Hooray

About 3 years ago I decided I wanted to put on muscle and get fit. I bought the book by Arnold, the New Encyclopedia of Modern Bodybuilding. It was only twenty-five bucks yet had the heft of a small city's phone book.

Arnold's book changed my view of bodybuilding. I had considered bodybuilders' appearance as "grotesque" and abnormal. If you read through it once, the guys in the photographs start to look more normal, oddly enough. After reading Arnold's book I had enough knowledge to get started. I read it repeatedly, I was gradually memorizing it, and could read through the entire thing in a couple of hours, whenever I wanted to reignite the fire under my bottom.

Arnold's book is written in such a way that a person without prior knowledge of bodybuilding can read it and learn that bodybuilding does not involve steroids or synthetic hormones--that anyone who assumes otherwise is in for failure; it's only cheating one's self.

I found out later that Arnold currently admits years of steroid (ab)use and actually advocated their use among his peers and in pamphlets. But the argument he makes in his book is nevertheless sound, tempting as it is to make that ad hominem attack and call Arnold a hypocrite, etc. Nevertheless he is correct, in his book. Also, we didn't know things then that we know now. And he has enough integrity to come clean and just admit it, instead of lying.

I do respect Arnold for writing thebook; it was inspiring enough and also gave me a proper direction to take, so I highly recommend it. I would say that persuading someone to do what he suggests is a feat in itself. Few individuals are able to convince people to pursue the "pain." Arnold can say what he does confidently because if anyone does what he says, they actually get what he promises.

In short my caveat to you, reader, is: Arnold advises hanging up pictures of competitors on the wall to strive to look like them. YET he does not tell you anywhere in the book that he and likely most or all other competitors took steroids to get there. Don't set yourself up for frustration (not getting what you expect). Get the poster, the Muscular System.

What was actually disappointing to me though was not finding out about Arnold's past or how much of competitive bodybuilding is contaminated with banned substances.

Deep down, what disappointed me more was that some things he described as part of the joy of bodybuilding, I felt I didn't enjoy. He wrote about how bodybuilders love to look at their muscles in the mirror, flexing and posing--they revel in the satisfaction and payoff for their hard work.

I did not feel like that. I didn't even like looking at my own body unless it was while I worked out. I thought there was something wrong with me; I started wondering if I had body dysmorphia, an illness where one's perception of his own body is distorted, burdened with feelings of constant inadequacy about body appearance, even when it's great by most people's standards. It's like anorexia for males. Just that thought was depressing in itself. But I kept going back because lifting made me feel great afterwards and nothing in the world clears my head as well as a rigorous and prolonged period of exertion. I don't think it's just me, who is like this (hint, hint ;)

I had lost about 20 lbs of fat and added about 25 pounds of muscle over all that time, but I still felt that something was still not 'right.' I liked looking at my legs below the knee, but that was about it. I learned to leg press 720 lbs ten times and squat 400 lbs but I didn't care, and I still don't. Strength is one of my last concerns.

Thankfully, I don't have body dysmorphia. It wasn't until relatively recently that I understand better, the source of every problem I had with my physique and what was screwing up every upper body exercise I did: Upper Cross Syndrome. "Syndrome" makes it sound like a disease, but the word just means that it involves a number of typical characteristics, which are:

The upper crossed syndrome is defined as tightness of the upper trapezius, pectoralis major, and levator scapulae and weakness of the rhomboids, serratus anterior, middle and lower trapezius, and the deep neck flexors, especially the scalene muscles. link

I started fixing my shoulders about a year ago, using this program, the Perfect Posture Plan. At least 3 or 4 times in the past year, I had thought my shoulders were finally "fixed," I even posted on this blog about it. I underestimated how badly slumped forward my shoulders were; my entire shoulder girdle was pulled forward and locked in position that way, the older exercises I returned to after 'completing' PPP only contributed to the problem.

I did regain the ability to pull my shoulder blades together by doing the PPP, but I still had not relearned how to use my shoulder muscles in coordination with my chest and back, again.
What I describe may sound extreme, but I didn't look like Quasimodo. Destablized shoulders detrimentally affect how every lift is done, but the appearance is subtle. I see at least a handful of strangers daily who I would bet have upper-cross syndrome.

I understand now why I rarely liked how I looked in photographs; why I've always thrown a football "like a girl," and why my posterior deltoids were thin and underdeveloped. I don't even have a "before" picture of myself without clothes because I didn't want to take pictures of myself. And no matter how much or how hard I worked them, my pecs and deltoids didn't grow much; they looked partly good only while I was "training" them, yet I was merely filling them with a little more blood.

