It's important to understand how muscle grows and why we lift weights. The fact is building new muscle is something that our bodies don't want to do without very good reason. There has to be a stimulus and that stimulus has to be strong enough to trigger a systemic response throughout the body. So if you just bend your elbow all day without holding a weight, your biceps will not receive a strong stimulus and will not increase in size. But if you bend your elbow while holding a 50 pound bucket of rocks the intensity of lifting is enormously higher and your body will trigger the muscle growth process.
To make a long story short, a great deal of research has been done to show that it is the intensity of lifting that is far more critical to muscle growth stimulus than the volume (or duration) of the lifting. This is why a 100 meter sprinter has quadriceps far larger and more powerful than a 26 mile marathoner's quadriceps. And since we humans do not have infinite power and energy on tap, any time we increase the duration of an exercise we automatically decrease the intensity. That's bad. What we need is to maximize the intensity and minimize the duration - that would be the ideal exercise. How do we do that? Stated another way, how can we lift the most weight in the shortest time - and do it with maximum safety? The answer is to lift the maximum possible weight in our strongest and safest possible range of motion. That is exactly what the 1 REP GYM machine is engineered to do! And here is some more good news for busy people; when you train with maximum intensity on every exercise your body requires more time to recover so your workouts need to be spaced farther apart. Most of my advanced clients training on the 1 REP GYM are working out only two to three times per month. Yet they achieve the best results of their lives and get stronger than ever! See why we call it revolutionary exercise performed on revolutionary equipment? Average, everyday people lifting two or three times more than they ever have in their lives, with maximum safety and with fewer workouts than any other training method and building leaner, stronger bodies than they've ever had in the past. Benefits of Muscle And what are the benefits of having more muscle and less fat? We all know how being in better shape can transform our looks. And lean mass is good mass. A man can weigh 200 and look flabby or he can weigh 200 pounds and look fit and athletic. The difference is how much lean mass he has. The same goes for a woman who weighs 140 pounds. But there is so much more to the story. A generally accepted medical fact is that the benefits of resistance training are a practical fountain of youth. Here is a partial list: Osteoporosis: As we age our bones naturally get more porous and less dense. That makes them more brittle and prone to breaking. Resistance training reverses this process and adds density to bones. Cholesterol: Exercise lowers LDL (bad) cholesterol and increases HDL (good) cholesterol. These are two key markers of heart disease that are improved by exercise. Human Growth Hormone: We're not talking about the synthetic HGH that is constantly advertised over the Internet. Heavy resistance training causes your body to produce more of its own, perfect-for-you natural growth hormone. Increased HGH is known to boost sexual potency, improve your sleep, improve memory, decrease the wrinkles in your skin! Testosterone: Resistance training naturally increases levels of testosterone which delays the onset of andropause, also know as male menopause. Fat Loss: Adding muscle to your body increases your Basal Metabolic Rate which means you'll naturally burn more calories and lose fat 24 hours a day. Adding just 5 pounds of new muscle will burn off 20 to 25 pounds of fat annually. More Energy: Having more muscle means that every activity throughout the day is less taxing. That means having extra energy to enjoy life more. Look Better: Resistance training changes the composition of your body in two very positive ways. It increases lean body mass and decreases fat. In short, resistance training makes you look younger and fit. The 1 REP GYM absolutely, positively delivers these benefits more efficiently than any other training method or exercise equipment in the world. We don't need to qualify that statement in any way. The 1 REP GYM equipment does what no other equipment or exercise method in the world can do: exercises of 3 to 5 seconds per muscle group can be performed at the absolute highest intensity any human (we know of) can achieve. Over three thousand pounds of resistance for upper and lower body isometric static contraction resistance exercises!
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American alpine skier Lindsey Vonn, a 2010 Olympic gold medalist, has won four World Cup overall titles and owns the record for most World Cup wins by a woman.
