There is very little new in the supplement world and most new supplements that hit the market are simple, effective ingredients that are really cheap if bought in raw form.
The cheapest place I know of for raw ingredients is bodybuilding.com. You might shop around and find a better deal once in a while, but for the most part that is your best bet and they have about everything under the sun.
1) Look at the label of any supplement on the market.
2)Find the main ingredients.
3)Go to bodybuilding.com and find those raw ingredients and price them in generic form.
Make your decision.
Example: Pre-workout formulas.
Most popular ones (that actually work) have caffeine as the primary ingredient, with some beta-alanine, L-arginine, and maybe some creatine monohydrate.
A jar of most pre-workout powders costs between $30-40 and will last you less than a month in most cases.
I bet you can find 3-6 months of those ingredients for the same price in raw form.
Five Guaranteed Ways to Sabotage Your Strength and Fitness Goals…
1. Unrealistic Goals:
If your goal is to look like a model on the cover of a fitness magazine, but you are only willing to exercise 2-3 times per week, you have an unrealistic goal. Perfect physiques take years of work and lives that revolve around training. Unless you are willing to make training and nutrient timing a 24/7 job, you will not attain that physique. Get that image out of your head unless you are willing to make that type of commitment for several years to come.
2. Missed Training:
This should be obvious, but allowing yourself to miss training times is unacceptable if you plan to progress. To make progress beyond a bare beginner level, expect to spend a minimum of 5 days per week training.
3. Fail to Maintain Strict Nutritional Guidelines:
Consuming junk – in any amount – such as: pop, cookies, candy, bread, chips, beer, cereals, anything that comes from a drive-thru window, sugary coffee drinks, etc..
One planned cheat meal per week is fine, but beyond that don’t expect results. “Just a handful” of this and that does nothing but preserve a nice layer of fat.
4. Fail to Make Yourself Accountable:
Keep a detailed training and nutrition log. If it isn’t documented, it didn’t happen. Unless you are logging nutrition, you really don’t know what you are taking in.
5. Focus on new movements/routines, rather than on weight, reps and rest intervals:
Sometimes the answer is simple: It is hard to understand this when so much marketing is done to make it seem as though every training method is the best thing out there.
Want to build muscle and to burn fat? Move more weight. Rest less.
Do not get sidetracked by 100 different exercises and new fitness gadgets that claim to work wonders.
Focus on moving a prescribed weight in a mechanically sound manner for prescribed rest/work intervals.
Do not overthink this!
Eat ONLY meat, fish, eggs, raw nuts, and fresh produce.
Drink ONLY water.
(Reasonable amounts of condiments, like real butter, real sour cream, coconut oil, olive oil, vinegar, etc are allowed).
Supplements are OK, as long as they are not a primary source of nutrition or consumed as meal replacements.
ONE cheat meal per week is allowed. Plan it and enjoy whatever you want.
Bodyweight Exercise Minimum Quota:
200 pullups per week
300 pushups
1,000 squats
-Break this up over as many days, into as many sets as needed. Do this as part of, or in addition to, your normal training. Don’t overthink this! Just start doing reps. Feel free to do more.
ANY needed or reasonable modification of these exercises is permitted.
Omission of any of these is OK for bonafide medical reasons (not just because you are sore or too busy. Suck it up).
Get creative and get moving.
Please…I don’t want to hear a single excuse from anyone.
Either do it or choose not to. I only want to hear what you CAN do, not how hard this is, or hear reasons why you can’t do any part of it.
So, it’s October again already, or it will be tomorrow.
For the past few years at this time, I have set myself to the task of completing 5,000 kettlebell snatches in 5 weeks. I think I’d read some internet forum or blog post about someone doing this back in 2008 or so, and I decided it would be a good thing for me to do. I have repeated that every year since.
Do not overthink this. Just do 1,000 snatches each week as part of your normal workouts, or extra if you want. Break up however you want throughout the day.
Anyone else who wants to join is welcome, but it is not something I really go out and recruit anyone for. If you just started throwing kettlebells around, I doubt your shoulders or hands are ready for this kind of volume and that can cause issues.
Don’t be afraid to substitute 1-arm swings or ½ snatches if you need to. I know I will include the double ½ snatch and the ½ snatch from time to time just to keep up on those particular exercises.
Drop me a line if you decide to jump in, and have fun. Happy snatching.
Javier Lopez took a day off of lifting kettlebells, to do 400lb tire flips, tire box jumps, followed by some 40yd sprints. Javi has lost over 25lbs in the past 6 weeks…the hard way. He is participating in the 2011 Canyon County Weight Loss Challenge. No matter the pounds lost, he will be the strongest at the end. He also check the nutrisystem reviews, Nutrisystem is a popular weight loss meal-delivery service that offers pre-packaged, lower-calorie meals and snacks for a variety of different dietary needs.
This is a revised version of an article I wrote a few years ago (back when I still did CrossFit and wore a Bodybugg). I like to send it out this time of year. Enjoy. – Jim
You can’t out-train the dinner table!
