Anthony Mychal - The Skinny-Fat Solution - Soldier 3.0 - (1) Training Guide [2014]

SOLDIER 3.0 (1)

X physique Training guide & Philosophy

A piece of The Skinny-Fat Solution

by and © anthony mychal of anthonymychal.com

1 The Skinny-Fat Solution © Anthony Mychal

http://anthonymychal.com/

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TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRO.................................................................................................................5 3.0 PHILOSOPHY.................................................................................................22 MUSCLE AS BODY ARMOR....................................................................................25 ASTRONAUTS, GOKU, AND MUSCLE GROWTH.........................................................38 PHASIC, TONIC, AND THE "X" PHYSIQUE...............................................................53 FUNDAMENTAL HUMAN MOVEMENTS.....................................................................68 BASIC BARBELL AND BODYWEIGHT MOVEMENTS....................................................80 THIS MATTERS, THAT DOESN’T.............................................................................92 GETTING BETTER..............................................................................................103 THE TRAINING SPLIT.........................................................................................116 INSTALL 1.0.....................................................................................................125 INSTALL 2.0.....................................................................................................126 INSTALL DETAILS..............................................................................................127 MAKING PROGRESS..........................................................................................132 FORMS OF PROGRESSION..................................................................................138 BODYWEIGHT PROGRESS..................................................................................147 LOOSE STRENGTH ENDS....................................................................................160 FAT LOSS, INSTALLATION 3.0 AND BEYOND.........................................................164 INSTALL 3.0.....................................................................................................172 INSTALL 4.0.....................................................................................................176 INSTALL 5.0.....................................................................................................180 CONCLUSION...................................................................................................185


ARE YOU READY?

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introduction

This is for the fight against muffin-top. This is to shed the burden of being called “lanky.” This is for everyone that’s grown up with sub-par genetics in a less-than-ideal cultural environment. This is

for the few that are ready to stand up and change their life.

his is a resource about personal rejuvenation through physical rebirth. Every day, people try to change their body. 99% of them think it will come easy, and only muster the motivation to dip one toe in the water. These people

will be quick to judge that nothing works for them, or that they’ve tried everything to no avail. But let’s be honest: these people don’t really want to go through the work. They want to wish to Shenron and have their problem fixed overnight without effort.

T

But then there’s the 1%. This 1% is all in. They have what it takes to change. They’re ready for change. They’re on their way into the water from the highest diving board. This sounds well and good, but the truth is that not all of these 1% make it. Not because of anything they do wrong, either—that’s the sad part. They fail, instead, because of the philosophy they follow.


We are not all created equally in the physical sense.

Some people that want to rejuvenate themselves through physical rebirth are plain old skinny. To them, they just want to add some muscle and feel capable. Others are already muscular but also have some body fat baggage that gets to them. And perhaps lowest on the totem pole are skinny-fat guys—there’s a lack of muscle and a bunch of fat to deal with. It’s the worst of both worlds.

A lot of skinny-fat guys are in the 99%. They want to change, but they aren’t ready for the work.

But then there’s the 1%.

And boy have I felt bad for that 1%.

And I felt bad because I, too, was skinny-fat. It plagued me. I can save my own psychosocial issues for a therapist, but it’s safe to say when a thirteen year old kid is told (by a girl nonetheless) that he has “girl boobs,” it has the potential to change a man.

Skinny-fat syndrome is a physical output (a phenotype—a certain look) formed by a combination of your genetics and environment and culture. Often times, those that are skinny-fat are working with a wonky physiology (basically how the knobs and gears inside of your twist and turn to accomplish bodily processes), which makes fat loss and muscle growth a tough pursuit.


I was in that 1%, but it didn’t matter. I schlepped my way through training programs and strategies to little avail. I had what it took, but what I did wasn’t what I needed because what I’ve come to learn over time is that skinny-fat guys are just different.

Most people at the top of this body composition world are either (a) genetic freaks, or (b) people that were in the 1% but just plain old skinny. And what I came to learn over time is that the whole fat baggage that a skinny-fat guy has changes things.

A true skinny guy needs to do the right kind of training and then often times they also need to eat the house in order to solve their issue and pack on some muscle to their frame. This is totally fine and 100% correct . . . for them.

But for a skinny-fat guy? All aboard the fail train.

As a skinny-fat guy, your fat cells change the game. You aren’t “true” skinny, nor should you act like someone that is. Where most true skinny guys add most of their weight as muscle mass, you have fat cell baggage. Fat cells generally want to consume. So when you eat a bunch of food in the name of muscle building, your fat cells are often the first in line to chomp the nutrients and energy down for storage.


This is a tricky spot to be in. On one hand, you’re fat. You want to lose the fat. On the other hand, you’re skinny. You want to gain muscle. But you can’t gain muscle because your fat cells are being greedy and stealing nutrients that true skinny guys seem to deliver just fine to the muscles. And the list of connections here goes on and on, each of which further pulls down the skinny-fat 1% hopes of change.

But you can change. In most instances, skinny-fat syndrome isn’t 100% genetic. Now, as a skinny-fat guy, you might not have the best genetics (not on par with those at the top of the pyramid, at least), but that doesn’t make change impossible.

Skinny-fat syndrome is what you’d call epigenetic—it’s how your genetics have interacted with your environment. Because your genetics likely aren’t the best for building muscle (as evidence by the skinny frame), most people in the 1% have to nail down the perfect environment to fix skinny-fat syndrome. Your genetics aren’t helping, but the ability to change it all is in your hands.

As long as you follow the right path.

Most people get into this physical space and follow mainstream advice. They get obsessed over calories and it becomes a game of burning calories to the gizzards.

But this isn’t the mindset you should have.


Instead, you should be thinking about change. You should be thinking about what you can do to alter how your insides are functioning. In order to do this, let’s first check out how your insides are likely functioning now.

If you have body fat and are under muscled, your body has made the decision that any excess energy or nutrients should be stored in your fat cells. In other words, your body thinks the fat is an important thing to have around—certainly more important than your muscles at this point. For whatever epigenetic reasons, this is the way the body is thinking. This is the way the body is flinching.

You can play the calorie game here and probably manage to lose weight. But the problem with that is that once you return to “normal” eating and life, then you’re still going to be flinching the same way: saying fat cells are important, muscle isn’t. We don’t want that, because it doesn’t make for any sort of muscle building and it makes for easy fat gain.

Problem is that you probably have a long time of this behavior at your back. It’s long since been learned by the body that this is how it should function. Just like you flinch to protect your head, your body is flinching nutrients and calories a certain way in your body in a way it sees best fit for survival. It’s your job to not necessarily give it less to flinch with, but to rewire the flinch. To change how your insides are functioning in a way specific to skinny-fat syndrome.


That’s why I’ve created what you’re reading now. After being in this space for quite some time, I realized that most skinny-fat dudes are running around like a chicken with their head cut off. They follow x, y, and z program to no avail. Truth is that most short term programs aren’t going to work for you because convincing your insides to function differently takes longer than six weeks.

Although what you’re about to read is a program, it’s a part of a system. This system is based around skinny-fat physiology.

The system as a whole is called SOLDIER, and it’s a triforce. There are three sequential parts designed to reset your body and put you in a mode where your body is more apt to deliver nutrients to your muscles, and less apt to dump them off in ever growing fat cells. If you were a computer, SHEILD is like a system reboot, only during the rebooting process, you’re also upgrading your equipment to run more efficiently when you finally come back online.

Along the way, you’ll build muscle and work towards that athletic “X” physique you’ve always dreamed of and also play to other skinny-fat stubborn spots, like the upper chest. And let’s not forget, you’ll also lose the love handles and moobs that are probably looming overhead.

What makes all of this special is that it’s designed specifically for the skinny-fat sufferer. Each stage builds upon the previous one, and even within each stage—in detailed ways that you’ll see when reading each phase—there are unique


attributes, like focusing on certain movements and exercises to build muscle in places that oppose the common skinny-fat build.

What’s in front of you now is SHEILD 3.0. Both SHEILD 2.0 and 1.0 are more advanced and respect the skinny-fat sequence I use to get in a spot in which it’s easy to build muscle without getting fat. So all of this was created to be sequential, with each level building off of the previous, and it exists in opposition to most one and done programs out there. With that said, here’s a quick overview of SHEILD, and then “the next step.”


SOLDIER 3.0

THE FIRST STAGE OF SKINNY-FAT SYNDROME This is the stage this particular resource is designed for. It’s the inception. The seed.

You’re struggling with fat loss, you’re undermuscled, undertrained, and just under knowledged all around.

The overt goal is fat loss. At this stage (when people think of fat loss) people tend to buzz around on a treadmill and hope for the best. I’m going to explain to you why that’s probably the worst thing you can do.

The covert goal is to begin turning the wheels of a deep physiological shift. Your body is unconsciously doing things a certain way right now. Just like a flinch is hardwired into your body—happening unconsciously—so too is the way you handle nutrients and how your body decides to build itself. SOLDIER 3.0 is the beginning of recreating the “flinching” that has made you skinny-fat.


The goal is to get rid of the body fat and begin building a solid strength foundation. You do this by learning the basic exercises needed to both build muscle and lose fat. You also learn the basics of the metabolic shift and getting your body in a mode that will make it want to use body fat as fuel—this is primarily the job of nutrition.

The strength and experience you gain here will be invaluable in the later stages. The ultimate goal is something I call “the solid base,” which represents—in my opinion—the ideal level at which you can pull back the fat loss reigns and really begin to build muscle. Don’t be fooled by that last sentence.

You’ll often gain muscle while you lose fat if you tackle this stage correctly, even though it errs on the side of fat loss. No guarantees, but it’s not uncommon to gain muscle while simultaneously losing fat when the body is completely new to this world. This is because we focus on physiology, not calories or numbers.

Don’t worry about turning into a skinned rabbit. With the way training is oriented, you won’t wither away into nothingness. You’re going to tell your body that it needs muscle, just like you’re going to tell it that it needs to get rid of its body fat.

The reason fat loss takes the priority cake, and why the solid base is the overt goal, is because the solid base represents ideal physiological functioning for putting on muscle without getting fat. Often times, when skinny-fat guys try to


gain muscle without getting to their solid base first, they simply put on fat and not much muscle.

This concept of nutrients shuttling to specific places—either fat or muscle—is known as partitioning. Those with good partitioning shuttle more excess nutrients to muscles. Those with bad partitioning shuttle more excess nutrients to body fat.

When you begin a strength foundation on your way to the solid base, and then get to the solid base, you’re sitting pretty. You will have gained some muscle and some strength, both of which will help you gain even more muscle and strength when you shift focus.


SOLDIER 2.0

THE SECOND STAGE OF SKINNY-FAT SYNDROME Not everyone hits the second stage snag of stubborn body fat. But those that do will need some guided wisdom so they don’t fall off track. This is a very sensitive stage that has to be approached with care.

The second stage is the stubborn fat stage. During SOLDIER 3.0, things usually go smoothly . . . until they don’t. The thing about the stubborn fat phase is that you often have to go through the first phase to determine whether or not you’re truly here. If you can’t do three chin-ups, you don’t have stubborn fat. You just have weakness.

Stubborn fat thrives on weakness. Often times, strength training will make magic happen. But sometimes, even those that go through the first phase hit a point in which their body stops responding to the initial training and nutrition plan just a few % points of body fat before the solid base.


When this point hits, it usually brings insanity. What used to work now doesn’t. Where do you turn? Most people get the idea that they need to eat less. This is often the worst thing you can do.

Stubborn body fat is biologically different than regular fat. You have to treat it as a different beast, and that’s what this stage is all about. But you also have to be careful once you beat stubborn body fat. If you go muscle building crazy at this point, you’re simply just going to get fat again.

This brings us to the final stage.


SOLDIER 1.0

THE THIRD STAGE OF SKINNY-FAT SYNDROME

The third stage is recreating your physiological set point. What’s this set point business? Fat cells aren’t dumb. When you empty them, they’re hungry. If you lose a bunch of fat and go immediate bulk mode, you’re just going to get fat again. In order to lull the fat cells away, you have to recreate your body’s set point for body fat. In other words, empty the fat cells, and don’t give them reason to fill back up for a while. Once you do that, you’re better off for gaining muscle without fat.

So after the stubborn fat phase, you should spend some time evening out things. Find a calorie intake that keeps you stable—neither losing or gaining. Settle into a more basic training program with nothing but strength training. The fat is gone, so any “extra” training is just going to create noise.



SOLDIER 0.0

THE freedom

Choosing what to do after you recreate yourself.

After SOLDIER has finished, you’ll be more uscular and leaner than ever. You probably

ps

or fat.

, I have my own program and philosophy that I’ve found to make this happen. After this, SOLDIER is finished. Your body is fundamentally different, and

mwill feel like you’ve beaten skinny-fat syndrome, and, for all intents and purposes, you will have. The only thing that keeturning the wheels in that direction is simply continuing to live in a way that doesn’t encourage fat cells refilling. In line with this, however, I think it’s best fany skinny-fat guy to have their sights set on building muscle without getting It’s the best way to handle the fat cell mania most skinny-fat guys have.

For this

you’re in the market for true clean bulking. The strategy I use to make this happen is what I call The Chaos Bulk.

http://thechaosbulk.com/


Why I’m behind this 100% This is about a physical Journey for those that are stuck with a certain kind of body, written by someone that struggled with that same body for most of his life.

entire SOLDIER system, is the blueprint I used to m not an award winning researcher wearing

d is

. .

Although this book, and the break free, it should be known that I’a white lab coat. I’m just a guy that happened to be skinny-fat, broke free, annow passionately curious enough to write a book about skinny-fat syndrome in hopes of helping others with their own Journey.

Most of what I know and what you’ll read comes from my experience. So this is what worked for me, and my theories as to why certain things tend to work certain ways for guys with the same body type.

It may seem bleak out there—like no one understands you. But don’t worry. I doI’ve also assembled a fellowship of others that have been doing good work, tooWe all exist inside of the Phenophalanx, and you can get in there if you purchased the Hyper Pack. There’s more tips, regularly scheduled Google+ hangouts, places

This is important because you’re dealing with fat cell baggage. Baggage that doesn’t really go away. Baggage that, if not controlled, will get out of control.

to ask questions, different learning courses (both new and ones that supplement what you’re reading) and even a small forum to share your own training and troubles.

The bottom line is that skinny-fat philosophy simply doesn’t exist out there. Most everything is written by people that don’t understand what you’re going through.


It’s important you make the change now. And perhaps let me end on this note: this isn’t a walk in the park. As a skinny-fat guy, you aren’t going to get help fromyour genetics. It’s going to come down to you and the work. Do the work. It’s your job to change the environment in a way that’s going to be positive for you

.

f

A secondary nexus, for which the Lakedaemonians have twelve more exercises, is the

s,

Fear spawns in the body, phobologic science teaches, and must be combated there. For ,

ess,

Under the oaks, in the still half-light before dawn, Dienekes practiced alone with

Perhaps this is best served with a little passage from Steven Pressfield’s Gates oFire, where Spartan’s really did rewire the flinch.

Phobologic discipline is comprised of twenty-eight exercises, each focusing upon a separate nexus of the nervous system. The five primaries are the knees and hams, lungs and heart, loins and bowels, the lower back, and the girdle of the shoulders, particularly the trapezius muscles, which yoke the shoulder to the neck.

face, specifically the muscles of the jaw, the neck and the four ocular constrictors around the eye sockets. These nexuses are termed by the Spartans phobosynakterefear accumulators.

once flesh is seized, a phobokyklos, or loop of fear, may commence, feeding upon itselfmounting into a “runaway” of terror. Put the body in a state of aphobia, fearlessnthe Spartans believe, and the mind will follow.

Alexandros. He would tap the boy with an olive bought, very lightly, on the side of the face. Involuntarily the muscles of the trapezius would contract. “Feel the fear? There.


FDrop the shoulder.” He popped the boy’s cheek again. “Let the fear bleed out. Feel

Man and boy worked for hours on the “owl muscles,” the ophtalmomyes surrounding the eyes. These, Dienekes instructed Alexandros, were in many ways the most powerful of all, for God in His wisdom make mortals’ keenest defensive reflex that which protects vision. “Watch my face when the muscles constrict,” Dienekes

eel it?” The older man’s voice crooned soothingly, like a trainer gentling a colt. “Now. it?”

“Now. What does this expression indicate?”

“Aphobia. Fearlessness.”

demonstrated. “What expression is this?”

“Phobos. Fear.”

Dienekes, schooled in the discipline, commanded his facial muscles to relent.

Re ing to be tough, but imagine what it’s going ll said and done. Let that sink in for a second.

Got it? Feel it? Good.

member, it’s in your hands now. It’s go to feel like when it’s a

Now it’s time to let the fear bleed out.


1 3.0 Philosoph

Your body is flinching. You dobody is flinching a certain

be

ou’re flinching right now. Everything you do trips a cascade of responses underneath of your skin. These responses? They’re, to some extent, ardwired. Not necessarily genetically, but epigenetically—you’ve molded

impact. Think about how fast an airbag deploys. Now think about how fast your

Y

y n’t have much muscle because your way. You have fat in certain places

cause your body is flinching a certain way. Your body right now is a product of these hardwired flinches.

hthem a certain way based upon everything you’ve done in your life.

Did you know that, in car crashes, the most damaged part of the body is usually the hands? That’s because the hands reach up and protect the face from the

hands have to flinch to beat the airbag. That flinch is hardwired. You don’t think about it.


It’s your job to rewire yourself.

Yo dy ng for retirement. e r someone preparing

for retirement, extra money goes into savings. Big savings makes the body feel

come

stment of muscle by needing muscle.

in muscle. , not an asset.

ur bo is a curmudgeon of an investment banker prepariIncoming nergy (nutrients, calories) is incoming money. Fo

safe, because it won’t go broke during an emergency. It wants the extra stuff around. It’s wired to keep the extra stuff around. It flinches in that direction.

Yet, everything you want to do is in the opposite direction. You’re spending money on building energy-grubbing muscle. Muscle requires more energy, so your expenses jump. And you’re losing fat, which is like unloading your savings bank into the pockets of the homeless. You have to convince the body to becuckoo enough to do this.

There are two ways to do this:

i. Justify the inveii. Make a big retirement fund a risk, not a benefit.

r, for our purposes: O

• Do the kind of training that justifies investing• Do the kind of training that makes body fat a liability


An dnutrition.

not true either. There’s also soul.

d on’t forget that training is only one piece to the puzzle. There’s also

That’s where most people stop. Training and nutrition as the one-two punch. But that’s

Eat right. Train right. Live right.

Th are they change the flinch. They change the way your body functions. They change you, as a person.

ese all things that effect signaling inside of your body—

Changing yourself is changing signals. You have to communicate things to your body, and in order to do that, you have to learn about the kind of questions the body asks.

Understanding this is the master key that unlocks every door from now until the end of time.


2 Muscle as Body Armo

Andy S

- The 40 Year Old Virgin

hat is muscle? You can get all biochemical here if you want to, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the stuff itself. What does

do? Why is it there?

end electrical love-notes throughout the nervous eurotransmitters, and do a bunch of other things (that were

e erwise your heart

wouldn’t be beating right now.

W

r

titzer: Is it 'true that if you don t *use* it, you *lose* it?

it

For the most part, skeletal muscle moves the skeleton.* Go figure. It hangs around, waiting for the brain to ssystem, release nonce crammed into my cranium for a final exam only to fade into oblivion themoment I walked out of the classroom) to tell it what to do.

*There are other types of muscle, like cardiac muscle and smooth muscle, that go likgangbusters without conscious command. That’s a good thing, oth


Save for the occasional flinch, reflex, or spasm, most of our skeletal muscle is under conscious command. So muscle makes movement, and most times it is voluntary movement. This doesn’t quite explain why some people have considerably more muscle than others though, which brings us back to the

utation, muscle is a body armor of sorts.* Not necessarily a drab iron drape-over kind of body armor, but rather a more active-

or. Having bigger muscles makes for more tension ven to a thickness of one millimeter and ten

original question: what is the stuff?

