Good Body Great Body Your Body: No More Gimmicks, Fads, or Excuses

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NO MORE GIMMICKS, FADS, OR EXCUSES

by

LOGAN MURCEK

Copyright © 2021 Logan Murcek All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means without the prior written permission of the author.

CONTENTS FOREWORD CHAPTER 1. Before Stepping Foot in the Gym CHAPTER 2. While inside the Gym CHAPTER 3. Muscle Building Principles and Myths CHAPTER 4. Diet and Nutrition CHAPTER 5. The Snap Back to Reality

FOREWORD Before we start getting in to the nitty gritty of “The Good Stuff,” I want to make you a promise that obtaining a healthy weight or physique is not as complicated as you might believe. I want to make you a promise that EVERYTHING that you need to create a shift towards a healthier body and a higher quality of life will be provided directly to you within the confines of this document. It’s probably in your best interest that you can listen to me. I spent the past DECADE of my life in the gym! From the time I was able to get in the gym, I was there training, learning, watching, and doing (that’s why we say we’ve been getting A1 from Day 1). It means from the first day we make the commitment to ourselves, we are making the commitment to change. We are making the commitment to exorcising the old devious habits that have made us feel this way in the first place. We are making a commitment to ourselves to expel the negative stigmas and mental road blocks that will hinder us from be the healthiest we can be! The moment we accept that this routine is what the rest of our lives will look like, honestly, as a former personal trainer, is a truly incredible and inspirational moment! I’ve learned to recognize it and I can honestly tell you how incredibly rewarding it is to know that the rest of your amazing life will be spent feeling how you, as a human, are meant to feel. Your digestive health will elevate to new levels and your digestive biome will allow your body to fully digest and absorb the proper nutrients. Once you begin to feel your body recover from your previous habits, you will begin to also realize how magical it is to feel your body functioning at a new capacity. It is truly life changing! Finally, you will feel like you belong to your body and that your body belongs to you. The most incredible part of the process is that once

you get yourself totally immersed within this new lifestyle, you will feel like you are 10 years younger! You will have a superior level of discipline than you had thought possible before! Your metabolism will increase because it is finally receiving the proper nutrients it needs and in the proper portions as well! As a person who has been a personal trainer for years, I have had countless clients and many of them have become successful in making the monumental shift from being totally unhealthy, lethargic, and undisciplined, and turned their momentum in to a positive direction and made the change and chose to live their lives incredibly and NOT in discomfort, disappointment, and regret. I promise you, personally, that within the confines of these pages, is the answer of how do I make my life better and how do I prioritize my health in a way that will allow for me to live the rest of your days as if you never have before! The content of this book is not only scientifically proven by a bunch of cool doctors who care about keeping us all super healthy, but is used by personal trainers all around the country at nearly every gym and concepts that are used by every good personal trainer! You might be asking, though, “What makes a good personal trainer? How do I recognize good characteristics in a coach that he won’t be leading me astray?” I would tell you those are some damn good questions and some fair ones as well! So I will throughout this book, provide you with, not only characteristics of coaches that I admire, but, more usefully, the traits I have been told that have also made me an excellent trainer. That way, by the end of this book, should you choose to seek a fitness professional’s help, you should have a very clear idea of what you will be getting yourself in to and you know that you will be in good hands! Which I have to say I recommend; I have since left the personal training industry so I really have nothing to gain from writing this book or selling you a course or setting you up with a personal trainer. I do, though, remember the pure joy and sheer euphoria of reaching a breakthrough with a client

and that is what I want to create for all the readers of this book. I want to create the kind of breakthrough with all of you. The healthier we all are, the more energy we will have to make our lives, our families, and our world, a much better place. But why trust me? What value do I bring to you that would make you believe me? Well, I’ve been in a gym for as long as I can remember. Growing up an athlete, I spent a lot of my free time with other trainers and coaches that would run my team and me through routines and circuits that would keep our team in tip top shape! However, once I graduated from high school with no real plan but a refreshing vigor for fitness, I became certified and hired as a personal trainer! It was from then that I decided that if I am going to do this for the rest of my life, I might as well do it 1000% and I would invest an immeasurable amount of time to mastering my craft. I read every book I could get my hands on. I watched every video on physical science and exercise that I could. I would learn as much as I possibly could about exercising and programming to allow my clients to get an incredible experience from me. In doing so, I broke my gyms sales record for new trainers! Not many people can say they’ve had a 100% sales record! I’ll grant you, it was a short lived achievement but one that I love to discuss. The reason I love it so much is because, at the time, I wasn’t any sort of fitness genie or any kind of health guru (at the time LOL); but what made me such a good trainer (Hint) is that my excitement and passion for fitness translated and transcended my knowledge. They could tell that I didn’t choose to be a personal trainer because of the loads of money they make (which isn’t that) but I chose that role because I carry with me, every single day I rise up out of bed, a genuine concern for peoples’ health! Plus, if I could measure how much time I had spent studying, researching, looking, reading, and watching, I would tell you. But generally speaking, once I fully committed to the mastery of body manipulation, I spent every bit of two years working 6 days a week and spending

anywhere from 12-14 hours each, constantly proving to myself and everyone else that I am a trainer that is not to be messed with. I knew I’d be the best—and I was! I was the top trainer of my gym within 6 months and remained there for the rest of my time spent as a personal trainer. So if we do some math, adds up to almost 90 hours a week and equates to almost 10,000 hours of training, reading, studying, testing, and training (again) and very carefully honed my craft to a science that allows me to write an exercise program for anyone on the planet without even meeting them (but we must know our limitations that can hinder our abilities to execute certain movements and can hurt us EVEN FURTHER; which we won’t doJ). So, in summation, yes, I take this shit seriously and I expect you do to the same and if done so, will alter the trajectory of what the rest of your life will look like. That leads me straight in to my final point before we get in to the meat and potatoes of this thing! I want to lead a little visualization exercise for us to carry out before we get in to this; imagine your life exactly how it is now (I know, pretty tough, right?) Imagine the number of times you eat fast food, or any food that we both know isn’t creating any healthy habits. Imagine what you are doing when you decide against going to the gym. Maybe it’s watching Netflix and Hulu. Maybe it’s eating junk food. Now, imagine how frequently we allow those habits to manifest. Do we see them happening once a week? Twice? Four? Seven?! Some of us allow these habits to get the better of us all seven days in a week! We must be honest with ourselves; it is the only possible way for us to find and fix the dysfunction and properly address it. Now, I want you to picture your life going unchanged. I want you to imagine yourself sitting in the same chair, eating the same junky foods, living the same life. We are going to, realistically, try and make as accurate of an assumption as we can, looking forward in to your life. I invite you to look deep and look long. Try as hard as you can, because it is all too real at this current moment in time. Do you enjoy what you see? Are you proud of yourself? Are you happy with how

your kids view you (which is going to dictate their lives as well)? I know that it is an uncomfortable exercise, but often times, we find our moments of greatest growth and development happen to take place in times of great pain. That is what we are experiencing! How you feel right now is your brain being desensitized to a neurotransmitter called dopamine (I have a whole chapter about fixing this) and the true you hate to face the real gravity of how dire this situation might seem. That is exactly why the next 57 pages will be my doctoral prescription that we will need to take if we ever plan on seeing our life fall upon the tracks of life. If you invest nothing else in me but the money that this book costs, it’ll have been rough for you before this book and it’ll be rough after the book. If you find it within yourself to invest your trust, I promise you, this book will have an uncontrollable urge to begin to be a master of your own life! Now, out of respect for my former people, I will not be using any names throughout the book here, but I will be referencing some of them in order to give you all a valid reason to trust everything I have to say. I have trained people across the board from stroke victims, pre, current, and post diabetics, obese people, rail thin people, you name it. What my knowledge has expanded to can be anywhere from body building and circuit training, to custom and specific routines that serve one singular purpose! That is exactly what we will cover in this book! We will be able to cover everything from mindset and muscle groups to diet and nutrition! I want to be able to provide everyone with enough information to never have to hire a personal trainer again!

CHAPTER I Before Stepping Foot in the Gym Before we are at all able to even step foot in the gym, we need to fix our mindset, first and foremost. We need to be able to foster a healthy mindset before we attempt to change our lives forever! This is important to do in order to keep us on track for days when we don’t have motivation. There will be many, MANY days where motivation is in short supply and it will be incredibly difficult to trek the journey to the inside of the gym. Even further, once we get to the gym, our workout will be insufficient and unsatisfying because we just aren’t in to it. Committing to the initial change in mindset will help keep us on track! There are a handful of different factors that will permanently hinder us from getting to achieve our fitness dreams! Motivation is the prime deciding factor in determining whether or not we will attack our goals and ambitions with tenacity and fervor or with sluggishness and lethargy! “How in the heck are we going to control our own motivation? It isn’t just that easy!” No, no it isn’t just that easy. There is not an “easy” part of this! It is simply not going to be that way and if that is something that you are unable to cope with, I would highly recommend coming to terms with it! That is a surprisingly powerful moment, as well, once you experience it! The realization that this routine of being active and healthy through daily exercise will become a regular thing for the rest of your life will be a moment that alters the trajectory of your entire life.

Don’t try to fight it. Approach it with a sense of openness and acceptance! But how do we control motivation? There can’t be a way that we can willingly control the amount of motivation we have at any given time! Well one tip is watching super duper motivational speeches on Youtube! That should last you a few days maybe a week. Another good way to willingly increase motivation is to listen to your favorite music while you exercise! How do we motivate ourselves? We must find it within ourselves. Now, I know that sounds very pretentious of me, but hear me out! I want you all to know you can trust me! We must find that one thing that is our greatest cause of pain that we are experiencing! Identifying where we are most vulnerable and our wounds are the tenderest is where we will find ALL of our motivation. The way this will have to work, however, is it will force us to be extremely real with ourselves. It will make you extremely uncomfortable! This is going to provoke very scary emotions that we have been suppressing for a very, very long time. It will be excruciating and very emotional, but again, please trust me. This is something that will drastically shift your perspective in to a much better place. I promise. We want to identify what it is about ourselves that hurts us the most? It could be how crumby we feel that our belly is too big. It could have to do with our love lives and it not being satisfactory. It could be your family (if not for yourself, lead a good example for kids and grandkids to show them how important and rewarding a healthy lifestyle can be! Their future depends on this you know…). Identify your most significant insecurity and exploit that to yourself. We are going to do this to ourselves every time we are unmotivated! We are developing a winners’ mindset—I want to inspire you to take action every time you feel like crap. Execution outweighs excuses, every single time. The more action you take, the less anxiety you will have about the matter. Using that one tactic is how winners develop their mind set to be able to obtain and unlimited amount of motivation. It is not enough to simply try to force yourself in to a position where you

feel like this with the “winner’s mindset.” That alone will be fairly selfdestructive to our self-image and will likely not ignite any passion, which means there will surely not be any following action! We must rewire our brain! Our brains have been hard-wired to accept our situation and that we are unable to execute on what we actually want to do. Why? Why does it seem like we are unable to ‘want’ to exercise or eat healthy? We know we want to but we don’t really want to. You know what I mean? It is because our previous, unhealthy habits have wired our brain to provoke a false dopamine trigger. Dopamine is the epicenter of what we do and how we behave! It is dopamine that tells us that we should sit down and relax. It is dopamine that tells our brain that the tub of ice cream in the freezer is delicious and it would be amazing if we ate the whole thing right now. Even though we feel like absolute garbage afterwards, we still do it! At the very least, we entertain the idea. We have an inner conversation with ourselves (I can’t be the only crazy one!). Imagine in the cartoons your kids watch, or if you don’t have children, the cartoons you would watch as a kid; picture a character with a devil and an angel of the shoulders. One of those voices is US. That is what we know we should and shouldn’t be doing. That voice knows what we truly want and what we should really be doing. That is the angel! The Devil is Dopamine telling you that what feels good to your brain, doesn’t feel good for your body! This seems impossible to fix, doesn’t it? It is NOT impossible! It is, though, very difficult. I will reiterate, this is not a process for the simple and feeble minded. It is for the bold, the deadly, and the vicious. Those who truly want to seek change and feel like the rest of their life is within their hands like wet clay; able to mold and shape as their vision fits. This is possible for each and every person that reads these words but it comes at a cost: Discipline. You see, what happens when you are doing something “enjoyable” like eating ice cream, watching television all day, it produces a dopamine

trigger in the brain which has receptors that are what your brain will use to tell you that you are happy. The more that we feed these poor habits, the more dopamine receptors that your brain will produce to keep up with the massive amounts of dopamine it is receiving. The more poor habits we adopt, the more dopamine our brain is flooded with. The more dopamine our brain is flooded with, the more receptors the brain has to have! The more dopamine receptors your brain has, the more difficult it will be to kick the bad habits. In order for us to be able to rewire our brain, we must muster up every bit of discipline that we have and focus as much of it as we can and direct it all towards one week. One week of change of habits and it allows you to get a clear vision of what life needs to look like. The reaction in your brain when you ‘cold-start’ this lifestyle, so to speak, your brain very quickly relearns what triggers dopamine and what will not trigger dopamine! The more you suffer during this process, the more effective the experience will be. Truthfully, the most painful part about this week of extreme discipline will be what is most rewarding after and will also be what you crave THE LEAST on the other end of the week! This process (rewiring your brain to actually trigger dopamine when you accomplish something challenging and stray away from easy or false dopamine triggers) will be something in your life you will never forget. You will finally begin to enjoy tasks that you had previously thought mundane. You will begin to enjoy learning coding, or eating healthy, or following an exercise regimen. All I ask is that you give me all your trust and all your faith and I promise you, what seems like a weeklong nightmare will change your perspective of what is possible and what you’re capable of for the rest of your time alive. You see, our brain is coded and hardwired for maintenance. No matter what our goals are; build muscle, get lean, burn belly fat, increase cardiovascular health, etc, the brain is going to try to contradict you the whole way! Here’s why that is the case. Your consciousness, your awareness, your

SOUL is aware of your past and your present and uses it as a filter to your subconscious. You see, all the thoughts we have in our subconscious are supposed to be possible solutions or variations of the biggest problems in your life, and it does all this without you having to be aware of it. For example, if you ever get in to a verbal altercation with someone and later that day, you randomly have an idea and think, “Oh! I should have said THAT! That was way better than what I said!” Your brain is most highly concerned with how poorly you performed in that argument and provided a solution based on what you know and have learned and experienced. It does this all day every day without you even knowing! Well, that part of your brain does this same thing with your health! The higher you prioritize it in your mind, the more the subconscious part of your brain will affect your thoughts and your behavior. It is a filter for reality and experiences for your conscious brain. Therefore, that is the reason why many people find it so very difficult to make a major change in their life like this, even if it logically and rationally makes perfect sense to do so. What happens is essentially, because our brain, MINUS our “soul” or consciousness, does one thing… maintain! It has no rationality or logic; it only knows what is “now”. Don’t forget, though, that not only will these behaviors continue because of the fact that our animal brain is now addicted to (and flooded with) dopamine. I like to refer to our consciousless part of our brain the “animal brain” and the conscious part the “human brain.” Our animal brain dictates our behavior by being controlled by neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine. The better our brain feels, the more it wants to repeat the process to “feel good” again. It is our animal brains that get us in this kind of trouble. When we listen too much to our animal brain, we get too much of what makes up happy, and not enough of what is good for us. We know consciously what the right thing is to do all the time but many times we still actively choose not to do it!

WHY? The problem lies within the human part of our brain; our subconscious, our problem solver! This is a large part of where the change must take place and it is VERY challenging and is VERY difficult… but at the same time, VERY substantial and will change the outcome of the rest our lives! Our brain’s subconscious is a learned reservoir of behaviors, perceptions, opinions, and ideas. It contains everything that your brain has EVER retained without you having to be consciously aware of it. Most people who struggle with their weight haven’t only done so in short time spans. Most of the time someone must make a big change to their health; I notice that it is someone who has struggled with it for a while, maybe their whole life. The subconscious is the greatest translator between your animal and human brain. This is what makes it such a dangerous part of your brain. It can pretty much justify any sort of poor or destructive behavior. Your subconscious brain is very persuasive and your conscious brain is very gullible. Your brain will lie to itself all day until our destructive habits are not only continuous and constant, but now also (falsely) justified. Any justified action in your brain is a right one. Therefore, what we must do is redefine what makes a decision correct and how to get our brain to stop lying to itself. The way we go about resetting this part of our brain must be to rewire our brain’s dopamine sensory system. Our brain only chases dopamine hits so we must change what gives us dopamine hits. What is the most unpleasant part of this is the “come down” so to speak. Understanding the fact that our behavior is going to feel almost torturous because our animal brain has learned our behavior is ice cream and television which releases A LOT of dopamine. Trying to switch to chicken breast and the gym from ice cream and television is going to be very taxing on you, emotionally and physically. Your brain will reject it. You must endure.

