How To Look Great With Minimal Effort pluscachange: Pluscachange’s Weightlifting and Diet Routine – By Popular Demand
Let’s start with the easy part, diet. Diet is 60% of the effort to getting to a state of chiseled-ness, so it cannot be neglected. You can exercise like a fiend, but if you eat poorly, you’re going to get nowhere near the gains you could, and you won’t be doing yourself any favors. It just makes everything take twice as long with four times the effort.
So, diet, for muscle gain and fat reduction, is simple.
6 small meals, spaced out at least 2 hours apart, over the course of the day. Healthy foods, including a good portion of protein and complex carbs. If you’re looking to put on muscle, you’ll want about 1g of protein per pound of body weight per day. Thus, if you weigh, say, 180 pounds, you’ll want to strive for 30g of protein per meal. Given that a piece of meat the size of a deck of cards is 20g of protein (assuming lean meat, not a bunch of fats), you have your work cut out for you. My route, since lugging that much cooked flesh around is a bit of a hassle during the week, is to use whey protein powder supplements (Optimal Nutrition is my brand, because it doesn’t have a lot of sugars in it and it does have enzymes added, which really helps digestibility, plus it’s easy to mix). Each scoop, mixed with 8 ounces of water, gives me 23g of protein, so I double scoop it and easily meet or exceed my protein requirements daily.
Complex carbs are things like vegetables. Broccoli is an especially good choice, though the line is open for just about anything (excluding the very few really fatty veges, like avocados).
Adding fiber is also a good thing. A bowl of whole oat oatmeal in the morning usually exceeds, by far, a normal person’s average daily intake of fiber. Fiber One cereal is also good, if you add a fruit to it, it’s even better. Takes getting a taste for though.
Drink lots of water. Straight, plain old water, not the flavored stuff. I do a gallon a day, but not more.
What you should avoid:
Anything made with a white powder. That is, anything made with white flour, sugar (any type), or salt. You should probably avoid cooking with cocaine too, now that I think about it.
Anything that has Corn Syrup/High Fructose Corn Syrup/Fructose added to it in the ingredients. I know I’m posting conjecture here, but can it be a coincidence that America’s obesity epidemic coincides almost along a parallel path to the progression of HFCS being added to everything we eat since the late 1970’s? Something to consider. Another reason to avoid it is that it’s a really potent sugar. Read the labels of what you buy. If it has HFCS or any of it’s brethren, put it back down and move on.
Any food where you cannot tell immediately what ingredients it was made with. Sounds funny, right? Think about it. You know what a steak is made of. Steak. Vegetables – vegetables. But what about that sickly sweet sauce stuff you see in restaurants made with chemicals whose names defy pronunciation?
Pop. Sorry, but lose the pop, even the diet stuff. It’s just empty calories at best, or in the case of non-diet, lots of high fructose corn syrup at worst. Bad bad bad. If you want caffeine, drink coffee or tea (no sugar or additives, of course).
Transfatty stuff. Groan, yep, I just said stop eating fried foods and potato chips and other snack foods. Sorry, but trans-fats just don't digest, and go straight to your fat stores.
And that’s it. Six small, healthy meals, within the parameters listed above. Not six medium or big meals, mind you, but small ones. For example, a meal might consist of a piece of baked chicken breast and a couple of broccoli spears. You get the idea.
All of that, and take a simple, non-additive multivitamin or regular vitamins (A,B complex,C,D and E). Adding omega-3/6/9 fatty acids is also a good idea. You can get these really cheap at a supplement store. I pay $19.00 for what is essentially a 4 month supply of them.
Re: How To Look Great With Minimal Effort pluscachange: CONTINUED
On to weightlifting.
Again, I work on the Thoreau theory of weight lifting. Simplify, simplify, simplify.
The goal is maximum gain in minimum time, with minimum work. Lifting weights should NOT be about lifting to exhaustion, but rather, lifting to muscle failure (which is an entirely different thing). That means, in short, working each exercise with maximum weight, to a maximum of 3 sets with a maximum of 6 repetitions per set, with 1-1.5 minutes rest between sets. I spend no more than 30-40 minutes in the gym, 4 days a week, tops.
You should exercise each major muscle group ONCE per week, tops. Your must allow your muscles time to recover from each exercise period, and science has shown that this takes at least 5-7 days, depending on the individual. I know this sounds contrary to what you probably think is accepted gym routine, but it’s a method used by just about every serious weight lifting contender in the game today.
Determining maximum weight is what you do for the first week as you move to each new muscle group. What you want is a weight you can JUST do three sets of four reps with, for each exercise. Once you determine that weight, you work from there to try and achieve three sets of six. Once you can finally do three sets of six with that weight, you increase the weight for the exercise from 5% to 10%. So if you could do 100 pounds bench press, and finally make it to 3 sets of 6 with 100 pounds, the next week when you sit down you increase the weight on the bar to 105-110 pounds, and try for three sets of six until you make that (it might take a week or two, don’t worry, progress in moving up weight is slow, so you’re not alone).
Ok, so where do you start? Well, ideally you’ll want somebody there your first couple of cycles to help you learn correct form when lifting. Lifting with incorrect form is wasted effort, and could possibly lead to injury as you start stacking on weights later. Lots of really good web sites demonstrate, sometimes in video, correct form. You might want to try good form for each exercise initially with an empty bar, and slowly, insuring that you perform the movement correctly. Then when you put on plates, insure you keep that form.
