Natural Bodybuilding, Fitness, and Peak Performance

“Rest Time between Sets”: Does it matter? Only if you want to gain muscle

Back in the early 2000s, I had a coworker who was doing the ‘Body for Life’ program. He religiously adhered to the program for a good six months and managed to track his fat loss and muscle gains with impressive precision. He ate his prescribed six meals per day that would each barely satisfy a bird. As a result, almost twenty pounds of ‘beer-guzzling produced’ blubber came off his body. And in the twelve-week period, he was even able to gain some muscle – a whopping one pound of it; hardly something to write home about or utilize for sustained motivation.

Being in proximity to his weight training workouts, I could see the problem from a muscle building standpoint. He did his ‘Body for life’ bodybuilding workouts during lunch in a gym at the facility where we worked.   The problem: Our lunch period was only thirty minutes long. That’s strange. On a cold morning, I’ve taken up to twenty minutes just to warm up my body for a workout. This guy was doing his entire “muscle building” workout in thirty? I’m suspicious of even that one pound of purportedly gained muscle; water retention can play tricks within a window of several pounds.

'Rest time between sets' is as important as the sets themselves if you want 'natural bodybuilding' to produce optimal results for you.

“Rest Time between Sets”: The reason ‘Body for Life’ didn’t create miracles for my former coworker

Just recently, I wrote an article on how to ‘get big arms’ by avoiding “three big mistakes.” Before dispensing with some insights I’ve gained over the years, I looked to see what’s currently being said on the topic. What I found were workouts by authors who subscribe to the notion that training time should be short – that ‘rest time between sets’ should be a minute or less – that you should “get in and out of the gym quickly.”

By contrast, here’s what I’ve discovered over the years: If your rest time between sets is kept too short – you’ll get really good at working your cardiovascular system while depriving yourself of shapely, strong, powerful, calorie-burning, confidence-building muscle mass that could be proudly plastered to your frame. I’ve been there and done that – years ago. My short rest time between sets got the admiring glances of those in the gym that recognize and acknowledge hard work when they see it. However, it got me little in the way of admiring glances for gained muscle because it hardly produced any of those kinds of gains.

My ‘Body for Life’ coworker was obviously taking short rest time between sets in order to perform a “workout” in thirty minutes. And it’s no wonder to me that he lost motivation for that program within months and went back to smoking, eating, and drinking too much as his whopping one pound of muscle vanished within subsequent fat gains.

“Rest Time between Sets”: The bottom line

For years, I performed weight training workouts in which my rest time between sets was limited to exactly one minute. This produced some pretty grueling workouts, especially when doing deep squats in this manner. I did not, however, develop an appreciable amount of muscle from training this way. In fact, I didn’t gain much of anything except the occasional kudos from some fellow gym members that sounded something like this:

“Wow… good job… you’re really working out hard.”

Okay… I guess someone who wants that kind of recognition some cardiovascular endurance gains should have at it. But I wanted a more muscularly shapely appearance to my physique. Getting this requires adequately working the body’s ATP-CP System, which is the only way to stimulate fast-twitch muscle fiber growth. And it’s these fast-twitch fibers that hold the most potential for augmentation.

If you are training your muscles for sport’s endurance, then by all means, take a short rest time between sets. But if your objective is hardbody success ,then add some rippling muscle to your body by taking longer rest intervals between your weight-lifting sets. I recommend about a 10 to 1 ratio between rest time and set time. That means if it takes you twenty seconds to finish a set of six to ten reps – you should take about three and a half minutes of rest time between sets.

Less time spent in the gym? I’m hardly ever there. But it’s not (nor ever will be) due to getting my workout “done” within a thirty minute lunch period. That would likely earn me one measly pound of muscle as my meridian prize of muscle building. I’d prefer to continue building an amount that turns my body into a calorie-burning machine.

“Mental Fitness” before “Physical Fitness”: The one thing many well-intentioned people are missing.