There are two ways that we typically can do this: 1. Fast and dramatically 2. Slowly over time. The first method trying to reset your dumb dopamine brain is fast and dramatically and I’m going to start off saying I DO NOT RECOMMEND THIS TO THE FIRST TIMERS. Don’t do it. This trick is mainly for if you fall off the wagon in the future and need a little kick in the caboose. I typically would only recommend this to people who already have strong and able bodies because a 36 hour “fun-fast”. “Fun Fasting” is a hard and immediate mental reset; a full day and a half of avoiding anything for a rush of dopamine, including but not limited to, sugary foods or drinks, fried foods, ANY FOODS (yes 36 hours, no food), television, video games, etc. What happens over a 36 hour fast? First and foremost, what happens is your body will naturally respond with higher levels of norepinephrine (theoretically due to lowering blood sugar) but will cause your body to burn energy PREFERENTIALLY! Your body does this automatically and you can literally tell your body to burn body fat instead of carbohydrates or sugars. The lower blood sugar, by the way, will help with insulin sensitivity! I know some who read this book might struggle with blood sugars and I totally get it. My brother has been diabetic for most of his life and it is for this reason I became so infatuated with nutrition and exercise and being healthy! Beyond this, I’ve helped clients and even non-clients alike with lowering A1C numbers and even increasing insulin sensitivity. For those that don’t know, the more sugar and carbohydrates you eat, as a diabetic, the more insulin you must pin to keep your blood sugar at a reasonable level. Insulin is what the body uses to break down and use sugar and if the body is imbalanced one way, or the other, it can cause extreme disorientation to us.

With insulin prices beginning to rise again, it is important to me that all of you become healthier for your body’s sake, and your bank accounts! Now, I do not recommend that method to anyone who has not yet established a lasting and sustainable diet and routine! That is NOT a rookie move! That’s a veteran move that I will cover more in this book! I only recommend those people do this, though, because these people will have a reference point for what they are hard resetting to. If someone has never established that healthy life, they have no idea what the reset should even look like and will inevitably do more damage to their bodies than good. Therefore, we are left with option two… slowly over time. Slowly over time, I understand sounds a lot less sexy than its counterpart; I know this. I totally get that a more immediate solution with fast results sounds like an answer to our prayers but it is not the case, unfortunately. Deep rooted problems must be met with a deep unrooting, and it is as unpleasant as it sounds. However, it is really our only option. The gradual adaptation to a newer and healthier lifestyle is a long one and a trying one, albeit. The correctional process is one that is irreplaceable. It teaches you things about yourself that you will never forget for the rest of your life. Being able to identify dark times when they are present is a painful thing to do… but it is the first step in a right direction It is a constant and ongoing battle to try to be better and many of us don’t really realize how true that is across the spectrum; from gym veterans to gym rookies! We all screw up. So by no means will tell you that you have to be the perfect idea of fitness in order to lose any weight! Let’s no longer start our self-standard at perfect and work our way down! That seems entirely too toxic to your self-image and so let’s no longer do that. Please. It’s very easy to get discouraged at this point, which is why I understand how perfection can seem like such an obscene or abstract idea but much alike any other aspect of your life, you can’t expect perfection from the get

go. Just like you weren’t dunking on your first day of basketball or solving algebra in kindergarten! You have to increase your capacity. Your capacity to execute and endure for what you want is directly related to how much of that thing you want… end of story. Whether that be fitness or in real life! The more out of your own way you go for your goals, the closer you get to become that person you are aspiring to be! The more you follow your diet, even when you like, REALLY, REALLY don’t want to, but you stay true to it anyway because you know it’s the right thing to do, well, your capacity is now greater for having gone longer and longer without cheating. It’s all about creating greater and greater capacity! If you can’t go a week without cheating on your diet, just break it down until the goal is attainable! Maybe it’s day by day; no one looks up at Everest and worry about getting there in a day. They travel from base camp to base camp carefully and tactfully and allowing their bodies to adapt to the literal hell they are going to go through… just like yourself! This journey is not one that is meant to be easy but, over the course of a year, you have overcome huge obstacles that have left you with a better perspective of your expectations for yourself. Your patience for your own abilities and how you handle your own expectations will grow tremendously. I’ve said this so many times, I’ve lost count: “being healthy is only as difficult as you make it.” I understand how that sounds; but really think about it. If you want to be healthier, like genuinely in your heart and in your soul, then you probably wouldn’t be fighting yourself the entire way. If you are constant in agonizing debate with yourself about your diet and going to the gym and it’s the worst thing in the world to happen to anyone ever? Then yeah. It will probably be that. The reality of the situation is that it doesn’t take long for the body to get to work with this new program and it isn’t long before we start to FEEL better! Once the nutrition and workout routines start getting dialed in,

sleep is likely next to fall in to order; presumably followed by energy levels throughout the day. I’ve always compared this principal to a sort of cause and affect with other realms of life. If you can plan and execute a scheduled workout routine on top of your previous responsibilities, that is impressive! Once you accomplish that, you feel obligated to at least try to eat better and you become better at that! If you can sustain that for a few months, that’s VERY impressive. Now that these two have become a bit more habitual and manageable, you start to feel so much more healthy and energetic! You might even start to feel that you begin to perform better at work now because your body and brain are fed and able to allow you to focus better and now your career benefits! The momentum from this point is what allows people to carry themselves through such unappetizing circumstances; so that they can overcome and achieve! This is the energy people build! THEY”RE CAPACITY! As you continue upward and onward on your fitness crusade, understand that your capacity to execute is only as good as you’ll ever be and the responsibility of how absolutely amazing you can be or can’t be falls unto the shoulders that picked up the fork. The human capacity is infinite as we look at guys named Elon or some women named Oprah.

CHAPTER II While inside the Gym Now that we have properly addressed the optimal mindset to be successful, we can now begin to discuss what we want to do while we are inside the gym! In the following parts, I will not only provide exercises that are unquestionably imperative to being successful in fitness as well as breaking down how to do each movement; I will also be dispelling many, many, MANY myths and falsehoods to avoid and ignore while working out. Having someone tell you exactly what to do and exactly how to do it is pretty damn awesome, I agree. You literally only have to do it and you will succeed. Having someone tell you what NOT to do? That’s a dream come true! We will not be hurting ourselves, we will have a much more enjoyable experience, and we can be more consistent because of the prior two statements! When we first walk in to the gym, it is crucial to our success to choosing what our objective is. Being indecisive in defining what our objective is (not being able to decide if you want your main objective to be gain muscle, fat loss, cardiovascular improvement, etc.) will be terribly destructive to any long term progress you will obtain. The reason why I make this claim is because there are many different ways to train your body while in the gym. Once your goal is clearly defined, we can focus on doing only the movements and exercises that will bring us our end results as soon as possible! The opposition looks more like us doing too many exercises that

aren’t advantageous to our goals and waste time and energy on meaningless exercises and extending our deadlines for our goals. I will begin this chapter by making a bold claim… in order for you to be successful in creating your picture perfect image of health body you’ve been lusting for so long; the amount of cardiovascular training that will be required of you is ZERO! I get excited talking about that because I thoroughly enjoy skipping cardio… however, I still will be covering the two types of cardio and how to incorporate them because they are great supplemental activities to weight loss! Especially if any of us personally or genetically prone to heart disease, much like me! The primary objective in weight loss is how many calories we eat! Cardio will burn more calories instantaneously which are why it is great to incorporate it but I want to emphasize that it is not our only choice to get in shape and keep it. But anyway… I am unable to set specific goals for you, because, I am only a voice that you can hear in your head while you read this. But, let me suggest this; our primary goal must be to build muscle! Let me tell you why; having a good foundation of muscle is just like providing a solid foundation for your home. Would you move in to a home with a moldy and shaky foundation? It’s such a health risk to you and your family! It actually might be worse. If you don’t believe me, imagine what the insides of a morbidly obese person looks like. Are you imagining it? It is quite a powerful image for your brain to try to illustrate. Building muscle before focusing on toning alone will make toning easier by an astonishing amount. This is because muscles require energy to function on a daily basis. Just like a giant body builder has to eat loads of food just to maintain his muscle mass. We will not be training that way, but we want to have a metabolism like an absolute machine. Another great example is gas mileage! Think to yourself which vehicle burns more fuel: a pick-up truck or a motorcycle? I really, really hope all of you said the truck burns more fuel (if not, hey, don’t beat yourself up, this

is a fitness book, not a car book). But why is that the case, why does the truck burn more? Well, first and foremost, it has a much larger engine! It creates a lot more power than the motorcycle does! Our bodies, in this example, are just like the vehicles, the more muscles we have (bigger engine); the more fuel is required to allow the engine to function properly (stored energy, aka BODY FAT)! I hope that adequately provides enough explanation as to why we want to build muscle first before we begin to solely focus on toning! No one wants to be skinny fat. “Skinny Fat” is a term that refers to people who have lost a lot of weight by solely doing cardio and eating less. They will spend hours and hours on a treadmill, bike, or elliptical and go until they got Clifford cheeks and their faces are red like a fresh spring tomato. By the way, this is a way to lose a lot of weight! People will take notice and compliment you on your dedication, which is awesome! I am not down playing that tactic, some people love it and I couldn’t be happier that they have found a routine they enjoy. However, once they take their shirts off, they appear much less impressive… they still have a solid and stubborn layer of body fat. It is extremely difficult to have any sort of muscle definition whatsoever. THEREFORE, if we want to have total control of our physique and we want to look good as hell when we are naked (which, like… duh) and we want to be snapping necks at the beach like killer whale (lol) then we will want to focus primarily on building that primary layer of rock hard and sexy muscle. Not to mention that in the process of doing so, we will lose a lot of body fat, regardless of how we train. When we are first starting, our calorie expenditure will greatly surpass how much we are consuming and we will have a rare opportunity to gain a lot of muscle and lose a lot of fat, simultaneously! Let’s dive in to the science behind this so that you know you are able to trust me! When we want to look at what causes fat loss, we want to reverse engineer what works and how we can apply it to ourselves. It’s

interesting how it is very seldom that we see anyone with an amazing physique that spends a majority of their gym time on the treadmill. That’s because they know how to make calories work FOR them. I know that saying something like that, “making calories work for you” sounds like I might pitch you some investing course or something that is equally ridiculous for a fitness book but it is true! These people with physiques and body types that we desire likely know something we don’t. When we analyze what all of that means, we will want to break it down to inspect each aspect. The only thing on this planet that we call earth that will dictate what happens with your body weight and whether we lose or gain weight is the amount of calories we consume on a daily basis. If we are consuming more calories than our body is able to use, the calories that go unused are recognized by the body as “excessive” and will be stored in the body’s natural energy storage tanks (body fat is simply stored energy readily available to be used later). We have a pretty standard amount of calories we burn in any given day. On a rest day, where we get to take a day off from the gym, all we do it just stay alive, we burn a certain number of calories. That number of calories is known as our BMR, or Basil Metabolic Rate and it is the number of calories in a 24 hour period to keep you alive! If you want to calculate this number, all we have to do is some simple math! If you are a man, we take 88.362 plus the result of your weight in kilograms and we add all that your height multiplied by 4.799 and subtract all of that by the product of 5.677 and your age in years! For women it’s the same equation but with different “constants”—let’s do this. Go to your favorite search engine and find the first BMR calculator and plug in your body composition quantities and let the internet do the rest. That will give you an excellent idea of what your daily caloric burn looks like. That way we can make sure that we are staying where we need to be in relationship to our goals. The farther our consumed calories are from that BMR, the more drastic and immediate our results will be! All that means is

the more we eat above our BMR, the more weight we will gain (muscle or body fat). The farther below that BMR value, the faster we will lose weight! Now, of course, we want to try and get close to our Basil Metabolic Rate every day! Remember, our bodily functions require calories! Things like keeping our heart beating (which is a muscle, mind you), brain functions, and breathing, all require energy to be done and all require us to eat! That is my scientific claim that not eating is a big no no. Let me say it again; not eating any food is going to be destructive to your body and you should eat even if you are not hungry! I hope I have made myself clear. Side Note: I’m not sure why this is the case, but the reason why I want to pound this point home is that, in my own personal experience, my ladies I have trained seem to disagree. I have had countless arguments about the importance of eating without being hungry. IT’S IMPORTANT! ‘But Logan, why is it so dang important? If I’m not hungry, I’m just not going to eat.’ Wrong! This is where our discipline is going to play a major role. You are correct that missing a meal here and there because you are not hungry is not the end of the world. However, we need to understand the significance of why this is so crucial so that we can stick as closely as we can to our eating routine. I want you to imagine your metabolism is like a train that is driven by coal. In order for the train’s engine to run most efficiently, it must be constantly fed coal! Not too much, though, for the train conductor might overwhelm the fire! Too little is just as bad because then the train stops! As long as we are constantly able to be feeding our train engine, our metabolism will stay burning at a higher rate. In order for this to actually make sense, I’ll break it down using a thing that we all trust: science. You see, our bodies, as far as the evolutionist is concerned, is dictated by the time of day our bodies “normally” needs to be the most efficient. Historically speaking, our hunter-gatherer ancestors would spend all day hunting and gathering and would consume 100% of their daily calories all at the end of the day. This would dictate for their

metabolism to be slower and more conservative throughout the day. This is a survival mechanism your body is able to utilize that would allow for our ancestors to survive in the event of a bad hunting day. The body fat they would pack on to their bodies was beneficial for survival. It would keep them warm and allow them to go long periods without eating if food was sparse. Maybe beneficial and reasonable for keeping body fat but we want to lose it! Thankfully, none of you reading this book live under rocks or have gone off the grid. Therefore, you are probably aware that we no longer need to hunt or gather food. We have discovered that our food accumulates in large stores for our convenience, and we call them convenience stores. We no longer have to wait for our food. Because our food in our era is readily available to us, we can construct an eating schedule to maximize our metabolic capacity. That is just a fancy-pants way to say we can eat at certain times of the day that will ensure our metabolism will run hotter for longer periods of time. Ipso facto, we will be burning much more body fat, simply by eating certain foods at certain times! We haven’t even started working out yet and we are one step closer to having the body we always wanted! The best routine that I have seen work for working and busy people, who have full time jobs and families, is eating five times a day. I understand that eating five times a day seems like a lot. That’s only because of our “Americanized” perspective of portions. A lot of times, we look at dietary habits of Americans as gluttonous. I don’t really need to mention that; we all know that we Americans aren’t the healthiest. We only eat once or twice a day and they are both meals we will typically eat and we won’t stop until we feel full. That is how we kill our metabolism. Let’s revisit the train analogy! Remember how I said eating too much will suffocate the fire and cause it to diminish? This is precisely what that looks like and precisely the problem with our eating habits. The way we are able to fix this is five meals a day where each one is

portioned to make you hungry hours later. However, by design or not, our body has to be allowed a grace period to adapt to our new eating schedule. We are literally going to be re training our metabolism to be faster; how stinkin’ cool is that? That is why it is so important that we eat when we are supposed to. Every time we skip a meal, it is the equivalent to failing a math test every time you don’t study. You are voluntarily allowing your body to fail at learning a behavior. Effort is like a piggy bank, my friends! Every time you do what you are supposed to do, you add a coin and become just a little bit richer. Every time you cheat against your discipline, you are taking a coin away, becoming poorer in your health. The contents of our meals are slightly less important than you would probably believe. Remember, our primary goal is to build a “base course” of muscle. Like a sky scraper, it is crucial for us to have a strong foundation for which we can build on! Therefore, as long as we are eating less and exercising more, for the first approximately 6-10 months, we will be able to lose weight and build muscle, no matter what we eat, as long as we are continuously eating less and less. This is why the way we pick to train and the goals we set in the gym will work harmoniously with our nutritional ones which will be in a future section. When we are deciding what to do, the movements we pick to do will directly dictate the results we get; we want to choose the hardest movements! The hardest movements we can pick are what are known as Heavy Compound Lifts. These are movements that use as many muscles as possible with every single repetition of the movement. We want to focus on activating and working as many muscles as we possibly can throughout our workout. If we want to look more athletic, we must train more like an athlete. Therefore, we will be doing full body workouts. No more booty blasting workouts for our ladies and no more arm day for my fellows (for the time being… I know that one is tough to hear). Moving forward, we will now focus on three main movements that we want to continuously get stronger

