Progressive overload: more thoughts (recovery)

So how long does it take for the body to fully recover from resistance training?

The funny part is that I don't think there is a definite answer to that question. The best one I can come up with is: it depends. There are numerous studies that provide such a wide variety of - not even answers - suggestions that it makes it extremely difficult to come to a complete and definite answer. I wonder if it's even possible. Different bodyparts require different amounts of time. It also vastly varies depending on the intensity and volume of training. Easy gainers and younger people with fast metabolism may require less time to fully recover than more senior "hardgainers". Traditional recommendations maintain that 2-3 days is enough for recovery, which is why most traditional programs are built around 3-4 sessions per week. "Hardgainer" pioneer Stuart McRobert, on the other hand, provides extensive evidence that 4-5 days is an absolute minimum for a typical genetically average trainee, and that some may even become overtrained on once-a-week programs.

There's another question relevant to it: how long does it take before the body becomes deconditioned, i.e. starts losing the gains after the last training session. Our body, like a well-managed team is not going to keep additional resources on the payroll unless they are used. It's been long thought that the muscle starts losing its strength after only 3-4 days unless trained again however there are other opinions claiming that the body remains "supercompensated" for 3 and even 4 weeks. It is a well known fact that some athletes take a month completely off training and come back stronger than before knocking their personal bests right off on the very first day after the break. Many HIT people train once a week and sometimes find that they grow even if they do big lifts (like squats or deadlifts) once every 10 days. Doug McGuff, father of Body For Science, claims that many of his clients maintain gains while training once every two weeks!

So where does it leave us? A range of opinions is so wide that the only choice we really have left is a good old trial and error approach.

Let's say you try working out twice a week, which gives you 3-4 days of rest between sessions. Theoretically, if your recovery time is sufficient you should be able to increase your poundage a little (say, 2-2.5 pounds) every week. The important thing is: you should be able to handle increased weight with roughly the same amount of effort and correct form. If you have to grind it out, cheating and compromising the form for the sake of making that last rep - it doesn't count! If you stall (can't handle the 2 lb increase no matter how hard you try) for more than two weeks it means your recovery is either compromised or insufficient. Whichever the case, the key is to focus on recovery - not exercise (unless there's an injury; in which case some exercise adjustments may be in order)! If that happens, it might be good time to review your eating regime, nutritional and caloric value of the food you eat, sleeping pattern (total hours of sleep per day), and possibly extend recovery time (by switching to once-a-week or 3-times-every-2-weeks mode, for example).

Again, the basic principle to remember is: if you eat well, sleep well and rest enough - you should be able to handle small weekly increases with no perceivable increase in effort! If you can't - it might be time for adjustments. Of course, there's more to it, but that's the basics.

Progressive overload: more thoughts...

When I was younger the only way to train was to train heavy. Heavy was the key word and experience driven "pedal-to-the-metal" by overinflated young egos. When I stepped into the gym I would see my peers loading up the bar - which was an experience in itself - to the very limit of their abilities. And often times beyond. "Cheating" (which translates swinging and jerking up the weight to complete the set when you can't simply admit that the weight is too heavy) was a common thing to do. Of course it would be - it was promoted by the Trainer of Champions himself as a way to break through a plateau - how could he be wrong?! The correct form was more of an "old fart's" advice than a necessity. Plateau was also a mysterious thing - kinda like flu - everyone experienced it but no one really knew what caused it.

But I digress. Ok, maybe not. Back to the principle of progressive overload. One thing that I think was forgotten back in those days (and even more so today) is the fact that it is not the heavier poundage itself that causes the growth - not directly anyways - it's the growth that results in increased ability to lift heavier poundage! Again, let me rephrase it, because I think it's important. It is widely believed that constantly adding weight to your lifts is what causes body to grow (I mean growing muscle, of course). It's not. It may appear this way, yes, but it's not. Not directly anyway. It's a very simplistic way of looking at it whereas the process is more complex. The problem is, it shifts the emphasis from growth to weights whereas in fact it should be the other way around!

