Every once in awhile, if you consume enough media, you’ll come across a real gem of an article.

Gary Taubes writes about how exercise doesn’t make you thinner - and how that myth came to be:

“The Scientist and the Stairmaster”

Ahh…the sweet taste of vindication. His insight might be old-hat if you’re already familiar with the research, but Mr. Taubes truly puts it all together in a well-written, straightforward manner. A summary of his key points:

• The research supporting the idea that exercising more (i.e., “doing more cardio”) results in greater weight loss simply doesn’t exist. Upping your treadmill time from 30 to 60 minutes won’t change a thing on your waistline - but controlling calorie intake and insulin levels will.

• We believe more exercise will help us lose more weight because of cultural hypnosis and the seminal work of Dr. Jean Mayer, not because the science actually says so.

• Lots of vigorous exercise makes you hungrier, so you eat more (and offset the calories you burned via exercising). Lesser amounts and intensities of exercise don’t burn enough calories to make it worthwhile (sounds familiar).

This article gives a prime example of the bias with which much of our fitness, health, and nutritional information is filtered through, and why it’s dangerous to accept “official guidelines” and “the latest scientific news” at face value. Even researchers who should know better act upon faith instead of science:

Steve Blair, for instance, a University of South Carolina exercise scientist and a co-author of the AHA-ACSM guidelines, says he was “short, fat, and bald” when he started running in his thirties and he is short, fatter, and balder now, at age 68. In the intervening years, he estimates, he has run close to 80,000 miles and gained about 30 pounds.

When I asked Blair whether he thought he might be leaner had he run even more, he had to think about it. “I don’t see how I could have been more active,” he said. “Thirty years ago, I was running 50 miles a week. I had no time to do more. But if I could have gone out over the last couple of decades for two to three hours a day, maybe I would not have gained this weight.” (emphasis mine)

WOW. Not only is Dr. Blair ignoring the findings in the AHA-ACSM report (which he co-authored), he is willing to discount his own personal experience. Now that’s what you can call a real “faith-based initiative.”

(BTW, in case you didn’t know who Dr. Blair is, he is a renowned researcher and “guru” of exercise science. The mere mention of his name elicits oohs and aahs from exercise physiology departments in colleges and universities all across the country. He’s probably best known for the ACLS (Aerobics Center Longitudinal Study), which is probably the largest study aside from Framingham that looks at how lifestyle factors like smoking and exercise affect mortality. Just in case the other 349 studies he published or co-authored caught your eye as well.)

Just goes to show you - you are your own best council. Take what you read with a grain of salt (Celtic Sea Salt, preferably), even the stuff you read on this blog. Don’t stop at the headlines, look deeper. Check the actual research, the actual science, and see what it says. The answers may surprise you.

The moral of the story: Don’t look to exercise as a panacea for your fat loss woes. Without proper nutritional habits, you’ll be getting nowhere fast with regards to fat loss (although exercise will make you feel better, sleep better, live longer, etc.).

Sorry, you can’t outrun a crappy diet.

The question I hear most frequently from guys in the Spike TV demographic (18-34) is:

“I’m lifting weights pretty regularly, but I’m not getting any bigger. Why not?”

First off, it’s interesting to see what most guys do in the weight room (*cough curls chest flyes and bench *cough). Knowing that most people lift with the intensity level of a beached whale just adds insult to injury.

Folks, to gain muscle, three things have to happen:

1. You must perform progressive strength training for the entire body.
2. You must strength train with a sufficient level of effort.
3. You must allow sufficient time for recovery.

(A more in-depth discussion of these three points can be found here.)

Now, onto the meat of our post. You may be surprised to learn that, assuming you’re doing everything correctly in the weight room, your size problem is more accurately an eating problem.

In short, you’re not gaining muscle because you’re not eating enough.

Take a friend of yours out to the middle of a field. Now, turn to said friend, hand him a hammer, and say, “My dear friend, please build me a house.” In all likelihood, your friend will say, “A house? With what?”

