The Death To Fitness Super Secret System For Programmed Fat Loss and Target Tonning Sculpter Routine

This is it. I can't stop smashing fitness in the face with a sledgehammer because I will now be joining the ranks of pop-fitness, money hungry, know nothing trainers. I am going to make bank off of peoples insecurities just like the pro's do. I will probably be one of the celebrity trainers on The Biggest Loser next season after I am finished with this one.

I tried to photoshop myself in there next to Bob just so everyone could get an idea of how he and I will look on the show next to each other but there wasn't enough room for my legs, my face looks too fat next to his, and I can't find any shirtless pictures of me. I'll probably need to completely stop lifting weights, being strong, and training everyday in order to not intimidate the little guy. I'll just start doing... whatever it is he is doing here.






So, my program. It is 100% peer-reviewed research based. Actually, it's only based off of one study. That one study, though, showed an average 2.2lb decrease in pure fat over the course of only 48 hours! Amazing. Repeating my protocol twice a week will allow you to SCORCH 4.4 lbs of unsightly pudge every week! This is it, the key, the magic bullet, the x-factor, the body composition game-changer (hopefully I have thrown in enough B.S. jargon to optimize my search engine presence by now... because honestly, I can't think of anything else... oh wait! SHREDDED!!!!!!).

What do you need to (thought of another one, RIPPED, bro. Pecs!!! Abs forever!!!!) have on hand to perform this program is very, very little. The only piece of equipment you need is a bike and a place to ride it. The intensity of the exercise involved is minimal. 48% of V02 max (or a heart rate around 105bpm for most people). The only small, minuscule catch is the duration restraint and distance of the exercise. You need to ride your bike 621 miles in 48 hours. 48 hours! That's a weekend! No big deal. A small sacrifice to make in the epic battle against fat loss. (SWOLE!!!!).


Ok. I'm done. Please don't do this... if you do, feel free to leave your results and ensuing exercise induced medical condition in the comments section below. Some mad scientist somewhere actually made other people do this. Here is a link to the study, the abstract is hilarious:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21722005

Sprint for 1,000 kilometers. Kill yourself. Eat.

Random Thoughts on Stuff That Sucks For You (That Everyone Tells You is Good For You)

It's been a while since I have posted something on here. Sorry about that. Hopefully everyone has not forgot about me and moved on to whatever Dr. Oz is recommending now.

"Now, what you do is, buy 30 pounds of whatever this is a day. You eat 7 pounds of it for breakfast, boil the rest, dump it in a bathtub, and soak in it for 20 hours. Repeat this process everyday for 6 years and, bingo! No more craving sweets!"


What is good for you? Seems like an easy enough question. There are many different answers to this depending on the person being asked but, from a health and wellness... or, hell, even easier, from a survival standpoint, your answers are very simple. Food, water, sleep, and shelter. Mess with not having any of those in your life and your life is going to start to suck really fast. So, why the hell do people limit food in order to lower a number on a scale? Or, why do people pretend to be too busy to sleep enough? Or, why do some people never drink water? Since most of the people reading this, I assume, are not in a third world country or in some situation where death is imminent, we can scratch the whole survival aspect of what you need. Let's get into some things that people tell you that you need but is really holding you back, making you fatter, and slowly killing you.

As opposed to a situation like this... which will quickly kill you.


Whole Grains, They're For Your Health!

I had a whole diatribe planned out to just go nuts about all of the inflammatory processes, the havoc that is wreaked on your insulin, and how bread is not a steak but, instead, I think I will just share one of the most awesome articles I have ever read (written by a very apologetic heart surgeon):

http://www.sott.net/articles/show/242516-Heart-Surgeon-Speaks-Out-On-What-Really-Causes-Heart-Disease

To sum up: the diets these medical professionals are recommending are killing you. Literally, killing you. I guess that's a little harsh. I will rephrase, these diets are making it so you need lot's of unnecessary medicines and HEART SURGERIES for the remainder of your sad, medical bill paying life.

