Brain Archive

Training!

Some things seem impossible. Like the L.A. Clippers winning an NBA championship. Or Kevin Federline (aka Mr. Britney Spears) having a successful music career. Or gaining muscle mass while losing bodyfat. Yes, that all-too-common refrain heard in the gym—“I want to build muscle but also lose my spare tire”—is most definitely bodybuilding’s odd couple of opposing goals.

Understand that two rules govern the world of muscleheads: 1) To lose bodyfat, you must eat less; 2) to build muscle mass, you must eat more. That being said, it seems downright impossible to, say, add an inch to your chest and arms while tightening up around the midsection. Or is it?

A carefully designed program combining high-intensity weight training with the right diet and supplementation plan can achieve these seemingly contradictory goals. The key is timing: alternating heavy- and moderate-weight workouts while also splitting each week into two dietary phases, a cutting phase and a building phase. This approach not only allows you to achieve both goals concurrently but also keeps your metabolism elevated, which is vital to burning bodyfat and increasing protein synthesis (muscle growth). Pay careful attention—many variables are at work and constantly change over the course of each three-week cycle.

MISSION 1: LOSE FAT

The cornerstone to shedding bodyfat is a controlled method of calorie reduction—specifically, eating smaller portions of carbohydrates while eliminating excess dietary fat. As calorie intake declines, your body begins using bodyfat for fuel, which makes your physique look harder. However, when you reduce calories, your body also increases the amount of protein it burns, meaning you risk losing muscle tissue, too. The solution: As you decrease calories from carb sources, bump up those from protein sources. This approach shuttles some amino acids into energy production (making up for the carb shortage), which ultimately protects against muscle loss. (See “Get Cut/Rest Day Meal Plan” for diet specifics.)

During a calorie-reduction phase, aerobic exercise can significantly increase fat-burning, but don’t overdo it. Zealous cuts in calories, sharp increases in aerobic work or prolonged dieting trigger the body’s starvation response—a built-in metabolic reaction in which the body slows its ability to burn calories and bodyfat for long-term survival. This plan sidesteps this issue because it doesn’t include extreme calorie reductions, lengthy dieting or marathon cardio sessions.

You can also manipulate your training to increase calorie burn and make your physique look harder. The “Get Lean Workout” utilizes moderate weights for higher-rep sets, which help deplete your working muscles of glycogen (stored carbohydrate) and, in turn, burn fat. Reduce between-set rest periods by 15-30 seconds to keep your heart rate elevated for added fat loss. Spending too much time on higher reps, however, isn’t the best way to build muscle tissue, so follow this high-rep protocol for only seven days every third week, then switch to two consecutive weeks with heavier weights and lower reps.

MISSION 2: ADD MUSCLE

Building mass requires not only protein but also calories, especially those from carbohydrates. Calories fuel your training, and if your body doesn’t have the resources to train really hard, you won’t grow. The muscle-building process, in which the body adds muscle by synthesizing the protein you eat into new tissue, is an energy-demanding event as well. Again, growth can’t occur without enough calories (see the “Get Big Meal Plan” for details). Supplementation in this phase will also help you build size.

The “Build Muscle Workout” uses heavier weights for fewer reps and longer rest periods to encourage muscle growth. Follow this heavy-lifting phase five days a week for two weeks; in the long run, this method of training is better for building metabolism-boosting muscle than a high-rep approach.

REST AND RECOVERY

This program provides two rest days each week; it’s unwise to lift weights on a daily basis because doing so wears the body down. On these days, cut back your carbohydrate intake and perform 30 minutes of cardio only (don’t do any weight training).

HELPFUL HORMONES

Cutting and building are also about hormones, which are influenced by the types and quantities of food you eat. In the cutting phase, the name of the game is insulin control. Insulin, produced by the pancreas in response to carb consumption, is a “pushing” hormone. After you eat a carbohydrate, insulin is released, not only replenishing your muscles and liver with glycogen but, more relevant to this discussion, also pushing dietary fat into bodyfat stores and excess carbs down fat-storing-pathways. When you reduce carb calories, insulin levels decline, which improves fat loss. Another bonus: A low-insulin environment magnifies the fat-burning effect of aerobic activity.