Now that my shoulders are pulled back farther and previously neglected muscles in my back are activated, it is a strange feeling to have shoulders, weird as that is to write. I feel like I have half a grapefruit at the top of each arm where clavicle meets humerus. It feels both good and funny.

I'm happy about it! I never considered posture to be that important before, Arnold doesn't mention it specifically, besides warning not to stand on stage with one's belly hanging out while others do their routines.

Posture is so important that it makes a good body look bad and a bad body look better.

No matter how well you think you "know" how to do an exercise there is always a little necessity for improvement or variation every so often.

The simplest way to describe 'upper cross syndrome' is that it is an imbalance between the chest and back, which oppose each other. It's like a tug-o-war and the front of the body is winning; the position of thee center flag (shoulders) is a good distance in favor of the "back team" buying dinner for the winning "chest team," except that the winning team doesn't get larger. All that happens: chest team gets shorter while back team gets longer. :|

Remember what Arnold writes about training every single muscle. Train your neck. Yes, your neck, especially where you're tilting your head back.

Keep going.

Don't Quit

---

"When things go wrong as they sometimes will
When the road you're trudging seems all up hill.
When funds are low and the debts are high.
And you want to smile, but you have to sigh.
When care is pressing you down a bit.
Rest, if you must, but don't you quit.
Life is queer with its twists and turns.
As everyone of us sometimes learns.
And many a failure turns about
When he might have won had he stuck it out:

Don't give up though the pace seems slow -
You may succeed with another blow.
Success is failure turned inside out -
The silver tint of the clouds of doubt.
And you never can tell how close you are.
It may be near when it seems so far:
So stick to the fight when you're hardest hit
It's when things seem worst that you must not QUIT.

-author unknown

I know it's a bit trite but I like the how the rhythm accompanies the meaning of the words :)

I'm Still Here

It was good to take a break; like taking a step back and observing from a different angle. I'm working on the circled parts currently. :)

Dieting vs. Exercise

Obese should exercise not 'diet'

Women who are clinically obese don't need to diet to improve their health, say UK researchers.

A programme which encouraged women not to diet but to take part in exercise classes found significant improvements in health and mental well-being.

The women in the study were also taught about good eating habits, such as how to cook, and received social support.

After a year, the women had only lost a little weight but were significantly fitter and happier with themselves.

...and after another year, I would bet these women will still be happy and still losing weight. Wouldn't you think they would be better off than those who lost a larger amount of weight but were still feeling lousy and thus more likely to gain it all back? The key is in the activity.

It's not just the obese who should exercise. It's everybody who needs to exercise, in order to feel normal or great. "Dieting" is a sham and has turned into a disgraceful money-making endeavor for those profiting from people not exercising; contributing to the myth that physical activity is optional. It's not. Look around. Do fad diets and weight-loss centers work for longer than the short-term? If they really worked, wouldn't these sorts of 'services' begin disappearing from a lack of demand? Are these people giving out (selling) fish or teaching people how to fish for themselves? Weyt Watchers and NootriSystems have figured out that they can get people to depend on them and pay them for all their food, at every meal. It sounds nuts, but that's all they do. They feed people false beliefs that they "don't have time" to cook or exercise instead of pointing out that they simply never bothered to try. It's a Jedi mind trick.

Most people who diet gain all the weight back, plus an additional 2 lbs. Dieting is crock.

Exercise is not optional it just appears that way these days. Ask the right questions. The right question is not "which diet do I choose?" The right question is, "what activities will help me lose weight and that I will enjoy and have fun doing?"

You don't have to run! Personally, I don't like the pounding my body takes from all the jarring foot planting from running for long periods. I like to row (rowing is mostly a leg exercise that burns more calories than running). Pick something that's fun and that'll make it easier to keep coming back. Then focus on how great you're gonna look and how good it feels to be moving and alive.

Don't imagine/hallucinate/fear that people are looking at your butt in baggy sweats today. I think most people who imagine exercise as dreadful or think it's not fun, spend most of their exercise time focusing on things that are not worth thinking about. What most people see: a person who has just realized how fed up they are, got disturbed enough to do something, and is on the road to achieving their goals.

Focus on your goals consistently and you will get there, even if you forget why you're doing it.

Fun

Food like drugs for some

Food like drugs for some, same brain path used

Overeating and drug addiction may be linked, researchers find

WASHINGTON - The same brain circuits are involved when obese people fill their stomachs as when drug addicts think about drugs, a finding that suggests overeating and addiction may be linked, U.S. researchers reported on Monday.

"We were able to simulate the process that takes place when the stomach is full, and for the first time we could see the pathway from the stomach to the brain that turns 'off' the brain's desire to continue eating."

