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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
If you missed Part One of the interview, click here.
RZ: Having followed your progress from day one, your development has been a true inspiration. What did you learn about yourself during your most recent journey to striated glutes?
TJ: Thanks! I appreciate that! I can tell you, I learned a great deal about myself in the weeks leading up to that last competition. You start to experience some really dramatic changes, not only physically, but even more so psychologically. As you diet down to ultra lean levels, most of your hormonal processes start to shut down. Hunger shoots through the roof, libido is non-existent, mood is all over the place, etc. It’s one of those things that you can’t really describe very well; you just have to experience it to fully understand what I mean. When I say hunger, I’m not talking about your normal, every day, “I’m hungry for lunch” type of hunger. I’m talking about you being hungry as you are eating, hungry immediately after you eat, and hungry to the point that food gives you no satiety whatsoever.
It’s not surprising, given the online company we keep, that Tommy and I were trolling the same online forums and within a few years he’d catapulted himself into the limelight of the fitness interwebs. Beside winning the 2007 OCB Mr. Natural Indiana and gaining his IFPA pro card the same year, he’s plastered near naked on the cover of Lyle McDonald’s The Stubborn Fat Solution. Not bad for a bodybuilding nerd. I had the opportunity to interview him, so without further ado, here’s the first of a two-part interview with ‘Sporto’ Tommy Jeffers.
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.
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.
Have you checked out my consultation services? I’m presuming your answer is ‘yes’ given the growth of my online client roster, so thank you. That said, I want to share with you, my readers, a testimonial that found its way into my inbox a few weeks back. It made me smile over my morning coffee and near spill my coveted Breakfast Blend all over my counter-top. It’s from one of my former clients, and, well, enough preamble. Here you go:
