Natural Bodybuilding, Fitness, and Peak Performance

Focus on Body Composition – Not Body Mass

A former colleague of mine could be really smug. He told me with glowing pride one day that he was blessed with the ability to eat anything he wants whenever he wants without getting really fat. Of course, the key word here is ‘really’, because he could hardly claim to be fat-free. In fact, I would guess that if you could somehow instantly strip the body fat from his frame, he probably would have been a one hundred pound skeleton without much more than skin stretched around it. That’s at a height of five-eight and coming down from a weight of one-ninety.

Nearly fifty percent body fat? Is that someone that’s not being affected by his or her sedentary lifestyle and ‘see-food’ eating habits?

But he was merely doing what many of us are prone to do; assess our overall body size rather than the ratios between the elements of what that size is composed.

If I weighed one seventy when I was a senior in high school and now I weigh in at one hundred eighty, an overly simplistic conclusion might be that I’m only ten pounds out of my late-teen physique. Yet there’s a big chance that I’ve lost much of my youthful muscle if I haven’t been utilizing resistance workouts to keep it. If I’d inadvertently lost twenty pounds of muscle over the years through neglect, then I’ve actually had a thirty-pound increase in body fat during that time. Yet it might not seem so because I’d only be ten pounds over my boyhood bodyweight. The bathroom scale would be telling me only what I want to hear rather than the brutal truth; that my body composition had been worsening by triple what I thought it had.

A one-hundred ninety pound person with ten percent body fat appears drastically differently from a person of the same weight with thirty or forty percent body fat. Not only is their appearance better, they’re most likely much healthier as well. The muscular 190 pounder’s youth hormone ratios are probably in better balance and his or her odds of getting diabetes, heart disease or cancer is much smaller. So the benefits of vanity are not the only motivational catalysts of significance for the leaner person.

My point? Be honest with yourself about your body composition. In my own case, I wasn’t really honest with myself about what was happening to my body until my blood pressure began creeping into the danger zone and I lost my breath climbing a flight of stairs. These provided enough awakening to prevent my having to get a measurement my ratio of fat to lean mass. I knew it was time to do an about-face.

And what about my former colleague? Well, last time I talked with him he was complaining about lack of energy and blaming it on what he calls GOA (general old age).

At 63 years young? I don’t think so. I believe he’s merely made himself a victim of his very own GBH (general bad habits).

‘Hinge at the Waist’ if you Want Better Abdominals

I saw something that pissed me off when I walked into the gym a week ago. It was a ‘personal fitness trainer’ overseeing his client performing an abdominal workout in a completely ineffective manner. The client was down on his knees using a rope and pulley to do weighted abdominal crunches. No problem there – great exercise. However, as if trying to see how much time and energy he could waste with useless motion, the client was ‘hinging at the hips’ rather than at the midsection of his body. Not only that, he actually had his back arched as he performed each useless repetition of this ill-executed exercise.

Why should this get me peeved? I don’t know – I guess I don’t like seeing people throw their hard-earned money down the drain by handing it to self-proclaimed experts who probably didn’t pass PE class in high school. Think about it: this guy must be paying the trainer at least sixty bucks a session – and he’s being shown how to do things the wrong way. And I’d always thought Southern California was some kind of ‘Mecca for Fitness’. There goes that idea.

The biggest key to making any abdominal exercise effective is to hinge at your abdominal region while performing the movement. Hinging at your hip joint will bring other (internal) muscles into dominant play and render the exercise nearly useless for creating six-pack abs. This is why sit-ups (the age-old, archaic exercise) produces such dismal results for those who still attempt to utilize them.

When I was in SEAL Training, we did a lot of sit-ups. Did we have nice abdominals? Not by a long shot. We became adept at withstanding the pain and discomfort that would prove our reliability under adverse conditions, but we were never close to having improved physiques.

Let me dispense with the same advice for those considering the purchase of an ‘abdominal gadget’. You know what I’m talking about; those devices (and downright contraptions) you see advertised on late-night infomercials when you’re suffering from insomnia. Examine the demonstrations closely. If you see the ‘exercise models’ hinging at their hip joints while performing the movements, I suggest you keep your credit card in your wallet or purse. Chances are if you make the purchase, you’re going to be displaying that thing at a garage sale about six months down the line.

When you perform an abdominal exercise, you should feel a real working of your abs and not a mere tensing of them. Whether for the upper or lower region of that muscle group, this is the tell-tale sign that you’re hinging at the proper location.

In What Part of your Time-Line is Your Mind?

I once read an interview of an NLP trainer who made an interesting claim. He said that most people spend about 97% of their day thinking about things in the past. When you consider the degree to which designing a better future for yourself requires ‘imagineering’ the time ahead of you, the implications are clear. Most of us have our heads in the wrong side of the time-line nearly all of the time.

How the hell anyone could figure this percentage accurately is mystery to me. I mean, what could be a more subjective thing to measure than whether people’s thoughts are in the past, present, or future? It’s kind of like those guys and gals who predict the weather: they can tell you there’s only a twenty percent chance of rain and whether it rains or not, nobody can ever prove there wasn’t a twenty percent chance all along. But oh well – I guess it doesn’t matter if the number’s exact; I think I get the point.

In fact, when I really think about the point it puts me in a meta-cognitive state. I begin thinking about thinking so much that I start talking about thinking and I share it with people like a friend of mine who responded like this:

"Well, of course we think about the past most of the time – that’s the most tangible and available material we can think with. The future hasn’t happened, but it’s becoming the present with every approaching second. And as each of those present seconds pass, they get heaped on that pile of past occurrences we call history. Our minds are in the past – replaying the ‘he said/she said B.S.’ because the present is only a flash in front of us and it can immediately be labeled the past within a moment."

Hey, and let’s face it, it’s from there that all the lessons can be derived.

However, if we want to make more of our dreams and goals a reality, we need to practice seeing a desirable outcome in our future as vividly and laden with emotion as we remember certain things from our past. Whether it’s a nicer body or a better career you’re after, you have to live it in your mind until it becomes reality. This is highly effective because the subconscious mind doesn’t make a distinction between that which is vividly imagined and events that have actually happened.

One of the best peak performance coaches I’m aware of has synthesized some of the most effective methods for empowering your subconscious mind. His name is Dr. Robert Anthony and his latest and most cutting edge work in this area can be found by clicking on this image.

Using his powerful methods, you will easily get your mind focused on the positive direction you want your life to go – and doing it a lot more than the current (estimated) three percent of your time.