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Trainer of Champions - October 2004 |
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Written by Charles Glass
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Thursday, 26 April 2007 |
I am a natural bodybuilder, currently still bulking for my first
competition (eep!) which is in November. I am really nervous! At the moment I'm sitting at 201lbs and around 13% bodyfat and I plan on getting to around 210 then diet down to around 170-175 totally shredded starting in September. How does my plan sound?
Straight up, your plan stinks, and I'll tell you why before you go and blow it for your show. The worst thing a natural bodybuilder can do is bulk up and diet down, especially all within a short time period like you are talking about here. I can't tell you how many guys I have seen who tell me they are going to diet down to 200 pounds, and then they end up around 175. In your case, you might go from the 210 you are contemplating all the way down to 160, and look so flat that if you were a pancake at IHOP the customer would send you back to the kitchen. Bodybuilders using steroids have a tremendous advantage when it comes to dieting. Steroids are anabolic, meaning they allow you to build more muscle than you could without them, but more importantly in a dieting situation, they are anti-catabolic. That means they are extremely potent at allowing you to retain lean muscle tissue even when your calories get very low, your carbs are way down, and you are doing a lot of cardio. So when a guy on steroids diets down, almost everything he loses will be fat. He keeps all the muscle he had when he was bulked up. The scenario is quite different for a drug-free bodybuilder. Without the benefit of anti-catabolic drugs, all those things - the lowered calories and carbs and the increased cardio - will burn up a lot of muscle along with the fat. The more fat you have to lose and the more extreme your preparations have to be, directly correlated with how fast you need to drop the fat, the greater the proportion of muscle to fat that you will lose. So in going from 210 to 170 (I will give you the benefit of the doubt that you will actually end up at this weight), you may lose twenty pounds of muscle and twenty pounds of fat. Twenty pounds of muscle is a huge sacrifice that no bodybuilder should ever have to make. Even someone like Ronnie or Jay looks flat and stringy when they lose that much. Think of Ronnie at the 2002 Olympia or Jay at the 2004 Arnold Classic. Both of these guys are 250-280 pounds on stage. For you, twenty pounds of muscle might make you look more like a swimmer than a bodybuilder. Without even knowing what you look like and just going by your stats, I can guarantee that you cannot afford to give up all that muscle and have any chance of doing well at your contest. Now let me tell you what I consider a much better plan to be a successful natural bodybuilding competitor. Do not gain any weight unless it is at least 90% pure quality muscle. Don't worry about what you see on the scale so much. That's how so many guys unwittingly get fat without even realizing it. Any fat you gain will eventually have to be lost once you diet down, and the more fat you lose, the greater the risk of losing the muscle you worked so hard to get. So stay pretty lean all the time. I say if you can't see your abs and some intercostals, you're getting too smooth and need to tighten up your diet. Don't worry, you can still gain muscle and stay pretty hard at the same time. The best thing about this is that once you do start your contest prep, you won't have to do anything drastic. Just bump up your cardio a little, tighten up your diet that last ten percent or so, and continue to eat plenty of good protein and carbs. You may even find yourself able to ‘eat up' to your show, that is, gain a little bit of quality muscle through intense training, and hitting a bulls-eye with your nutrition and supplementation over the last eight to ten weeks. Forget about bulking up, the results would only be disastrous.
Hi Charles. I have been training for two years and have gone from being 170 to
over 220 pounds in that time. I am still only twenty years old and am hoping
to get to over 240 pounds. I am 5-9 and come from a naturally strong, stocky
family. My dad never touched a weight in his life and he is a very solid 200 pounds at 5-8, and I have an older brother who only lifted for a couple years off and on and is also a good size. My problem is that I am completely obsessed with building muscle and have excluded everything but bodybuilding from my life. I have dropped out of college and have become a hermit, spending my time either in the gym or at home eating. My parents are not happy about it, but they don't understand my dreams of being a humongous pro bodybuilder. I am now thinking of taking steroids but at the same time I believe I have the genetics and work ethic to get to well over 240 pounds naturally without much trouble. From what I have told you, do you think so as well? Also, is it true that because of my age my body is already in an anabolic state without taking steroids? I would really appreciate your advice because I live in Ireland (a very long way from California!) and nobody here seems to know much about bodybuilding. I really need some help. Thank you for your time.
