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Blog, Motivation

Save Money By Making Smarter Training Choices

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Penny smart, Dollar Stupid

Today I’m going to give you guys a little investment advice. I’m no Warren Buffet but I really do believe that if you listen carefully to the following advice I think you will get a good return on your investment.

I’m talking money wise and training wise here and I’m also going to be calling out certain people and places. If you find yourself being offended then yes i am talking to you and this advice is for you.

A few times a week the topic of fitness and weight training pops up in conversation and one of the most common occurrences is when after listening to someone’s problems, I ask them where they work out and they get a little quiet, they shake their head and they reluctantly admit that they work out at Planet Fitness. You can see the shame in their face almost as if they admitted to spying on their country or cheating on their wife. The second most common occurrence, and one I find much more annoying is the pompous and arrogant statement of “I have better things to spend my time and money on then going to the gym.” This statement usually comes from older people who generally make quite a bit more money then average people, or young people who think they make way more money then most people. It’s quite common for the same people who go to planet fitness to also say they think spending time and money on fitness is stupid. I ultimately find this ironic because the business model of Planet Fitness is to make sure people stay unfit, but for 10 dollars a month. Why not just save the 10 bucks and stay unfit at home for free? But what the hell do I know about anything?

First off let’s get the qualifying statement out of the way, not because I’m worried about offending anyone who may be going to Planet Fitness, but because I actually want you to keep reading long enough to benefit yourself. Planet Fitness is better then nothing, for sure and it may be possible that for some people that is the only gym they have access to at this point in their life. That’s fine because sometimes you have to just make do with what you have. But almost everyone with some serious muscle building or strength goals realizes that Planet Fitness and others like it are marginal gyms at best and ill equipped to handle the goals of someone moderately serious.

Health and fitness is one of the most important investments that most people can make in their life and it is also one of the easiest. The cost of a gym membership is a pretty small price to pay compared to all the benefits and a few hours a week surely isn’t too hard to do.

First lets talk training and lame gyms. A cheap chain gym may seem like a good monetary investment at only 10 dollars a month but what are you really getting for that 10 dollars? A pizza party on Fridays? Access to a ton of inferior, feminine colored machines? Bagels in the morning? Which one of these things is going to get you to your fitness goals faster? Since all the junk food isn’t going to help you, lets tackle the issue of the machines. Machines are just not the most efficient way to get stronger and build muscle. Fundamentally, when was the last time you had to exert your leg or arm maximally while in a seated position? Honestly tell me. Have the basics of human movement evolved so much since the invention of the smart phone that we have to create all these fancy new machines to train these new movement patterns? How did Eugene Sandow, Paul Anderson, Reg Park and John Grimek build their strength and physiques before such advanced machines were created?

The big basic barbell exercises are the simplest, most efficient way to create strength and muscle especially in beginners. Barbells can accommodate small incremental loads and they can continue being used and scaled up indefinitely. The very same barbell that can build a 225 pound bench press can build a 500 pound bench press. The four basic barbell movements also hit the most muscle mass, thru the largest range of motion, resulting in more strength and muscle gains per any given amount of time. Since so many people are at crappy gyms like this to save money maybe they should also look at saving time as well. After-all time is money and time spent in the gym can eat into your time making money, so why not pick the movements that can build the most muscle in the shortest amount of time? Adding ten pounds of muscle will happen much faster under a heavy squat bar then on a purple seated leg extension machine.

Now let’s address the money issue. The people I’m going to hit hard are the people I meet out at the bars and social events who think 30, 40, or 50 dollars a month is too much to spend on a gym membership. What are all of these people doing when they say this to me? Drinking a beer or mixed drink and getting drunk. These must be free beers because because the average beer in my town is about 4.25 or 4.75 and the cheapest real mixed drink is about 6 bucks, and that can add up to more then a monthly gym membership real quick. I bet most of these people aren’t walking out with less then a 20 dollar bar tab any given night, and most are going out a few nights a week, sometimes even eating food too. Just being conservative and saying they go out once a week and have a 20 dollar tab; that’s 80 dollars a month….enough for two memberships at my gym. Are we all starting to see where I’m going with this?