Here's what I think happens. Weight simply exemplifies resistance, a stimulus, which - when applied against the muscle triggers certain metabolic processes in the body, which are mostly of catabolic nature - including breakdown of muscle cells and release of certain hormones. That's where the role of the weight is pretty much complete! The nature and mode of the lift and amount of weight only affect the intensity of the breakdown and a relative combination of hormones released into the blood - that's it! The rest has nothing to do with the amount of weight you lifted in the last session - outside, like I said, the intensity of "damage" sustained by the body from working to overcome resistance.

What happens next is quite simple (without going into much detail). The hormones flooding the body trigger a set of chemical and physiological reactions that aim to repair the damage. This is where nutrition comes into play. Just like with a construction team materials (concrete, cement, limestone, bituminous mix, paint, etc.) are required to do the job certain nutrients are needed to provide the body with proper elements to do the repair. No matter how skilled and efficient your building team is insufficient or poor quality materials can hinder the process and adversely affect the outcome. Usually a certain combination of protein, carbohydrates and fats is needed to make repair efforts more efficient.

Now that your building team is engaged all you need to do is to provide sufficient supply of materials and allow enough time for the team to complete their job. If you don't supply materials - it will affect the team's dedication; they are going to get frustrated, lazy and eventually have people transfered to other projects. If you don't allow enough time - team will become overwhelmed, overstressed and will not be able to deliver at full capacity. In terms of physical training it means rest and recuperation. Eat well, sleep well and let the body take care of itself. Simple, huh? Well, from my own experience, it's much easier said than done.

So why is that? Why is it so difficult to simply rest and eat and let your "building team" take care of the repair? Well, the biggest challenge - as surprising as it is logical - is our mind. Our mind functions within the paradigm of rules. Statements and beliefs that we grew up with, learned at school, read in the books, heard in the media, etc., become rules by which we choose to live by. Often self-imposed (actually always self-imposed), although usually those are notions adopted from external sources (media, parents, friends, internet, religion).

Let's say, you come to the gym for the first time and a big guy on a bench next to you shows you a biceps curl. He also says that it's the best way ever to build big guns. Hmm, this guy is so big - he could be on to something. You take a mental note. But so far it's simply an opinion. Then you hear it again from someone else and you say "yeah! that's the way to train!"; now two people said the same thing. Then again. And again. Then you read a book or an article in a popular muscle building magazine that says that you should be training every other day and sometimes two out of three days your - and this is when your mind makes a conclusion that this is the way it should be. It's written in a book, after all, isn't it? And what if it comes from, say, Arnold the Governor or Joe the Trainer of Champions since 1936! People who made bodybuilding the sport it is today. And if the statement is souped up by a glossy image of a model with ripped abs? Chances are you not only will take it as an opinion - it may well become your truth, i.e. the rule you decide to live by without questioning its validity. It becomes one of the ten commandments to you. That's why advertising is such a powerful tool...

If for years and years you have been hearing that unless you train every other day - 3-4 times a week - you are not doing it right - even if your body is screaming "I'm tired! Give me a break!" what are the chances that you will listen to its plea? That's right: next to nothing! Why? Because your mind is conditioned to stick to the rules. Rules are the framework within which it operates.

Now back to training. I'll talk about the philosophy of rules in one of my other posts.

So we have established that rest and recuperation are a step critical to ensure that muscle is not only repaired but repaired exceedingly. In exercise physiology this is called supercompensation. Not only the body repairs the damage caused by stress in the form of resistance but it strengthens existing fibers and builds some extra ones in "anticipation" of an increased demand. This results in increased ability of the body to overcome resistance. This is a temporary condition, in a sense that unless this increased demand is imposed to the body the recruited fibers will gradually lose their ability to work against load. And it makes sense, the construction manager is not going to keep his entire team on the job unless there's enough work for them simply because the costs of keeping them there will not be justified. However, if the higher demand is applied again within that timeframe it will trigger the same processes and the body's ability to withstand higher resistance will increase yet again. There you have it. It's the theory of training.

To sum it up:

Step 1. Resistance is applied to the muscle (stress phase).

Step 2. Muscle is forced to work against resistance it is not accustomed to (overload), which results in temporary disruption of normal muscle cell metabolism and causes certain damage to the fibers (catabolic phase).

Step 3. A chain of chemical and physiological reactions is triggered and certain hormones are released into the blood to repair the damage and promote the healing process (anabolic phase).

