Six years ago my only sartorial option was a forty-two slash forty-four stretch-pant husky pair of jeans. I was nineteen at the time, and if you couldn’t guess, this blog lead is code for, “I was really fat.” Within six months of my nineteenth birthday I dropped over one-third of my body weight through obsessive cardio and strict adherence to FDA dietary guidelines. Yes, the food pyramid does work if used correctly. I’m not saying it’s going to get you into cover model shape, hardly,  but it will allow you to lose  weight. So much for all the ado over carbohydrates and insulin blunting fat loss.

At the end of my cardio thrashing I tipped my home Tanita scale at 119 pounds at a  height of 5’7”. So yeah, maybe I overdid it a little, but I had a 27” waist, and suddenly girls had taken an interest in me. This made me happy.

Since then, I’ve spent much of my free, non-academic time obsessively pursuing  an education in the human body, learning how to defy our sometimes terrible genetics. These days I rarely let myself go above 13-14% body fat. In the process, I’ve learned from some of the best, including my direct mentor Alan Aragon, alongside Lyle McDonald, and Jamie Hale, and cohort fellows Martin Berkan, JC Deen, Skyler Tanner, and Roger Lawson. Lou Schuler has been a huge influence in my publishing career. I’d be remiss to not mention him.

So, in no particular order, here are some musings on what  I’ve learned in the past half-decade concerning body transformation.

1. To succeed, you have to change your (eating) habits for life.

I put eating in parentheses since this is the sticking point that most often derails diet and fitness resolutions. With studies like this coming out showing that exercise takes a backseat to proper nutrition, this is hardly surprising. For most people these habits amount to more protein, more vegetables and fruit, and less junk and sugar and processed foods. This is important, perhaps the most important thing folks need to learn about getting and staying lean. If you adopt a whole slew of habits that you realistically can’t maintain for the rest of your life, you will fail. Hence the issue with low-carb diets, paleo diets, low-fat diets, and on and on.

I keep my habits basic. Ensure I get enough protein each day, at least 1.0g/lb of total bodyweight. I eat a minimum two servings of non-starchy vegetables a day. I take six total grams of fish oil, and hit at least three heavy resistance training sessions per week. I get servings from the major six food groups – lean protein, dairy, fats, starchy carbohydrates, non-starchy carbohydrates, and fruit – in mostly unprocessed form. 20% of my calories come from junk, whether it be Chinese takeout, pizza, or cookies.

This stays the same regardless of my goals. The only things that change are the amounts. And that’s it. Stuff I can stick to no matter how crazy and hectic my life gets.

2. To change your body you have to change your mind.

So this is the big catch twenty-two I’ve discovered with successful clients and other successful body transformers. To get where you want to be you have to put your mind in that place. At a basic level, our brain controls everything we do. Your brain determines whether you binge on that sleeve of bagels. Your brain chooses to workout or stay home. Your brain chooses whether you put on pants in the morning and drive to your job.

Those who have the hardest time with transforming their bodies, unsurprisingly, have the hardest time transforming their minds. Belief is a powerful thing. If you can’t re-frame your mindset to re-frame your behavior to emulate that of those who have been successful, well, no amount of reading or wishing is going to get you there. Like I tell my clients, if you want to look like a cover model you have to have the mindset of a cover model. Does this mean you do everything they do, to a fault? Of course not. But true mental, emotional, and spiritual commitment to a goal will do more for your health and physique than any supplement, any training, or any diet plan.

3. Moderation, temperance, and rest should not be underestimated in the physique equation.

Yes, everyone wants to be ten pounds lighter as of yesterday. Or increase their arm girth by two inches in two weeks. I notice this low-level paranoia and obsession most on fitness forums, which can at times devolve into the blind leading the blind. Not always, but sometimes. If someone tells you to do three sessions of high-intensity interval training a week, ask them how much they squat or deadlift. You’ll probably hear something about bad knees or something. Put simply, intensive resistance training demands rest.

One of the hot things circulating around the interwebs these days is this notion of auto-regulation. In non-labcoat speak, this boils down to modifying whatever program you’re doing based on your performance during that session.

Example. If I’m scheduled to do 5×5, I’ll make it a point to use more weight than the previous session. I’ll slowly increase the weight until I can’t complete a rep with good form. Let’s say by my third set I’m spent, having performed three PR sets. There’s absolutely no logic to me taking the same weight and grinding out two poor sets, only to accumulate fatigue. My time would be better spent moving on to an accessory movement or performing a higher rep, lower weight set of the same movement.

The same thing can happen with a diet. If I can’t think, can’t move, weight loss has stalled, and body temperature is down, a refeed, at the bare minimum, or a perhaps a full diet break is probably in order.

4. Find a goal and stick to it.

Seriously, what the hell is it with so many people wanting to lose weight and train for marathons at the same time? Could your goals be any more mutually exclusive? To train for a marathon you have to focus and improve upon performance. What’s the first thing that suffers under fat loss conditions? Performance. Presents quite the conundrum, doesn’t it?

This is why I urge athletes who want to lose fat to do it during the off-season, when performance can take a hit and pose no serious issue. The vain bros out there love to talk about losing fat and gaining muscle. What they fail to understand is how quickly (or, to be more appropriate, slowly) they can expect this body tissue transference to occur. It’s much slower than one would initially presume. In these cases, I urge trainees to select a primary goal, and accept either quicker muscle gain with minimal or no fat loss, or the converse, quicker fat loss while maintaining or slightly increasing lean body mass.

Lest we forget, maintenance, or what I term the “cruise” phase, is often my favorite goal of all. In a nut shell, you chill out, drop protein, eat a bunch of carbs, scale back training and just relax. I normally give myself December off, doing three instead of four workouts a week, and adding in some ample fun foods that I normally restrict to special occasions. By the time January rolls around, I’m tearing it up in the gym setting PRs all over the place.

5. Develop a social support network.

Individuals, when they jump on diets, tend to have a ‘go it alone’ attitude. They become social pariahs, living off whatever few food choices their particular nutrition plan offers them, and then the world becomes a dismal hell where everyone else stays skinny and eats nachos and pizza. Well, it doesn’t have to be that way, first off, since any diet that is that restrictive is probably not worth doing. Secondly, you have to find like-minded folks to help you along the way. Enter the interwebs.

Hop on to any fitness forum and you’ll find, sans Misc or Off-Topic, the most popular board to be the Training Log board. Start a log and you’re sure to attract a following. I’ve witnessed entire bodybuilding contest preps, rapid fat loss programs, and a host of other spectacular transformations from the warm confines of my bath robe. Take advantage of the inter-connected world we live in and leverage it find success in your physique aspirations.