and stronger on. The more muscle groups and the bigger muscle groups that we train; the more Human Growth Hormone is released by our endocrine system to support muscle development. If you want the legs like a legend and a beautiful back, the dead lift will provide exactly that with the title of the king of all lifts. The dead lift works more muscles than any other lift I can imagine. It begins by allowing us to build a bullet proof core. Our rectus abdonimis (6 pack muscles) will develop more from this movement than any other movement as well as the lower back (thoracolumbar fascia). By the way, if you suffer from lower back pain, we want to dead lift much more frequently. That sounds counter intuitive but the stronger and healthier that muscle is, the less pain will nag you. From beginning to end, the dead lift activates our back (trapezius upper and lower, rhomboids, latissimus dorsi, erector spinae are the main ones, not that there’s a test at the end or anything). We are also working out our lower posterior chain (gluteus maximus, hamstrings, and calves). This entire system is known as our posterior chain which contains two of the biggest muscles on our body; our glutes (our booty) and our latissimus dorsi (the muscles on our back that are directly below and behind our armpits) and those two muscles alone will burn the most calories and build the best lean muscles. We all know how much us dudes like the booty. But hey, bros, girls like booty too! Hit them dead lifts, son! The dead lift is a lift that begins with the weight on the floor with a barbell loaded with weight on each side. The lifter will approach the middle of the bar with feet about shoulder width apart. The lifter will want their hands to grip the bar just slightly away from shoulder width. Once we approach the bar, we want to drop our hips down until our shins touch the bar. This is optimal starting position. Once you mentally fortify yourself for the heavy lift you are about to impose on yourself, pull back your shoulder blades, drop your butt, lift your chest and your head and press your feet into the floor. As you drive your feet through the floor, you want to keep your abdomen tight and hold that bar tight to your body. The

reason we want that bar to remain tight to the body is primarily to keep the bar as stable as possible as we pull upwards. It forces the bar to travel in a straight line allowing you to pull with more force and creates more leverage, but will also lower your risk for lower back injury! The finishing of the dead lift is a total lock out of the arms and complete contraction of the back. Pull your shoulders back drive your hips forward until fully locked. Once locked, lower the bar back down to the floor. We will reset and do it over and over again until our desired repetition range is reached! Then we celebrate with some wild grunts, slams, and screams because that is what dead lifting is all about… kind of… it does feel good though! The rush of endorphins and the feeling of accomplishment after lifting heavy! Taking second only to dead lift, is the barbell squat. The barbell squat is a lower body focused pressing motion that will primarily activate muscles including the quadriceps, the glutes (aka booty), and our abdominal muscle group as a whole! We are also using our shoulders, back, and hamstrings. That is a lot of different muscles. It will really be great for us since the gluteus maximus (which will be referred to as glutes for short) is the largest muscle in our entire muscular system. That, basically, means that it will burn way more calories than other muscles and will build the best lean muscle! So if you are a girl who is trying to get that bodacious bottom, let’s hit some heavy barbell squats! Contrary, if you are a dude who is trying to get legs like a lunatic horse; let’s hit some barbell squats! (I will, in a later section, talk about why “getting too big and bulky” as a man or a woman, as an excuse to not lift weights, is the absolute worst excuse I have heard in my entire life). When we set up for a squat, we want to elevate the bar so that it is in alignment with our sternum (as far as height of the bar). We want to place the bar along our retracted scapulas. In English, we want to puff our chest out and squeeze our shoulders together behind us as we lay the bar across our shoulders behind us. When we descend downward in to our squat, it is imperative that we initiate the movement by pushing our hips

back behind us. This will draw the shoulders and upper body forward, as we now have our butt sticking out. We don’t want to go too far back with our hips because it could result in a lower back injury and we lose all of our leverage throughout our movement! We stick our butt out behind us and we want to drop the hips straight down towards our heels. Once our legs break the plain of being parallel with the floor (simply put, you could rest a glass on your legs and it wouldn’t spill in front of you) we want to stop and press our feet in to the floor allowing our power to be derived from our heels to the balls of our feet. Let your feet press flat in to the floor. Stand all the way up until you are at full extension of your legs, back, and hips. We will repeat that exact motion as many times as required of us. The only exercise we have left to cover as part of our heavy compound lifts is the bench press! I will specify right now, again, and will again later in the book, but I want to stress this. This is as much for my ladies as it is my boys reading this! Our idea of what bench press looks like is skewed by dudes who don’t know how to properly bench press. Therefore, I will stress I want all my ladies reading this to also be doing their repetitions on bench press. It is the heavy compound pressing movement. To everyone who is thinking that shoulder press should also count, I invite you to consider the strength and the stability of your shoulders. First off, shoulder press will be more directly focused on the deltoids, whereas bench press will do that, as well as our pectorals (chest), triceps, and abs. If you want to develop a well balanced and symmetrical physique that will pop peoples’ peepers like popcorn, we must not neglect our bench press. Not to mention is will be one of the greatest exercises to build upper body strength. Bench press is a very easy movement to set up for but VERY easy to do incorrectly. It is a movement that we will want to start at a very light weight and move up incrementally as to not injure our shoulders or elbows in the process. This is called ‘progressive overload.’ We will greet the bar with our hands at a width that is about a thumbs length, each side, outside of

shoulder width. We will want to also make sure our feet are flat on the floor with our shoulder blades squeezed together behind us. We want to make absolutely certain that we do this for the sake of our shoulders. It will allow our body to focus on pressing with the intended muscles. More importantly, it will refrain us from over using the wrong ones (shoulders) and prevent a lot of pain. Like a lot of pain. We want the bar to begin at shoulder height, with our arms fully extended. The bar will be lowered down, slowly and controlled until we make contact with our sternum. Once we hit our chest, we want to press our feet in to the floor, keep our butt glued to the bench, and squeeze the buns and drive the bar upward! One of the more challenging aspects and probably the most important is to keep your elbows tucked inward! It is VERY common for newbies and veterans alike to develop a habit of flaring their elbows outward while pressing on the bench. Therefore, the bar touches the chest, we keep the elbows tight, squeeze the abs and the glutes, and drive the bar towards the heavens as if your life depended on it (in some instances it will… use a spotter to help you when necessary—I’m not responsible for deaths while benching hahah). Anything beyond these three main core lifts will be known, from this point on, as accessory lifts. They will be accessory to our main goal, which is mastery of the three core lifts above. The reasoning for my preference for these main three lifts is because they are entry level lifts that can be done for pretty much, forever. Getting stronger, progressively over time, is our main objective and these three lifts help us achieve that perfectly by compounding pretty much every muscle in the body. The lifting with other equipment other than a bar will provide us much more specific purposes. That could be helping us focus on a weak part of our body to help advance ourselves in a core lift or it could be just to help that muscle grow more rapidly. They will supplement those lifts and make them stronger. Plus they will develop our physique to the dimensions that will please us most as well as

burn additional calories and pack on muscle in a more direct fashion that, if done properly, is called ‘hypertrophy.’ Hypertrophy only means that we are increasing the size of the muscle cells that our muscular tissue is composed of. More directly, we are getting jacked, tan, and juicy as hell! I will only give you a few options per muscle group as to not encourage over training! To provide context to this, when we are lifting weights, we are creating microscopic tears in our muscle fibers. We are breaking those muscles down so that when they recover and heal, the size of the muscle fibers, over time, will continuously become thicker and stronger, creating a stronger and larger muscle. Now that we know that, over training is what happens when we break down the muscle to such a degree that it is unable to properly heal because we have created so much damage to the muscle that it does more damage to the muscle tissue than good. We always want to have a plan for when we go to the gym. With no clear vision of what movements to do, they all seem like they would be a good choice. In reality, a solid plan of movements and repetition ranges and number of total sets, we now know what the “good choice” is. In other words, without a plan, all paths appear right; with a plan, the right path appears. I want to specify, real quick, during this portion of the book that we are not going to be doing all three of our core lifts in the same day. We want to only focus on one of them every session, alternating around the three lifts every 4-5 days (rest days). The accessory lifts that will follow our main lifts, however, will follow a common theme. The structure we will follow will be primarily up to all of you, all as long as you follow the pattern I will give you to ensure that we hit all the functions of our muscular system (nerd stuff= boring). We will want to follow the following workout structure:

Movement

Muscles Targeted

Example

Horizontal Push (upper body)

Pectorals, Deltoids, Triceps

Pectoral Flys/ Bench Press

Vertical Pull (upper body)

Lats, Rhomboids, Traps, Biceps

Wide Grip Lat Pull Downs/ Chin ups

Vertical Push (upper body)

Deltoids, Triceps

Overhead Dumbell Press/ Standing Military Press

Horizontal Pull (upper Lats, Rhomboids, body) Traps, Biceps

Close Grip Cable Rows

Lower Body Push

Glutes, Quadriceps

Leg Press/ Squats

Lower Body Pull

Hamstrings/ Calves

Seated Hamstring Curls/ Deadlifts

Just to make this clear, we do not want any of our accessory lifts to also be a core lift. Our core lifts also do all of these things but are meant to be lifted heavy. These accessory movements should be done much lighter to focus on the muscle development. Let’s establish one thing before we attempt any one of these top tier alpha movements and that is making sure we engage the muscles to the max of our own capabilities. There are a few factors that will go in to affect when taking in to consideration of how well these lifts are executed! There is a purpose to every exercise that you do. Typically speaking, the purpose of a lift and the effectiveness of it depend on two key factors. The ‘primary muscles’ that it is targeting: which ones/how many and how

intensely. The way we measure this is as such; the more acutely that we can utilize the intended muscles, the more effective the movement is and the more impressive the body’s response will be! Primary muscles are only which muscles we are INTENDING to target more than any others! We talk about why hitting more muscle groups is beneficial but not at the expense of the perfection of the movement! We only want to focus on ONE muscular function (Hip Hinge, Upper Body push/ pull, etc.) and the effectiveness becomes reliant on your ability to perform the movement By focusing on using the primary muscle as much as possible and trying to negate any other muscle groups from engaging will increase the efficacy of your movement! Not only will we activate the muscle better, stretching the muscle fascia. This allows more blood and oxygen to enter the muscle and it further stretches the tissue causing it to grow stronger. Because we want to engage as many muscles, per lift, as possible, we can’t only ever focus on our primary muscles; by working on secondary muscles, we can lift heavier weights or increase our progressions! Secondary muscles, logically, are the muscles activated during a lift that is not the targeted muscle. For example, let’s take the bench press! The primary muscle on a bench press is the pectorals. Any other muscles activated during the bench are what we would refer to as the secondary muscle functions; the deltoids, the triceps, and even the abs and parts of the back! I have been told by MANY powerlifters who specialize in bench press (and one even goes to my gym, he bench presses for the National American Powerlifting Team as their designated bench press-er) tell me how critically important it is to have a stable and strong foundation from your back-side to have a strong bench press! But this is all talk for a completely different book altogether! The point is that we want to make sure which muscles perform what roll during our exercises so that we can hit the muscles correctly and not hurt ourselves. The less we get hurt, the less time we spend away from the gym

and the sooner we have our health back. Pro Tip: Your abs should ALWAYS be a secondary muscle… there should never be an exercise you do without keeping your core engaged, tight, or braced. One of the most vitally important concepts in fitness is one that I’ve already hinted at but it is the utilization of various interactive muscle groups! Here are the brass tacks of it, the bigger and/or more numerous muscle groups you hit at one single time, the more calories you will burn and the more muscle you will build and the more fat you will burn! If this book had to be a sentence, it’d be that one. It is that exact reason that I preach full body focus workout days with rest days every week, opposed to doing single function muscle groups daily (bro lifting/body building). It creates a better response from the body! By hitting more muscle groups, you will be causing a reaction from your brain to release more insulin, human growth hormone, testosterone, and other bodily catalysts for fat burning! Let’s identify what good form actually looks like because I don’t want any of you lovely people hurting yourselves. I want to start with a basic overruling concept that will help with pretty much any exercise. Visualize your starting position and your finishing position, exclusively. If you do that, you can draw an imaginary line from beginning to end positions from the perspective of the weight. It really becomes apparent how every joint and muscle in the body has a singular plane it functions best on. This plane that the joints typically like to move in is typically, by no coincidence, the same direction the muscle fibers go that are attached to them. Look at your elbow. Notice how there is a muscle group for both directions it moves. To pull your hand closer to your shoulder, you use your long head and short head biceps! Pushing anything away, however, uses your lateral, medial, and long triceps. Not that there is any sort of quiz at the end here but the point being made here is that the example with the elbow moving forward and back applies to every single muscle and joint in your body. It is a very good idea

to be at least semiconscious of which muscle group you’re targeting and which direction the muscles move. I am by no means saying that there is any correlation between knowing the names of the muscles and having a good physique. There should be, though, a mental aspect to your physical exercise. Meat heads get a bad rap, honestly. They may not be good at anything else, but they ARE very good at focusing mentally on their body. They are, as far as the gym is concerned, the most physically intelligent people. By knowing which muscles to emphasize focus on and when, they’re wisdom reigns supreme. That’s part of the reason why that chest-popping thing that Terry Crews does is so impressive. It really is when you really think about it, quite a mental effort when you are lifting weights or performing cardio. There are many new things you have never known existed that you are now aware of and have to be constantly aware, this brand new thing! That’s not really that fair to expect perfection. There are many healthy people I still see making some minor mistakes but the good news is our bodies are SO RESILIENT! Best advice I can give you for preventing hurting yourself is something I call the KIT idea. KIT is an acronym, very simply standing for KEEP IT TIGHT! If you ever are performing an exercise and you feel tight from head to toe and everything is sturdy, likely, the body is not in any compromising positions. During any performance of any exercise, there is an opportunity to put yourself in a compromising position, where you might feel like you have very little control or leverage over the weight being lifted. The whole purpose behind the KIT idea is that if you keep your body rigid in its relationship with the weight versus being fluid and loose, you will find it much more difficult to hurt yourself than it would be with the latter. The final anti injury method we will talk about is Borg’s Rating of Perceived Exertion or RPE. It is another important meat head skill to be able to listen to your body and know when to work harder and when to

take it easier. According to the CDC, the Borg’s RPE is a scale from 6-20; 6 being no real perceived exertion whatsoever and 20 being maximal perceived effort. BUT LOGAN, why does it start at 6? That’s weird. Nope, it is (loosely) based on your heart rate! It’s a system that is scaled your heart rate as a factor of 10! The CDC defines “moderate intensity” is about 12-14 on the scale and that is decided via heart rate. The scale factors it place on the scale by taking your heart rate and scaling it by a factor of 10! Therefore, moderate exercise is approximately sustained activity that invokes a heart rate of 120 to 140. It is important to get your heart rate up while exercising, regardless the method be weight training or cardiovascular training. It is also important to be aware of it while exercising to ensure you are not UNDER PERFORMING! You don’t want that to be your excuse in 6 months when you haven’t made any progress… have no excuses. Warm ups are important, in order to prevent injuries and should typically invoke an RPE of about 10-12 or bring the heart rate to triple digits, start breathing heavier and maybe start to break a little sweat. I don’t really think any effective workout has any justified reason to ever surpass an 18 so if you ever feel like your exertion is overwhelming, then by all means, take a chill pill. Don’t overexert yourself for the sake of the end goal. This same concept goes for weights and our ability to complete them! An important skill in the gym that allows people to continuously get stronger is simply being aware of their RPE. There is a skill to knowing when a certain weight feels light for a particular repetition range and when you can go heavier. I want to make the RPE system very clear for this one sole purpose. It was the best way I find fit to help illustrate how hard you really must work to be in good shape. I tell new people not to achieve an RPE of over 18

because your body likes time to adapt and overexerting in the beginning can make you nauseas or pass out. Once you establish this routine and feel like you are starting to stick to it, you must kick up the intensity, by a lot. People used to seriously ask me all the time what it was that I was keeping secret and how I ate the way I did and still stayed in crazy shape, it’s literally and only that I work REALLY stupid hard in the gym. I reach a 18-19 nearly every workout. If you go in to the gym and try and perform five lifts as HEAVY as you can POSSIBLY go, then you are going to see what I mean. That is, honest to god, where the secret lies. If you are someone who can will your way into sustaining life in that fashion, you win the game and will receive the prize! We will want to start with a horizontal pushing motion, and I will explain why here in just a moment why it is my favorite to begin with. A horizontal push will be in relation to our standing normal position. All that means, is a the push will obviously be pressing away from us and the horizontal means it will be pressed out in front of us as opposed to over head of down (both working very different muscle groups. My favorite upper body horizontal push is the Pectoral Flys! I prefer using the cable towers to do these because the cables allow you to keep constant tension on the muscles we are training! Essentially, we want to get those pectoral muscles screamin’ like crazy and we do that by starting with our cables adjusted to about shoulder height. We will begin with cables in each hand and a split stance, where one foot will be out in front of us and the other back behind us (stand however is comfortable for you, I like this stance better because I feel more stable and I feel more confident with pressing the weight). Remember, for those are guilty of swinging their weights and executing improper repetitions, the longer our muscles remain under uninterrupted tension, the more the muscle will forced to work. I will go much more in depth on muscle building concepts later in the book but we want to remain in constant interaction with the weight.