Let’s break it down and look at how long they spend drinking, I’d guess on average about 4 hours each night they go out, conservatively. Simple math shows us that is  16 hours spent each month. The real numbers are likely much higher then this. Please don’t now tell me that it’s hard to find time to go to the gym….. Honestly if you’re serious about getting to the gym then you can cut back on this somewhat and you’re just lying to yourself if you say otherwise.

And now the nail in the coffin, health or lack of it is one of the great equalizers in this world. All the money in the world won’t stave off a heart attack if you insist on eating like shit and not exercising. Sure you can buy a new heart,  but that’s assuming you live thru the heart attack in the first place. What kind of hospital bill will it be after spending a week in the hospital after a heart attack? Or after breaking a bone, or tearing a weak muscle? Taking some kind of interest in fitness and proper diet of any kind is your first, best and most controllable step you can take as far as keeping your health in check.  I have one friend who refused to take weight training seriously and suffered a torn acl, the surgery to fix that costed more then I’ve spent on gym memberships in the last 12 years.  Another friend of mine neglected weight training for years and suffered a shoulder injury that never healed properly that will most likely require surgery one day. This won’t be a free procedure either….

This comes full circle back to the idea of the best results for your time and money spent. 4 hours a week in the gym kept me strong enough to avoid injuries doing the very same activities that hurt my friends and I got a whole host of other benefits as well. A relatively short amount of time spent on the big basic barbell exercises will have a much greater return then the same amount of time spent on inferior machines and the results will be fairly permanent with a fairly low amount of maintenance required just to maintain it.

A gym membership alone won’t be enough but the lasting discipline, knowledge and muscle that come from reaching and exceeding strength and physique goals will make a huge difference later in life. Look at famous lifters who are older men now and compare them to the average penny pinching man, or woman, the same age that you see in the real world and tell me who would you rather be? I look around and at 31 most of my peers from high school look and act as if they were 50 years old. A good friend of mine a few years ago died of a heart attack at age 45. Let’s compare that to one of my bmx heros Dennis Mccoy who at 47 years old won third at the X Games this year and pulled a 900 on the vert ramp like 8 feet high. Which one of those two do you think was eating doughnuts and drinking cases of soda all the time?

Would you rather save 40 dollars a month now and pay for it the rest of your life or would you like to treat your body and health as an investment and spend that 40 dollars now and stave off a $100,000 dollar hospital bill later? The best way to save money is a little bit at a time and to make a habit of it, the same goes for fitness, a little bit now will pay off a lot late

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The Basics Made Simple

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On the weekends I like to go out with my friends to make the rounds at all the bars in my town. Usually at least once or twice in the weekend the topic of weight lifting or nutrition comes up. This past weekend it seemed like more people then normal were asking me about weight training or nutrition advice.

In a bar scene its always hard to give real in depth answers. My attention is often elsewhere or focused on something else, and a lot of times everyone who asks for advice is really just hoping you’ll reaffirm the preconceived thought they had in their head and aren’t really looking for a real answer. This time was different. I had a few people come up to me with some legitimate heartfelt questions and they really seemed to care about the answers.

I gave out a few answers but I mainly told a few people that I would get back to them later with a more in depth response. This is going to be a general response to them and I really hope it helps.

Basically the key to all of this is to master the basics. According to the internet there are so many answers to all these questions that you’d think we were talking about chemical engineering or astro physics. At the end of the day all any of us are really talking about is how to get a little stronger, a little more muscular, a little leaner or eat a little better. It really isn’t hard at all to do those things.

Here in a nutshell are a few basic tips to help get you started in the right direction. By the time you’ve mastered these things you will be well past the original results you had hoped to achieve.

1: Put most of your focus into learning and progressing in the big basic lifts, the squat, deadlift, bench press and over head press. Mastering  these 4 exercises will be the key to your strength and muscle building goals.  If you insist on belonging to a gym that cannot accommodate these 4 exercises in their true barbell form then you can use the next best thing. For the squat you can use the leg press, or the smith machine. For the bench you can do dumbell bench pressing, and the same for the overhead press. For the deadlift you can use a smith machine and if your gym doesn’t have one you can substitute in pullups. thats not a similar exercise but it is simple to do and learn and it will still hit the back muscles and you can revisit the deadlift at a later time when you have come to your senses.

