How do I get the body I want?
The perfect way to get the body that you want is to identify your goals. first you must know what is the reason why you train.
Imagine you are training to perform better in sports. You would be very disappointed if you train purely for muscle gain am I right?
But worry not - I will break down two specific goals:
1)Aesthetic (Bodybuilding, Fat loss, muscle gain)
and
2)Athletic Performance (want to increase my vertical jump, Become better in boxing, powerlifting, strength)
Let me explain - There are gonna be some major differences on how you will train depending on which goal you have of the two.
For example - cold water immersion is great if your goal is athletic performance butits a bad idea if your goal is muscle gain. Cold immersion stops inflammation which will allow athletes and powerlifters to train more often therefore honing their skills but this same pain relieving effect is bad for bodybuilders and those who train to gain muscle (and for people who want to lose fat you will want to prioritize muscle gain as well) since this same inflammatory process is required for the body to hypertrophy your muscle fibres.
No pain no gain indeed!
Another great difference is training to failure. Obviously both athletes and aesthetic lifters will need to lift weights but for those whose goal involves muscle gain (fat loss included) will need to go for momentary muscle failure which means his reps would need to be taken until his muscle cannot contract anymore or lift the weight in that set. This is done to maximize muscle micro trauma since if your goal is aesthetic muscle damage is important because your body builds upon this damage to make your muscle bigger as you train. Off course proper recovery is important for this to happen.
Failure however is not a good idea for athletes or powerlifters (see article).
No one defines failure better than Mike Metzer:
Executing that last, almost impossible, rep causes the body to dip into its reserve ability. Since it only has a small amount of this reserve to draw upon before depletion occurs, the body protects itself from future assaults upon its reserves by enlarging upon its existing ability through the compensatory build-up of more muscle mass.
Only high-intensity effort can force the body to resort to its reserve ability sufficiently to stimulate an adaptive response in the form of a muscle mass increase. Repeating tasks that are within your existing capacity do nothing to stimulate growth, there’s no need. Ending a set before failure, just because an arbitrary number of reps have been completed simply will not induce growth.
Mike Mentzer
Athletes need to train more often and train their muscles to contract more explosively. If you wait for failure your muscle contraction will be subpar and this is not optimal for athletes and anyone who trains for strength and power. Keep in mind that muscles don’t necessarily have to be bigger to contract with great force. Not training to failure will give an athlete a chance to grease the grove and train more often since not much muscle damage was done and therefore train his/her skill. He/she MIGHT experience a little bit of muscle gain though but that’s only a side effect. As we can see bodybuilding is all about getting this “side effect” so they train differently.
Okay Now that we have covered these two very important specificity points you can more or less have an idea of how you must train whether your goal is muscle gain (includes fat loss) or to increase performance.
I am willing to bet that your goal is aesthetic though. Maybe you’re skinny or you are a little over weight and you want to look good without clothes and you want to burn those extra flab and love handles.
In that case you should live and train for muscle growth and fat loss. I say fat loss because building muscle and lifting weights is the most effective way to burn fat anyways. Your body considers extra muscle or lean mass as free-loaders since they consume the most amount of calories and that’s only for maintenance - which means a muscular guy consumes 10x more calories than an obese individual without doing anything. I wrote more about that on the article i cited in this paragraph (tips for fatloss).
And no you don’t have to necessarily look buff and scary. I myself (look at my profile) I am not big but I have more lean mass than fat - my body consumes more calories as a result I hardly go above 10% bodyfat. This is the same reason why you had a higher metabolism as a teenager and you ate almost ten times you do now but you hardly got fat (well that’s for most people, okay?). It’s because you had more muscle mass back then - but you weren’t big right? But it doesn’t have to be big and obvious. Even a typical “fit” guy or gal already contain “VORACIOUS” amounts of muscle mass already that its enough for them to lose fat automatically . Being “toned” is actually very buff already for the body and at that point you will already gain muscle but off course your body needs to justify keeping them or else you will lose them therefore you must train regularly.
What do I need?
Here I will share with you the first part of my book Real Talk Muscle - which will serve as an ingredients list to get you started:
Every great recipe begins with a list of ingredients; and since this book is a recipe for muscle growth, it is only fair that we discuss the ingredients before anything else.
Fortunately, our method of building muscle is very minimalistic resource-wise so you wouldn’t really need to buy drugs or expensive supplements or enroll in some “high-end” globo gym. That way you can earn slabs and slabs of muscle gains even if you are in a very crappy financial situation or are simply in a very tight budget.
