Should I train differently if I’m aiming to lose weight as opposed to gaining muscle, and can both be done at the same time? Plus, what general tips can you give on different exercises, the fitness magazines have so much choice it’s confusing, do you recommend any publication? How hard should I push myself in the gym? A.J. Canada.
Great questions A.J, and I can certainly pack a fair bit into the answers, which I know a lot of people want the truth on, so here goes;
The chances are that whatever you’re doing to build muscle, will also be the best exercise to lose weight with, and yes, they can both be achieved at the same time.
Just steer well clear of this stupid idea of ‘Bulking’ the ‘Cutting’, because you’ll be playing Russian roulette with your metabolism.
I know bodybuilders still swear by it, but then they really don’t give a rat’s arse about their metabolism, and take a shit load of drugs to that effect. So, beware.
That said, it might be worth pointing out that exercise is just about the worst way of losing weight you can imagine, and for more than one reason.
Your question asked ‘should you train differently’ and as stated, no, but you definitely ‘should eat differently’, though it’s outside the scope of your question.
I’m assuming you’re doing big compound movements to build your body, and not fucking around on the edge of a bench with dumbbell isolation bicep curls.
That’s a ‘shaping’ exercise, and don’t waste your time trying to shape something that doesn’t exist yet.
If any exercise isolates your quads, hamstrings, low back, forearms or whatever, your pissing into the wind, and most likely following something you read in a bodybuilding mag.
Same goes for incline, decline, pec deck and cable crossovers for your chest.
There will always be some twat in the gym who’s bored shitless with the basics, that will tell you of the need to do upper, lower, inner and outer chest for example.
Bullshit, all you’ll ever be doing is wasting energy you could be throwing into your flat bench press, heavy dumbbell presses, and weighted dips.
Huge compound exercises like squats, deadlifts, and cleans, will make you ‘seriously grow’, as they go beyond just being compound movements (multiple muscle groups and levers), and have been shown to have a ‘global’ or ‘systemic shock’ growth effect on the body, meaning for example, that even your arms and neck can benefit from squats, deadlifts and cleans.
This is from the effect that such monster exercises (that all the gimps avoid) have on your hormonal system, plus the body is so clever, it intuitively knows that if you need to be strong enough to squat twice your bodyweight, deadlift 2 ½ times, and clean your bodyweight for 8 reps, then you’ll probably need huge fucking arms, and a neck like Mike Tyson’s to go with it.
Although they are a very high rep muscle group, even your calves should respond to the above.
Abs can be worked in the mornings or on different days, because why would you want blood in them at the end of your workout, that could be providing oxygen and nutrients to all the big stuff you just thrashed?
Doing abs at the beginning of a workout is commonly done, yet is totally retarded, since you’ll be fatiguing the very structure and postural muscles, that will be called on in every exercise worth mentioning above.
If you lose that support, you won’t be able to lift as heavy for starters, thus stunting your growth, and can look forward to a bad back injury, just as soon as your strong enough to lift a big enough weight for it to go twang!.
Your abs provide support for your low back, and vice versa remember, so hyperextensions become the next most retarded thing you could possibly do unless you want to weaken the back as well as the front!
Hyperextensions, ham curls, leg extensions and so on, are all exclusively designed for bodybuilders to create minute detail in specific muscles, so as to look better on a stage.
If you play soccer, run, or do martial arts and so on, those exercises will all cause muscle imbalances, and fuck you up!
Not that any bodybuilder or gym instructor knows this to be able to tell you, but in the real world, your fucking hamstrings and quads work ‘together’ and not separately, so stick to squats and deadlifts if you want to build legs that actually fucking work, as opposed to just look nice for ‘guys’ watching you on a stage!
And if you’re a runner or a real athlete of some kind, maybe this explains why your knees are always fucked (from leg extensions), and you’re plagued with hamstring tears and low back issues (from ham curls and hyperextensions)!
Your question; ‘should you train differently for weight loss v size’, presupposed that you knew what the fuck to be doing for size in the first place, and 99% of guys and gym coaches don’t.
How hard should you go?
Next time you’re in the gym A.J, do a rough head count of the guys for me.
Sure, pretty much all of em will do a bench press in their routines.
Big deal, they get to have a lay down and look at their spotter’s hairy balls, and if they don’t have a spotter, they’re wasting their time.
But how many of those same guys will you see squatting?
A few maybe.