2: Five to eight reps should be your ideal rep range. Since you’re a beginner you won’t get too much out of doing super heavy low reps and as a beginner form breakdown starts to creep in pretty dramatically after eight reps. Five reps is good for muscle building and strength and the closer you move towards 8 reps the more it tilts toward muscle building.

  1. You must progress upwards in weight or reps each week. Choosing an effective proven plan will make it much easier to do this but until you decide to do that then you can just make do with this simple formula. For upper body lifts add 2.5 pounds per week and for lower body lifts add 5 pounds per week. If your gym can’t accommodate that then for example shoot for 3 sets of 6 reps each week. When you can get all 6 reps on all sets then move up to the next increment in weight and repeat until you can get all 6 reps for all 3 sets. Then repeat again, and again. This is not the absolute best method but sometimes you have to work with what you have and this is still linear progression and it will take you a very long way.

4: Cook your own food. Stop eating out and stop buying junk food. This alone will work wonders. You can’t drink sodas if you don’t have any in the house and if you commit to only eating foods you cook yourself then luckily some of the most unhealthy foods are some of the most difficult to cook so that will make it much easier to eat healthy.

5: Focus on whole foods that you have to cook, don’t buy a bunch of prepared food. You cant control what’s in it and you definitely can’t believe the labeling these days. Here are some easy basic food items that can be prepared in bulk and easily combined in different ways to make more exciting dishes. Meats: ground beef, steaks, london broil, chicken breasts, pork. Vegetables: frozen broccoli and mixed vegetables, anything green. Carbs: rice, white or brown, potatoes, yams, black beans, pasta. Fats: olive oil, cheese, milk, and red meat has a higher fat content then chicken or pork. Don’t forget eggs as a source of good protein that is easy to cook and very versatile.

6: An overly simplistic way of looking at nutrition is this, if you want to gain weight, add more carbs. If you want to lose weight eat less carbs. An extra serving of potatoes or a half serving of potatoes. Overly simple, yes. Effective for a beginner and much better then eating processed junk and enormous portions of expensive restaurant food-yes.

Those few things are the simple basics that you need. You’ll notice that there was no mention of workout plans, body part splits, supplements, macros, max lifts or anything like that. If you’re asking a guy with an overly tight shirt at the bar for training and nutrition advice then you aren’t ready for all that yet. You’re in the beginner stage of just trying to undo or change bad habits or lack of good habits and you don’t need more then this yet.

You need to cultivate an actual interest in training and eating healthy first and once you’ve grown to like the results and begin to enjoy it then you can move on to more advanced principles. Just get a feel for weightlifting and cooking and make it fit into your life first before you do anything else. Experiment with these simple ideas and I guarantee you will start to see positive results. That alone is a very satisfying thing to experience and will help cultivate a permanent change in behavior.

Blog, Motivation

Put The Books Down!

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Just 5 years ago the internet was a very different place. Today you can find any information you want, on any subject that you desire, especially fitness. Whatever your fitness goals, you can find methods of achieving them on the online.

Want safe steroid advice? The internet has it. Stuck at a 300 pound bench and not sure how to get it higher? The internet has the answer. Want advice about a new, trendy, yet inefficient new strength activity/sport? The internet has that too. The internet and especially youtube has enabled us to find a wealth of knowledge about any topic we wish.

Unfortunately there is no filter on the internet. There is also no “stop” button. It seems as though new studies are giving us new information every single day. Every day it seems as though the accepted knowledge is being challenged and new answers are being put forth. This seems to be happening in the fitness industry more then most.

Is brown rice better then white rice today? Should I do a linear progression plan or a periodized progression plan? What about squats? Are they good for the knees today or bad? High carb or low carb diet? Gluten free? What the hell is a paleo diet? With so much information available how does anyone know where to begin? Unfortunately this is exactly the problem.

Many people never begin.

They are constantly searching for the perfect information, the best plan, the best diet, and they put off achieving their goals until they find this elusive “perfect plan.” Another name for this is Analysis Paralysis. There is simply so much information available that you don’t know where to begin.

This can happen to anyone; it even happened to me.