How to Grow Body Armor Aside from the occasional genetic m

protective kind of body armpotential. Compare ten ropes woropes woven to a thickness of one foot.† Same number of ropes, but each rope is stronger.

*A semi-common genetic mutation affects the protein myostatin, which then codes fan uncapped muscle growth of sorts. A Google Image search of “myostatin” helps.

or

†When a muscle gets bigger, the existing fibers get bigger. This is called hypertrophy. Hyperplasia, which also deals with muscle growth (and which also sounds a lot like hypertrophy), involves the formation of brand new muscle fibers. Muscle growth in humans is of the hypertrophy sort.

This is why people often hit the gym to lift weights: it's a viable strategy to signal for the need of more muscle mass. Sadly, they almost always miss the point and get caught up in fancy techniques and catching a "pump" (can you say 21’s?).

(21’s are a favorite bicep-blaster among (mostly) the uninformed. You do seven reps of the bottom-half of the curling range of motion, seven reps of the top-half of the curling range of motion, and then finish it off with seven full-range of motion curls.)

Sad to say, you can catch a pump forever, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to build muscle. In fact, most methods that focus solely on the pump usually fail to build an appreciable amount of muscle. To this, you might be wondering why? Doesn’t high repetition training make you jacked? Can’t you feel the pump? The sweet, sweet pump?

Muscle growth is not necessarily about the pump Muscle is active body armor. It’s built to produce more tension and more forceful muscle contractions. The best way to encourage muscle growth is to continually signal the body that it’s going to need more forceful muscle contractions.

Things like 21’s seem to build muscle because they flush lots of fluid to the working area. This makes your muscles look fuller and bigger.

The pump is when blood and

other fluid gushes into the

muscle giving it a “tight” feeling.

Arnold once compared the

pump feeling to ejaculating. He

must have really enjoyed going to

the gym every day.


If you use a lot of pumping techniques, you probably wonder why your apparently-huge muscles wither away ten minutes after training. And then you wonder why your apparently-not-as-huge muscles wither away even further after you don’t train for a few days.

Once again, we return to the concept of need. Higher repetition training is less about creating more muscle tension, and more about being able to shuttle fluid to the working muscles. We can get into the metabolic reason as to why, but that’s not necessary. Most of the time, with pump style training, you’re mentally hung up about the burn before being physically unable to complete a repetition.

Since the body adapts based on need, the cells become better at holding and dealing with the fluid rush. This is known as sarcoplasmic hypertrophy. In other words, when you challenge your body’s ability to hold and flush fluid into the muscle, it gets better at doing just that. The body doesn’t interpret it as a force or tension threat, but rather an endurance (for lack of a better word) threat. Part of endurance is being more metabolically active, and being metabolically active is about flushing fluid and blood to the area.

With muscle growth, we need to challenge the muscle fibers to contract more. That’s the only reason they’re going to grow. This is done by training in a way that’s going to stress the fast-twitch fibers (more on this soon). Myofibrillar hypertrophy is the actual increase in size of the muscle fibers, and it trumps sarcoplasmic hypertrophy for long-term muscle building effect.


Fluid increases feel nice in the short-term, but they don’t really mean that you build instant muscle. Growing muscle fibers is a long-term process that requires constantly challenging the muscle’s ability to produce tension. So when your muscles wither away after days without catching a pump, it’s because you aren’t losing muscle, you’re losing fluid. It’s not muscle because you aren’t training in a way that’s actually stimulating muscle-building.

Challenging tension and NOT building muscle Taking a step back, building muscle is about needing to create more tension. It’s about contracting the muscles harder and more forcefully. The body has many solutions for this problem, and muscle isn’t the only out.

Another way the body can produce more tension to move the skeleton is neural adaptation.* Remember, muscle awaits directions from the nervous system. If the nervous system fires more efficiently or synchronizes existing muscle fibers a bit better, that turns into more tension output on the other end.

And if you haven’t learned enough from emergence yet, there’s also more at play here. Whether or not adaptations err to the muscular or neural (or even metabolic) side primarily depends on two factors:

• Type of stimulation and stress • Supply


Types of Muscle Fibers We have three types of muscle fibers.

Type I – these are slow-twitch, endurance fibers

Type IIA – these are fast-twitch intermediate fibers that kind of swing both ways, but are more on the fast side of things

Type IIB – these are fast-twitch fibers that are used for explosive and fast contractions and are better than Type IIB at this job, so consider them faster

The ones that grow most in the name of muscle are the fast-twitch fibers, and the overriding theme of this resource is that the body preferentially takes care of what it needs most.

Doing 100 push-ups might seem cool and all, but you aren’t going to be packing on the meat during that quest. Endurance training stimulates slow-twitch fibers


most, which then take the brunt of the adaptation. Since slow-twitch fibers don’t grow much, endurance training shouldn’t be expected to build much muscle.

On the other end, in general, lower repetition or explosive training (something like a vertical jump) taxes the nervous system more. Although explosive training stimulates the fast-twitch muscle fibers, the nervous system bears most of the load. Moving into barbell exercises, something like a one-repetition max still lands more on the neurological side of adaptation, even though overcoming a huge load seems like it would mobilize the body for muscular change.

You have two ends of a spectrum. On the endurance end, the body adapts to make the muscle it already has more resistant to fatigue. On the explosive and really heavy end, the body adapts to make the muscle it already has contract more efficiently. (It’s as if the contraction needed is so powerful that the body recognizes that it’s now or never—use what you got or else.)

Somewhere in the middle is where the neural is big enough to produce lots of tension in the muscle, the metabolic is big enough to help with blood flow and nutrient delivery, and both are too small to steal the adaptational thunder—this somewhere is where muscle building magic resides.


The best number of repetitions for muscle growth The accepted shifting point from more-neural to more-muscular is around three repetitions. On the other end, the shift from more muscular to more endurance is around fifteen repetitions.

This gives us three distinct zones of need-based adaptation.

i. Heavy, explosive short-term training = more neural adaptations ii. Lighter, sustained long-term training = more slow-twitch adaptations iii. Moderate stress, moderate duration training = muscle building magic

I’d be lying if I said there was one number that ruled them all. Some people get big using three repetitions, others get big using twelve repetitions. Part of this has to deal with your specific muscle fiber makeup, as everyone is different. Someone chock full of fast-twitch fibers is likely to respond much better to fast-twitch training.

The best compromise, in my opinion, is the 5-10 range. Perhaps the most famous rep number seen in well-regarded programs (and the number we're using) is five repetitions. In The Strongest Shall Survive, Bill Starr mentions studies showing that 4-6 sets of 4-6 reps seemed to be ideal for strength. Five, being the middle man, then became the go-to. Doug Hepburn—known as “the world's strongest man” in his day—enjoyed using five repetitions way back in the first half of the twentieth century.


Sticking around five or six is useful because this range is heavy enough to stimulate for the creation of muscle, and yet it doesn’t go on long enough to be hindered by metabolic fatigue. It takes a lot longer to feel fresh after a draining pump-inducing set. Why deplete yourself with that kind of training if it’s not all that conducive to the goal at hand?

HYPERTROPHY hang up and being a lemming Don’t freak out about the type of hypertrophy you’re getting. For most people, both types of hypertrophy come in tandem. You’re probably going to increase size as you increase fluid retention. This is fine, but most meaningful growth is going to come from the muscle fibers, and you can’t forget that they’re going to grow from a consistent tension challenge.

Also, don’t be a lemming. Think emergence. There’s more than one factor in the muscle building process. Lower rep, higher weight training tends to use less volume overall. You might assume that 3x8 is better for muscle building than 8x3, but you’d probably be wrong.

We traditionally think of volume as doing high repetitions (ie: 5 x 10 is more volume than 5 x 5), but volume is determined by sets, reps, and weight. 5 x 10 x 30 pounds (1500) isn’t more volume than 5 x 5 x 200 pounds (5000).

Throughout this resource, it

always goes “sets x reps”


Note: if you’re reading two numbers with an "x" in the middle (__x__) it generally refers to SETS x REPS. I say “generally” because it might be different (although not usually) depending on if you’re reading information from elsewhere. When there’s three numbers with an "X" in there twice (__x__x__), it means SETS x REPS x WEIGHT.

Keep in mind that higher repetition work is useful at times. Flushing fluid through muscles increases nutrient delivery and waste removal. And improving the nervous system can then improve muscle building by being able to contract the muscle more, or handling more weight.

I know you want absolute rules here, but there just aren’t many. You can use sets of ten reps or even twelve or even fifteen and find a way to build muscle, as long as you strive to increase overall tension over time. As mentioned before, however, I’d rather not have you deal with the combination muscle-metabolic fatigue right now. That’s why we stick to a lower range. To safeguard from the extremes, our training lands somewhere in the 5-10 repetition range. I generally go with 5-8, partly to get away from the dreaded 3x10 that seems to so common in fitness lore.

And this 5-10 zone is about tough repetitions. If you can do 100 push-ups, stopping at 8 doesn’t mean you’ve done a good job and you’ve fallen in the secret muscle-building zone.

The meat-and-taters muscle-

building zone for most is

somewhere around 5-10 repetitions.


You should be working hard within that 5-10 zone. Keep in mind, however, that this won’t apply at the beginning of your journey. Starting light is an important first step.

Supply and muscle vs. neural For the most part, improvements in muscle strength and tension (being able to overcome a load) go down both neurally and muscularly simultaneously. The most common reason it skews neurally—even when you’re training in a solid repetition range—is a matter of supply.

For some wild animals, muscle is plumage. It’s a signal to the opposite sex that you’re well fed enough to have a bunch of extra energy around to upkeep metabolically costly muscle.

“Hey look at me, I’m a healthy specimen with big muscles. Don’t you want my genes?”

When you aren’t well fed, your body isn’t really fond of keeping muscle around. Muscle is metabolically expensive. This is known by now. But because of this, what happens when you put yourself in situations that demand stronger muscle contractions, yet deny it of the energy it needs to create and upkeep metabolically expensive muscle tissue?


You get mostly neurological adaptations. The nervous system levels up its abilities as best as possible to better contract the muscle you already have instead of packing on extra muscle that you can't supply. Change is an investment; investments must be justified. When you don’t have a lot of savings in the bank, you aren’t going to make it rain to get attention.

When you give yourself enough energy and nutrients during the change process, the body is much more likely to add muscle. This is why bodybuilders often go on "bulks" where they eat tons of food. (Keep in mind, most of their performance enhancing substances mitigate total fat-gain during this process. For most of us, we need to be a bit more cautious with supplying nutrients and energy for muscle gain. This philosophy is built into the skinny-fat system.)

You might be worried after reading this, as our sights are set primarily on fat loss and building a solid base. Although you won’t exactly be optimizing muscle gain, beginners will almost always build some muscle. The muscular-neural tail-off is more pronounced as you gain experience. There are two benefits of going the route within this skinny-fat system:

A. Improvements in the neurological system will make muscle building easier when you do have the freedom to increase your food intake in the name of (sick) gains (brah). You’ll be able to contract your muscles harder and stress your body more, which means good things for muscle growth.


B. Anabolism (muscle building) is stimulated by periods of catabolism (fat loss). By leaning down, the body will be primed for some quality growth. Combine this with the above point, and you’ll be sitting pretty.

chapter 2 summary Muscle is active body armor and must be challenged in the right way in order to grow. You have three different types of muscle fibers, but the fast-twitch fibers are the ones that grow the most. For the most part, you want to stick within the 5-10 repetition range if you’re in it for muscle.


3 ASTRONAUTS, GOKU, AND

MUSCLE GROWTH “... all good things beyond sleep come precisely because we defy

gravity while we live.”

B - Dan Simmons, A Winter Haunting

uilding muscle is more than muscle stress. It might sound counterintuitive at this point, but you’ll soon learn why. And with this, you’ll learn why the gamut of contraptions and machines guaranteed to "blast" and "confuse"

muscles to get you "ripped" will do nothing but take you further away from what’s truly effective—even if you’re training in the right muscle building repetition range.

The first question you should be asking yourself is, “Why do all of these contraptions fizzle out over time if they’re so great?” The second question, which


realistically answers the first, “If building muscle is about more than stress, what’s really going to build muscle?” Well, glad you asked.

The secret to muscle growth, everywhere but the muscle? Julius Wolff was a surgeon that created a now-popular law (unsurprisingly known as Wolff’s Law) that states bone remodels under the presence of external stress. (Goku knew this, which is why he trained under extreme supragravitational resistance on his way to Namek, by the way.)

Jokes aside (was it a joke?), gravitational forces exemplify Wolff’s Law. Astronauts do special exercises in space to prevent their bones from becoming brittle and their muscles from withering into nothingness. With no gravity, why would the body waste energy on tissues it doesn’t need?

You don’t use it? You do lose it.

The body doesn’t adapt on a whim, it adapts on need. Don’t need it? You won’t have it. Want it? Then need it. Need is a tough word to use, but tough is good. The fastest way to get the body to mobilize is to threaten its survival. This is why a fly buzzing around your face gets a hand wave, and why a bear chasing you in the woods leaves a brownish-yellow stain in your pants, increases your heart rate and makes your muscles ready for action.

The master key for signaling

“If you don’t do ‘x,’ then

something bad will happen,

perhaps even death.”


"Putting your life on the line," so to speak, is the best way to justify an investment. Signal that to the body, and things get done. The body will listen if a lack of muscle carries a death risk.

Now, with the idea of death and danger getting thrown around, don’t soil yourself in terror. I don’t mean danger in the injurious sense, nor do I mean actually coming close to dying. These are just thrown out to convey that whatever you do needs to say “This is an intense stress.” This will be clearer as this chapter moves along.

Focusing solely on the muscle side of things isn’t enough. Even though it seems at first glance that muscle stress would be the only factor in getting a muscle to grow, there’s more that goes into signaling to the body that muscle needs building than simple contractions.

Why training like Goku is the fastest path to muscle Bones are no joke. They’re stronger than steel. Every second of every day, your body invests a considerable amount of energy in keeping them strong. Why have strong bones and invest a bunch of your resources into them when gravity isn’t tacking you to the floor? The energy used to maintain strong bones—especially if you don’t need strong bones, which is the case in the absence of gravity—can certainly be used elsewhere. And that’s exactly what happens.


Wolff’s law teaches two things:

• The power of gravity-like resistance. • Muscle growth isn’t solely about muscle.

If a lack of gravity causes bone-density loss and muscle wasting, what do you think reverses those trends?

Wolff’s law and the astronauts showcase the power of gravity. Gravity is a downward force imposed on the entire body every second of your life. You, no doubt, take this for granted (imagine the fecal waste no-gravity alternative). Every time you stand up from the toilet, you’re working against an external resistance you can’t see. It’s essentially an invisible barbell.

Without gravity (external resistance), the entire skeletal system weakens. The only reason you have semi-strong bones and muscles is because of gravity!

Zero-gravity hints at how the body interprets a lack of external loading, which then hints at how the body interprets an excess of external loading. Imagine Earth's gravity was fifty times as strong. Would you be able to squat up from the toilet with the same muscle and bone strength you have now?


The best types of muscle building exercises The best way to grow muscles and build strength is to use systemic loading similar to gravity—situations that mimic supragravity during regular-old natural movement. Since we don’t have supragravity chambers (waiting for Capsule Corp. to become a reality) we have to replicate the systemic external resistance using other means.

In other words, we have to load the body as holistically as possible in a rather free state of movement. Machines, as you’ll see, don’t do this very well. (Unless you’re on sauce, and machines tend to do well for those people.*)

*Sauce = anabolic steroids or other performance enhancing drugs.

That’s not to say machines can’t be used as a sort of icing on the cake. But, by their lonesome, they usually don’t get the job done. What trumps them:

• Free weight exercises with the barbell, dumbbells, and other like equipment • Body weight exercises

The beauty of bodyweight exercises, and why they’re a great addition to free weight exercises, is because they require relative body strength.

Doing a chin-up is all about moving your entire body mass with just your arms. Gravity is literally trying to pull your arms from their socket. You can’t be good at chin-ups if you have a lot of “dead” weight on your body (fat). Think about it.


Doing chin-ups with fifty pounds of body fat hanging from your waist is like doing it with a fifty pound plate attached to your waist. Even if you don’t get any stronger, losing the body fat makes the exercise easier.

Getting good at bodyweight exercises is a sign that more of what you have is useful mass. They are also a powerful signaler in the fat loss department, surprisingly enough.

Bodyweight exercises burn more fat This is just a theory of mine, but doing a bunch of bodyweight exercises (or things that have you leaping throughout space like sprinting and jumping) makes that retirement fund a risk. Doing a bunch of chin-ups (or something else that’s about moving the body through space with some muscular tension) is a signal to the body for fat loss. It says you can’t be overly fat, and that you need to be leaner in order to get better (survive).

Make a big retirement fund a risk, not a benefit.

Bottom line: if your bodyweight numbers are improving, you’re doing good things. Because of this, we incorporate bodyweight exercises any way we can, and as often as we can.


Why machine training fails, why the Bible backs barbells The idea of using machines to train is actually a relatively new thing. The ThighMaster. Zillions of abdominal contraptions. "Cardio" machines. All come and gone within ten years time. The Shake Weight shares the same fate, I can assure you. Yet barbells, dumbbells, and body weight training have been around since the days of Eugen Sandow in the early 1900’s.

The 1900’s!

There’s a particularly interesting heuristic (rule of thumb based on empirical evidence) in the writing world: the longer a book has been on the shelves of a bookstore, the longer it will be on the shelves of a book store. In other words, The Holy Bible isn’t going anywhere.

Fancy new fandangled machines are invented often. But lifting heavy objects and controlling your body weight through space outlive practically every training modality in existence.

The machines that have had the longest shelf life are the typical circuit of machines that infiltrate most mainstream fitness facilities. These things boomed because they required little in the way of teaching. You could tell people to go in, sit down, and read the directions. Lots of people in and out, more dollars in the pocket, less dollars to qualified coaches. While these machines are more viable than the "As Seen on TV" stuff, they have drawbacks.

The longer a training method

has been around, the longer the

training method will be around.


First, most machines have a place for you to sit, which means your skeletal system doesn’t really get stressed. The levers of the machines themselves aren’t really affected by the reality of gravity (most movement is done horizontally as opposed to vertically, which means the plane of resistance isn’t in the same downward direction of gravity), which further unloads bone.

In other words, you’re working against resistance, but often times that resistance only affects the muscle. The bone doesn’t encounter the same loading as it does during gravitational situations.

Second, they don’t deliver the "free movement" aspect of training. When you’re on a machine, you don’t balance or stabilize anything. The machine does that for you by guiding the movement. Imagine if you walked around in a machine that balanced for you. What do you think that would do to your muscles? Balancing and teetering are what activates so many muscles in your body. If you don’t believe me, stand on one foot with your eyes closed and see how your entire body fires to maintain equilibrium.

Third, compare "danger." Compare a bench press and a machine chest press. Which is more "threatening?" Which one requires more mental effort? Which one is going to freak the body out to the point of justifying the investment of change? Which one is going to say, "Pssst, you know this can kill you, right?" Which is going to create strong bones, which will then encourage stronger muscles? Which is going to stress the entire system in a way that would mimic supragravitational conditions?


In the bench press, the bar is held over the throat. Controlling your muscles prevents it from teetering back and forth as you lower it to the chest and then back up to lockout. The body doesn’t want to get crushed under a heavy, unstable object, so it’s going to "do something" to prevent itself from getting killed. That something is building more muscle and improving the nervous system.

The load has to be dangerous enough to alert the body. Light weights are kind of like flies buzzing around your face. You swipe your hand at them a few times and then they go away. No big deal. But a wasp scares most people enough to make them get up and move. Bigger stress, bigger response.