Following our theme will dictate for us to do our lat pull down next with will primarily work our latissimus dorsi which is the largest muscle on our back and the second largest on the body. It will help us build a solid physique and provide us a strong back. This movement is probably one that I see done wrong most frequently. So, first and foremost, if you are someone who does lat pull downs back behind your head, stop doing that. Stop doing that right now. It is horrible for your shoulders and can not only cause ligament and tissue scarring in the shoulders but can also give us a shoulder impingement (an injury involving limiting the range of motion in your scapula/shoulder blade). We want to first make sure we are using the proper equipment. We will approach the overhead cable tower and we want to attach a handle that is long and narrow with down turning ends. That is the specific handle that is best for this movement because we want to try and target the muscles in the direction that they go. Just like our hair grows in a certain direction, so do our muscles! Our lats connect just under our armpit and connect to our back in a diagonal direction. We are also working muscles like the traps, rhomboids, and biceps. That handle is what allows us to fully stretch and contract the muscle and get a full range of motion. We will sit down with our feet flat on the floor in front of us with our hands on the handle and our hands should be pretty clearly outside shoulder width (technically speaking, ideal hand width is 1.5x shoulder width). We will start by retracting our shoulder blades and squeezing our back together behind us. I want to exaggerate the important of this aspect. We want to drop our shoulders towards the floor in order to fully activate our lats. If we don’t, our shoulders will roll forward once we get tired and leave an open opportunity to get hurt. Once we squeeze our shoulders together, we want to pull our elbows back and pull the bar handle to our chest. Slowly allow the bar to rise back up to full arm extension and repeat the necessary number of times. Once completed, for my guys reading this, after the movement is completed, you my leave your arms down at your

sides. Puffing your chest out and holding your arms out at your side like a body builder does not actually make you one. ;) Drill instructor Logan says our next movement is Military Press! Also known as over head press, we are going to focusing on our core stability and vertical pressing strength via deltoids and triceps. We will set up for this movement the exact same way as we do a squat, with the bar about just about chest height in the power rack we are lifting in. Optimal overhead pressing grip width is about one thumb, maybe a thumb and a half away from shoulder width (I am aware thumbs are not in our metrics but it is the easiest way for me to give all of my lovely readers a good point of reference since all of us are different). Be careful removing the bar from the rack as it will be resting about where our collar bones are, directly below our chin. It is important to have an engaged core (flexed abs) while we press so that we can be stable and safe while pressing and will keep injuries to a minimum. We will approach lock out as our arms fully extend and we want to push the head forward as we lock out to reach our final position, careful as to not strain the neck! We will continue this repetition one time, then call it a day… just kidding! We will keep executing in this manner as many times as our program requires. Finally, we have our last upper body movement, the horizontal pull. We are going to be focusing, again, on the lats (big calorie-burning machines) as well as rhomboids, traps, and biceps. Find the cable row machine, which will have a long bench to sit and a platform in order to put your feet up for leverage and power in our rowing. The grip we will want attached will be a small handle looking a little bit like a capital “V” with handles. We want to maintain only a slight bend in our legs so that we are not locking our knees but straight enough to allow us to be more powerful in our movement! This movement is very similar to our vertical pull—we want to start with squeezing our shoulder blades back behind us. This will allow the weight we are pulling to target the muscles on our back. The elbows will be drawn back behind us as we keep our arms tight to our body and drive

the chest forward out in front of you. Squeeze the muscles the shoulder blades as tight as possible before releasing the muscle slowly back to our starting position with our arms fully extended out in front of us. General consensus of most people in the gym is leg day is not very much fun. I understand that, and it is one reason why we don’t do a leg day. We have full body day because, well, it sucks a little less. I will cover the real reason later on in the principles part of the book. Nonetheless, it is time for us to leg press! Leg Press is a great plate-loaded or stack-loaded lift for the gluteus maximus and the quadriceps. Our objective with leg press is to be able to load these muscle groups up with heavy weights as to break the muscle down further without putting more strain on the lower back. In this seated position, we can press more weight and make stupendous leg gains but without the continuous lower back issues. Leg presses are one of my favorite lower body lifts because it is such a simple movement that can be executed very intensely! We want to load those muscles up with weight in order to increase the amount of tension acting on the muscle! Leg presses are a seated lift done with plates added either to the sides or top of the leg sled (machines with weight stacks or cable and pulley systems will work in the same fashion). Attached to the leg sled is our platform unto which we press. We will sit down directly in front of said platform, with our feet slightly outside shoulder width apart and our toes pointing just slightly away from each other. We don’t want to position our feet too high on the platform, but we also don’t want to place them too low. The prior will cause us to over use our hamstrings, and that, my friend, is simply NOT what we are doing! The latter will put way too much stress on the knees and likely cause sharp pain in the joints. So we are shoulder width, toes are just ever so slightly pointing outwards, and our feet are in the middle of the platform. We may now, lift the weights and remove any safety restraints and lower the weight, knee over toe, until our knees make a 90º angle and we press our feet firmly in to the platform until our legs are fully extended! Remember, we don’t want to lock out!

Locking out will put an incredible amount of stress on the ligaments in your knees and can cause long term damage and pain! We will repeat that movement over and over again until our legs look like they belong to a race horse! The last muscle function we haven’t done yet and will not forget about is our lower body vertical pull! Our Hamstrings, for cryin’ out loud! It will not be a heavy movement, at all; it is going to be a very muscularly specific. We are wrapping up with a seated leg curl, with the intention to isolate and target our hamstrings only! Most of the time, this machine will be labeled as such and we will begin in a seated upright position with one of the machine’s arms under your ankles and one arm adjusted to be just over the top your leg above your knees! This machine is very simple; pull your legs downward and backward, pivoting at the knee. Everything else can remain still, as your heels are pulled back towards your butt; you want to squeeze the hamstrings as tight as you can! Slowly, release your hammy’s until your legs are nearly straight. Remember, we want to keep tension in the muscle for as long as we can without interruption. We will repeat that for the necessary number of times our program dictates. How do you feel now?! That will completely cover every muscle function that we have to cover! That wraps up our workout! Of course, I’m not assuming your reading this and exercising in real time, but if you are, that’s hella impressive and I want to meet you so I can also learn to read like a super hero! On the contrary, if we do this routine on a consistent basis, while also allowing enough time for our body to recover, you will feel like a super hero (minus the muscle soreness). I have ran programs similar to these with so many of my clients throughout my training career and the only ones who were unable to see success in using it were the ones who grossly underused their programs I provided. In which case, they would be grossly wasting their money on the gym membership as a whole. I much prefer to put the clients in the spotlight who are total work horses and love the process of working out

and are able to see themselves in the gym multiple times a week! My favorite success story isn’t necessarily qualified to be one. Let me explain, the most impactful person that I was fortunate enough to work with wasn’t even one of my clients. Again, I will be keeping all names to myself (because duh), but this specific person was unable to afford training… like at all. I knew this person needed help though; this person was told by a doctor that they were type II diabetic and that many health problems were sure to follow if no action was taken. This person came to me not looking to get shredded or sexy. This person wanted a better life. They desired not a six pack or a juicy booty or big muscles, but just to change. I told this person I would not be charging them for the information I gave them (technically I was supposed to) but I had told them that if they followed this one simple program I had given them, and made sure they were able to stick to it, there would be incredible results and her health would improve incredibly. I saw this person a few months later, without knowing that they had had a check-up earlier in the day with her doctor. I forgot that the time of our original meeting was a few months prior. I could feel the weight of the emotion they were carrying. I thought I had screwed up and that I was about to get by butt chewed. Quite to the contrary, actually she wanted to talk about the progress she had made. You see, I was keeping up with her fairly frequently and knew that she was putting in the work and I knew she was really trying which made me incredibly happy but it was nothing compared to what I heard next. Tears began to well up in her eyes and her voice began to shiver and splinter in and out of gasps of emotion that had balled up in her throat. This person had told me that the doctor that they had seen earlier in the day had noticed her progress. I don’t mean physically. I mean this person’s doctor had lowered the prescribed insulin levels that they were to be taking. The doctor had told this person that their type II diabetes was

beginning to remiss. He lowered her insulin levels! It is that story that I will share for the rest of my time left alive because it demonstrates the true potential of discipline and motivation. Someone found me who was desperately looking for help in a situation that forced them to feel helpless. Many times in life, we know what is good for us and we know what we expect of ourselves, yet we voluntarily choose to think, talk, and act according to the exact opposite of what we should be doing. Why?! Because we know what is expected of us but not the how! It is the curse of construction of our goals. We know our “why”—we want to feel better, whether it is about what we see in the mirror every morning, how we look for our significant other, or just want to have more confidence, our “why” is very easily defined within ourselves. Why do we want to do this? Why did you buy this book? That is where we will derive our motivation from? Remember the feeling of how much you hate where you started and why you started in the first place? The “what” is very easily defined as well! What are we doing? What is your objective? This is what you must have in the back of your mind, every single time you even take a step in to the gym and every breath of gym air you breathe must fill your lungs with purpose. Constantly have your goal in mind so that you are always avoiding behaviors that pull you farther away from your end results and attract behaviors that promote it! The “how” is where I provide myself as a tool that you all are to use on this new journey! The “how” is the hardest damn part about this whole thing. The “how” is everything from the correct exercises to do, and also, the way we do them must also be correct. It begins to be a burdensome compound when we consider that the discipline of carrying out the actions (food and exercise) is a heavy and awkward transition. The discipline is what breaks people. The discipline is what fails people. The discipline is also what creates the success and creates a personality so strong that it will be what trains us to keep the weight off and will keep us healthy. The

discipline will allow us to be so strong, mentally, that, the allowance you have for yourself and the poor behaviors we used to carry with us every day will dwindle away to nothing. Once you stop taking your own bull shit excuses for why you behave a certain way, you become more confident in yourself than you ever have before. All this changes your life for the better in more ways than I had ever fathomed possible. As promised, cardiovascular training is not something that is a necessity to lose weight and I say that because of how much of distaste I have for it; however, having a strong and healthy heart is probably a good thing and superior lung capacity can’t be too bad either. I make jokes about cardio but it is a powerful tool to stay healthy and keeping in great shape. If you are a person who gets easily winded walking up and down stairs or during mild exertion, no amount of weight training is going to be able to fix it! Cardio, on the other hand, will be able to not only accelerate fat loss, but also increase endurance and increase blood flow. This is not only important in helping your stair climbing fatigue, but will also promote healthy hormone levels that promote fat loss and happier and healthier living. When we discuss cardiovascular training, we essentially have to main options for how we can do our cardiovascular training; we can either be a sprinter or a jogger (not referring to the super cool sweatpants). The first kind of cardiovascular training is what is known as LISS training, or Low Intensity Sustained State. This is the most commonly done form of cardio and is the main reason many people become so bored doing so! Now, I want to also mention that I understand that many people love doing this kind of training. It is a long distance or time endured variation of cardio that will be performed at a continuously and constant pace. This kind of cardio (LISS) trains your heart just like any other sort of weight training focuses on any other muscle. This is because it is important to remember that your heart behaves less like most other organs, and more accurately performs like a muscle. It expands and contracts just like

your biceps doing curls but it pushes blood through the veins and arteries throughout your entire body. The way we enhance and strengthen this muscle is to expand the amount of volume that the heart is pushing. By biking, running, stair mastering, or ellipticalling, by working our body this way, we are depriving our muscles the amount of oxygen they need to maintain their function. This is why we begin to breathe so heavily. The muscles utilize oxygen to perform and the more vivaciously we perform our cardio, the more cardio our muscles will require. We begin taking in oxygen at a ferocious rate. Once our lungs suck up all the oxygen, our blood becomes rich and must be transported to the muscles that so desperately need it (in quite a larger quantity than normal). It is this function that forces the chambers of our heart to pump more excessively than normal. With a reason of necessity to be forced to pump with more volume, the capacity of our heart must be increased to support the higher demand for oxygen to the muscles. It is with this constant stimulus of higher oxygen transport that expands the volume that our heart is able to pump. I am not saying that our heart physically gets bigger, like a bicep, but the strength at which our heart can pump will increase over time making our heart a little iron fist of life. There exists only one other form of cardio and is debatably the more effective form of cardio training and we call it HIIT training, or in long, High Intensity Interval Training. It is a kind of training that usually comes in the form of circuit training (not always). It is achieved by performing one or several movements with extreme tenacity and short intervals of break periods separating one another. Cardiovascular training, in its purest form, whether it HIIT or LISS, works the same way… so how can one be more effective than the other? This is a valid question that many as themselves because LISS is much simpler to do and much more enjoyable for some, so it is something that important to understand in order to achieve our dream body. The way I usually like to answer this question is with a comparison between elite athletes. Those

who master certain athletic practices go to extremes to do so, which is why they make great subjects to compare each other for learning purposes. Let’s examine two of the greatest athletes of all time—Usain Bolt and Eliud Kipchoge. If you need a second to identify them via your internet browser, go ahead; Uncle Logan will give you a moment to do so. We want to exclusively examine their physiques. They both are top tier athletes that perform better than their competitors. Usain Bolt holds several records for his sprinting ability and his sheer speed on his own two feet. No man on earth has feet faster than his. Eliud Kipchoge holds a record for the fastest marathon ever ran and did so in less than two hours (seriously, it’s one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen). What separates these two men on a physical stand point is their cardiovascular capacity. Both of these men, clearly extremely talented and incredibly hard workers but we can see a clear distinction. Bolt’s physique is strong, powerful, and explosive. He isn’t what some people would picture as a “runner.” We picture most runners as being small and thin, so what makes Bolt and other sprinters different. They treat their cardio as if it were a weight training routine. They do a predetermined number of exercises as explosively and as intensely as they can which is followed by rest periods and more ferocious workouts. The reason why this is such an effective way to workout is because of the amount of metabolic stress that is applied to the muscles. Basically, on a cellular level, we are utilizing the full potential of the mitochondria of our muscle cells (we all know what the mitochondria is; it’s like the one main thing we all remember from biology). The mitochondria are the powerhouse of the cell and are responsible for generating energy for the cell. What we are doing is exhausting the muscle of oxygen and requiring the muscles to use more energy to sustain muscular function. This forces the body to produce hormones like Human Growth Hormone in response to our cellular break down. This is a primary effect of HIIT that isn’t invoked by LISS training. This is why many sprinters appear more muscular and

runners like Kipchoge still remain relatively small and thin. LISS primarily affect our heart and lung capacity as well as calorie expenditure. HIIT will provide us with the same effects; however will be able to provide us with an additional boost in attaining a muscular and athletic physique. The way we go about incorporating these in to our routines will solely depend on how much time we are willing/ able to spend in the gym. If we have plenty of time and motivation that we can spend a few more days in the gym, incorporating a little long distance low intensity training will leave us feeling accomplished and healthy and will keep our heart and lungs healthy as well as provide a steeper calorie deficit that will make losing weight and toning become a reality much quicker than without it. On the contrary, like most of us, are not able to expend a whole lot of time in the gym. This is why HIIT will provide us an advantage over time spent in the gym. Let’s not forget, though, what makes cardio training of any sort so effective? The key lies in your heart rate. That might not have really surprised anyone but how high and for how long is optimal? Fat burning, generally, will reach a peak at a heart rate about 70% of your maximum heart rate, according to Daniel and Ashley of Healthline (Marcin). They also say that your maximum heart rate is calculated by subtracting your age from the constant variable, 220. A women aged 35, they say, have a maximum heart rate of 185 which if sustained for too long can be hazardous. Therefore, we see that an effective pace would be 130 and above for 15 minutes or longer! Being aware of how much you are pushing your body is important! The way I prefer to incorporate LISS in to my weight lifting routines is in a fashion where I can cool down from my weight lifting at the end of my workouts. My clients, as well as I, will finish our strength training routines and will do about 15-20 minutes of moderately paced cardio before leaving the gym. Whether it is fast walking on a treadmill, mildly paced pedaling on a bike, or rowing on rowing machine, I always prefer my

clients doing this before leaving the gym to cool down the body and maximize calorie burn of every session. HIIT cardio can be very easily incorporated in the same way with some minor adjustments to our execution. It can sound more complicated than it actually is when first starting out but it is really much simpler than most would think. The way I teach HIIT and the way I incorporate it in my own personal routines is similar to LISS. It requires the same machines we would normally be using. We will use a treadmill in the example because it is one of the most commonly used machines but the principle is the same across all machines. We want to find a pace that is difficult to sustain for anything more than 30 seconds. We want to exert as much of our effort as we can in a small 30 second window. It will be immediately followed by a much slower pace that is slow enough for us to continue to move but be able to catch our breath for between 60-90 seconds. We will want to follow this 30 second and 90 second interval for the same 15 minute time period. If we execute this properly, we will surely feel the difference in these two vastly different styles of training. If we are also able to stay consistent and follow this regimen for several weeks, will SURELY see some impressive results!

