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  • The Doctor Says, “Aerobics Will Kill You!”

    The Doctor Says, “Aerobics Will Kill You!”

    Title: The Doctor Says, “Aerobics Will Kill You!”

    By line: By Tom Venuto

    URL: www.BurnTheFat.com!

    Word count: 1492 words

    The Doctor Says, “Aerobics Will Kill You!” By Tom Venuto www.BurnTheFat.com!

    I recently got an email from a reader who was told by a fairly prominent doctor/authorthat aerobics and running will “kill you” (that was more or less the gist of it). As a result, you should avoid aerobics like the plague, says this MD. Since I’ve tolerated enough “steady state cardio is dead” and “aerobics doesn’t work” nonsense over the last few years, despite the success stories I keep churning out that clearly show otherwise, (not to mention my own bodybuilding success, which includes regular cardio), I thought I should not only answer my reader, but also make this topic into an article for anyone else who may have doubts.

    Here’s the “killer cardio” question and my response:


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    BURN THE FAT READER EMAIL:
    ——————————————————————————————

    Tom, your articles are great. Here’s the problem. More runners die from sudden heart attack and stroke than any other form of exercise on the planet.
    It’s because nothing is more foreign to human beings than getting their heart rate up and keeping it there for long periods of time.
    Recent studies have shown that while there are benefits to aerobics, (like weight loss), in the long term, statistics show a direct increase in heart disease.
    Part of the reason for this is that in an effort to adapt to the unnatural demands being put on the body, to economize, the heart and lungs actually shrink.
    Just look at the long list of joint, bone, and muscle injuries that come along with running (it’s right there in the magazines).
    As I know you know, a serious weight lifter, if he’s paying attention to form, should almost never suffer injury from weight training. The same is true for the following:
    Instead of unnatural, self-abusive aerobics, the best way to actually increase heart and lung capacity and size is to go beyond aerobics. In short, spurts of intense exercise, such as wind-sprints, you move past your ability to produce ATP with oxygen as fast as you are using it, causing your muscles to become ATP depleted.
    That’s the point at which your anaerobic energy system kicks in. This is also known as crossing your aerobic threshold.
    Burst training, sprints, whatever you want to call it, it shouldn’t be done in addition to aerobics, it should be done in place of aerobics.
    Incidentally, I am not saying that one shouldn’t walk, jog, bicycle, swim, etc, just be reasonable.
    I had a heart condition that has been totally alleviated. Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday of each week, I go through a 45 minute weight training session, followed by a 20 minutes of the interval program.
    Check it out, I think this sort of thing would be a great addition to your already good program.
    -Jeff

    ————————————————- RESPONSE: ————————————————

    While I agree with much of what you said about the benefits of intense “burst” exercise, I find the anti-running and anti-aerobics arguments promoted by these “experts” to be horribly inflexible, dogmatic and, unlike what you suggested, totally UNreasonable.

    Based on the science, I also find the argument that traditional cardio or aerobics is “unhealthy” to be wholly unconvincing. That doctor isn’t giving the full picture.

    I subscribe to many sports medicine and exercise science journals and I’ve certainly seen research papers looking at sudden death in elite runners, etc. But most of them were case studies and epidemiology. Believe me, there’s another side to the story.

    Marathon running is a highly publicized sport, and the media loves bad news, so the oxymoron of a runner dying of a heart attack makes a great story, which means greater visibility for what is actually a very rare occurrence.

    It’s also easy to cherry pick case studies on just about anything to start up a big scare.

    This comes from the American Journal of Cardiology:

    “The overall prevalence of sudden cardiac death during the marathon was only 0.002%, strikingly lower than for several other variables of risk for premature death calculated for the general U.S. population.”

    Although highly trained athletes such as marathon runners may harbor underlying and potentially lethal cardiovascular disease, the risk for sudden cardiac death associated with such intense physical effort was exceedingly small.”

    I also find comparing serious endurance athletes pushing their physical limits to regular cardio for general fitness training to be an inappropriate comparison.

    What does a rare cardiac event during a 26 mile run have to do with you doing 30 or 45 minutes of jogging or me doing 40 minutes of moderate work on the stairmaster to get cut for a bodybuilding contest?

    Even sillier are the people who keep using the late marathon runner and running author Jim Fixx as an example of anything but a guy who had a genetic predisposition for heart disease (gun was loaded). Rumor has it he was a long time smoker, too.

    I know some bodybuilders and weight lifters who died of heart attacks in the gym. Should we argue against against weight lifting too? Should we just play it safe and stay on the couch? Freak incidents happen and heredity is a factor.

    Please note, I’m saying all this as a strength/physique athlete (bodybuilder), who understands full well that excessive aerobics is counterproductive to my goals and that weight training is priority #1.

    But in the right amounts, balanced with proper recovery (as you said, “reasonable”) regular cardio can be instrumental in helping me lower my body fat and it can benefit you in many other ways, physically and mentally.

    There are MANY ways to do cardio and all of them have their place at certain times for certain people.

    What you’re talking about with sprints or burst training is also known as High Intensity Interval Training or HIIT for short.

    HIIT can be a great way to get cardiovascular conditioning and burn a lot of calories in a very time efficient manner.

    Furthermore, a paper just published recently in the ACSM’s Exercise and Sport Sciences Review (July 2009) discussed the research suggesting that intense aerobic interval training provides greater benefits for the heart than low or moderate intensity exercise.

    The benefits discussed included:

    • Increased maximal oxygen uptake
    • Improved heart muscle contractile function
    • Improved heart muscle calcium handling
    • reduced cardiac dysfunction in metabolic syndrome
    • Reversed pathological cardiac hypertrophy
    • Increased physiological hypertrophy of the heart muscle
    • Overall improved quality of life and length of life by avoiding fatal heart attacks.

    This is NOT an argument AGAINST regular cardio, it is evidence in favor of intense cardio.

    I like HIIT and intense types of cardio! I don’t need to add it to my program because it’s already a part of it.

    My first book about fat loss, BurnTheFat Feed The Muscle was first published in 2002 and I recommended HIIT way back then – as well as regular cardio, not one or the other. I Still do!

    There were also people promoting HIIT long before me. It’s not any revolutionary idea – people just keep putting new names and spins on it for marketing purposes.

    The problem is, to argue in favor of HIIT should not be construed as arguing against conventional cardio or aerobics.

    Many of the world’s best bodybuilders and fitness models used slow, steady state cardio exclusively prior to competitions and they got ripped right down to the six pack abs. They didn’t die of a heart attack and they didn’t lose muscle either.

    In fact, many bodybuilders opt for low intensity cardio specifically for muscle retention when they get to the tail end of contest prep where body fat stores are getting low and food intake is low. Adding more high intensity training on top of all the weight training is often catabolic in that caloric deficit situation.

    Listen, HIIT and other types of intense cardio are great. It’s time efficient, making it ideal for the busy person, and its very effective for both fat loss and cardiovascular conditioning. It’s also more engaging, as many people find longer, slower sessions of cardio boring.

    If you have a history of heart disease and you smoke like a chimney and at the same time you decide you want to take up marathon running, ok, I’ll concede to some caution.

    But, “Aerobics is going to kill you!”??????

    GIVE ME A BREAK!

    Perfect marketing hook for a cultish “HIIT is the only way” type of program… little more.

    Bottom line: sure, do your HIIT, do your sprints, do your Tabatas….

    OR…

    Do your regular steady state aerobics or running too…

    Or, do a little bit of everything like I do!

    Be sure weight training is your foremost training priority and then do whatever type of cardio you enjoy and whatever type gets you the best results.

    If you like to run, then RUN, and tell the “experts” who say otherwise to BUZZ OFF and take their sensationalistic journalism and marketing with them!

    Train hard and expect success!

    Tom Venuto, author of Burn The Fat Feed The Muscle

    Founder & CEO of Burn The Fat Inner Circle at www.BurnTheFat.com!

    About the Author:

    Tom Venuto is the author of the #1 best seller, Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle: Fat Burning Secrets of the World’s Best Bodybuilders and Fitness Models. Tom is a lifetime natural bodybuilder and fat loss expert who achieved an astonishing 3.7% body fat level without drugs or supplements. Discover how to increase your metabolism and burn stubborn body fat, find out which foods burn fat and which foods turn to fat, plus get a free fat loss report and mini course by visiting Tom’s site at: www.BurnTheFat.com!

  • 5 Tips to Avoid Plateaus and Metabolic Slowdown

    5 Tips to Avoid Plateaus and Metabolic Slowdown

    Title: 5 Tips to Avoid Plateaus and Metabolic Slowdown

    By line: By Tom Venuto, CSCS, NSCA-CPT

    URL: www.BurnTheFat.com!