Forget about steroids and how much you can gain without them for a minute, because there is a much bigger issue here that you glossed right over. You quit college, which is bad enough, but you quit just so you could spend more time training and eating? My goodness, boy, what in the hell were you thinking? That was a terrible decision, just plain dumb. I don't mind sounding so harsh because you need to hear all this. One thing you really need to succeed in today's society is an education. We live in an information age, and the gap between the haves and the have-nots is directly related to the level of education a person has. Only a very few men will ever become pro bodybuilders, and only a few of them will actually earn a good living from the sport. So don't go and put all your eggs in one basket. Trust me, I have seen a thousand guys just like you come out to Venice Beach to make their fortunes as pro bodybuilders, and I can count on one hand the ones who actually did. And even among the pro's that have managed to make good money from the sport, eventually your days on stage come to an end. Then what? A couple of smart ones like Dean Tornabene, Lee Labrada, and Rich Gaspari went into the supplement business and are doing very well. But these were all educated men in the first place. For those who had absolutely nothing to fall back on, there are some very sad stories involving poverty, depression, and substance abuse. A lot of uneducated athletes who don't have good, trustworthy financial advisors to watch out for them simply blow through every dime they make, then find themselves broke and with no options once the prize winnings and endorsement checks stop coming. I think we all know a couple guys who used to have all kinds of fancy houses and cars and then lost it all. And nobody feels sorry for them, only considers them a fool. So I implore you, go back to school immediately. Your fixation on bodybuilding is not healthy at all. Get out and do things, be around other people. Otherwise you are setting yourself up for a very lonely, withdrawn life without friends or female companionship. You may have all the muscles in the world but be miserable and all alone in life. I hope that sounds horrible, because it is. You don't need to cut yourself off from the rest of the world to be a great bodybuilder, and in fact you will better off at least associating with others who share your goals. Did you ever think that maybe other bodybuilders could share useful information with you and help you stay motivated? Okay, enough of that. I have said what I could and the rest is up to you. Now, on to your question about whether or not you should start using steroids. At twenty years old, and particularly with the good genetics that have obviously been passed down to you, I think you would be foolish to do so. Your hormones are very high naturally right now and should be for at least another four or five years. Most guys make the best gains of their lives from ages twenty to twenty-five and then things start slowing down. At that point you may consider steroids to keep improving, but don't even think about it until then. Look at the facts. You have already managed to gain fifty pounds in just two years of training, without any pharmaceutical assistance. That's fantastic! Another twenty pounds in a year or two should not be a problem at all. Youth and genetics are on your side. But let me say this one last time - get a life, and get an education, or else you won't be a very complete person no matter how much you weigh or how many trophies you may win someday.
One thing I really need help on is chest. It appears big because that is where my fat goes and right now I'm on a mass-gaining diet. Actually I have been on a mass-gaining diet since I started lifting a year ago. If I hit a side-chest, my chest looks big, but I don't just want that. I want it to be super thick, like Ronnie Coleman's. I train at home with free-weights and dumbbells (5-45 lbs). I also have a cable station with a high and low pulley. It also has a pec-dec and bench press machine. I
weigh 200-205 with not that much fat to be called obese (my excuse for
looking chubby is I'm mass-gaining). I'm 5'8" and 16 years old. Here's my
problem. My upper chest and inner chest really suck. I do three
movements in incline EVERY WORKOUT, incline flyes, incline press, and
incline dumbbell press. Still I have the feeling that when I diet down for
summer next year I'll be able to see my clavicles. I also need help with
inner chest. I try doing presses with dumbbells and getting peak contractions
(most of the time) and everything else, but it doesn't work. I need to get
it up to par with my back (my best bodypart) and my shoulders, which are
starting to grow with a routine I'm using from an old issue of MD with Lee Haney. I
also need more basic overall mass because I don't look like the guys in the Olympia yet. Any special techniques you have would help....
Thanks bye.
The first problem I think you have is that you have allowed yourself to get too fat. You can't see what your chest even really looks like because you have a layer of blubber over it. If you stopped eating a lot of junk food and started adding some cardio into your routine, I bet that pretty soon you would have a much better idea of where the development in your chest is, and whether the areas you think are weak really are or not. It's crazy to have to wonder what lies beneath all the fat once you decide to diet down someday. How can you gauge your progress with all that fat on your body? It's almost like trying to assess your strengths and weaknesses in the dark. So first of all, stop living in denial and realize you are overweight. If you don't do that, you will only get fatter and I hate to see that, especially with young people. It's so unhealthy. Now, you also need to develop some patience. You are only sixteen years old and you're worried about looking like the guys who compete in the Mr. Olympia, the biggest pro bodybuilding event in the world. A year of training is almost nothing. Those men up there in the Olympia have all been training for fifteen to twenty years. Don't worry that you don't have the chest you crave just yet. When I was sixteen, I was training hard but I had no chest at all. It mystified me, because I was pretty strong on bench presses. But I didn't know at the time that it takes years of hard and heavy training to build serious muscle thickness. It wasn't until I was nineteen or twenty that my chest finally started getting thicker, and another three or four years beyond that before I was starting to become satisfied that it was almost as thick as I wanted it to be. By then I had everyone in the gym asking me for tip on how to make their chest grow. Keep focusing on getting good contractions and using a full range of motion. Incline dumbbell and barbell presses will build the upper pecs, just give them time. You can speed the process up by training the chest two or three times a week. Normally that would be overkill, but at sixteen you should be able to get away with it. Just pick two exercises for each workout and hit them hard for three or four good work sets. I would do one press and one flye type of movement each time. But don't get discouraged because your chest doesn't blow up in a week. That's not how the human body works. Just have faith that every time you train you build a little more muscle than you had before, and over time those tiny gains add up to big gains. Believe me, if you keep at it, your body will look so different in five years that old friends from high school won't even recognize you.