CHAPTER III Muscle Building Principles and Myths Stop doing cardio for fat loss. Seriously; if there is anyone reading this right now and you currently are doing hours upon hours of cardio to lose weight, stop that shit right now. Obviously, if you are doing cardio training for a sport or if you enjoy doing it, then by all means, keep that ticker healthy! On the flip side, however, if you are doing cardio every day and spending hours a week on a treadmill and hating every step of it because of the belief that doing that will provide us the weight loss answer we have been searching for, that is simply not the case. Myth #1 “Cardio burns more calories than weight training does and his how we will burn more body fat.” Y’all, this could not be further from the truth. For me to demonstrate that, we will have to go in-depth on how your body burns calories and body fat. First, let’s understand what body fat actually is from the body’s perspective. Body fat is literally energy that is stored below the skin, just like a car stores gas in the tank! What we must make as our primary objective is to slowly burn more fuel than we are taking in. The way we do that is to make sure we are doing certain actions to ensure that we are making the most of our days and the most of our workouts and burn the

most calories which will, over a period of time, burn the most body fat and make us the most sexy. How does that work, though; like cardio feels like it so much harder! Naivety with pride will kill you slowly and foster the embodiment of self destruction. In English, don’t be so proud of your current basis of knowledge that you don’t let new knowledge be absorbed. I have witness this happening thousands and thousands of times and as a personal trainer, and it could not be more infuriating. There are so many people, men and women (both of y’all are equally stubborn), that I try to help and think I am full of hot air and go back to destroying themselves. All because the feeling of admitting what they were doing is wrong is too much of a kick in the pride to fix. Most people will not listen because it makes them uncomfortable and feel bad to admit they were doing it wrong and are probably embarrassed and it makes people feel less wrong when they refuse to admit they were wrong in the first place. Let go off all your preconceived notions of fitness and understand that people in this world will know more than you about certain things. It’s time to get out of your own way, and let those that want to help and you will be amazed at what you end up accomplishing! The whole idea of why weight training is a more efficient method of health and lookin’ cute lies within the recovery process. You see a lot of what I have been talking about so much this entire book about what our objective to lose weight is all about calories. The ratio of calories in versus calories out; we must make sure that we are in a caloric deficit every single day. All that means is that on a daily basis, we must make sure that we are burning more calories than we are eating. This does not require as much math as you would probably think (thank god). I covered in a previous chapter how to find the amount of calories you burn in a day at rest using the internet. But, again, just look up BMR on your search engine because it bases the calculation off of your muscle mass, therefore, you will have a good point of reference of how much we should be eating.

As to why cardio is less effective for fat loss than weight lifting. Like I had mentioned earlier, when we are weight training, we are breaking down the muscles. Imagine your muscles act kind of like a microscopic rubber band ball with millions of rubber bands. Whenever you train a certain muscle, it is the equivalent to pulling all the rubber bands at once. Some of them will be stretched beyond their limit and will break. Those will then heal with proteins and become bigger and stronger. The more frequently we do this, the more rubber bands we will break. What happens is when we eat; the food we eat will provide our rubber band balls (our muscles, lol) with proteins that will be able to repair our rubber bands and over time will become more and more resilient. When we are eating in a caloric deficit, our body will be in a negative energy balance, which means we are forcing our body to function without sufficient energy from food! Our body is truly amazing; it uses the stored fat cells and is able to convert and use them to assist in the recovery process. Read that sentence over and over again. Then do the same with this one too: that literally means our muscles are able to burn the fat like it’s a big ass furnace. It is that reason and that reason only that I believe full body work out programs are the best for health in longevity! Full body work outs force our body to be highly reactive to our training. Imagine the rubber band ball analogy but all over your entire body. Yes, I know, I can feel the soreness from that sentence but that is a good sign. We will have a lot of muscle that need healing and will force the body to utilize the fat storage to assist! This is the reason why it is such an effective method for weight loss and keeping weight lost.

Myth #2 “Lifting as heavy as possible is the only way to get your muscles to fully engage and grow” This is the stigma that causes “gym bro’s” to never increase muscle mass and also the stigma that keeps a lot of women away from weight training, from my own observations. The sad part is that it isn’t even remotely true. So let’s talk about bro’s swinging weights! I do have to admit, as a long time lifter, I thoroughly enjoy lifting heavy. It is one of the most fun parts of weight training for me. The pains of lactic acid build up in the muscle and the satisfaction of completing a lift or a weight that others cannot is a satisfying feeling, for sure. Where I personally will draw the line is where you begin to use momentum and swinging of weights. More often than not, it is because our homie who’s swinging his bicep curls like a schoolyard playground chose dumbbells that he clearly is not able to control through the entirety of the movement. I CAN’T STRESS HOW IMPORTANT IT IS THAT IF YOU DO THIS, TO STOP RIGHT NOW! I’ll say this because no one else will. Everyone knows you can’t curl that weight properly. Everyone is also aware of how dumb it looks swinging 45 and 50 lbs dumbbells on your curls because it’s showing everyone in the gym, “Hey, I don’t actually know what I’m doing… but if I do it confidently enough it might seem like it.” Which is perfect; now you never have to actually accept the fact that you’re wrong, and never feel stupid! Your brain and biceps will stay the same size, resting atop that enormous ego that convinced you to curls those in the first place! I learned very early on about a principle of muscle building that is commonly referred to as “King TUT.” Yes, famously, King Tut is the short name for the youngest king to have ruled Egypt… but this is MORE IMPORTANT than him! TUT is an acronym for Time Under Tension. It is called king because it’s, like, the number one rule. The longer duration of time that the muscle endures being engaged by the weight and movement, the more the muscle will have to work. Your muscles have a certain gas take that allows them to use glycogen

as a fuel source (glycogen is the term for carbohydrates once they’ve been digested and used for muscle function). Your muscles have a finite amount of carbohydrates that it is able to use. The longer you can train your muscle under tension of the weight WITHOUT INTERRUPTION, meaning CONTINUOUSLY, the more distress you deliver to the muscle. The more distress that is applied to the muscle, the more it will break down the muscle tissue, which means the body will need to recover and the muscle is rebuilt, bigger and stronger. By swinging the weights, you are doing much more than you think. Not in a good way. All it is doing, when a lifter swings his or her weights, is taking tension that SHOULD be breaking down a specific muscle or muscle group. By Swinging, we are using many different muscle groups in order to execute the movement. Because of the weight is so heavy for us and unable to be controlled, we are using muscles we aren’t supposed to be, but also, we are using LESS of the muscles we actually are trying to train. The swing steals tension away from the muscle, allowing it to disengage, and thus, rendering the entire exercise completely and utterly useless to you as a lifter. I hope I’ve established this is a pet peeve of mine. If you do it, stop it. If you don’t do it, you’re my friend. If you start doing it, you’re no longer my friend. Moving on! Myth #3-4 “I don’t want to get too big. I don’t want to accidentally get too much muscle. I, as a female, don’t want to lift weights because I will get too bulky and I don’t want to be a bulky chick.” ! I promise to keep my cool during this section. This is a phrase that can be so easily debunked with Common Sense. Honestly, some people will spend their entire lives trying to reach a certain weight or a certain physique. Some people will spend hours and hours and lots of money just to attain a certain, muscular physique. All I hear when someone says, “I don’t want to get too bulky,” or “I still want to be able to wipe my own

ass;” I understand a lot of times it’s a joke (rightfully so). When I hear someone say it with ice in their veins and 100% seriousness, all I hear is the pretentiousness of someone who is unwilling to try and escape what they are comfortable with and refuses to try. For anyone to think that they are going to get to big, BY ACCIDENT?! That doesn’t even scientifically stand up to any sort of logic. How would someone who is just beginning to lift weights going to ACCIDENTALLY get bigger than everyone? They just aren’t. It’s still cute whenever I hear it as an excuse. Same for my ladies; I want all my ladies who are hesitant about weight lifting to look at any girls lifting in any gym. Yeah, I’ll grant you the fact that there are probably a few chicks with wide backs, huge quads, and bicep veins. They, most likely, are taking some sort of “extra-curricular” supplements to allow them to grow to that size. By the way, don’t ever ask a girl if she’s on steroids or running test. It’s like asking if she’s pregnant… on steroids! I feel like I might have just saved a few lives hahaha. But in all seriousness, how do I know if I never have asked. Because science; no other girls that lift heavy look that way. But why is that the case; what science backs this up? Testosterone; ladies and gentlemen, the leading hormone responsible for muscular growth and development is testosterone. I’ll let you all know, right now, that women will not naturally produce enough testosterone to become even remotely close to the size of these “too bulky” people. Not Even Close. Now one of my favorite people to talk to about weight lifting is my ladies! I say that for two main reasons! I love to be able to debunk the myth that women seem to commonly believe when they are new to the gym that if they lift weights, they will end up looking like a dude with a bulky body and guy-arms. It is actually quite the contrary; most women I know that partake in weight training routines have a physique that most define as being quite desirable. Don’t get me twisted, everyone’s body is beautiful but healthy ones are beautiful-er. If I am to speak entirely

objectively, the people that I typically encounter feel better about their self-image and body confidence while on a weight training regimen and many others agree. Bodies that train with weights in addition to cardio are what people seem to find more attractive. If this upsets you, don’t get defensive, get busy! :) One of the first main reasons I love to encourage my ladies to start weight lifting is because of the physique that is produced as a result. So many of the ladies nowadays are starting to realize the most confidence comes from having a body you can be proud of, regardless of anyone else’s opinion! That being said, I am VERY body positive… as in I’m Positive you need to exercise for a healthy Body! I tell every single one of my clients that we will NEVER EVER measure our success by the number on the scale! Success, to me, comes from when you feel happy when you look in the mirror. Being confident and happy with yourself is what I am all about, y’all! Building muscle is something that, I think, is a huge confidence booster for men and women! For men, testosterone is the NUMBER ONE catalyst within the body of muscular development! For all you ladies out there, here is what I want you to keep in mind! Ladies, you will not get too bulky! That excuse for women to not lift, being because they do not want to get too muscular, I think, is absolutely laughable and, as a trainer, nothing in the world is more frustrating than having an argument with someone about this when they are already convinced they are right and you are wrong. So here’s the facts; the top 10 percentile of female bodies has *literally* 4 TIMES LESS testosterone than the bottom 10 percentile of men! On average, a healthy female body will have anywhere from 40 to 70 nanograms of testosterone per deciliter of blood! Men, on the other hand, will have anywhere from 300 to 1,200 ng/dL (Weatherspoon, Ph.D., R.N., CRNA). So for the sake of keeping peace of mind using SCIENCE, you ladies have nothing to worry about when weight lifting as far as getting too bulky or looking too masculine, I give you my word. You will, however,

gain the physique that you’ve always wanted. Many women love to ask me what the secret is to getting the body they want or a plump rear end or a flat tummy and toned arms and, well, this is it! In summation, this is a very easy myth to be able to debunk. I don’t want any of you to be worried about getting too big or growing too fast. That is a far-fetched ideology anyway; this is a discipline that people will follow for a lifetime and will learn infinitely but never master. It is a goal that is constantly pursued but never caught. It is a master craft in perfect balance. Myth #5 “I can train 7 days a week, NO PROBLEM! I will lift weights every day because I’m dedicated and want to see the best results as fast as possible.” In all reality, I understand that kind of dedication to the gym. It makes sense that people can become addicted to going to the gym—it causes a rush of dopamine in the brain that gives you the sense of accomplishment and pride. It scientifically makes you happy! But what about biologically and anatomically; what is weight training every day doing to your body? Remember earlier, when I was covering how muscles grow, I mentioned that the muscle must be broken down before it can heal and recover and will grow over time. The same goes for cardio too—what exercising is basically is tearing down your body for it to heal and be better than it was. The recovery process is much more important than a lot of people think. It is important to let our body heal properly before we begin to break it down again. If we don’t, we are guilty of this principle called “Over Training.” Most people will tell you that over training is a myth and when asked, a lot of gym goers will say “well, I’d rather over train than under gain,” which I used to think was hilarious. However, the more mature I became in my lifting expertise (not to be confused with actual maturity—I have none of that), the more I learned that that phrase was coined out of ignorance. Not only is it ignorant, but it is also coined out of hubris. People who claim

that to be their motto are too proud of themselves to admit that what they are doing is wrong. So what happens when we over train? I’ve gotten all of the bagging on the meat heads out of my system, now we can talk science. The effects of over training are easy to spot and must be heeded in order to protect you! The short term effects are not directly what we must worry about… but it is these short term effects that will, over time, cause serious damage to our bodies. In the short term, we will know that we are over training once we are getting nauseas and drowsy. These will be effects that we will notice during our actual workout sessions and are the signs that, even if you feel like you want to keep going and that you still have gas in the tank, that you need to stop, go home, and eat and rest. This is happening because, even though our muscles can handle the work load, our brain and our nervous system can’t. The nausea and the tiredness are signs that our Central Nervous System is being strained and it is telling you that whatever you are doing is not good for the body and is telling you to stop. So many people want to tough it out and this will force your body to start breaking down muscle in order to prevent any further over working. We don’t want that. Long term effects can cause more detriment than most people are even remotely aware of. That is a scary sentence. It should be, chronic over training can cause a multitude of insane effects that will take weeks and likely months to recover. If it sounds like I’m being dramatic, good; I am dramatic. The point to be made here is that severe exhaustion is not a joke. Long term over training will rail your nervous system like a crack head with a pension. Putting that much stress on your CNS over a long period of time can cause severe hormone imbalances since your body has absolutely no idea how to react to that much work. Everyone knows how dangerous it is for models when they are bulimic or anorexic. I want you to imagine what it looks like when a model literally

starves herself (or himself—it’s 2020 I won’t discriminate) and I want you to visualize the kind of damage that is taking place within their bodies. Now, with over training, it may not be as obvious because it may not be as easily visible as a the poor girls rib cage, but let me make this very clear to my readers; the damage you are doing to your body by working out as hard as you can, every single day, and not eating enough to properly allow the body to heal will screw with your body and your hormones just like a staving model. Hormones that regulate the body will have no idea what “regular” is anymore and will begin to shut down. That’s only the CNS; we still haven’t even touched on the physiological effects. Injuries will become your new normal if over training is your thing. Without a proper healing time, your muscles will become literally exhausted. The cool thing about your muscles is that, unlike your brain, you cannot tough it out. Once your body’s glycogen is depleted, your muscles just stop. Just like your car, once you’re out of gas, no more. Some of you might be wondering though, there have been times during workouts that you’ve probably felt tired and pushed beyond your normal threshold. That’s fine, which is actually how you should workout; however, once you begin to feel the fatigue of your muscles beginning to give out, you are done, my friend. If you are a lifter than can’t manage to stop when it is time to stop, that is up to you. The only person who knows when you have reached your limit is YOU! If you do decide to continue to train, you better get real comfortable with ligament tears and joint injuries. Once your muscles are done, like I said, they will simply no longer engage. Like trying to wake up a drunken person, your muscles will lie there; limp, in a pool of their own vomit and a ruined Jimmy Buffet t-shirt. Continuing to lift in this state will cause more ligament and joint damage than I had ever imagined until I developed lateral epicondylitis, or more commonly, tennis elbow, which is inflammation of the Extensor Carpi Radialis Brevis (ECRB). I loved training my back muscles; it was (still is) my favorite muscle group to train! I did it so much that the ligaments in my

elbow (ECRB) almost completely tore which would have required surgery. Understand that this was probably 4-5 years ago and have since recovered (I appreciate all of your concern for my elbow). I now know my limits and can confidently say that it will never have to worry about injuries again due to the fact that I know my own limitations and when to stop. Myth #6 “Logan, honestly dude, I don’t really care about how to train the rest of my body. I just want to grow/tone my abs/arms/chest/chin/neck/love handles etc.” Another illustrious distortion we have come to accept as being truth due to the convenience it brings us. The idea that we can spend a little less time in the gym and only work our abs to get our abs or to tone our bellies is one of the most famous lies I’ve ever heard. And believe me, I’ve heard it over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over...I’ve made my point pretty clear. I’ve heard it thousands of times. People telling me, as their certified and professional trainer, that they want to pass on the squats and dead lifts and would rather just tone their mid sections. They then will continue to argue with me over the fact that that is scientifically not how it works. When we are talking about the percentage of your body weight that is specifically body fat, it is only a segment of our body composition. Just like your body has more muscle in some areas and the amount that muscle grows is purely genetic. If you are like me and have a tiny little pre teen girl chest, and all the dudes with big barrel chests piss you off, you (just like I have done) get to thank your genetics. Your genetics will dictate what muscles grow more and what muscles will be harder to get to grow and which ones will be bigger and stronger with much less effort. And, like muscle, our genetics will also dictate where on our bodies the fat will deposit. I, for example, will not collect much fat on my extremities and can very easily maintain very lean and vascular (veiny). On the contrary, any fat that