Recently Vonn announced her retirement stating "My body is broken beyond repair and it isn't letting me have the final season I dreamed of". Sadly her amazing career will end short of her ultimate goal. Vonn has attained and unbelievable 82 World Cup wins (most ever for woman) falling just short Ingmar Stenmark's record of 86. "Retiring without reaching my goal is what will stay with me forever" Even though Vonn has accomplished more than any woman will likely achieve for many years to come her body at ONLY 34 years of age, has given out on her. There is any number of reasons why her career is being cut short due to her "broken down" body HOWEVER, there is absolutely ONE reason which if she had been properly advised on, could've not only extended her career but would've made her even better! I will call this reason her "limiting factor". Her limiting factor was STRENGTH. Let me be very clear, Lindsey is definitely strong, but I guarantee if her strength training program incorporated static contraction training using the 1 REP GYM she would in no way be ready for retirement. You see her performance on the slopes when she is competing last only seconds or minutes all together, yet her in preparation for an Olympic Gold or winning whatever race, she dedicated 1,000's upon 1,000's of dumb strength training. It is dumb because it failed to keep her from getting injured so badly that at only 34 years of age her career is over. She would ski at more than 80 miles an hour and no matter how strong or how effective a strength training program is, if she crashes the result i most likely going to end up with injuries. If she had someone really smart in her strength training camp they would have had her performing static contract isometric training using the 1 REP GYM. But instead she was told do perform countless worthless full range of motion strength training exercise that NEVER forced her muscles to rebound stronger. The concept of "Stimulate Don't Annihilate" is a foreign to anyone in her camp. Please keep in mind I'm not referring to her stretching exercises, practice runs on the slopes, or IR sauna sessions. I'm ONLY referring to her "strength training" regime. Lyndsey Vonn only 34 years old and the greatest female skier of all time succumbs NOT to injuries but to failed inefficient strength training programs combined with improper "recovery" periods which would've allowed MAXIMAL muscle recovery, gain, and strength. What a shame! 10. You’re probably off. Way off.It’s a very well-known problem for diet researchers that people are absolutely terrible at estimating how many calories they eat – and the more overweight they are, the worse they’re likely to be at it. The typical underestimation is 10-45%, with an average of 30%. So if the average person thinks she’s eating 1500 calories, she’s probably closer to 2100. The more overweight you are, the worse you’re likely to be at calorie reporting: in this study, obese subjects underreported calories by 47% on average (on top of overreporting physical activity).
This study is even more telling. Researchers took women who claimed they couldn’t lose weight on a 1,200 calorie diet, and trained them how to track their calorie intake. They had all the women keep food logs, but also used very accurate metabolic techniques to measure how many calories they were really eating. Almost all the women were severely overestimating their energy intake – one of them thought she was eating 1100 calories and was actually eating over 3000! On average, they were underestimating by around 50%. And these were women who were trained by experts and knew they were being evaluated based on how accurate their records were. So chances are very good that even if you think this doesn’t apply to you, it does (this study isn’t free full-text, but there’s a great detailed analysis here if you want the details). To put it very simply, very few people are accurate calorie-counters. We tend to tell researchers – and Cronometer, and FitDay, and SparkPeople – what we think we should be eating, not what we actually eat. But unfortunately, our bodies keep an accurate log whether or not we write it down, so the end result is frustration: people honestly believe that they’re eating only 1200 calories per day, and get angry and discouraged when they still can’t lose weight, not realizing that they’re actually eating 2500+! 9. Calorie labels are inaccurate.Even assuming that you’re in the very small minority of people who can accurately keep track of your portion sizes and write down everything you eat, all your efforts are still being undermined by the incredible inaccuracy of labeling laws. Just to give a few examples:
8. It makes you hungry. Calorie restriction is a deliberate attempt to eat less than your body needs to maintain its current weight, forcing it to use up its fat stores for energy instead. It’s basically a very mild form of self-starvation. Given that fact, it’s completely natural to expect feelings of hunger. Unfortunately, when you’re expecting to feel hungry, chances are pretty good that you will! Take a look at this study. The researchers tested restrained (dieting) and nonrestrained normal-weight women with either a high-calorie or low-calorie drink before a meal. Some of the drinks were labeled correctly, but on others, the labels were switched (so a high-calorie drink got a low-calorie label and vice versa). The dieters – but not the normal eaters – felt hungrier after a drink labeled as low-calorie regardless of how many calories it actually contained. This one makes it even clearer. Study subjects who got either a high or low-calorie liquid meal “reported hunger more in accordance with belief about caloric value than actual value.” And in this study, just calling a food “healthy” made subjects feel less satisfied afterward (as opposed to calling it “tasty”). So let’s take a look at what this says about a typical calorie-counting dieter:
7. Your baseline is probably skewed.Everyone’s heard of the 2000-calorie diet. That’s supposed to be what healthy people need to eat – despite the obvious silliness of having just one standard for everyone. Since it’s an average, men tend to assume they need a little more, and women tend to assume they need a little less. So for weight loss, most people take 2000 and subtract a more or less arbitrary number of calories to come up with 1500 or 1800 or something in that range. But did you know that the 2000 calorie number is actually totally imaginary? You can read about this here: the short version is that it’s an estimation based on guesswork and surveys, and then rounded down in order to deliberately underestimate everyone’s calorie needs. The committee actually thought that giving an accurate number would somehow give us all permission to overeat, so they decided to lie instead. So how many calories to weight-stable people actually need? Normal, healthy adult men need roughly 2700, and healthy adult women need around 2400. Those numbers are based on accurate measurement of how much people actually eat (using a technique called doubly-labeled water), not just surveys that give people the opportunity to lie and underestimate. If you don’t believe this, or don’t believe it applies to you, you can use the equation from this study (free full-text) to figure out your personal requirements. All you need to plug in is your height (in centimeters), your weight (in kilograms), your age, and your sex. The upshot: if you’re basing your calorie restriction on anything like a 2000-calorie baseline, you’re probably severely underestimating your body’s actual needs. That’s called starvation, and it isn’t healthy – so don’t do it. 6. It encourages you to see “low-calorie” as a synonym for “healthy.” Another insidious danger of calorie-counting isn’t obvious at first. It only shows up later, in the tendency to start conflating “low-calorie” with “healthy,” as if calories were the only aspect of a food that mattered. This is called the “health halo” effect: whatever particular aspect of food you’re looking at, whether it’s calories, fat, nutrients, or anything else, you’re likely to make snap judgments about food based entirely on that one number, and miss out on the bigger picture. This has been documented extensively with “low-fat” claims, but it’s just as true for “low-calorie.” And “restrained eaters” (research-speak for “dieters”) are more sensitive to external cues than normal eaters, so if you’re trying to restrict calories, you’re at a very high risk of falling into this trap. Say for example that you start out intending to have some olive oil and vinegar on your salad. But after looking up the nutrition facts, you realize that just 2 tablespoons of that will cost you 200 calories: ouch! On the other hand, if you take the lite dressing from the grocery store, you’re only out 50 calories, so you can “afford” an afternoon snack later. That makes the grocery-store dressing look really tempting, but take a look at the ingredients: Water, balsamic vinegar, soybean oil and extra virgin olive oil, sugar, salt. Contains 2% or less of each of the following: spices, garlic powder, caramel color, xanthan gum, sodium benzoate and sorbic acid and calcium disodium edta (used to protect quality), propylene glycolalginate, gum arabic, natural flavor, sulfur dioxide The only reason why you’d think that dressing was better for you than oil and vinegar is that you’re focused on calories to the exclusion of everything else. But calorie-counting is like that: it tends to keep you zoomed in so tightly on calories that you start eating processed junk because not only is it lower in calories, but it’s also easier to count those calories when it’s right there on the label for you. 5. It makes you stressed.In this study, researchers assigned healthy women to one of four groups:
Chronic stress is bad news. It deranges everything from your gut flora to your skin to your immune system. If you’re stressing over your diet, it’s undoing at least some (if not all) of the health benefits of the diet itself. 4. It’s a risk factor for compulsive exercise.The natural companion of calorie restriction is cardio. After all, the catchphrase is “Eat less, move more,” not “Eat less, and sit on the couch.” So when most people start a diet, they also start trying to increase their calories out, by virtuously spending hours on the treadmill or elliptical trainer, or some other form of calorie-burning activity. None of these things are bad in themselves – exercise is generally good for you and even the much-demonized cardio isn’t anything to be afraid of if you know your limits and don’t let it turn into a chronic addiction. But if you start exercising exclusively for the purpose of burning calories, you’re likely to cross the line into overdoing it very fast. This study says it best: “Exercise and food regulation were often ‘traded off’ against one another, with increased exercise used to compensate for decreased dietary restraint.” This is the familiar pattern