About a year ago I got the competition bug. I decided to enter a few small powerlifting competitions being held at my local gym. I entered two push/pull competitions and one full competition that had bench, squat and deadlift.  Due to my advanced training age, I thought i was in need of a lot of advanced lifting techniques. I spent a year doing all kinds of crazy things, chains, partial reps, paused reps, heavy singles, deadlift every day, bench press every day, extended range of motion exercises, partial range of motion exercises, explosive variations of exercises, and all sorts of other “advanced techniques” that I had read about online. Every day I was learning about some new method to “strengthen my weak point”, and implementing it into my training.

My results were less then stellar.  In general after a year of such techniques and intense reading my results were not impressive.

At one point I realized that I myself had turned into one of those “program hoppers” and I had over estimated my response to training, and as a result I made much less progress then I would have made on a much simpler  intermediate program, or honestly, any actual program.

Beginning in 2016 I decided I was going to pick a proven plan and just stick to it. I tried out the Madcow Advanced 5×5 and I’ve never looked back. After running that for it’s entire 9 weeks I chose an even simpler intermediate program because I felt like my recovery abilities could support it and I’ve been extremely pleased. My progress has been astounding but almost as important as that was another unexpected side effect….

I had freed my mind!

Suddenly now that I was on a proven, effective program based around a simple linear progression of adding 5 pounds per week, I no longer felt the need or desire to constantly read the bodybuilding and powerlifting blogs every single day. I simply did not feel required to know every single trick in the book, I was already making effective progress with the tricks i was currently using. This allowed me to concentrate more on my work, and my side business and it really made training more fun and easier to do. All the trouble shooting and constant “improvement” was over. It almost felt like my training was on autopilot. And without having to read all the weightlifting blogs every morning I was able to use that time for more productive things.

I had realized that I had found that elusive perfect plan. The unicorn of the fitness world.

The only problem is that there is no such plan. There is no unicorn. No plan works forever. But the best part is, so what? So what if every plan will stop working someday? Why not just run the plan until that happens? There’s the answer. There is no need to fix something that isn’t broken. Wait till it breaks, then fix it. Once your program stops, assess what has happened and find a new program that will take you forward again. Every lifter goes thru these various phases throughout their training career. These are natural cycles.

The problem with the internet is that it provides new information at a pace that far exceeds our ability to fully assess and vet that very information. There is no need to suddenly change an effective program that is working simply because some new article got posted today, or some guy on Youtube has a new bench press variation “guaranteed to bust your plateau.” Hell, most of us, myself included, are not even strong enough yet to be at a real plateau.

The basic proven principles of building strength haven’t changed much in 50 years, I doubt tomorrow’s new blog post will revolutionize the weight training world with some amazing new techniques or methods. One thing that was true 100 years ago and is still true today, internet or no internet, is that no one ever got strong just by reading a book, or watching a youtube video, or reading a blog post. Action is the single most important thing, without action nothing will ever happen.  The only way books alone are going to make you stronger is if you hang them off the ends of the barbell and start squatting them.

Strength is built in the gym. Take Action; find a good plan, then turn off the internet and start lifting!

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Take Your Ego Out of The Equation

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Take your ego out of the equation

Today I am going to explain to you the single biggest reason why you aren’t making better progress in the gym. I don’t even know you and I already know what your biggest training mistake is already. I’m talking to the men here, women are different (duh, no shit) and a lot of them have a very different reason why they aren’t making progress in the gym.

A lot of you are thinking, Nate this is nonsense, you aren’t even a coach.

How can you tell me what my biggest training problem is? Well I know because it used to be my problem too.

Ego.

That is it in a nut shell for the majority of guys I know who aren’t making the progress they want. This was definitely my problem. Most of us guys who have been training for a while all think we’re pretty damn smart. A lot of us are bigger then average guys, stronger then average guys, more dedicated then average guys and so on and so forth. That is definitely true for most of us. The problem is, at least here in the USA, the average guy is a pretty weak, out of shape slob, being better then that isn’t saying much. So we are more knowledgeable then a guy who knows nothing at all…seems like a pretty low bar doesn’t it?

I started lifting weights when i was 13 years old, currently I am now 31. That is a long time of mostly consistent training. I still have almost every issue of Flex magazine I ever read. I’ve read a ton of books on bodybuilding, I’ve tried dozens of variations of exercises, I’ve tried lots of different routines, I’ve rehabbed numerous injuries sustained in a fairly dangerous and debilitating sport and I even managed to build up and maintain a decent base of strength in the face of those many injuries. I’d been writing my own seemingly successful programs since I was in high school. Needless to say I thought I was pretty knowledgeable.