Fewer still will ever be observed deadlifting, hardly any of them will be doing weighted chins and dips, and absolutely none of them will be doing 4 sets of ball busting barbell cleans, where they fail at 7 to 9 reps each set.
Why?
A better question might be to ask why all the lat pulldown machines, triceps cable presses, leg extension, hamstring curl, and pec decks will always be busy, while the dipping and chinning bars just stand there empty?
Because their fucking faggots in your gym! (which has nothing to do with being gay by the way, it’s just a word I’ve always used to describe people who wind me up messing around in gyms)
Are you a faggot?
Here’s a simple scientific test for you to find out, together with some ‘old school’, but super effective advice;
Out of your last 10 visits to the gym, how many times have you actually vomited, felt very very close to vomiting, passed out, or busted blood vessels in your nose or eyes?
If your answer is 8 – 10 times = Bloody well done to you sir, that’s what you joined up for.
It would be an honour to train with you, and after a few short years with this attitude, your before and after story should be amazing, regardless of your genetics.
If you do have poor genes, you’ll still end up with an impressive physique, simply by virtue of how you push yourself, and if you are blessed with ‘Arnold’ type genes (check out photos of him at 15/16 yrs. old), then you’ll be awesome!
5 – 7 times feeling crap = Excellent, but find yourself a tougher training partner if you want to get to the next level. Same as above on the genetic front for you.
3 – 4 times gagging to puke = Well done, you are truly pushing yourself, but are probably self-conscious about vomiting in a public place. Get over it. Unless you’ve eaten within an hour of the gym, or just quaffed some faggy pre-workout shake, you likely as not won’t actually vomit, but just feel like shit in between sets.
Your great genes will still see you ok after a few years, but if you’re currently Mr average, or a bit weedy, then don’t be too surprised to find yourself disillusioned after a few years, or even doing business with the gym steroid pusher.
Also, try and keep focus on why you joined the gym, especially if yours is one that looks like a fucking ‘hall of mirrors’ and is full of ‘beautiful people’ wearing their stupid ‘Beats’, taking selfies, quaffing fruit smoothies at the juice bar, and talking bollocks for 4 minutes in between sets.
Leave, and join a more traditional ‘spit and sawdust’ hardcore ‘Athletic’, ‘Powerlifting’, or ‘Bodybuilding’ gym.
Sack your ‘gaylord’ training partner, and only train with ‘nutters’, or track and field guys.
0 – 2 times puked in the past 10 workout sessions = You’re a faggot!
Thus, here is some serious faggot training advice for you;
You’ll need 4 protein shakes a day, in-between eating 4 small boring meals out of stupid fucking Tupperware containers.
Don’t forget your ‘pre-faggot’, ‘during faggot’, and ‘post faggot’ workout drinks.
Take every supplement going, use steroids, and get 11 hours’ sleep each night, and you just might look half decent in 3 to 5 years.
But you’ll still be a faggot!
If you’ve never been sick in a gym, had to run outside, or had to rush to the bog to lay down and ‘find a happy place’, then please go buy some ‘Beats’, and make sure you have a state of the art mobile device to plug them into.
Next, go buy all the latest gym fashion, and please remember most importantly, you must include ‘lifting gloves’, ‘lifting straps’, ‘forehead and wrist sweatbands’, and a ‘weight belt’ fit for a world record deadlift attempt.
You’re beneath the level of ‘Faggot’, so in addition to the above, you really have to pull out all the stops with social media, by making sure that your whole world knows when you’re at the gym.
And do remember to request that all your friends forward your pics to anyone on their friend list.
That way, you have a better chance of some random stranger recognizing you in Starbucks, and making your dream come true by saying; ‘hey, aren’t you that guy who works out’.
Fuck all that A.J, if that’s what you’re after, why not just sign up for CrossFit!
Welcome to the ‘Gun Show’
If you were doing that lot mentioned earlier (squats, deadlifts, cleans, dips and chins), plus bent over rows, you’d never need to do a single arm exercise!
That’s right, the body part most guys crave, usually gets ‘overworked’, and don’t grow as well as they could!
This is because your forearms are involved in absolutely everything, your biceps are being trashed on your chins, rows, cleans and deadlifts, and your triceps should be murdered after 4 sets of flat benches, 4 of weighted dips, and any shoulder presses you may be doing.