    Word count: 1340 words

    5 Tips to Avoid Plateaus and Metabolic Slowdown By Tom Venuto www.BurnTheFat.com!

    QUESTION:Tom, Is it possible to not lose body fat because you’re eating too little? -Linda

    ANSWER: Yes and no. This gets a little complicated so let me explain both sides.
    Part one of my answer: I say NO, because if you are in a calorie deficit you WILL lose weight.
    Most people have heard anecdotes of the dieter who claims to be eating 800 calories a day or some starvation diet level of intake that is clearly in a deficit and yet is not losing fat. Like the mythical unicorn, such an animal does not exist.
    Every time you take a person like that and put them in a hospital research center or metabolic ward where their food can be counted, weighed, measured and almost literally “spoon fed” to them, a calorie deficit always produces weight loss.
    There are no exceptions, except possibly in rare diseases or mutations. Even then metabolic or hormonal defects or diseases merely lead to energy imbalance via increases in appetite, decreases in energy expenditure or changes in energy partitioning. So at the end of the day it’s STILL calories in versus calories out.
    In other words, NO – it’s NOT your thyroid (unless you’ve got a confirmed diagnosis as such…and then guess what… it’s STILL calories in vs calories out, you’re just not burning as many as someone should at your height and weight).
    One famous study that was published in the New England Journal of Medicine years ago proved this point rather dramatically. After studying obese people – selected specifically because they swore they were eating less than 1200 calories but could not lose weight – Steven Lichtman and his colleages at St. Luke’s Roosevelt Hospital in New York came to the following conclusion:
    “The failure of some obese subjects to lose weight while eating a diet they report as low in calories is due to an energy intake substantially higher than reported and an overestimation of physical activity, not to an abnormality in thermogenesis.”
    That’s right – the so-called “diet-resistant” subjects were eating more than they thought and moving less than they thought. This was probably the single best study ever published that debunks the “I’m in a calorie deficit but I can’t lose weight” myth:
    Part two of my answer, YES, because:
    1) Energy intake increases.
    Eating too little causes major increases in appetite. With hunger raging out of control, you lose your deficit by overeating. This happens in many ways, such as giving in to cravings, binge eating, eating more on weekends or simply being inconsistent, so some days you’re on your prescribed 1600 calories a day or whatever is your target amount, but on others you’re taking in 2200, 2500, 3000 etc and you don’t realize it or remember it. The overeating days wipe out the deficit days.
    2) Metabolism decreases due to smaller body mass.
    Any time at all when you’re losing weight, your metabolism is slowly decreasing due to your reduced body mass. The smaller and lighter you get, especially if there’s a large drop in skeletal muscle mass, the fewer calories you need. So your calorie deficit slowly shrinks over time as your diet progresses. As a result, your progress slows down even though you haven’t changed how much you eat.
    With starvation, you always lose weight, but eventually you lose so much weight/body mass that you can reach energy balance at the same caloric intake you used to lose weight on. You might translate that as “I went into starvation mode” which wouldn’t be incorrect, but it would be more accurate to say that your calorie needs decreased.
    3) Metabolism decreases due to adaptive thermogenesis.
    Eating too little also causes a starvation response (adaptive thermogenesis) where metabolic rate can decrease above and beyond what can be accounted for from the change in body mass (#2 above). This is “starvation response” in the truest sense. It does exist and it is well documented. However, the latest research says that the vast majority of the decrease in metabolism comes from reduced body mass. The adaptive component of the reduced metabolic rate is fairly small, perhaps 10% (ie, 220 calories for an average female with a 2200 TDEE). The result is when you don’t eat enough, your actual weight loss is less than predicted on paper, but weight loss doesn’t stop completely.
    There is a BIG myth about starvation mode (adaptive thermogenesis) that implies that if you don’t eat enough, your metabolism will slow down so much that you stop losing weight. That can’t happen, it only appears that way because weight loss stops for other reasons. What happens is the math equation changes!
    Energy balance is dynamic, so your weight loss slows down and eventually stops over time if you fail to adjust your calories and activity levels in real time each week.
    I teach a system for how to adjust calories and activity weekly using a feedback loop method in my Burn The Fat, Feed The Muscle program (more info from www.BurnTheFat.com!)
    So what can be done to stop this metabolic slowdown caused by low calorie dieting and the dreaded fat loss plateau that follows? I recommend the following 5 tips:
    1) Lose the pounds slowly.
    Slow and steady wins in long term fat loss and maintenance every time. Rapid weight loss correlates strongly with weight relapse and loss of lean body mass. Aim for one to two pounds per week, or no more than 1% of total body weight (ie, 3 lbs per week if you weigh 300 lbs).
    2) Use a higher energy flux program.
    If you are physically capable of exercise, then use weight training AND cardio to increase your calorie expenditure, so you can still have a calorie deficit, but at a higher food intake (also known as a “high energy flux” program, or as we like to say in Burn The Fat, “eat more, burn more.”)
    3) Use a conservative calorie deficit.
    You must have a calorie deficit to lose fat, but your best bet is to keep the deficit small. This helps you avoid triggering the starvation response, which includes the increased appetite and potential to binge that comes along with starvation diets. I recommend a 20% deficit below your maintenance calories (TDEE), a 30% deficit at most for those with high body fat.
    4) Refeed.
    Increase your calories (re-feed) for a full day periodically (once a week or so if you are heavy, twice a week if you are already lean), to restimulate metabolism. On the higher calorie day, take your calories to maintenance or even 10, 15, 20% above maintenance and add the extra calories in the form of carbs (carb cycling). The leaner you get, and the longer you’ve been on reduced calories, the more important the re-feeds will be. (You can learn more about this method in chapter 12 of Burn The Fat, Feed The Muscle at www.BurnTheFat.com!)
    5) Take periodic diet breaks.
    Take 1 week off your calorie restricted diet approximately every 12 weeks or so. During this period, take your calories back up to maintenance, but continue to eat healthy, “clean” foods. Alternately, go into a muscle building phase if increasing lean mass is one of your goals. This will bring metabolism and regulatory hormones back up to normal and keep lean body mass stable.
    There is much confusion about how your metabolism, hormones and appetite mechanisms are affected when you’re dieting, so this was really one of the most important questions anyone could have asked.
    If this didn’t REALLY click – then you may want to save this and read it again because misunderstanding this stuff  leads more people to remain frustrated and stuck at plateaus than anything else I can think of.
    If you’d like to learn exactly how you should be eating to lose 2 lbs of fat per week, then visit www.BurnTheFat.com!.
    Train hard and expect success,
    Tom Venuto, Author of Burn The Fat, Feed The Muscle www.BurnTheFat.com!

    About the Author:
    Tom Venuto is a natural bodybuilder, certified strength and conditioning specialist (CSCS) and a certified personal trainer (CPT). Tom is the author of “Burn the Fat, Feed The Muscle,” which teaches you how to get lean without drugs or supplements using methods of the world’s best bodybuilders and fitness models. Learn how to get rid of stubborn fat and increase your metabolism by visiting: www.BurnTheFat.com!

  • How I Got “Ripped” Abs For The Very First Time

    How I Got “Ripped” Abs For The Very First Time

    Title: How I Got “Ripped” Abs For The Very First Time

    By line: By Tom Venuto, CSCS, NSCA-CPT

    URL: www.BurnTheFat.com!

    Word count: 2222 words

    I’ll never forget the very first time I got ripped, how I did it and how it felt. I’ve never told this entire story before or widely published my early photos either. Winning first place and seeing my abs the first time was sweet redemption. But before that, it was a story of desperation…

    I started lifting weights for bodybuilding when I was 14 years old, but I never had ripped abs until I was 20. I endured six years of frustration and embarrassment. Being a teenager is hard enough, but imagine how I felt being a self-proclaimed bodybuilder, with no abs or muscle definition to show for it. Imagine what it was like in swimming class or when we played basketball in gym class and I prayed to be called out for “shirts” and not ‘”skins” because I didn’t want any one seeing my “man-boobs” and ab flab jiggling all over the court.

    Oh, I had muscle. I started gaining muscle from the moment I picked up a barbell. I got strong too. I was benching 315 at age 18. But even after four years of successful strength training, I still hadn’t figured out this getting ripped thing. Muscle isn’t very attractive if it’s covered up with a layer of fat. That’s where the phrase “bulky” really comes from – fat on top of muscle. It can look worse than just fat.

    I read every book. I read every magazine. I tried every exercise. I took every supplement in vogue back in the 80’s (remember bee pollen, octacosanol, lipotropics and dessicated liver?) I tried not eating for entire days at a time. I went on a rope skipping kick. I did hundreds of crunches and ab exercises. I rode the Lifecycle. I wore rubber waist belts.

    The results were mediocre at best. When I made progress, I couldn’t maintain it. One step forward, one step back. Even when I got a little leaner, it wasn’t all the way. Still no ripped abs. When I played football and they beat the crap out of us at training camp, I lost weight, but STILL didn’t get all the way down to those elusive six pack abs. In fact, it was almost like I got “skinny fat.” My arms and legs lost some muscle but the small roll of ab fat was still there.

     

    Why was it so hard? What was I doing wrong? It was driving me crazy!

    My condition got worse in college because I mixed with a party crowd. With boozing came eating, and the “bulk” accumulated even more. At that point, the partying and social life were more important to me than my body. I was still lifting weights, but wasn’t living a fitness lifestyle.

    Mid way through college I changed my major from business management to exercise science, having made up my mind to pursue a career in fitness. That’s when I started to feel something wasn’t right. The best word for it is “incongruence.” That’s when what you say you want to be and what you really are don’t match. Being a fitness professional means you have to walk the talk and be a role model to others. Anything else is hypocrisy. I knew I had to shape up or forget fitness as a career.

    But after four years, I STILL didn’t know how to get ripped! Nothing I learned in exercise physiology class helped. All the theory was interesting, but when theory hit the real world, things didn’t always work out like they did on paper. My professors didn’t know either. Heck, most of them weren’t even in shape! Two of them were overweight, including my nutrition professor.