does collect on my body will be on my mid section. More specifically, on my butt and on my chest; and I am aware that it sounds like a white girls wet dream but from the perspective of a bro, not the greatest. That being said, all we can do in order to rectify our either good or bad genetics is something we have been told since we were five years old. We must make the best of our situation. On this same note, I would like to go over the three different body types: Ectomorph, Mesomorph, and Endomorph. The three different body types largely dictate our proportions (our muscular build and distribution) and our metabolism (how fast or slow our body utilizes energy). The first body type we will want to cover is the ectomorph; which is the smallest of the body types. You can typically identify an ectomorph by their narrow shoulders, tiny waist line, and very lean body composition. They will have the fastest metabolism of the three, therefore, they will lose weight the easiest, but will find it near impossible to gain any sort of muscle mass. They are the person in your friend group that can eats whatever they want and will never gain a pound. In order for these people to gain muscle, they must eat very significantly past their caloric maintenance in any way they can. Many that have this body type will want to eat a considerable amount of carbohydrates and will finally see muscle growth and will likely not have to worry about any sort of substantial fat deposits. These people will, as a matter of fact, will want to avoid doing any extensive cardiovascular training. This is because these people, should they want to build muscle, will need to be in as much of a caloric surplus as possible and will want to use every calorie they can get. I will be covering caloric surplus and deficits in the dietary section of the book. The point being made here is that minimal cardio for an ectomorphic body builder is opportune for muscle building. On the contrary, for ectomorphs to lose weight… okay, let’s be honest. If you are an ectomorph body type, losing weight is probably not even remotely on your radar. Of all the people I’ve met with this body type in

my years in the fitness industry, only one has ever told me he wanted to lose weight and get “super shredded.” To which I then convinced him that he only weighs 140 lbs and losing more weight would put his health at risk. Not only that, but what 19 year old dudes want to weigh less than their girlfriends. No adult male should desire to weigh sub 135 lbs. Not because of any sort of macho-man pride thing (but still yes that too), but it is incredibly unhealthy to be any lighter than that as an adult. Your body uses body fat to fuel bodily functions. Being that small, as an adult dude, would begin to fail bodily functions. The main concerns come with exhaustion, fatigue, slowed immune system, and erectile processes. Don’t get too skinny, my brothers, too skinny equals less boners (just delivering the facts). The middle body type is the happy medium of the three categories. It is a moderate build with broad shoulders and a rather narrow waist line, creating sort of a Dorito Chip shape torso. Everything about his body time is the in between of the two extremes (ectomorph and endomorph). Their metabolisms are mildly active but have no issues at all packing on lean muscle. They must be careful, though, that it is very easy to over eat and is just as easy to put on additional body fat. As I mentioned prior, it is not difficult for our mesomorphs to pack on solid and lean muscle. A good lifting routine focusing on the building of the heavy compound lifts with some additional accessory lifts focusing on specific muscular functions (push/pull muscles) and when executed with intensity, will provide the exact results that our mesomorphs are looking for. Mesomorphs, with their metabolism running at a very mediocre rate, in order for them to lose any considerable kind of weight, one of two things must happen. The first is a restrictive diet; and I know what you other fellow mesomorphs are thinking. The sound of a “restrictive diet” sounds about as appealing as sticking your hand in a bear trap. Trust me when I tell you,

going 6 months without pizza and beer isn’t going to kill you (you know, it’s actually just the opposite). The best thing in the world for you to do to fix your mentality about your mindset concerning your diet and your mind; it will cleanse your dopamine receptors (see back to my section about dopamine receptors in the beginning of the book). Your body and your mind will only tell you that you need pizza and beer as long as it continues to make you feel good. Once you go a 6 months without either of them, your brain will learn that you actually can do other, more constructive things, and still get the rush of dopamine and accomplishment without taking down a Domino’s store with a 30 rack of Miller Light. I bet having a body you never thought possible will be much more rewarding than Little Caesar’s and a 12 pack of Budweiser. But, then again, that’s all up to you; I’m just saying you can’t do both. There is only one other method for us mesomorphs to get leaner and get our muscle mass to become more visible. I am going to say this first— caloric deficit is THE only way. Therefore, everything I just got done saying about pizza and beer IS A MUST! All the junk food must go. Our ectomorphic friends can get away with it because they have the metabolism of a fully grown South African Elephant during their migration west (or where ever it is they go, I’m not a zoologist). If the mesomorphs of the world want to really lose weight and they want to take complete control of their life and their health, some cardio will be required. I, as much as anyone on earth, HATE doing cardio. I hate it. But, I do it. Why? I feel better after doing it and it burns calories much more instantaneously than any other method of training. Whether it’s HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training) or Circuit Training or crossFit (Do yourself a favor and don’t do crossfit; your spine and shoulders will thank you). I’m just poking fun at the crossfit athletes; when taught properly, can be an intense workout and an effective way to workout, just be careful, y’all! The point I am trying to establish is that mild cardio is most effective for our kind (mesomorphs) to lose weight. I am not saying all of you should be hitting the treadmills like

it’s the first day of the last year on earth! MILD! Take it easy, mesomorphs! One or two days a week of 15-30 minutes of cardio, each, will serve you just fine and you will be well on your way to living a longer, healthier, sexier life. The grandest of our body types is our endomorphs and I use the word “grand” tactfully. Endomorphs are the stockiest and the strongest of the three body types. They are identifiable by their broad shoulders and larger waste lines and strong chests. They have the slowest of the metabolisms when considering all the body types collectively. It is the easiest for them to build solid and strong muscle mass but will usually be partnered with a layer of body fat. Unfortunately for them, they will usually not have the same proportions as the other two, and will not normally have an “aesthetic” physique. However, contrary to looking like a model, they look strong as hell year round. It is not a very difficult task for our endomorphs to pack on solid muscle. Their body type will allow them to lift very heavily quite often because they will constantly have a reservoir readily available energy that allows their body to lift heavy a lot more than the rest of us. Our bodies require A LOT of “fuel” in order for our bodies to execute at full capacity and dominate a heavy weight lift. As I had mentioned, endomorphs have attached to them a constantly accessible fuel source that runs energy directly in to their muscle mass. Weight lifting, as I had mentioned prior, muscles requires a lot of energy to perform at full capacity. This fact is what allows endomorphs to have incredible strength and lift with an insane level of intensity that puts an insane amount of tension on the muscles that force them to grow to wicked levels. Unfortunately, for our endomorphs, this beautiful reservoir that allows them to lift as heavy as they can is also very hard to get rid of. Many people see this as such a severe negative quality because they are lead to believe that being a big strong person isn’t able to also be sexy. However,

if we decide as an endomorph that we want to get in great shape, we must be very strict as our body’s metabolism will be unforgiving on our diet. I will be covering this topic much lot more in depth in our next section where I start to cover specific dietary patterns that will be most beneficial for each body type but the large and grand of it is that we want to make sure our diet is accomplishing two things: caloric deficit (just like the rest of us) but it will be much more important for endomorphs than anyone else to restrict our carbohydrates. Endomorphs, which already naturally have a little slower metabolism, will require more cardio training than the rest of us. Cardio will only be important because the caloric deficit is what we want to focus on and making the deficit as large as possible. The size of the caloric deficit will directly determine the amount of weight we lose and how quickly we do so. Cardio is an excellent supplement for that because it will burn significantly more calories instantaneously than weight training. Therefore, the more cardio we do, the more calories our bodies burn, the more we force our metabolism burn calories faster than the Notre Dame Cathedral (remember that? Yeah, that happened). I hope all of that information helps many of you identify where you belong and gives you a more concrete and clearer idea of what you category you identify with and how to construct your new and improved exercise routine. Many times, we will not fit perfectly in to once category alone. Some of us will, many of us will be some sort of hybrid between two different adjacent body types. The takeaway I want to stress about this is how important it is to be able to be real with yourself. The first step in ACTUALLY being successful on this journey is to use the information above and be able to accurately categorize yourself with the body type that you believe you fit in the most so that we can begin to accurately implement the proper actions to create a routine and construct a regimen to produce the best possible results for you. What’s even more important is the amount of discipline it takes to

continue to endure this routine long enough for you to reap the fruits of your labor and begin to get the results you desire. It’s the exact reason that I disagree with personal training. ‘Oh my good god Logan; you used to be a personal trainer! How could you say that?’ Because, my lovelies, the knowledge a personal trainer can provide you is only as good as your determination to implement the knowledge. Personal trainers are very good at being your accountability tool if you have enough money to pay them for four sessions a week (where you will be paying probably A LOT). My point is, no one you can pay or wish for can do the work for you or deliver the results. That is why fitness is my passion. You can’t pay your way to a good body. You literally can only earn that shit. That’s real and that’s facts. Myth #7 “I am in such good shape because I workout seven days a week and when I really want to push it, I will go twice a day!” I cannot stress enough how important recovery is to our health and wellness. Many power and strength routines followed by professional athletes are typically only higher intensities for as many as 12 weeks. The body can only withstand a certain amount of stress for a limited duration before we start to do more damage than good. The results of over training or under feeding (starving yourself) can have affects on the body that negate what we want to accomplish in the first place. First and foremost, we want to be in the gym as CONSISTENTLY as possible, which is not to be confused with as MUCH as possible. The difference is the more we are in the gym, the harder our body has to work to recover. Yes, this means we are burning calories to recover but much like the debt in America, the bigger the deficit (caloric or dollar), the more trouble we open ourselves up to. We want to ensure we can be in the gym three to five days a week and anything that stops us from being able to do that will only pull us farther from our objective. Over training can lead to pulled muscles as well as

damaged tendons. Once our muscles are depleted of carbohydrates to use, they will become fatigued. The harder we push ourselves beyond that point will not exactly make us stronger. The more fatigued our muscles get, the less they will work. Once this threshold is passed, and we continue to lift, our muscles are not the ones who are doing the lifting. Our tendons are what will make further execution doable. Lifting with our tendons is a nightmare and we must avoid it as much as possible. We must be careful and take care of our joints so that they can take care of us. Tendonitis, if any of you have felt that kind of pain, is not fun at all. I’m sure some of you already know how it feels but for those of you who don’t; tendonitis, which is inflammation due to over use or straining of tissue that connects our skeletal system, feels like your joints are on fire and will swell up, sometimes to a visible amount. Being able to avoid this will allow us to sustain our routine in the gym because healing tendonitis takes a long time, allowing it to rest and stretching constantly. Trying to stay healthy with tendonitis is like running a race with a parachute on your back; you’ll finish the race but it will do you no good and only slow you down. Therefore, an ideal gym schedule would look like three to five days a week, allowing our body time to recover fully in between workouts which will allow our hormones to maintain a balance and actually make us become more fit, much faster. Speaking of hormones, overtraining can affect our hormonal balance, as well. By over training and under recovering, our body will become depleted of Human Growth Hormones that help with muscular development and recovery, can deplete and begin to lower which can cause muscular cannibalism. Your body must use nutrients to produce hormones like testosterone and Human Growth Hormone, yet, is unable to do so when so many systems are already failing (digestive and muscular). These hormones will be lower in our system causing recovery to come to a screeching halt. If it seems like I’m repeating myself, it’s because this is important! These lowered hormones due to an exhausted body will slow

our muscle recovery which will cause unnecessary stress on the ligaments and tendons which will cause us to snap, pull, or hurt something that will take us out of the gym for potentially weeks. That is the exact reason why eating proper amounts and taking proper rest days away from the gym to allow us to recover will be ideal. There is no need to listen to people who say that the more we are in the gym, the more we are making gains. We don’t always have to train harder; sometimes, we must focus on training smarter. When we add in a proper sleep schedule, we making becoming fit so much less daunting and draining than we are made to believe it is. Sleep is one of the most important aspects of recovery that I feel goes over looked more than anything else. When weight training, we are not only taxing our muscles, but our brain and our CNS (central nervous system) as well! Having a proper sleep schedule keeps our body fresh; this shouldn’t be news to anyone. During the night, hormones like HGH and testosterone are peaking which is when most of our recovery takes place. In order to get the best sleep, we must establish a consistent sleep schedule. The body does not really like surprises and loves routine. The less our body has to do manually and the more it can automate the easier and better our bodies are able to function. By going to bed and waking up at consistent times every day, the better sleep we will get at night. People love to discuss the rule of not eating after a certain time at night, which is a true fact. Our body produces melatonin which is like our body’s natural clock telling us it is time for bed. This is what makes our eyelids heavy and bodies feel heavy, which results in our metabolism slowing down quite substantially. If it is 8pm and we haven’t eaten our daily intake yet, it’s time to find a better feeding schedule. Melatonin, however, is a great supplement to take an hour before bed to help us begin to establish our night time sleep routine. If you are like myself and find it hard to relax or settle down for bed time, it is an excellent tool to ensure proficient sleep at night. I would recommend the lightest doses possible and working your way up! Taking too much seems

like it would be a good idea to fall asleep fast. The aftermath, though, results in waking up in the morning incredibly difficult. Too much melatonin will cause us to wake up groggy and making getting out of bed feel like running a marathon. I understand that going to bed hungry can make going to sleep feel like it takes more “effort,” which is the opposite of what we want when going to sleep. Therefore, not all snacks before bed are necessarily bad. One of the best snacks for before bed is typically rich in protein. Snacks like full fat Greek yogurt or casein protein shake allow your body to maintain muscle recovery over night. However, for our friends who are lactose intolerant, an equally sufficient snack could be a handful of nuts that are rich in fats and will feed our brain and body in to a restful sleep while maintaining a nice and high metabolism while we rest. Myth #8 “I want abs so I will just train abs all day and all night and the fat will be targeted on my tummy if only I do ab workouts.” ABOLUTELY NOT! This one makes me feel physical anguish and pain. This is the largest and most commonly accepted falsehood that I am here to disprove. There is no such thing as “spot reduction” and the more we train abs, the larger the abdominal muscles will be! Our body has one homogenous body fat composition and is consistent throughout. In referendum to our genetic makeup, some people are genetically disposed to having pockets of body fat in some areas and less body fat in others. That being said, if all we do is train abs, we will inherently end up looking fatter! That sounds very crass but it is meant to be that way because I really want to drive this point home. If we want to tone the arms, we must tone everything else. If we want to tone the chest, we must tone the rest of the body. If we want to tone the neck and chin area, we must tone the rest of the body. Are you seeing a pattern? If all we do to get a six pack is a ridiculous amount of abdominal

exercises, the result is this. Since the muscle beneath the body fat is increasing but the body fat is remaining unchanged, the result is the muscle will push the belly fat outwards and inherently make the belly look bigger until the body fat is burned away with diet and more effective workout routines! Therefore, if we want the abs to be visible and the arms to look lean and the jaw to look tight, we must do them all together, not one at a time! That seems like a redundant statement since all of those things are pretty desirable. I can’t imagine anyone complaining about obtaining any of those. That’s not why we complain about them, though, is it? No! We only want to change the things that we are insecure about. More often than not, it is only one thing we wish we could change! Spot reduction is one of my arch nemeses of the fitness industry. I’ve never heard anything more ridiculous, but was also guilty of believing it at the same time when I was much younger! If you are someone who is insecure about excessive arm fat, training arms muscles more will never burn that fat any faster. Building that particular muscle will only provide shape and structure, once the fat has been lost! The problem (psychologically) is that once we fix that one thing that makes us insecure, there will be another thing we notice we don’t like about ourselves. This will be followed by another and another which is how eating disorders start! “We must be perfect,” people say for some reason. Others, they are perfectly fine being a total dumpster fire and are the happiest people I have ever met! Let’s be adults here and understand that there is a happy medium to this broad spectrum of physical acceptance and understand that there is a gray area in the middle that is kind of the sweet spot! We must understand that all we can be is the best we can be! It is a serious self love exercise and I want you to hear it from me that we must love ourselves for whom and what we are and NOT what people expect. We can only control the things in life that are controllable! We

have to remember to only compare ourselves to ourselves. It is very easy to let head games whirl around in your head. Don’t let the emotional rush of competition between others, or the sometimes overwhelming envy of others will be very distracting, I assure you. It will happen, regardless of your awareness of it. Being aware of it, though, will allow you to recognize when it happens and begin to catch yourself from those thoughts.

CHAPTER IV Diet and Nutrition This will be the most important section of this entire book. Everyone will tell you that fitness is 20% what you do in the gym and 80%. I humbly disagree. You can still be in amazing shape and not workout very intensely. As long as you eat healthy and maintain a healthy calorie balance, you can lose weight and feel amazing. People say you are what you eat and it is literally true. The cells in your body use the stuff that you eat to recreate its cells from your skin to your muscles to your hair; everything you eat becomes what you are. In order for us to comprehend what it is that we must be aware of and what our diet must look like, we must first understand the basics with proficient clarity. Therefore, we will start from the beginning and cover everything from what a calorie is to what you eat and its effect on the body. First things first, a calorie is not something that exists solely within your food. A calorie (or Kcal) is a scientific measurement of energy. A calorie is the amount of energy that is required to warm 1000 grams of water by one degree Celsius. The amount of calories in your food is the amount of energy your body is able to use to keep you alive by contracting your diaphragm so you can breathe and your heart to keep pumping and to regulate your body temperature. All of the bodily functions that your brain is able to automate are done with calories!