Exactly.

How do you expect your body to build muscle without the raw material it needs to build it with? Many guys are worried about “getting too fat”, so they focus on eating in a manner befitting a fat loss program. If your body requires an excess of calories (and a fair amount of protein) to build muscle, and you supply it with barely enough calories to keep “all systems running”, how do you expect to build any appreciable muscle?

That’s right; you can’t. And this is precisely what happens.

So does that mean you should do your best imitation of a Dyson vacuum and indiscriminately suck up every last morsel of food in site? Certainly not. Here’s a more systematic way to go about things that isn’t overly complicated:

• Estimate your daily caloric expenditure by multiplying your bodyweight (in pounds) by 13 (if you’re female, multiply by 11 instead).
• Add roughly 500 to that total. Now, make sure you get that number of calories in every day, no excuses (not sure how much you’re eating in a day? Keep a food journal. In fact, keep one anyway, even if you think you know how much you’re eating. You may be surprised at how wrong you are).
• If you fail to gain muscular weight each week (doesn’t have to be much - it could be as little as a half pound), then eat more - add a couple hundred calories to the mix.

This procedure assumes that you’re working out regularly with weights, and that you’re looking to gain muscular weight, of course.

As is the case with most things in exercise and fitness, the concept is simple, but the execution of that concept is far from easy. However, consistency can do wonders (do you know how Michael Thurmond packed 18 pounds of muscle onto this guy’s frame in only 6 weeks? Weight training and serious eating).

Let’s discuss the three basic “must-haves” for success in a strength training program.

In order for you to experience muscle gain, three conditions need to be fulfilled:

1. You must perform progressive strength training for the entire body.
“Progressive” means that the demands of the training increase over time. Today, you can lift 10 pounds over your head. Next month, you should be able to lift more (perhaps 20 pounds). Next year, your overhead lifting ability should be outstanding.

“Progressive” = Lift more over time

Why work the entire body, if all I want are bigger arms or smaller thighs? By performing whole-body workouts, you get hormonal benefits. Your body releases greater amounts of growth hormone, a key hormone in cell (read: muscle cell) growth, increasing your total muscle mass. Who would’ve thought that you could make your arms grow larger by doing squats?

Additionally, we’re interested in building fully functional, whole body strength, as well as an aesthetically pleasing, well-proportioned physique. Seeing a bodybuilder with a large, muscular upper body and tiny chicken legs is probably the oldest gym cliche in the book.

2. You must strength train with a sufficient level of effort.
Of course, progression can be achieved through false means. If I lift a 3 pound plastic-coated dumbbell today, and lift a 5 pound one tomorrow, well, that’s technically “progression”, but it won’t get me anywhere because it doesn’t involve sufficient effort. In order to stimulate muscle growth, the weight has to be heavy enough to require significant effort. In other words, it has to make you work hard.

How heavy is heavy enough? How much effort is required? No one really knows what the specific percentages are for sure, but a good rule of thumb is it should feel difficult. If, on a 1-10 scale, 1 is easy as pie and 10 is impossible - couldn’t do it if I held a gun to your head and said “Lift.” - your workouts should require an overall effort of about an 8 (”tough, but not impossible”).

3. You must allow sufficient time for recovery.
Exercise is not what causes physical improvements; it is merely the stimulus for those improvements. What gives you a larger biceps or a smaller waistline is your body’s response to the exercise stimulus. By strength training, you force a specific adaptation to occur; in this case, larger, stronger muscles.

It takes time for your body to make these changes. According to studies, muscle repair appears to take place within a 24-72 hour window (with most authorities naming 48 hours as the window for full recovery), but your mileage might vary. If you’re a 16 year old awash in testosterone and sleeping 10 hours a night, you will recover much faster from a workout than a 57 year old father of three who consistently skips breakfast. Leaving 48 hours between weight training workouts, however, is a good rule of thumb.