A typical exercise week for me looks like this:
Day 1 – Shoulder/Abs
Day 2 – Chest/Biceps
Day 3 – Legs/Forearms
Day 4 – Triceps/Back
Three days spaced out with nothing, except bicycling in the morning.
Figure on doing at least 2-3 exercises per major muscle group. Yes, only 2-3 exercises per muscle group. Max weight though, and you’re working towards the fastest gain. Remember, the goal isn’t exhaustion (though you will be exhausted the first couple of weeks doing this, but you’ll adapt and discover that you can walk out of the gym eventually at peak energy and not tired at all). The goal is maximum gains for minimum work utilizing correct form.
So, as an example, for chest, I’d do (only an example)
Bench press – 3 sets of 6
Inclined Bench Press – 3 sets of 6
Chest flies – 3 sets of six (it’s a dumbbell exercise)
Minute of rest between sets, 3 minutes of rest between exercises (switching from Bench press to Inclined bench press for example)
Then I’m done. Figure the same kind of max weight briefness for biceps that day, puts me in and out of the gym in about 25-30 minutes. Do that 4 days a week.
Which means, you don’t spend all of your time in a gym, but you get killer results. My arms are 17.5 moving quickly on 18 inches, chest is 50 inches. When I started doing this, I was at about 12-13 inch arms and a 46 chest.
Re: How To Look Great With Minimal Effort pluscachange: CONTINUED
Now I know what the women are saying: “Yeah, great PCC, but what about us? We don’t want to look like those icky weightlifting women that kind of look like guys instead of girls”. Well, here’s a bit of a secret. Most of them are so hopped up on testosterone SUPPLEMENTS that they end up looking like that. A woman who follows my advice above, will end up looking essentially like a bikini model. Yes, it’s true. Most bikini models/beer commercial women weigh a lot more than you think they do, because they’re pure muscle. I know of several fitness models/bikini models that I’ve met personally who are about 5 foot 6 to five foot 7 and weigh at least 150 pounds, because they follow the routine above. Looking at them, you’d swear they weighed 100-110 pounds though. The thing is, muscle weighs a lot more than fat, and looks fabulous on women (assuming they’re not doing a lot of testosterone supplements, which makes most women look like man-things that most of us associate with women weightlifters). Unlike men, women don’t really bulk up naturally, they tone down a lot, and the muscle they add actually adds to their curves and they really get the flat belly thing going a lot easier than guys.
WARNING: What you don’t want to do is kill yourself with aerobics in an attempt to get healthy.
I know, I know. GASP! Plus, how can you say that?
Easy. Excessive aerobics don’t really benefit you, unless you do them at a specific time, assuming you’re using them as a strategy for losing weight. They are good for your heart, and do increase blood flow, of course. But they should not be done to excess. Anathema, I know, but it’s the truth. If you wish to use aerobics for weight loss or for maximum gains, such as they are, do them immediately in the morning, right after you wake up, prior to eating a single bite of food or taking your first sip of coffee (water is ok though). You will immediately start burning your fat stores, since the carbs you ate the previous day were essentially already digested while you slept. Doing aerobics at any other time of the day, and you’re doing it for hobby only. Again, I know this defies conventional wisdom on health and fitness and what they try to sell you at the foo foo gyms, but it’s practiced in the bodybuilding community as I just outlined.
I'm sure I've opened up a lot of questions, so if you have any, please feel free to post them on this thread. If I don't answer in a bit of time, PM me, as sometimes threads scroll faster than I get to them. :)
Re: How To Look Great With Minimal Effort lemondrop: Wow - thank you. I am sitting here still trying to fully absorb what you wrote so that I really believe it for myself... and it's funny because I have been recently been feeling like I've been spinning my wheels at the gym lately... doing an hour (yes - a whole hour of cardio) followed by about 20 minutes of lifting about 4 times a week for the last few months but my body hasn't really changed that much (I have a little more muscle in the upper body but nothing to go "wow" about)... I've been doing the cardio late at night though and now I think you're opening my eyes to what I should really be focused on - more lifting, less cardio... hmmm... I'm gonna give some of what you suggested a try and see how it works...
*and I need to eat better too - lol*
Thanks again!
Lemondrop
Re: How To Look Great With Minimal Effort pluscachange: [quote author=lemondrop link=topic=14542.msg121655#msg121655 date=1120748406">
Wow - thank you. I am sitting here still trying to fully absorb what you wrote so that I really believe it for myself... and it's funny because I have been recently been feeling like I've been spinning my wheels at the gym lately... doing an hour (yes - a whole hour of cardio) followed by about 20 minutes of lifting about 4 times a week for the last few months but my body hasn't really changed that much (I have a little more muscle in the upper body but nothing to go "wow" about)... I've been doing the cardio late at night though and now I think you're opening my eyes to what I should really be focused on - more lifting, less cardio... hmmm... I'm gonna give some of what you suggested a try and see how it works...
*and I need to eat better too - lol*
Thanks again!
Lemondrop
[/quote">
You're welcome! :)
I'd eliminate that hour of cardio, period. It should not be a part of your trips to the gym. Again, only in the mornings, before you eat or drink anything, for any real effect. What you're doing now, is essentially draining your energy such that by the time you get to the weightlifting, you probably don't have anything really left in you to put in a good workout.
I'd eliminate the cardio, put in a warm up set (empty bar set) for the muscle groups your exercising that day (say, chest do a 3 set of 6 with an empty bar for warm up, and for biceps do curls 3 sets of 6 empty bar), and then move straight into the routine.
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