WARNING: Just a head-up - most of these dietary recommendations will be far from the Government’s Recommended Dietary Allowance. But who cares! RDA sucks anyway! RDA is designed so that people will eat more sugar than they need to so that more of them will become chronically ill so that Big Pharma can take more money from YOU. If you really want to follow the Government’s RDA so badly; then forget about muscle gains and throw away this book.
Supplements and nutrition:
EGGS - that’s right! Eggs are the real deal! Every piece is a guaranteed 5g of protein with all the cholesterol you’d need to fuel muscle-growth. As you will learn later on, natural cholesterol (the one’s found in animal meat and poultry and are not manufactured like vegetable oils and margarine) is scientifically more related to muscle growth than even protein itself.
What about whey? Yes whey protein is very good and it certainly is one of the two types of supplements worth buying but eggs have high quality protein too plus it has some of the highest quality cholesterol you can find – in short eggs will bring you more bang for your buck. The only advantage that whey has over eggs is the fact that it is absorbed more quickly into the bloodstream which makes it perfect as a post workout recovery tool - but eggs can do that too.
You can still buy whey if you want but eggs are just more critical for growth. You will learn that it will be easier for you to gain muscle with eggs and no whey than whey with no eggs unless you are already taking in a lot of animal fats in your diet.
Recommendation: At least 5 hard boiled eggs after training and extra 5 more around the day even on your rest days. That would go down to at least 25 extra grams of protein per day on days when you don’t train and 50 extra grams on your training days.
Water – water is critical; your muscle is made of 80% water and if you want to destroy your gains – the easiest way is to dehydrate. Show me a gym rat who is not getting muscle from a perfectly designed lifting and diet protocol and I will show you a lifter who is not drinking enough water.
Recommendation: 3 litres of water around the day (bare minimum) and bring at least one liter of water as you train make sure that you’ll finish it. You can buy fancy stuff like Gatorade if you like but plain old water will get the job done.
Real food: you don’t really need anything special – you don’t even need to “design” or count your macros like what some fancy diet gurus will. The only important thing you need to remember is to eat more of the stuff that are not manufactured or packaged.
You don’t even need to count calories – Just make sure you’ll take in a decent amount of meat and animal fats. And if you’re an ectomorph or a naturally skinny guy (your typical HARD GAINER) you won’t even need to worry about whatever you eat. I myself would just discipline myself and see to it that I am eating like a pig. Just remember to eat your daily dose of eggs and water and you’re good to go. You will not get “fat” as long as you are lifting and training hard like what REAL talk muscle will get you doing.
If you’re a naturally bulky person; then that is when you’ll need to keep in mind eating only “real” foods. But seriously – lifting hard and gaining muscle will get you burning more of your stored fat on a daily basis especially as you recover from muscle damage so expect some reduction in your bodyfat percentage as you go through our Real talk protocol even if you’re not exactly stressing too much on your diet.
Ideal Place of Worship
It’s up to you if you fancy being in any high end corpo gym complete with spas, Jacuzzis, 100 treadmills, etc! But those things are completely insignificant for muscle gains. As long as your weight room has a full set of EZ bars, straight bars, a dips and a pull-up bar, dumbbells (at least up to 50 pounds) and complete set of plates which hopefully have 50 pound plates (a lot of them) and a few 2.5 pound plates, ooh and let’s not forget the SQUAT RACK!
BONUS if your gym has hammer strength-type pressing machines, decent cable machines that pull smoothly, some heavy ass tires for flippin’, a punching bag (which you can go to in between sets if you really need a good cardio if you’re cutting), and a shock absorbent floor where you can drop weights if want to do some Olympic-style lifts.
Now believe me folks – a gym that has all of those is an A-List gym on my book. And luckily most cheap street gyms would have most (if not all) of the things highlighted above.
From: Real Talk Muscle - Check it out on amazon
okay there you have it
Now I will give you some programs start off with some Consolidated training. This is the part where you will use mostly compound movements because they work the best.
That’s a good start. Also employ some HIIT protocols as Cardio. Keep in mind that traditional cardio simply DOES NOT WORK - those who practiced traditional low intensity steady state cardio actually got fatter I kid you not science has proven that.
So there you have it! I hope my answer was helpful. I will also give you a free Ebook - 5 Muscle Keypoints to help you more in your journey to sculpting your perfect body. For those who want to connect with me and ask me further questions just follow me on twitter and tweet me any further inquiries, praises (or insults). I also regularly post helpful content on Facebook so be sure to Like our page and turn on the notifications.
Cheers I wish you the best!
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