Step 4. Damaged fibers are repaired with excess which means they attain a temporary state of higher capacity that allows them to handle higher levels of stress (adaptation and supercompensation).

Or put it simply:

Train well.

Eat well, sleep well and rest well until supercompensation occurs and you feel stronger than before.

Increase your working resistance a little.

Repeat steps 1 to 3 over and over again until you grow as strong and muscular as you want.

Of course there's more to it, but that's it in a nutshell.

So the key to progressive overload is to apply increased resistance (stress) but ONLY when the body has recovered enough to be able to handle it! Not until then. Consistently pushing yourself harder before your body is fully recovered from the previous session is the reason why there's much less muscle in the world than it is called for! So if everyone had focused more on growth than on the amount of weight lifted the world would have been a more muscular place in just a few short months.

Now, having said that, the question still remains: how long does it take for the body to repair the damage and supercompensate? And that's a million dollar question.

(...to be continued)

Stuart McRobert: bodybuilding for hardgainers

Those who know my philosophy about fitness, diet and bodybuilding (in a large sense - not just building muscle) know that I've been on a "mission" - my quest for a healthier body, search for an approach that would be based not on violence, but on "invitation". To coax, not coerce. Which means methods and practices designed to invite the body to change in the direction we want, rather than trying to violently force it to. Years of studying and practicing bodybuilding (mostly unsuccessfully - in a sense that I did not succeed in or even get close enough to building the body I wanted - even though I have always been in a fairly decent shape compared to many of my peers) and nutritional approaches made me realize that most conventional methods and techniques of altering your body are based on an ongoing fight against our bodies - usually by subjecting it to various forms of deprivation, over-exertion, extreme stress, etc.

When I first heard about Stuart McRobert I was in the process of arriving to a simple but painful realization that years of battering my body and following conventional and some less than routines (nutrition and training) in an attempt to make it change the way I wanted did not produce the results I wanted - no matter how hard I tried. I would always end up pretty much at the same weight (give or take), percentage of fat (give or take) and not any closer to where I wanted to be.

Stuart appears to be one of the pioneers who - through his own painful experience - first came to conclusion that a rate in which our body can grow muscle depends primarily on its ability to recuperate, when subjected to physical training. Second, he concluded that routines presented in most muscle-building magazines and books only apply to a relative minority of people blessed with favourable genetics - in terms of their ability to respond to exercise and speed of recovery. The rest of the population (which is most of us), he contended, are those whose bodies are less genetically blessed therefore take longer to recover and grow and can only handle a much smaller amount of training that they can respond to without becoming overtrained than is widely believed. He's the one who coined a term "hardgainer" and ran Hardgainer magazine for several years. I read four of his books. The one I liked best is "Beyond Brawn" simply because it - in my opinion - is more suited to a more experienced lifter. I found more answers to my questions in this book than in the other three combined.

His main philosophy revolves around several key points:

• A genetically average trainee should not copy training routines of more genetically blessed. Ironically those are the ones most magazines and books present to the public as the way to train. He believes that many trainees overtrain themselves badly when they try following those. In that sense I absolutely agree that, in a way, Joe Weider - although played a major role in popularization of bodybuilding in the last 40 years - may have caused a lot of damage to the training population by promoting champions' routines as the only way to train.
• Training frequency. He believes that 3 and 4 times of hard training a week is a definite overkill for an average trainee simply because it stretches their bodies' recuperative abilities too far.
• Correct form of exercise. Stuart preaches it with passion putting quite a heavy emphasis on it. Although I understand that it, in itself, is not going to grow more muscle but it goes a long way in terms of preventing injuries.
• Progressive overload. A principle of progressive load - which seems to have been a cornerstone of training since the beginning of times - surprisingly is not given enough justice in popular magazines. It often comes almost as a side-note as does "recuperation" by the way.

Although I certainly agree with Stuart on many accounts, some things still don't ring the truth to me. Too much emphasis is on genetic limitations, in my opinion - almost to a point where it becomes a negative mantra ("I can't grow as much muscle as I want because chances are I'm genetically challenged"). Thing is - you don't know until you try...

(...to be continued... possibly :)))

Enticing, not forcing...