When I was fresh out of the military and had just joined Gold’s Gym in my mid-twenties, I was briefly acquainted with a young woman who had just broken into the ‘personal trainer’ industry. She’d been at it for only a few months when a passing conversation I had with her revealed the frustrations she was experiencing with that business. She told me it was often like “babysitting”, whereby she struggled to get her clients to follow through on their prescribed workouts and eating plans. I felt both the implicit humor and biting frustration in an experience she shared:

“One client showed up for his workout and then told me he needed to go to the restroom. As I waited for him outside – I never saw him come out of the restroom. In fact, I never saw him again.”

Wow… I can vouch for the fact that the restroom she was referring to had no rear exit door. That guy either escaped through the rafters or she briefly took her eyes off the front door. At any rate, her client wasn’t only unmotivated to work out – he was highly motivated to escape undetected.

"Mental Fitness" can optimize 'workout focus' so that "physical fitness" becomes easier

That story – with its humor and slightly tragic undertone – is revealing of the need for “mental training” before “physical training” in the physique improvement and fitness arena. We’re often told how physical fitness will improve our mental and emotional well-being. Yet we’re rarely reminded of how a good mental game needs to precede the physical one in order to make the physical one effective and achievable. And it raises the proverbial “chicken and egg” question: Does mental fitness come first to help provide physical fitness or is physical fitness the priority so as to create mental fitness? I’ve found the former to be more important – especially for those individuals who’ve spent most of their years on the sedentary side and haven’t developed much of their ‘mind/body connection.’ Once that’s developed, improved well-being and self-esteem from having a stronger and shapelier body becomes a catalyst that keeps motivation self-perpetuating.

What is ‘Mental Fitness’ for ‘Physical Fitness?’

I always divide the issue of ‘mental fitness for physical fitness’ into a macro-level and a micro-level. Unsurprisingly, the macro-level issues typically need to be addressed before the micro-level ones can be applied for fitness optimization. Dealing with the macro issues is the only method I know of that can prevent the kind of “disappearing through the backdoor of the gym” scenario described above. Macro-level issues for ‘mental fitness’ include the following:

• Motivation
• Confidence
• Breaking Negative Habits
• Creating a Compelling Future
• Physically Empowered Self-Image

Can working out and improving one’s body create these positive mental conditions? Yes… but often too slowly. We run the risk of escaping the gym through a trap-door or letting an inch of dust collect on our home gym equipment before this can take effect. That’s why I recommend dealing with the ‘mental fitness’ before the ‘physical fitness’ in most cases.

So what constitutes the micro-level of ‘mental fitness?’

That’s where we get into things such as “workout performance” and “weight lifting concentration” and even “inter-workout recuperation performance.” If you want to really change your body for the better, think of yourself as an athlete and your workouts as athletic performances. If you’ve been the sedentary type, this will be easier to do once you’ve addressed the macro-level ‘mental fitness for physical fitness’ issues and optimized them.

The field of NLP provides a terrific array of tools for optimizing mental fitness for physical fitness. I use many of them with my clients. However, I don’t limit myself to them either. There are also skills within the fields of sports psychology and mental training that are just as valuable.

One thing worth mentioning: Good mental fitness needs to work synergistically with a physical fitness program. Even the best mental training can be completely ruined by physical training that doesn’t provide a trainee with positive feedback – both psychological and physiological. HardBody Success shows trainers and trainees alike how to make their mental fitness for physical fitness work synergistically – whereby their combined effect is greater than their individual effects.

‘Steroids and Athletes’: What about Steroids and Personal Fitness Trainers?

I know of a guy who took so many steroids as a competitive bodybuilder, he’s now having multiple health problems in his later middle-aged years. At fifty-something, his physique is a shell of its former drug-built glory. Interestingly, he moonlights as a ‘personal fitness trainer.’ My question: Would you hire him as a personal trainer? If you’re training your body naturally, would he effectively show you what to do to build a better body?