Hi my name is Brandon and I am a big fan of yours. I enjoy reading your column because you are the only real Trainer of Champions as far as I am concerned. I know Joe Weider is the Father of Modern Bodybuilding, but who did he ever train compared to your track record? Well anyways, on to my point. I am in a position that I feel I need help on because I have a friend who also trains. Right now I am stronger than him (you're probably thinking yeah, so what?) but the thing is if I get serious about bodybuilding and he finds out, he will work on pure strength. If he gets stronger than me he will think he is God of powerlifting (well basically because me and him got the strongest bench/curl in our High School right now) and I will not appreciate it at all because he will always brag and try to be cool. You know what I mean, I have heard you talk about people like him, well kind of like me too, EGO-DRIVEN. But I really admire you and the top pro's and want to be a bodybuilder. I have anger seeing him catch up to me in strength and would go nuts if he gets stronger than me so please help. The guys here respect how much you lift more than how big you are. If you were me, what would you pursue bodybuilding or powerlifting?
Oh boy, being a teenager sure is a rough time in a man's life. You have all these hormones driving you crazy, and you are desperately trying to earn respect and find your identity as you make the painful transition from boy to man. We all have to go through it. What you need to do is sit down and figure out what's important to you. Do you want to build a body that will instantly identify you to all who see you as a dedicated, hard-training bodybuilder, or would you rather be able to tell everybody you can bench press 500 pounds and curl 225, without looking like anything special, just a big shapeless moose? What I'm getting at is that you need to stop worrying so much about your friend and which one of you has bragging rights in the cafeteria at lunchtime. I can assure you that outside of you and him and maybe a couple of your other friends, nobody could care less about the weights you guys can lift. It might seem like a big deal in high school, but once you're out it won't matter at all. Just try putting how much you bench on your resume and see how many companies hire you! If you really want to be a bodybuilder, start training like one and your body will begin to change its shape and grow. You can't be obsessed with using maximum weights and low reps or else you won't ever look like a bodybuilder. There are plenty of big powerlifters, but very few of them have any shape to their bodies. They just look like big, husky guys. Bodybuilders need to develop a great mind-muscle connection, use good form, moderate to high reps, and include isolation and shaping exercises in addition to the basic mass-builders. There are some very strong bodybuilders out there, Ronnie Coleman and MD's own Johnnie Jackson being two prime examples, but it's their incredible muscular development from bodybuilding-style training that sets them apart in the world and marks them as exceptional athletes. If it's your ego that needs to be stroked, think of it this way. If you have the best bench press around, nobody knows unless you tell them. However, if you have the best physique around, everyone who sees you will know it. And ironically, most people will just assume you are super strong anyway when you are built like that. So forget about your friend and focus on you. Self-improvement only happens when you start focusing on how you can be better and stop worrying about what everyone else is doing.
I think my 18-year-old son is using steroids. I found some syringes
and two vials in his drawer. The vials are DK Aquatest and Macrotest.
The first one is in Spanish and says for veterinary use only and the Macrotest
says testosterone on it. I am very concerned. Do these sound like steroids? Are these things harmful? I have noticed he has been getting bigger lately and he is a little snippy and short-tempered.
I am not even sure this is a sincere e-mail, or just a joke from some kid trying to pull a fast one on me. But I will assume you are the actual mother of this boy and this is a legitimate question. Yes, those certainly are steroids you have found in your son's room, and the change in temper is a very common side effect of using testosterone. What you need to do right away is take your son to a doctor who can sit him down and explain the pro's and cons of steroids to him. He should also do a full physical including bloodwork to make sure he is healthy. A lot of times young kids start taking steroids without doing any research on the proper ways to use them and hurt themselves. They may take a lot of highly toxic oral steroids like Anadrol or Dianabol for extended periods, or neglect to include anti-estrogens in their cycles and get gyno. Once a young man starts using steroids, it's very hard to get him to stop. Don't think that by throwing them out you will solve the problem. When a kid is determined he might simply keep his drugs at a friends or girlfriend's house. It's just like any other drug. But at least get him checked out by your doctor and encourage him to get educated about the subject. MD's Author L. Rhea has a book called Chemical Enhancement that has a lot of great information, and there are many other valuable Books to look into. Try not to be too upset. I certainly don't condone teenagers using steroids, but I would be far more alarmed if I found out my child was using recreational drugs like cocaine, Ecstasy, or heroin. All of those can kill a person fast with just a single overdose. Steroids have long-term health dangers, but they can be minimized when used sensibly and not abused.
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