Fitness is at least 80% nutrition.
For most embarking on a fitness mission, the objective is some form of weight/fat loss. Many think an hour on the elliptical or a cycling class is sufficient to burn off the extra calories consumed during an eating binge. Not so.
For the more enlightened, some form of strength training, kettlebell training or maybe CrossFit workouts are prescribed, which will create a greater conditioning effect, and also speed fat loss. Generally, these types of workouts also expend way more calories than just cardiovascular training, or distance running, which burn only slightly more calories than walking.
Here is a concrete illustration of the fact that no matter how hard you train, your nutrition is still the deciding factor in whether you lose or gain weight. By nutrition, I mean the amount of calories you take in relative to the amount you burn throughout the day.
Forget about ratios of protein to carbohydrate and fat, or what types of foods you eat. Yes, they do have an impact on your physiology and the way your body will respond to training. But, let’s not get that complex for now. It is calories in versus calories burned, first and foremost.
Since kettlebell training is not familiar to some, I will use a simple bodyweight workout as an illustration. By simple, I do not mean easy. This is a smoker. Give it a shot sometime.
Set a stopwatch and do the following as fast as possible:
CrossFit’s “Murph”
1 mile run
100 pullups
200 pushups
300 bodyweight squats
1 mile run
Puke breaks are allowed, but the clock still ticks. Think this is enough to “burn off” poor eating for the day? Think again.
Some time ago, I hit this workout hard. I completed it in roughly 40 minutes, so I was jacked.
That is an awesome workout, probably a little harder than normal for me. And, I dare say, lugging my 230lb frame though 600 bodyweight reps and two, 1-mile runs is significantly more power output than is found in any cycling or aerobics class, or any DVD course found on some infomercial.
I went home and downloaded my Bodybugg. I’d burned 722 calories during the workout. That is a lot for 40 minutes.
The Bodybugg is a device that measures g-force, the amount of heat your body dissipates, the amount of sweat you are producing and the amount of heat your skin produces. All these factors are figured together in order to calculate calorie burn. It is the most accurate device on the market, but still not perfect. There are still other factors that impact this number, and more importantly, how many calories you burn as your body recovers from a workout like this.
Do not believe the electronic calorie burn numbers on machines at the gym or on any heart rate monitor. They are not close to accurate.
A pound of fat equals 3,500 calories of energy.
To lose a pound per week, you have to reduce your caloric intake by 3,500 per week, or 500 calories per day. To lose two pounds, you’d have to reduce your intake (or increase your expenditure) by 1,000 calories.
If you reduce your expenditure (or increase intake) by 500 calories per day – or one 12oz latte – you’ll gain a pound a week.
That same day I did the Murph workout, I ate the following:
– An Apex Fit Drink and a bowl of oatmeal.
– A 12″ turkey and pastrami deli sandwich with a small bag of barbecue
potato chips and a 32oz raspberry iced tea.
– Post workout, I had another Apex FIT Drink mix, with a scoop of glutamine.
– For dinner, I had a heaping plate of pasta with shrimp wrapped in bacon. Oh, and I also had two 12oz pale ales and a glass of red wine.
Yes, this was a “cheat meal/day” and I ate like absolute garbage.
Grand total calories consumed for the day? 4,170
Total calories burned that day: 3,798
.
That equals a calorie surplus of 372 calories.
That being the case, if I were to do the this workout everyday (!), and eat like a pig, I would still gain a pound of fat about every 9 days. If I did that every week for a year, I’d gain 40lbs of fat.
Even after a workout like Murph, a binge at the dinner table will more than out-do any hope of trimming down through exercise alone.
Think about this the next time you try to rationalize poor nutrition by a trip to the gym. It won’t work. It is about consistent hard training, and constant accountability for what you eat and drink. There is no “I eat pretty good.” Unless you strictly monitor your calorie intake -vs- output, you will not reach any weight loss goal.
No matter how hard you train, you can’t out-train the dinner table.
-Jim Beaumont
Recently, someone asked a question regarding my choice of exercises for heavy strength work.
Question:
Jim, In your training logs I notice that you only use barbells for deadlifts, but use kettlebells and bodyweight for most other things. Why is that?
Answer:
There really is no implement besides the barbell that enables one to progressively load as much weight, so they are necessary for building maximal strength. I find that I can get most of what I need with heavy kettlebell presses and weighted pullups for maximal strength work, but to really load up the lower body I need something more.
The reason I choose the deadlift for my “big lift” is because it carries over into so many other activities and puts a huge demand on your system. This is necessary to get stronger. Since heavy deadlifts will help me run faster, jump higher and punch harder, it is on my list.
I have recently added double kettlebell front squats more for flexibility and core stabilization than for added strength work.
I do not want to start a squat -v- dead debate, but I personally do the deadlift instead for the following reasons:
* I don’t need a spotter or to use the squat rack. I can just drop it if I need to.