    However, out of my college experience did come the seeds of the solution and my first breakthrough.

    In one of my physical education classes, we were required to do some running and we were instructed to keep track of our performance and resting heart rates. Somehow, even though I was a strength athlete, I got hooked on running. After the initial discomfort of hauling around a not so cardio-fit 205 pound body, I started to get a lot of satisfaction out of watching my resting heart rate drop from the 70’s into the 50’s and seeing my running times get better and better. And then it happened: I started getting leaner than I ever had before.

    The results motivated me to no end, and I kept after it even more. My runs would be 5 or 6 days a week and I’d go for between 30 minutes to an hour. Sometimes I had a circular route of about 6 miles and I would run it for time, almost always pushing for a personal record. When I finished, I was spent, drenched in sweat and sometimes just crashing when I got home. And I kept getting even leaner.

    That’s when I started to figure it out. If you’re expecting me to say that running is the secret, no, that’s NOT it per se. I was thinking bigger picture. In fact, I noticed that my legs had lost some muscle size, so I knew that over-doing the runs would be counter productive, ultimately, and I don’t run that much anymore these days. But that’s how I did it the first time and I had never experienced fat loss like that before. The fat was falling off and I had barely changed my diet.

    My “aha moment” was when I realized the pivotal piece in the puzzle was calories. It wasn’t the type of exercise, it wasn’t the specific foods and it wasn’t supplements. Today I realize that it’s the calorie deficit that matters the most, not whether you eat less or burn more per se, but in my case creating a large deficit by burning the calories was the absolute key for me.

    These runs were burning an enormous number of calories. Everything I had done before wasn’t burning enough to make a noticeable difference in a short period of time. 10-15 minutes of rope skipping wasn’t enough. 45 minutes of slow-go bike riding wasn’t burning enough. Hundreds of crunches weren’t enough. I put 1+1+1 together and realized it was intensity X duration X frequency = highest the total calorie burn for the week. How much simpler could it be? It wasn’t magic. It was MATH!

    It was consistency too. This was the first time in SIX YEARS I stuck with it. Body fat comes off by the grams every day – literally. Kilos and pounds of body weight may come off quickly, but they come back just as fast. Body fat comes off slowly and if you have no patience or you jump to one program to the next without following through with the one you started, you’re doomed. In six years, I had “tried everything”… except consistency and patience.

    Then the stakes went up. I had finally gotten lean, but there was another level beyond lean… RIPPED! My buddies at the gym noticed me getting leaner and then they popped the question: Why don’t you compete? My training partner Steve had already competed 3 years earlier and won the Teenage Mr. America competition. Since then, I had been all talk and no walk. “Yeah, I’m going to compete one of these days too… I’m going to be the next Mr. America.” Days turned into weeks, weeks into months, and months into years. The only title I had won was “Mr. Procastinator.” Then finally, Steve and my other friends challenged me almost in an ultimatum type of way. Well, the truth is, I set myself up for it with my big mouth and they called me out, so I would have been the laughing stock of our gym if I didn’t follow through.

    The first time you do a real cut – all the way down to contest-ready – is the hardest. Not as much physically as psychologically, simply because you’ve never done it before. Doing something you’ve done before is no big deal. Doing something you’ve never done before causes uncertainty and fear, sometimes even terror! I was plagued with self-doubt the entire time, never sure if I was ever going to get there. It seemed like it was taking forever. But failure was not an option. Not only did I have an entire gym full of friends rooting me on, I had great training partner who was natural Mr. Teenage America! The pressure was on. I had to do it. There was no way out. No excuses.

    Some other day, I’ll tell you all the details of the emotional roller coaster ride that was my first contest diet, but let it suffice to say, at that point, I still didn’t know what I was doing. It was only later that I went into “human guinea pig” mode with nutritional experiments and finally pinned down the eating side of the equation to a science (and gained 20 lbs of stage-weight muscle as a result).

    In the late 1980’s, the standard bodybuilding diet was high carb, low fat. For that first competition, I was on 60% carbs – including pancakes, boxed cereal, whole grain bread, and pasta – so I guess you can toss out the idea that it’s impossible to get ripped on high carbs – although high carb is NOT the contest diet I use today. But it didn’t matter, because I had already learned the critical piece in the fat loss puzzle – the calorie balance equation. Understanding that one aspect of physiology was enough to get me ripped. It only got better later.

    In the end, I took 2nd place at my very first competition, the Natural Lehigh Valley, and one month later, I won first place at the Natural New Jersey. Seven months later, the overall Natural Pennsylvania.

    Looking back, was all the effort worth it? Well, my good friend Adam Waters, who is an accountability coach, teaches his students about using “redemption” as a motivator. Remember the Charles Atlas ad where the skinny kid got sand kicked in his face and then came back big and buffed and beat up the bully? That’s redemption. Or the dateless high school nerd who comes back to the 10 year class reunion driving a Mercedes with the prom queen on his arm? That’s redemption.

    After all the doubt, heartache and frustration I went through for six years, I not only had my trophies, my abs were on the front page of the sports section in our small Pennsylvania town newspaper. The following year, I was on the poster for a bodybuilding competition… as the previous year’s champion. THAT’S REDEMPTION. You tell me if it was worth it.

    There are 7 lessons from my story that I want to share with you because even if you have a different personal history than I do, these 7 lessons are the keys to achieving any previously elusive fitness goal for the first time and I think they apply to everyone.

    1. Set the big goal and go for it. If your goal doesn’t excite you and scare you at the same time, your goal is too small. If you don’t feel fear or uncertainty, you’re inside your comfort zone. Puny goals aren’t motivating. Sometimes it takes a competition or a big challenge of some kind to get your blood boiling.

    2. Align your values with your goals. I understood my values and made a decision to be congruent with who I really was and who I wanted to be. When you know your values, get your priorities straight and align your goals with your values, then doing what it takes is easy.

    3. Do the math. Stop looking for magic. A lean body does not come from any particular type of exercise or foods per se, it’s the calories burned vs calories consumed that determines fat loss or fat gain. You might do better by decreasing the calories consumed, whereas I depended more on increasing the calories burned, but either way, it’s still a math equation. Deny it at your own risk.

    4. Get social support. Support and encouragement from your friends can help get you through anything. Real time accountability to a training partner or trainer can make all the difference.

    5. Be consistent. Nothing will ever work if you don’t work at it every day. Sporadic efforts don’t just produce sporadic results, sometimes they produce zero results.

    6. Persist through difficulty and self doubt. If you think it’s going to be smooth sailing all the way with no ups and downs, you’re fooling yourself.. For every sunny day, there’s going to be a storm. If you can’t weather the storms, you’ll never reach new shores.

    7. Redeem yourself. Non-achievers sit on the couch and wallow in past failures. Winners use past failures as motivational rocket fuel. It always feels good to achieve a goal, but nothing feels as good as achieving a goal with redemption.

    Postscript: My journey continued. Since that initial first place trophy, I have competed as a natural for life bodybuilder 26 more times, including 7 first place awards and 7 runner up awards. And yes, I finally nailed down the nutrition side of things too. You can read more about that and the fat loss program that developed as a result at www.BurnTheFat.com!

     

     

    Tom Venuto Newspaper Photo

    Train hard and expect success always,

    Tom Venuto, NSCA-CPT, CSCS Fat Loss Coach www.BurnTheFat.com!

    About the Author:
    Tom Venuto is a natural bodybuilder, certified personal trainer and freelance fitness writer. Tom is the author of “Burn the Fat, Feed The Muscle,” which teaches you how to get lean without drugs or supplements using secrets of the world’s best bodybuilders and fitness models. Learn how to get rid of stubborn fat and increase your metabolism by visiting: www.BurnTheFat.com!

  • The Truth About Fast Weight Loss

    The Truth About Fast Weight Loss

    Title: The Truth About Fast Weight Loss

    By line: By Tom Venuto

    URL: www.BurnTheFat.com!

    Word count: 1356 words

    WEIGHT LOSS POP QUIZ: What are 3 things that ALL 8 of these advertisements have in common?

    “Burn 30 lbs in 3 weeks – no diet!”

    “Lose 9 Pounds Every 11 Days!”

    “Lose a pound a day without diet or exercise!”

    “Lose 2 pounds a day without dieting!”

    “Lose 30 pounds In 30 Days!”

    “Lose 20 lbs in 3 weeks!”

    “Burn 30 lbs in 25 days!”

    “Lose 10 Pounds This Weekend!”

    ANSWER: (1) They are all FALSE, (2) they are all DECEPTIVE…

    I just did an Internet search for “how fast should you lose weight” and these are just a small sample of ACTUAL ADS that are running this very moment. They sure are enticing, aren’t they? They play on your emotions and on your desire for instant gratification.

    But did you know that…

    (3) these claims are all actually ILLEGAL, says the Federal Trade Commission (FTC)

    “We have known for some time now that there is a serious problem with weight-loss product advertising,” said FTC Chairman Timothy J. Muris. “Reputable marketers continue to take care to avoid false and misleading claims, but it appears that too many unscrupulous marketers are making false claims promising dramatic and effortless weight loss to sell their products. It is not fair to consumers; it is not fair to legitimate businesses, it is illegal, and it will not be tolerated.”