Bench enough times and the muscles of the chest and arms get stronger, which is the body’s way of getting better in an effort to survive. Compare this to sitting on a pec dec machine where there’s literally no danger. Your muscles don’t stabilize a weight being forced down by gravity. It’s just not the same.

The comprehensive systemic effect of working against gravity isn’t realized with machine training. You may be able to stress the muscles, but the muscles are only one factor in the grand scheme of muscle growth.


The real secret(s) behind rapid muscle growth Machines can theoretically stress the muscle, but what’s the totality of stress on the system? What’s the whole? Muscle stress, without much systemic stress, won’t be all that powerful of an adaptation provoker. There’s not enough threat—the investment isn’t justified.

There’s more here. Much more. The nervous system, endocrine system, immune system, and just about every other system has some part to play in the process of muscle growth. World famous sport coach Buddy Morris even said that training is more stressful than breaking a bone!

And I know we’ve been talking a lot about bones here and loading bones, and the reason is because the body is smart enough to not grow a muscle stronger than the bone that it’s attached to. How cool would it be to rip your muscles off your bones in a feat of superhuman strength?

As David Epstein writes in The Sports Gene:

Holway measured the forearms of a group of tennis players ranked in the top twenty in the world and found that their racket arms grew slightly differently from their nonracket arms. The racket-side forearm bones of the players grew around a quarter-inch longer than the forearm bone of the nonracket arm. And the elbow joint widened a centimeter. Like muscle, bone responds to the exercise. Even nonathletes tend to have more bone in the arm they write with simply because they use it more, so the bone becomes stronger and capable of supporting more muscle . . .


. . . Holway compares the skeleton to an empty bookcase. One bookcase that is four inches wider than another will weigh only slightly more. But fill both cases with books and suddenly the little bit of extra width on the broader bookcase translates to a considerable amount of weight . . .

. . . Holway has found that each kilogram (2.2 pounds) of bone supports a maximum of five kilograms (11 pounds) of muscle. Five-to-one, then, is a general limit of the human muscle bookcase.

Bone strengthening relates to muscle building more than you probably think. All of our muscles funnel into tendons, which then attach to bones. Rarely will a muscle grow to a level of strength in which it can rip itself from the bone. Bone strength is important for muscle growth, and, ideally, both muscle stress and bone stress come in combination. So, in general, holistically loaded bone stressing movements that also stress the muscle are going to be voodoo for muscle growth.

The barbell isn’t the smith machine The barbell is not the smith machine. The smith machine is a contraption in which a barbell slides up and down in between two holsters. Go back to the idea set forth a few sections ago: most "new" gizmos are nothing but failed attempts to reinvent old things that work.

The smith machine reduces the need to balance and stabilize. It also puts you in a fixed plane of movement. It’s actually quite silly when you think about it. If


you’re 6' 4”, you’re thrown into the same contraption as someone 5’ 2”, and you’re both expected to move exactly the same. There are a lot of people that feel the smith machine is, in fact, more dangerous because of this.

Learning how to dump a barbell isn’t very difficult, and that’s really the only reason a smith machine exists: to "catch" the bar if you ever get stuck on a repetition. Being safe with a barbell is easy, and it’s all about learning how to arrange yourself in the right kind of rack with safety pins set at the correct height to "catch" the bar in case something goes wrong. (And, of course, learning how to not be an idiot and max out, especially when no one is around to help you.)

Let your body move through the world the way its individual and unique proportions want to move. Don’t let a machine do that for you.

Seek refuge in free weight exercises. Barbells, dumbbells, kettlebells—these things are your friends, and you can use them in such a way to build muscle according to your frame. Contraptions like Smith machines reduce the need for control and subsequently decrease the overall "danger" sensed by the body.

The different types of bars This pertains to you more if you plan on creating your own home gym, but there are different types of barbells in the world. Some of very very cheap. Some less cheap, but still cheap. Some good. Some not so good.

Free weights are preferred

because they have to be

stabilized and controlled

through space.


You want to go with a quality Olympic barbell. Olympic barbells usually weigh around 45 pounds (20 kilograms) and are just about 7 feet long (2ish meters). (These values change if you’re a female, as there are female Olympic barbells out there.)

Olympic barbells are what you’re looking for. They can hold heavier plates, most of which have two inch holes in the middle to fit on the ends of the barbell. Often times, people looking for free weights find standard barbells and standard plates.

Standard barbells are thinner and shorter, and often have a one inch diameter (and thus, the plates have a one inch hole). There’s nothing wrong with a standard barbell, as downward force is downward force, but if you’re serious about this, you’re better off springing for an Olympic bar. Standard bars won’t hold enough weight in the long run, and mess with programs centered around an Olympic barbell because the plates are different heights.

The most important factor in my own success Before moving on, let’s talk about the idea of training at home. If you’re one of those people that don’t enjoy the idea of training in front of others (as I was), consider investing in a home gym. For about $1000 (probably less, really) you can build yourself a "facility" that will serve you for a lifetime.

I’m confident in saying that I wouldn’t be where I am if I didn’t play to my own personality and build my own gym. No commute. No weird looks from strangers.


No wiping down equipment. Just me, my own motivations, and my own self-learning. If this is something you’re interested in, I have a pretty thorough home gym guide here. The truth of it all is that you’re weird now. If you’re uncomfortable being weird in public, you won’t do well in a gym. Regardless of your background, you have to embrace the weird. These training methods have been around for ages, but have never really been the “mainstream” popular choice. It wasn’t long ago that lifting a barbell was “weird.” (It still is seen weird by many.)

Arnold Schwarzenegger wasn’t exactly seen as "normal," and neither were other bodybuilders of his day. Back then, if you toyed around with a barbell, you were probably involved in a barbell sport (Olympic weightlifting, bodybuilding, powerlifting).

Non-barbell sport athletes didn’t even start using the barbell until the 70’s, fueled by the Soviet and Eastern Bloc sporting dominance. Athletes in America thought that strength training made them muscle-bound and slow (which isn’t the least bit true). And then the Eastern Bloc started dominating sporting competitions, with systematic preparation (of which strength training was a part).

The barbell has outlived practically any other piece of physical training equipment. Call it a coincidence, but you wouldn’t convince me.


http://anthonymychal.com/2014/01/viii-how-to-build-a-home-garage-gym-capsule-corp-style/

Chapter 3 summary Your body builds muscle as a protective sort of active body armor. In order to justify the investment of its creation, you have to need muscle. The best way to signal the need for muscle is to load the body in a free state of movement. Translation: barbell, bodyweight, and other assorted free weight exercises.


4

Phasic, Tonic, and the "X" Physique

You need to build—and thus, train—in a unique way that’s suited to your body. This means not only building up certain parts

preferentially, but also recognizing that certain shelves of yours may not hold as much weight.

uilding muscle is kind of like building a callous. Tickling the skin with feathers doesn’t build a callous, just like gentle exercises don’t build muscles. You have to need thick skin, just like you have to need muscle.

Once you understand that, it seems like building muscle is all about hopping on the nearest program with any old worthy (barbell, bodyweight, free weight) exercises.

B


But building isn’t a haphazard process.

Just because you train or lift weights doesn’t mean your body develops in line with what was conceived as Ideal in your mind’s eye. Stress, and the recovery from stress, is a specific process. You become immune to the flu after getting a flu shot, not measles or mumps. You callous in the spots directly exposed to the stress.

Doryophorus or Ronnie Coleman? You can look like Ronnie Coleman or the Doryophorus. What’s your pick? Although Ronnie is on sauce and out of every natural man’s league, you get the idea that physique is more than being random blobs of muscle. If you wanted to amass as much muscle as humanly possible, you would have picked Coleman’s physique. He’s the obvious choice, being 300 pounds at 5’ 11”. But most don’t pick Coleman, and I’m betting you didn’t either.

There’s a reason "body of a Greek God" is such a powerful image, and this resource explores that. Some seedling inside of you has a specific aesthetic idea of perfection. We will call this the Ideal. Ignoring the Ideal is going to put you in a


bad spot. You’ll always be unsatisfied with your physique unless you build in a way that covers your insecurities.

There’s no difference between creating an aesthetic Doryophorus and an aesthetic you. It’s normal to admire your body; it’s normal to admire artwork. After all, you are kind of stuck with your body forever. This is often lost, and it’s often why the number of people with their Ideal or Greek Ideal or Dragon Ball Z Ideal (who doesn’t want to look like Goku?) for that matter is dropping.

As an artist, you don’t just hunk clay down and hope for the best. You hunk it down in the right places. If you’re doing just any old training program, you’re in line for just any old results.

The ideal body? The Greek God Ideal, in modern times, is widely known as the "X" physique. It’s defined by a thick upper back, broad shoulders, a thin waist, and powerful legs. (Ever notice those hulking dudes with pipsqueak legs that just look . . . off? They forgot about the lower half of the X.)

There are also sexual and performance triggers to this aesthetic:

• Women value physical characteristics in men such as height, muscularity, and broad shoulders 1

• Narrow hips are an advantage in fast running 2


http://www.jasnh.com/a8.htm

http://lucy.ukc.ac.uk/LOCAL-ONLY/FHC/FHCL1495-6.html

• Well-known human traits such as...broad shoulders, and large gluteus maximus were selected through evolution to make it easier for us to run long distances 3

• Using facial photos of male college students that were cropped at the neck, those with faces that women rated as attractive had more pronounced wedge shaped torsos (broad shoulders and narrow hips), a masculine feature many women prefer. 4

• Proportions alone are associated with physical attractiveness. In the crudest sense, the more you appear like a certain sex, the more attractive you will be. We don’t like ambiguity 5

This "X" aesthetic was brought about by old-time bodybuilders such as Steve Reeves, Vince Gironda, and Frank Zane. They are still considered to have some of the best physiques of all time, even though bodybuilders of today dwarf them in absolute muscle mass.

Getting it is all about emphasizing the right muscles and movements. When Arnold Schwarzenegger got beat by Frank Zane, Arnold said, "I just got beat by a chicken with 17-inch arms." Despite Arnold being "bigger," Zane won because Zane was in better "condition." And Zane had proportion people would have died for.

The biggest killer is that, despite using performance enhancing substances, Zane topped out at about 185 pounds during competition. Here we have Frank Zane, who some consider to have the greatest and most well proportioned physique of


http://www.trtreads.org/uploads/Bramble_and_Lieberman_Nature_2010.pdf

http://www.scribd.com/doc/42623520/The-Science-of-Sex-Appeal-an-Evolutionary-Perspective

http://videos.howstuffworks.com/discovery/35991-science-of-sex-appeal-sexy-body-motions-video.htm

all time, sitting at 185 pounds. And that’s with the use of performance enhancing substances.

That’s because physique is proportion. You can have little muscle and look better than someone with more, as long as your muscle is ideally placed.

Note: I should mention that it wasn’t until I after I had long admired Dragon Ball characters that I really stumbled on this idea of proportion. Who would have thought that a cartoon would ingrain such an idea, and who would have thought that such an idea would have stuck with me for so long?

Skinny-fat to Greek God, the need-to-know Not only do your bones have play in how much muscle you can hold, they also form what you look like—your bony structure is a wireframe of sorts.

Contrary to what shady websites tell you, you can’t change your bone structure. It’s there. Deal with it. The only thing that potentially alters bone growth is anorexic-like eating during growth periods, which can potentially stunt growth. (Even then, there’s evidence to suggest bone growth will return to normal when feeding returns


to normal. But many wrestlers, gymnasts, and dancers could probably anecdotally suggest otherwise.)

So each of us are born with a different wire frame—different proportions, everything. If you were born like me, and most skinny-fat sufferers, you have an embarrassing wire frame.

Here’s the thing: losing fat doesn’t really change the wire frame. The only thing that fundamentally changes the frame is building muscle in the right places in order to create an illusion of having a different body frame. Training has to be skewed to the side of preferentially developing the muscles that most contribute to the "X" physique. Generic muscle building programs build generic muscle.

Assume that a generic muscle building program adds muscle in an equal proportion over the entire body. That might seem good, but it’s not. If your wire frame sucks (if you’re reading this, it probably does), keeping your same body proportions (despite bigger muscles) will leave you with the same unfavorably proportioned wire frame.


And if that happens, your plans to be Goku next Halloween are all but shot. So, in this sense, a generic muscle building program will only give you an "X" physique if your wire frame is already set up for the "X" physique. And if that’s the case, you already have an "X" physique.

Your hip-bone width is set. It’s genetic. So if you have a naturally wide waist (as us skinny-fat sufferers tend to) you have to create an illusion of having a narrow waist by building the lats, shoulders, upper chest, and upper back—basically the entire area above the lowest point of the shoulder.

The plan for building a new body Take, for instance, two houses built in a new plan of homes. The first house (let’s call it House Goku, for easy reference) has a ten foot base, and a twenty foot roof. (This doesn’t make any sense, and no house would realistically be built this way, but stay with me.) The second house, let’s call it House Pat, has a fifteen foot base, and a five foot roof. (Kudos to those in tune to the Saturday Night Live reference. And, once again, stay with me on the logic of the house building dimensions.)

By sheer dimensions, House Goku looks like a "V." Its roof is much wider than its base. House Pat looks like an "A." Its roof is much narrower than its base.


Assume each house’s wood frame is already built. The only way to then alter the shape of the house is through exterior cosmetic work. The wooden frame isn’t changing. If you don’t like the shape of the house, you can’t change the interior foundational structure. You have to build around the wood frame.

In other words, if, after the houses are built, you want to change the shape of House Pat to look more like a "V," tearing the bricks off won’t do much. The "A" frame remains. The only way to make it look more like a "V" is to add bricks to the exterior of the house—to build the right parts on the outside of the house to give it the illusion of having a different shape than its internal wood frame. This would essential amount to growing wings on at the bottom of your "A" to turn it into a "W."


Why you’re (probably) training wrong As far as the upper body is concerned, there are two big focal points for skinny-fat training. First is growing wings, or the lats. "Lats" is a shortened term that stands for latissimus dorsi, and this is the back muscle that’s responsible for making a physique look wider (red lines). You have to learn how to contract them and involve them in exercises, as most don’t have conscious control over them at first. They neglect them and compensate with other muscle groups.

The second is the "halo." That’s everything above the deltoid tuberosity on arm (yellow sphere), but primarily the shoulder itself (both rear and front) and the upper chest.

Most guys train in complete opposition to the "X" physique. When you think about most people that go to the gym in the name of muscle building, you get an abundance of flat benching and curling—typical meathead stuff. Too bad flat bench pressing overemphasizes the lower chest (most skinny-fat are upper chest poor), and this kind of meathead training neglects the muscles that make a physique pop. Pop is phasic.


Vladimir Janda, a physiologist and neurologist, classified muscles into two groups: phasic and tonic. For the most part, tonic muscles are also postural muscles. Think about the muscles you’d need to silently work if you decided to stand up all day. Phasic muscles are more fast-twitch, sprint, throw, and attack muscles.

Muscles That Get Tighter (Tonic) Muscles That Get Weaker (Phasic)

Upper Trapezius Rhomboids

Pectoralis Major (Chest) Mid-back

Biceps Triceps

Pectoralis Minor (deep chest muscle) Gluteus Maximus

Psoas (Those hip flexors that get bad press)

Deep Abs

Piriformis External Obliques

Hamstrings Deltoids

Calf Muscles

Table taken from The More You Lift, The Worst You Look? on T-Nation


http://www.t-nation.com/free_online_article/most_recent/the_more_you_lift_the_worse_you_look

While I’m not all in on this classification system (the serratus anterior, for instance, is also a postural muscle), it’s a good enough guiding system to use. (The serratus anterior is commonly known as the boxer’s muscle, and it’s the finger like muscle that show on the side of the ribcage in those with lower body fat and a big enough serratus to show through.)

On the whole, phasic muscles get weaker with age, and tonic muscles get tighter with age. The weaker-tighter relationship is best illustrated by posture—specifically the degradation of posture. If you picture a hunched older man, you’re seeing a weak upper back and a tight chest. You’re seeing weak glutes and tight hips.

As Dan John points out in one of his articles, The More You Lift, The Worst You Look?, the vast majority of people are obsessed over their tonic muscles, and often forget about their phasic muscles.

You’re hunching more, not blossoming out Tonic muscles are your "mirror muscles" in the pecs and biceps, and are often big hitters in the previously mentioned meathead bench ‘n curl crew. This is bad news, because the muscles that get weaker over time (the phasic) are neglected. And when you neglect the phasic, you get natural weakening with age and further weakening from neglect.


The implications? Oh, no big deal, really. It’s not like the phasic muscles are "X" physique magic or anything . . . oh, wait, that’s right—they are "X" physique magic. Clearly, there’s work to be done here—we need a mindset shift. Programs should pinpoint the phasic over the tonic. Programs should build wings and halos.

The shrug is a popular exercise, and you’ve probably seen before. It hits that giant muscle in between your shoulders and neck: the trapezius. Since shrugs can be loaded up with a lot of weight (because of the small range of motion), and since they’re relatively easy, it’s a rather common exercise among gym rats.

But here’s the thing: when you’re going for the "X" look, you don’t want to jack up the upper trapezius by its lonesome. Any big size additions to the trapezius must come in proportion to the upper back, rear deltoids, and deltoids in general. Shrugs neglect this proportional development and often give a blocky build as opposed to an winged out "X" build. In other words, don’t do shrugs.

Now, that’s not to say you never want the trapezius to grow—because you do—it just needs to happen in tandem with everything else. We want to grow side-to-side in the upper back; we need wings. Shrugs grow you up-and-down. (Check out the chart a few pages back. Upper traps = tonic. Rhomboids, mid-back = phasic. See a theme?)


What this means for training Classifying things into phasic and tonic also guides training. Tonic muscles, being postural and constantly "on," can handle lower load, more volume, and more frequent training—just what you’d expect out of the kind of muscle that fires all the time in order to keep your skeleton upright. Phasic muscles, being more fast-twitch and more powerful, are more of your hit ‘em hard and rest ‘em for a little while muscles. They aren’t as prone to frequent training.*

*This is just a general beginner rule. The body is an adaptable machine, and tolerance can be built up for many things, including frequent training in phasic muscles.

With these things in mind, and with a few more skinny-fat specific tricks, you’re looking at the foundation of a solid program. Not that you need to neglect certain muscles, but you should play to what you need, not what others tell you that you should need.

When you see the typical hunched, poorly muscled, posture-impaired form (a lot of skinny-fat sufferers deal with this), you’re seeing a tonic overtone. The phasic muscles aren’t big, strong, or dominant enough to hold the chest high with proud posture.

We’re going to put huge emphasis on the phasic muscles—to the point of making a few tweaks to skew our training—in order to give these muscles the attention they deserve. We’re also going to expand the tonic muscles by focusing most stretching attention on them.


Too detailed is a failure Now we're putting emphasis on different muscle groups to build up the body in a certain way that opposes the typical skinny-fat build. This is a good mindset, but you can’t take it too far. You can’t go full-blown detail mode.

If you have little muscle and overly obsess about adding a teeny tiny bit of muscle to the upper chest, you will fail. This is why a lot of people don’t even bother with the whole shaping business. There are lots of guys out there with very little muscle mass that prematurely obsess over aesthetic imbalances. It’s just downright silly to obsess over specific ratios of growth between body parts when you don’t have much muscle to begin with. There are certain philosophies out there that are calculated down to Polykleitos’s canon and ratios based off of Fibonacci numbers.*

*Polykleitos was the sculptor that made the Doryphoros. He usually used a canon (rule) throughout his works to show perfect harmony and balanced proportions.

This will get you nowhere. It’s unfortunate we aren’t as easily shapeable as one of Polykleitos’s sculptures, but the reality is that we can’t change our bone length or wire frame. Some things just are what they are.