I don't believe that torturing your body physically into something it inherently resists is a natural way to attain an ultimate physical shape. It may be the most obvious way or a way people were led to believe was true through centuries or what an official science believes is true - but I feel that there must be a better or more efficient way.

My explanation of why I think this self-torture approach sometimes works is because sometimes it brings you to a change of lifestyle or the entire mental attitude or frame of mind and that's what makes it successful - not extreme self-annihilating training by itself. In my opinion the very idea about hard, intense and merciless training being the only tool to transform your body is a major misconception (or rather misattribution) that we were blindfolded by for decades.

My feeling is that the body resists the changes we want to see not because it is inherently lazy or inert, but because it reflects our inner state of mind and energy balance. I believe that at each specific moment we have a body that fully corresponds to our current mental state - whether we realize it or not. When our body craves something that is not considered "healthy" I think it should not be treated as a bad habit - but rather as a signal that something may be out of balance in our inner energy field. In my opinion the problem often lies in the fact that when we discover a craving (for instance, for potato chips or french fries) we start treating it as a "bad habit" and then our response ranges from total acceptance and letting ourselves "balloon" to a shape we do not want to desperate attempts to "fix" it by employing willpower and trying to resist the craving.

But if we look in the mirror and discover that there's something we don't like about the reflection we see we don't go trying to change the reflection or fix the mirror, do we? We know that image in the mirror is merely a reflection of what we are (or what we look like for that matter) - and the mirror simply provides us with honest feedback about the way we look.

As it has been said many times in many ways: What you resist to, persists. To me often times the approach that we apply to our body is that same violent approach which mankind has been using to address many other problems for centuries. If you don't like what you see - simply use the most obvious way - through violence. If you don't like the cat hanging around your backyard - force it out of your yard (or sometimes even kill it). If you don't like that your child watches too much TV or plays computer games - ground them or deny their access to the computer. If you don't like that your body is getting flabby - starve it or put it on a restrictive diet. Seems so easy, doesn't it? Except that the method often appears inefficient and the results often prove to be short-lived, so we press even harder only to discover that the problem manifests itself in a different form later.

I think that there has to be a non-violent way of changing this "reflection in the mirror". A way that encourages or invites a positive change rather than forcing it. In the "cat" example: instead of forcing the cat out of your yard, try making it feel LIKE going elsewhere, make it more attractive to the cat to stay outside of your yard. Instead of denying your child of computer games or TV, try to understand what it is that drvies them to it and then try to make it more attractive for them to be "away" from it without manipulating them through the use of guilt or fear.

I believe that when we bring our inner energy field to balance and adjust our mental state we will discover that our body has stopped craving food that we consider "unhealthy" - it will simply be enjoying other types of food. Instead of craving "Doritos" we may soon find that our body wants an orange or an apple and feels happy with it just as much as it once craved chips. I feel that the same applies to getting rid of "love handles", unwanted fat deposits in the abdominal area, etc.

Thoughts on training frequency

Reading through some articles on HST (hypertrophy specific training) website got me thinking about training frequency. That is, how many times per week is it optimal to have resistance training sessions. Of course, "optimal" assumes certain criteria. In other words, optimal in what sense.

So I went on a quest to find out how often is too often and where the golden optimum lies. I ran into a couple of articles on that very topic. The first one suggests that 3 times a week sessions produce more strength and lean mass gains than 1 time a week in trained subjects - with the SAME total volume of exercise! In other words, they claim that if you split the same training volume (# sets X reps X weight) into 3 separate sessions you will get better gains than if you do them all in a single weekly session. It makes sense to me although the key here appears to be the same weekly volume, which I think is extremely important and adds a lot of value to the study.

At the same time there was another article I stumbled onto with a similar setup. The only difference was they used two groups of untrained individuals (both men and women) and had 2 sessions per week vs 3 sessions. The volume (sets * reps * weight) was the same, again. At the end of 6 week training period no distinct differences were observed between the two groups. I.e. the results appeared very similar in terms of strength and lean mass gains. They suggested that it's the total weekly volume that matters - not so much the frequency per week.

Now, of course there were differences in the initial setup - trained vs untrained so that could be a factor as well. Plus no two environments are absolutely identical. However, those results still carry some value and may contain important clues.

