How to not crap out all your expensive nutrients

Let's start off with a basic argument: if you're crapping out all your nutrients, your muscles aren't getting bigger. Hence, you're not getting stronger.

That said, here are some basic guidelines to help you not watch all your expensive food flush right down the toilet bowl.

Since I have a sensitive digestive system and have problems processing lactose and casein, my number one is milk and all its derivatives.  

Milk products can come in many forms.  Butter, ice cream and so on and so forth.  It can also come in forms you might not expect like sour cream, certain types of cheeses, and as an added ingredient to foods like mashed potatoes, or buttermilk put in cole slaw, or Rice Krispy treats and certain types of chocolates.

To get around the lactose and casein, I drink pea protein while I workout.  The taste is like cow manure but it's cheap (around $15 for a tub of it on Amazon) and one scoop of it carries approximately 27 grams of protein.  One scoop mixed with water in a shaker bottle is all I can tolerate per workout.  Anymore than one scoop will cause me to get the sh*ts and make a run to the bathroom.

Second food I avoid is soybean oil and soy.  They also liquefy my guts into the toilet.  Unfortunately the only way to avoid it is I have to scrutinize every ingredients list on every food label before I consider buying it.  Soybean oil tends to creep in about 80% of the available food supply.   They put it in peanut butter, mayonnaise, certain types of Asian Sauces for stir-fry cooking, some brands of protein shake mixes, cans of tuna and other canned fish and meats, and even in ramen noodle instant and certain artificial butters.  The list goes forever and it's rare that a processed food from a can or plastic bag doesn't have soybean oil or soy but like I said I avoid it as best I can.

So it begs the question what the hell do I eat then?

I do mostly boiled chicken or rotisserie chicken I get from the grocery store.  I sometimes buy cuts of beef at the grocery store and I salt and pepper to taste or I put BBQ sauce on my protein. If I want carbohydrates, I'll boil up some noodles like pasta or maybe cook rice.  If I feel like I need some vitamins I'll eat fruits and vegetables canned or frozen or fresh.  For fats, I like to eat natural peanut butter.  It has the added benefit of increasing my level of satiety which gives me a nice full feeling after I eat lean pieces of chicken and get hungry again, so I reach for the natural peanut butter and put two cups of it on a plate and eat it raw.  It's called "natural" because there's no soybean oil in it. Natural peanut butter uses palm oil instead.

Another way to avoid emptying your guts into a toilet is to have good food hygiene.  What I mean is how you prepare your food and what cooking utensils you use to process your food.  To wash dishes, buy antibacterial grease lifting dish soap and then mix with a 1/2 cup of bleach into a tub or sink that doesn't leak.  Adding bleach can only be done with antibacterial dish soap because it doesn't have ammonia which when mixed with other soaps that do have ammonia can bond to the bleach to make something akin to the type of mustard gas used in chemical warfare during World War I.  Definitely something you don't want to breathe in while you're washing dishes.  

Probably the best investment you can make is to buy a high quality digital food thermometer,  It should go without saying that proteins have a risk of food borne viruses and bacteria, and the only way to kill them is to make sure your foods reach safe eating temperatures.  Chicken with bone in should be cooked to 180 degrees Fahrenheit.  Boneless chicken no more than 145 degrees Fahrenheit.  Beefs are tough to comment on because who wants to eat a leather shoe from beef that's been overcooked, but then again nobody wants beef that squirts blood into your eye when you poke it with a knife either.

  

Protein: by any means necessary

Alaskan salmon from a can

The Key to strength training: consistency

 No doubt this is a brutal workout that I espouse.  After a couple weeks, you'll feel sore or your joints will ache.  I even from time to time experience a weird phenomenon where I get anxious accompanied with muscle soreness and then my central nervous system gets hay wired from aching all the time and I start to feel unmotivated to workout for the simple fact that my body is sore.

At this point, I like to take what I call a break from my usual brutal workouts.  I workout just to maintain muscle memory.  Usually the workout takes 30 minutes to an hour.  I might pop off a couple singles.  I may do a couple doubles.  The key is to only spend about 10-15 minutes on each set and not try to set any personal records.  Just do enough to keep the joints and muscles in tune for your next taxing workout.

When do you do these muscle memory workouts?  Do them when you experience that weird aching listlessness accompanied with having a frazzled central nervous system.  That's my usual cue.  Maybe after you've had two or three weeks of taxing workouts, you go for a muscle memory workout and give your body and mind a break. The reason for the muscle memory workout is just to maintain consistency.

I don't advocate more than 96 hours of rest or even the occasional rarity of 120 hours rest between workouts.  72 hours of break time between workouts is ideal but that can lead to mind and body fatigue after a couple weeks.  If you go to an extreme of strength training only once a week, you'll probably start losing strength after the second week so skipping workouts in the name of rest and repair is a setup to fail in your strengthening endeavors.  Just do the muscle memory workouts and you'll maintain strength so on the next workout you can start making personal gains again.