"We thought the activated area (of the brain) must be in the satiety center, which we learned in medical school is supposed to be in the hypothalamus," Wang said in a telephone interview.

They used a positron emission tomography or PET scan to see which parts of the brain activated when the stimulator was activated. They also carefully questioned their volunteers, all of whom were very obese, about why and when they overate.

The stimulators also sent messages of satiety to brain circuits in the orbitofrontal cortex and striatum, which have been linked to craving and desire in cocaine addicts.

What is addiction anyway?

Addiction:
1.
a. Compulsive physiological and psychological need for a habit-forming substance

2.
a. The condition of being habitually or compulsively occupied with or or involved in something

From the Latin, it means ad-dict, to speak toward. There is a voice in the head that says, "do it again."

So people can develop addictions to food (and sex and drugs and gambling...etc.) too. This website here is the most ultimate source on addiction on the internet. Ultimate, because the site actually shows people how to quit an addiction--any addiction--by articulating how addiction works and teaching a learned skill called AVRT.

The conclusion of the study was that the sensation produced by eating until the stomach is full --that is the sensation which is addictive, not the food itself. Food is metabolic fuel; is necessary.

But eating until the stomach feels stretched is not necessary. The longest-living people on the planet live in Okinawa, Japan. Do you know how they eat by tradition? They eat until they feel like they are 80% full. Then they stop eating.


If you try it, you'll notice that if you stop at 80%, and just wait a minute or two, you feel perfectly sated. I know that if I eat until I feel "full," a few minutes later I feel so full it can hurt.

You are not trying to get A's for eating. A B grade for eating is actually B for better. I will give you an overall 'A' and a well-deserved pat on the back if you shoot for a B and get it, at every meal.

I'm no paragon of fitness or judge of what is best for anyone. But I've gone through periods of eating 1 or 2 meals a day, basically gorging during those meals, based on built-up hunger. Eating 5-6 meals a day, by adding snacks, works best, I have found. It works for both losing weight and building muscle mass.

Too Much Testosterone Kills Brain Cells

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- Too much testosterone can kill brain cells, researchers say, in a finding that may help explain why steroid abuse can cause behavior changes such as aggressiveness and suicidal tendencies.

Tests on brain cells in lab dishes showed that while a little of the male hormone is good, too much of it causes cells to self-destruct in a process similar to that seen in brain illnesses such as Alzheimer's.

"Too little testosterone is bad, too much is bad but the right amount is perfect," said Barbara Ehrlich of Yale University in Connecticut, who led the study.

Apoptosis is the body's way of killing off cells that are unnecessary or die as a natural part of growth. It is programmed cell death. An example of this is the webbing between people's fingers. As an embryo, humans have pronounced webbing between fingers and toes. The cells in the webbed tissue are normally killed off by apoptosis; if not, people are born with webbed digits.

Nerves are like this too--they're highly sensitive to signals that tell them it's time to die. Even though we're born with trillions of brain cells and nerves throughout the body, they normally die as part of their life cycle. The stuff that isn't used is like excess baggage that needs to be eliminated. The rule for the brain and for nerves (and for muscle, and for bone...) is "use it or lose it."

Apoptosis, it turns out, is triggered by high levels of testosterone. This may be analogous to the rapid bodily changes that occur during puberty in males, accompanied by a surge of testosterone.

"Anabolic steroids, which are synthetic versions of the primary male sex hormone testosterone, can be injected, taken orally, or used transdermally. These drugs are Controlled Substances that can be prescribed to treat conditions such as body wasting in patients with AIDS, and other diseases that occur when the body produces abnormally low amounts of testosterone. However, the doses prescribed to treat these medical conditions are 10 to 100 times lower than the doses that are abused for performance enhancement." link

Anger and Oxygen

Nearly sixty percent of people experience road rage as a part of their morning commute.

Getting angry compromises lung function.

Many experts agree that the stress reaction is triggered by one or more small cues. The stress reaction is a physiological cascade where the body prepares for the three F's: fleeing or fighting or reproduction. Stress triggers include shallow breathing and clenching the jaw; the rest of the body follows these cues that may be anchored to certain thoughts or the way we perceive things ("he cut me off on purpose!"). What we perceive is not necessarily how things are.

Getting in a rage in the morning could possibly be the worst way to start off the day.

It's tough to remember sometimes but smile and breathe deeply. Imagine that today were your last day, if your life ended at midnight, you would have spent the last day pissed off and short of breath, even though anger changes nothing.

Some people psych themselves up to do a set by getting enraged, by making their "blood boil." I wonder if that has a negative effect on performance? I dunno.

What is the Deal with Bodybuilders and Tanning?