We know what we need to do in order to create the illusion of better proportion, and that’s build. We have to add bricks in the right places, not pebbles. You can’t be overly obsessive about sculpting because, at some point, you just need enough clay. You can’t shortcut your ability to gain muscle by trying to add


Obsessing over ratios and fine

detailing is a recipe for

failure.

miniscule hunks of clay in super specific places. Instead, add big hunks of clay in the right places.

Left-right muscle imbalances and size differences tend to iron themselves out over time with good training methods, and shouldn’t be obsessed over. Freaking out over them from the get-go is a mistake.

Chapter 4 summary We’re skinny-fat. Accounting for love handles, our waist appears wider than our sullen shoulders. Our chest is anything but a cuirass. We have no physical prowess.

We crave a life opposite to this, to reverse the anguish. We crave to appear physically imposing. We want broad shoulders that funnel into a smaller waist. We want strong and powerful arms. We want something that shows their shape even with clothes on. We want something that represents the kind of life they live.

Building a physique isn’t solely amassing weight. Don’t listen to people that say, “You must be 200 pounds if you’re a male. Blah, blah, blah...” Physique is about creating an illusion. You can do things that make you look bigger than you really are. This illusion is created by phasic proportion.


5

Fundamental Human Movements

“No man has the right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training. It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the

beauty and strength of which his body is capable.”

―Socrates

t this point, most people just want the program. “Gimme the sets, reps, and exercises. I’ll be fine.” But remember that you’re artificially imposing a stress on your body that forces it to recreate itself. This isn’t a gentle

process that can be easily captured by numbers on a slip of paper. A

Lots of people dive in, thinking they have a grasp on things, only to get injured and then quit. They think they have a grasp on things, but don't employ exercises


for nearly what they’re truly worth. Lots of people dive in . . . few swim back up to the top.

The sad part of mainstream fitness is that it doesn’t address the things that make people sink. If you want to change your body, you have to understand your body. And your body is more than a mathematical calorie calculation or a fancy chart with sets and reps.

The importance of a solid foundation If you’re going to be throwing yourself under a supragravitational load, you have to know a little bit about body mechanics. If you’re going to be targeting some kind of specific growth, you have to know how to get your body into certain positions and activate certain muscles. If you’re going to beat skinny-fat syndrome, you have to lay a foundation.

This is a process, not a switch. You don’t get to the top of a pyramid without a base. Four movements are the foundation, and teach you how to move in a way that transfers over to just about every exercise, develops mobility, and prepares the tissues for the work down the road.

The best part? You can do them in your home with nothing more than a milk jug—you can develop the abilities you need within your own doors before showing yourself to the public world and feeling embarrassed. When you bust through the gym doors, you’ll know what you’re doing.


Why you need a solid foundation Your body is designed to move. That’s why muscle is attached to your skeleton. That’s why you have joints, articulations, and synovial fluid. Unfortunately, the modern life we live doesn’t require much movement.

Is it true that if you don’t use it, you lose it?

With movement, it’s absolutely true. Not many in the Western world can squat all the way down. Those that can won’t be very comfortable. Yet among hunter-gatherer tribes, the squat is a basic resting position. When done correctly, the full range of motion squat is a beautiful expression of skeletal and muscular harmony that involves contractions, relaxations, and coordination throughout the entire body.

We’re entering a world that’s forcing us to wake up things that have been sleeping. It’s unpleasant to wake up to an ice bath, and yet most people climb into the ice bath voluntarily. If you’re 18 years old, your body has probably been asleep for ten years. And if you’re 30, 40, or even 70, your body has probably been sleeping for a lot longer than that.

Learning the fundamental human movements


Dan John should be a familiar name by now, as he came up before in phasic and tonic talk, and he’s rearing his head again. He’s noted for pushing this idea that humans have five basic movement patterns:

1. Squatting 2. Hip Hinging 3. Pressing 4. Pulling 5. Carrying*

Personally, I consider carrying to be a part of the broader category “locomotion.” For our purposes, though, we won’t be focusing much on this designation, so don’t worry about it. For each of the top four categories, there is one basic exercise that serves as the bottom row on the pyramid—every other exercise within the category is built atop it.

In order to focus on certain muscles and stress certain muscles to build the look that combats skinny-fat syndrome, you have to be able to achieve and get into certain positions and contract muscles in those positions. After beginners hear about how powerful the basic barbell squat is, it’s not uncommon for them to run to the gym the next day, load up the bar, and give their hand at the movement.

This ends in complaints, no doubt. Things end up hurting. “My knees hurt on squats.” Excuses are made. “I’m just not built for it.” Maybe that’s the case. But it’s probably not. An exercise is going to make your shoulder feel funky if you don’t understand how to put your shoulder in the right position. An exercise is


going to feel unstable if you don’t develop comfort in the range of motion. These things aren’t the exercise’s fault. They’re your fault.

You didn’t learn the body mechanics and the underlying principles that almost every exercise is founded upon. You’re trying to squat with a loaded barbell when you’ve never squatted down more than ten times in your life without a loaded barbell! And I know this because, well, I might have been that guy that I’ve been referring to throughout this text. You know, that guy and that person or those people that always make x, y, and z mistake? I’ve been there, done that. And I don’t want you to make the same mistakes.

Just about everyone can do the exercises outlined in this resource. I’m 6’ 4” and get by just fine. You can too, even if you’re taller. You just have to reinvigorate your body and nudge it back to life. Don’t be the douche that dives into ice water before he learns to swim.

SQUATTING DEEP AIN’T BAD, KIDS For those worried about squatting, know that squatting deep isn’t going to destroy your knees. This was a myth perpetuated long ago, and one that’s slowly fizzling out. In fact, the squat is the basic resting position for the human body.

When done correctly, it alleviates strain on the body from long days of standing. The reason most people hate the squat is because they don’t have the mobility to be comfortable in the bottom position. And since no one does the fundamental


prep work to get comfortable, people often end up squatting with an added load which only makes the problem worse.

Squatting can hurt your knees, yes. And saws can chop off fingers. A lot of things can happen if you do things wrong. Take the time to understand the machine at work, practice within a comfort level, and slowly build ability over time.

Gentle awakening Learning the fundamental human movements is a gentle waking up. They showcase the natural expression and movement of your skeleton through space and teach you how to activate certain muscles in the process. A while ago, we talked about training the lats and building wings.

Can you even contract your lats? Do you know what position you need to be in to contract your lats? And if not, how do you expect to get into this position during an exercise? How do you expect to contract your lats during an exercise?

So the fundamental movements not only help you with these things, but also training the smaller postural muscles that are often neglected when people dive into heavy training.


Developing feel and comfort If there’s an underrated, underused, underappreciated, underwhatever aspect of this game, it’s feeling the targeted muscles work during any given exercise, and developing comfort within a movement pattern. If you can’t squat down without a bar with ease, then doing it with a bar will always be uneasy.

More weight is better . . . until you can’t "feel" the muscles execute the movement.

“If you really want to experience the greatest benefits from your training, you must enter a stage of deep concentration. Do not let your concentration be broken by anyone or anything.”

- Steve Reeves

In the quest, it’s easy to forget feel. Often, training is a tao of slapping more weight on the bar, hiking it in the air, and rubbing the joints down after. But we can avoid that.

The muscles that encounter the most stress have the greatest potential for growth. Short track speed cyclist are a great example of this. Their quads are huge because they encounter the most stress. Increasing the mind-muscle connection increases the stress on the muscles. And if greater growth potential wasn’t enough, it also decreases stress on the joints.


Part of me thinks a lack of attention to the mind-muscle connection is why we’re in this age of repatterning and muscular amnesia. I would know, as my knee pain book, An Athlete’s Guide to Chronic Knee Pain, is based around the concept. It’s all the same. Lackluster mind-muscle connections throw more stress on the joints. It’s like the muscles tell the connective tissue, “Hey bro, take this.” And then they give them something to hold. This happens until the joint can’t carry anything else, eventually dropping what they’re already carrying.

The mind-muscle connection stems from conscious thought. That’s all. One of my best anecdotes comes from the principles of my knee pain book. Sometimes, people instantly get rid of knee pain by simply putting their mind to use in a new way.

I just finished your book. I was having patellar tendon pain EVERY TIME I stood up from a chair. I’m now extending the hips similar to the way you described . . . and the pain has disappeared. I’m already impressed.

- Jahed Momand

Try keeping your mind on your muscles. Feel them work. Feel them lengthen. Feel them shorten. Feel the targeted muscles doing the work. You won’t regret it. That’s not to say, “Turn into a sissy.” We’ll get into what matters later, but lifting weights like molasses isn’t on the menu.

As for how to increase your connection, I like Frank Yang’s "anatomy book" technique of pretending the working muscles are a different color than the rest.


http://anthonymychal.com/kneepain

During every repetition of every lift, picture your body as nothingness except for the muscle you’re targeting. Check out the dudes in anatomy text books with different colored muscles. Envision that. Seriously. Try it. It works. Close your eyes and practice it before every set. Think of the targeted muscle lighting up bright red in a sea of white. This gets murky with the more complex and quicker exercises, but you want to feel things in the muscles, not the joints.

The entire rationale behind patterning a muscle for more feel can be found in A Mortal Man’s Guide to Upper Chest Size and Strength, which is an adventure in getting the chest more active in those that have years of bad patterning under their belt.*

*Preferentially developing the upper chest is a focus of this program. If you have some experience at your back, and have bench pressing for a long time or training in an anti-upper chest manner, you should consider checking out A Mortal Man’s Guide to Upper Chest Size and Strength as it outlines a complete repatterning program.

Consider feel on par with comfort. You won’t be able to feel if you aren’t comfortable with a movement. In a squat, for instance, if you’re shaky at the bottom, you’re going to be too worried about balance.

The goal of the fundamental human movements is to develop the comfort and control you need to make for a safer and effective journey throughout training.


https://gum.co/NNEH

https://gum.co/NNEH

Learn the rules, break the rules Consider these fundamental human movement patterns, and their associated exercises, the "rules." But as any good artist showcases, at some point, you become smart enough to break the rules. The lesson here being that you generally have to learn the rules before you go ahead and break them.

So you might be browsing YouTube and see things that go against what is taught here. Aside from the fact that they may be using an exercise for an entirely different purpose what’s intended here, know that there are little in the way of absolute rules. Rules can be broken, so long as you know why and how.

The fundamental movement pattern integration The fundamental movement patterns teach our body how to move again. You might be wondering about the again bit there, but life often restricts movement. We rarely squat below the depth needed to sit on the couch or toilet. We rarely use our upper body for any kind of loaded movement unless we begrudgingly help our friends move. We stop hanging from things when it’s not longer cool to be a kid and climb trees. Yet these are all things the human body is capable of, and things we have to re-teach ourselves.


THE FUNDAMENTAL MOVEMENTS 1) Squatting: Goblet squat The squat expresses maximal bilateral standing range of motion about the hip, knee, and ankle. It strengthens every muscle in the leg, and even works its way up the chain.

2) Hinging: Bulgarian goat bag swing The hinge expresses maximal bilateral range of motion about the hip, and teaches how to incorporate the hip into standing movement.

3) Pressing: Push-up Pressing, specifically the push-up in the way it’s taught, teaches how to apply torque to solidify the shoulder.

4) Pulling: Bat wings Pulling, specifically bat wings, is all about learning how to use the lats and rhomboids.


Even if these movements seem easy to you, there are subtleties with each movement that I guarantee you’re missing. The details of each of these movements, and their progressions, are inside of the human movement and posture guides.

We also add on top a solid warm-up and a solid cool-down. The cool-down emphasizes stretching the tonic muscles that bottle us up and ruin posture—it reverses the aging process.

After mastering these, you’re prepared for barbell work.

Chapter 5 summary Life has taken us away from movement that our body is capable of, and in order to re-learn it, we must gently coax ourselves back into the fold. Jumping right into training without this prep work usually ends in complaints and excuses.

To prepare yourself and learn about the body, you should master four fundamental human movements: squatting, hinging, pressing, and pulling.


6

Basic Barbell and Bodyweight Movements

“The Iron never lies to you. You can walk outside and listen to all kinds of 'talk, get told that you re a god or a total bastard. The Iron will always kick

you the real deal. The Iron is the great reference point, the all-knowing perspective giver. Always there like a beacon in the pitch black. I have

found the Iron to be my greatest friend. It never freaks out on me, never runs. Friends may come and go. But two hundred pounds is always two

hundred pounds.”

-Henry Rollins, The Iron


fter grooving the fundamental human movement patterns, and getting familiar with your body, you’re ready for increased loading and more holistic exercises. A

The foundation of any worthwhile training program is a little something called compound movements. Compound (multi-joint) movements train as many joints as possible for a selected muscle or group of muscles. They also allow for a lot of weight to be used in the long run—more bone loading, more total-body freak out, and that whole jazz.

Although we had four fundamental movement patterns, we jump to six primary exercises. The entire body, more or less, can be effectively trained with these six exercises (or groups of exercises), and they are the foundation of just about every reputable barbell program.

Branching into new movement patterns The fundamental movements teach you how to express the extent of your anatomy by moving through space and different planes of motion with control. In the squat, you learn how to use the entire leg mass to hit a full range of motion in the hips, knees, and ankles. In the hinge, you learn how to shoot the hips back and forth. In the press, you learn how to coordinate the arm to keep the shoulder safe. In the pull, you learn how to retract the shoulder blades. These carry over to every exercise you could ever dream of doing.


Some stick with one movement for each of these patterns, but variety is needed to combat stubborn skinny-fat areas. Angles change muscle activation, and then change where muscle is preferentially grown. In general, the lower body is less mobile than the upper body, so less variety is needed. The shoulder being rather mobile gets split into two planes: vertical and horizontal. (Since the shoulders are a lot more mobile than the hips, the upper body generally requires more exercises for comprehensive development.)

This gives us:

Squatting

Hinging

Vertical Pressing

Vertical Pulling

Horizontal Pressing

Horizontal Pulling


These six movements are broad enough to cover just about the entire body. (I’m hesitant to say this though, because there is more out there. There’s inverted pulling and downward pressing. Getting into gymnastics, there’s adduction and even hyperextension movements that come into play, too. Still, these categories work for us for now. )

Now that we have some movement categories, the remaining variables are: which exercises should we use, and are there any quirks we should know about to make them more effective for us? Are some exercises better than others? How do you arrange all of them into a program that enables the best progress?

For each category there is usually a "best" variation to use for now. And I say "for now" because this is only the second layer on the pyramid (although, it’s the most important layer). Much like the fundamental movements prepared for this layer, this layer prepares for future layers.

For example, I recommend snatch-grip deadlifts to those advanced enough to do them, as they’re a wonderful exercise for the "X" physique. But unless you’ve mastered the conventional deadlift, and have exhausted it of its initial potential, there’s no reason to snatch grip deadlift. None. You’re actually asking for injury if you do them prematurely, as you probably don’t quite know how to correctly lift a bar from the floor.


BEES KNEES IN EACH CATEGORY

Squatting: Front squat

Hinging: Conventional deadlift

Vertical Pressing: Overhead press

Vertical Pulling: Chin-up

Horizontal Pressing: Thirty degree, close grip incline bench press

Horizontal Pulling: Inverted row


Note: There are suggested substitutions for every exercise within the program inside of the “X” physique exercise breakdown guide. Substitutions aren’t ideal and are only listed to work around potential problems. If a shoulder problem prevents you from thirty degree incline pressing, don’t just pick a friendlier exercise and be done with it. Fix your problem so that you can eventually do the intended exercise. Each exercise was hand selected based upon the intended physique goal. This isn’t about variety; it’s about consistent and steady progress. Make that a priority, and you will win.

Exercise selection and maintaining balance Squats of all types generally hit the quadriceps and glutes the most, with the hamstrings coming in third. Deadlifts of all types generally hit the hamstrings and glutes most, with the quads coming in third. (These relationships can change depending on the type of squat or deadlift, but they’re rather safe assumptions.) Here you can see that with these two movements, the lower body is just about covered.

Benching compares to rowing in a crude way, as you’re pressing and pulling in the horizontal plane. Chin-ups compare to overhead pressing, as you’re pressing and pulling in the vertical plane. These movements aren’t exactly in direct opposition, but they’re close enough.

• Bench pressing trains your chest, shoulders, and triceps. • Overhead pressing trains your shoulders and triceps. • Rowing trains your lats, mid-back, and biceps. • Chin-ups train your lats, upper back, and biceps.


Pull-ups train the mid-back, as do rows with the upper back. Chin-ups even train the triceps. Overhead pressing trains the upper back, too. Don’t scratch your head. It’s confusing, I know. Just know that there’s overlap, so don’t get bogged down in the specifics. The big picture: doing things at different angles and positions tends to activate different muscles. (We use this knowledge to our advantage.)

It would make sense to keep all of these things aligned and do the same for each movement pattern to keep prevent imbalances and keep the body equally developed. Unfortunately, we aren’t balanced as is, and what we want requires unbalance.

(By the way, the theory of muscle imbalances is a crooked one. No one really knows what balance is, we just know that weak opposing muscles can sometimes limit performance of moving muscles. Great athletes, however, will always have some kind of imbalances.)

Right now, your physique is unbalanced. And realistically, you want it even more unbalanced in the opposite direction. There’s nothing "balanced" about an "X" physique. You want wings and halos, and this means putting more emphasis on certain muscle groups. We do this, but we also take heed to keeping the body relatively healthy.


Adding extra to combat struggling areas If you go to the gym and hit these six movement patterns, you train just about your entire body. Some programs endorse this kind of minimalism (only doing the six) because it helps you focus on the lifts that matter the most. And while I agree, I also think that we need just a little bit more to hit our skinny-fat trouble areas effectively. I’ve seen one too many people go on squat-centric programs (where you squat very frequently to the point of neglecting meaningful upper body work) only to end up unsatisfied with their physique.

If you check out the pictures above, you see huge leg growth with lackluster growth everywhere else. That leg growth is great and I wouldn’t not want that, but I think that better upper body gains should have accompanied it.


The upper body has more movement capacity, and thus needs more stimulation.

• A curl will give your biceps extra pop. • Another press that’s more tricep-centric will help your arms, too. We

supercharge this by also making it a press that will help the upper chest. • A calf raise and/or jumping rope will get your lower legs growing. • An ab exercise will take care of your six-pack needs.

The two most important exercises Powerlifters have three lifts they focus on. Olympic weightlifters have two. Arnold used to have a "big six." I’m not quite sure what any of this means, but the moral of the story is that it’s a good idea to put most of your effort into a handful of exercises to keep your head on straight. If you’re getting better at the handful, you know you’re getting closer to where you need to be. They are lighthouses in the sea of training that’s so vast, you will end up lost unless you end up sticking to the planned path. All of the exercises we do . . .

• Build strength in a way that caters to real movement • Build strength in a way that mimics supragravitational conditions • Prioritize building of the "X" physique • Cover all mental reserves anyone with a build like House Pat has • Use minimal equipment, making it easy to assemble a garage gym • Create a solid platform for advanced exercises (both barbell and

bodyweight) that further inch us towards the "X"


There’s no fluff or "just for fun" work. But since we started introducing exercises, we went from four to six to ten, and we aren’t even done yet.

To keep your head on straight, focus on two: the deadlift and the chin-up.

These are your two most important lifts. The deadlift is the supragravitational, holistically-loaded exercise you need to freak out the body. It’s really a lower-body exercise, but the back is also heavily involved. It leads into other great "X" physique pulling exercises like barbell rows, snatch grip deadlifts, and a bunch of other pulls. Not only will it grow your back now, but it will be the catalyst for “secret weapons” in the future.

The chin-up is, perhaps, the most important exercise you can do. Not only does it grow your lats and upper back, it hints at where your body composition stands. You know your body composition is improving if your chins improve.