    You might be asking, “Ummm, if it will not be tolerated, then why do we keep seeing these ads?” Ah yes, well, God bless the Internet, On Google, you can put up an ad and have it showing in 15 minutes. You can then have it taken down just as fast. Same goes for websites. The FTC couldn’t keep up with OFFLINE false advertising, how are they possibly going to keep up with it ONLINE??? And it’s only going to get worse.

    There’s only so much the FTC and other consumer watchdog organizations can do. It’s up to YOU to educate YOURSELF and know the red flags and warning signs of bogus weight loss claims.

    Here’s what else the FTC says about why these types of advertising claims are so damaging:

    • “The deceptive promotion of quick and easy weight loss solutions potentially fuels unrealistic expectations on the part of consumers. consumers who believe that it really is possible to lose a pound (of fat) a day may quickly lose interest in losing a pound a week.”
    • “The proliferation of “fast and easy” fixes undermines the reality of what it takes to lose weight. People who need to lose weight are buying empty promises.”

    I believe that the weight loss education industry has been knocked a few steps backward in the last few years due to (1) the internet and (2) the horrendous reality TV shows that actually encourage people to attempt “extreme” body makeovers or see who can lose weight the fastest. The winners (or shall we say, the “losers”, as if that’s a flattering title to earn), are rewarded generously with fortune, fame and congratulations.

    These shows are damaging and despicable. I’m shocked that so many millions tune in and I’m even more surprised how many people think this garbage is “inspiring.”

    Let’s face it. Everyone wants to get the fat off as quickly as possible – and having that desire is not wrong – it’s simply human nature. Patience is the one thing you never seem to have when you’ve got a body fat problem. You want the fat gone and you want it gone now!

    Like the FTC said, with what we see on TV these days and with web page after web page of fast weight loss claims, you actually start to believe it’s doable and you’re no longer interested in a healthy 1-2 lbs weight loss per week. In fact, you even see people with your own eyes losing weight incredibly fast. How do you deny it’s possible when you see THAT?

    Well, the answer comes to you when you expand your time perspective and see where those people are 6, 12, 18 months from now. Deep in your heart, you KNOW the answer…

    The faster you lose weight, the more muscle you will lose right along with the fat, and that can really mess up your metabolism.

    An even bigger problem with fast weight loss is that it just won’t last. The faster you lose, the more likely you are to gain it back. It’s the the “yo-yo diet effect” – weight goes down, but always comes back up.

    What Really Matters Is Not How Much WEIGHT You Lose, But How Much FAT You Lose

    Where did your weight loss come from? Did you lose body fat or lean body mass? “Weight” is not the same as “fat.” Weight includes muscle, bone, internal organs as well as lots and lots of water…

    Don’t Be Fooled By Water Weight Losses

    One thing you should also know is that it’s very common to lose 3 – 5 pounds in the first week on nearly any diet and exercise program and often even more on low carb diets (because low carb diets deplete glycogen and every gram of glycogen holds 3 grams of water). Just remember, its NOT all fat – WATER LOSS IS NOT FAT LOSS – AND WATER LOSS IS TEMPORARY!

    The only way to know if you’ve actually lost FAT is with body composition testing. For home body fat self-testing, I recommend the Accu-Measure skinfold caliper as first choice. Even better, get a multi site skinfold caliper test from an experienced tester at a health club, or even an underwater (hydrostatic) or air (bod pod) displacement test.

    From literally hundreds of client case studies, I can confirm that it’s rare to lose more than 2 to 3 lbs of weight per week without losing some muscle along with it. If you lose muscle, you are damaging your metabolism and this will lead to a plateau and ultimately to weight relapse.

    The Biggest Weight Loss Mistake That Is FATAL To Your Long Term Success

    Lack of patience is one of the biggest mistakes people make when it comes to losing body fat. If you want to lose FAT, not muscle, and if you want to keep the fat off for good, then you have to take off the pounds slowly (of course, if you want to crash diet the weight off fast, lose muscle with the fat and gain all the fat back later, be my guest!).

    This is one of the toughest lessons that overweight men and women have to learn – and they can be very hard learners. They fight kicking and screaming, insisting that they CAN and they MUST lose it faster.

    Then you have these TV shows that encourage the masses that rapid, crash weight loss is okay. To the producers of these shows, I say SHAME ON YOU! To the personal trainers, registered dieticians and medical doctors who are associated with these programs, I say DOUBLE SHAME ON YOU, because you of all people should know better. These shows are not “motivating” or “inspiring” – they are DAMAGING! They are a DISGRACE!

    The rapid weight loss being promoted by the media for the sake of ratings and by the weight loss companies for the sake of profits makes it even harder for legitimate fitness and nutrition professionals because our clients say, “But look at so and so on TV – he lost 26 pounds in a week!”

    Sure, but 26 pounds of WHAT – and do you have any idea what the long term consequences are?

    Short term thinking… foolish.

    Do it the right way. The healthy way. Take off pounds slowly, and steadily with a sensible lifestyle program like my BurnTheFat Feed the Muscle System that includes the important elements of cardio training, strength training and proper nutrition.

    Measure your body fat, not just your body weight, and make this a new lifestyle, not a race, and you will never have to take the pounds off again, because they will be gone forever the first time.

    Tom Venuto, author of Burn The Fat Feed The Muscle www.BurnTheFat.com!

    About the Author:

    Tom Venuto is the author of the #1 best seller, Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle: Fat Burning Secrets of the World’s Best Bodybuilders and Fitness Models. Tom is a lifetime natural bodybuilder and fat loss expert who achieved an astonishing 3.7% body fat level without drugs or supplements. Discover how to increase your metabolism and burn stubborn body fat, find out which foods burn fat and which foods turn to fat, plus get a free fat loss report and mini course by visiting Tom’s site at: www.BurnTheFat.com!

  • No Pain No Gain: Fitness Myth or Ultimate Fitness Truth?

    No Pain No Gain: Fitness Myth or Ultimate Fitness Truth?

    Title: No Pain No Gain: Fitness Myth or Ultimate Fitness Truth?

     By line: By Tom Venuto URL: www.BurnTheFat.com!

    Word count: 1086 words

    No Pain, No Gain. Is this aphorism just a fitness myth and downright bad advice? A lot of people seem to think so. As a bodybuilder with 25 years of training experience and more than two dozen trophies on my shelf, I have another perspective to offer you. Success with your body and in every area of your life is all about stepping outside of your comfort zone and that means embracing pain.

    To reach high levels of physical and personal success you must approach your training, and your entire life, as an endeavor in constant growth. The ultimate truth is, you are either moving forward or moving backward; growing or dying. There’s no such thing as comfortably maintaining.

    To grow, you must step above past achievements; beyond your perceived boundaries and limits. That means stepping out of the known, into the unknown; out of the familiar and into the unfamiliar; out of the comfortable into the uncomfortable. You must get out of your comfort zone.

    The Late Cavett Robert, who was founder of the National Speakers Association, said something I’ll never forget: “Most people are running around their whole lives with their umbilical cords in their hands and they’re looking for some place to plug it back in.”

    Most people are scared of the unknown. They prefer to stay in that womb of comfort. When the going gets tough; when the effort gets painful, when the work gets hard, they always pull back into safety. But the extraordinary people do the opposite. They know they have to get out of the comfort zone, and into new territory or they’ll stagnate and die.

    Walt Disney once said that he never wanted to repeat a past success. He was always creating something new. They called it “Imagineering.” Disney’s mission was to continuously dream up and create things they had never done before, and look at what Disney has become today.

    Here’s a little quote that you should post on your bulletin board, your computer desktop or somewhere you will always see it:

    “Do what you always did, get what you always got.”

    You can’t grow or change by doing what you’ve already done. You’ve got to train just to prevent yourself from going backwards. Maintenance doesn’t occur when you do nothing, maintenance is working to fight entropy, the tendency for things to naturally deteriorate.

    Still, most people won’t leave their comfort zones. They won’t do it in business, they won’t do it in their personal lives. They won’t do it in their sport. They won’t do it for personal health and fitness. Why? The answer is simple… It hurts.

    By definition, what’s it like outside the comfort zone? It’s UN-COMFORTABLE, right? Change is uncomfortable. Sometimes it’s physically painful, but it’s always mentally and emotionally painful, in the form of discipline, sacrifice, uncertainty and fear.

    The maxim, “no pain no gain” gets knocked all the time as if it were bad advice. The fact of life is that you don’t grow unless you’ are constantly stepping outside the comfort zone, and outside the comfort zone is discomfort and pain.

    I find that it’s mostly the non-achievers who make out “no pain, no gain” to be a bad thing. But the winners get it. The champions understand stepping outside the comfort zone in a healthy context, so they embrace it.

    When you’re talking about the Olympics, or pro bodybuilding or the Super Bowl or a world championship, you’d better believe it’s physical pain, it’s discipline, it’s sacrifice, it’s blood, sweat, and tears – literally. But for most people who simply want to go from unfit to fit, from overweight to ideal weight, it’s not so much about physical “pain”; it’s more like stretching yourself.

    How do you develop flexibility? What does your trainer tell you? You stretch to the point of discomfort, but not to the point of pain, right? You get into a position of slight discomfort and you hold it just long enough, then what happens? The discomfort goes away, because the muscle becomes more pliable, and the range of motion is increased.