The reason why this is important to understand that principle is because in order for us to be able to gain the results that we desire (gain muscle or lose body fat), the simplest way to be able to do so is caloric manipulation. We have a certain number of calories that we will consistently burn every single day. As I mentioned earlier, the easiest way to gage your baseline caloric intake is to look up on your search engine an online calculator where you can plug in your stats and it will tell you the exact number of calorie that you want to be consuming for your goals! For my fellow nerds out there, like me, I love to be precise. I love to control everything I am able to control. That way, if I fail, it is to my own accord. I will not let chance be an effect in the likelihood of my success or failure.

Men: 13.397*W + 4.799*H - 5.677*A + 88.362

Women: 9.247*W + 3.098*H - 4.330*A + 447.593 Source: Fletcher

I refuse to turn this in to an algebra seminar, but you all know how math works. I’m not the only one reading this book that hates algebra! But this is important so let’s make this quick and painless. The letters in the equation are variables that will be plugged in by you depending on your own body composite. Where there is a “W”, we will insert or weight in the form of kilograms. Where there is an “H”, we will insert our height in centimeters. Finally, where there is an “A”, we will insert our age in years (because if you

measure your age in days, weeks, or months, I will be calling you an ambulance because you have dementia). Now that we have established what our daily caloric expenditure is, we now have a proper point of reference for how much we should eat in order to achieve the physique we are yearning for! The amount of calories that we consume in a day will directly dictate the number of the scale. As I have prior mentioned, calories are purely a measurement of energy. Your weight will be a direct reflection of the proportion of energy balance that you maintain most consistently. All that really means is that, on a daily basis, the more consistently you can stay either above or below your daily caloric value of expenditure. It is important to understand the energy balance of our bodies and the results of our actions that affect this balance. If we are eating too many calories and aren’t burning enough, the result is we have a “positive energy balance.” In order to prevent confusion, “positive” in NOT indicative of our perspective; it only means that it is numerically positive and is more commonly referred to as a caloric surplus. We want to think about this like numbers on a number line. All it means to be in a positive caloric balance is that we are consuming a higher number of calories than we burn. Therefore, our net energy balance is positive! What that means, anatomically, is that anything that is excessive or “positive” is stored on the body as body fat! That’s all body fat is; stored energy to be readily used for later. The more consistently that we are in a net positive energy balance, the more energy we store on the body. That is the polite and scientific way of saying the more you eat, the more fat your body stores. Inversely, if our goal is weight loss, we want to focus as much as we can on maintaining a “negative energy balance.” I will, again, use the number line reference because I want to make it abundantly clear that negative is only perspective. The energy balance is objective; not perspective. Negative, meaning, below zero, means that our caloric intake is sub-

maintenance level. We want to be sure that we are burning more calories by being active, every single day, and eat fewer calories than that which we are burning. What the long lasting effect of being able to stay in a negative energy balance (more commonly known as being a caloric deficit) is your body is being deprived of energy it needs to sustain keeping you alive. Your body is not receiving the necessary amount of calories needed to sustain bodily functions; therefore, what the body must do is utilize energy from somewhere. If only our body had this storage system of readily available energy to be used whenever we need it! Oh yeah. That’s what body fat is! The further below the maintenance level that we are, and the larger our caloric deficit is, the more energy our body has to “borrow” from somewhere else. That is the fastest way for us to lose the body fat that we so desperately need to lose! Now that we have a strong understanding of caloric energy balances, we can now begin to manipulate how our body reacts to certain macronutrients. Macronutrients are the components of our food that affect our body specifically in their own way. Just like the tools in your garage have different functions for the different parts of your car, different macronutrients have different functions in the body! We have three main dietary macronutrients that we want to make sure are accounted for when we are deciding what to eat and how much of it. Most of us are aware of what they are but where the confusion becomes an obstacle is with what they do or how much of them we require. The main three macronutrients are our carbohydrates, our proteins, and our fats. The first one I wish to discuss is carbohydrates, mainly because of the amount of mystery surrounding them. People seem to have adopted the idea that weight gain and loss all stems from the amount of carbohydrates we consume. Which, to a degree, can be true, but not in the same way many perceive it to be. Many believe that the in/out balance of

carbohydrates work much like the balance of calories—meaning that the more carbohydrates that are in my diet, the more weight I will gain and the less I eat, the more I will lose. This is a complex topic because this is both right and wrong. Let’s start by first defining what a carbohydrate is—that is a fuel source that feeds our muscles. If we remember back when I would talk about the energy balance, we understand that we want to maintain a negative energy balance. Which is why it is so important that any carbohydrates we intake must be “used for good, not evil.” Carbohydrates contain calories in each gram. When you examine the nutrition facts (IF you examine nutrition facts), there is a certain number of calories in each morsel of food. Duh, right? It is important to understand where those calories come from and each cram of carbohydrates contains four calories. Mathematically, any food source with 100 calories and 10 carbohydrates, 40 of the calories (out of the 100 total) come solely from carbohydrates. The rest come from proteins, fats, and other components of the foods we eat. Carbohydrates are simply that and are not good, nor are they evil. They are only used; and they good and evil are only in the way they are used (or abused). I only mean that carbohydrates are stored in our muscles cells in the form of glycogen. Glycogen is what carbohydrates break down in to so that it is usable for the muscles. Much like a light bulb, the more power is provided to it, the brighter the light bulb will shine. Our muscles behave in a similar such a way where the more carbohydrates we consume, the more energy our muscles are able to use to execute heavy lifts and allow us to utilize our muscles to their full potential. It is with this principle that we are able to fuel our muscles like a machine and develop an educated and amazing physique that is sure to grab attention and people are sure to notice. Of all the macronutrients, another one we must be able to understand in perfecting our diet in obtaining sustainable health is lipid fats! It is important to understand how lipid fats (which I will start to refer to solely

as “fats”) because we want to understand what the affects of over or under consuming fats will do to our bodies and how we can benefit from eating the appropriate amount and why doing so is so crucial. The primary functions of dietary fats in the body is to hold energy for the body to use without it being stored as body fat, as well as regulate certain hormones, and maintenance of cellular membranes. We will focus on the three most common kinds of fats that we can find in our foods. The primary three kinds of fats are saturated fats, unsaturated fats, and trans-fats. The kind of fat that is typically referred to as being a “healthy fat” is our unsaturated fats. What makes them the most beneficial form of dietary fat is because of its minimal molecular bonding. This makes it harder for it to coagulate within the body; it is harder for it to make bonds at warmer temperatures. Unsaturated fats are normally found in a liquid state even at room temperatures. The body maintains a constant internal temperature that allows the unsaturated fats to help reduce cholesterol. There are two subcategories of unsaturated fats that break down in to mono and poly unsaturated fats. Mono unsaturated fats have one double molecular bond, hence the name. Conversely, poly unsaturated fats have multiple double bonds. The only real difference between the two is the source from which they come from. It is important for us to begin to incorporate as many sources of unsaturated fats that we can so begin to reap the benefits of them. Our unsaturated fats do wonders to increase heart health. Unsaturated fats, because of their molecular structure, are able to stay fluid and runny within our body and act as a lubricating agent within our arteries and veins increasing heart health and decreasing our chances of heart problems. Not only that, but we are able to use unsaturated fats to decrease inflammation in the body. Without getting too freaky with science, having sufficient unsaturated fats in your diet reduces inflammation by limiting the inflammatory response to phospholipids in the cells of your body. Essentially, more unsaturated fats create a better cellular response and

helps eliminate inflammation from the inside out. Quickly and in summation on unsaturated fats, it is good to know what foods contain good sources of this unsaturated fat so that we can begin to incorporate these foods into our diet as soon as possible. One of the best sources of these fats is, naturally, nuts and seeds. This can include peanuts, almonds, sesame seeds, and can even stretch as far as peanut butter. We cannot forget our oils; peanut oil, coconut oil, and sesame oils are rich in this essential fat. The biggest application (and also motivation to eat more unsaturated fats) is that the main purpose of dietary fats is to help reduce inflammation in the body! I CANNOT stress this part enough… that people with joint issues can really benefit from having plentiful amounts of fat in their diet! Combating joint pain and arthritis is something we all will deal with at one point or another. Whether the cause is age, sports, over usage, it could be anything; we want to protect the joints we are given AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE! I hear some freaky stories about how hip and knee replacements work and you can google it but take my word for it. Let’s save the money and the rehab and just take care of our joints now! That’s not to mention that almost all of us have suffered from poor skin conditions at one point or another. It’s okay to admit because we all know what it’s like. Good for us that we now know how good fatty oils like omegas 3 and 6 are great for keeping inflammation of the skin under control and will help keep your skin feeling better than ever! Remember y’all: We literally ARE what we EAT! Our body uses the nutrients it is given by the food we eat to replenish dead cells in the body. W cannot discuss essential dietary fats and unsaturated fats without also learning about the contrary, saturated fats. They are composed of substantially higher double bond contents and are saturated with hydrogen molecules causing it to be slightly more viscous than its oily counterpart.

Saturated fats are primarily found in fatty meats such as fatty beef, fish, lamb, and pork. They are also what our fatty non-meat animal products are made of such as lard and butter. These products are typically something we want to have to maintain a healthy diet because of the qualities that come with their consumption (most specifically the protein that is inclusive with the meat). It is certainly important to understand that consumption in large quantities will result in health issues. For reasons of the causation of plaque build-up in our blood vessels, the tar-like substance will cause heart problems that will only worsen with prolonged negligence. Problems like heart disease can set in and be problematic if not monitored and addressed. Like many things in life, saturated fats are part of a healthy and balanced diet. It is only once we begin to over consume it that we may become at risk. But that rings true with most of the fun stuff in life. Trans-fats are the first kind of fats that should be cut out of our diet first and must be done so as completely as possible. Scientifically speaking, all that trans-fats consist of is called hydrogenating unsaturated fats. All that means is, in comparison to unsaturated fats, is it is adding a hydrogen molecule creating hydrogenated oil. This kind of fat is pretty typically found in shortening agents used in baking and dough that will cause prolonged bloating and over retention of water. It is also the main component of fried foods that will invoke other heart and health issues which is why any time we find trans-fats in any of our foods, should be avoided at all costs. The prolonged affects of over eating trans-fats is pretty simple and has clear repercussions that are already pretty clearly understood. Elevated consumption of trans-fats will result in a substantial increase in LDL (or Low Density Lipoprotein). That is the “bad cholesterol” that can have deadly long term backlash. The overconsumption of trans-fats will increase the amount of a plaque-like tarry substance on the insides of our veins, arteries, and heart that steeply increase the likely hood of strokes and

heart attacks. It can have some smaller affects on our metabolism and hormone levels that all stem from proper blood flow to the body. It is fairly clear as to why it is so important for us to stay as far away from trans-fats as possible. One of the most important aspects of our diet and nutrition would (debatably) be based around our protein intake which I think many people very easily muddle. Protein is a paramount in a healthy and well-balanced diet, much more definitely if you live an active life style. We have all heard the saying, “protein is the building blocks for muscle.” That’s mostly because it 100% is. There is an over abundance of false information about fitness and nutrition out there but that certainly is not one of them. Protein is the macronutrient that is most paramount in muscular recovery and will be our best dietary friend in our fitness epoch. It is important to understand, before we get ahead of ourselves and assume that this portion can be skipped under the assumption that you already know everything about how protein benefits the body, that it is much more versatile than you might think. First and foremost, most of our body is actually comprised of different kinds of proteins. Your skin, hair and bones are all repaired and grown through proteins in your diet. Even cartilage can be regenerated with a proper protein intake. Many kinds of tissues from your hair to your toe nails are able to grow healthier and stronger from proper protein consumption; not only your muscles. We will want to begin to be conscientious of increasing our protein intake so insure we can insure healthier hair, skin, and bones, which are inclusive of having awesome muscles. This is actually supported by another by product of protein which is oxygenation of the blood. Our red blood cells are composed of a protein compound that is able to transport oxygen throughout the body promoting more effective blood flow and makes the blood much more effective in nutrient transport throughout the body.

I have always said that protein is not only for weight lifters. The runners and cardio junkies of the gym also have very good incentive to increase protein intake. Once we have eaten the protein, however, it will also support a healthier digestive system. There are very large portions of the amount of protein you consume in a day will go into producing enzymes that will aid in the breaking down and absorbing of food in the digestive system. In completion, protein helps keep hormones regular during transformation and times of development which is crucial during puberty but during time periods of exaggerated change in diet and habits such as we are setting off on now! We will want to understand the best sources of protein so that we may begin to implement some of these into our diet as soon as we can. Fortunately, there are many different sources of protein that we can incorporate very easily and deliciously. Typically, the most potent sources of protein are typically from a wide variety of animal products. If you are vegan or vegetarian, it will naturally be much more difficult to get all the proper sources of protein. I, personally, do not recommend it. However, if you are unable to eat certain foods for religious or personal beliefs, there are still plenty of options for the vegan trainees, especially in our current day in age where it is becoming more common than it has historically. The best sources of protein are going to also going to typically be the leanest meats available to us. The primary ones that we typically think of are the lean meats that are mostly available to us at the grocery store. What we most commonly imagine are meats like steak, chicken, and lean beef. These can be prepared a million different ways and some are healthier than others. This is a book about fitness—not cooking. I am as much of a chef as I am a unicorn so I am not able to provide much insight on the great ways to prepare these awesome meats. However, typically what I enjoy most is including them in larger dishes. Instead of having a chicken breast or a steak by itself, I love to prepare them in larger dishes

like steak tacos or chicken lasagna. Part of the fun with embarking on a journey like this is how versatile your diet can be while still being productive. You are able to really be creative with so many different flavors and preparation styles that will make being on a diet so much more enjoyable! I would like to clarify; I am not saying that it will be effortless or easy as stopping through the Taco Bell drive through, but with a little patience and a sprinkle of love, thousands of foods can be prepared with plenty of protein that are absolutely delicious. The stigma that healthy foods that lose your weight are not tasty and enjoyable must be broken; everything we eat can’t taste like a Snickers bar. If that is the case, we have found the problem. For people who aren’t as keen on meat, there are plenty of alternatives to meat that can provide us a proper amount of protein without ingesting meat. My favorite source of meatless protein is eggs. Eggs, similarly to meats, are versatile in their preparation but are rich in nutrients. Mostly, protein— eggs are excellent sources of protein, as well as amino acids (which I will cover in supplementation) as well as saturated fats. Many nonmeat sources of protein will be higher in fats than our meaty counterparts. This is because they will typically be animal by-products. Whole milk, cottage cheese, and Greek yogurt are all excellent sources of protein that are meat free. I understand that not everyone wants all of their protein to come from animals or animal by products and it is rather wise to have a well rounded diet and have multiple sources of protein and some plant based proteins, though not as effective at muscle building as animal protein is, is still going to provide bountiful protein to keep our metabolism flying high and our muscles plentifully fed and rock solid (to flex on all the haters). Two excellent sources of protein that don’t require any animal products are nuts and beans. Cashews and almonds, as well as peanuts are not only high in unsaturated fats but are also going to provide us an accessory amount of protein. I would not, by any means, rely on nuts for our daily

protein. Beans and tempeh are also packed with protein as well as being decent sources of fiber which help digestive health! Finally, foods like peas, chickpeas, edamame, and quinoa are all substantial protein sources for vegan lifters or people with specific diets. Protein cannot outsmart us. We will be weight lifters. We will eat ALL of our protein. And we will get insane gains! Okay it’s time for one of the most highly controversial topics in the fitness industry: meal timing. For those of you who have any idea, my god, there are a billion different theories of meal timing and the number of meals the size of the meals and all the possible variants you can think of. Here’s the deal… I will give you all a rundown of each of the most popular dieting methods and how they work and my opinion and you are free to pick your own based on your own body type, preference, and lifestyle. I get it; life’s different for everyone from genetics to jobs so might as well keep it simple for everyone.