THE TWO FOCAL LIFTS: THE CHIN-UP AND DEADLIFT.

Both are “X” magic, and with chin-ups, You know your body composition is improving if your chins

improve.


Emphasizing the importance of deadlifts and chin-ups doesn’t devalue any other exercise. Push-ups are great for the serratus, the incline press is great for the upper chest, the overhead press is great for the shoulder, the squat is great for the entire system (spinal loading) and it even helps the deadlift, and I could go on and on. There’s a reason each exercise is included within the program.

The difference between chin and pull As a note, the difference between chin-ups and pull-ups is wrist position. During a chin-up, the wrists are supinated—that’s to say your palms face your body. During a pull-up, the wrists are pronated—palms face away. This is a small tweak, but supination increases bicep activation. So chin-ups hit the biceps better than pull-ups.

So to be a bit more accurate, both chin-ups and pull-ups are king. Chin-ups, with the increased bicep activation, will be easier and you’ll likely always be better at them. Magical things happen when you get good at either, or when you do them often.

They not only develop everything needed for the "X" look in the upper back, posterior delts, lats, and arms, but they also silently work the abs. Not only will they grow your wings, but they also do something incredibly unique in gauging your relative strength.


You can’t be good at chin-ups when you have a lot of dead weight (read: body fat). This is because being able to lift your own body weight depends a great deal on how much excess fat you carry.

Chapter 6 summary The four fundamental movements turned into six in order to broaden our muscle activation and growth across the entire body. A few others were thrown in to take care of the fact that skinny-fat sufferers have arms like string beans.


7

This Matters, That Doesn’t “Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and

more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.”

― E.F. Schumacher

hat matters? Sure, we know the repetition range that tends to build muscle. We know the types of exercise that build muscle. We know what muscles to build. We now know the general exercises, too. But what

matters? W Are You Picking Up Pennies? Shiny pennies are everywhere. That fancy new machine at the gym? Shiny penny. New infomercial product? Shiny penny.


Finding shiny pennies is exciting. For a second, at least. But in the end, it’s still the same old hunk of metal worth one cent. The shiny penny mindset causes people to "major in the minor." The "skills" (I dare say "secrets") of training are evergreen.

Everything you need to know is known, but the fitness industry needs to make money. And instead of getting people honest and real results, they opt for shinier and shinier pennies.

At the end of last chapter, I told you to base your training on the progress of two exercises. Two exercises! Compare that to the normal gym rat, juggling numbers on every exercise.

What matters is focus. Your mentality shouldn’t be that of an ADD three-year-old. Your mentality

should be of mastery. How do you become a master? You pick a few things and get really good at them.

Evergreen skills:

Performing exercises that deliberately overload targeted muscles

Flushing blood into the muscle to deliver nutrients and increase the mind-muscle

connection

Overloading tissues in a stretched position

Delivering enough protein to the body

Eating the right things at the right time

If you want to become a good tuba player, spend your time playing. Imagine if you wanted to get good at playing the tuba, violin, guitar, and drums. What do you practice with? How do you get good? Will you master any of them? The trap most enthusiasts fall into is spreading their efforts across too many exercises.


Pour your heart and soul into a select few exercises. You can’t stay violently focused on training when you do many exercises (all around and even per training session). Cap it at three to five exercises per training session.

Muscle Confusion and Soreness Having different programs and changing exercises frequently is a common practice. But for someone skinny-fat, program hopping and rotating exercises frequently is suicide. Rotating exercises regularly makes progress harder to track, and progress is a primary skinny-fat pursuit. Making the sole goal more complicated is nonsense.

Physique is proportion. The goal is set. An "X" physique. The only thing left is to practice the lifts that preferentially build the muscles develop the "X." Get better at these skills over time. It doesn’t happen in one day.

Common myths float around about having to confuse muscles in order to spur gains, and that this is a good (if not the best) way to go about making progress. (This is the premise behind P90X, I think. I don’t know much about it though, which should tell you how I feel about it.) There are a few things wrong with this logic.

First, muscles don’t get confused. They respond to stress, not calculus problems. You’re either adapated to stress, or unadapted to stress. If you’re unadapted, things probably break down from being used in an unfamiliar way. Do things


right, and these broken down things build back up just fine. And even beyond the level they used to function. (This is constantly setting a new level of homeostasis, which we will get to soon.)

Second, more often than not, training to confuse muscles is stupid. Think callous. It’s slow and steady progress over time. Doing something that confuses this process (something that causes a bunch of soreness for the sake of soreness), is similar to shooting way beyond your adapted capacity and blistering.

Blistering seems good because it hurts—we associate pain with gain. But soreness isn’t an indicator of an effective training session. You don’t need soreness to get gains. That’s not to say you will never be sore. It does happen from time to time, and especially when you’re brand new to training or doing an exercise for the first time.

You shouldn’t chase soreness. Anytime you probe uncharted territories, be it ranges of motion or new levels of muscle

contraction, you might feel a little soreness. But the body gains muscle just fine without accompanying soreness. Don’t feel bad if you aren’t sore.

The exact cause of muscle soreness isn’t exactly narrowed down yet, but

it’s generally accepted that it has to do with damage to the muscle itself. The technical term for soreness is delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS) and it

tends to be at its worst two days after training.

There are lots of theories as to what causes DOMS. Some say it’s the

eccentric (lowering) portion of a lift, but even concentric-only (overcoming

or lifting portion) work can cause soreness. Take someone that’s never

lifted in their life, apply a heavy dosage of concentric work, and you’ll

get soreness.

Once you get settled into a solid training program, soreness won’t be as prominent. A stupid rookie mistake is "changing things up" in order to continue


feeling sore. This is like being in the initial callous stage and suddenly destroying your hands on purpose to create blisters.

If you know the good exercises, the one’s that hit (and work for) skinny-fat areas of need, the only thing left is “callousing” over time. It’s not a short-term program. short-term programs are poison. So you have an eight week stint planned. Good. But what do you do after those eight weeks? Jump to another program? And then what? Another one? And another? How do you callous?

Program hopping is the worst behavior anyone can adopt. If a program isn’t sustainable and adaptable for long-term use, don’t bother with it unless you have a narrowed short-term goal (stubborn fat loss, for instance).

That’s not to say you’re doomed into doing the same thing day in and day out—a program should be adaptable to some degree--but progress is the ultimate motivator, and progress comes from practicing a handful of lifts consistently enough to get good at them. Doing barbell row for two weeks and then switching to dumbbell rows and then switching back to barbell rows before trying arc rows after moving to inverted rows after doing chest-supported machine rows makes progress impossible to gauge. Your body doesn’t get familiar enough with a stressor to adapt accordingly.

I’d rather you do chin-ups or push-ups or certain squats more frequently than rotating exercises every training session to hit different muscles.


You’re going to be so happy with yourself when you can do twenty full range of motion chin-ups and deadlift twice your body weight. If these are your two goals, how would you get there? What if you just put your head down and went for them instead of getting mixed up in the fluff?

It’s a tough mindset to take, but for a while, all you’re going to be doing is practicing. You don’t really think of yourself as playing the tuba when you can’t orchestrate good sounds. You’re practicing.

Principle of Practice: Rep Speed

What matters: grace

What doesn’t matter: tempo

Rep speed is also known as tempo. Usually, when someone says to do something with a certain tempo, they’re talking about lowering a weight for a specific number of seconds, and then lifting it for a specific number of seconds.

Some people worry about tempo, but I’m not one of them. In fact, I think most people are hurt by tempo. You can’t have your mind on your muscles and the lift while simultaneously counting how many seconds it takes you to lift and lower the weight. I’d much rather you think about the muscles at hand.


Lower the weight under control. Not necessarily molasses slow, and not necessarily so fast as to dislocate your joints. Lift with vigor—own the weight. Make use of a controlled stretch reflex at the bottom of each lift—it will feel like a little bounce. Try more and more to harness this stretch reflex in your muscles, not necessarily your joints.

Perhaps the best thing you can do is think about lifting gracefully. Yeah, it’s kind of meta, but think grace. Always. Grace. You’d be amazed at what happens to your body when you put that word in your mind. You can’t lift with grace when you’re unfamiliar or tentative. You can’t lift with grace when you’re bouncing and dropping weights to help you lift them.

When you practice, think grace.

Principle of Practice: Rest in Between Sets

What matters: feeling fresh

What doesn’t matter: the clock

I don’t even look at a clock when I train, and I think you should take as long as you need without being excessive. This means nothing to you, I know, but it usually translates into taking 2-3 minutes in between sets. This varies if you’re supersetting non-competing muscle groups. (Non-competing supersets would be


alternating between two exercises that don’t fatigue the same muscle group set-for-set.)

Supersets aren’t inherently special, nor are they anything magical. What they do, however, is save time. Time is valuable. Therefore, supersets are valuable. "Supersetting" is a fancy term for alternating exercises, set for set. So instead of doing five sets of pull-ups back to back to back to back to back, you can alternate a set of pull-ups with another exercise set for set. This usually works better on your upper body days, and looks like:

• Set of pull-ups • Catch your wind for about one or two minutes • Set of presses • Catch your wind for about one or two minutes • Set of pull-ups • Catch your wind for about one or two minutes • Set of presses

This cuts down workout time as rest periods in between sets generally become shorter, as you’re working non-competing muscle groups for the most part. (When you train your pressing muscles, your pulling muscles get a slight break.)

If your gym isn’t set-up for supersets, don’t fret. They don’t have to be done. They’re just recommended to save time. As for how to arrange the supersets, that’s already done within the program. If exercises have the same letter by their


name with a different following number, they are candidates for supersets. Alternate A1 with A2, etc.

What’s most important about rest is making sure you’re in the moment. If you’re stumbling around over the clock, you aren’t really worried about your body. Listen to your body. It tells you things, and you’re better off having listened to it. Rest as long as you need before you feel fresh. Now, this doesn’t mean you should take five or ten minutes (although some do), but you shouldn’t go so quick that you aren’t confident before doing another set.

Principle of practice: matter You know the good repetition range. You know the good methods. You know the good philosophy. You know the good prep training. You know the good exercises. You know the good practice principles in lifting with grace and being in the moment.

You know that simply practicing and getting in quality repetitions is going to be the most important thing you can do. Rest enough so that you can lift with grace, make everything you do matter.

THE LIFTS + GRACE + PRACTICE + REP RANGE = MAGIC


Everything we’ve gone over to this point can be distilled into the following two tidbits:

• Do a little preparation work and really learn the fundamental human movement patterns.

• Go after the Great 8 in the 5-10 range. • Lift gracefully and be in the moment.

We know the exercises that build the kind of muscle we want, and we know how heavy we need to train in order for muscle to actually be built. If you take this mindset with you, I’m confident you’ll be in a better place than 99% of the people out there.

This isn’t anything special either, it’s just practice. But the problem is that a monkey can bang on the tuba in the name of practice. Just because you’re doing something doesn’t mean you’re aiming for something in particular. In order to get places, you have to have intent. You have to want to get better.

Chapter 7 summary Don’t fall into the mainstream muscle-confusion bologna. Pour your heart into the good exercises, lift with grace, and be mindful of the process. You need to practice your way to success.


THE LIFTS + GRACE +

PRACTICE + REP RANGE =

MAGIC


8

Getting Better Strive for continuous improvement, instead of perfection.

- Kim Collins

he problem with practice is that it’s practice. Practice is garbage if you’re just going through the motions. Practice is useful if you’re getting better along the way. T

It’s one thing to understand the body mobilizing for action (see a bear in the woods, run from the bear in the woods), but it’s another thing entirely to understand the body getting better at a particular mobilization over time.

Something that freaks the body out initially won’t always freak the body out. When someone unexpectedly jumps out at you behind the water cooler at 12PM as you’re about to go to lunch, you’re going to freak out. Your heart rate jacks up. You get sweaty. You breathe harder.


But those things won’t happen if its day 256 of the same guy jumping out behind the same water cooler at the same time every day.

Humans are wonderfully plastic creatures that adapt to regular demands (as long as they aren’t too much too soon). It’s like creating a callous; use your hands a lot, and callouses form on the parts that encounter the most stress. And they do this as a means of protection. Without the thick skin, it would rip open daily. Your body is one smart cookie, and it doesn’t want that to happen. Why risk infection?

But callouses don’t form overnight. The skin thickens gradually, and only in the area that encounters the stress. It doesn’t make sense to build tissue where it isn’t needed. That’s just waste. And so, the two-step process to create a callous is to introduce some kind of stress, and then repeat that stress over time. Careful though. Increase the stress too fast, and you don’t get a callous, you get a blister.

Blisters are useless. Nothing gets accomplished. The skin doesn’t thicken in protection. It just rips open, hurts like hell, and makes you rip excess skin off creating even more injuries. With a blister, you’re immediately in the hole (you can’t use your hands like you need to), and you’re also long-term in the hole. After the blister heals, you start with a fresh patch of skin. You have to restart the callous from the beginning.

In the land of callous building, take your time and all goes well. Too fast too soon, and you’re defeating the purpose of the protective mechanism by voluntarily hurting yourself and restarting the thickening process.


Two important nuggets here:

• Don’t go too fast, too soon. • Constantly challenge the current state of adaptation.

For someone starting out, this translates into:

• Start light. • Get stronger.

Strength is important in this world, especially for a beginner. When you start at some baseline level, your body adapts. The only way to continue adaptation is to increase beyond the baseline—to continually create a new baseline.

If you go in the gym and do the routine with some easy weight to start, you’re on the right track. But if you do nothing but do the same routine with the same weight week after week, you’re going to fail. You have to continually increase the stress of the exercise. You have to make a callous. Without trying to get better, you’re nothing more than a monkey banging on the drums and calling it practice.

If you’re in this world already, you’ve likely heard of a little something called progressive overload, AKA doing more than you’re used to. There are many ways to do more, but for you, there are really only two things you should worry about: more weight, or more reps. If you go into the gym and you’re not either adding more weight or more reps, you’re doing it wrong. This more business is


synonymous with strength for now. So for a beginner, muscle building is the same as strength building.* In some sort of systematic way, you have to continually do more than you’re used to. This is not a tough process, and you don’t have to be mathematically inclined to make this happen.

*This relationship changes after a basic layer of strength is built.

So even if it’s just by one repetition, you should get better. If you attack this with a “small win” mindset, and with a proper program, you will snag some serious progress. The footnote of this process is starting light, working within your means, and giving your body ample time to callous and recover from training session to training session.

Understanding adaptation A great analogy used in Starting Strength, a famous barbell training resource, is that training is like tanning. Go outside when the sun is high for five minutes one day, and that’s your baseline. Go outside every day for five minutes when the sun is high, repeat that for one month, and where do you end up?

You probably think you’d be a lot tanner, but you probably wouldn’t be. Your body adapted to handling the sun for five minutes, and you didn’t give it reason to adapt further.

Your body only adapts to the right now. If you want to push beyond what you are right now, you have to train beyond what you are right now. You have to get


better over time. You might remember the term homeostasis being thrown around in your high school science classes. The idea of homeostasis is that your body has some kind of a baseline it likes to operate around.*

*I’m aware that homeostasis is being replaced by the much more comprehensive allostasis. A bit beyond the concept presented here, but something worth checking out if you’re a science geek.

With training, you’re constantly setting a new level of homeostasis. Squatting one-hundred pounds to start might be your homeostasis today—meaning your body enjoys this level, and kind of even wants to stay there—but it’s your job to make two-hundred pounds and beyond the new homeostasis as time passes.

Consistently upping that baseline functioning level is what consistently forces the body to make change. When you stagnate, and do the same thing over and over, the body stagnates, too.

What about maxing out? Working to failure? If you play your cards right, there will be no maxing out, nor working to failure for quite some time. Just as there’s no overt benefit to being sore, there’s no overt benefit to working a muscle to failure or maxing out as a beginner.

You just need to stay fresh and get as strong as possible within the repetition ranges and with the lifts given. You need to callous yourself, not blister yourself. You need to tan, not get sunburn.


I know you want the body of your dreams in six weeks, but it doesn’t work like that. Most guys playing in the NFL are at least eight years into their training career (four years of high school, four years of college). Maxing out or training until failure won’t help get you there quicker right now.

The goal is slow progress over time, but the important part is progress. There’s no maxing out until your eyeballs dangle from their optic nerves. You will work hard. It will be difficult. But, all things considered, it’s not about bringing deathly intensity. It’s about bringing intensity, period, with consistency. This leads to better progress, better results, and, most importantly, better health.

I’m reminded by a Mike Webster quote: Injuring yourself is not conducive to explosiveness.

Injuring yourself isn’t conducive to anything. Anyone can train until exhaustion and puking, but neither are signs of an effective training session. And if there’s one thing that derails progress, it’s injuries.

“Yeah, well, I got hurt and stopped going to the gym, and now I’ve been trying to get back.”

We don’t want to be that guy. Stay smart. Progress slowly. Let your body’s muscle and connective tissue adapt with you slowly over time. Crock pots cook some damn good food, but they cook it slowly over time. So slow, in fact, that some people don’t bother. But you can’t deny the tasty results.


Put progress in a crock pot.

Getting Better at Each Lift Getting better over time is specific to every exercise you do, just as getting a callous is specific to the area on the hand that’s getting stressed. You have to get better over time on every exercise, but you also have to respect that every exercise is different and won’t adapt at the same rate.

There are many factors that affect the adaptation process, but there are three big ones: number of muscles involved, size of muscles involved, and range of motion involved.

More muscles, bigger muscles, and less range of motion make for more weight and more potential for rapid strength increases. So, in general, lower body lifts progress not only quicker, but also more—you’ll be loads stronger with them. Upper body lifts progress less all around, which makes for a skinny-fat conundrum—your upper body is small, yet strength (which is the driver of muscle) stalls early. This is why we do more for the upper body.

It’s common for skinny-fat guys to hit a huge wall in upper body progress when following traditional rules, or doing something silly and expecting the upper body to adapt at the same rate as the lower body. (Pressing movements are usually the toughest. Blame the small wrists.) Remember, a smaller bookcase doesn’t hold as many books. You can’t compare your progress to others that have a


bigger bookcase. Not only should upper body lifts have an expected lower rate of progress than lower body lifts, but other techniques should be used to sneak in extra work without interfering with overall progress.

The general breakdown of strength potential goes like this:

1. The deadlift 2. The squat 3. The incline press 4. The overhead press

Dumbbell exercises (and the barbell curl, really) fall into a side category. Smaller exercises that involve less joints won’t be anxious to make much progress. Dumbbell exercises are just different and don’t progress as fast as barbell exercises. The technical reason as to why doesn’t matter as much as the reality—don’t expect them to progress fast.

Bodyweight exercises are sort of their own entity. They load the system a bit differently, so they are trained a bit differently. Most barbell exercises load the spine. Bodyweight exercises don’t, so they don’t "freak out" the entire system as much. They can be trained at a higher frequency if you program properly.


The training split Everything thus far can be distilled into the following:

One: Pick a worthy exercise that loads the body in a way that’s actually going to cause muscle gain (rubbing feathers on the skin don’t create a callous). Think supragravity and all that fun stuff here.

Two: Make sure the exercise is efficient at targeting the muscles you want targeted. Think phasic and tonic, and building something that opposes the skinny-fat build.

Three: Lightly introduce stress to build the callous.

Four: Gradually increase the stress over time to create a thicker callous. Don’t go too fast, too soon, or else you’ll blister.

That says nothing about any kind of training split, or how to arrange the exercises. Part of this is because the split isn’t magic. How you arrange exercises into a weekly routine is a façade behind the bigger picture, which is overloading the right muscles with the right exercises within the right repetition ranges.

That’s the bigger picture.


However, given that we’re attempting to get better, we have to consider recovery. If you go to the gym on Monday and do bench presses, and go to the gym Tuesday and do overhead presses, you’re probably going to feel crappy on those overhead presses. The basic tenant behind beginner progress is to get better every time you train. The underpinning of this is being recovered enough to make it happen.