    Each time, you stretch a little further, just barely into the range you’ve never been in before, and eventually, you’re doing the splits. And why do you approach it like that? Because you don’t want to injure yourself. Stretch too far, too fast and your muscle tears.

    The elite athletes and high achievers really have to push themselves; they’re going to push their boundaries and test their limits. But if you’re not an elite athlete or seasoned bodybuilder, and you take the advice, “no pain, no gain” too literally, you’re going to end up getting injured.

    I always say to my training partner when I watch him cringing during a set and he finishes up with that pained look on his face, “Are you injured, or just hurt?” He knows what I’m talking about. If he says he’s hurt, I say, “OK, good. As long as you’re not injured. Let’s get on with it. Next set.”

    It’s not about injury. That is bad pain. That is stupidity. But do stretch yourself. You can’t improve unless you stretch yourself. If that’s what some people want – if they just want to “stay fit” – OK fine. It actually doesn’t take that much to stay fit, once you’ve already achieved it.

    But what if you want to improve? What if you want a new body? What if you want to change? If that’s what you want, you’ve got to push yourself a little. You’ve got to break comfort zones. And if your body is not changing, then I don’t care how hard you think you’re working, whatever you’re doing right now is inside your comfort zone.

    The statement “no pain, no gain” has been misinterpreted, criticized and labeled a fallacy by many. However, the people doing the criticizing are almost always comfort zoners who haven’t achieved much. Don’t listen to them. Instead, follow the small percentage of people who step out and achieve great things. If you don’t like the sound of it, then say, “No effort, no gain.” We’re still talking about the same thing.

    Embrace the discomfort like the champions do. Soon it subsides, you enjoy the benefits of the change and the pain is forgotten. You’ve reached a new, higher plateau of achievement. Enjoy the view for a short while. But be on guard because it’s not long before that higher level becomes your new comfort zone and then its time to press on again.

    About the author
    Tom Venuto is a lifetime natural (steroid-free) bodybuilder, freelance writer and best selling author of www.BurnTheFat.com,Feed The Muscle: Fat Burning Secrets of the World’s Best Bodybuilders and Fitness Models. Tom has been featured in IRONMAN, Australian IRONMAN, Italian IRONMAN (Olympian’s News), Natural Bodybuilding and Fitness, Muscular Development, Men’s Exercise, and Men’s Fitness Magazines. Tom’s hard work, no-quick fixes approach has won him multiple titles in drug tested bodybuilding including Mr. Natural Pennsylvania, Natural New Jersey, Natural New York State, Natural Mid Atlantic States and NPC Natural Eastern Classic championships. More important, tens of thousands of people in 141 countries have used Tom’s Burn The Fat program to lose as much as 253 pounds or just the last stubborn 5-10 pounds and achieve that coveted 6-pack of abs. To learn more about Tom’s all-natural approach to fat burning, visit his site at www.BurnTheFat.com!

  • The Little Thing in Your Head That’s Keeping You Fat

    The Little Thing in Your Head That’s Keeping You Fat

    Title: The Little Thing in Your Head That’s Keeping You Fat

    By line: By Tom Venuto

    URL: www.BurnTheFat.com!

    Word count: 1685 words

    The Little Thing in Your Head That’s Keeping You Fat

    By Tom Venuto

    I have no doubt that a scientist somewhere just read the title of this article and said out loud, “YES! Venuto is right! That little thing in your head – the hypothalamus – it IS the thing that is keeping you fat! By George, that Venuto guy isn’t a dumb bodybuilder after all – he’s been doing his research!” At which moment, I will be shaking my head and thinking, “you need to get out of the laboratory and into the real world, with real people, buddy.” Okay, okay, to be fair, Neuro-endocrine control of appetite and body fat really is quite fascinating. But today, I’m talking about PSYCH-ology, not PHYSI-ology. The little thing in your head that’s keeping you fat is actually just a….

    Limiting belief!

    Self-limiting beliefs are among the biggest problems that people deal with in their struggles to achieve a healthy ideal weight. They’re also one of the reasons that so many people start to falter or fall off the diet and exercise wagon as early as late January or early February in their New Year’s goal pursuits.

    If you’re that science guy I spoke of and you’re about to bail because you’re thinking, “Here we go again… another psycho-babble, self help article,” then think again. A belief is the force behind the placebo effect, which is well known by every scientist and medical professional. A respected doctor gives a patient a pill and is told it’s a powerful drug. The patient gets well immediately, not knowing that the “miraculous” substance was a dummy pill. Inert. Sugar. The miracle was in the mind.

    But beliefs are not only involved in the mind-body connection, they are unconscious programs that control your behavior. The most important factor in whether you achieve the body and the health you want is NOT what diet or training program you follow. It’s what makes you follow your diet and training program. And guess what? What you believe controls your behavior – whether you will stick with your program or sabotage it with cheating, bingeing or inconsistency.

    What to do about limiting beliefs

    Ok, so now you agree that beliefs are psychological factors that affect you physically by controlling your behavior, including your eating, exercising and lifestyle. What now? 3 steps. 2 questions.

    STEP 1: IDENTIFY LIMITING BELIEFS

    You are fully aware of many of your beliefs. For example, beliefs about spirituality or politics are usually in the front of your conscious mind.

    But the beliefs that hold back your health and physical development the most are usually the ones you don’t even know you have. They are like unconscious “brain software,” running silently in the background.

    So the first step is to bring those unconscious and potentially damaging beliefs up to the surface so you are aware of them. You can’t fix a problem if you don’t know you have one.

    2 Quick Questions That Will Help Draw Out Your Beliefs

    Beliefs can go back to childhood, but don’t worry, you don’t have to go to a psychotherapist and be regressed back to kindergarten. It’s simpler than that. But it does pay to do this questioning process as a formal “exercise” with serious quiet time, with pen and paper (instead of just thinking about it).

    Question #1: What causes me to be overweight (or unhealthy, or not having the body I want)?

    Question #2: What’s preventing me from getting leaner? (or healthier?)

    Spend some time with it and see how big of a list you can create. Ask yourself whether each belief helps or hurts you. Does it move you forward or backward. Does it empower or disempower you? The ones that hurt you or hold you back will be obvious. You may come up with beliefs such as:

    “I’m overweight and I can’t get leaner because”:

    I have no time I’m too old I can’t stop eating I hate exercise You just can’t do it when you have 4 kids It’s impossible after having a hip replacement

    But the million dollar question is: are these beliefs actually true?

    Beliefs are not facts. You may hold your beliefs as absolute reality, but when you deconstruct them and challenge them, you may see that they don’t hold any water.

    Self limiting beliefs are false interpretations (negative thought patterns) that hold you back. And you keep holding on to them because making excuses and staying the same is a lot more convenient than changing, isn’t it? Change requires hard work, effort and leaving your comfort zone.

    Your mission now: weaken the limiting beliefs and get rid of them

    STEP 2: CHALLENGE THOSE BELIEFS

    How do you challenge a belief? 4 ways:

    (A) Challenge it directly: Is the belief even valid at all? See if you can find a “counter example” that disproves your belief. For example; if you think that after you’ve had 3 or 4 kids, it’s impossible to get a nice flat stomach, what will you say after I introduce you to a dozen of my clients and readers who had 3 or 4 kids and went from bulging belly to rock-hard flat stomach? If they did it, then how could your belief be valid? Answer: It WASN’T! You believed something false and inaccurate and it was holding you back!

    (B) Challenge the source: Is it your belief, or have you been living what your parents, peers or culture handed down to you? Just the realization that a belief wasn’t yours to begin with is enough to shatter it.

    (C) Challenge the usefulness of the belief: Ok, so you believed something when you were younger. Does still believing it has any usefulness today? Does it help you move closer to what you want in your life today? If not, then wouldn’t today be a good time to get rid of it?

    (D) Challenging the belief by weighing the consequences: If you keep this belief, what is it going to cost you? What will the pain be like? What will you miss? And what will these consequences be if you don’t change it NOW?

    STEP 3: INSTALL A NEW BELIEF

    Nature abhors a vacuum, as Spinoza once said. You don’t simply get rid of a belief, you must also replace it. What things would you want and need to believe instead that would create positive behaviors that would move you toward your goal? Write them down, then massage them into an affirmation. For example, if you’ve hung your hat on the belief that you didn’t have time to exercise, could you write a new affirmation of belief similar to this?

    “I’m a very busy person, so that means I must set clear priorities and I must keep my health and body on the top of my priority list. I always schedule time for my most important priorities, I am efficient with my training, and I use every minute of my day wisely. And if Barack Obama, the busiest person in the world, can train for 45 minutes a day 6 days a week, there’s no excuse for me. I can do it too.”

    Write down your new belief affirmations and read them, right along with your goals, every day.

    Then “activate” this affirmation by doing what Olympic and professional athletes do: engaging in mental rehearsal. Visualize yourself carrying out the behaviors that this belief would generate. Think about and feel what it would be like to take those positive actions steps and play mental movies of how your life would change by doing so. Involve all your senses: see it, hear it, feel it.