Saving energy (consciously or unconsciously), to be able to fully work your arms is a joke, and if you do have enough energy, it means you simply didn’t work hard enough in, or are avoiding the huge mass building compound exercises that all involve, and actually benefit your arms.
Of course, any gym mongoloid will tell you the way around that is do a split system, like back and biceps one day, then chest and triceps the next, and so on.
Bullshit, and fine if you’re a Jew boy who needs to be in a gym 6 days a week to maximise value on your membership.
I’ve even heard people proudly stating; ‘yeah well it only works out a dollar a day if I train twice a day 7 days a week’!
These same red sea pedestrians will also randomly fly into the gym just to use the showers on their way out somewhere, or fly in, do some bicep/tricep pump sets, and fuck off out to the club, or bar.
Still, I suppose it beats using the bar’s toilet and sink to do triceps dips, and incline push-ups to achieve the same pumped result!
Split systems are for lazy bastards, ‘gym Jews/Rats’, or intermediate/advanced, and serious bodybuilders, who lift so heavy and furiously that they simply can’t contemplate doing a ‘whole body’ workout, 3 times a week anymore.
But you can, and don’t kid yourself otherwise!
You want to be in and out of the gym inside an hour, use monster compound exercises, with 60 to 90 seconds’ rest in between sets, feel sick or lightheaded at least once, shower, and get the fuck out and go eat, then enjoy your life.
Why?
Because this type of training will stimulate all known hormonal and psychological pathways to growth, strength, and power, in the shortest possible time.
This, in turn, will keep you ‘lean’ at the same time.
More on the secrets of ‘real, results-oriented training’
My ‘playground’ from 1973 to 1979. Blue arrow shows the door to ‘secret gym’
In my early training years, I trained at the Crystal Palace National Sports Centre, pictured above, in their main public gym, situated in the huge building you see.
It was pretty well equipped, packed with trendy people, and so on.
But then one day I discovered a couple of very famous track and field athletes wandering around the complex, but obviously ‘going somewhere else’ to train, so I followed them.
Not 20 yards from where the public trained in the luxury heated gym of the main building, was a covered, but unheated concrete bunker with a locked door (see the blue arrow above).
What passed as windows, were too high to see through, but the sounds they were making inside was the real giveaway.
I waited till someone came out, and before the door could close behind him, let myself in.
Holy fuck!
There were some fucking monsters training in there, including at the time, ‘Britain’s powerlifting champion’ Steve Zetelovski, Britain’s famous Judo champ, Brian Jacks, and several track and field athletes of the day.
The rest were all nightclub bouncers, boxers, or gangsters!
I don’t remember there being a single machine of any type, other than a hack squat, and it was all Olympic weights and dumbbells.
I’d never even touched an Olympic bar before this (1975) and was fascinated by what I saw.
Squats, deadlifts, cleans, jerks, snatches, heavily weighted chins and dips, weights being dropped from overhead, shouting, screaming, slapping of faces, smelling salts, a sick bucket, and clouds of lifting chalk, all in the fucking freezing cold, and not a single mirror or a beautiful person in sight (actually there may have been one mirror).
I waited till everyone left the bunker before daring to lift an Olympic bar, and remember thinking how heavy it was, compared to the mickey mouse bars that come with the home weight sets I owned.
It was only 20kg of course, but then that was a third of my bodyweight back in 1975.
Next, I examined the dumbbells, where I found the lightest ones hard to remove from the rack.
Again, not 20 yards from this ‘secret’ lifting gym, I discovered another door leading to an indoor area with a sprinters track, high/long jump, and pole-vaulters’ area, plus a net for practising discuss, shot and hammer. It’s to the right of the blue arrow in the photo above.
And all the thousands of people using the main gym to the left of the arrow hadn’t a clue all this even existed.
Back then, all the equipment was just left out, there was no such thing as security, and no one would challenge you at Crystal Palace, as long as you were doing something half sensible.
I discovered that track and field athletes, boxers, serious martial artists, gymnasts and so on, don’t have the time to spend fucking around doing back and biceps, chest and triceps bullshit, since they have so much technical work to do for their sports, and yet they always had awesome physiques.
How come?
Because they only focussed on exercises that gave them more speed, power, strength, mobility, flexibility, protection from injury and mental strength. And the side effects of such training were their amazing physiques.
But apart from the powerlifters, these were physiques that could still look good in a business suit or dress, and they didn’t move like they’d shit themselves or were carrying bricks under their arms when they walked down the street.