In the building phase, the body experiences hormonal changes that include a boost in insulin. Thus far, insulin has been a bad guy, but not here: It exerts a remarkable effect on muscle growth by forcing amino acids into muscles while increasing testosterone levels. Testosterone encourages muscle growth and fat-burning, but its levels decline when a person diets for an extended period. By moving from a cutting phase to a building phase, you avoid prolonged dieting, which helps maintain testosterone levels and prevents your body from falling into a starvation mode in which metabolism slows significantly. Insulin also turns on key processes in the muscles that lead to their growth.

The magic of alternating the cutting dietary phase with the building phase is that you get the fat-burning effects of a low-insulin environment and the muscle-building effects of a high-insulin environment. Many individuals fail by dieting without a building phase, which results in a steep drop in metabolism and causes a loss of muscle mass. Conversely, traditional mass-building or bulking diets, in which calories are kept high consistently, result in a buildup of unwanted bodyfat. By alternating phases, you can add muscle while losing bodyfat simultaneously, but you must follow the program carefully to ensure an optimal response.

To order Chris Aceto’s training and nutrition books Championship Bodybuilding and Everything You Need to Know About Fat Loss, visit www.nutramedia.com

» The key to building muscle while stripping fat is alternating heavy and light training days.

BURNOUT

» Done at the end of your high-rep chest workout, the cable crossover can really pump your pecs.

CHANGE PHASE

Testosterone aids muscle growth and fat-burning, but its levels decline when a person diets too long. Alternating dietary phases prevents this from happening

BUILD MUSCLE This workout uses heavier weights, fewer reps and longer rest times

THINK CUT Aerobic exercise can greatly increase your fat-burning, but don’t overdo it

RELATED ARTICLE: HOW YOU’LL PUT ON SIZE

DIET

» Consume six high-calorie, high-protein meals on Fridays and Saturdays (see the “Get Big Meal Plan”). Integrating higher-calorie days into your diet helps prevent your body from slowing its metabolism and using muscle tissue for fuel. Getting those extra calories is critical to adding muscle.

» Ingest carbs at every meal to keep energy levels elevated and restore muscle and liver glycogen. This gives you the energy to train heavy.

SUPPLEMENTATION

» Take 3-5 grams of creatine both before a workout and with your posttraining meal to boost strength, which translates into more mass.

» Consume 5-10 grams of glutamine before a workout and with your postworkout meal. This increases your ability to manufacture glycogen.

» Ingest 400-600 mg of magnesium, which helps make ATP, the high-energy fuel that powers training; one study showed consuming 560 mg a day can increase strength. Take it with 10-15 mg of Vitamin [B.sub.8] to help get it to cells. These can be taken before bed in the form of a ZMA supplement.

TRAINING

» Perform two consecutive weeks of heavy-weight training in the lower-rep ranges (doing the “Build Muscle Workout”). Follow this by a single week of the “Get Lean Workout,” then return to this protocol.

» Keep your rest periods a bit longer for improved recuperation from previous sets. Training with heavy weights requires longer rest periods.

CARDIO

» Don’t perform any cardio on Get Big Meal Plan days; this helps muscle tissue replenish low levels of glycogen. And skip the pickup basketball.

The Anosognosic’s Dilemma: Something’s Wrong but You’ll Never Know What It Is (Part 1)

1. The Juice

David Dunning, a Cornell professor of social psychology, was perusing the 1996 World Almanac. In a section called Offbeat News Stories he found a tantalizingly brief account of a series of bank robberies committed in Pittsburgh the previous year. From there, it was an easy matter to track the case to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, specifically to an article by Michael A. Fuoco:

ARREST IN BANK ROBBERY,
SUSPECT’S TV PICTURE SPURS TIPS

At 5 feet 6 inches and about 270 pounds, bank robbery suspect McArthur Wheeler isn’t the type of person who fades into the woodwork. So it was no surprise that he was recognized by informants, who tipped detectives to his whereabouts after his picture was telecast Wednesday night during the Pittsburgh Crime Stoppers Inc. segment of the 11 o’clock news.

At 12:10 a.m. yesterday, less than an hour after the broadcast, he was arrested at 202 S. Fairmont St., Lincoln-Lemington. Wheeler, 45, of Versailles Street, McKeesport, was wanted in [connection with] bank robberies on Jan. 6 at the Fidelity Savings Bank in Brighton Heights and at the Mellon Bank in Swissvale. In both robberies, police said, Wheeler was accompanied by Clifton Earl Johnson, 43, who was arrested Jan. 12.[1]

Wheeler had walked into two Pittsburgh banks and attempted to rob them in broad daylight. What made the case peculiar is that he made no visible attempt at disguise. The surveillance tapes were key to his arrest. There he is with a gun, standing in front of a teller demanding money. Yet, when arrested, Wheeler was completely disbelieving. “But I wore the juice,” he said. Apparently, he was under the deeply misguided impression that rubbing one’s face with lemon juice rendered it invisible to video cameras.