    Keep it up until you start to see your behavior change and your habitual actions come into alignment with your goals/intentions. If you’re diligent, you’ll see changes in attitude and behavior with 21-30 days. It may happen sooner. It may take longer if you’ve carried deep, lifelong limiting beliefs. But in less than a month, the roots of the new belief pattern will be formed.
    Then you can update your goals and affirmations to reflect your current priorities and move on to the next goal you want to achieve or the next limiting belief you want to change. Keep THAT up, and pretty soon, you will be LIMIT-LESS!
    BELIEVE ME, spending quality time understanding and working on your beliefs is a lot more productive than spending time in forums arguing about whether a low carb program is better than a high carb program… or even whether the cure for obesity is found in the arcuate nucleus of the lower hypothalamus. It’s in your head all right… but most people have been looking in the wrong place.
    Train hard and expect success.

    Tom Venuto Fat Loss Coach www.BurnTheFat.com!
    About the Author:Tom Venuto

    Tom Venuto is a fat loss expert, lifetime natural (steroid-free) bodybuilder, independent nutrition researcher, freelance writer, and author of the #1 best selling diet e-book, Burn The Fat, Feed The Muscle: Fat-Burning Secrets of The World’s Best Bodybuilders & Fitness Models (e-book) which teaches you how to get lean without drugs or supplements using secrets of the world’s best bodybuilders and fitness models. Learn how to get rid of stubborn fat and increase your metabolism by visiting: www.BurnTheFat.com!

     

  • A “Mind Training” Technique That Makes You Stronger

    A “Mind Training” Technique That Makes You Stronger

    Title: A “Mind Training” Technique That Makes You Stronger

    Author: By Tom Venuto

     Word count: 691 words

    A “Mind Training” Technique That Makes You Stronger By Tom Venuto www.BurnTheFat.com!

    The word “visualization” sometimes conjures up images of new age gurus teaching esoteric techniques for personal enlightenment and “attracting” what you want into your life. This causes many evidence-based types to scoff. However, piles of research has shown that mental imagery (aka “visualization”) can improve performance. The latest study suggests that a certain type of mental imagery can also increase your strength

    Olympic champions and professional athletes have used visualization and mental rehearsal techniques for decades. Not only is visualization one of the most widely accepted techniques in sports psychology, it’s supported by scientific research.

    Nevertheless, many people remain skeptical.

    Some people agree that mental rehearsal might enhance specific skills, like a golf swing or a basketball throw, but they question whether it could make you stronger, increase muscle growth or help you lose weight.

    A new study published in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research suggests that indeed, mental imagery can make you stronger. This study also begins to explain how mental imagery works on a neurological level…

    Twenty two sports students, with a mean age of about 20, participated in the 6-week long experiment. Prior to the study, none had done mental imagery before. The students were divided into a control group and a mental rehearsal group.

    The goal was to see if mental imagery could increase bench press and leg press strength.

    Each participant was given very specific instructions on how to perform the mental imagery. During the rest period between sets, they were to vividly imagine the exercise movement and the muscle contractions generated from each rep.

    After 12 workout sessions, the mental imagery group had significantly increased their strength more than the control group, especially in the lower body (leg press).

    The researchers concluded:

    “The results provided evidence that mental imagery did contribute to improve strength of the leg muscles without any macroscopic structural change”

    What they were saying is that the duration of the study wasn’t long enough that there was any major muscle size increase, so they credited the strength increase to non morphological adaptations.

    It’s well known in exercise science that gains in strength occur from changes not just in the muscle fibers and surrounding tissues, but in the nervous system.

    That gives us clues about how mental imagery works.

    Put simply, mental training techniques, (since they’re working with your brain/nervous system – as the name implies), can trigger some of the same neurological adaptations that occur from physical training.

    Apparently, mental imagery can increase synchronization of motor units in muscles, having large corresponding cortical areas in the primary mortor cortex.

    There are also psychological benefits, such as increased motivation, improved focus during the set, technique improvements, more confidence and less apprehension or anxiety. But clearly, there’s more to this than just “psyching up.”

    Here’s something else interesting. The researchers even suggested that mental imagery could decrease strength loss when athletes are inactive due to injury.

    This recent study is a practical one because it gives us one specific technique that you can apply to your next workout: vividly imagine a successful lift for the upcoming set while you’re resting between sets.

    NOTE: it’s important to mentally see (visualize) the exercise and mentally “FEEL” the muscle contraction. This is multi-sensory – both visual and kinesthetic.

    In some of my previous articles, I talked about density training and superset training as excellent techniques for busy people because these methods reduce rest intervals, making the workout time efficient.

    But the rest time between heavy sets doesn’t have to be wasted – now you know what to do with that time…

    Instead of chatting with your gym buddies, or scoping out the attractive bods in the gym, you can be mentally rehearsing your next set… and enjoying the strength increase that follows.

     

    Most fat loss programs only focus on diet or physical training. If you want to learn more about how you can add “mental training” techniques to increase fat loss, muscle growth and muscular strength, then be sure to check out chapter one in my ebook, www.BurnTheFat.com!.

    Tom Venuto, author of Burn The Fat Feed The Muscle www.BurnTheFat.com!

    Founder & CEO of Burn The Fat Inner Circle Burn the fat inner circle

    About the Author:

    Tom Venuto is the author of the #1 best seller, Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle: Fat Burning Secrets of the World’s Best Bodybuilders and Fitness Models. Tom is a lifetime natural bodybuilder and fat loss expert who achieved an astonishing 3.7% body fat level without drugs or supplements. Discover how to increase your metabolism and burn stubborn body fat, find out which foods burn fat and which foods turn to fat, plus get a free fat loss report and mini course by visiting Tom’s site at: www.BurnTheFat.com!

     

     

  • 8 Reasons Why You Keep Falling Off The Diet Wagon

    8 Reasons Why You Keep Falling Off The Diet Wagon

    Title: 8 Reasons Why You Keep Falling Off The Diet Wagon

    Author: Tom Venuto

    Word count: 719

    URL: www.BurnTheFat.com!

    Clearly, we have an obesity problem in America and many other countries across our planet. Yet, I propose that we do not have a weight loss problem today. In case you’re confused at this apparent contradiction, consider these statistics:

    According to a study from Oxford University published in the International Journal of Obesity, within 3 to 5 years, about 80 percent of all ‘weight losers’ have regained the lost weight, and often gained back a little extra.

    According to research by the National Weight Control Registry, that relapse rate may be as high as 95 percent.

    For comparison, relapse rates for drug, alcohol and tobacco dependency have been reported in the range of 50-90%.

    This means that lots and lots of people have “successfully” lost weight. But not many have kept it off. Therefore, we don’t have a weight loss problem, we have a weight-relapse problem; we have a “not sticking with it” problem. Wouldn’t you agree?

    In fact, the fall and subsequent weight-regain usually doesn’t take years. Many people have abandoned their new year’s resolutions within weeks. By the time the Super Bowl party rolls around, their diet is history!

    If this is true, then shouldn’t we put more of our attention onto figuring out why you haven’t been sticking with your program, and what you should do about it?

    I put together this new list (below) of the top 8 reasons why you fall off the wagon.

    Rather than worrying about the minutiae of your diet plan, like whether you should be on low carb or high carb, Mediterranean or Okinawan, vegetarian or meat eater, I propose that if you simply focus on these 8 issues, you’ll start getting more lasting results.

    How? By being able to stick with whichever plan you decided was best for you! After all, even if you have the best nutrition program in the world – on paper – it doesn’t do you much good if you can’t stick with it in practice!

    THE 8 REASONS

    1. No focus: you didn’t set goals, you didn’t put your goals in writing, and/or you didn’t stay focused on your goals daily (by reading them, affirming them, looking at a vision board, etc.)

    2. No priorities: you may have set a goal, but you didn’t put it on or near the top of your priorities list. For example, your goal is six pack abs, but drinking beer and eating fast food on the weekend is higher on your priorities list than having a flat stomach.

    3. No support system: you tried to go at it alone; no buddy system, training partners, family, spouse, friends, mentors or coaches to turn to for information and emotional support when the going got tough.

    4. No Accountability: you didn’t keep score for your own accountability – with a progress chart, weight record, measurements, food journal, training journal, and you didn’t set up external accountability (ie, report to someone else or show your results to someone else)

    5. No patience: you were only thinking short term and had unrealistic expectations. You expected 10 pounds a week or 5 pounds a week or 3 pounds a week, so the first week you lost “only” 1 or 2 pounds or hit a plateau, you gave up.

    6. No planning: you winged it. You walked into the gym without having a workout in hand, on paper, you didn’t plan your workouts into your weekly schedule; you didn’t have a menu on paper, you didn’t make time (so instead you made excuses, like “I’m too busy”)

    7. No balance: your diet or training program was too extreme. You went the all or nothing, “I want it now” route instead of the moderate, slow-and-steady wins the race route.

    8. No personalization: your nutrition or training program was the wrong one for you. It might have worked for someone else, but it didn’t suit your schedule, personality, lifestyle, disposition or body type.

    So there you have it – 8 reasons why most people fall off the wagon! Have you been making these mistakes? If so, the solutions are clear and simple: focus, prioritize, get support, be accountable, be patient, plan, balance and personalize.

    Train hard and expect success,

    Tom Venuto Fat Loss Coach www.BurnTheFat.com!

    About the Author:

    Tom Venuto is a fat loss expert, lifetime natural (steroid-free) bodybuilder, independent nutrition researcher, Tom Venutofreelance writer, and author of the #1 best selling diet e-book, Burn The Fat, Feed The Muscle: Fat-Burning Secrets of The World’s Best Bodybuilders & Fitness Models (e-book) which teaches you how to get lean without drugs or supplements using secrets of the world’s best bodybuilders and fitness models. Learn how to get rid of stubborn fat and increase your metabolism by visiting: www.BurnTheFat.com!