They all had a massive functional strength and spent most of their time on their feet while lifting. (that’s a massive clue for you mate, I hope you get it)
Once I became friendly with some of them, a coach explained how; since every athletic event takes place on the feet, the athletes lifting weights should also do likewise.
Equally, no athletic event involves the isolation of a single muscle or limb, but most often the entire structure of the athlete, therefore anything that isolated any single group or muscle, was seen as retarded and may lead to muscle imbalances or injuries.
Furthermore, these athletes all merely ‘tolerated’ bodybuilders, and then only if they were deadly serious, hardcore dudes.
Athletes are also wise to not ‘overtrain’ since they need to use their bodies for an actual purpose, rather than just to look good in a mirror, and this is why their weight routines are brief, brutally intense, and often not repeated (in the same way or exercises) for 3 to 6 days, to allow full recovery.
Please remember, improvement has to go through the following phases; exercise, rest, recovery, then adaptation (size, strength, endurance etc.), before you hit it again, and if you’ve hit it hard enough, then depending on your age, you’re looking at 3 days’ minimum to adapt, regardless of how many protein shakes you may be quaffing day and night.
If you’re on steroids (P.E.D’s), then that recovery and adaptation time (3-6 days), may come down by a third, or even by half.
So, at the end of a year, you may have trained 30 to 50% more frequently than someone training naturally, so it’s easy to see how that might give an athlete the edge, especially when winning and losing can come down to fractions of a second, inches, 1 punch or 1 kilo, depending on the sport.
This hidden gym within a national sports arena was to become my new playground, and the foundation of my physique was born in; ‘the Bunker’.
I was only ever challenged once by a coach as to what I was up to, whilst throwing a javelin outside (obviously), in the main sports arena.
“What are you training for,” he asked since it was clearly not the Javelin, and I thought I’d get rumbled and banned from the centre for life since I had no pass, coach, or ever paid to work out there.
“Karate” I replied.
“Ok, and you think throwing a javelin will help you throw a stronger punch, yes”
“Erm, yeah”
“Good, it will, if you do it right, and understand the mechanics,” he told me.
It was like that scene in the ‘life of Brian’, where the Roman Centurions find Brian defacing the wall, and end up helping him finish the job.
The coach gave me a few brilliant tips, and wandered off back to coaching his high jumper!
These experiences, and following this ‘athletic lifting wisdom’ enabled me to go from a puny 117lbs age16, to 135 at 18, 140 at 21, 150 at 25, 160 at 30, and a solid and lean 175lbs, by age 35.
At 5’ 8” and with 6 ½ inch wrists, this defied any genetic disadvantage I may have had, and in fact, had you met me anywhere between age 25 and 40, you’d have found it difficult to believe just how much of a ‘hard gainer’ I’d truly been, which I always found irritating, given the blood, sweat, tears and vomit, that went into building me.
That’s 58 lbs (26.3 kilos, 4.1 stone) of solid muscle in 19 years, drug-free, but more importantly, it was functional muscle, and I could still fight, run, jump, climb, and basically do whatever I desired, while still maintaining incredible endurance.
I appreciate you’ll be impatient, and perhaps not want to wait 19 years, but I started to look really good for my height in just 5 years, and pretty damn athletic within 10.
With what I now know, and can coach you with, I reckon I could do it a lot quicker, and if you’re not trying to gain 3 black belts as I was during the same time period, you could bring that time down to maybe 6 years, for 30lbs of solid muscle, give or take a bit, depending on your height, starting age, diet, and bone structure of course.
People who train really hard, often don’t train really smart, and people who train smart, don’t necessarily train hard, just you remember that.
I see men and women in the gym every night training really, really hard, but doing some of the dumbest routines and exercises totally devised for pro bodybuilders to improve a tiny specific aspect, of a specific muscle, which they already often possess in huge quantities!
These same exercises do not translate to 99% of men or women in any gym I’ve ever worked in, coached in, or owned.
But these popular fitness magazines know their readership sales would plummet if they ever printed what you ‘actually’ needed to do to build and maintain a healthy natural physique.
Moreover, if they printed the same fucking thing month after month, people would be bored shitless, and respond with; ‘yeah, got that mate, squats, deadlifts, cleans, chins and dips, and abs on non-training days, if at all’!
Also bear in mind, that their actual magazine sales only just help them break even, their true profit comes from selling advertising space.