In a follow-up article, Fuoco spoke to several Pittsburgh police detectives who had been involved in Wheeler’s arrest. Commander Ronald Freeman assured Fuoco that Wheeler had not gone into “this thing” blindly but had performed a variety of tests prior to the robbery. Sergeant Wally Long provided additional details — “although Wheeler reported the lemon juice was burning his face and his eyes, and he was having trouble (seeing) and had to squint, he had tested the theory, and it seemed to work.” He had snapped a Polaroid picture of himself and wasn’t anywhere to be found in the image. It was like a version of Where’s Waldo with no Waldo. Long tried to come up with an explanation of why there was no image on the Polaroid. He came up with three possibilities:

(a) the film was bad;

(b) Wheeler hadn’t adjusted the camera correctly; or

(c) Wheeler had pointed the camera away from his face at the critical moment when he snapped the photo.[2]

As Dunning read through the article, a thought washed over him, an epiphany. If Wheeler was too stupid to be a bank robber, perhaps he was also too stupid to know that he was too stupid to be a bank robber — that is, his stupidity protected him from an awareness of his own stupidity.

Tuesday, June 22, 2010 Read more …

The Failure of the American Jewish establishment

In 2003, several prominent Jewish philanthropists hired Republican pollster Frank Luntz to explain why American Jewish college students were not more vigorously rebutting campus criticism of Israel. In response, he unwittingly produced the most damning indictment of the organized American Jewish community that I have ever seen.

The philanthropists wanted to know what Jewish students thought about Israel. Luntz found that they mostly didn’t. “Six times we have brought Jewish youth together as a group to talk about their Jewishness and connection to Israel,” he reported. “Six times the topic of Israel did not come up until it was prompted. Six times these Jewish youth used the word ‘they‘ rather than ‘us‘ to describe the situation.”

That Luntz encountered indifference was not surprising. In recent years, several studies have revealed, in the words of Steven Cohen of Hebrew Union College and Ari Kelman of the University of California at Davis, that “non-Orthodox younger Jews, on the whole, feel much less attached to Israel than their elders,” with many professing “a near-total absence of positive feelings.” In 2008, the student senate at Brandeis, the only nonsectarian Jewish-sponsored university in America, rejected a resolution commemorating the sixtieth anniversary of the Jewish state.

Thursday, June 10, 2010 Read more …

My Reading List for the summer

Yann Martel - Life Of Pi
Douglas Adams - the Hitchhikers Guide to Galaxy
Harper Lee - To Kill a Mockingbird
JD Salinger - The Catcher in the Rye
Leo Tolstoy - War and Peace
Margaret Mitchell - Gone With the Wind
Alexandre Dumas - The Count of Monte Cristo
Philip Pullman - The Golden Compass
Philip Pullman - The Subtle Knife
Philip Pullman - The Amber Spyglass

I’ll probably read them in that order..

The last three are added to my list, because I always had a curiosity as to how “The Golden Compass” movie would progress if it had a sequel.

Any suggestions/recommendations/advice?

Thursday, June 10, 2010

Zakaria’s opinion on Obama and BP Oil Spill (CNN)

New York (CNN) — President Obama’s stepped-up focus on the Gulf oil disaster and his hardline rhetoric against BP are accomplishing little and risk distracting the White House from other urgent responsibilities, says analyst Fareed Zakaria.

Obama, responding to critics of the government’s handling of the spill, has made a point of emphasizing the time he’s devoted to the crisis and has used blunt language to express outrage about it. In an interview with NBC, he said he met with experts “because they potentially have the best answers, so I know whose ass to kick.”

Thursday, June 10, 2010 Read more …

AJ Jacobs: My colossal task burden | Life and style | The Guardian

The stereo is silent. The TV black. The room dark. I am focused on nothing but a glowing computer screen. I’m doing this because I have a problem focusing. My brain is all over the place. Unless I’m doing at least two things at once, I feel like I’m wasting my time. Phone and email. Watching TV, checking Facebook and reading the news online. Texting and peeing.

Tuesday, June 1, 2010 Read more …