Breakfast Is The Most Important Meal of The Day!

Here is how I start everyday:

... this really is not too far off.

A giant breakfast is the ideal way to start your day... if you want to completely destroy your insulin resistance, get fatter, be half-asleep all day, and have hormonal induced mood swings that mimic roid rage:

He just ate a stack of pancakes...

Our bodies have natural biorhythms that have evolved over thousands of years of being awesome hunter gatherer's in order to survive to now never missing an episode of "Real Slut-Wives of Plastic Face County." The biorhythms create a circadian (sleep cycle) rhythm to our hormone releases. Without getting too complicated, insulin (stores what you eat=anabolic hormone) is lowest in the morning and cortisol (breaks stuff down, makes loves handles go away=catabolic hormone) is at its highest right when you wake up. These hormones switch at in the evening (insulin high, cortisol low), around 5pm to 6pm. It would seem that a big breakfast would be a good thing because that storing, anabolic hormone is low. Well, your body doesn't work that way. Instead, a giant breakfast spikes your insulin into the stratosphere and pretty much any and all attempts to lose fat that day are out the window. So, how do you take advantage of your normal biorhythms? Here is an outline:

-Immediately upon waking, do some sort of high intensity interval training
-Nothing but coffee till noon
-No carbs until 5pm-6pm
-Eat the bulk of your calories for the day in the evening

Total opposite of everything anyone has ever said right? That's how you know it's good for you.

For more info on this kind of eating plan, check out: www.dangerouslyhardcore.com.
You're welcome.

Lifting Weights Will Make Me Too Bulky

This is more a complaint from women than men... usually. What people don't seem to understand is that to look like those 'juiced up bodybuilders' that have been training for size and eating perfect diets for most of their lives, you actually have to train for size, eat perfect, and do steroids for most of your life. Gaining some muscle is not some accidental thing. It takes a work ethic that most of our miserable genotype is not capable of. That being said, some people do swell up right when they start resitance training. This is an acute volumizing effect that resistance training (and subsequent muscle damage) causes and it goes away in a few weeks.

Intense training does more than just help you lose fat while not even at the gym (EPOC Theory... google it), over time, smashing weights for months and years actually remodels your skeletal muscle physiology to burn more fat than a normal person. This is a huge reason why Olympic sprinters are jacked and Olympic marathon runners look like, well, pretty much everybody else on Earth. I've already beat this into the ground but let's review:

Jogging uses a lot of fat for energy. When you jog more, your store more fat in order to be able to jog more. Also, as a means of energy conservation, your metabolism slows down when you aren't jogging. Which means you need to jog more to burn more fat... but then you store more when you stop. Eventually, you must never stop jogging ever.

Sprinting and high intensity exercise require being awesome. The more you do these things, the more awesome you get.

Which option sounds more appealing?


Don't believe everything you see, hear, or read... unless I wrote it, of course.

Sprint. Kill. Eat.

Feelin' Crappy? Take a 'Power Shower'

Recovery is often overlooked in, well, pretty much every training program. When you lift hard, run hard, and train hard week after week, month after month, your going to have to start putting an emphasis on recovery. Even after the most intense of workouts, muscle damage only takes about 48 hours to repair. Unless the damage is done during an intense session with the face trainer:



"She SHREDDED 20lbs of that stubborn, hard to lose face weight. Now, those old jeans fit again, she has her long forgotten college-slut confidence back, and walking down the street with he skull exposed scares off would be purse snatchers."

Anyway, muscle damage is easy to fix. Your body is pretty efficient at doing it naturally but things like food, water, supplements, stretching, ice packs, steroids, etc. help get the damage under control faster so that you can train again. Sometimes, the inflammation from the recovery process takes a little bit longer to subside. Also, another big problem is the amount of stress that your nervous system takes during bouts of heavy training. Like I mentioned before, muscle damage is pretty much fixed within 48 hours. Nervous system activity can take up to two weeks to get to levels that don't mimic that of a schizophrenic serial killer.