Namely, it seems natural to conclude that there indeed is such a thing as optimal frequency given the same total weekly volume under certain criteria (for instance, maximum lean mass gains or strength with minimum sessions per week, etc.) and of course it would vary from person to person.

Let's compare three programs: P1, where weekly volume is done in one session; P2 (where it's split into two sessions) and P3 (when it's split into three smaller sessions - 1/3 volume each). Now if we assume that for a given person P1 turns out to be less efficient than P3 and there's no apparent difference between the results produced by P2 and P3, then we will have to conclude that P2 is the optimal program based on our set criteria simply because it produces higher gains with fewer sessions per week.

So does it mean that 2 sessions a week is a magic number? Well, not necessarily. First, everyone is different. I am sure that among the tested individuals there were fast gainers (those who gained more on P1 than most on P3) and slow gainers (those who had low or no gains regardless of the program). Secondly, it would be nice to see if an even higher frequency (say, 4 or 5 smaller sessions a week) would produce higher or lower gains - again, under the same volume. Also, it would be really interesting to see if higher volume would produce even greater gains and to what degree (clearly there would be a limit to the volume after which overtraining will set in and hinder the progress).

Now the question remains: why is it that 3 smaller sessions a week turn out to be more effective than a single big session in terms of muscle gains and strength even if total volume stays the same? The mechanism is not quite clear to me, however, I could see a couple of possible reasons. First, possibly because of the body's limited ability to recover and supercompensate for damaged fibers after a single higher volume session. Second, possibly because of some muscle loss due to several days of deconditioning, although I doubt that 7 days of relative inactivity is a period long enough to cause any significant loss in lean mass. One other thing, we don't know if nutrition and rest pattern could be a factor. Hypothetically, it is easy to imagine that a higher nutritional and caloric intake might be required for the body to promote optimal post-exercise recovery and ensure growth after a very intense single session compared to a smaller session, especially in the first 24-48 hours, so I wonder if that was taken into consideration or not.

The take-away message... Frequency is great but let's not forget that the most critical part here was, again, the controlled overall volume, which was kept constant for both tested groups! It's just that the post on the HST blog (written by the HST founder Bryan Haycock, who I deeply respect) that quoted the first article made it sound as if working out 3 times a week is better than once a week, period. But it may create a false impression that frequency is the single critical factor without much regard for overall volume, which can be a dangerous conclusion. Yes, the study suggests that working out 3 times proved to be more efficient than 1 single session, but each of those 3 sessions was only 1/3 of the volume of that single session!! I'm sure that's what Brian had in mind but somehow it wasn't made very clear in the post - well, not to me anyway. So if I were to summarize the main idea of the study it would sound something like: Weekly training volume (# of sets X reps X exercises) split into several smaller sessions (2 or 3) proves to be more effective than when done in one single session a week. Now that goes well along with the idea of HST, which makes a lot of sense to me.

The trick is, in my opinion, to find such weekly volume that doesn't lead to overtraining and yet provides enough stimuli to make body grow. Once we found it - then we can tweak the frequency till our heart's content - for instance, split the volume in two, three or even four smaller sessions a week. And then see what works best for you.

P.S. Btw, training volumes in both studies were different. In study 1 (1 vs 3) they used 3 sets to failure for each exercise - either done in one session or split into three. In the second study the weekly volume was 6 sets to fatigue for 9 exercises, split into two or three sessions respectively...

Maximum Muscle, Minimum Fat (cycles)

I have been reading Ori Hofmekler's "Maximum Muscle - Minimum Fat". What can I say - I love this book! It's a little deep into biochemistry and physiological terminology, so I can see how it may scare off some readers. Most important thing for me is that it "rings my truth" meaning that reading this book makes me feel that I'm getting somewhere, that I'm on the right track in my quest. It makes sense to me. To a significant degree.