So, what have you learned in your fitness endeavors? What tips can you share with other readers? Post your thoughts in the comments section below.

If my gym is any indication, New Year’s resolutions are in full effect. I haven’t seen so many cardio machines occupied on a Sunday evening in quite some time. Actually, in about a year to be more exact about it. Even the weight room was pulsating with epic levels of brotitude. I should have snapped some photos.

And yet, I still see so many folks avoiding the very exercises they need most, continuing to seek the easy way out. Everyone wants to know, what’s the secret to fat loss? How do I get abs? How do I get rid of all that excess leg fat?

Here’s your magic equation: T (Time) + IEE (Inspired & Educated Effort)= R (Results)

It works every time.

I can’t help you with the time, you have to figure that out on your own. If something matters enough, you’ll make time.

I can help, to a certain extent, with the inspiration. I am a bonafied former fatty, and not just the kinda-sorta overweight kind. No, I fell into the “obese” category for the majority of my adolescent and teenage years, and while my story may be inspiring, I can’t physically give you my inspiration.

What I can offer you here is education. To get you started, I’ll give you three easy steps you can take right now to make whatever program you’re following that much more effective.

1. Eat more protein

This alone could stave off culinary hedonists from rampant overeating. Protein is satiating, it’s thermogenic (meaning it encourages fat burning in the body), and it’s the big dietary component of muscle creation or muscle retention. Without it, you’ll turn out to be a smaller, weaker version of your current self. If you’re on a fat loss program, aim for around 1.25g/lb of total body weight in protein per day.

2. Define your goals

Trying to prep for a marathon and focus on fat loss is, frankly, dumb. They are two contradictory goals, and while not mutually exclusive, one does not necessarily follow from the other. Lose the fat first, then focus on the marathon.  The same goes for guys who want to gain muscle and lose fat at the same time. It’s an entirely possible but long and slow road, necessitating at least short-term improvements in one or the other.

3. If you’re a woman, start resistance training

I have no idea what the current tenor of the Internet is with regard to women and bulkiness in relation to sexiness, but my stance is firm. If you’re female and you want to be curvy, toned, or sexy, you have to do some form of resistance training. Now does this mean you need to do the same training as a figure competitor if you want to look like Jessica Alba? No. But it does mean getting accustomed to handling your bodyweight, being able to perform push-ups, lunges, and the like.

So there you go. Three easy pieces of fat loss friendly fun. Get to it.

Photography by Emily C. McArthur

After a good dose of scientific inquiry we’re onto the meat of our program, literally. I touched on intermittent fasting in part two and here we’ll see how it fits into a Form Factor Nutrition program. FFN (may as well acronymize it at this point) takes a lesson from fixed-time scheduling and productivity and applies it to the world of nutrition.

I design my eating schedule around the times in which I am most likely able to prep healthy, whole-food meals, and my clients do too. So rather than rushing about chugging protein shakes and downing bars to meet some arbitrary “eat every 2 to 3 hours” rule, FFN focuses exclusively on the quality and content over all else. If you enjoy what you’re eating – and I’ve yet to meet a person who actually enjoys living off of powder – you’re more likely to stick to your program. Striving for some theoretical optima takes a distinct backseat to getting the hard work done. With that said, let’s dive right in.

Step One: Find Your Time

Start off by mapping a daily schedule. I’ll give you two examples: Frank, the IT employee, and Allison, the student, whose schedules bear as little resemblance to each other as Velveeta does to cheddar.

Here’s a typical day for Frank:

• Up at 6:00am. Coffee.
• On the road at 7:00am.
• Grabs a Pepsi and donuts at the office at 8:00am.
• Works from 8:00am to 3:00pm snacking on nuts, candy, chips etc. If lunch is catered may pick up whatever is available. Typically something low in protein, high in carbs and fat.
• Finishes off the day at 5:00pm. Cruises to the gym and downs a Muscle Milk before his training session.
• Home at 7:00pm, flat out exhausted. Downs whatever is in the house, usually frozen pizza and chicken wings, and heads to bed by 10:00pm.

Now, is this the ideal schedule for someone looking to radically improve their physique? Unlikely. But working around our limitations is a requisite part of growth. Based on his itinerary it’s clear that Frank could benefit from an intermittent fasting protocol. Remember, we can train our bodies to get hungry at specific times by manipulating the hormone ghrelin, and that’s what Frank will do here.

Frank gets his first meal around 3:00pm. It’s a simple shift to move this first meal time to 2:00pm. From there he will intersperse quality meals until 10:00pm. Three meals would probably be ideal. He would eat one largish meal at around 3:00pm to break the fast, a smaller meal before hitting the gym at five, and then a large post-workout meal before heading to sleep. On training days his meals would be accompanied by ample starchy carbs, while on off days he’d focus more on healthy fats and fruits to pair alongside his protein.

Allison’s schedule as a student proves far more irregular than Frank’s, and when paired with an early morning workout, means she will need more meals. College students have schedules that often vary from day-to-day. Throw in extra-curricular activities and you have a packed schedule with minimal flexibility when it comes to nutrition. Allison would benefit from four evenly spaced meals per day: Breakfast before her workout, lunch after her workout, a mid-afternoon snack, and dinner. Macro-composition would be similar across all meals on all days given her workout schedule which has her in the gym six days a week.

Never compromise pre and post-workout nutrition for a set of dieting rules. At its core, Form Factor Nutrition is about matching proximal energy demand with proper caloric intake. By timing calories properly, bracketing protein and carbohydrate around a workout bout, though fat by no means should be excluded, you improve your chances of funneling those calories (that you were going to eat at some point of the day anyway) toward either increased power output during the workout or improved protein synthesis post-workout.

Step Two: Determine Your Maintenance Calories

There are a million different formulas out there to determine proper diet, maintenance, or mass gain caloric requirements. Ideally you’d take a week to track your intake, totaling your macronutrients and basing your deficit off of that final value. But my guess is that whoever is reading this wants to get started on their diet ASAP. Here’s the best simple and dirty formula I can give you for maintenance:

1. To determine protein requirements, multiply your bodyweight by 1.0 – 1.5. Those on a ‘cruising’ phase can drop protein closer to the 1.0 number. If you’re looking for more aggressive body transformation, multiply by a higher number (1.3 or above). That’s your total daily protein in grams.
2. Divide your bodyweight by 2. That’s your total daily fat in grams.
3. Daily carbohydrate total is body weight + 0, 5, 10, 15, or 20% of total body weight per hour of weekly exercise. If your exercise tends to be of a lower intensity, or if you’ve had difficulty maintaining a lean physique in the past, keep the range between 0-10%. If you’re a hard-gaining ectomorph, or someone who performs exercise at a high level of intensity, err toward the 10-20% range. Most folks would do well starting at 10%. So for a male who weighs 150 pounds and performs 5 hours of purposeful, aggressive weight training, he’d need 225g of carbohydrate per day. This is right in line with a more generic 1.5g/lb of body weight metric that comes up, but instead takes into account overall activity level.