How frequency effects progress Let’s say you decide to squat once per week. If you went into the gym, picked a number of reps and picked a number of sets, did the same exact template, and increased the weight on the bar five pounds every time you went into the gym. You would add 260 pounds to your squat in one year.

If you started with the empty Olympic bar (which weighs 45 pounds), that means you’d be squatting 305 pounds in one year. Do you think you’d be a tiny bit more muscular if you took whatever you squatted now and took it to 305? The answer is yes.

But in comes the paradox of improvement. If you take the above example and say . . . well, why not go in and do that twice every week! And then I’d add 520 pounds in one year! MAYBE THREE TIMES PER WEEK, AND I’D BE SUPER SAIYAN IN NO TIME!!


There’s a good chance that won’t pan out as well because your ability to adapt and change is finite—just as if you inject too much of a pathogen into your body you end up infected instead of immune.

There are many things that go into our ability to add weight on the bar, one of which is nutrition. This is why you often see people recommend drinking a gallon of milk every day (a strategy known as GOMAD)—it eliminates the energy and nutrient factor. If you GOMAD, you know you’re getting enough stuff to repair and build muscle tissue and recover from hard training.

Since we don’t (you shouldn’t) want to blow up like a cow, you don’t want to do the GOMAD thing. And because of this, you have to accept that your progress will be slower because you aren’t absolutely ensuring that you’re getting enough energy.

Go back to our previous example. Say you stuck with the first example and added five pounds per week. That’s 260 pounds in one year, 520 in two years.

Want a dirty little secret?

I’ve never squatted 520 pounds. The most I’ve ever squatted was 405 pounds, and I’ve been training for a lot longer than two years. What I’m trying to say is that if you chipped away and did the five pound per week thing for two years—played the slow card—your progress would trump my 6+ years of training.


And the reason why I haven’t squatted over 405 is because of injury. When you try to make progress too fast, you get injured. See how this all comes together? Slower is better, and we’re even going to take it down a notch from five pounds per week on most lifts. Learn from my mistakes.

More frequency, faster progress The more frequently you train any one lift with immediate progressive intent, the more stressful it will be on the system. This is what makes a full-body training program tough to manage. You train the body and the lifts at a higher frequency, which means you’re expected to make rapid progress (assuming you’re trying to get better every session).

Not to be the bearer of bad news, but, as a skinny-fat sufferer, your ability to adapt and make great strength progress isn’t the best in the land. My small wrists aren’t really all that great at supporting a load, and my pressing strength suffers for it. This is the rule, not the exception. I’ve never met a skinny-fat sufferer that excelled in pressing strength, and, more often than not, they hit a wall they can’t escape from.

It’s a sad reality: a toothpick won’t hold as much weight as tree trunk. This doesn’t mean we can’t progress, because we absolutely can. We’re just better off slow-cooking the process and giving our body ample time to change. This isn’t the fancy-flashy eight-week solution, but if those things worked, you probably wouldn’t be here. Think crock pot. Put it all together, set it, and forget it.


We can still get better every time we go into the gym as long as we take a slower path. We have lower body lifts that can be loaded more, yet progress easier. We have upper body lifts that are stingy. Body weight exercises that we might not even be able to do well. Splitting the workload up makes for better recovery—you go into every training session feeling fresh enough to do some damage. But the type is split is important. Those ultra bodybuilding splits you see in magazines are not what the doctor ordered.

Chapter 8 summary Training and muscle building follows similar rules to callous building, tanning, and just about every gradual adaptation you can think of. Just as a callous forms primarily on the areas in the immediate stress vicinity, muscle preferentially grows in the areas that receive the most neural signals for meaningful contractions. This could be a muscle group as a whole or even a select part of the muscle, as long as there’s a separate nerve innervations to make the latter possible.

It’s possible to preferentially callous the upper chest more than the lower chest because the upper chest has its own neural connection independent of the one for the lower chest. Increase the upper’s circuitry, you get better growth. This is what A Mortal Man’s Guide to Upper Chest Size and Strength is about.

This is not a fast process. Rushing progress is like creating a blister, and blisters are a regression, not a progression.


https://gumroad.com/l/NNEH

9

The training split

iven that skinny-fat sufferers don’t have a body type that’s ideal to make huge strides in progress, the workload should be split to allow for ample recovery. At the same time, it shouldn’t be split so much as to go against

sending signals at the right frequency. G The right kind of training split to fuel progress Thanks to muscle-building magazines, most think they need to do ten exercises per training session. Even worse, they think they need to do ten exercises per body part. While you might eventually benefit from more exercises, keep in mind that you won’t exactly be eating for big-time muscle growth. Training like you will be is only going to waste your adaptation potential for when you are ready. It’s like artificially creating a higher ceiling. If you start with little, then adapt, then you only need to add a little bit more to further challenge yourself. If you start high, then adapt, where do you go?

From full-body routines to body part splits, there are many ways to put exercises into a program. Not all of them are necessarily created equal either. Consider full


body routines on one end of the spectrum. On the other end there are body part splits. Now, even body part splits have variance as you can do something like back-biceps, chest-triceps, legs. Or back-triceps, legs, chest-biceps. You can even split things further. For now, we’ll just say if you’re cleaving the body into parts, you’re doing a split routine.

Total body routines are generally the most demanding type of training, as the entire system is used in one training session. This is a good thing for skinny-fat sufferers because it’s a very powerful, holistic signal. The drawback, however, is that they’re tough to recover from. Think of a full body training session as a fever of sorts—something that throws the entire body out of whack at once.

Split routines are more like colds; they are localized, not as systematic as a fever. While advanced body part splits give more attention and potential volume to individual muscles, this is usually a bit too much for a skinny-fat sufferer. Goes back to the whole "ceiling" thing. If you start out training with ten exercises per muscle group, where do you have to go afterwards? Often times, I recommend advanced splits be saved for those with solely aesthetic goals that also have a lot of experience (those that can stress their body enough to warrant a lower training and signaling frequency).

The best strategy for a natural dude erring towards aesthetics, in my opinion, is either a full body routine or an upper-lower body split. For the most part, I err to the upper-lower split, as it’s not too split-esque and not too whole-esque, which puts us in the middle. We can focus on the exercises that matter most, while also


benefiting from extra recovery (in comparison to a total body routine, where recovery is trickier). It also has other benefits we will get to shortly.

More focus less results When you make training sessions crammed, you get less results. Effort dwindles as a training session goes on. Whatever is first gets lots of attention and effort. If you put something really tough first, everything underneath tanks even more. You are what you do first in your training session. (A lot of squat-centric programs put the squat first. And guys wonder why their legs do fine while their upper body lags behind.)

We always train our back first when applicable. Always. Even though we might mix in other exercises via supersetting, a back exercise is always first. Most people? The do a press first because they think pressing is going to solve their problems by its lonesome. It won’t, and you should know that by now.

It might just be me, but I like going into every training session with one or two big goals. With the lower body, it’s usually one. Once you hit that goal, you know you did good things. With the upper body, it’s usually two—more movement patterns allow for more training without being totally gassed.


The general structure of training goes like this:

• Making progress on one or two bigger movements. • Sneaking in quality, non-fatiguing volume if needed. • Doing some extra work to facilitate movement and keep motor patterns

fresh. • Showing up every day.

Although it’s possible to squat and deadlift the same day and live to talk about, there’s enough overlap in between the muscles (and they improve much easier, too) that I think each should be given their own focal day. One day, improve your squat. Another day, improve your deadlift.

A – squat focused

B – deadlift focused

For the upper body, since movement patterns aren’t as competitive, you can focus on two non-competing movements. In other words, one press and one pull. Given that much emphasis is put on the back and chin-ups, they come first in the training session.

A – chin-up focused, incline press focused

B – pull-up focused, overhead press focused


This gives us four primary training days. We can alternate the upper body days and lower body days for best recovery. Upper gets taxed as lower rests. Lower rests as upper gets taxed.

A – deadlift focused

B – chin-up focused, incline press focused

C – squat focused

D – pull-up focused, overhead press focused

This is a crude shell, and much more detail will emerge, even blurring the upper/lower distinction we have now.

Optimal number of days It’s best to feel fresh going into a training session, so three days per week is ideal for starters. Having two days back to back to get your wits about yourself and to reinvigorate your training motivation is better than setting high expectations (training daily or something like that) and crashing and burning. Three days per week is an easy enough commitment to make happen, and sets good long-term training habits.


Sometimes people enjoy training four days per week though, which can also work. You’ll have less recovery time, which is something to think about though. Technically, working four days per week will be better for signaling, but it also increases the rate at which you’re expected progress. I tend to go with three days in the beginning, shifting to four at the stubborn fat level and beyond.

If you can only train twice per week, that’s better than nothing. It’s not really ideal, but sometimes constraints can be beneficial. Each day you go to the gym, you know you have to do damage and you’ll be fresh enough to do so. More on two day options in a future chapter.


Three days per week:

Week one: OFF – A – OFF – B – OFF – C – OFF

Week two: OFF – D – OFF – A– OFF – B – OFF

Week three: OFF – C – OFF – D – OFF – A – OFF

Repeat...

You’d ideally train three non-consecutive days, leaving two days to recover between the last session of each week and the first session of the next week. This is the classic MON-WED-FRI set-up. Of course, the days don’t matter. You can train TUES-THURS-SAT if you wanted or needed to. Just hold on-off-on-off-on-off-off pattern, rotating between the training days in sequence as each training day arrives.


Four days per week:

The added training day means you can train A, B, C, and D in one week. You

can make this happen three ways.

A – OFF – B – OFF – C – D – OFF

A – B – OFF – OFF – C – D – OFF

A – B – OFF – OFF – C – OFF – D


Installations: phases and extras You have the chance to install extras onto the base template. Consider the base template Install 0.0. You’d do Install 0.0 if you were in a severe time crunch or looking to do as little as possible. We already have a few other exercises that we mentioned that we need to program for, so the first upgrade is Install 1.0.


Install 1.0 1.0

A – deadlift focused, light squat, calves + abs

B – chin-up focused, incline press focused, unilateral floor press + inverted rows

C – squat focused, light hinge, calves + abs

D – pull-up focused, overhead press focused, curls + push-ups

1.0 is a great basic install for friendly development all around. It sets the stage for just about every future install. The lines are clear cut between upper and lower body, which makes for the best recovery.

You can figure out the details by checking out the next install (which is dissected) and then subtracting what is omitted.


Install 2.0 2.0

A – deadlift focused, perfect chin, light squat, perfect push-up, calves + abs

B – chin-up focused, incline press focused, unilateral floor press + inverted rows

C – squat focused, perfect chin, light hinge, perfect push-up, calves + abs

D – pull-up focused, overhead press focused, curls + push-ups

Install 2.0 is one that I recommend doing. It’s loaded with body weight extras even on lower body days, and with two exercises that are going to signal for not only fat loss, but also the fabled "X" physique.

Of course, one does not simply walk into Install 2.0 without a plan. Considering that I just harped over needing more recovery, and this split basically trounces recover with the frequency of certain movements, let’s clear up the loose ends.


THE DETAILS

The green symbols will make sense soon enough. Note: the warm-up and cool down are explained in the Mastering the Fundamental Human Movement Patterns and Perfecting Posture Guide.


DAY A A) Money hinge: Conventional deadlift – [4 x 5] 1 x 3-5

• Work up to a max set of 3-5 reps

A2) Graceful BW: Perfect push-up

• Do an easy amount of reps in between each set of the money hinge

B1) Smooth squat: Front squat – [1 x 5] 3 x 6-8

• Work up to three sets of 6-8 reps, keeping the workload lower than a max level

B2) Graceful BW: Perfect chin-up

• Do one or two reps in between each set of squats. If you can’t yet do one rep, go for a rocket wing hold for five seconds. (Rocket wings are explained in the Fundamental Movement Guide.)

C1) Calves: Donkey calf raise (or any calf exercise) – 2 x 20

• Do slow reps, focus more on feel

C2) Gymnastics Abs Circuit – 4 exercises, 10-20 reps each


DAY B A1) Vertical pull: Chin-ups – Ten consecutive reps or [2 x 5] 3 x 5-6

• If you can’t yet do five, work to ten consecutive repetitions • If you can do five, add weight and work up to three sets of 5-6 reps

A2) Horizontal press: 30° incline press – [2 x 5] 3 x 5-6

• Work up to three sets of 5-6 reps

B1) Smooth curl: Barbell curls – 3 x 8-10


B2) Smooth press: Unilateral floor press – 3 x 6-8



DAY C A1) Money squat: Back squat – [4 x 5] 1 x 5-8

• Work up to a max set of 5-8 reps

A2) Graceful BW: Perfect chin-up

• Do one or two reps in between each set of squats. If you can’t yet do one rep, go for a rocket wing hold for five seconds.

B1) Smooth hinge: Romanian deadlift – [1 x 6] 3 x 6-8


B2) Graceful BW: Perfect push-up

• Do an easy amount of reps in between each set of the money hinge

C1) Calves: Donkey calf raise (or any calf exercise) – 2 x 20

• Do slow reps, focus more on feel

C2) Gymnastics Abs Circuit – 4 exercises, 10-20 reps each


DAY D A1) Vertical pull: Pull-ups – Ten consecutive reps or increase max reps

• Work up to 10 consecutive repetitions • Once you can do 10 consecutive repetitions, push for a higher one set max

A2) Vertical press: Overhead press – [2 x 5] 3 x 5-8

• Work up to three sets of 5 to 8 reps

B1) Smooth pull: Inverted rows – 3 x 8-10

• Work up to three sets of 8-10 reps, keeping the workload lower than a max level • Use more difficult variations when the workload gets easy

B2) Push-ups – 3 x 8-10

• Work up to three sets of 8-10 reps, keeping the workload lower than a max level • Use more difficult variations when the workload gets easy


Making Progress

GOAL #1: Pick an easy starting weight The most important part of slow-cooking strength gains is picking a weight that you can easily manage the first workout with. Don’t be a hero. Pick something relatively easy. Be conservative. There are people out there that run programs that start with nothing but the empty bar. You have to ease yourself into training. Pick a weight that you can complete with ease within the entry repetition zones.

If you have some training history under your belt, I recommend starting over from scratch. Seriously. If you’re skinny-fat and have been training for a while, you’ve been doing something wrong. Pick an easy weight, run the program with this progression, and let it do its job.

Of course, you can always ignore this, get hurt, stall early, remain frustrated, and sulk in your skinny-fatness for another century. That’s your choice.

GOAL #2: Pick the right rate of progress The common barbell programs out there today generally recommend adding five pounds to the bar every time you train. Squat 100 pounds day one, squat 105 pounds day two. This consistent increase on a session to session basis is known as linear progress.


Linear progress works. And then it doesn’t.

With linear progress, you’d likely continue on for a little while, only to fizzle out down the road. Everyone fizzles out eventually, no matter the method of progress, but most with subpar genetics (and without shoving food down their face) don’t often make it that far on a strict linear progress regimen. This hearkens back to a concept we talked about at the beginning: everyone has a different bookcase.

It stops working because you outwork your capacity to adapt. There comes a point when the body throws the cards on the table and say, “I’m out. I can’t do this. I can’t change rapidly enough to accommodate the increasing weight. It was fine at first because it was kind of easy. Now though? Can’t do it.” At some point, injecting too much of a pathogen is going to get your sick, not make you immune.

The problem with the five pound linear logic is twofold. First, five pounds is an arbitrary mass. Second, it doesn’t respect differences between upper body and lower body.

Five pounds is a stupid weight Weight increments are manmade. The body has no conception of a pound or kilo. They’re simply amounts bundled together to the point where everyone said,


“Yeah, that sounds about right. That’s a pound.” (Of course, a kilo has more logic behind it, but it’s the same premise.)

But because we live in a commercial world, and 2.5 pound plates are often the lowest increment plates we have at our disposal, the answer then becomes to add the 2.5 pounds on each side of the bar every training session. Lo and behold, that’s the magical philosophy behind adding 5 pounds to the bar every training session.

Most mortals find that sustaining progress on upper body lifts at a clip of 5 pounds per session is simply too demanding. The muscles of the upper body are smaller and weaker than the lower body's, so they tap out on strength faster. The logical thing to do is to add less weight to the bar, but that’s impossible unless you have fractional plates. Instead of spending boatloads of legit fractional plates, head over to McMaster Carr and buy their plumbing washers.

You can get some here.

You can buy fractional weight plates, but they cost bundles. Two inch plumbing washers fit nicely over the bar and weigh around 10oz apiece. Put two on each side of the bar, and you’re looking at just about 2.5 pounds added to the bar total. You can even add one to each side to add around one pound the bar total.

This, of course, doesn’t come without hiccups. Progressing at a slower pace is less sexy. Who wants to add one pound to the bar and take forever to get strong


http://www.mcmaster.com/#91081a046/=od2xgl

when you can add five pounds to the bar and get strong(er) quick(er)? The smart person, that’s who.

Before we go further, it’s best to dissect the set and rep scheme within to program.

GOAL #3: Understanding the sets, reps, and warm-ups Typically, in any program, you see “number x number.” For instance, 5x5 is a popular scheme. Old time strength nut, and idol to Arnold Schwarzenegger, Reg Park used a 5x5 scheme. The 5x5 scheme is well known and goes as far back as Doug Hepburn in the mid 1900’s—it’s really the most basic and true protocol around.

Although Reg Park classified his scheme as 5x5, it was actually two warm-up sets with 5 reps and then three work sets with the maximum weight for the day. So if the incline press workout was supposed to be with 165 pounds, the workout might end up looking something like this:

• 5 x 95 • 5 x 135 • 3 x 5 x 165

Some would write that as a 5x5 workout, but in reality, it’s really only a 3x5 workout. Sticking with one weight and doing it many times is known as doing sets


across. If you’re asked to do many sets at a static weight (sets across), I’ll also sometimes call this your work sets, which is to differentiate it from your warm-up sets. So with the workout above, it’d be better to say, “Work up to three sets of five reps using two warm-up sets with five reps.”

Perhaps best written, [2x5], 3x5. Translation: do two escalating warm-up sets with five reps, then stick with a weight for three sets and five reps. If you aren’t all that strong yet (you will be in the future, don’t fret) in a given lift, you might not be able to escalate the warm-up. For instance, if you’re just squatting 65 pounds (which is fine—it doesn’t matter where you start, it matters where you finish), you warm-up sets might be with just the bar.

We use brackets to signify escalating warm-up sets—escalating meaning that the weight on the bar should increase with every set.

No matter how strong you are, ALWAYS START WITH THE EMPTY BAR FOR ANY EXERCISE. Even the strongest people in the world start with the empty bar. Seriously! Watch Olympic weightlifters. They grab the bar and do their movements to get the blood flowing. They throw a little weight on and gradually increase the weight. You’re never advanced enough that you can forget about this prep work.

Most barbell lifts will have some kind of warm-up recommended. For other movements, it’s always a good idea to get the blood flowing, and it always depends on how good you are with the exercise in question. If you can’t yet do


one chin-up, then the warm-up will be different than if you’re doing chin-ups with 50 pounds attached to your waist. Use your judgment here, but for just about every exercise, you want to do something to get the muscles warm.

USING THE SYMBOLS Within the program, take note of the symbols. They correspond with a particular go-to method of progress, and those methods have the same symbols attached to them below.


GOAL #5: Understand

progress on the

big(ger) lifts

!

Look for the primary symbols. Also, if a symbol in the red box has a subscript (like this 1) that means there is more than one progression that can be used, and each usually go in tandem to a certain degree. Make sure you check both out to see which progression is the best suited for your situation.


1 +5 and +2.5 POUND PROGRESS

For lower body money lifts, you can get away with adding five pounds per training session for the first few sessions. These lifts are all about working up to one maximal set.