We’ve all heard the media hoopla over ‘steroids and athletes.’ We saw the latest episode just recently as Mark McGwire “came clean” about his drug use over a decade after the fact.  This aroused all the interest of a collective shrug from the public who probably suspected intuitively if not from the ‘steroids in baseball’ scandal that occurred between McGwire’s ’98 record-breaking season and his present-day emotional confession.

Steroids and other 'bodybuilding drugs': Not just a question in baseball

But I’ve got a question for which the answer has more personal implications than whether one’s favorite pro athlete is taking or has taken anabolic steroids, especially if you hire a personal fitness trainer: Has your trainer used steroids?

Why is this important?

Because personal fitness trainers are sought after for alleged expertise within the very context that gets distorted with the use of bodybuilding drugs – namely: ‘how to build a nice physique.’ If a person builds all or most of his or her own musculature with the use of powerful drugs, where will that person have gained the necessary knowledge to help you add muscle and strength to your body using purely natural means?

This ‘steroids and personal fitness trainers’ question might seem an opaque diversion on my part, but it has its warrant in practicality. I’ve seen dozens of clients of personal trainers who unknowingly didn’t stand a chance of gaining muscle because the trainers had them on routines that could only produce gains with the help of anabolic steroids. Overtraining is an understatement in describing the condition these trainers produce for their client’s bodies. Adding a financial issue to the bodily one, clients are often paying substantial hourly rates to be guided through activity that, at best, teaches them proper exercise form and, at worst, conditions them with habits that leave them perpetually in the “no-gain zone.” This is not something I’d think would be considered worth the money.

I owe it to my Clients and Readers: Proof that I’ve not used Bodybuilding Drugs

Now… if an athlete or personal fitness trainer passes a drug urinalysis test, it only proves one thing: they had no drugs in their system at the time the test was administered. However, since the effects of steroids on accelerated strength gains, muscle gains, and improved athletic performance have lasting benefit, it’s not too difficult for steroid users to cycle on and off the drugs in order to reap the advantages of using them while appearing “clean” on these tests. The same goes for competitive bodybuilders and personal fitness trainers.

What’s my point?

Simply this: A polygraph test is the only type that can currently provide an indication of one’s life-time status of drug use. And when administered by an experienced and skilled technician, this testing is extremely accurate.

That’s why I decided to take one for the benefit of my clients and readers. In a world where many former steroid users call themselves “natural bodybuilders” when it’s time to charge money for personal training services, it’s important to separate the ‘current naturals’ from the ‘life-time naturals.’ It’s important for fitness clients to at least be aware of the ‘steroids and personal fitness trainers’ possibility.

Click here for my Steroid Polygraph Test

Am I claiming that all muscular personal trainers have used steroids or that every former steroid user is “lost” when it comes to the context of natural bodybuilding? Of course not; I can’t possibly know that and I can only share what I’ve personally observed. And what I’ve observed for certain is a huge discord between what’s practiced in gyms by thousands and what really works for the genetically average trainee who doesn’t use bodybuilding drugs. It’s when this discord is intuitively being experienced that a client/trainee should ask themselves whether the routine they’re on is realistic or only beneficial to the ‘pharmaceutically enhanced.’

After all, if your body’s being trained naturally – you wouldn’t want to be led astray by someone who’s never really walked a mile in your shoes.

“Side Effects of Using Steroids”: Fleeting benefits – lingering pitfalls

Was it the “side effects of using steroids” that steered me away from the temptation to try them at an age when I was most vulnerable to the allure of what they promised? Partially, but that can’t account completely for my insistence on the ‘life-time natural’ route when confronted with a relatively easy solution to an age-related male insecurity: feeling scrawny and under-powered. It had to be more; sort of an overwhelming combination of incentives and constraints predicated on the dubiousness of the idea of shutting down my own natural testosterone production along with the knowledge that if I’d ever use steroids, I could never again call myself a natural bodybuilder in good conscience.