I've been getting increasingly tired and frustrated from hearing things and rules served as ultimate truths over the last few years. They are usually referred to as "myths", although in truth I wouldn't always call them that. I believe that all they are is partial truths, or opinions/beliefs based on partial truths. The funny part about partial truths is that they can even seemingly contradict to each other and still be valid to a point. Partial point, that is. A few simple examples:

• "To build muscle you should eat plenty of protein, otherwise you body will not grow". It certainly makes sense, since protein is a critical tissue building component, however the key questions to ask are "How much is 'plenty'?", "How much is 'too little'?" and "How much is 'too much'?". I remember seeing studies where much smaller amounts of protein intake than those widely accepted in bodybuilding community (1 g per lb) were found sufficient to sustain muscle and stimulate growth.
• "When you're hungry - your body is already losing muscle". Although it is true that long periods of fasting may indeed lead to some muscle proteins being metabolized for energy, there is sufficient evidence that such breakdown does not happen until after 24-48 hours of fasting.
• "To burn fat you need to do lots of cardio". This has been around for years as well. It too makes certain sense and is based on a well supported claim that low-to-moderate intensity aerobic exercise indeed uses fat as fuel in a higher degree than higher intensity (anaerobic) exercises. That doesn't mean though that, say, resistance training is totally useless for fat burning purposes. There is also evidence that high intensity exercise triggers certain hormonal response that raises metabolic rate for up to 24 hours, which means that the body tends to use more energy in post-exercise period. That's why interval training has become very popular in the recent years.
• "You have to work your body at least 3 times a week, otherwise you start losing muscle". This rule caused me a lot of grief. As obsessed as I was overtraining almost became my constant companion for years. I realize that for an average person three times a week with fairly light weights might be a good enough starting point. But I was never able to maintain heavy workouts three times a week for any extensive periods of time. After a few weeks fatigue would start setting in and I remember cutting my training short simply because I couldn't maintain the intensity I thought I needed to maintain. There is evidence of people working out twice or even once a week (for some HIT supporters, for instance) and still growing muscle and getting amazing results.
• "Free weights are the way to go. Machines are for wussies." vs "Machines allow you to hit your muscles from various angles better than free weights can." Both ar partial truths and/or opinions.

So why was I getting tired of those? Because, like many of us, I, too, had been conditioned to following the rules. There was always some authority figure (parent, teacher, government, supervisor, fitness guru) to tell me what I should and shouldn't be doing - what to eat, how to study, who to marry. And of course how to exercise. I was religiously following advices abundantly given away in many bodybuilding and fitness books. Listening to my own body wasn't really one of them. So I kept ignoring my body's cry for help until I could no longer ignore it. Linear mindset made me keep pushing. "The more - the better", "The harder the better", "No pain - no gain". I thought the reason I wasn't getting results was because I wasn't trying hard enough, so I kept pushing and pushing and pushing. Until one day I finally realized that years of pushing and following different advices didn't really get me any closer to the body of my dreams. Fatigue and frustration seemed to be the only things that I was left with at the end of the day - after 20 years of trying. Time came to face a painful question: WHAT TO DO NOW?

Why can't I get the body I want? By that time I pretty much realized that systems and approaches I had used didn't yield the results I wanted. Not because they didn't work in general. Most of them had some partial truths behind them. But because they didn't work for me. So it was time to start my own quest...

That's some long intro now, isn't it? :-))

Now back to Ori's book. He's a big supporter of what is now known as Intermittent Fasting (IF). I read his "The Warrior Diet" before and it makes a lot of sense to me. The main idea that really appeals to me is that there is cycle to any physiological process in our body. We sleep - we are awake, we feel full - we feel hungry, we feel tired - we feel rested, and so on. Everything fluctuates in our bodies, pretty much like in all of nature. Heart beat, blood pressure, hormonal levels, etc. What if linearity is not inherent to our bodies? Would it make sense that body loses fat and builds muscle in cycles rather than at a steady pace?

What if the fact that many women fail to drop weight despite very restricted daily calories (sometimes down to 800-1000) has something to do with this "linearity issue"? What if body simply adjusts to living off a very "fixed income"? Think about it. Let's say you live in a big house with a wife, two kids, two dogs and two cars. You make $5000 a month between you and your spouse. Then all of a sudden she loses her job. You income drops to, say, $3500 a month. What do you do? Well for the first couple of weeks you may try to maintain the same lifestyle. However, after a while you realize that something has to change. What? Well, first you cut back on some expenditures. Most likely you won't go cutting grocery list - not in the first place anyway. First to go will likely be your son's soccer class, your daughter's dance studio, and your weekly dining at a local steak house. Along follows high-speed internet (you switch to "light"), second phone line and 1000 channels satelite package (you can get away with "basic" plan). Then you switch to lower premiums on your second car and your wife starts using email instead of spending hours on the phone with her girlfriend in Europe. Then your Hawaiian vacation may be put on hold. But even now, you still live in the same house, you don't give up on your kids or your dogs. You don't go renting out your wife either (just joking). You don't cut back on food or health - at least not for awhile and not until it gets worse. Well, you get the picture.