     

  • Q & A: Intensity or Insanity: How Much Training Effort is Enough?

    Q & A: Intensity or Insanity: How Much Training Effort is Enough?

    Title: Intensity or Insanity: How Much Training Effort is Enough?
    Author: By Tom Venuto

    Word Count: 1705

    QUESTION: Tom, do you think that the intensity of your workout is “THE THING” that gives you results or is it more about being consistent with your workouts? The reason I ask is because I’m following your www.BurnTheFat.com! nutrition program and I also just got a new high-intensity workout program called the Insanity series. I like doing these workouts, but I’m having a hard time pushing myself that hard every day and I’m finding now that I’m starting to dread doing them. I have been doing these workouts only 2-3 times per week instead of the 5 times per week that is recommended in the program. This workout brings me to my knees. I’ve started questioning myself and wondering if it’s even worth the torture. – Paul

    ANSWER: Intensity is one of the most important training variables, and at times, you’ll definitely want to train with high intensity to get maximum results in the shortest time.

    But the real answer to your question may depend on your goals, the shape you’re in now and even your personality type.

    Some things to consider:

    • Are you a beginner or already in shape and looking for the next challenge?
    • Do you like home bodyweight workouts or are you a gym and weights/ cardio machine type?
    • Are you the “hard-core” fitness nut type of person or do you simply want to get leaner and healthier, nothing crazy?
    • When you say you want “results”, are you talking about fat loss, cardiovascular fitness improvement, muscle growth or all of the above?

    With that in mind, let’s answer the HOW MUCH INTENSITY question in the context of fat loss first.

    I’m sure you can appreciate that people can lose weight while lying in a hospital bed. If someone is sick and can’t keep food down, then there can be a significant calorie deficit even without exercise. That rules out high intensity training as an absolute prerequisite for weight loss. In fact, this simple example proves that exercise is not a requirement to lose weight at all.

    Obviously, starving yourself is NOT the approach I recommend! My burn the fat program (www.BurnTheFat.com!) is based on the opposite: train more and feed the muscle and fuel the training. I’m simply making the point that it’s NOT intensity PER SE or even ANY type of particular workout that creates the fat loss, IT’S THE CALORIE DEFICIT!

    To burn fat, focus on establishing and maintaining a calorie deficit.

    To increase speed of fat loss, focus on increasing the size of the calorie deficit.

    Calorie deficit = fat loss is a liberating concept because it makes you realize you have endless options for achieving your fat loss goal using all kinds of different combinations of nutrition and exercise. Furthermore, none of the workouts have to beat you into submission to achieve a calorie deficit, especially if you work diligently on the nutrition side of the equation.

    Countless thousands of people have acheived their goal weight with walking (low intensity exercise) as their only cardio. They chose walking because that’s what suited their needs and their personality.

    Here’s where intensity comes in:

    From a bodyfat loss perspective, using higher intensity training makes the workout more EFFICIENT. The higher the intensity, the more calories you burn. The more calories you burn, the more fat you lose, if all else remains equal (ie, if you don’t compensate by eating more).

    Some trainers claim that low intensity steady-state exercise is “ineffective” or even “totally worthless.”

    THIS IS TOTALLY FALSE!

    Low intensity training is not ineffective, it’s simply less efficient. For example, it takes a lot of time walking to burn enough calories to put a major dent in your fat stores. If you were to increase the intensity of your cardio, you’d burn more calories in less time and you’d drop the fat faster. You’d also be improving time efficiency by achieving a calorie deficit with less time investment.

    But think about this: If that high intensity workout made you start to dread it, or if you started to think of it as torture, or if it got you injured, then how long would you stick with it?

    If you can’t stick with it, what good did it do you? It gets tossed on the ever-growing pile of other quick fixes.

    It’s surprising how often a moderate approach, or even the slow and steady approach, beats out the quick and intense approach if you extend your time perspective and think long term.

    It’s the classic story of the tortoise vs the hare:

    The hare comes blazing out of the gate in a sprint and leaves the tortoise in the dust. Looks like the hare will be the clear winner. But the hare gasses out after that sprint and takes a nap.

    The tortoise, being the more consistent of the two, slowly but surely keeps making progress, getting closer and closer to the goal, never missing a step.

    As the fable goes, the tortoise eventually passes the complacent and or exhausted hare, who is lazily snoozing under a shady tree. In the end, the Tortoise wins the race. Leisurely, I might add… (no “pukey” t-shirt necessary).

    Intensity gets you there faster, if you can stick with it, but consistency ALWAYS pays in the long run when it comes to fat loss.

    What about intensity in the context of fitness improvement?

    It’s important to know that you can get health benefits from moderate and even light exercise. But when you compare it to intense exercise, there’s no contest. Higher intensity types of cardio kick low intensity’s butt.

    In fact, it’s almost shocking how much cardiovascular improvement you can get from a fairly small amount of intense, or sprint-like training:

    This is one of the reasons High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) is justifiably so popular.

    A paper just published in the ACSM’s Exercise and Sport Sciences Review (July 2009) discussed the research suggesting that intense aerobic interval training provides greater benefits for the heart than low or moderate intensity exercise.

    The benefits discussed included:

    Increased maximal oxygen uptake

    • Improved heart muscle contractile function
    • Improved heart muscle calcium handling
    • reduced cardiac dysfunction in metabolic syndrome
    • Reversed pathological cardiac hypertrophy
    • Increased physiological hypertrophy of the heart muscle
    • Overall: improved quality of life and length of life by avoiding fatal heart attacks.

    The researchers concluded:

    “The studies indicate that high intensity may be an important success factor for designing effective exercise programs and that high intensity may be particularly critical for improving cardiac function.”

    Ok, so that covers intensity in the contexts of fat burning and cardiovascular improvement. What about for building muscle?

    Once again, training intensity is a critical factor. For muscles to grow, you have to literally break down muscle fibers, disrput your body’s homeostasis and create a stress response. The adaptation to that disruption is strength and hypertrophy, but it only occurs if you can recover from the stress. The major point is that intensity is a critical factor for all kinds of health and fitness training, but it’s also the one variable that has to be managed the most carefully… and sensibly!

    Doing knock-you-to-your-knees workouts of any kind, every single day is not a smart strategy.

    I know a few guys – like my friend Mike the kickboxing instructor – the dude is indestructable! He could take any workout you give him, chew it up, spit it out and then say, “Is that it?” (Then he would go teach 3 classes in a row!)

    But unless you’re one of these super-human genetic mutants, your body just can’t take a nonstop pounding. Yet there are lots of people with the dispostion and personality type to go in the gym and beat themselves to a pulp each time. Despite the heroic effort, they may be doing their bodies more harm than good (of course, I was never one of those crazy “insane training” people, ahem, cough, cough)

    This is why most experts today are recommending only 2-3 HIIT style or high intensity cardio workouts per week when you’re concurrently doing intense weight training. If you want to increase your calorie deficit so you can burn more fat in less time, go ahead and do more training. But for most people, the additional workouts should be low or medium in intensity so they don’t interfere with physical recovery or lead to mental burnout.

    Intense daily boot-campish workouts may appeal to the “I want to be tough as a navy seal” personality types and advanced workouts serve their purpose – to provide an appropriate challenge for advanced fitness enthusiasts. If you enjoy it, and if you can recover from it, and if you can stay injury-free, and if you can stick with it consistently, then go for it. But be sure to balance your intensity with recovery:

    * Balance your weight training and cardio (volume, frequency and intensity) so you can recover from both and reap the benefits of both forms of training.

    * Vary your workouts with some form of periodization or intensity-cycling system.

    Last but not least, I believe that weight training should sit atop the exercise hierarchy as one part of a total fitness program.

    Fat loss programs that are based entirely on calisthenic, aerobic or body weight exercise are popular today, but I recommend a 4-element model:

    1. Nutrition
    2. Weight training
    3. Cardio training (low/moderate and intense)
    4. Mental training (mindset and motivation)

    For total fitness and physique development – muscle, strength, conditioning and leanness, combine weights with cardio…

    Judiciously balance hare-like intensity with recovery…

    AND do it all with tortoise-like consistency…

    Then, watch what happens to your body. You will like it!

    Train hard and expect success,

    Tom Venuto
    Author
    www.BurnTheFat.com!

    PS. You can learn more about my 4-part model of fat loss in my burn the fat program at: www.BurnTheFat.com!

     

    About the Author:

    Tom Venuto is a natural bodybuilder, certified strength and conditioning specialistTom Venuto (CSCS) and a certified personal trainer (CPT). Tom is the author of “www.BurnTheFat.com!” which teaches you how to get lean without drugs or supplements using methods of the world’s best bodybuilders and fitness models. Learn how to get rid of stubborn fat and increase your metabolism by visiting: www.BurnTheFat.com!

     

     

     

  • How To Lose 20 Pounds Really, Really Fast!

    How To Lose 20 Pounds Really, Really Fast!

     Title: How To Lose 20 Pounds Really, Really Fast!

    By line: By Tom Venuto, CSCS, NSCA-CPT

     URL: www.BurnTheFat.com!

