range-specific catalyst.

Steroids, on the other hand, make your body ultra susceptible to any type of mechanical stress. If you use sufficient amounts of steroids, everything will work.

The problem is that all those muscle-group specific training programs published in countless bodybuilding magazines and put together by bodybuilders have done us a disservice.

These programs have convinced many of us to focus on curls, kickbacks, shoulder lifts, front raises and leg extensions when our time would have been better spent investing in training with large systemic loads on our backs with multi-joint exercises.

2. you train muscles instead of movements

A few years ago, I visited one of those disturbing body exhibits where long-dead, taxidermied human bodies were on display. As I looked at the exhibits with a constant grimace, I noticed how every muscle in every body seemed to be connected to other muscles.

It dawned on me how ridiculous it was to assume that you could isolate one muscle with one exercise. Every movement you perform involves an orchestra of muscles. This is why splitting workouts by muscle group can be bad for your progress.

Your traditional training split by muscle group might look like this:

• Monday: quadriceps, hamstrings, calves
• Tuesday: Back
• Wednesday: Chest
• Thursday: Shoulders
• Friday: biceps, triceps

However, there are some problems with this layout.

Throughout the second half of the week - when you train chest, then shoulders, then arms - your workouts include multiple overlapping muscles, so you train triceps and, to a slightly lesser extent, the front shoulder muscles three days in a row.

And if you train the hamstrings using Romanian deadlifts and then perform bent-back rowing the next day, then you are loading the hamstrings two days in a row, as bent-back rowing involves a long static contraction of the hamstrings.

If these examples don't meet the definition of overtraining, then I don't know what else does.

Push-pull workouts can avoid all of this because they train all the muscles involved in pulling movements (back, biceps, posterior shoulder muscles, trapezius, forearms, hamstrings) in one workout and all the muscles involved in pushing movements (chest, triceps, quadriceps, calves, anterior and lateral shoulder muscles) during another workout.

By separating the muscle groups according to their function, you are also able to train more often because your muscles stay fresh. If you vary sets and repetitions sufficiently in each training session, you can potentially train each muscle group up to three times a week.

3 - Your ideas about training nutrition are 10 years old

You may think that you need to eat a protein meal about an hour before your workout and then eat again about an hour after your workout.

This pre-workout meal raises your insulin levels and the nutrients are piggybacked by this hormone and transported to the muscle cells.

This sounds good in theory, but unfortunately by the time you start your training session, insulin levels will have dropped back to baseline, allowing the antagonistic hormone glucagon to start robbing your muscles of amino acids so that they can be converted into glucose, which the muscles need for energy.

Other catabolic hormones such as epinephrine and cortisol are also released, robbing the body of even more energy, often in the form of protein, and the harder the training session, the greater the protein breakdown.

Sure, testosterone, growth hormone and IGF-1 are also released, but their levels are too low and their appearance is too fleeting to fight back. Insulin could also fight back, but its amounts are now too scarce.

After the draining exercise session, the exerciser goes home and pours a protein shake, but by this time his muscles are too numb, dumb and blind to respond to any increase in insulin levels.

As a result, while insulin can transport amino acids and glucose to the gates of the muscle cells and knock as loud as it wants, the muscle cells will turn down the TV and pretend that no one is home. Without a place for it to go, much of that glucose ends up directly in fat stores.

Protein won't be stored as fat, but it will take the express train to the liver, which is a sort of purgatory for unused amino acids. The net result of this type of training diet is minimal to non-existent anabolic stimulus and maybe even some fat storage.

However, we know how to manipulate all of these hormones and nutrients on a much larger scale. The enlightened exerciser takes a pre-workout protein and carbohydrate drink and this is a little more sophisticated than what has been used in the past.

This modern drink contains unique di- and tripeptides that go directly into the bloodstream, combined with a healthy amount of easily digestible functional carbohydrates. Insulin levels begin to rise naturally and the glucose and amino acids are transported to the muscle cells.

15 minutes before training, the modern, smart exerciser consumes another mixture of functional carbohydrates and fast-acting protein. This ensures that insulin continues to flow and work at maximum capacity. During the training session, our enlightened exerciser continues to consume the same protein/carbohydrate mix in sips.

During what would normally be the most metabolically devastating part of the workout, his insulin levels are high and the antagonistic hormones like glucagon and the catabolic hormones like cortisol and epinephrine stay locked in the basement, not daring to come out.

Instead of being besieged by aggressive hormones, the muscles are force-fed the right nutrients so that anabolic processes can take place.

After training, our modern exerciser mixes himself another protein drink and, as his muscle cells are still sensitive to insulin, the freshly supplied di- and tripeptides are quickly transported to the still ravenous muscle cells.

The net result of this approach is super high protein synthesis, low levels of catabolic hormones and increased fat oxidation.

And if you were to weigh the muscles of this advanced exerciser, you would see that his muscles are heavier than if he followed the old solid meal approach.

The message should be clear. Use a state-of-the-art training diet.

4 - You think that cardio in a fasted state is your ticket to fat loss

Sure, it seemed to make sense. You perform aerobic exercise first thing in the morning and since you haven't eaten anything at this point, your glycogen levels are low and the body has to resort to burning fatty acids for energy

As a result, you see the fat just melt away - or so the story goes.

There are two aspects we need to look at. The first is simple...does this approach work?

Most studies do indeed suggest that you burn more fatty acids in a fasting state, but actual levels vary widely. One recent study suggests that cardio exercise performed in a fasted state burns 17% more fatty acids than cardio exercise performed in a non-fasting state. But let's look at this study in terms of actual calories burned.