Step Three: Plan Your Meals & Track Your Intake

I hate diet rules so I won’t inundate you with many. One of the biggest mistakes people make is to haphazardly remove entire food groups from their diet. Depending on your goals and personal tolerance, you should aim to consume at least one serving daily from the six basic food groupings:

• Protein (meat, eggs, and other animal derived protein. Soy and milk-derived powders would theoretically fall in this category as well)
• Fats (butter, oils, nuts, seeds)
• Starches (anything you think of when you don’t think “salad,” corn, potatos, peas, beans, bread, pasta, rice)
• Non-starchy Vegetables (green vegetables or “salad” vegetables like broccoli, asparagus, carrots, lettuce)
• Fruits (come now…)
• Dairy Products (milk and milk-derived products like cheese, yogurt etc.)

And here are the basic rules:

1. Plan your meals around protein. This would solve 95% of all the over-eating I see on a regular basis. Protein promotes the greatest satiety out of all the macronutrients. The Greeks were onto something with their nomenclature. Since this is the application post, no science here. Now go eat some protein.
2. Have some fat with each meal. If you’re eating a low-fat source of protein like a protein powder, non-fat milk, or extra lean chicken breast, feel free to include some oil, butter, nuts, or seeds to fill out the meal. Roughly 10-15g per meal is right in the neighborhood. If you’re using intermittent fasting as a strategy, this rule proves more flexible.
3. Try to get some form of fiber in with each meal. Vegetables would be ideal, but if it comes from your starches or nuts that’s okay too.
4. Add in fruits and starches based on daily caloric allotment and overall goal.
5. Include dairy products to fill in protein and fat requirements. If you don’t tolerate dairy, no sweat, just take a calcium + vitamin D supplement to cover micronutritional requirements.

From here, it’s as easy as plugging in values into something like CalorieKing or FitDay. I urge clients to not track veggie intake as the FDA still doesn’t have a concrete guideline on how to determine the caloric value of fiber-rich foods. People get freaked out when they see that 1 cup of broccoli has 6g of carbohydrate and 35kcal. The FDA has yet to institute its revision on fiber’s caloric value or carbohydrate calculation methods, and there’s currently debate about the caloric value of protein. Some researchers are arguing the value is close to 3kcal/g versus the typically cited 4. This is a long way of saying “don’t worry about it,” so eat as many vegetables as you damn well please. Under dieting circumstances, increasing your vegetable intake isn’t a bad idea. It can help slow the digestive process and fill in micronutritional gaps from reduced food intake.

Step Four: Pursue Your Goals

I hesitate to proscribe fat loss or muscle gain diets for individuals unaware of their maintenance intake. Getting in a proper amount of protein, taking into account nutrient timing considerations, consuming enough fiber, resting, and inducing a proper exercise stimulus is often enough to produce improvements in body composition and decreases in fat mass. Conversely, eating enough protein and training properly (less volume, more weight) can do the same for the muscle gain crowd.

I suggest testing your maintenance intake for a full week so you’ll know the effects of that given caloric level. Then, the fun starts. For the body recomposition crowd who is looking toward a long, slow road of fat loss alongside muscle gain with a minimal impediment on life style, you’ll want to vary your carbohydrate intake between training days and rest days. For the fat-loss crowd, take your current intake and multiply it by 0.8 – 0.85. That’s a 15-20% decrease in calories that should spur your body’s metabolic processes into mobilizing stored body fat. This decrease in calories should come mostly from carbohydrate, though hacking away at fat isn’t necessarily a bad idea, but I hesitate to have someone consume any less than 0.4g/lb of body weight in fat per day. At that point, maintaining hormonal and satiety levels becomes an issue.

Gaining muscle mass tends to be another story in of itself. Depending on your genetic predisposition outlined generally in the somatotypes discussed in part two, I find it easier to work off explicit calorie prescriptions rather than percentages. With dieting, so long as protein is kept high and training volume reasonable, folks can lose fat at a variety of rates and still hang on to lean body mass. The question, of course, is how much discomfort they’re willing to endure in that process. With muscle gain it’s a bit trickier. Sure, you could theoretically aim for a “get f’in huge” strategy and start piling down the calories, but few people are willing to sacrifice their daily appearance and wardrobe for a few pounds of muscle.

Instead, after finding your true maintenance, start slowly increasing calories until you find that sweet spot where muscle is coming on with minimal (or reasonable) fat gain. An extra 250 daily calories with most of your added foods focused on carbohydrate seems reasonable, with the rest going toward protein and fat. Measure your progress over the course of a week, and if weight is stable or gains insufficient, increase your daily intake by another 250kcal.

Conclusion

So there you have it. Form Factor Nutrition. This is how I design diets for myself and my clients. Sure, it gets a little more involved when portioning out individual meals but the principles are the same. What you know is only as good as its application. So rather than mulling about what diet you should hop on for 2010, take some time to analyze what you’re doing now. This will give you much needed information on how to adapt your habits for the physique of your future.

I am, of course, indebted to those who came before me. A big thank you goes out to Alan Aragon, Martin Berkhan, and Lyle McDonald for their help in crafting this article series.

Researching Reduced Meal Frequency

Any nutritional protocol that requires a reduction in meal frequency invokes its own unique set of costs and benefits. Prolonging the time your body stays in the post-fed or fasting state raises the hunger ceiling, so to speak, and would appear to be a damning blow against nutritional methodologies that utilize fasting protocols – who wants to be hungrier more often, right? Well, our bodies and brains being what they are, things aren’t quite that simple. Let’s begin with a discussion of meal frequency and its effect on appetite.

Appetite

With regard to appetite, very low calorie diets (VLCDs) negate the hunger response regardless of the populations being investigated, hence the ability of anorexics to survive for years on starvation diets. VLCDs are quantified as diets providing less than 800 calories per day. Above this 800 or so calorie threshold hunger signals return and the expected daily ebb and flow of hunger resumes. Researchers compared a control group fed three meals per day to a group fed one meal. The former group experienced less hunger throughout the day, and in an ad libidum test meal following the fasting phase, the one meal group consumed on average 26.5% more than the three meal-a-day group. Shaky ground to start on, for sure, but the likelihood of finding a diet that promotes a one meal-a-day protocol is pretty much nil, thus not a concern for our purposes herein.