of exercising to “burn off” the calories in dessert. Unfortunately, it also meant that the subjects had some pretty disturbing answers when asked about their exercise habits. They showed symptoms both of addiction and of compulsion. To quote one of them: “I often think that if I…became ill or I had an injury that would prevent me from exercising, would be just the worst possible thing that could happen in my life!” This is a married woman with two children. And the “worst possible thing” that could happen to her is not a divorce, not a child becoming ill, but having to skip the gym. This is not healthy. Compulsive overexercise is a serious health problem – it can cause all kinds of metabolic issues, not to mention overuse injuries (if you “can’t” take a day off from running to nurse a sore knee, that sore knee is going to get a lot worse very quickly). And that excessive exercise in turn cycles back to disordered eating: in this study, young women who exercised for the primary reason of “working off food, losing weight, or changing their appearance” had much higher levels of eating disordered symptoms than women who exercised for other reasons. The upshot: exercise to feel healthy and strong, to build muscle, or to enjoy time with your friends. Do not exercise to “burn calories,” to “make up for” eating something you regret, or to “earn” your food. If you don’t care about calories in the first place, it’s a lot easier to take a healthy attitude toward the gym. 3. It doesn’t address the reasons why you overeat. Nobody woke up sometime in the 1980s and just decided that obesity sounded fun. For any given overweight person, there is a reason why he or she is overeating relative to his or her body’s requirements, and chances are it’s not “because I want to be fat.” That reason might be personal trauma (eating for comfort after the death of a loved one); it might be a twisted protection mechanism (“if I’m fat, nobody will want to date me and I won’t have to fear the heartbreak of a breakup”); it might be habit (“I’ve always eaten this way and change is too hard”). It might also be hormonal derangement or deregulated hunger cues caused by years of junk food and a sedentary lifestyle. It could be anything. This has actually been studied, and the results are nothing but supportive of the commonsense idea that people tend to overeat for very compelling emotional reasons – reasons that aren’t addressed at all by calorie-counting. For example:
2. It doesn’t account for nutrient partitioning.“Nutrient partitioning” just means whether a given calorie is used for fuel or stored as fat. This is the big premise of the low-carb idea. In people who are severely insulin resistant, carbohydrate calories are preferentially stored as fat, even though the person’s organs are actually starving. This person doesn’t need to reduce total calories; he needs to get those calories to where they’re so desperately needed (his liver, brain, and other organs) and stop storing them as fat. If you embark on a 1200 calorie diet in this state, you’ll probably lose some weight (or at least, gain it more slowly). After all, you can’t store calories as fat if they aren’t coming into your mouth in the first place. But that doesn’t heal your metabolism; now you’re just starving your muscles as well as your organs. Thinking about what kind of calories you’re eating, rather than just how many, is a much better way to tackle the real issue. 1. It doesn’t work in the long term.This review of diet studies said it best: “Dieters who gain back more weight than they lost may very well be the norm, rather than an unlucky minority.” Calorie-counting can take off pounds in the short term, but in the long term those pounds come right back, usually with some friends along for the ride. Even if you’re willing to weigh and measure everything to ensure accurate portion sizes, and deal with the hunger, the deprivation, the stress, and everything else, this should give you a reason not to do it: all that sacrifice ultimately won’t get you what you want. The exceptionsFor every rule, there’s at least one exception. And the advice against calorie counting is no different. Exception: Ex-DietersIf you have starved yourself in the past, you may have to count calories to make sure you’re getting enough. It’s very well-documented in eating disorder treatment programs that chronic restrictors have a skewed idea of how many calories are in their food, and counting for a little while may help you re-set. This should be temporary, but sometimes it helps in the short term. Exception: AthletesAthletes who want to compete at a very high level (especially strength athletes) may also have to count calories to make sure their food intake is adequate to support their training. What the heck CAN you do that is effective? A good place to start: At this point, hopefully you’re convinced that counting calories is not the way to go. What you really need for sustainable weight loss isn’t calorie counting; it’s a diet that…
Nobody’s claiming that Paleo is perfect, but it certainly works a lot better than calorie-counting to hit these key needs. A few tips to help you really tweak the diet for weight loss without counting calories:
This is a good way to start, for more info on Paleo visit: www.PALEOLEAP.com |
AuthorShawn Bennett, inventor 1 REP GYM™, & creator of "Measured Intensity Training", the World's FASTEST Strength Training System! Archives
February 2019
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