Post image for Musings on Body Transformation

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.

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2010 Fat Loss

by Ryan Zielonka on January 11, 2010

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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.

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Post image for Form Factor Nutrition – Part Three

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.

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Post image for Form Factor Nutrition – Part Two

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. Read More

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Post image for Form Factor Nutrition – Part One

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. Read More

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Post image for Physique Revision – Part One

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.

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Pink Dumbbells

by Ryan Zielonka on October 8, 2009

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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?

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Brotology 101

by Ryan Zielonka on September 8, 2009

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Gals and guys, please excuse the mess: my projects are now off the table and on my guitar amplifier, and while I can’t reveal too much about what lies in present disarray, I can tell you about my latest collaboration with bro-extraordinaire Alan Aragon. With just a few juicy posts on internet fitness forums Alan became an online legend, and now I, with my great coercive powers, have culled the Brofessor himself out of his PubMed hibernation.

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fat-loss

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.

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Post image for Lou Schuler is Blogging Again

The guy most responsible for my weight-lifting career is blogging again. Lou was Fitness Editor for Men’s Health back in its ‘hey-day.’

Okay, at least in my mind five to ten years ago was its hey-day.

I had the pleasure to speak with Lou at the 2009 JP Fitness Summit, and worked with him on this article you can read at T-Muscle.com entitled The Tao of the Iron.

I learned a lot from the early 2000s iteration of Men’s Health, and it’s super-cool to see Lou back in the public blogging arena. Click here to check out some of his new stuff.

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