There exists a hierarchy of hunger response, fasting serving as the maximal acute deficit and thereby eliciting the most hunger. As a dieting strategy, the research is pretty clear – the more aggressive alternate-day fasting programs (24 hours or more without food) are poor diet strategies. The alternation between feast and famine can be marred by adverse subjective states including irritability, poor concentration, and lethargy. Moreover, the problem of elevated hunger during the fasting phase could lead dieters to quickly over-eat their daily caloric allotment once given access to food. Such aggressive swings in energy balance may expedite latent tendencies that encourage the development of an eating disorder.

However, to look at this research and hastily proclaim that fewer meals prove commensurate with problems of adherence, excessive discomfort, and psychological disturbance is to ignore a middle ground that carries real benefit.

Researchers over the past few decades have continued to refine classification systems for human body types, physical generalizations indicative of genetic propensities in body shape. Everyone has a friend who drinks herself silly over the weekend, gorging on Italian gelato and pan-Asian cuisine, yet stays rail thin and draws the ire of her associates. Then there is the guy who, despite five days a week in the gym and a strict low-carbohydrate diet, still bears that extra pudge around the mid-section. Genetics explain this difference.

The fitness world appropriated a misguided behavioral theory concerning the relationship between body type and personality. Regardless, the body type classifications of ectomorph, endomorph, and mesomorph have persisted even if their psychological associations have disappeared. In our first example, a person with a general propensity toward leanness is known as an ectomorph. The latter, a person with a propensity toward corpulence, is known as an endomorph. The holy grail, of course, is the mesomorph. Most professional athletes fit into the mesomorphic category. These are the few gifted individuals predisposed to carry greater amounts of muscle and less fat than the average person.

In overfeeding studies, ectomorphic somatotypes have the tendency to fidget or otherwise unconsciously match an increase in caloric intake with a concurrent increase in caloric expenditure. The individual differences in response to overfeeding are striking. In studies, certain test subjects easily match and at times exceed the additional caloric input, meaning there are cases where additional food actually puts these ectomorphic individuals into am unconscious and unintended caloric deficit. Conversely, other subjects who exhibit classic endomorphic characteristics see no increase in basal metabolic rate. In one study, a participant actually had their BMR decrease in response to overfeeding.

These adaptations tend to be genetic and inalterable. The easy answer would seem to be that endomorphs need to exercise more, as so many in the fitness community suggest. However, this is to ignore the potential increase in appetite exercise may induce. Those of the endomorphic somatotype appear to have difficultly matching their caloric intake with their caloric expenditure. Some of the available research links habitual overeating with poor dopamine receptivity. Researchers have theorized that obese individuals fail to receive the same reward ectomorphs do at a given level of caloric intake, and thus compensate by eating more food until their particular dopamine threshold is met.

Unsurprisingly, endomorphs tend also to be novelty seeking individuals who demand a variety of foods to fulfill certain sensory satiety measures. In my practice, ectomorphs are pickier eaters, willing to drop their fork and step away from the table if a given food doesn’t sit well with their taste buds. By reducing meal frequency, we can potentially alter the expectation and reward system dopamine is responsible for controlling. Larger boluses of calories can provide an acute increase in dopamine and, by amplifying anticipation of these larger meals, merit a reduction in appetite mid-meal.

Life Extension & Neuroplasticity

Some of the more interesting argumentation concerning the use of fasting has come not out of the physique obsessed crowd but rather the life obsessed crowd. The use of caloric restriction as a means toward life extension has grown in popularity over the past few years. Now, it seems that intermittent fasting and other low meal frequency diet variations may promote gene expression better than caloric restriction, regardless of caloric intake.

Thus far, caloric restriction (hereon abbreviated as CR) has a fairly impressive track record. Researchers have observed increases in insulin sensitivity, meaning subjects showed improved tolerance and usage of dietary carbohydrate, in CR populations. Insulin sensitive individuals tend to handle higher levels of carbohydrate and are able to convert ingested carbohydrate into lean tissue more readily than insulin resistant individuals. Insulin resistant individuals have difficulty converting glucose into glycogen in the muscle and at the same time suffer from higher than normal concentrations of fatty acids in the bloodstream. Clearly, the former proves more desirable than the latter.

What’s most surprising about intermittent fasting is its ability to replicate the bonuses offered by caloric restriction sans the starvation and irritability. CR has attracted a quixotic following and stirred heated debate amongst researchers. The great confounder of CR, however, is its inability to fuel high-intensity activity. In the case of intermittent fasting, the same benefits of CR accrue while simultaneously providing a diet plan that maintains the weight of the practitioner. Independent of caloric intake, intermittent fasting showed greater improvements in exototic stress reduction, basal serum glucose levels, and lifespan than CR interventions. For the life-extensionist crowd, IF seems to be a case of having your cake and eating it too. Literally.

The benefits don’t stop there. IF has also shown to improve biomarkers for obese individuals and offer cardioprotective advantages. Oxidative stress and inflammation subsided in intermittent fasting studies testing asthmatic patients. Neurodegenerative diseases, resultant from exototic stress, appear to be transduced through mechanisms that can result in both acute or delayed forms of death. Fasting appears to enhance the neuroplasticity of the brain and allow new neuronal connections to form more readily than might otherwise. For stroke patients and other victims of brain trauma, intermittent fasting could be worked in as a modal recovery unit accompanying other traditional forms of therapy and rehabilitation.

Some Conclusions

First, intermittent fasting isn’t the end-all-be all panacea anecdote makes it out to be. While it has aroused popularity on fitness message boards and bodybuilding forums across the ‘net, the individuals succeeding with this protocol may be predisposed to such semi-radical measures based on their individual personality traits. Bodybuilders tend to be an extremist bunch, falling often into the ‘all-or-nothing’ mindset, in turn making intermittent fasting ever the more appealing. Practitioners already have a certain placebo effect engaged once they start their new nutrition plan fueled by the feverent support found in the online fitness community.

That said, from a practical standpoint, intermittent fasting gives us a lot of good. By compressing the eating window, life will be less likely to get in the way of prepping solid, healthy meals. Moreover, the early purported benefits offer a lot in the way of health improvement, and certainly the theories of nutrient timing support intermittent fasting as a legitimate means toward physique improvement. While much of the research surrounding IF remains in infancy, early feedback has shown it to be a field of positive inquiry that merits further investigation. For now anecdote shows it to be a wonderfully pragmatic nutritional methodology offering a myriad of at- this-juncture theoretical benefits.

In part three, our final installment, we’ll discuss the application of IF in the context of a complete nutritional system. This will be the applied form of Form Factor Nutrition, so stay tuned, and if you enjoyed this post, please comment below.