My first reality check came in early 2014. It was at that point that I actually realized that I was stuck at using roughly 215-225 pounds on the bench press for years on end with no real improvement. At that moment I realized that I wanted to get a 300 pound bench press. After a one rep max test of 265 pounds I created my own plan which got me to a 300 pound bench press in 4 months with an ultimate record of 315 pounds in 6 months at a body weight of 205 pounds. While this plan worked, it worked for reasons I couldn’t entirely explain and this further fueled my ego.

 

The second reality check came the next year when I decided to enter some powerlifting contests at my local gym.

I began reading all I could about powerlifting. I read almost every article in the Tnation.com archives and I used almost all the various advanced powerlifting techniques to try to increase my one rep max. With all my years of training I was positive that I was an advanced lifter. I clearly knew what I was doing…..boy was I wrong.

While that year was not entirely disappointing, I eventually realized that I really had no idea what I was doing when it came down to real, legit strength training, and even the things I did get right were not always for the reasons I thought. All those years of bodybuilding books and magazines had left me unprepared.

Basically my two biggest mistakes were over estimating my level of advancement, and not sticking to a proven plan. I let my ego dictate my training. I thought I was knowledgeable enough to write my own effective program. Starting to sound familiar? How many of you are writing your own routines but deep inside you realize that you are not really reaching your goals despite the high opinion you have of yourself?

The good part of all this is that the reality of your situation is not nearly as harmful to your ego as you think.

First off, being advanced has nothing to do with your knowledge of training; it has to do with how your body responds to the training stimulus. A beginner who has never lifted before has the best response to training. They are able to make progress almost daily on the major lifts. An intermediate lifter is now stronger and is now responding to the training slower. Progress has slowed to making improvements once a week or so. While their ability to adapt and progress is less, it is now much more sustainable and a lifter may be in this stage for a really long time. An advanced lifter is one who has now gotten so strong that his response to training is now at a monthly frequency or even longer. This is where elaborate training methods like the conjugate method or block periodization come in. These lifters are very strong and it is getting very hard to get stronger. Who do you think has the hardest time adding 5 pounds to their bench press, a guy who can bench 225, or a guy who can bench 600? adding 5 to 600 is going to be way harder then adding 5 to 225….. this is an advanced lifter.

Think about all that for a minute, which one of those would you rather be? A beginner making rapid gains but for a fairly short period of time, an intermediate making slower gains for a very long time or an advanced lifter making small gains in a few months instead of a few weeks? You want to be an intermediate lifter.

For a lot of men, the guys we are most familiar with who are most likely to be intermediate lifters are pro athletes. These guys are all big, strong, agile, powerful, sometimes freakishly so, yet they are mostly intermediate lifters. It’s possible that the strongest guy in the NFL still isn’t an advanced lifter yet. Being an intermediate doesn’t mean you aren’t strong. Being an intermediate lifter is a great thing. Being as strong as a pro football player isn’t hurting your ego that much now is it?

So if we are intermediate lifters, or even beginners, what plan do you think we should be on? This is where your ego is hurting you. Choosing to be on an advanced plan when you are not an advanced lifter will cause you to make slower progress then a good intermediate plan. You are capable of recovering and growing faster then an advanced plan is designed for. You are actually going to be less strong at the end then if you chose a simpler and possibly more boring intermediate plan. That doesn’t sound exciting on the face of it, but this isn’t P90X or Insanity, this is training and exciting or not results and progress should be your priority. Getting stronger should be exciting enough.

Writing your own plan as an intermediate is a foolish idea. No matter how much you think you know you don’t know more then the combined knowledge of all the other lifters, coaches, and scientists from the last 60 years. They have already done all the work for you and come up with great plans that work for tons of reasons that you don’t even know you aren’t aware of. Why make it harder on yourself? The easy road this time is the best one to be on.

A wise man knows that he knows not.

Be smarter; realize that you don’t know everything, and that you don’t need to. Take advantage of the proven methods and start making some real progress; pretty soon you’ll realize that you’re now moving so much weight that you don’t even worry about it anymore.