Now if a company wants a whole page for its protein powder, and ten other firms likewise for their various products, and ten more for exercise equipment, then the owner of the mag will be nursing a semi (or be wet, for you ladies).
That same magazine owner isn’t going to refuse to have ‘drugged to the gills’ male bodybuilders, holding the protein powder tubs in those ads, because ‘they don’t want to send that message to their readers’. Fuck that, there’s no moral setting on a magazine editors compass, just dollar or pound signs.
Nor will they refuse a (photoshopped) sexy woman, with abs and suspiciously large tits (the two don’t really go together), and probably a clit the size of a small cock.
I say ‘photoshopped’, because I’ve yet to meet one of these ‘ladies’ whose skin was fit for anything other than sitting on, and it’s a pity the ladies buying into the advertised products can’t hear the models’ deep masculine voices, or they’d run like fuck from whatever they were promoting.
Have you ever noticed that a fitness magazine, is more like a fucking supplement and equipment catalogue?
Well, now you understand where the money’s at for the owners of those mags, and why the few pages that aren’t trying to sell you supplements, powders, potions, equipment and gym wear, are filled with shit routines.
Those magazines were never founded on the basis of you hitting your physical, mental, and emotional goals, you do realize that, right?
No one at that magazine, or who writes for it, gives a flying fuck if you join a gym on January 1st, quit in March, get obese by June, and slit your fucking wrists in July when you try on your swimwear.
Because; ‘There’s one born every minute’ remember.
I was one of them, and to a lesser or greater degree, so are you, dear reader.
As long as the magazines show what you ‘want’ to see and ‘want’ to read, contain enough cock, minge, or arse to satisfy your sexual preference, and contain articles that appear to be written by ‘expert’ people who ‘understand’ your predicament, then job done as far as any magazine owner is concerned.
I must have spent more money on health, fitness, bodybuilding, and martial arts magazines, from age 15 to 40, than many people reading this do on a car!
I was habitually buying 4 or 5 a week, and even having ones not available in the UK, shipped over from the states.
In the later years, I justified it as needing to keep up on current trends, routines, fads, diets and so on, since I was ‘in the trade’ being a Life Coach, gym owner, nutrition expert, and martial arts coach.
Hand on heart, I feel like a right cunt admitting that for you!
Having to admit to being a ‘mag fag’ for 25 years isn’t easy, but if it helps you to grow, then its served its purpose because trust me when I tell you this;
Those mags always have been, and always will be full of shit, misleading advertisements, doctored photographs, drug fucked models, out of date or skewed science, totally useless routines, and exercises that won’t be appropriate for 90% of its readership.
This here, what your kindly reading right now, is truthful, informative, to the point, and its author knows sincerely what you’re feeling and wanting.
But I’m giving you what you ‘need’ to read, rather than what you ‘want’ to read.
How popular do you think any fitness mag I’d ever own would be, in the grand scheme of things?
How many companies would clamour to spend money advertising with me, when I announced that my readership consisted of ‘normal’ members of the public trying to improve themselves naturally, while often holding down two jobs, and feeding 3 fucking kids.
Thus, I don’t want any ‘professional models’ or in other words; ‘people with fuck all else to do but train, eat right, and swallow drugs all day’, to be featured in any products or equipment ads appearing in my mag, unless their totally covered up, or you can only see their faces.
I doubt I’d be that popular with supplement and powder producers either, what with what I know about most of that unnecessary and mostly unusable garbage.
Treadmill and elliptical machine manufacturers, along with Crossfit and TRX, would have hit men following me around!
No, fuck the fitness magazine business, you can’t make a dime in that game unless you’re a total sell out, and are singing the same fucking tune as pretty much every other publication of the same ilk.
You need to train really smart, and really hard, and then be really consistent, to maintain the ‘muscle memory’, come what may.
And there will be times when you can only train once or twice a week, perhaps with a new baby or work commitment.
There will also be the occasional illness to deal with, and injuries you may have to work around, or that require rest totally, for months even.
But when you ‘Own’ that muscle, then firstly you won’t lose much at all from a layoff, and secondly, it may only take a few weeks to get back to your best shape, due to that muscle memory being so ingrained.
So, train consistently smart and hard for at least 10 years, and that muscle memory will see you through any hard times.
Be well, and thanks for your questions.
Blunt Coach Andy