"My Fran time is down, my bench press is up but, I am running out of places to hide the bodies."

Damn. She could really use a shower. Actually, she could probably use a Power Shower. Hydrotherapy has been used forever for a wide array of medical and psychological problems... which the women in the above picture has plenty of both. What a Power Shower, or a contrast shower for those who don't like things that sound bad ass, entails is alternating between hot and cold water in certain timed intervals in order to speed up nervous and muscular recovery. Everything from decreased muscle soreness, to increased ROM, to increased levels of Growth Hormone have been found in studies involving Power Showers.

'Well, how do I do it?'

A ratio of 3:1 to 4:1, hot to cold seems to work best. Instead of standing there with a thermometer in one hand and stop watch in the other, just turn the water up as hot as you can stand and count to 45, turn it down as cold as you can stand and count to 15. Do this at least 10 times. Always start with hot water and always end with cold to room temperature water.

You should probably go take a shower now anyway. I can smell you from here.

Sprint. Kill. Eat.

You've Already Lost

So, you want to lose? You want to push yourself hard everyday, eat well, and totally change your lifestyle to completely and totally set yourself up to lose? Of course you do, you want to lose weight. You want to lose fat. Let's look at some synonyms for "lose":

be careless, be impoverished, be reduced, become poorer, bereave, capitulate, consume, default, deplete, disinherit, displace, dispossess, dissipate, divest, drain, drop, exhaust, expend, fail, fail to keep, fall short, forfeit, forget, give up, lavish, misplace, miss, misspend, oust, pass up, relinquish, rob, sacrifice, squander, suffer, suffer loss, surrender, use up, waste, yield.

Holy hell. That doesn't sound like something that is good for you. Think about it. Think about you and your goals. Why the hell would you make a goal based on such a negative connotation?

Well, here is what you have to look forward too:


I'm sure her goal is to lose weight... most people wait until after its actually happened to put the bikini on though.

Turn on the news. Right now. Is it something negative they are discussing? Probably. The world sucks. People suck and do sucky things everyday. Basing your whole training and living regime around a goal that sounds negative and sucky will make you a negative and sucky person. So, how do can you change your goals around to make them sound and seem less sucky and more superhumanly-bear wrestling-kill'em all awesome? Here are a couple tips:

Use Your Scale-... for target practice.



Bathroom weight scales should be illegal. You should need a prescription from your doctor to get one. Unless you have some Biggest Loser-going to die if you don't lose 500lbs-scenario on your hands, you don't need one. Why would you? Are you striving for a healthy Body Mass Index (BMI). Guess what? Insurance companies made this up so they could charge you more money. It has nothing to do with your actual health and well-being. What is more important to you:

-A number on a scale

or

-Having a body that looks like a masterpiece of Roman architecture?

Here is a practical example...



Guess which one weighs more? Neither. They weigh the same.


Replace Your Body weight Goals... with personal record goals in the gym. You'll start to find the harder you work, the better you feel, and the better you look. Keeping track of records on everything you do in the gym accomplishes two goals:

1. You keep track of and have quantifiable data for progress

and

2. You build a mental fortitude that can't be broken.

Stressed at work? Stressed at home? Stressed with life in general? The weight of life's problems seem a whole lot more manageable after you've squatted a 30lb personal record. You carry the weight of other people's problems and your own problems all day long. Take all of those pent up, everyday aggressions out on something constructive for yourself. Like putting yourself through a brutal Hell of a workout at the gym. The world can't touch you if the hardest part of your life you put yourself through... so, train that way.

Stop Eating Like You Don't Know... the crap that is bad for you. Eat veggies. Eat meat. Stop eating meals cooked in a microwave or ordered from a crack-head at a Wendy's drive through. You are short on time? Make time. Your life depends on it.


"Welcome to Wendy's, would you like some straight, un-cut rocks with your Triple Classic?"



