By Mike Geary
Certified Personal Trainer
Certified Nutrition Specialist
Author/Founder of TruthAboutAbs.com
COPYRIGHT© 2007
All rights reserved
TABLE OF CONTENTS
2.3 Tired of the Same Old 3 Sets of 10? So is Your Body! Discover How to Manipulate
2.4 Your Workouts Need Both Consistency and Variability for Max Results...................... 13
2.6 Barbell, Kettlebell, and Dumbbell Complexes - a Different Style of Weight Training for
3.2 Don’t be Afraid of Dietary Fat! Even Some Saturated Fats are Healthy for You......... 34
3.4 The Top Fitness Foods to Stock Your Cabinets With…Making Smart Choices Starts
3.5 Are Vitamin/Mineral Supplements Necessary or Just Money Down the Toilet? ......... 51
Disclaimer: No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations utilized in articles and reviews. The programs and information expressed within this book are not medical advice, but rather represent the author’s opinions and are solely for informational and educational purposes. The author is not responsible in any manner whatsoever for any injury or health condition that may occur through following the programs and opinions expressed herein. Dietary information is presented for informational purposes only and may not be appropriate for all individuals. Consult with your physician before starting any exercise program or altering your diet.
1.0 INTRODUCTION
I hope you enjoy your copy of Training & Nutrition Insider Secrets for a Lean-
Body. Please feel free to email this e-book to any of your friends, family, or co-workers that you think would enjoy these topics. They will surely be thrilled that you shared all of this information with them!
Inside this e-book, you’re going to find various powerful strategies to make your training and nutrition program more exciting and result producing. You’ll find out the truth about cardio. You’ll discover some extremely effective strength training exercises, tips, and strategies. You’ll even discover some new training styles that have emerged in recent years as well as some fresh ideas you’ve probably never thought of before. I’ll also give you some great healthy meal ideas and unbiased nutritional strategies…none of that low-carb or low-fat gimmicky crap! I’m also NOT
going to give you any of the same old BS that you’ve heard from mainstream health professionals about how you need to do endless hours of boring cardio routines, and eat nothing but bland meals like tuna and rice, or plain grilled chicken with broccoli in order to get in great shape. HELL NO!
Instead, I’m going to show you that you can enjoy life to the fullest while simultaneously building the body of your dreams and increasing your energy so that you feel like a million bucks every single day. Not only that, but you’ll be able to perform like never before…whether it’s performing physical tasks at home, dominating the competition on the playing field, or even performing in the bedroom!
Yes, these are all just the start of some of the benefits of striving to achieve your own peak fitness.
Aside from the fact that you can take action now and improve how you look, feel, and perform, one of the most important aspects of taking responsibility for your own fitness is that you’ll live a longer, happier life and reduce your risk of degenerative diseases. In all seriousness, the health condition of the majority of people in developed nations has deteriorated to such an extent that it has literally Training & Nutrition Insider Secrets for a Lean-Body
TruthAboutAbs.com
become a crisis. In the US, experts estimate that approximately 70% of the adult population is currently overweight or obese. That means that if you are a lean and healthy individual, you are a minority! It has literally become the norm for most people to be out of shape, overweight, and ridden with degenerative diseases like type-II diabetes, heart disease, and cancer. That’s pretty sad. With as fast as obesity rates are increasing, if things don’t change soon, we could very likely see 9
out of every 10 people as overweight or obese in another decade or two.
Something needs to give. People need to start taking responsibility for their own health and fitness and that of their families. Nobody else is going to do it. The billion dollar food manufacturing companies sure aren’t going to do it. All they want to do is make huge profits by selling you cheap junk food, heavily refined and processed full of chemicals that are causing a cellular disaster within your body.
The billion dollar pharmaceutical companies sure aren’t going to look out for your health either. Hell, they want you to be sicker than ever, so that you’ll have to buy more of their medicines. And the rich supplement companies won’t look out for your health either. They love the fact that people are getting fatter all the time, so that they can persuade you with fancy marketing into thinking that there’s a quick-fix solution and all you have to do is spend lots of money on some of their pills and you’ll magically be lean and mean without changing anything else in your life.