If 30 minutes of cardio training at a constant intensity, performed in a non-fasting state, burns about 300 kcal and you do this training three times a week, you will burn 900 kcal. Do this for 26 weeks and you burn 23,400 kcal, which equates to about 6.6 pounds of fat...over a 6 month period.

What if we were to overestimate and assume that doing cardio in a fasted state would burn 30% more calories, even though there is admittedly not a single study showing it to be that effective?

Burning 30% more calories would help you burn a meager additional 0.07 pounds per week, which adds up to another 2 pounds of fat loss within the same 6 months.

Not too impressive, right? And that's using a very generous estimate. But it's at least something to see if there's another reason we shouldn't be doing cardio in a fasted state.

For this we need to look at it from a "muscle health" perspective. We know that cortisol levels are highest in the morning and if you don't eat, they stay elevated. If you do cardio in a fasted state, cortisol levels rise even further and this is one of the best ways to lose muscle.

Instead, you should do cardio in the morning in a state where you are neither in a fasted state nor actively digesting food. You can achieve this by drinking a mixture of dipeptides and tripeptides, which practically go straight into the bloodstream without much active digestion.

This way you can keep cortisol levels low and force your body to burn glycogen and fatty acids. More and more experts are also recommending the use of LIPOMID from GN Laboratories. It has been scientifically proven to burn more fat and help prevent the breakdown of existing muscle mass.

Yes, technically fasting cardio will burn more fat than non-fasting cardio, but the amount of extra calories burned will be quite meager. However, fasted cardio will also increase cortisol levels and burn valuable muscle mass, making it counterproductive at best.

5 - You don't love the "upper body squat"

If squats and deadlifts are the big systemic exercises for the lower body, then pull-ups with added weight are one of the biggest and meanest systemic upper body exercises.

Pull-ups will work the latissimus, teres major and minor, infraspinatus, rhomboids, levator scapulae, trapezius, shoulder muscles, pectoralis major and minor, brachialis, brachioradialis, biceps brachii, and even the abs and triceps brachii.

In short, this exercise builds everything we want to build, apart from the legs of course. And these are just standard pull-ups with your own body weight. What I want to talk about here are pull-ups with additional weight.

Many people can do an impressive number of basic pull-ups, but the muscle building will come from adding weight in the form of a weighted belt, weight vest or dumbbell held with your feet.

The increased resistance and relatively lower repetition range will bring out more of the serious muscle-building potential of this often overlooked exercise. Lat pulldowns on the cable don't even come close to pull-ups with added weight.

6 - Your definition of recovery days is too literal

No one makes progress during training. Instead, we make progress while recovering from training.

Rest and sleep are essential, but too many people take the concept of recovery to too extreme a level.

Unless you've just run a marathon wearing an Atlas Stone, you don't need to spend your non-training days mimicking a corpse in an upholstered chair.

Instead, practice active recovery techniques like pushing a weight sled, swinging a kettlebell, training with a sledgehammer or even cycling in a hilly landscape.

A workout with weights involves both eccentric and concentric movements, but it's the eccentric (lowering or negative) movements that cause muscle damage and soreness, and it's basically the eccentric activity that you need to recover from.

The best active recovery exercises are non-eccentric or mainly non-eccentric movements. It is also important to take GABA Power GN on recovery days. This will help your muscles recover much better and you will be fit for the next workouts more quickly.

You can perform these exercises on your recovery days to increase body-wide blood flow, which improves recovery and burns a few extra calories that would otherwise be stored as fat after a cheat meal on a rest day. All of this further advances your body-building processes.

I'm not recommending that you do these exercises during every non-workout day at the gym, but there's no reason you couldn't do these exercises twice a week and have a non-workout day with complete rest.

Here's an example:

• Monday: Workout
• Tuesday: Workout
• Wednesday: Active regeneration
• Thursday: Training
• Friday: Training
• Saturday: Active regeneration
• Sunday: Complete rest

7 - You eat 6 meals a day

Since the day you started taking an interest in building an impressive body, everyone has told you to eat six meals a day or every 2 to 3 hours.

The reason for this was to keep blood sugar levels steady and never allow you to get hungry. The problem is that there is no scientific research to suggest that this works and there is a lot of evidence that it doesn't work. The whole thing has to do with insulin.

In normal healthy people, glucose enters the bloodstream and is transported into the cells where it is burned for energy. This process is mediated by insulin, which is secreted by the pancreas after you have eaten a meal.

However, glucose can build up in the blood if the cells are unable to use it properly and this condition is known as insulin resistance. Type II diabetics are the best example of this.

They cannot cope with the amounts of glucose in their bloodstream because they have eaten so much or so badly that the cells refuse to use sugar, resulting in the pancreas releasing more and more insulin which has no effect.

As long as the beta cells of the pancreas are able to throw enough insulin at the cells to overcome this resistance, everything is fine - blood glucose levels can remain in the healthy range.

Over time, however, insulin resistance develops and this can lead to a precursor to diabetes or type II diabetes as the cells' insulin requirements exceed the amount of insulin secreted.

Unfortunately, you may already be on the cusp of insulin resistance because you have constantly kept your insulin levels elevated through the "6 meals a day" bodybuilding dogma. Even if your cells were once sensitive to insulin, they have now become sluggish.

If the words beefy or permanent bulking describe your body, or if you're indiscriminately stuffing carbs down your throat, then you're probably at least a little insulin resistant.

To change this, consider eating 3 or maybe 4 meals a day instead of 6. Have a big breakfast with protein, healthy fats and functional carbohydrates and the same for lunch. Eat protein in the afternoon, followed by a dinner of protein and healthy fats.

Do the same on training days, replacing your lunch with your training nutrition.

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>> The best training method you're not using

>> How bodybuilders get really hard and defined