• Session one: 1 x 5 x 95 • Session two: 1 x 5 x 100 • Session three: 1 x 5 x 105 • Session four: 1 x 5 x 110

For upper body barbell pressing lifts, you can get away with adding 2.5 pounds per training session for the first few sessions. These are all about working up to three maximal sets—sets across.

Metric: If you’re in metric-land, this is about one kilo per session.

• Session one: 3 x 5 x 95 • Session two: 3 x 5 x 97.5 • Session three: 3 x 5 x 100 • Session four: 3 x 5 x 102.5


("Training session" is a loose term here, but it refers to anytime an exercise comes around in the rotation. If you’re training the upper-lower split, and going at it three times per week, sometimes you won’t train a specific money lift in a week, so it’s not always about progressing weekly on a specific lift; just whenever it rolls around again.)

Keep in mind, you can only do the 2.5 pound increments if you have the right plates. You shouldn’t make the bar unbalanced by only adding weight to one side.

Work sets and reps stay constant, weight increases five pounds per session, and warm-up sets come along for the ride as your strength increases. This rate of progress will soon curtail though, which is why I recommend a slower rate of progress all around, hence the repetition zones.


2 +REP PROGRESS Although you can get away with adding 5 or 2.5 pounds to the bar every time the lift comes around in the rotation, I only recommend doing this for the first few training sessions. Granted, this instant gratification with more weight can become addictive, so be careful. At the first sign of difficulty (preferably before), move to the one rep method of progress, only adding weight after conquering the zone for each specific exercise.

You might be able to add weight to the bar every session for a while, but you’re going to hit a wall. If you’re skinny-fat, that wall will come sooner rather than later. When this happens, most run around without a plan, swimming in uncertainty and doubt, not knowing what to do next. The answer isn’t to jump on some fancy program, it’s to dial it back and progress incrementally but slower.

Almost every exercise has some sort of zone attached to it. A "zone" is a repetition range, not a static number. So if you’re slated to do 3 x 8-10, then your first workout you pick a weight you can easily do 3 x 8 with (the lowest repetition number in the zone). You do 3 sets of 8 reps at 50 pounds (or whatever weight). The next time you do ( 9 – 8 – 8 x 50 ). Then ( 9 – 9 – 8 x 50 ). You keep adding one repetition per set until you reach the top end of the zone. It would take eight training sessions before you increased the weight on the bar in the example


above, but each session you’d be doing more than the previous session, and that’s what it’s all about.

When you reach the top end of the zone, you add 2.5 pounds for upper body lifts (metric: one kilo). Make it 5 pounds for lower body lifts (metric: two kilos). Sample barbell curl progression:

• Workout one: 45x8, 45x8, 45x8 • Workout two: 45x9, 45x8, 45x8 • Workout three: 45x9, 45x9, 45x8 • Workout four: 45x9, 45x9, 45x9 • Workout five: 45x10, 45x9, 45x9 • Workout six: 45x10, 45x10, 45x9 • Workout seven: 45x10, 45x10, 45x10 // add 2.5 pounds • Workout eight: 47.5x8 47.5x8, 47.5x8...

This method of progress is a must if you aren’t willing to spring for the plumbing washers on upper body lifts. Keep in mind, the rate of progress stays the same.

With the lower body money lifts, since there is only one set, you simply increase the weight after you hit the top end of that one set.

• Workout one: 100 x 3 • Workout two: 100 x 4 • Workout three: 100 x 5


• Workout four: 105 x 3 • Workout five: 105 x 4 . . .

To recap: one rep to the workload per training session, increase the weight only when the top end of the repetition range is hit for every set.


Smooth progress With lower-body money lifts and upper-body pressing, you can be a bit more aggressive on the progression. Built into some other lifts is the idea of smooth progress. It follows the same rules, but I recommend starting with the rep-by-rep strategy from the beginning. You want to make progress on these lifts—it’s not that these exercises are any less important—it’s just that they shouldn’t be pushed in a way that overly taxes your recovery.


Graceful progress

With the secret bodyweight exercises included on the lower-body days, these are meant to stimulate, not annihilate. The workload depends on how good you are, but every rep should be smooth. I recommend no more than two repetitions for chin-ups, no matter if you can do more than ten. Push-ups can swing to ten if you can do more than twenty.

If you can’t do any chin-ups, then hold the top of the chin-up position for five seconds. (Check out the Fundamental Movement Guide for rocket wing information.) If you’re doing less than ten push-ups, make it one single push-up.

Do these gracefully. Use a full range of motion and have control over the entire movement. It shouldn’t be fast. It shouldn’t be slow motion. It should be graceful. If someone was watching you, they would say, “Wow, that looked easy.” Or, it should look like you have absolute control over what you’re doing. Perhaps the best way to describe this graceful concept is to show you a video of a muscle-up done by Andreas Aguilar. Now, if you aren’t familiar with the muscle-up, you should YouTube around. Note that most muscle-ups are done violently, swinging, and without much control. Then when you watch Andreas, “It looks so easy.” That’s kind of the tempo and feel you want these reps to have.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2q8KMnWUsvg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2q8KMnWUsvg

FEEL progress When it comes to calf exercises and ab exercises, the most important part is feel. It’s easy to do half baked ab exercises where you wriggle like a worm and don’t fully rely on muscular effort. Same goes with calf exercises. On these, make sure you feel and control the movement. Add weight or increase difficulty or increase repetitions whenever you want as long as you maintain that dominance.


Bodyweight progress NEED-TO-KNOW With the chin-up, pull-up, inverted row, and push-up, there are many ways to go about training them, each of which depends on your level of proficiency. Unlike barbell exercises, you’re "stuck" with your bodyweight on bodyweight exercises. This is like being "stuck" with a 315 pound barbell. What if you can’t lift 315 pounds? What if you can only lift it once? How do you arrange sets? Reps? How do you make progress?

Not a

progression, but

important stuff for the progression

below.

Read.

Good question. So with chin-ups, pull-ups, push-ups, and inverted rows, this will be your guide.


• Start by testing into a baseline number of continuous reps you can do with ease for each exercise.

In other words: do a set of chin-ups with perfect form (full range of motion) and see how many reps you get. During the set, chances are you’re going to go through three phases: easy reps, grinding reps, failed rep(s).

Grinding reps feel just like they sound. They’re slower, forced. You’ll only fail one repetition unless a spotter helps you complete more past failure (not recommended, not one bit). Your objective with this test set is to find out how many reps you can do with ease. We need to start light and build our way into this program.

Say you got four reps but the third and fourth rep were eyeball busting—grinding. You’d then start with TWO REPETITIONS, because that’s how many you got before feces hit the fan. For now, I’m going to assume you got less than ten repetitions. If you got more, hold onto your pants—we’ll get to advanced progression techniques in a little.

As we move along, it’s important you see every exercise separately. You might be rank beginner on the pull-up and more advanced on the push-up. This is normal, and each exercise will use a different method.


<10 REP PROGRESSION Using your “ease” number, apply it to the basic progression strategy.

• 1-2 reps -> 8 total sets, work until 8 x 3 • 3-4 reps -> 5 total sets, work until 5 x 5 • 5-6 reps -> 4 total sets, work until 4 x 8 • 7-8 reps -> 3 total sets, work until 3 x 10

So if you can do three reps with ease, but four or five reps is tough, start with three. This puts you in the second category, doing five total sets.

Take your initial number (3) and apply it to the five sets to give you a workload of five total sets @ three reps per set. You then work towards 5 x 5 using rep-by-rep progress.

• Workout one: 3-3-3-3-3 • Workout two: 4-3-3-3-3 • Workout three: 4-4-3-3-3 • Workout four: 4-4-4-3-3 • Workout five: 4-4-4-4-3 • Workout six: 4-4-4-4-4 • Workout seven: 5-4-4-4-4...


If you can only do one set of one rep (meaning you get gassed from that one rep), then scale one rep sets until you hit ten total.

• Workout one: 1 • Workout two: 1-1 • Workout three: 1-1-1 • Workout four: 1-1-1-1 • Workout five: 1-1-1-1-1...

Once you hit ten, then you’d go into the first category of the original progression. If you can’t do any repetitions, or you can’t do at least one repetition with ease, I hope you were smart enough to spring for the Hyper Pack to get the Perfecting the Pull-up Guide, which covers basic pulling strength for the chin-up and pull-up.

Here’s another example from the original chart: say you can only do one “ease” repetition. Start with eight sets of one repetition. Add one repetition to each set until you get to ten sets of two reps.

• Workout one: 1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1 • Workout two: 2-1-1-1-1-1-1-1 • Workout three: 2-2-1-1-1-1-1-1 • Workout four: 2-2-2-1-1-1-1-1...

This is the simplest way to improve your abilities over time. It might seem “slow,” but that’s what you want. Trust me on this. You’d be amazed at what going from


three chin-ups in one set to ten chin-ups in three sets does for your body composition and physique. The last thing you want to do is interfere with your ability to do this by getting greedy and trying to sneak reps. Slow and steady wins.

<10 REP PROGRESS takes you from the ground to being able to do ten repetitions on any exercise. I recommend following <10 REP PROGRESS until it ends for pull-ups, but for chin-ups, I’ve been known to ditch <10 REP PROGRESS around 6-8 reps in order to add weight.

Once you’re fairly experienced, developing lower rep strength can boost you through higher rep plateaus. This is why I think you should stay on course with pull-ups, as weighted chin-ups will have some carry over to your pull-up abilities.

Keep in mind, however, higher repetition exercise prepares the connective tissues for heavier work. If you have any hint of elbow pain or shoulder pain after loading the chin-up, you should dial back and continue your higher repetition <10 REP PROGRESS.

From my own experience, however, I’ve found that loading the chin-up tremendously improved my overall abilities. I got stuck at a lower repetition range for a long time, but once I added weight, I blew past that range.


Loading the push-up and inverted row are hard without a partner, so I recommend switching to more challenging variations with these exercises instead of adding. We’ll get to this soon.

On the chin-up, you add weight with something called a dip belt. It buckles around your waist and has an opening to feed a chain through. Loop the chain through the weight plate, through the opening on the dip belt, and then connect the chain to itself so the weight dangles from the belt.

Once you’re in weighted territory, you’re back to loading it and progressing it like any other upper body exercise. When you add weight to your bodyweight exercises, they become "barbell" exercises, for our intents and purposes. Since you’re just moving into the territory, your warm-up sets will likely be two sets with just your bodyweight.

As you advance, I think the washers come in handy for adding weight below the 2.5 pound mark. At some point, squeezing out little progress is better than no progress. Adding one pound or so to your upper body lifts is progress that should be gladly accepted. That’s just about five pounds per month, which adds up quick. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: don’t rush strength—don’t be greedy.

This might be stupid to say (but it might not be), start your weighted bodyweight exercises with 2.5 pounds (1 kilo) attached to your waist—no more!


1 +TOUGH PROGRESS For exercises like the push-up and inverted row, adding weight is challenging. It’s best, instead, to pick a more difficult variation. For this, I tend to dichotomize push-ups and inverted rows into their own category—a category that exists in contrast to chin-ups and pull-ups.

Once you can do more than ten reps on inverted rows and push-ups, move onto a more challenging variation. Your money zone for these exercises, then, is thirty total repetitions (3 x 10).

When you move onto a more challenging variation, your reps might drop below ten. Don’t fret. Simply work them back up with +REP PROGRESS (or something similar).

You might not be able to do 6-8 reps, depending on the new variation. If you want to use +REP PROGRESS, set a baseline number of repetitions, do that amount for three sets, and then strive to increase your workload by one rep every training session until you reach 3 x 10.

Alternatively, you can do thirty repetitions in as many sets as it takes, gradually reducing the number of sets over time. So if you move onto a harder push-up


variation and you get 8/6/7/6/3, you’d then try to condense the total workload (thirty reps) into less sets over time.

So, for the most part, I think that once you hit ten repetitions on any given variation, it’s time to move onto a more challenging exercise. That is, of course, unless you’re intentionally doing higher repetitions. In that case, I have something for you.


2 +DELORME PROGRESS2 On some of the bodyweight exercises, one you hit a certain cusp of ability, you can use this advanced method of progress to ratchet up to a final set of high(er) repetitions. You should be beyond the beginner phase (doing more than ten repetitions) before considering this.

Most people will be able to crank out more than ten push-ups, at which point progress becomes a little tough to wrap your head around. Usually doing a bodyweight exercise for higher repetitions isn’t really all that "dangerous" enough to signal for the necessity of muscle building.

At this point, I recommend switching to a more challenging exercise (+TOUGH PROGRESS with push-ups and inverted rows), adding weight (+REP PROGRESS for chin-ups), or boosting the repetitions to Super Saiyan heights (+DELORME PROGRESS).

That last one may seem like an anomaly. Why boost repetitions higher if higher repetitions aren’t all that effective for muscle building? Two reasons. First, by doing it within the confines of my program, this tactic will often be alternated with a complementary exercise that’s trained for lower repetitions, so it’s not like we’re going to forego muscle supragravitational signaling all together.


For example, once you can do ten pull-ups, I recommend doing one day of weighted chin-ups, and then one day of higher repetition pull-ups. Doing weighted chin-ups and pull-ups with the program given would be overkill, so we can tit-for-tat them—one heavier and lower rep, the other lighter and higher rep. This delivers a different stimulus each training day.

Second, higher repetition bodyweight exercises, for reasons I can’t explain, seem to do wonderful things for muscle building and body composition as long as they’re icing on the cake and not the cake itself (making sure you’re not just getting the tit . . . er . . . you know what I mean). It could be because of the relative strength aspect of bodyweight exercises, or the metabolic fatigue that flushes blood and nutrients to the area—I’m honestly not certain. But I’m not one to ignore results, so it’s definitely worth trying when you’re beyond beginner level.

The method I like to use for this is an alteration of a method popularized by Tom DeLorme, which looks something like this:

• 50% 10RM for Ten Reps • 70-75% 10RM for Five Reps • 100% 10RM for Ten Reps

Basically, a lighter set with higher reps first. A medium set with lower reps second. Then going for broke on the last set.


The alteration for us then looks like this:

• 50% max reps • 25% max reps • 100% max reps

Since I don’t often like shooting blind, I enjoy using something simple like +REP PROGRESS to guide the last set, always looking to tack just one more repetition onto the final set.

For instance, if you can do 15 chin-ups, you’d arrange your sets something like...

• 8 reps • 4 reps • Try for 16 chin-ups

And then if you got 16, your next training session, you’d try for 17. Then 18. It’s a little bit more structured than going for broke every week, as you’ll often burn yourself out trying to do that.

Once you’re doing weighted chin-ups and weighted dips, don’t be afraid to carry this high with push-ups and inverted rows. If you can rock 30-50 push-ups, feel free to give +DELORME a try for a change of pace. Training heavy all the time with +TOUGH PROGRESS can run you down, so don’t be afraid to throw in an Easter egg like this every once in a while.


Adding more to the warm-up and choosing The warm-up sets are there to accumulate volume, as well as warm-up the tissues. There’s little reason to calculate volume on a session to session basis for our purposes, so when you hear me talk about accumulating volume or doing more volume, I simply mean accumulating more total work.

Ideally, your warm-up sets shouldn’t fatigue you for your work sets, but they should escalate in intensity. Your last might walk the border of challenging and slightly fatiguing, but it shouldn’t gas you for your work sets.

Work sets are your "meat" sets. They are the one that help us track progress. Warm-up sets come before the work sets and will change over time with your strength level. As you get stronger, you might need to do more warm-up sets with lower reps, but you should still do the warm-up called for.

So, for instance, let’s take the squat in the program. [2x5], 3x5. Say you’re a beginner, and your warm-up looks like this: 5 x 95, 5 x 135, and then you go into your three work sets at 155, which looks like this: 3 x 5 x 155.

As you get stronger and your work sets are using a weight of, say, 275 pounds, your beginner warm-up of 5 x 95, 5 x 135 won’t really provide the same preparation. You’ll have to do a little more.


Maybe

• 5 x 135, • 5 x 185, • 3 x 225

and then hit your 3 x 5 x 275. As you can see, you still hit two decent warm-up sets with five repetitions, but you added another set with lower repetitions before your work sets.

Now, you could have kept the repetitions constant and did 5 x 225 for your last warm-up set if you didn’t think it would fatigue you too much for your work sets. This is where the warm-up has play, and where everyone is different because everyone needs different things to feel ready for the work sets. And this is precisely why warm-up sets aren’t often used as a marker of progress (why I said we don’t calculate volume).

Gauge your progress on your work sets. As long as you get in the warm-up sets called for in some fashion, you’re on the right track. I would advise against using too low of a weight on your warm-up sets though. They should be heavy enough to prepare the tissues for the work ahead, but light enough not to overly fatigue.


10

LOOSE STRENGTH ENDS

Resetting At some point, you’re going to fail to increase the reps one workout on your weighted lifts. When this happens, try the workout one more time. If you complete the workload, keep going as if nothing happened. But if you fail the workload twice in a row (in two consecutive workouts), you need to reset. Drop the weight by 15% and do the same exact progression, working your way up until you stall again.

If you do this right, the initial stall and re-stall will take months to achieve. Don’t get hung up over stalls; embrace them. They mean you’re getting stronger, and stronger is good.

At that point, you should have gained a considerable amount of muscle and you should be free of the initial skinny-fat grasp. Programming will have to take on more complexity, and that’s more SOLDIER 1.0 and beyond realm.


Deload Ethos There are no deloads (weeks off or anything of the sort) written in the program because I don’t think they should be taken unless needed. If you’re training and making awesome progress, there’s no reason stop because some arbitrary document on the internet says so.

If you’re failing to make all of your lifts for consecutive sessions, take one week and only do your warm-ups. So go through the motions, just ditch the work sets. For your body weight exercises, cut the volume in half.

If you already have some experience If, by chance, you’re reading this and have experience with the barbell lifts—enough that you’re beyond coming at this from a newbie perspective—I recommend starting the entire progression over from scratch. Two reasons why.

First, if you’ve toyed around with a barbell for a while, and still consider yourself skinny-fat, your initial training didn’t go as well as it should have. Second, the methods of progression and frequency of training the lifts (perhaps the split) are undoubtedly different.

Think of this as a fresh start.


Two days per week Condensing everything into two sessions look something like this:

DAY ONE

Conventional deadlift Chin-up Incline press Push-up Curl Abs

DAY TWO

Pull-up Overhead press Unilateral floor press Back squat or front squat Inverted row Abs


Three days per week, but with back-to-back days If you can only train three days per week with two days being back to back, here’s what I recommend. Train A and B back to back.

A – chin-up, incline press, curls + unilateral floor press

B – money squat, money deadlift, calves + abs

C – pull-up, overhead press, inverted rows + push-ups

Yeah, you only train your lower body once per week, but everything essential is crammed in there. The reason why squats come before deadlifts, even though the deadlift is the prioritized lift, is because squats after deadlifts generally end horrifically. The other way works better.

About Fat Grips If you have a thick bar, or thick grip attachment like Fat Gripz, use them for curls. You can also use them for pressing exercises, as they tend to be more forgiving on the shoulder joint. Who doesn’t want healthy shoulders? Thick grips force you to squeeze harder, which usually makes for greater activation of every muscle up the chain involved in the movement. Personally, I use Fat Gripz for all of my curls and presses.


http://www.fatgripz.com/429.html

http://www.fatgripz.com/429.html

11

FAT LOSS, INSTALLATION 3.0 and beyond

If muscle is built in order to survive, what does that say about body fat? Here’s where we take a look at more than energy balance.

hy now? Why not talk about fat loss first, especially when the goal is the solid base? Aside from it being much easier logistically now, being an install, the bulk of your focus should be on strength training. Although

we sprinkle in fat-loss goodies, the majority of fat-loss progress comes from nutrition. Get strength training going, get your nutrition ironed out, and good things will happen. Sprinkle the extra fat-loss work on top, and you have the ultimate recipe.