Fok the Gym: the fundamental theorem of arm pressing

If calculus can have a fundamental theorem then why can't I?  Thus, the fundamental theorem of arm pressing.

Let's clarify a few terms before I go on.  

First what do I mean by arm pressing? It could be a shoulder press, a bench press, a dip, a decline press, so on and so forth.

Second what do I mean by fundamental theorem?  Fundamental to any arm press, there are three fundamental movements.  The first is the sweeping backwards of the shoulders.  Second is the acute angle between forearm and bicep that is formed when one lowers the bar to his chest or anytime the the knuckles of the hand are in parallel or below the chest.  Third is the wrist joint.  Often overlooked in arm press training, the wrists are one small important part of the kinetic chain in the arm press movements.

Now I'm going to blow your mind.

I claim that without a strong bench press you can't have a strong shoulder press, or without a strong decline press you can't have a strong behind the neck press.  In other words, all arm pressing is interrelated and dependent on each other because of the simple fact of the fundamental theorem of arm pressing.

All the varieties of arm pressing all follow the same principle:  sweep the shoulders rearwards, form a twenty degree or less angle between forearm and bicep making them almost touch each other, and use the wrists and hands as bar stabilizers during the movement.

Now what do you do with information?

The answer is train all varieties of arm pressing even if your only goal is to get stronger in the bench press, or shoulder press, etc., because they are all linked in a symbiotic kinetic chain.

When training the bench press, your pectoral muscles and front deltoids will fatigue quickly.  Remedy that by moving onto the shoulder press.  It will still train your upper pectorals and upper deltoids, and that will have tremendous strength training carry over to your bench press but lessen the stress on the lower pectorals and front deltoids. Then move onto a behind the neck shoulder press because that will focus on the posterior deltoids and triceps and wrists and forearms.  

A side note about the dip. Dips only lead to strength carryover to other arm presses if they don't violate the fundamental theorem of arm pressing which means the shoulders sweep backwards putting a nice stretch on the pectorals and front deltoids, the wrists and forearms stabilize the movement and the acute angle between bicep and forearm closes them together almost touching each other.

Another side note.  Cable tricep pushdowns have zero strength carryover to any arm press.  For the fact the cable pushdowns violate the fundamental theorem of arm pressing.  True, the movement forces the angle between forearm and bicep closed but it completely misses the pectoral and front deltoid stretch.  That stretch is essential for any accessory movement to have strength gain carryover to any arm press.

Last but not least are the wrists and forearms.  Train the wrists by putting them close to each other in the middle of the bar while arm pressing.  This will also tax your forearms.  Then to hit the forearms, alternate on one day with underhand bicep curls and then on your next workout, do overhand bicep curls.  Overhand bicep curls will alleviate stress on your bicep tendons and will minimize the chance of bicep tendon tears.

Intra-workout protein intake

You need to consume protein while working out to maintain and gain strength while training.  The question is what is too much and what is too little?

The answer is it's a yin yang dilemma.

On the one hand, if you drink too much protein shake while working out you'll be crapping out your expensive protein down the toilet.

Alternatively, if you drink too little you'll be missing out on strength gains.

If you look at the body as a closed loop system, you input a variable into your digestive system and what comes out is a function of that variable.  The variable is protein intake.  The body's strength performance is the function.

And your body will give you cues as to how much protein to take in.  

The first cue for too much protein is upset stomach or a gurgling in the large intestines. Take in more protein, you will urinate or maybe fart(protein farts).  Still take in more and more protein, you will most likely have to empty your bowels and expensive protein down the toilet.  Not only does this cost a lot of money (protein shake is not cheap), but also it will add more time to your workout and break the rhythm of your routine. So the lesson here is at the first tingling of upset stomach, no matter how small, cut out the protein intake.  Wait until after you complete a couple more sets and then maybe take a small bit of protein in.  If you're going to err, it's best practice to take in only enough to barely get you through the workout.

Now here's how to tell if your intra-workout protein is too little.  My first and most important cue to insufficent protein intake:  I usually get a trembling weakness in my quadriceps when I stand or in my glutes and hamstrings when I bend over.  If you keep going with deficient protein, you will be missing lifts you could otherwise make had you digested enough protein.  At its most extreme, you'll be risking rhabdomyolysis -- a condition in which your body breaks down skeletal muscle that could lead to kidney damage. So when I get this trembling weakness, I drink protein shake but not too much. 

It's definitely an art form to tell when you had too much or too little protein.  Hopefully you master it quickly enough to give you those most sought after gains.

Fok the gym: modified decline press

 

Fok the gym