The latter reason stated above – transcendent as it may be – doesn’t discount the influence the previous reason has had on my decision. As a cause for many of the short-term ‘side effects of using steroids’, suppressed endogenous testosterone release seemed like it’d be a real blow to my manhood. I pictured the months passing by that would be spent vainly attempting to jumpstart my endocrine system while watching much of my muscle gains wither away as my ability to perform sexually lay dormant. All this friggin’ drama would be for some musculature that I wouldn’t even be able to proudly say I’d created myself. No thanks!

What sealed the decision for me was when I glimpsed a list of ‘side effects of using steroids’ written by the late Dan Duchane back in 1990. Under the side effect of ‘testicular atrophy’, Mr. Duchane remarked: “for whatever it’s worth, they never seem to come back to their full pre-steroid size.”

“What?”

So despite the PCT (post cycle therapy) drugs that a steroid user utilizes, ones endogenous (internal) testosterone production might be indefinitely suppressed? ‘If so’, I thought, ‘what else might be unalterably changed by using these drugs?’ I saw this as evidence of possible permanent truncation of my body’s ability to produce testosterone.  How could I ever expect to make natural muscle gains if my natural testosterone levels aren’t up to par? I could see the writing on the wall that spelled ‘prescription for addiction.’

That said – here’s a list of the most common side effects of using steroids. It should be noted up front that many of these effects occur in varying degrees and in some cases, minimally or not at all. Side effects are typically dose dependent, heavily affected by which particular drug a bodybuilder or athlete uses, and grossly exaggerated by the media. Generally, the more androgenic a steroid is, the more negative side effects it tends to engender.

Acne

My step brother started out as a natural bodybuilder. After not seeing him for many years, I noticed his increased muscular development when he came to town for a visit. When we hit the beach on the second day, his shirtless shoulders displayed the evidence that he’d become a “juicer” in the interlude: a roadmap of deep “zit scars” peppered his rear delts and upper back.

Anabolic steroids, especially the most androgenic of these drugs, tend to cause the sebaceous glands in the skin to secrete more oil. This can cause the breakout of heavy acne, especially in the areas of the back, neck, and face. Although it’s said that this most unsightly of the side effects of using steroids can be countered with certain drugs or avoided by abstinence from certain steroids, it remains a dead giveaway that a bodybuilder is soliciting “pharmaceutical help” in his quest to build muscle when it rears its ugly head.

Hypertension/High Blood Pressure

This side effect of using steroids is brought about by anabolic drugs that have a high propensity to ‘aromatize’ into estrogens. As estrogen levels rise in the body, so does the level of sodium and water retention – leading to elevated blood pressure. This can often be amplified by intense weight training workouts and rapid gains in body weight. Untreated high blood pressure can raise the chances of cardiovascular disease and eventual kidney failure.

Kidney Stress and Damage

Although the danger of kidney damage is most threatening to those prone to prolonged and super-elevated blood pressure, the possible strain to this internal organ should not be ignored by those considering the use of anabolic steroids. The kidneys are vital to the filtration and removal of byproducts from our bodies. Those using steroids, especially the highly androgenic kind, might cause the kidneys to work especially hard as most of the elements in these pharmaceutical compounds are excreted from the body through the urine.

Liver Stress and Damage

Many years ago when I was educating myself about the side effects of using steroids, it became readily apparent that most of the horror stories regarding liver damage from steroid use revolved around one particular steroid drug: Anadrol 50®. That’s because this drug is a c17 alpha alkylated compound, which makes it capable of being administered orally. In addition to this being an oral steroid, it contains a whopping 50 mg. of active steroid per tablet. Although I can’t tell you from any personal experience, I’ll assume that’s a lot because a daily small handful of those prescribed to medical patients has been known to cause severe liver damage over time. In some cases, it’s led to liver cancer.

Orally administered steroids are particularly hard on the liver compared with injectable drugs that don’t need the extent of chemical breakdown performed by this organ. The process of extensive breakdown of these compounds can actually damage the liver cells. This has an inhibitive effect on the liver’s ability to break down and excrete waste products from the body. Prolonged usage of oral steroids has occasionally led to peliosis hepatitis, a condition whereby the liver develops blood-filled cysts. Although rare, this condition can be life threatening.