W


What Body Fat Means for Survival Body fat isn’t dangerous to survival when the extent of your physical activity is sitting down on a couch to catch the 11 o’ clock news. But what if you lived a more demanding life? What if your survival depended on regularly running from lions? Carrying around those fat sacks suddenly hinder survival.

Exercise burns calories, sure, but not that many. Most people can forego the Tastykakes and see the same net caloric reduction they would see after running on the treadmill for two hours. (If you go by the treadmill calorie burning counters, you’d probably reach 300ish calories. Eat two Twinkies, and you’re looking at 300 calories. Two hours of work, only to mitigate two Twinkies.)

Training, in this sense, is more than simply burning calories. It’s “stimulating” the body to understand that weighing more (or carrying more useless [useless here depends on the context, but fat sacks aren’t useful for sprinting] material) is hurting survival potential.

It’s not uncommon to seek out a massive calorie burning activity in order to lose weight, as if burning calories was the only determinant in weight gain or loss. But this isn’t true, and it’s a shortsighted view. For instance, lifting weights "burns calories." It’s activity. It’s movement. Anytime you’re moving around, you’re using energy. But lifting weights, despite "burning calories," provokes weight gain by stimulating muscular growth. This is known as a negative feedback loop.


The body is regulated big time by negative feedback loops. For instance, look at the dreaded survival mode. Survival mode is a term used to describe what happens to the body when someone tries to lose weight by dropping calories absurdly low. By all mathematical logic, this would then lead to weight loss. Less calories coming in, more calories going out. It all makes sense on paper.

The body, however, isn’t quite as easy as simple arithmetic. Governed by these negative feedback loops, the body senses lower calorie and nutrient intake, so it becomes stingier with what it has. It’s the investment banker all over again. No income? You won’t be as apt to throw your saving away at strip clubs.

Just because something has a metabolic cost doesn’t mean it’s in the name of fat loss. If our muscles grow to better survive an external stressor, we can lose fat to better survive an external stressor. It all depends on how the body interprets the stimulus and then signals for adaptation.

So training follows the same rules. What does the body "think" about what is happening, and how is it going to adapt to survive? From a physiological standpoint, low-intensity running (typically known as cardio) utilizes fat as a fuel source better than just about any other exercise, which is something to consider. But, once again, this takes us back to the type of adaptations in response to the activity.

Exercise is more than calories. Exercise signals a cascade of responses throughout the body which have the potential to hint at other things.


How Signaling Affects Body Fat Say you run ten hill sprints. Sure, you’re burning calories. But what do the hill sprints mean to your body? Probably that you’re either escaping danger or trying to catch food—two things essential for survival. Aztecs didn’t trek up and down mountains for a hardcore workout. Long distance running, we now know, was an integral part of persistence hunting. (Persistence hunting involves injuring an animal and chasing it for miles upon miles across the savannah. Humans that can endure win out, because humans sweat. Sweat is essentially built in air conditioning. Most animals, however, can’t sweat, so they fry from heat exhaustion.) Running wasn’t recreational. It was necessary for food, which is necessary for survival.

The body will rarely do

something that will make itself

less able to survive as long as

signals aren’t conflicting.

So does fat loss come from the body’s recognition that fat is damaging its immediate ability to survive? Or from the calories it uses for energy? In my opinion, likely both. And I say that because the other side of the equation is nutrition. No matter how much you sprint, the body won’t lose weight if you’re consistently overfeeding. Again, from a survival standpoint, you wouldn’t overfeed unless it was necessary. So the body thinks it will need the energy in the future. Grossly underfeeding yourself doesn’t help either because the body assumes famine. It will hold on to, and be diligent with, what energy is left.

This makes it tough to pinpoint any one thing in particular because there are many signals being sent to the body at once. This is the nature of emergence, and everything having a hand in everything. The only thing we can do is be as comprehensive as possible—fix nutrition, and fix training.


The bigger implications of fat loss This all gets very confusing because there are a lot of signals being interpreted by the body. The more the signals conflict, the tougher time you’ll have going in any one direction. With body composition, we have our first goal, which is to build muscle. With fat loss, we have three goals:

• Do exercise that mobilizes and oxidizes (burns) fat • Do exercises that signal to the body that being lean is necessary, and excess

body fat is hindering survival • Do things that make the muscles cells take nutrient precedence over fat

cells

This translates into three courses of action:

• Moving the body through space slowly and steadily (walking) • Moving the body through space aggressively (sprinting and other like

activities) • Strength training like you mean it

Moving slowly (walking, light jogging, anything that can be sustained for a good while) is the best way for the body to use fat as an energy source. As exercise intensity increases, the body pulls more from its carbohydrate stores. There’s a whole world where higher intensity exercise can be beneficial for fat loss, because it impacts hormones and does some other neat things, but that’s more for the stubborn fat loss phase in SOLDIER 2.0.


98.7% of people that jump into high intensity interval training (HIIT) aren’t ready for it, and don’t adjust their routine accordingly. What happens?

Injuries. Derailed progress. Stupidity.

HIIT is one of the most intense forms of training because you’re working more than you’re resting. This taxes every metabolic system in addition to the muscular and nervous system. For those without proper preparation, it’s like jumping into a frozen pond. System shock.

I typically recommend HIIT for those at the stubborn fat phase as long as it’s prepared for, and your routine is adjusted so that you don’t set yourself up for injury. Part of this preparation is embedded within this resource, so that you can seamlessly transition into SOLDIER 2.0.

Keeping clear lines and eliminating noise This isn’t to say that running one mile is going to ruin your body. It won’t. But intense training for middle-long-distance running is going to go against muscle because the two adaptations compete with each other.

For the body to get good at chasing down an animal that lures you across the savannah for 20 miles, you can’t have a lot of excess body mass, period. This includes muscle. You’ll waste away, and your energy demands will be impossible to meet. This is why distance runners aren’t often all that muscled. You simply


don’t need much muscle strength and power to jaunt across the universe, and excess muscle is nothing but excess baggage.

On each end of the spectrum though—walking and fresh sprinting (or mutations of each)—your body isn’t getting conflicting messages. It won’t be torn in deciding whether or not to build muscle. Sprinting and other like activities even go for the creation of muscle at times, as muscle contributes to running faster. Walking isn’t demanding enough to wither away muscle tissue either.

Now, this isn’t to say you absolutely can’t be a distance runner and have muscle. Some people are able to walk this line, but most of us on the genetically unfavorable side of muscle gain are better off not going there.

A little bit of aerobic training won’t kill you. But when you get into doing prolonged steady state aerobic sessions (50+ minutes) more than three days per week, you’re creating problems.

First, the adaptations of prolonged aerobic training go against what we’re training for. Second, it means you aren’t really expending most of your energy where it needs to be expended.

The primary signal sent to your body should be towards building muscle. Too much aerobic work and the body shifts adaptation means towards the functions that boost aerobic capacity. Since adaptation is finite, these changes compete with muscular changes, too.


Translation: some of your resources that would be going towards the muscular side of things are taken and given to the aerobic side of things; you won’t build as much muscle.

The Three Fat-Loss Installs For starters, we use three fat loss methods atop Install 2.0. Each subsequent install gets a little more demanding. Keep in mind, these methods aren’t the most important part of training. Strength training is the primary focus and will build what you need most. This is the very, very useful extra, and chosen in a way that won’t destroy your strength progress.


Install 3.0 3.0strength Install 2.0

+

Walking for 30-40 minutes on non-strength training days (preferably on an incline treadmill), and walking more in general (preferably getting outside and enjoying fresh air).


Install 3.0 details

3.0 Most people fail because they send too many signals via training. Too many signals means a lot of noise—that fuzzy sound you get when tuning into a radio station.

So you might train hard, and lift some weights in a way that’s going to build you an "X" physique. Good. That’s a good signal. But if you add in high intensity interval sprints one day and low intensity, long duration aerobic work the next, you’re now sending three distinct "signals" to your body.

You’re sending one from standard barbell strength training. You’re sending one from your high intensity interval training. And you’re sending one from low intensity aerobic work. You’re not tuning into one radio station and things get fuzzy. We want to send one clear signal at the start. That’s all. One signal.

Mild walking won’t be intense enough to interfere, which is why we do it.

Some of the best athletes in the world fly themselves to beaches and simply walk along the shore as a means of mental and physical recovery. Walking is good for the soul. Instead of slugging out on your rest days and having your intestines rot into a comatose state, walk. Even on your training days, if you have some extra time, get outside and talk a walk. Brisk walking for the sake of walking never hurts. And this isn’t something I’d even call "training."


It’s always a good idea to encourage blood and lymph flow through your body to help cleanse and refresh our insides. This is why you can walk for the sake of walking anytime you want. If you’re walking for the sake of walking, go outside. Get fresh air. De-stress. Go to your happy place. If you’re walking for the sake of training, you can up the stakes a bit and use an incline treadmill.

Using the incline treadmill For most leisure walks, I recommend going outside. Anytime you want to, go out and get some air. Take a stroll around the neighborhood for 20-40 minutes. Have an hour lunch break? Maybe it takes you thirty minutes to relax and eat, what do you do with the extra thirty? How about you take a small walk? Any extra helps, and you can find cavities like this in your day to make good things happen.

You can walk outside for training too, but a treadmill has one primary benefit of use in the name of walking for the sake of training: it creates a constant incline. Inclines, more so than any other tweak, encourage the body to use more energy. So simply hop on a treadmill, jack up the incline, and move at a decent pace for 20-40 minutes three or four times per week. Walk fast enough to get your heart pumping, but slow enough to still be walking.

Obsessing about the details Don’t worry about timing (ie: walking in the morning or evening) or anything else right now. The goal is to solidify good habits by getting out there and moving


around regularly. Things change when questing against stubborn body fat, but for now, it’s all about using the least complex strategy. No need to make it complex if it doesn’t have to be.

You’ll feel awesome and rejuvenated after breaking a little sweat; revitalized and ready to tackle the world.

• Here are some things to keep in mind: • Lose yourself in some music when you do this stuff. Get a portable music

player with ear buds and jam away. Fifteen minutes will go like nothing. Use calm.com and meditate yourself into serenity.

• Once you get down to your solid base, after shedding your body fat, feel free to ditch the treadmill work. I still recommend relaxing walks because I’m all for their therapeutic benefits.

• You don’t need to have any kind of meal or anything to recover from walking. Walking is recovery in itself.


Install 4.0 4.0Install 3.0

+

Jump rope for ten minutes post-training.


install 4.0 details

4.0 One of the most old school ways to get “in shape” (whatever that means anymore) is to jump rope. It’s so non-fancy that you’ve probably forgotten about it. All you need is a rope and a small space, and you can jack your heart rate up while also having some fun. And yes, it will help you lose fat.

At first, put ten minutes on the clock and just go. Don’t think you’re going to jump for the ten minutes consecutively—always strive to prolong how long you can jump before resting. Set a time you can jump for—maybe thirty seconds or so—and then set a rest interval—maybe ten seconds or so. Try to repeat this work and rest interval until your timer ends. When you get good enough to do that, then reduce the rest time or increase the jump time.

As you get better, up the time to twenty minutes. Or, spike it.

Spiking normal jump rope sessions If you’re like me, you'll find repetitive activity boring. Some kind of repetition is necessary for fat-loss training though, so it’s not like we can escape it fully for now. What we can do is make it a bit less repetitive by spiking the training.

Go back to Install 2.0. Note how, on lower-body days, calf work and abdominal work are paired. There’s a reason for this. When you get into rope jumping, you have a choice. You can ditch the calf work, knowing that rope jumping is going to


be quite stressful to that area. Even if you don’t want to ditch the calf work, you can combine rope jumping and your abdominal work into one activity.

Instead of jumping until gassed, resting, and then repeating, spike the rest period with your abdominal exercises. This keeps your heart rate up and continues to stimulate your body, all while your legs rest for the next bout with the rope.

For instance:

• Jumping for thirty seconds • Set of abdominal exercise • Jumping for thirty seconds • Set of abdominal exercise • Repeat

Be sensible about things. Go as long as you can, rest until you feel good. Your heart rate won’t return to its absolute baseline, but you shouldn’t be puking in the trash can. The goal is to be able to go longer and rest a little less each time.


DAY C EXAMPLE

Squat Perfect chin-up Light hinge Perfect push-up Calf raises – optional Jump rope + abdominal work / 10-20 minutes

Finishing touches For Install 4.0, I recommend jumping rope after every training session if you’re training three days per week. (If you really enjoy the spiked jump rope method, feel free to also use it on your upper-body days, even though there is no programmed abdominal work.)

If you’re training four days per week, be a little bit more careful with recovery. Jump rope on your lower-body days, and maybe go with incline treadmill walking on your upper body days.

Also, don’t forget that you should still be walking. Walk on rest days, walk to get some fresh air. Walk.


Install 5.0 5.0Install 4.0

+

Jump rope for ten-twenty minutes post training on upper body days, sprint for twenty minutes on lower-body training days. Walk on rest days. Walk to get fresh air as much as possible.


Install 5.0 details

5.0 Sprinting is awesome because it complements strength training. The adaptations it demands are similar to, and useful for, lifting heavy things, and it also provides a metabolic hit.

Now, sprinting isn’t high intensity interval training (HIIT). Sprinting is running a short distance (100 meters or less, for our purposes), taking enough time to recover and get your wits about yourself, and then sprinting again. When you get into HIIT—which would essentially be the same “sprinting” activity, but with a short rest period, getting gassed, and probably puking in the nearest garbage can—you’re going to stress yourself in a way that makes it harder to recover

from, which is going to hinder strength gains.

There is a time and place for HIIT, if you need it. That’s down the line if you happen to get hung up on stubborn body fat though.

Sprinting, when done correctly, boosts strength gains. It’s an explosive activity that teaches us how to rapidly apply force to the ground—this gets transferred to lower-body lifts, which then boosts strength.

Nothing you do should hinder strength gains right now.


Sprinting semantics There are two big problems with sprinting. First, it usually requires travel and good weather. Incline treadmill sprints, while being a worthwhile substitute, aren’t really the same. (And potentially dangerous. All you have to do is set the treadmill speed to ludicrous speed, jump on, gauge the speed of the belt whirring below you, and then kick your legs into gear, and then hop off when you’re tired. Safe.)

Second, it’s a demanding form of exercise that most people aren’t ready to do without some preparation. This is why there’s a skipping sequence that’s sort of a sprint prep program built into the warm-up.

As a recap: If you haven’t sprinted in a while, you should prepare for legs and hamstrings for a few weeks. The first week of preparation focuses on the skipping progression:

• Butt kicks • A skips • High Knees • B skips

These skips go in order of hamstring involvement and should be done before any sprinting to get the legs loose.

Here’s a quick video: click here.


http://youtu.be/cD-M8izgOJ4

Here’s more of a tutorial and in depth explanation: click here.

These are included within the warm-up to every training session to prevent neglect.

Starting after week one, begin incorporating sprints at 50-60% of your perceived max. Week two, 70-80%. Week three, 80-90%. And then week four, just touch on 100%. After that, you can do multiple runs at 100%. For our goals, which are mostly metabolic (and not sport), stick to hill sprints. The angle of the hill lessens the stress on the hamstrings which reduces the likelihood of injury.

Implementing sprints Sprint post-workout on your lower body days. I like to do them directly after a training session while your muscles are still warm and ready to go.

Here’s how to do hill sprints:

• Find a big hill. • Stand at the bottom. • Run to the top. • Walk back down the hill. • Catch your wind for a minute or two. • Do it all over again.


http://youtu.be/JoPtZbYhZ4M

That’s "one rep." Don’t jog to the bottom or do crazy things in between reps to keep the heart rate elevated. This is sprinting, not high intensity interval training. And sure we can get caught up in details here: What about the angle of the hill? What about the distance? What about this and that? But just find the biggest, steepest hill you can that’s most convenient for you to go to. Nothing else matters because you aren’t going to do something that isn’t convenient or sustainable. Driving 30 minutes to find the perfect hill is nonsense. Find one nearby that is big enough. Bonus points available if you walk there.

Only do hill sprints on lower-

body days. On upper-body days,

stick to the jump rope for ten to

twenty minutes. You shouldn’t

sprint more than twice per week,

unless you’re asking the powers

that be to injure you.

Instead of counting the repetitions, get as many reps as you can in twenty minutes. Some days you might baby your rest periods and only get seven reps. Other days you might feel like a champion and get fifteen. Let your body decide, but don’t punk out. Go as hard as you can. Daydreaming about what you’re having for dinner in between reps is a sign you aren’t working hard enough. Stop being a sissy and work faster.

Sprinting alternatives If you don’t have anywhere to sprint, or the weather isn’t in your favor, then stick with Install 3.0. There are some sprinting alternatives, but most require the same conditions that you’d need for sprinting. (You could push a prowler or drag a sled if you’re into these sorts of things.)


12

Conclusion

Skinny-fat sufferers fail because they either: • expect results too fast (blister themselves) • follow a program not suited to their body (callous in the wrong place)

These behaviors lead to: • program hopping • bulking

In either case, you might as well club baby seals. Neglecting slow progression out of impatience is a mistake, and a huge one at that. You need to start winning. Winning creates a mindset not apt to be forgotten.

Getting the body you want requires consistent, dedicated effort. Not effort here and there. Not half-assed effort. Or inconsistent effort. But consistent,


dedicated effort. This requires motivation. Nothing kills motivation quite like no progress. Progress is the ultimate motivator. Take things slow and ensure consistent progress. Training is easier when you’re always getting better.

Slow progress steadies your mind. Progressing too fast leads to plateaus. Plateaus are met with question marks. What do you do when you aren’t making progress? Rarely do people stick with what they’re doing, and why would they? It stopped working, so they hop from one program to the next. Six months and twelve programs later, they’ve regressed more than progressed.

I don’t want that to happen to you. Go to the gym and chip away consistently. You don’t get the body you want in one day, one week, one month, or even one year. It takes hard work, consistency, and time. Now, that’s not to say you can’t look better in a month, or a whole helluva lot better in one year. You can and you will if you stick to the slow progression.

Go Having said that, you aren’t going to find one holy grail exercise, so stop looking. Results come from consistent training. There are a few tricks that manipulate physiology through training and nutrition to trip the body into the, “I need big muscles and a low bodyweight to survive,” mentality, but the actual exercises in themselves aren’t overly critical as long as they’re within the same ballpark.


Sometimes skinny-fat sufferers do the right things in the gym, but they do them for the wrong reasons—largely a consequence of environment. We’re told squats make bigger arms. And deadlifts do just about everything. Not to take anything away from those important lifts, but for all around development—what most skinny-fat sufferers seek—you have to embrace vanity.

If you want big arms, you have to curl. Sure, you should do chin-ups and rows. But you should curl here and there, too. You’ll never match the arm growth you would otherwise have with isolation movements. Adaptation is specific to the stressor.

It’s like math. Why do long division by hand when a calculator gets the answer much quicker? Now, this isn’t a squat bashing. I squat. I always have. And I will until I can’t. You should too. But there’s simply more to consider for a well rounded physique.

It seems silly, but we know what exercises produce good results. We know that rows target the back. We know benching hits the chest. We know squats hit the legs. We know curls hit the arms.

The only unknown is you. You have to get out there and do these things regularly enough to get good at them.



WHAT’s NEXT:

READ: (2) NUTRITION

You can also go to (3) Movement AND POSTURE if you are feeling more motivated for that one, as nothing in (2) is needed to understand (3). just don’t neglect (2) all together.

Anthony Mychal - The Skinny-Fat Solution - Soldier 3.0 - (1) Training Guide [2014]

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Transcript of Anthony Mychal - The Skinny-Fat Solution - Soldier 3.0 - (1) Training Guide [2014]