     Word count: 1816 words

    How To Lose 20 Pounds Really, Really Fast By Tom Venuto, NSCA-CPT, CSCS www.BurnTheFat.com!

    Back “in the day” when I was a full time personal trainer and I met with weight loss clients in person at my New Jersey Health Club, the first thing I would always ask during the initial consultation was:

    “Tell me what you want… and I’ll show you how to get it.”

    Typical reply from client:

    “I want to lose 20 pounds fast.”

    My reply:

    “Are you SURE that’s what you want? …If I can show you how to lose 20 pounds REALLY fast, will that make you happy?”

    They nodded their head affirmatively as their eyes lit up in anticipation of the rapid weight loss secrets I was about to reveal…

    Their face went white when – with a totally straight face – I pulled out a hacksaw and started walking towards them…. menacingly.

    Not sure whether to laugh or run in sheer terror, they said,

    “What the heck are you doing?”

    “You said you wanted to lose 20 pounds fast. This is the easiest, surest, most effective way I know to take 20 pounds off you FAST! In fact, I figure that right leg of yours might even weigh 25 pounds!”

    I kept walking closer and started to get into sawing position, wielding my fast, effective and guaranteed weight loss tool…

    “Bear with me because this IS quick, but sometimes it takes a few minutes for me to cut through the bone.”

    By this time, my client (and I) are either completely cracking up, I have seriously scared the living you know what out of them, or they just think I’m a complete lunatic… (depends on whether I was able to keep a straight face or not)

    Finally, the light bulb goes on, and my client would see where I was going with this:

    “Okay, smart alec,” I get it… I don’t want to lose WEIGHT, I want to lose FAT.”

    Sometimes I would be having so much fun, I would just keep on playin’…

    “But why not? This is easy, fast and guaranteed – just what everyone wants these days… it’s even better than taking a pill! Come on… let me hack it off! You’ll be my next testimonial: ‘I lost 20 pounds in 5 minutes!’ Imagine what that will do for my business!”

    “Very funny. I told you, I get it! I want to lose FAT, not muscles and bones. I need my leg!”

    Naturally, of course, I don’t always have to pull out my trusty blade. Every once in a while… about as often as a total solar eclipse… a client answers my question like this:

    “What do I want? Tom, I want to lose 20 pounds of body fat in the next 12 weeks. I want to do it slowly, safely and healthfully and then keep it off permanently. I want all the fat around my hips and thighs completely gone and I want a firm flat stomach. I want muscle all over my body while still looking feminine. I’d like to see myself at about 16% body fat and maintain all my muscle or gain a few pounds of lean mass if I can, especially in my arms. This is important to me because I want to set a good example for my kids, I want to be healthy and live to at least 90 and I want my husband to look at me and say, “I love your body,” and I want to be able to *honestly* say back to him, “me too!”

    It is on these rare occasions that I know there is still intelligent life on this planet.

    If you could answer the question, “What do you want” with the lucidity, clarity and specificity that this woman did, I don’t think you would ever have any difficulty reaching your health and fitness goals… or any other goal in your life, for that matter.

    Her answer was what you call a very “well-formed” goal, backed up with lots of emotional motivation-inducing “reasons why.”

    “I want to lose weight” is a poorly-formed goal.

    “Weight” is not the same as “fat.” Weight includes muscle, bone, internal organs as well as lots and lots of water.

    If you only learn ONE thing from all my newsletters, articles and books, PLEASE learn this:

    WHAT YOU REALLY WANT IS TO BURN THE FAT, WHILE KEEPING THE MUSCLE!!!!

    FAT LOSS is what you want, not weight loss.

    If your body were 100% rock-solid muscle, with absolutely nothing that jiggled (unless it was supposed to), would you care how much you weighed?

    I bet you wouldn’t! And if that’s true, then…

    STOP WORSHIPPING THE SCALE AND START MEASURING YOUR BODY COMPOSITION!

    By measuring your body fat, you take the guesswork out of your health and fitness plan and you get an accurate picture of what’s really happening in your body as a result of your diet and exercise program.

    Instead of worrying about whether you are losing muscle, or wondering if you are losing fat, you can measure it and KNOW for sure. (I always get a good chuckle when someone tells me they’re worried about losing muscle when they don’t even measure how much muscle they have!)

    Instead of being confused by all the “opinions” from weight loss and exercise “experts” who are all telling you something different, you can MEASURE your body composition and based on the results, you can KNOW for sure whether your program is working.

    A very wise man once said,

    “A single measurement is worth a thousand opinions.”

    So, how do you measure body fat?

    Thanks to technology, there are some methods today that are so accurate, they can tell you whether your left pinky has more fat than your right pinky! Unfortunately, many of them are either too expensive or they are inaccessible, being found only in hospitals or research facilities

    If you want to learn a LOT about various body fat testing methods, chapter 3 of my e-book, Burn The Fat, Feed The Muscle (www.BurnTheFat.com!) goes into great detail about the pros and cons of all the various fat testing methods. Instead of re-hashing it all here, let me give you three quick and easy, practical suggestions:

    Suggestion 1: Have a trainer or fitness professional measure you if this service is available at your local health club. Sometimes, there’s a charge – usually $15 – $25, although some clubs offer the service for free to all their members.

    Suggestion 2: Purchase an Accu-measure skinfold caliper. Do a google or yahoo search to find a reseller.

    The Accu-measure was designed to allow you to measure your own body fat in the privacy of your own home (you don’t need someone else to measure you)

    Some people wonder if this is really accurate. Truth is, it’s not quite as accurate as a multi site skinfold test from an experienced tester, but what’s most important is not the “accuracy” per se, but the reliability and consistency of your measurements so you can track your progress. Skinfold calipers in general are not accurate or inaccurate, it’s the person doing the test that is accurate or inaccurate.

    Suggestion 3: If you have a spouse, roommate, or friend who can measure your body fat, you can purchase a Slim Guide body fat caliper (or just about any brand of caliper) from Creative Health Products: chponline.com

    The Slimguide is the best inexpensive caliper available (about $20), but it wasn’t designed for you to measure your own body fat like the Accu Measure. You’ll need someone to measure you with this caliper. Other models of body fat calipers (if you want to splurge), range from $150 to $450. (At our health clubs, I use the electronic “SKYNDEX” caliper with the 4-site “Durnin formula.”)

    The calipers come with instructions, or you can use these formulas, which I have used and found to be very accurate:

    4 Site formula for men (abdomen, suprailiac, thigh, tricep)

    % fat = .29288(sum of 4 skinfolds) – 0.0005(sum of four skinfolds squared) + 0.15845(age) – 5.76377

    4-Site Formula for women (abdomen, suprailiac, thigh, tricep)

    % Fat = (.29669)(sum of 4 skinfolds) – (.00043)(Sum of four skinfolds squared) + .02963(age) + 1.4072

    [Source: Jackson A S, Pollock, M (1985) Practical assessment of body composition. Physician Sport Med. 13: 76-90.]

    Body fat percentages vary based on age and gender, but 20-25% body fat is average for women (15-19% is ideal), while 15-20% is average for men (10-14% is ideal). I have detailed charts for body fat charts in my e-book if you’re interested.

    Once you know your body fat percentage, then weigh yourself and record your weight and body fat on a progress chart such as the one found in my Burn The Fat Feed The Muscle Program (a fat loss program, not a weight loss program). This chart is how you will track your progress and “keep score.”

    You can calculate your lean body mass (muscle and other fat free tissue) very easily just by crunching some numbers:

    For example, if you weigh 200 pounds and you have 10% body fat then you have 20 pounds of fat (10% of 200 = 20). That means you have a lean body mass (LBM) of 180 pounds.

    Now we’re talking! With this data, you can get a really clear picture of how your exercise and nutrition program are affecting your physique.

    Losing weight is very easy. Losing fat – and keeping it off without losing muscle – is a much bigger challenge. If you simply wanted to lose weight, we could just chop off your leg.

    Or, (slightly less painful), I could show you how to drop 10 – 15 pounds over the weekend just by dehydrating yourself and using natural herbal diuretics. Wrestlers do it all the time to make a weight class. But what good would that do if it’s almost all water and you’re just going to gain it all back within days?

    You don’t have to “throw away your scale” like many “experts” tell you to. By all means, keep using the scale, the tape measure and even photographs and the mirror – the more feedback the better – but body fat is where it’s at.

    By the way, I recently bought a chain saw and a shiny new axe from Home Depot, and I’ve been practicing my “American Psycho” and Jack Nicholson, “The Shining” impersonations… so if you want to come to my office any time soon for personal consultation, you’d better have the right answer to my question, “What do you want?”

    For more information about a nutrition and training program that focuses exclusively on FAT LOSS, not WEIGHT LOSS, visit: www.BurnTheFat.com!

    About the Author:

    Tom Venuto is a lifetime natural bodybuilder, an NSCA-certified personal trainer Tom Venuto(CPT), certified strength & conditioning specialist (CSCS), and author of the #1 best-selling e-book, “Burn the Fat, Feed The Muscle.” Tom has written hundreds of articles and been featured in IRONMAN, Australian IRONMAN, Natural Bodybuilding, Muscular Development, Exercise for Men and Men’s Exercise, as well as on dozens of websites worldwide. For information on Tom’s Fat Loss program, visit: www.BurnTheFat.com!

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