It’s pretty simple as to why the world is becoming a fatter place at an astonishing rate. For one, the population has become increasingly more sedentary over the years. Kids no longer spend most of their time running around and playing games outside. Now, they spend more time inside playing video games or surfing the web on the computer. Adults do less manual labor than ever before. Technology allows us to be lazier than ever and perform as little movement as we want on a daily basis. This simply means that we must intentionally add extra movement to our daily lives in this day and age where we’re not required to do much movement any more. My thinking is…why does it have to be a chore to add movement to your daily life? It should be the opposite…you should be active because you enjoy it!
For example, if you’re not the least bit interested in weight training, then find 2
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something you do like such as swimming, rock climbing, mountain biking, or competitive sports, and enjoy it on a regular basis.
Another reason the world is becoming fatter is that our food supply has become more heavily processed, refined, filled with chemicals, and modified from its natural state over the years. Everybody thinks that they don’t have time in this fast-paced world to prepare their own meals anymore, so they grab quick junk foods from corner stores, fast food joints, and restaurants. This habit makes it that much harder to stay healthy and lean, because THEY aren’t looking out for your health.
Only YOU can do that!
The solution is easy! First, we need to make smart whole food decisions, and prepare our own meals. Second, we need to get out and move. Our bodies are meant to move and be active on a regular basis. That’s the simplest way to look at it. Now let’s get down to some of the insider secrets from a fitness junkie on how you can get top notch results out of both your training and your nutrition programs.
This E-book will provide you with tons of ideas to take your workouts to a whole new level and to open your mind with respect to your diet. After you read this Ebook, if you want to really step it up and discover the entire system that I’ve created, that 10’s of thousands of people all over the world are using now for
developing a lean, rock hard body, check out my Truth about Six Pack Abs
program. This program is fully comprehensive with everything you need to know if you’re serious about your body. The Truth about Six Pack Abs program is not just about doing abs exercises. It’s about smart full-body training and nutrition strategies for reducing your body fat to levels so that you can finally see your abs, and bring out eye-catching muscle tone throughout your entire body.
On another note, if you haven’t signed up yet for my FREE Lean Body Fitness
Secrets Ezine, what are you waiting for? I’ll send you a brand new E-zine every couple weeks giving you all kinds of hard-body tips and strategies that you can go out and use right away to get better results and achieve the body that you’re 3
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looking for. As thanks for signing up, I will give you instant access to several free bonuses that I think you’ll like. First, I’ll give you your own personalized metabolic rate calculator that will take into account all of your personal characteristics and calculate your approximate calorie requirements for whether you want to lose weight, gain weight, or maintain. Second, I’ll give you free access to five of my own secret hard-body workout routines. I guarantee these routines will take your workouts to a new level of intensity and are way different than anything you’ve ever
tried before! Sign up now if you’re not already a member. Go to the ‘free fat loss report’ tab at the top of the page.
Before we get into the meat of this, let me give you a little more info about myself so that you can get to know me a little better. My name is Mike Geary and I’m a nationally Certified Personal Trainer and Certified Nutrition Specialist. I’m the owner of TruthAboutAbs.com & BusyManFitness.com and have authored the internationally selling book The Truth about Six Pack Abs, with 10’s of thousands of readers in over 100 countries world-wide. I’m also contributing writer for Muscle
& Fitness Hers Magazine, a “Platinum Expert Author” by Ezinearticles.com, and have had my fitness articles published on over 1000 fitness related websites around the world. Just so you know that I’m a real person, here’s a couple pics of me performing 2 of my favorite & most challenging drills…the overhead squat and the deadlift.
Alright, enough about me…now let’s get to some good material!
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TRAINING STRATEGIES
2.0
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2.1 Bad Cardio vs. Good Cardio
It is common to hear fitness professionals and medical doctors prescribe low to moderate intensity aerobic training (cardio) to people who are trying to prevent heart disease or lose weight. Most often, the recommendations constitute something along the lines of “perform 30-60 minutes of steady pace cardio 3-5
times per week maintaining your heart rate at a moderate level”. Before you just give in to this popular belief and become the “hamster on the wheel” doing endless hours of boring cardio, I’d like you to consider some recent scientific research that indicates that steady pace endurance cardio work may not be all it’s cracked up to be.