So in comes premise #1. I suspect that something like that happens to our body when put under caloric restriction. It strives to live on reduced "income" while maintaining as much of its functionality as it can.

Premise #2. Non-linearity. The book contains some indication that fat-burning (lipolytic) and muscle-building (anabolic) processes do not occur simultaneously. In fact they seem to be almost antagonistic in nature. For instance, insulin - known as an anabolic precursor - is also known to severely reduce lipolysis (the main fat-burning process). In other words, when insulin level raises (usually after food, especially rich in carbohydrates) it effectively shuts down the fat burning factory. And it makes sense if you think about it. Carbs appear to be the "fastest" fuel for the body to metabolize because they require fewer steps to convert them into energy compared to proteins or lipids. So body prefers them whenever they become available. However (fortunately or unfortunately) body can only store this much glycogen (up to 400 g on average) which doesn't last very long. When the body runs low of glycogene it is forced to switch to two of the other sources: stored fat and proteins. This is apparently where the fat-burning furnace gets to work. I am not 100% sure how exactly body decides which source to use when it runs out of glycogen. There is some evidence that when subjected to low-to-moderate intensity exercise body uses fat acids as a primary source (when glycogen is not available), whereas under a heavy load more protein starts breaking down for energy.

The important part is that in order to make the body switch from glycogen to fat acids as a primary source of energy (which seems to be the main process behind fat loss) it is reasonable to suggest that two conditions must be met:

• Glycogene pool must be depleted (at least to some degree)
• Exercise (if any) has to be kept at low-to-moderate intensity (to minimize muscle breakdown)

So, in theory, if you engage in low-to-moderate intensity exercise when your body is in the fasting or near-fasting state (glycogene depleted) it will be forced to burn fat for fuel as a primary source.

But if that's the case then let's take it to the extreme and ask ourselves: why can't we simply stop eating for a week and go on a treadmill for 3 hours a day and burn 7 lbs of fat in a week - clean and simple?

Here's my take on it. Aforementioned conditions must be met but it's not enough. I suspect that two things prevent it from happening. First, it seems like fat cells in our body are not only used as a convenient energy deposit boxes but also as containers for toxins. When toxins enter our body and when it can't neutralize and dispose of them immediately it will wrap them in fat and put them away. Much like criminals frozen in cryocells in futuristic movies. When a fat cell gets pulled off the shelf and broken down for energy it may also release toxins into the blood stream. Too many of those can overwhelm the immune system and cause mild-to-severe poisoning (symptoms of poisoning occurring after 3-4 days of fasting are very well documented - I actually experienced it myself about 20 years ago) so the body will try to wrap them back in fat in a desperate attempt to keep the system clean. At which time I would assume it would trigger some mechanism that would start breaking down more and more of muscle protein to provide energy.

Secondly, it appears, that there's some kind of regulatory mechanism that is dependent on a level of ketones in the blood...

Therefore, timing-wise it makes sense to separate those two processes - building muscle and cutting fat. So the idea of cycles makes a lot of sense to me. Or I should mini-cycles...

(to be continued)

Thoughts on Frank's MBB

Thoughts evoked by Frank Zane's "Mind In bodybuilding".

I was thinking about the power of synchronicity.

One of the things I have always had in my dream map that I want to be doing do in the next few years of my life is becoming involved in creation of what I called DreamBits: little multimedia projects of inspirational and motivational nature (including visualizations, affirmations, specially created mantras, guided meditations, generic or personalized, etc. in the form of jingles, music, slide shows, recorded narratives, animations, videos or any combination of those).

And seems like I got Frank's new book at just the right time! It has a few thoughts and ideas that I have been pondering over for quite awhile now. And he was talking about it too! I have also noticed several things in his experience that are similar to what I went through in my life or at least they feel this way.