Introduction

Finding the right nutrition plan is like finding the right lover, this article series offering a novel approach to just such an endeavor. It argues that there is no ‘right’ nutrition plan, because looking for the right nutrition plan is a fruitless pursuit, a waste of mental energy. Like love, the right nutrition plan should instead come to you, should fit you, should complement you and your personality and your life. I find it dispiriting that non-athletic populations now require eating agendas, veritable consumption itineraries in Excel as complex as an office work-chart, to see them to an admirable physique. It is to take something instinctive and biological and routinize it, to suck the joy from one of life’s simple luxuries. Form Factor Nutrition is my effort to restore the pleasure inherent in eating, to put the stick and rudder of nutrition in the hands of the people and wrest it from the grips of a distracted diet industry.

For those of us in the industrialized world, the food scarcities our grandparents endured have all but disappeared. In turn, we have lost touch with our hunger. Hunger was a regular sensation for our elders, an experience welcomed before supper, which, in just a few generations, faded for millions entirely. Before fast food, before microwaves, before canned goods, you had to cook to eat. Vegetables had to be chopped, batter had to be whipped, and those chocolate chip cookies you’re eying right now baked.

Think about it, of the meals you ate today, how many did you cook? I am lucky to eat two meals a day birthed from my own labor. Unsurprisingly, these two meals provide the greatest preponderance of fiber in the form of vegetables and protein in the form of meats, making them the healthiest meals of my day.

If you are searching for the answer to the obesity epidemic, or maybe phenomena a little more intimate – your love handles, for instance – I have an answer. We eat too much food. A soon to be released research study by Swinburn et al draws near perfect correlation between food availability and our expanding waistlines, destroying, in the process, all claims of insulin resistance and excessive dietary fat as causal mechanisms in obesity. We just eat too damn much.

Yet every day more articles hit mainstream media outlets talking about the dangers of food sub-types – too much fat, too much salt, too much sugar – and transient, unidentifiable, intractable ailments like Syndrome X. This is bullshit at its finest. Steven Pressfield, author of The Legend of Bagger Vance and The Gates of Fire, amongst other works, while working at an advertising agency was told by his boss to “make up a disease. That way we can sell the cure.”

Look, the cure is less food. Our problem is too easy and too ready of access to foods that never find themselves situated in a proper meal. Can you imagine sitting down to a meal of eggs, toast, and a Snicker’s bar? How about chicken marsala, asparagus, and a bag of Dorito’s? One of these is not like the other. If you operate like a typical American, these isolated food products that should be treats or occasional indulgences make up 75% of your daily intake, all eaten in isolation.

Ironically, in my consultation practice, my clients and I start by not talking about food. We begin first by unpacking the client’s psychological tethers and self-limiting beliefs independent of whatever their physique goals may be. The same halting resistance confronts both my fat-loss and my muscle-gain clients. If we can key in to the absurdities and jettison them from our conversation, if we can barricade the mainstream media’s perpetuation of misinformation, we win.

Once the mental stuff is out of the way, we start plowing through the physical limitations: time, money, irregular schedules, irregular sleep, no gym, stress. Carving out time to exercise usually is not a problem. Finding time to prepare healthy meals, however, is another beast entirely.

And this is where my nutrition methodology, what I call Form Factor Nutrition, fits in. It is nutrition for the real world, a world with power outages, business luncheons, the co-worker who brings in cookies every day to the office, your significant other’s parents who want you over for dinner, and children who demand pizza five nights a week.

In the field of quantum physics, a form factor is as a function yielding the properties of a specific particle interaction in absence of the underlying physics. When a calculation proves too difficult to solve, a form factor can be measured experimentally even if the underlying physics cannot be explained. Over the past ten years, as more supplement companies, food industry organizations, and financially vested interests began to sponsor peer-reviewed research, the usual filters in place served to vet information have failed to operate as well as they should. Academia is a funny place where grants can come as easily from for-profit corporations as they can from non-profit groups. As a result, the literature looks at present like a contradictory mess.

Thankfully, for those of us tied by divine providence to critical analysis, we march on undeterred. Most of the major questions surrounding the body, food, and exercise have been answered. The debates in the field now focus almost entirely around minutiae. In turn, this obsession over trivialities like low verses high carbohydrate diets, or whey verses casein protein, continues to intercalate the lay-world of fitness professionals, further perpetuating gobs of misinformation, and missing the caloric forest for the GI trees.

Form Factor Nutrition takes what I have seen to work best with my clients – how I analyze, compute, and derive a nutrition plan from the array of variables each case presents – and distills it down to its essence so anyone can use it. Zealotry comes in many forms, and depending on your specific background you may completely agree or emphatically disagree with my points. Regardless, these principles have helped and will continue to help me and my clients in our pursuit of physical excellence.

The Basics

Form Factor Nutrition borrows from the literature and protocols surrounding nutrient timing and intermittent fasting. At the heart of the system beats the pulse of culinary hedonism. I wanted to solve the problem of food choice and efface the sense of deprivation and chronic restriction with which dieters often cope. At the same time, I wanted to provide tools for the less genetically gifted to make up for their biological physiognomy. By bracketing the majority of our calories before, and most chiefly after a training session, we optimize the body’s metabolic pathways and shift our biology to more readily lose fat and gain muscle.

You may recognize this as nutrient partitioning, a concept I discussed in brief in an earlier article. It bears repeating here:

“Partitioning refers to what happens to calories when they find their way into your body. High-intensity activity, especially high-intensity resistance training, puts your body into an optimal nutrient partitioning state. By demanding a lot of your physiological systems, resistance training elevates a host of hormones and metabolic processes that encourage your body to build lean muscle and lose fat. When you consume food before, during, and after your workout your body wants to lose fat and gain muscle. Partitioning, then, refers to how many of those calories get stored as body fat and how many of those calories go toward replenishing muscle glycogen or building lean muscle tissue.

Nutrient timing is getting more press in mainstream literature; in essence, timing your food intake to benefit maximally from the calories your body receives. Regardless of the type of training you’re doing, you are best off consuming the majority of your daily calories before, during, and immediately after training. All that cool stuff resistance training does to your body puts it into a repair and utilize state rather than a store and waste state. But here’s the kicker – to put your body in this state you need to tax it.”