Just some stuff to think about. Your scale is not a measure of your health and well-being. If it were, all scales would tell you the same number or the only way you would be able to use one is if you were at a doctors office. Blood lipid profiles, resting heart rate, and blood pressure are much better measures of if you are fat or not. If for no other reason, just because these are tests that only a medical professional can administer. You can't just drive to Bed, Bath, and Beyond and just pick up a blood lipid tester. Well, maybe you can, Hell if I know. I've never been inside a Bed, Bath, and Beyond.

Anyway, stop doing the easy stuff and start doing what's actually good for you. And, for God's sake, don't jog.

Sprint. Kill. Eat.

Losing Weight Will Make You Fat

What in the hell does "weight loss" mean? Think about it. You have a lot of things in your body that contribute to how much you weigh. Water, muscle, hair, skin, eyes, fat, bones, undigested double cheeseburgers, spider eggs, baby aliens, tape worms, and lots of other little icky things that make up your body mass. I would assume most people that partake in some sort of diet and exercise program are looking to lose weight. Well, I have a sure fire plan to lose 20% of your weight in less than 10 minutes. It's going to work 100% of the time. You don't need a gym membership and doesn't require diet OR performing any actual exercises. Here is what you do, go buy a bone saw and cut your left leg off. Next time you get on the scale you'll be shocked and pleased at the amount of body weight you lost. Cut off an arm too to lose even more. That will be $500 dollars. That might seem steep but, once you cut it off all that stubborn unwanted body mass, I'll send you one of those "I did P90X T-Shirts."

Don't actually do that. Unless you are an idiot... then go ahead.

"Weight loss" is a term diet companies use to get you to buy something. Something that is killing you inside when you put it into your body or (in the case of diets) stop putting things in your body. Do you know that when you eat less than 120g of carbohydrates a day it can put your body into a constant state of catabolism. This means, your body starts frantically eating stored fat and protein in order to convert said macronutrients into usable forms of carbohydrates/keep you from starving to death. This is why the low carb diets work. You lose a ton of weight fast when you don't eat any carbs. Some of that weight is stored fat, which is a good thing. Most of the weight is water and stored protein. Pop quiz: Where is protein stored in your body? The answer is your muscles. Your muscles keep you strong and healthy. You don't want them to go away. Then you will be weak, slow, and one of the first people to be eaten during an unexpected lion attack.

The same holds true with low calorie weight loss diets. Anything less than 800 calories a day is killing you. Plain and simple. 800 is the magic number for things like thinking, walking around, being productive, not crapping your pants unexpectedly, and just general survival. 800 is also assuming you aren't exercising. If you are just barely eating enough to survive and exercising at the same time, you are going to die. Ok, maybe not die but, you sure aren't going to feel too good or be very productive. Low calorie is the same as low carb. The only difference is instead of tricking your body into thinking its starving, you are actually starving.

So, why would anyone ever recommend these types of weight loss diets? Because the number on the scale goes down. WEIGHT goes down. Yes, that means fat. That also means water, stored carbs that your body uses for energy, muscles mass, which has a direct correlation to, bone mass all go down or are eliminated from the body.

At this point you are probably wondering how losing all of this weight is making you fat. You can't stay on these diets forever because you will incur the wraith of biology and become and extremely inefficient organism. One of the mechanisms of your body that is thrown out of whack from doing these awful things to yourself is your insulin sensitivity. Basically, the lack of carbs and calories causes your insulin to react as if you just at a 10 pound Hershey bar covered in high fructose corn syrup with a side of pure cane sugar for dipping the first time you take a bite of a piece of bread. Your body will go into freak out mode as soon as you go back toward any kind of normalcy with your diet, storing absolutely everything you eat in worry that you are going to try to starve it again. This will make you gain all that weight back and then some. There are even studies out there that suggest restrictive diets + cardio will cause NEW fat cells to form once normal foods are re-introduced. Not only will you get fat, you'll get fat(ter).

