Category: fitness

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!

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?

2800 calories. That’s roughly how many calories it takes an average man to build 1lbs of muscle, assuming the training is right and you’re getting enough protein. The problem is most guys that want to build muscle are so afraid of gaining fat that they don’t eat nearly enough. You would need an extra 400 calories a day every day to equal 2800 extra calories in a week. Are you getting enough?

I know people are going to ask about this. Learn the rules before you break the rules! Beginners need to build basic strength and learn how to brace the core when lifting. Don’t round your back when deadlifting if you’re a beginner. Build up your back by flexing the lats to keep that neutral spine position (spinal extension). When you’ve got a few years of lifting experience and you’re strong, then rounded back DL may be an option for you.