Depression

Because steroid use comprises the introduction of an ‘exogenous’ (outside source) of the male hormone testosterone to the body, the user’s ‘endogenous production’ (bodily source) of this hormone eventually shuts down during steroid use. This can leave the body without much source of testosterone once the “steroid cycle” has concluded. A subsequent suppressed level of testosterone coupled with a raised level of estrogen (from aromatization of the steroids) can cause a hormone imbalance that often results in negative mood swings for the drug-using bodybuilder or athlete.

The severity of this side effect of using steroids is probably greatly dependent on the dosages of drugs administered and/or the duration of the steroid cycle. The longer and heavier the use of drugs, the more severe and prolonged the suppression of one’s own testosterone production.

Often adding to this physiologically-induced depression is the psychological exacerbation of witnessing much of one’s strength and muscular gains diminishing after a cycle. With endogenous levels of testosterone being inadequate to build or even preserve muscular gains, the “juicer” may experience bodybuilding regression – something bound to depress anyone with a voracious enough appetite for muscle building to resort to the drugs in the first place.

It should be noted that steroid cycles are often successfully followed by the use of drugs like HCG (Human Chorionic Gonadatropin) in order to “kick-start” endogenous hormone production. However, what should also be contemplated is the fact that, despite these “post-cycle therapy drugs”, some bodybuilders and athletes acquire what appears to be a psychological addiction to steroids due at least in part to their respective proneness to post-cycle depression for the reasons cited. I knew an incessant steroid user who actually admitted his body was no longer capable of producing its own testosterone. He was afraid to ever go off exogenous testosterone therapy because he sensed his body would “crash” if he did. This could be viewed as a combination of both psychological and physical addiction – the possibility of which should be considered before ever resorting to the use of these drugs.

Prostate Enlargement

Dihydrotestosterone (DHT) is a metabolite of testosterone and often rises in the body with the use of anabolic steroids. This is especially the case when bodybuilders and athletes use drugs such as testosterone, methyltestosterone, and Halotestin, which are strong 5-alpha reducible androgens. It appears that the heightened level of DHT combined with elevated levels of estrogen (from steroid aromatization) might contribute to the condition of benign prostatic enlargement – especially in older steroid users. The immediate and obvious effect of this condition is reduced urine flow and increased sensation for the need to urinate in those who experience it.

Although my impulsive recommendation for avoiding this one of many ‘side effects of using steroids’ is to stick with natural bodybuilding, I realize some mature bodybuilders will choose to do otherwise. For them, I’ll recommend steering clear of the above-mentioned steroids as well as other highly androgenic drugs such as Proviron, Dianabol, and Anadrol 50®.

Hair Loss

The same culprit that could contribute to prostate enlargement (DHT) can accelerate the progression of male pattern baldness in those who are genetically prone to it. In fact, younger men who experience male pattern baldness in the absence of steroid use tend to have the genetic predisposition for both finer hair follicles and higher DHT levels. The negative results of this combination can easily be exacerbated by the use of anabolic steroids as they accentuate the ‘high DHT’ side of the equation. This, like acne, is one of the cosmetic side effects of using steroids, but represents more permanency within this context as the effect tends to be irreversible.

Again, my advice for averting this side effect (along with all others) is to engage in effective natural bodybuilding. However, for those who choose otherwise, the best advice for reducing hair loss is to avoid drugs like testosterone, Halotestin, Anadrol 50®, and Dianabol®. The most favored anabolic steroid for avoiding this side effect is Deca-Durabolin®. Also, the use of ancillary drugs such as Propecia® can inhibit the 5-alpha reductase enzyme, thus reducing two of the ‘high DHT’ side effects of using steroids: prostate enlargement and hair loss.