In Form Factor Nutrition, a minimum 80% of your daily caloric allotment will come in the eight to twelve hour time span surrounding your workout. On non-training days, you will repeat the same pattern and have your meals in the same time frame. Martin Berkhan of Intermittent Fasting fame advocates something similar to his clientele. In routinizing your eating patterns, ghrelin, the primary hormone controlling hunger, will adapt to your new eating schedule, prolonging the onset of hunger and making the fasting period (gasp) enjoyable. No food is off limits. An emphasis is placed on the consumption of lean protein sources and adequate fiber in the form of vegetables. By limiting the times in which meals are consumed, practitioners are encouraged to provide their own meals and avoid powders and meal substitutes wherever possible. The benefits are as practical as they are physiological, not to mention psychological.

Meal frequency remains a topic of heated debate. There seems to be more misinformation surrounding it than any other topic in fitness. Form Factor Nutrition challenges the “small, frequent meal” proscription invoked by fiat, spread to every fitness publication and drilled into the minds of nutritionists and personal trainers by well-meaning but wholly uninformed experts.

The Myths of High Meal Frequency

The erroneous purported benefits of an eating pattern incorporating small, frequent feedings began with a simple misunderstanding. A few observational studies quickly hamstrung the theory in academia but somehow the memo never it made it to the mainstream press. Food costs the body energy to process, with different foods costing the body different amounts of energy. This cost, known as TEF, or the thermic effect of food, negates roughly 10% of the calories of a mixed diet. That means in order for the body to process and utilize 2,000 calories across a given day, 200 calories will be burned. Researchers noted that the consumption of a given meal nets an acute increase in thermogenesis within the body. Someone then extrapolated from this that, by eating more frequently, we can raise our overall daily thermic effect of food.

In the tight confines of theory, sure, this could work. But in reality, the body’s physiological processes are working off a much longer time line than most people think. A given meal’s thermic effect is directly proportional to the size of that meal. So a bigger meal merits a bigger thermic effect. In practical terms, if someone has a 1,500 calorie a day diet and eats three meals, that person will burn 50 calories at each meal, for a total of 150 calories burned per day. Now, let us presume the same person eats six meals for a total of 1,500 calories. At each of these meals 25 calories will be burned. 25 calories over six meals? 150 calories. Exactly the same as the three meals a day group. At the end of the day, no actual or measurable difference in thermogenesis can be found.

The obvious corollary to the belief surrounding the thermic affect of food is the notion that, in absence of frequent feedings, the body turns to amino acids for fuel and burns off lean body mass. A typical adjunct to this theory is the now infamous ’starvation mode.’ In tandem with the aforementioned phenomenon, starvation mode is the supposed down-regulation of metabolic rate that occurs under low meal frequency conditions. Both of these theories fail to hold water.

As far as human data for the above theories, well, there is none. In fact, studies investigating fasting or intermittent fasting show a slight increase in metabolic rate, likely from cathecolimine upregulation and the associated fidgeting from an increase in norepinephrine in the brain. This increase is maintained for the first 72 hours of the fast, RMR decreasing only after about three or four days of practically zero calories. And considering that an average sized meal takes five to six hours to digest, amino acids will be trickling in from a meal for quite a long time, and yes, all of the protein will be digested. The notion that the body can only absorb 30 grams of protein in a given interval? Yup. More unsubstantiated semi-intellectual theorizing. Presuming adequate protein, long-term research shows no loss in lean body mass under strict fasting conditions while eating at a maintenance caloric level.

In the end, meal frequency has absolutely no impact on fat loss or muscle gain. Body composition changes are predicated entirely on what they always have been:  total daily caloric intake and exercise modality. Eating more begets an increase in weight, eating less, a decrease, regardless of meal frequency. In part two we will look at the costs and benefits of dropping meal frequency, and what populations might benefit most from this approach to nutrition.

1.

Today I want to talk about accomplishing the impossible: concurrent fat-loss and muscle-gain. There’s plenty of debate in the industry as to how fast this feat can be done and to what degree the body can vacillate between an anabolic (muscle-gaining) and a catabolic (fat-losing) state where the trainee continues to see progress. Certain strategies – intermittent fasting comes to mind – try to do this on a short, arguably daily time-line, while others like Lyle’s Ultimate Diet 2.0 push the time-line out to a week.  Alan Aragon’s culking method is probably the least aggressive of the aforementioned, making its manipulations to a multi-week or monthly basis with moderate daily undulations of caloric intake.

Alan’s philosophy bears most similarity to mine. In true guru fashion, I’ve adopted my own unique fitness nomenclature: physique revision. I like its connotations and they just happen to fit my philosophical habituations. Physique refers specifically to the form or structure of the body; in essence, its make-up. This is perfect as it encompasses not just the physical appearance of the body but its content of both fat and muscle. Second, revision implies a transmutation of state, an improvement on a previous version. Explicit in revision is the root vision, which immediately conjures up thoughts of accomplishment, of dreams, goals, and forward movement.

In my experience, getting clients comfortable with their ideal physique is at least half the battle. To achieve that ideal physique I instill a self-confidence, an unshakable belief in them that inspires adoption of the lifestyle and habits of those whose bodies are truly exceptionable. To get there, we focus on daily victories, necessitating a long, slow, and mediated approach. It’s not particularly exciting, but in truth, dieting or physique revision shouldn’t be. No more a surprise than brushing your teeth in the morning.

As Marcus Aurelius wrote in Meditations, “Always have clear in your mind that ‘the grass is not greener’ elsewhere, and how everything is the same here as on the top of the mountain.”  Chronic dieters and fitness obsessive compulsive would do well to take this quote to heart as getting that six-pack is not nearly the rush one would expect.  That said, I feel our purpose here is to educate ourselves, to infuse our bodies, minds, and souls with knowledge and experience. Challenging ourselves, pushing the boundaries and asking “What is my limit?” may be the best form of education available to us. In The Magic of Thinking Big, David J. Schwartz writes “[g]oals are as essential to success as air is to life.” By surrendering your heart and mind to a goal, you receive in turn physical power and energy that, without agency, innervates the fabric of your day to day life, compelling you to succeed not just in the endeavor of the moment, but any endeavor you can fathom. Success begets success.

Thus, I argue for a mediated strategy toward physique revision which can provide these wanted daily successes. The temptation after a brutal stint of dieting or bulking or what have you is to immediately revert to old habits and destroy any progress made. Thus I condemn aggressive bulking or cutting unless the client and circumstances demand it. Without reprogramming the subconscious through a series of productive inputs the entrenched practices remain and success is fleeting. Contrast this with a physique revision strategy that, rather than relying on dramatic improvements to the tune of say a 10% improvement in your physique each week, asks for maybe just a 5% improvement. Or even better, a 2.5% improvement.

Let that gel in your mind.

Now it’s time to make this philosophy a reality.

2.