* The deadlift works more muscles than the squat (i.e. forearms, traps, etc.).
* The deadlift is all concentric, which is important in avoiding hypertrophy and soreness. My legs are big enough already, and I don’t like being so sore that it affects my martial art or other training. If I was looking to add 20lbs of muscle, I would definitely hit the heavy squats.
* Lifting is an activity people do every single day. One of my main reasons for including this is to prevent injury. The better I am at picking heavy things up, the less likely I am to get hurt doing so.
I do not specialize in this type of training, but add it in a few days per week for balance, and because it carries over into every other type of activity. This is really a “bare minimum” selection of max strength exercises, meaning they cover most of the bases with only a few exercises. I should also add that I rest from 3-5 minutes between each set of each exercise on these days.
Why doesn’t my commercial gym just have a whole bunch of kettlebells, barbells, dumbells and pullup bars instead of machines?
This is not a simple question, and therefore will not get a simple answer.
Money for nothing.
Like most everything else, it comes down to money. Corporate gyms don’t make money from people who get results from exercising through effective training methods. They get results from people who sign a membership contract and don’t use the gym.
I trained at a corporate gym for a while, and their own statistic was that 75% of those who sign a membership will not even be using the gym in 90 days. Of course, they’ll still be paying and the gym owners will be making money for nothing for the next two years.
Effective exercise takes time, discipline and lots of hard work and nothing else. Most people won’t pay to work that hard. Machines appear to offer an “easy way out” for lazy, misinformed or desperate people.
Any idiot can step on an exercise machine, slap on an iPod and watch TV, while making some flailing motions on some worthless exercise machine. Ever had to “elliptical” your way quickly from one place to another? I rest my case.
No doubt you will burn slightly more calories than sitting on the couch at home, but you gain little else from it.
As far as strength training with machines goes, forget it. Just forget it. Lifting heavy objects is the only way to teach your body to lift other heavy objects safely. Pushing or pulling a lever on a machine does nothing but teach you how to push and pull levers, no matter how much resistance is offered.
The owners and sleazy salespeople at big corporate gyms make money off people who come to a commercial gym, are in awe of all the fancy machines, and sign a two-year contract with the good intention of using the gym almost everyday.
The inviting atmosphere and vision of getting in shape while watching TV gets you in the door. I’m sure there are pictures of fit people on the walls using those worthless machines, and if you only sign on the dotted line, you’ll get there too. I’m sure they also have a rack full of miracle supplements – that are marked up at least 100% – to help you meet your goals.
Congratulations! You are now paying hundreds, if not thousands of dollars for a gym membership at a corporate gym.
For the first few weeks, all is well and you may even lose a few pounds as your body adapts to the new routine. But quickly, your body will find ways of decreasing the effort required to pedal that bicycle, or “elliptical” your way to health. The results stop, and you soon find reasons not to go to the gym.
That is how corporate gyms make money. The initial investment of those machines is more than offset by the steady stream of people willing to pay for easy fitness.
The problem is there is no such thing as easy fitness!
Being strong and lean requires work, sweat and sacrifice. Not machines. Muscle soreness, missed social engagements, and denying yourself things like junk food is part of the game. There are no shortcuts. No easy routes.
You will feel pain from working out. Deal with it.
Learn to separate slight soreness from actual injuries. If you haven’t been moving much, your body will hurt at first, but the results will come fast. Just don’t fall into the trap of gauging the productivity of your training strictly by the amount of soreness you experience. More on that later.
You will have to miss out on the after work party, the football game or your favorite TV show. Deal with it.
You will have to plan your meals, because working out hard while eating nothing but processed junk will hurt. All that sugar, salt and fat does not fuel a body well enough to accommodate hard training.
You have to pay attention while you train (not watch TV). If you are not paying attention while lifting a heavy kettlebell, dumbell, barbell or your bodyweight, you will get hurt. Period. And, it will be your own fault.
You will have to cut the bullshit and be accountable. No more crap about how you have a “slow metabolism” or “I eat pretty good.” You don’t.
If you don’t measure out every gram of food, you don’t know what you are eating. You have a “slow metabolism?” That is because fat requires less calories to maintain than muscle. Want to change that? Move more, and gain muscle.
Yes, there are some people who have health issues that impede their progress. Guess what? No one cares. The task is the same. Take responsibility for your health and work hard.
Leave your self-pity at the door. It does not serve a purpose. You must take control. No one else will, or can. Find out from a medical professional if you have some physical reason why weight loss is difficult (for a small percentage this is a real issue).
The bottom line
Your neighborhood corporate gym makes money on the promise of easy fitness. There is no such thing. Machines are the tool they choose to use to separate you from your money.
Serious training is not for the person who is content to disconnect their mind and body with an iPod, a TV and some form of repetitious movement that serves no purpose.
It takes hard, intelligent work to meet a fitness goal. Lifting your bodyweight and other heavy objects is the best means to that end.