One of the parts I found especially exciting was a fascinating story about the Muse followed by Frank's thoughts about advertising. I immediately found that those resound very closely to my ideas and experience in that area. Although I have always been an IT guy since I graduated from the University in my home town of Irkutsk, Russia - developing software and managing software projects - I happened to work in advertising for about 6 years between 1992 and 1998 - in both print and broadcasting (FM) media - where I was heavily involved in creative process - including writing jingles, music and narratives to commercials, recording (and sometimes singing) them.

My musical background goes back into my teenage when I learned how to strum a few chords on a guitar at the age of 14. Then I played in a band till I was in my mid-twenties, where I was a lead singer and also learned to play some bass. I wrote about 300 songs over the years, most of which were in Russian, naturally enough. Besides songwriting I also did some creative writing as well - poems, stories, etc.

I have been playing with recording software since mid-90's. The radiostation I used to work for at that time was the first one in the entire region that switched from tapes and CD's into recording, storing and playing their commercials directly to/from a studio PC and I happened to be one of the driving forces behind that initiative.

Now as I look back I realize why it was happening to me throughout these years. Advertising, computers, music... It helped me gather all the skills I might find helpful to do what I know I want to be doing in the future. Amazing! I can perfectly picture myself creating and leading a group of talented creative people towards producing exciting inspirational pieces of powerful "inspirational advertisement" charged with positive energy, powerful imagery through power of visualization to motivate and inspire people instead of trying to sell something to them. My own analysis of conventional advertising reveals that typical messages are based on and cater to several major ego traits (usually four): vanity, greed, envy and fear - all ultimately based on fear. So instead of trying to "force" some product on people and seeing them as "buyers" through fear-based messages I choose the idea of treating them as human souls and offering something their soul seeks. Topics of those "DreamBits" can range from physical perfection to romantic relationships, successful career, wealth and health.

Another part I really enjoyed was the section called Bodhibuilding. Many of its concepts and notions are so in sync with what I feel is true to me that it astonished me deeply and evoked a flurry of happy positive thoughts and ideas in my head. Again I couldn't help but feel inspired by this power of synchronicity. It has been my experience that since I first started to think about synchronicity as being more than mere coincidence (which was the way I had been thinking about it for years) I realized that the more you pay attention to it the more it appears in your life. Again, paying attention feels to be the key as I truly believe that energy flow follows the attention. The notion of synchronicity was first introduced to me in Celestine Prophecy (by James Redwood) in summer 2006, however there were some other thoughts and concepts discovered prior to that that led me to perceiving it as my truth. That book was followed by Conversations With God, Power Of Now, and a few more that have been providing me with more and more food for thought as well as incredible charge of positive and creative energy.

I loved the graphic images and drawings in the book as well - beautiful and very pertinent!

One of the main things I loved about Frank's books (I also read Mind, Body and Spirit before) is this: they radiate calmness and peaceful energy. I find him very positive and non-judgmental. Both qualities are very appealing to me. He's one of those rare few authors who choose not to resort to fear-based strategies, so his books are free of agressive sales pitches like "Unless you do what I say and like I say, it's not gonna work and you'll never become what you want to become" or "Mine's the only way". He's sharing his view and experience without promoting it. When I read them I don't feel pushed, I feel inspired. And that to me is the key.

With that I understand that this book may make your typical gym rat puke with disgust and disappointment and make them feel as if they just wasted their money they'd rather spend on another "Get Big Quick" program or pill. There are different levels of consciousness so peace be with them and hopefully one day they will realize that there's more to exercising and being in shape than trying to figure out which machine to use and which food to eat. One day they will learn to look past "technicality" of human experience. Reminded me of "He That Has Ears To Hear, Let Him Hear..." (Matthew 11:15-30)

This story of the Muse also made me think about Frank's role in bodybuildng. When all said and done it's quite possible that being an incredible source of inspiration to millions of people and showing them that a body like that is possible may well be one of his most significant achievements in this lifetime. Maybe even more significant than him being 3-times Mr. Olympia and a renowned author. The science of physical excellence needed a person who is capable to look past the tools, past the "visible", past the diets, sets and reps. That's what he will be remembered for.