First, realize that our bodies are designed to perform physical activity in bursts of exertion followed by recovery, or stop-and-go movement instead of steady state movement. Recent research is suggesting that physical variability is one of the most important aspects to consider in your training. This tendency can be seen throughout nature as animals almost always demonstrate stop-and-go motion instead of steady state motion. In fact, humans are the only creatures in nature that attempt to do “endurance” type physical activities. Most competitive sports (with the exception of endurance running or cycling) are also based on stop-and-go movement or short bursts of exertion followed by recovery. To examine an example of the different effects of endurance or steady state training versus stop-and-go training, consider the physiques of marathoners versus sprinters. Most sprinters carry a physique that is very lean, muscular, and powerful looking, while the typical dedicated marathoner is more often emaciated and sickly looking. Now which would you rather resemble?
Another factor to keep in mind regarding the benefits of physical variability is the internal effect of various forms of exercise on our body. Scientists have known that excessive steady state endurance exercise (different for everyone, but sometimes defined as greater than 60 minutes per session most days of the week) increases free radical production in the body, can degenerate joints, reduces immune 6
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function, causes muscle wasting, and can cause a pro-inflammatory response in the body that can potentially lead to chronic diseases. On the other hand, highly variable cyclic training has been linked to increased anti-oxidant production in the body and an anti-inflammatory response, a more efficient nitric oxide response (which can encourage a healthy cardiovascular system), and an increased metabolic rate response (which can assist with weight loss). Furthermore, steady state endurance training only trains the heart at one specific heart rate range and doesn’t train it to respond to various every day stressors. On the other hand, highly variable cyclic training teaches the heart to respond to and recover from a variety of demands making it less likely to fail when you need it. Think about it this way -- Exercise that trains your heart to rapidly increase and rapidly decrease will make your heart more capable of handling everyday stress. Stress can cause your blood pressure and heart rate to increase rapidly. Steady state jogging and other endurance training does not train your heart to be able to handle rapid changes in heart rate or blood pressure. Steady state exercise only trains the heart at one specific heart rate, so you don’t get the benefit of training your entire heart rate range.
The important aspect of variable cyclic training that makes it superior over steady state cardio is the recovery period in between bursts of exertion. That recovery period is crucially important for the body to elicit a healthy response to an exercise stimulus. Another benefit of variable cyclic training is that it is much more interesting and has lower drop-out rates than long boring steady state cardio programs.
To summarize, some of the potential benefits of variable cyclic training compared to steady state endurance training are as follows: improved cardiovascular health, increased anti-oxidant protection, improved immune function, reduced risk for joint wear and tear, reduced muscle wasting, increased residual metabolic rate following exercise, and an increased capacity for the heart to handle life’s every day stressors. There are many ways you can reap the benefits of stop-and-go or variable intensity physical training. One of the absolute most effective forms of 7
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variable intensity training to really reduce body fat and bring out serious muscular definition is performing wind sprints or hill sprints. Also, most competitive sports such as football, basketball, racquetball, tennis, hockey, etc. are naturally comprised of highly variable stop-and-go motion. In addition, weight training naturally incorporates short bursts of exertion followed by recovery periods. High intensity interval training (varying between high and low intensity intervals on any piece of cardio equipment) is yet another training method that utilizes exertion and recovery periods. For example, an interval training session on the treadmill could look something like this:
• Warm-up for 3-4 minutes at a fast walk or light jog
• Interval 1 - run at 8.0 mi/hr for 1 minute
• Interval 2 - walk at 4.0 mi/hr for 1.5 minutes
• Interval 3 - run at 10.0 mi/hr for 1 minute
• Interval 4 - walk at 4.0 mi/hr for 1.5 minutes
Repeat those 4 intervals 4 times for a very intense 20-minute workout.
The take-away message from this section is to try to train your body at highly variable intensity rates for the majority of your workouts to get the most beneficial response in terms of heart health, fat loss, and muscle maintenance.
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2.2 Body Part Isolation vs. Complex Movements in Strength Training Working as a fitness professional, there is one type of question I get all the time that shows that many people are missing the big picture regarding the benefits of strength training. This popular question usually goes something like this:
“What exercise can I do to isolate my _______ (insert your muscle of choice – abs, quads, biceps, triceps, etc)?”
It doesn’t matter which muscle someone is asking about, they always seem to be asking how to ‘isolate’ it. My first response to this question is always – “Why in the world would you want to isolate it?”