To begin you’re going to need an objective portrait of where you are right now. I suggest taking three photos of your half-naked physique – a front, profile, and rear shot. Photos humble even the leanest among us. This is your starting point and from here you need to make a decision. Either focus on an increase in muscle mass with some fat-loss, or focus on fat-loss with some potential muscle-gain. Next, you need to find out how many calories you should be eating. The way I prefer to do this is to figure out the maintenance caloric intake of your ideal physique. The revisioning magic happens by combining a detailed approach that is at the same time expansive as it is intensive. By undulating calories on a daily basis you can make a positive impact on your partitioning ratio. Then, through slight adjustments  on a longer time-line we can prevent plateaus and continue to progress. Let’s address, then, the latter.

Taking a broader view of our plans, you’re going to have to modify your approach and adjust calories based on the feedback you’re receiving every two weeks. The body is a multi-faceted system that, while in the long-term is surprisingly linear, needs a gentle touch in the short-term to forestall overtraining and plateaus. Beyond intra-week variations in caloric intake, recalculations based on direct feedback from your plan will guide adjustments. I encourage small modifications incorporated on a bi-weekly basis. Let’s presume you’re trying to lose fat with potential muscle gain. Here’s what I do with my clients if they’re not seeing the results they want:

1. Ensure exercise volume has reached five hours per week with the incorporation of an intelligent resistance training program. Ensure diet adherence is at 85-90%.
2. Evaluate recovery. Is the trainee complaining of lack of energy? How is the client coping with dietary intake? Are there excessive cheat meals or dietary transgressions? If results are poor, incorporate additional recovery measures including supplementation for sleep and relaxation alongside low-intensity rejuvenation techniques.
3. After improving recovery, check for body composition improvements. If no improvement, incorporate two thirty-minute low-intensity cardiovascular sessions, increasing exercise output by one hour per week.
4. If fat-loss does not improve, reduce weekly average caloric intake by 250kcal, mostly from dietary carbohydrate. Monitor strength levels. If strength levels remain elevated and recovery is not impinged, continue.

Based on this feedback, I run through the above in order until we see the results we want. I cap exercise volume at 10-12 hours per week and will make dietary adjustments once that volume is reached. I save high-intensity interval type work for last. I address why in the homework section of numeral three of this article. In part two I’ll cover in brief strategies to see consistent improvement in muscle-gain oriented plans.

3.

So here’s your homework until next time.

• Take three photos of yourself. Front, profile, and rear. Yeah, the results may be ugly, but you have to know where you are now before you plan out where you want to be. I like clients to evaluate mostly by the mirror and the “Do these jeans fit?” method. Feel free to take a weight measurement and girth measurement – waistline for guys or thighs for women, wherever the fat tends to go.
• Take a three day dietary record and record everything that goes into your mouth. Make them representative days, so if you tend to eat a lot more on Fridays or weekends, record at least one of those days. This may be difficult if you like to get trashed with the boys, or lighten the wallets of bros who want to “buy you a drank.” Tally up your calories and macronutrients.
• Check to see how many total hours of exercise you’re doing per week. Make sure it’s at least four hours of resistance training and build up from there. Beware throwing in excessive amounts of high-intensity activity. I’ve seen trainees destroy themselves with too much interval training. For more info on proper resistance training, take a look at Reverse Pyramid Training – Part One and Reverse Pyramid Training – Part Two for some ideas. There are plenty of good resources out there. If you need some help, send me an e-mail at ryan.zielonka@gmail.com.

In the follow-up article we’ll incorporate these results into the basic outline of a training and nutrition program that embodies the principles of physique revision. Until then, for the guys keep it bro, girls keep it bra.

Ladies, I feel bad for you. Really, I do. When it comes to fitness marketing, women are preyed upon like helpless bunnies in a field brim-full of intimidating, roided-out personal trainers and professional salesmen. It’s as if fitness professionals go full-retard when presented with a female audience. Seriously, how many training programs do we need that tell its victims to do a bunch of cardio, some butt raises, and biceps curls with pink dumbbells?

Let’s get some things straight. First, lifting weights isn’t going to magically give you more tone or burn more calories while you sit at work all day, regardless of what some authors might claim. In fact, weight training has a marginal impact on metabolism, an average session burning somewhere around 300 calories. Even the addition of lean muscle mass to our bodies bears little on our thermodynamics. Building appreciable muscle, particularly for women, is hard, and I can count on one hand the number of women I’ve seen in the gym lifting in a way congruent with the goal of lean body mass gain or retention.

So if weight training doesn’t burn that many calories while you’re doing it, doesn’t give your metabolism much of a benefit when you’re not doing it, and on top of that, it’s hard to gain muscle anyway, why do it at all?

If you put a discerning eye to the screen or page and scan the above paragraphs a few times you’ll notice much of the disappointment comes out of the exaggerated promises found in books, magazines, and in the mouths of personal trainers. These sources are obsessed with calories burned. To a degree, this caloric obsession has merit. If the number of calories consumed exceeds the number of calories burned, body mass accrues – i.e. weight gain. What none of these sources tell you is that weight training’s great benefit is its ability to tilt the partitioning scales in our favor.

So what the heck does partitioning mean?

Partitioning refers to what happens to calories when they find their way into your body. High-intensity activity, especially high-intensity resistance training, puts your body into an optimal partitioning state. By demanding a lot of your body’s physiological systems, resistance training elevates a host of hormones and metabolic processes encouraging your body to build lean muscle and lose fat. When you consume food before, during, and after your workout your body wants to lose fat and wants to gain muscle. Partitioning refers to how many of those calories get stored as body fat, and how many of those calories go toward replenishing muscle glycogen or building lean muscle tissue.

Nutrient timing is getting more press in mainstream literature; in essence, timing your food intake to benefit maximally from the calories your body receives. Regardless of the type of training you’re doing, you’re best off consuming a good proportion of your daily calories before, during, and immediately after training. All that cool stuff resistance training does to your body puts it into a repair and utilize state rather than a store and waste state. But here’s the kicker – to put your body in this state you need to tax it. Most women exert more effort cleaning the house or grocery shopping than they do at the gym.

So what to do? Find a challenging program and work on increasing your weights. Build on the basics – squats, deadlifts, overhead press, bench press, and rows. The basics will always stay the same and will always apply to both genders. No, you won’t get ‘too big,’ no matter how hard you try. Hit the gym with passion and purpose, and then reap the rewards.

This post comes from a discussion I found myself in on a prominent online fitness forum. I offer the original author a mechanism by which a higher carbohydrate could promote greater fat loss than a lower carbohydrate diet presuming calories were the same across both diets.

In my client roster, I’ve found that active populations suffer and fat-loss worsens under chronic low-carb conditions, presuming caloric control.