Gynecomastia - one possible side effect of using steroids

Cardiovascular Disease

It is commonly known that there’s “good” cholesterol and “bad” cholesterol. The HDL (high density lipoprotein) type is the cholesterol we want more of for better cardiovascular health while the LDL (low density lipoprotein) is the type we want to reduce. The use of anabolic/androgenic steroids tends to send this ratio in an unfavorable direction over time – reducing the good stuff and raising the level of the kind that leaves plaque on the arterial walls while increasing total cholesterol at the same time.

This negative cardiovascular effect of the side effects of using steroids, when combined with a tendency among some of these drugs to raise blood pressure, makes it of paramount importance to have these readings professionally monitored, especially in older bodybuilders and athletes who choose to use these drugs.

Natural bodybuilding is the way to go in my book. However, for those who insist on going the steroid route, it appears that the injectable steroids have less of a negative impact on HDL/LDL cholesterol ratios than do the orally administered drugs.

Gynecomastia

Back in the early 1990s, I was acquainted with a former steroid user who adamantly recommended abstaining from even experimenting with their use to anyone who would listen. In talking with him, I discovered that he’d experienced a nightmare battle with one of the side effects of using steroids that was both painful and unsightly: Gynecomastia; a condition whereby the male body begins developing female breast tissue. A genetic predisposition had made this negative side effect an acutely dramatic and embarrassing event for him, eventually requiring surgery in order to remove the unwanted tissue.

A percentage of the hormone testosterone ‘aromatizes’ into estrogen in the male body. This is for the simple reason that males require a certain amount of the female hormone in order to function properly. It stands to reason, therefore, that if you jack up your testosterone levels with exogenous sources of the hormone (steroids), you’ll also jack up your estrogen levels. When this heightened level of estrogen acts upon receptor sites in the mammary gland region of a man’s body, female type breast tissue growth is often the undesirable result. The odds of this more cosmetic-centered of the side effects of using steroids is increased when using highly aromatizing androgens such as testosterone and Dianabol.

Short of abstaining from steroid use completely (my recommendation) or at least avoiding the ones most prone to aromatization (such as the two mentioned), there are estrogen antagonist drugs that can reduce the likelihood of affliction of this condition or at least the severity of the problem if it’s encountered. The most common of these are Clomid® and Nolvadex®. Alternatives to these are aromatase inhibitors, such as Proviron® and Arimidex®, which work by reducing the enzyme that converts the increased testosterone to estrogen.

Sexual Dysfunction

The body’s natural testosterone production works on a loop-feedback system. When the monitoring feature of this system (the hypothalamus) senses there’s more than adequate testosterone in circulation within the body, it ceases sending a signal to the testes to produce endogenous testosterone. Prolonged administering of exogenous forms of testosterone (anabolic/androgenic steroids) can therefore cause the body’s own production of this hormone to shut down until the loop-feedback system can be “jump-started” again. In the interim, low testosterone levels can naturally lead to sexual apathy or downright impotence; quite an embarrassing predicament, I’d imagine, for an otherwise muscularly-virile appearing body.

Conclusion

The aforementioned list of side effects of using steroids is by no means exhaustive, nor is it implied that all or any of the listed effects afflict all users in every case of usage. So much is dependent on so many variables. People often respond differently from the side effects of mild drugs like aspirin, so it stands to reason that variances would be even more pronounced with drugs such as steroids.

One effect of using steroids that might be a subjective projection on my part, yet a pronounced observation nonetheless, is the possibility that prior regular users of these drugs often don’t learn to ever make physique progress without them. In my twenty-five years of bodybuilding, I’ve witnessed many bodybuilders and fitness enthusiasts who grew accustomed to the easy progress these drugs provided finding themselves completely lost when they realized they couldn’t utilize steroids indefinitely. Without the knowledge of natural training and how to customize it to their bodies, they’ve simply allowed themselves to go downhill since they’ve stopped “cycling.”

This more subtle of the side effects of using steroids might be the biggest pitfall representing just how fleeting the benefits of using them can be.