Hopefully now you realize your weight is not a problem. Your fat is the problem. How do you lose the fat? Build as much muscle as you can, eat a ton of protein and veggies, drink a ton of water, and kick ass every time you step into the gym. Don't go through the motions, don't half ass your diet and make a bunch of compromises with yourself every time you binge on an entire bag of oreos or eat so much crap you can't sleep because your stomach hurts and have to cram a bunch of pills down your throat to help all these stupid made up problems people have because they eat a 100% crap diet. You won't have to make these compromises if you don't eat it in the first place. See how that works.

Sorry no pictures or videos in this post, I didn't write it on my computer and didn't want to save a bunch of novelty cheeseburger pictures and Scott Herman fitness debacles on here.

Make good choices, eat real food, and train your body in the gym like a juiced out maniac.

Sorry if there are any grammatical errors in this one, I didn't proof read it at all. The Walking Dead is coming on in a few minutes and watching that takes precedent over making sure all my writin' words look good.

Sprint. Kill. Eat.

Plans for Future Posts

So, as much as I love doing it, writing smarmy and sarcastic nutrition and general, *sigh*, "fitness" advice can get a little boring. My next couple posts are going to focus on my own personal training philosophy for a wide range of goals. Weightloss will be covered but I would much rather be writing about more complicated concepts like training for sports and optimizing your own personal human condition. Human condition in terms of being as strong, fast, and mobile as you possibly can just because you are alive and healthy and there is no excuse to not have those things maximized in your life. Do you think guys like Henry Thomasson and Derek Poundstone are worried about things like a few extra pounds to lose around their love handles:





Nope. They are too busy kicking ass because they have set goals, worked so hard that there was no room for failure, and are nuttier than squirell poop.

More to come soon, in the meantime... dont do this:



You've really got to ask yourself which is worse, the "exercise" that guy is doing or the jealous hint of an illiterate upbringing in the trainers voice? Either way, they have both made the world a more awful place.

Eat the biggest steak you can get your hands on today.

Sprint. Kill. Eat.

The Glut4 and Caffeine Cheat Code

The human body does all kinds of crazy impressive scientific stuff that is very hard to explain, if it can even be explained at all. For example, in regards to exercise, there is a phenomena called DOMS (Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness). Pretty much everyone who has done intense or high volume physical work has experienced this. Simply put, it is getting sore up to 2-3 days after cessation of the physical task. Science offers a wide array of explanations for this strange happening but nothing 100% conclusive. Personally, I think it is a survival mechanism that we, as hunter-gatherer humans, have adapted over thousands of years of sprinting after and killing our food or sprinting away from becoming food for something else. Think about it. If you started getting sore the moment you started running after your dinner, you would slow down, fall down in excruciating pain, and then your dinner would turn around and eat you. Our evolved ability to not get sore for a couple hours to three days after strenuous physical work has kept our species alive long enough to not have to worry about survival induced DOMS as much. Also, it has kept us alive long enough to enjoy the sweet deliciousness of whatever the hell this is:


When DOMS happens in your arteries, it's called a heart attack.


So, you may ask, why do I need to care about any of this fancy science stuff? Well, you hillbilly, some book learnin' might help you drop a few pounds, get lean, and improve performance if you are an athlete.

This post is going to basically outline a cheat code to trick the crappy foods you eat actually work for you. Will this help you keep weight off during your month long McRib bender? Absolutely not. And you need professional help because those things taste terrible. Yea, I said it. What the following suggestions will help you with is those little cheat meals you slide in while already eating, mostly, like an efficient human being.

Here is a scenario:

You have been eating clean and making very good food choices all week. Saturday night, a Friend calls you up and says, "All you can eat pizza, wings, and all you can drink beer all night for $10 at (insert local establishment here)." Turning this down will make you less of a human but you do not want to feel guilty about all of the good work you have done since your last Miller High Life and stuffed crust binge. If only there were a way to control where this bountiful meal is being stored in your body and a way to use all of these calories to help you lose fat, build lean body mass, and not eat yourself into a coma/some horrible-crap-food-walrus-with-diabetes induced disease. Hmmmmm...



