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The parks in Taipei are amazingly safe. The ground has thick, hard rubber. The equipment is usually fairly new and well maintained. And I love to watch the kid’s faces when they arrive at the park. They’ve been stuck inside an apartment all day or stuck at school sitting down the whole time. Their little faces light up when they see the park and they run forward. And what do you hear next? Mom says,”Don’t run! Don’t climb on that! You’ll get hurt! Get down! Don’t jump off.!” What is wrong with these people? Why do they take their kids to the park in the first place? Do they allow their kids to breath? Treating children like this destroys their movement skills. They are already stuck inside all day and can’t run or jump or climb. Then when they go to the park, they still can’t move. What happens when these kids grow older? What happens when they become adults? How many people need to be pushed around in a wheelchair by a Filipino maid because they weren’t allowed to run and jump as children?

This past weekend was the Mr Olympia contest. Phil Heath won by the way, but the Olympia has many different categories. The women’s section has Ms. Olympia, Figure, Fitness, Physique (a new competition), and Bikiki. That’s a lot of categories. One of the bodybuilders I follow was disgusted with the bikini category and suggested it be eliminated altogether. He called it the “plastic surgery, doesn’t work out” category. Funny, but not far off, unfortunately. Compare this clip of the winner of the bikini Olympia  to this clip of the fitness Olympia winner
The bikini champion makes a lot of basic mistakes in her exercises while the fitness champion shows real fitness. Love those pullups. The point: train like the fitness champion and ignore the bikini champs routine!

I used to have lots of trouble sleeping. I had trouble falling asleep. I woke up a lot during the night, and sometimes I would just get up and start doing work since I couldn’t fall back asleep. The lack of quality sleep was starting to interfere with my workouts and was making me very irritable during the day. I had heard about ZMA and decided to give it a try. ZMA is a mix of zinc, magnesium, and the amino acid arginine. A lot of men are deficient in zinc and magnesium and that lack interferes with out sleep. Without quality sleep, we don’t release testosterone, which interferes with our lives as men in many ways. Taking three tablets a night before bed worked immediately for me. I fall asleep faster, sleep deeper, and sleep longer than before. And I’m lifting heavier weights than ever before. So if you’re having trouble sleeping, maybe try ZMA. And by the way, no, we don’t seel ZMA so this isn’t an ad for us. 🙂

Some people may have wondered about our article last week about doing one pullup. In this video, fitness guru Steve Maxwell is teaching us how to get a fantastic workout for the upper body with ONE pushup. It’s called the 2:00 pushup – 1:00 up and 1:00 down. Working toward this will give you incredible upper body strength and endurance and is so much more fun than doing boring planks because you’re holding a full plank position for 2:00 straight. Try it out and you’ll see why when you exercise correctly, you don’t need to do 100 pushup or 50 kipping pullups to get a workout.

2800 calories is needed to build a 1lbs of muscle, as I said before. Now, that’s 2800 EXCESS calories that wouldn’t be burned doing anything else. So you need to eat at least 400 calories a day in EXCESS of what you’re burning to build 1lbs of muscle a week. So gt rid of those ideas of building 4lbs of muscle a week. ain’t gonna happen. Any special consideration for women? Oh brother, don’t get me started.

For women, the calories needed are roughly the same. The problem is getting women to eat enough protein and fat, eating an excess of calories so muscle can be built (remember, 2800 calories is EXCESS,  i keep pounding this home because people don’t get it), and getting them to do enough hard training and the right kind of training to build muscle. The Korean chick’s workout won’t do it.

The second problem in doing this for women is that every piece of advice out there (especially in Taiwan) is against women training with weights, eating protein, and trying to gain muscle in the first place. So in order to really do this, you’d need to stop listening to nearly everyone else and follow the muscle building path. Most of my women clients turtle up and stop talking to people about their training. It’s the price of being an individual and going against the societal grain. Who needs grain, anyway?