Why? Dietary carbohydrate provides the most bang for the bang in fueling the ATP or phosphagen system. Under resistance training conditions – what amounts to high intensity activity – carbohydrate is the preferred substrate. Chronic insufficient availability of carbohydrate in the form of muscle glycogen has crippled a-many trainees progress in the gym. Moreover, carbohydrate nets a greater thermogenic effect upon consumption, and under overfeeding conditions, is more difficult to store as fat in the body. Beyond that, it looks like less than about 130g of daily carbohydrate causes a down-regulation of thyroid output.

Note that the anaerobic energy pathway, otherwise known as glycolysis, creates ATP exclusively from carbohydrates, with lactic acid being a by-product. As exercise intensity increases, the body relies more and more on carbohydrate metabolism.

So, quick thought experiment. Trainee walks into the gym. Is overloading on fat, all the while under-carbed. His training session nets a 300kcal burn. Contrast this with someone sufficiently carbed, with a lower fat intake. His training sessions nets a 400kcal burn due to greater loads lifted, improved recovery, and more repetitions performed.

Boom, greater potential for fat loss through indirect mechanisms. To be clear, I’m not saying that a higher carbohydrate diet is always going to net greater fat loss than a fat-based diet, but for certain athletic populations they’ll need more, not less carbohydrate than the typical inactive American.

Author’s Note: Check out http://www.leangains.com, the home of Martin Berkhan. The inspiration for this series of posts came from his article, The Minimalist. Enjoy!

Last time I discussed what I see as a pretty novel approach to hypertrophy, reverse pyramid training. It goes against a lot of dogma and mythology about pyramiding sets. Let’s be frank, you can lift the most when you’re warmed up and well rested, not midway through a painful series of squats. How the traditional pyramiding of weights got started I’ll never understand.

There’s been some discussion about how HIT and minimalist training fit into contemporary research.  If you’re putting out a true max effort as described in my previous post, there is no way in hell you’re going to be able to perform another max effort of the same movement in two to three days. Impossible.

And I think this keys into the big debate in the community. For hypertrophy purposes, where on the volume vs. intensity axis should bodybuilders place themselves?  Strength is a secondary concern to aesthetics, but clearly plays a formative role in building exceptional physiques, roid junkies aside.

Our first confounder, I suppose, is the current research, which pretty conclusively argues for a training frequency of 2x/week for a  given muscle group. This sort of set up, however, presumes something far less than an max effort set, given that in the research trainees were doing three sets of an exercise. There’s clearly a compromise here between volume and intensity.

Either you suck it up and build your routine around maximizing strength in the hypertrophy rep ranges for a given set of major exercises, or you take a volume approach that has you gaining strength (albeit in slower fashion) across a given range of exercises. The guy who is giving his body 7 – 8 days of rest before hitting a given movement is going to be a lot fresher physiologically and psychologically than the guy who hit deadlifts a few days ago. He’s also going for broke, so to speak, when he performs a given exercise.

For those just beginning their training careers, this sort of approach can skyrocket your early gains. Getting the body used to heavy weights early on will give you the ability to, down the road, experiment with training philosophies while lifting appreciable loads. Most ill-guided trainees begin with the polar opposite – 6 days a week of high volume, high fatigue training. If this is done too early in a training career, gains stall quickly, and you’re left endless repping 135 pound back squat loads. If you even make it that far.

Hey guys, back for more blogging after an extended move out here in Seattle. I’ve been playing around with two new (to my body, at least) training philosophies, reverse pyramid training and HIT. I caught wind of both through my friend Martin Berkhan and his website.

For those of you unfamiliar with Martin, he’s one of the first guys who, to my knowledge, has put together intermittent fasting with a targeted  exercise protocol. I contacted Martin not so much for his nutritional insight but rather for his take on training. He and I come from very similar places. Overweight during childhood into our late teens and early 20s, we both dropped serious fat through excessive cardio and dietary restriction. Our baseline was skinny and weak, and we both had a long way to go at the start of our training careers.

Intelligent HIT – the kind promulgated by Martin, at least – keeps volume to a minimum. Major movements are trained infrequently. Martin has taken his cues from guys like Arthur Jones and Stuart McRobert, altering the workout week to an extended 8-day schedule and emphasizing  progressive overload over volume. I put together a program, e-mailed back and forth with Martin to refine it, and pursued it with gusto over a period of four weeks. There were some things I really loved about the program and, yes, there were some downfalls. Before I delve into the relative pros and cons, which I’ll discuss in a follow-up post, let’s discuss what I did.

The Modality

My mission at every workout was to see improvements in either reps or weight. I saw consistent improvement for the first three weeks and then actually lost strength on the fourth week. I’ll go into this a bit later, but first some numbers.

I’m a pretty small guy – 5’6”, 142lbs at the program’s inception, 147lbs at program’s end. I objectively gained ~ 1 – 1.5lbs of lean mass over the period. The rest appears to be water and increased glycogen storage from more carbohydrates. Keep in mind, I’m coming off an extended layoff, a result of medically diagnosed overtraining, so my recovery is nowhere near what it used to be.

For the past four weeks I was in the gym three times every eight days. My bench press improved by 30lbs for five reps. My deadlift improved dramatically, over 80lbs for four reps. Back squat didn’t move as much as I would have liked, from four to six reps with a 15lb increase in weight.

Reverse pyramid training is quite the interesting methodology. For a given set, in Martin’s program a major compound movement, your first set after warm-ups is a top set, followed by a drop in weight. This second set, unlike the first, is not a max effort. The intent is to beat your max effort set by one to two reps. During this training period, major compounds were performed in the 4 – 7 rep range, sets kept to a maximum of two. Accessory movements varied in execution and mapping but with an everpresent emphasis on reaching concentric failure.

As a quick example, let’s take a look at one of my bench press sessions courtesy of my training log:

Bench Press, Set 1: Barx10, 95×10, 135×7, 185×5, 195×2, Rest 3min, 210×4

Rest 3min

Bench Press, Set 2: 200×5

And that’s it. During the same workout I performed one set of max reps on close-grip bench to failure, and one set of max reps on incline DB bench to failure. This would be all the chest work I’d do for the entire eight day cycle.

No doubt this is a strength-based program. Hypertrophy herein is a product of progressive overload. I think it’s a great set-up, perhaps the best set-up of the abbreviated programming philosophy. The reverse pyramid methodology wasn’t used on every set, as I’ve noted, so don’t jump into the gym trying to reverse pyramid every movement.

So if you find strength stalling, or you’re just bored with your current training, try adding in a reverse pyramid set as an alternative to your usual lifting. Next time I’ll discuss my take on the program as a long-term strategy for bodybuilding and hypertrophy.