Part 1: Controlling where the food goes.

The only places you need to worry about where food is stored in your body is in your muscles and in your fat cells. When/how much you eat during the day combined with your daily activities determines where the extra stuff gets stored. Everything you read about exercise tells you to eat as soon as you can after your workout and to eat higher glycemic foods paired with protein. Why high glycemic? Because they digest and absorb faster than low glycemic foods. This means they get to the muscle faster, restore spent energy (glycogen) faster, and, when paired with protein, slow down the rate of muscle damage and begin the recovery process. During this time period, most of what you eat is sent directly to your muscles due a a protein inside your muscle cells called Glut4 (hey, that's in the title of this post!). Glut4, when activated, moves to the surface membrane of muscle cells and opens the flood gates for nutrients to be absorbed and stored inside.

Two things activate Glut4. In the time period, up to 4 hours, after exercise, Glut4 is activated by the muscular contractions that occurred during the workout you just completed. This is how your body knows that your muscles just incurred some damage due to physical work and that they are in need of nutrients to begin the recovery process. So, most of the food you eat in the time after contraction induced Glut4 is activated is sent to your muscles for storage rather than your fat cells. Pretty cool stuff. While I explain part 2, keep in mind that Glut4 can be activated via muscular contraction.

Part 2: Not going into a diabetic coma.

Every time you eat anything, but especially crappy food, your insulin goes up. Insulin is one of the most anabolic, building up and storage hormone, compounds in your body. The problem with insulin is that it stores the byproducts of the food you eat wherever it can, which will mostly be fat cell and maybe muscle via the pathways discussed above. Insulin activates Glut4 proteins as well. The problem is fat cells also contain Glut4 and are exclusively activated by increased insulin, since you can't "flex" fat. Eating a butt load of crappy food=giant insulin spikes=being a fatty.

This begs the question, How do you activate just your muscular Glut4 protein while keeping insulin low in order to control where the all night wing, beer, and pizza fest ends up in your body?

The answer is coffee and muscle tension.

Coffee (well, caffeine) actually LOWERS insulin sensitivity in normal, healthy people. This means eating, even some crappy foods, will keep your insulin levels lower than if you didn't have any caffeine. The only problem with this is the amount of caffeine is enough to kill a horse. 400mg to 1g seems to work. Keep in mind the half life of caffeine is 5 hours in most people. So, if you ingest a gram of caffeine at one time, don't plan on going to sleep for a while.

Now that you are all jacked up and your insulin is all jacked down, how the heck do you get those Glut4's activated in your muscles? Like a buffalo in a small kitchen with a midget, here is where things get awkward.


He might just be sitting down and not actually a midget. Either way, this would be awkward to walk in on.

Tim Ferriss (4 Hour Body guy) recommends 60-120 seconds of exercise should be enough to activate Glut4 proteins in muscle. The keys are to do big movements (squats, push ups, dips, lunges), keep tension on the muscles for the full 60-120 seconds, and for God's sake, don't let anyone see you doing this stuff. You should do these immediately before gorging yourself to near death with food and then 1.5 hours after you take your first bite. So, sneak off to the bathroom, do your exercises, come back to the table, go nuts on your all you can eat, and return to the bathroom 1.5 hours later and repeat your exercises... which should be pretty interesting after 38 of the all you can drink beers.

To recap:

-400mg to 1g of caffeine about an hour before you head out on your maximum food mission to lower your insulin sensitivity
-Immediately before eating- 60 to 120 seconds of constant tension exercises
-1.5 hours after your first bite, repeat the exercises

These little tips should help you get the most out of your "cheat" meals with the least amount of guilt and fat accumulation. No, you can't do this every time you eat and just eat crap all the time!!! Get your life together!!! These are for those occasional gigantic food and beverage outings that we all need every once in a while just to have some fun and keep our sanity intact.

Just remember you are what you eat. So, eat a bunch of crap and you'll be a bunch of crap.

Sprint. Kill. EAT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!