It helps to sleep, as well. By getting a full night’s rest, you maximize growth hormone release, which, as we’ve seen, is a good thing for building muscle.

There is a fourth aspect - you must eat in a manner that supports muscle growth - but I’m leaving it out of this discussion as the previous three points have applicability to all fitness goals, whether it’s improved performance, a smaller waistline, or 18.5 inch biceps. If you’re interested in getting muscularly larger but it is a goal that continues to elude you, you can finish up your reading with this post.

One small dietary change you can make that will have dramatic impact on your health is to eliminate the Big Four from your diet.

What are the Big Four?

The Big Four are, for most people, the four major dietary sources of insulin surges. They are the foods that, when overconsumed, cause weight gain and negatively impact health.

The jury will also note that the Big Four are all grains and starches.

Some of you may ask, “What if I substitute those foods with their healthier alternatives?” - i.e., sweet potato for russet potato, brown rice for white, etc.

Well, I guess you could do this and nothing else, and it would definitely help you (my friend Nikita switched all his “whites” for “browns” and lost over 10 lbs). However, with very little additional hassle, you could substitute more non-starchy vegetables (such as spinach, Brussels sprouts, or haricots vert) or more protein/fat sources (like meat, walnuts, or fish oil) and reap infinitely greater benefits (such as improved hormonal tone in the form of lower insulin levels, natural hunger suppression, and decreased intake of antinutrient compounds that prevent absorption of key micronutrients).

After all, it’s not like I’m asking you to give up all the foods you love in one fell swoop.

Unless, of course, all those foods are potatoes, rice, pasta, and bread.

What would you look like with 117% larger muscles and 73% more muscle fibers? Well, researchers are one step closer to making those pipe dreams a reality.

Mighty Mice Made Mightier.

(For all you science geeks, like me, here’s the study link. If you can’t be bothered with all that “science stuff”, this picture should make everything perfectly clear.)

When scientists get to the point where sports-based performance can be affected on the genetic level, where do we draw the line between cheating and “doing every last thing possible to insure success?”

In a sport where everyone else is on drugs, is Barry Bonds really a cheat?

Here’s the thing:

You can cheat all you want, but achievement still comes down to one basic formula: sufficient motivation, proper application, and consistency.

Without sufficient motivation, you won’t have the drive to do everything that is required in order to achieve your goals. When the going gets tough; when that piece of cheesecake starts calling your name, when the urge to skip a workout turns into the urge to skip seven of them, when it is oh so tempting to set the weight down for a second to rest your hands for that last rep in the deadlift, it is your motivation (your compelling reason for achieving your goal) that will kick you in the ass and say, “Not this time, friend.”

Without proper application, you’ll merely be spinning your wheels. In simpler terms, if you find a program that works, follow it! If you know you’re supposed to strength train, but your strength training consists of a couple of sets of light curls and a leg extension instead of relatively high-effort squats, presses, and chin-ups, then the principle didn’t fail you; your application was incorrect.

Rome wasn’t built in a day, and you won’t be either. Without consistency, you won’t have enough of a repeated stimulus to cause changes to occur in your body. Just as a master violinist wouldn’t merely practice all of one day before a performance at Carnegie Hall (what a practice session that would be!), you can’t expect to gain 6 inches on your vertical leap or lose 3 inches from your waistline in a single workout. It takes some time for your body to manufacture these changes, and repeated reminders!

There is much disdain for modern day bodybuilders because of the massive amounts of drugs they take. However, they don’t just take the drugs, sit back, and relax while their muscles swell. If they don’t lift the weights, they won’t grow - period.

Even for cheaters, there’s no way around the “magic formula”: If you want something, you need to work to get it!

Keep this in mind when you see all the supplement ads and gizmo infomercials. They may be selling you a “shortcut”, but it’ll take a real vehicle to get you to your fitness goals.

By the way, in my eyes, Hank Aaron’s still the real Home Run King.