Odd as it seems, being tan hundreds of years ago was a mark of being poor, of belonging to the working class (serfdom) whose members toiled in the fields all day long. Not being tan was a sign of affluence; people powdered their faces to appear more pallid. But today, being tan is associated with having the means, spending leisure time in the outdoors, to vacation on the beach, on the golf course, taking a boat on a 3 hour cruise, etc. Tanning has a sort of status appeal nowadays.

If you've ever seen bodybuilding competitors on stage, they're all tan; they all look brown or tried to be. Some are naturally suntanned, some are tanned artificially through use of UV tanning beds. Others with fair skin use dyes that color the skin. There are others still, who use dyes because of the dangers of developing skin cancer.

Bodybuilders don't brown themselves for status reasons. They do it because a tan brings out the definition in the muscles. It's a visual effect. For this reason, fitness models are also usually a little more tan than not. In "body transformation" photos (before-and-after pictures) the after photo almost always shows a more tanned body.

A downside of long exposure to the sun (besides skin cancer, of course) is premature aging of the skin. There are nuns in convents who rarely see the sun and even in their 60's they apparently have the skin of teens. Leathery skin from a lifetime of UV radiation is not something good. Lying out under the sun and in machines is also time-consuming; boring.

Dyes are often difficult to spread evenly and when applied to the face and ears to match the body, it often looks like some have painted themselves with wood stain, using a too-big paintbrush.

There are costs for being bronzed which may not be worth the benefits. The rising incidence of deadly skin cancer, malignant melanoma does not help this. But there is hopeful news!

The journal Nature reports:

Fake tanner wards off skin cancer:
Plant extract triggers pigmentation to protect fair skin.
There is hope for fair-skinned people who long for a tan. Researchers have found a chemical from a tropical mint plant that works both as a sunless tanner and as a solar shield in fair-skinned mice. If the compound works for people too, it could prove a boon for the cosmetics industry and a life-saver for people with a rare genetic disorder that keeps them indoors. Unlike other sunless tanners on the market that simply dye the skin, forskolin prompts the body to produce a real tan, protecting against ultraviolet radiation.

Scientists develop a sunless tan (BBC)
Scientists have given mice a tan without exposing them to the sun.
They have developed a cream, which has not yet been tested on humans, that switches on the tanning machinery in skin cells.

Experimental Lotion Could Be Secret to a Safe Tan (NPR)
"I will confess I suspected we might see some darkening," says Fisher. "But I was fairly shocked that it was as efficient and complete as what we actually saw."

After several weeks, of applying every day, the mice became really tan.

Sunless Suntan Proves Possible (Scientific American)
Sun seekers and tanning-bed junkies take note: Researchers have induced honest-to-goodness suntans in mice without exposing them to ultraviolet (UV) rays.

Estimated number of people worldwide who die each year from too much sun: 60,000

More Fun Pictures

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Number of Reps in a Set

There's no fixed rule about how many reps should be done in each set since the body eventually adapts.

If a generalization can be made, this might be close:

1-4 reps	6-12 reps	12-20 reps
Strength	Mass / Hypertrophy	Streamlining / Toning
"Powerlifting"	"Bodybuilding"	"Endurance"
little cardio or sprinting	Sprint-Interval Training	Cardio, Marathon, Triathlon, Cycling
Hardly winded	Anaerobic	Aerobic
Workout time = mostly rest	Little, measured rest	No rest

.

A

B

C

If one does too much A or already looks like A, more C would be appropriate

If one does too much C or already looks like C, more A would be appropriate

Equal amounts of A and C average out to B

Too much B all the time is not as effective because the body adapts.

Cycling A and C with B, periodically, helps break through plateaus. This is called Periodization.

Lifting heavy weights all the time is not the best way to build muscle

The body adjusts if you lift heavy weights everyday, preventing you from progressing in your strength training. In addition, lifting heavy weights on a regular basis increases the potential for muscle pulls and strains. Exercise physiologists recommend "periodized" schedules in which you vary your weights in two- to four-week cycles in order to stimulate optimal development of bone, muscle and other tissues.

DOS

1. Do vary your workouts.

We recommend you alternate among light workouts, moderate workouts and heavy workouts. Sometimes women use very light weights because of the fear of getting too muscular. In reality, most women don't have the hormones to get the type of muscles that men can develop, but they will lose fat just under the skin and have more definition of their muscles.

You just can't go in and lift heavy weights everyday, either, because they body gets used to it and you won't progress. Lifting heavy weights can also increase the potential for muscle pulls and strains. Through the use of what we call periodized schedules, where you have variations, either from workout to workout, or over two- to four-week cycles, you can expose the body to different types of workouts that will stimulate optimal development of bone, muscle and other tissues.