Figure 1 (Metabolism scale 0-10) There are 3 main approaches taken to the TIMING of our meals, including

how much and when. The first is the traditional, good ol’ fashioned 3 square meals a day. The second is more frequent and less substantial meals. The third is any form of intermittent fasting. The concept of eating three square meals a day is like square one. It is probably one of the easier diet patterns to follow because everyone has a daily routine that allows time for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The second is the committed person or maybe fitness professional style of eating. This diet pattern is likely followed by someone who is very committed to achieving and maintaining a certain weight or body fat professional. Maybe they are an athlete or could be an average person who is very fixated and has a lot of freedom to eat every 2-3 hours! The third is intermittent fasting, which, again, I don’t recommend for rookies to the health game and I will go in to why shortly. Intermittent fasting is a dieting pattern, not a diet. The success of IF largely depends on two things, the duration of your fasting period and what you consume during your feeding window! Typically a diet consisting of high protein in an eight hour window, while the other 16 hours of the day are spent drinking LOTS of water. Before we get too deep into any of that, I am going to illustrate the rubric for that I will be judging the different eating patterns by simultaneously doing so illustrating the most common diet that I encountered with clients and non clients alike that I found to be fairly disadvantageous and counterintuitive. Most people that I have talked to about corrective dieting have a day that typically looks something like this. When waking in the morning, we typically will not wake up early enough to make ourselves anything for breakfast. Therefore, many will skip and grab an energy drink or coffee instead. This is our first missed opportunity; when we wake up in the morning, our metabolism is like a burning furnace! What you do to a fire to keep it going is typically more oxygen or more shit to burn. If we start

inhaling coffee or sugary drinks, we actually dehydrate our body and slow our metabolism DOWN! Trucking right along throughout the day, most people might have some sort of snack at lunch time, which is that little tiny bump; I was rather generous with my bump on the graph, assuming most people have somewhat substantial midday meals, but I know of quite a few others who suffer through eating a bag of chips or another coffee for lunch and that is inadmissible and will more realistically dehydrate your body further and slow your metabolism further, likely putting telling your body no food is coming any time soon, and forcing it to hang on to body fat to be used later (and it never does which is this compounding problem). Then finally at the end of the day, we might see one more spike of insulin and increased metabolism when we finally consume pretty much the entire day’s worth of food all in one sitting. This likely will overwhelm our gastrointestinal tract, as our body is already dehydrated and moving sluggish and cause very little effect to our metabolism. What makes this worse is that the downward spike you see at the end of the day is when melatonin usually starts to release in the brain, telling your body to chill out and that it is bed time, including slowing the metabolism to conserve energy over night. That means that pretty much any food we eat gets stored as fat over night? Yeah, in worst case scenarios like this, yes. The result of this kind of diet is that you can see a general decrease in energy throughout the day in correlation with your metabolism. It is this constant winding downward of efficiency coming from the body which is why poor diets like this can cause such rapid weight gain, depending entirely on the contents and frequency of certain foods. This style of eating is, by definition, reckless and problematic by perspective of our goals. It not only derails your metabolism and your hormonal time release, but also your body’s insulin sensitivity. Any sort of hormone imbalances that go unchecked for too long can really screw up our ability to lose weight in the future!

We are all taught growing up three square meals a day is the only option for eating healthy… I mean I was taught that and presume that anyone growing up in the same education was taught the food pyramid and three square meals a day and blah blah blah. This is like the Little League, so to speak, if dieting and nutrition were analogous to sports. This is where, quite honestly, most of our developing good habits start to form! This is an important step in the process, in my opinion. It is while doing this that our body’s response to a routine diet will normalize again. We will see our energy levels in the morning return to normal, our metabolism will return to normal as we feel hungrier at times that we should be eating at, and most likely, even start sleeping better! You will find, according to figure 1, which is a graphic line representation of your metabolism on 0-100% efficiency based on a scale of daily caloric burn starting at 1,000 and reaching as high as 3,500 calories per day. We will see this trend across any diet in the world because one of the functions of the body is to achieve restful sleep in order to recover and rest. There is a part of that function that includes bodily preparation, including a neurotransmitter known as melatonin, which is responsible for making you sleepy. This is what happens when you sleep schedule is healthy and your body is properly balanced with daily expenditure, rest, and diet. I just figured I’d address that downward ending trend all at once. There will become a time where we will realize one of two things; the traditional diet is working and weight loss is taking place, in which case, don’t start over thinking things and change things up because you think it might be a good idea. If that isn’t the case, then it is I tried to fix my diet, genuinely tried, and we are not being as effective as we think we are. In this case, we have good dietary habits already established; it is now time to try something new. There are many who claim that the most effective dietary way to lose weight is to eat more meals in smaller proportions throughout the day. They are correct; this diet is the perfect way to eat if you care enough

about your health and fitness that building muscle and keeping your metabolism that consistently high throughout the day and even over night. I call these people athletes and professional because your either getting paid for it, or you care so much about it you are willing to invest a stupid amount of time to meal prepping every week. Hear me out, that is not to insult anyone who does meal prep; I am also that person who puts a stupid amount of time in to meal prep. It is time consuming and boring but it is our best insurance we keep our body’s running like machines! The constant and continuous feeding of very small and digestible food is what your body loves more than anything else. Benefits of a high carb and high protein diet is that the body will constantly be breaking down substantial nutrients and by keeping muscles well fed with carbs and protein, your muscles will grow exponentially while your metabolism will sky rocket. It is because of the fact, though, that it is so time consuming for people with families or busy jobs to maintain a diet with that kind of commitment, even though, for the record, I hate those excuses; I think if you want it, commit and there will be no excuses or no success. Granting people the benefit of the doubt, because I know some crazy hard working people who do ACTUALLY don’t have enough hours in the day, here is my favorite eating pattern ever. Intermittent fasting is a concept I’ve experimented with, read about, and practiced since 2013 and is, by far, my preferred way to lose weight, or even lean bulk muscle mass. There are many different ways to approach intermittent fasting, such as variations in hours fasted, feeding windows, and days on and off. I will, from this point on, refer back to not only, Dr. Alex Lickerman, M.D., but also my own personal life experiences. Intermittent fasting is my favorite because it is, in my opinion, the best return of your investment of time and energy. You can see incredible results while committed to IF but it must be done with pure intent. What I mean is I know many people who IF but still eat like garbage during their

eating windows. This is the most DESTRUCTIVE way to IF and will actually have adverse side effects. One of the reasons why IF is so potent is that you are selectively increasing your cellular sensitivity to insulin. I’ve referred to this before and all I mean is your body has a limitation to its usage of carbohydrates. It is for this reason that some men, me included, can eat an entire pizza and not gain a pound. Other men eat salads all day and don’t LOSE a pound. This is your introduction with insulin sensitivity. The more you overload your body with carbs, starches like chips, yeasts like bread, and so on, the more your body has a surplus of these compounds and NOTHING to do with it (assuming we live a sedentary lifestyle). Imagine a time you got so overwhelmed at work, you decided to do absolutely nothing as a result. This concept translates that idea, perfectly, and subsequently, will store everything as body fat because your pancreas, which produces insulin to break all that crap down, just says ‘fuck it’ and type two diabetes is diagnosed. The reason why I love IF is that it helps increasing insulin sensitivity as well as lowering blood sugar. I had a client I worked with before that came to me needing help… her health and her life had become a factor at this point. I had no room for error and to this day, I still pride this instance as my favorite training story, but she came to me months later telling me what I had told her to do actually allowed her doctor to LOWER HER INSULIN DOSAGE! It is not an easy habit to start, however, I will admit that it is very uncomfortable in the beginning but you’re tough and you’ll live. Most traditionally, the most common practice is the 16:8 ratios. This means you spend 16 hours of every single day fasting and 8 of them you are able to eat. Most typically spanning from morning to early afternoon, many fast from midnight to 2pm. The reason is you can get away with some later in the night snack-age, as long as it is high protein. I, personally, prefer longer fasting periods such as a 24 hour ratio

looking more like 20/4. I fast for ~20 hours a day (give or take a few, I allow myself a lot of flexibility with this diet). The remaining 4 – 6 hours, depending on when I broke my fast, I will eat very high protein foods and very fiber-rich foods like asparagus, green beans, sweet potatoes, etc. This causes my body to be extremely sensitive, on a cellular level, to the food I eat, and I am able to kick my metabolism in to an absolute furnace, when I maintain that with a moderate intensity lifting routine. As we get in to longer fasting periods, we must be aware of our bodies ability to recover. Working out too vigorously while fasting can be problematic so it is important to maintain a high RPE (16-18) and moderate to conservative frequency of workouts. Dr. Lickman can vouch for me, because he also has some opinions on the effectiveness of IF for weight loss! Fasting has timed and delayed affects on the body. Typically, the body’s response to fasting from 36 to 60 hours is, first of all a drop in blood sugar, which releases norepinephrine, which tells your body to burn body fat preferential to carbohydrates in the blood, due to the lack thereof. This seems to provoke an increase of resting energy in expenditure for up to 60 hours but anything beyond that can see upwards or 20% of a decline of your Basil Metabolic Rate (BMR= Daily Calories burned) (Lickman). I must include the importance of staying hydrated during fasts. It’s important. There, it’s been emphasized. It is so incredibly important to your health and metabolic rate, already, but like by a factor of 10 now. We are putting a reasonable amount of strain on the body by doing this and it is important to stay hydrated! It’s funny how we, as humans, are so very precise in our selectiveness for what is “correct.” We are very stubborn creatures, by nature. Everyone loves to believe that their way is the correct way and there is no other way than their way and we selectively believe the things we want to believe to make us feel smarter. Let’s just say this, be open to any and all way of dieting and weight loss! Be explorative and adventurous. There is a

method that works with your body and your schedule that supports weight loss so commit to one and see what happens! No more excuses! The final idea I want to share about our diet before we get in to supplementation is a very common excuse I hear quite often. The ONLY thing that will stop you is yourself. I have been a personal trainer for long enough to have heard the excuse long enough to be sick of hearing it. If I had a dollar for every time someone had told me the reason they don’t eat healthy is because it doesn’t taste as good. And that is a fair statement. Many of the foods that we (as Americans) eat are rich in fats and carbohydrates that our digestive tract and our hormones and our bodies as a whole will be thrown so far out of equilibrium that all the crap we eat are stored as fat. My response to you all with that school of thought is this; if you are not disciplined enough to fix your diet and realize we eat to live, not live to eat and are not enough of a grown up to understand healthy food won’t always taste just like a Big Mac and Chocolate cake, then don’t change. If stopping eating such garbage is something that you find too hard to do and refuse to make the change, then don’t! I am not telling you how to live your life and I cannot control what you do! You have all the freedom to choose what you do with this information I give you. Just understand how childish it sounds to be giving up a healthy and fortuitous life style where you are stronger, healthier, and happier, because you couldn’t put down the box of Krispy Kreme. One of the most important concepts to understand while on a fitness odyssey is supplementation. I have always seen the supplementation industry as fairly shaky. It is not because it is out of necessity; I think that there are plenty of supplements that are wildly necessary. However, I think that there are a lot of companies that have begun making pseudo supplements and bogus products that they will try to sell to people who simply don’t know better. I have very strong feelings about companies like these, but I believe from the bottom of my heart and soul that some supplements are financially beneficial and will bestow a plethora of

valuable dietary goodness. It is important to keep fresh in your mind that supplements are made by humans in a factory to replace and act as a dietary addition to what you are already and normally eating. It is by no means meant to REPLACE normal home cooked food. Home cooked food will always be a primary but supplements will be an amazing compliment to those home cooked meals. The first thing most people think of when they think of supplements is protein shakes. In my experience, protein shakes have gotten a bad rap over the course of the past decade. I have heard that they all taste bad and aren’t enjoyable to drink. First and foremost, it is 2021; dietary supplementation technology has come such a long way since Hulk Hogan’s Python Powder (for those of you old enough to even remember what that is). In our current day and age, the protein powders that we have to choose from are incredibly more advanced in a way that I mean is much more enjoyable than the chalky and flavorless crap we used to drink. The flavors we have now are much more various in our options. Not only that, but are vastly more enjoyable than the standard we are used to. It is almost harder to find a normal chocolate or vanilla flavors; so many protein packaging comes in flavors like ‘triple chocolate chunk’ or ‘strawberry shortcake’ or ‘rainbow sorbet.’ The amount of variety of flavor we have been blessed with is absolutely unfathomable. I am tired of the excuse ‘I don’t drink protein powder because it tastes funky’ or ‘I don’t like it.’ That’s fine but food for thought; protein powder costs about $50 depending on consumption and how conservatively it is consumed can last you up to a month to a month and a half. A package of 6 chicken breasts might last a few days (depending on diet variety and number of mouths to feed). A lot of this depends on the price of chicken in your area of the country but it isn’t unrealistic to be spending upwards of $15 every single week, assuming we are eating enough to cover our protein requirement every single day.

We are now looking at possibly spending upwards of $150 only on chicken in the same time frame as $50 on protein powder. Financially speaking, it is a wise decision to save some money on food by supplementing it with some powdered protein! If I haven’t yet convinced you to begin taking a protein supplement, that’s fine! I don’t get commission or anything. Which is why I still think you should trust me and do it! But before you decide, let’s be more precise on what kind of protein we want to be consuming (or consciously ignoring). There are three main kinds of packaged protein powders: 1. Whey Protein 2. Casein Protein 3. Blended Protein 1. Whey Protein, if you remember from our previous protein talk, is a faster digesting protein which can be absorbed by the muscles quicker 2. Casein Protein, being a dairy derivative, is much slower digesting, therefore, will not be used by the muscle as efficiently but can be broken down slowly over a few hours 3. Not surprisingly, a combination of both The reason this is important is to know the appropriate times to drink them! Side-note: ultimately, it doesn’t matter that much when you take either one. If you are one of the people getting anywhere near enough protein, your body will be healthier with any protein than if the alternative is/was no protein. With that being said, it is beneficial to drink your protein powders in accordance to your eating and workout schedule (which sounds like a chore but really requires just a little effort and cognitive effort). Because we

have covered protein pretty well already, I will be able to keep this short. Whey protein, with it being faster digesting, will provide more totality of the required nutrients when it is needed most which is directly after an intense workout. Casein protein, with it being a protein that is slower digesting, works very well as a dietary supplement such as something I would drink for breakfast or for a snack throughout the day. The body has an incredible system called protein synthesis: which is the body being capable of creating and utilizing proteins (in many different forms, not just aforementioned) and is able to rebuild broken down damaged tissue hence why we get bigger and stronger the more we exercise! Protein synthesis must be fueled using little things called Branch Chain Amino Acids. By bonding these amino acids together, the body is able to repair damaged and broken down muscle tissue. Many supplementation companies will include BCAA’s in a lot of supplements and will even have some stand alone BCAA’s but I have found many are not in full comprehension of what they actually are. BCAA’s are a supplement I consider to be beneficial to beginning trainers. BCAA stands for Branch Chain Amino Acids and is the building blocks for protein molecules. If our physique is a completed puzzle (by the end of our journey; beautiful and perfect) and the muscles are the pieces, protein is the image on each and every single piece of BCAA’s are the cardboard that creates it. Branch Chain Amino Acids are tiny little molecules that exist within our food and our bodies. There are three main BCAA’s; Leucine, isoleucine, and valine. These three BCAA’s are also considered EAA’s (Essential Amino Acids) and they are not considered essential because they compose about 35% of the muscles in our body (but they DO do that). They are considered essential because the body is not able to create them on its own. They are essential due to the role they play during protein synthesis. When the body begins this process, it is fuelled by these branch chain amino acids. The body builds protein molecules to heal

muscles and the body uses branch chain amino acids like building blocks to create protein molecules. So, rationally thinking, the more BCAAs our bodies have, the more surplus our body will have in making protein. When we are able to ensure a surplus in this fashion, it will help us with combating DOMS (Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness). The benefits of having a dietary abundance of BCAAs is by fully fuelling protein synthesis, it allows our body to replicate cells much more efficiently, which causes our muscle soreness after working out to be dramatically reduced. Since the body is unable to create these amino acids, we must consume them. When we think about what kinds of foods will be rich in BCAAs, it is a similar thought process to picking what foods are high in protein. Like we discussed, it is only produced in animals, like ourselves. There are other animals that have muscles and those muscles also produce and utilize branch chain amino acids to also develop their very own proteins and muscles. Lucky enough for us, we can eat the meat that contains the very amino acids we want to be so inclusive in our diet. A lot of the foods that we coincidentally want to include in our diet for amino acids are the same foods high in protein, good for us, it will be incredibly easy to include in our diet and allows us to knock out two stoned birds, or whatever the expression is. Lean meats and fish are two of the highest in our essential amino acids. Lean meats like turkey and chicken are two meats that are very low in fats compared to many other red meats. Fish are rich with amino acids and also omega-3’s which is great for lubing up them blood pipes and lowering your risk of heart disease. Eggs are an incredible muscle building source. I freaking love eggs. I love eggs so much; they are so versatile and incredibly rich in proteins and amino acids. They are high as hell in protein, they are a great source of fats, and have yolks rich in amino acids that will turn your body in to a transformer that changes from a regular person in to a super human; kind of like that scene in Captain America but instead of science and machines,

it’s eggs! Finally, various nuts, seeds, and beans can also be very high in amino acids, even though they aren’t animal products. ‘How is this at all possible? Logan, you said they only exist in animal muscles! Plants don’t have muscles; they can’t beat people up!’ This is true (although I have seen my friend lose a fight to a tree), but certain plants are very high in plant based proteins. These essential amino acids exist where protein does, not only muscle. Foods like quinoa, beans, and nuts (peanuts, walnuts, and macadamias) as well as edamame and legumes are all meat-free sources of protein that will also give you an amino acid boost to help eliminate as much of the soreness as possible. But, hopefully, if you worked out properly, will still hurt… but at least you know you accomplished something! There is one more white and powdery substance that will take you from zero to hero in the eyes of the opposite sex across the world and that is cocaine. I can’t condone cocaine so the next best white powder that still accomplishes that goal and that is creatine. I want to start this off with a little lesson in how creatine works and that is purely because I think there is a shroud of confusion around what creatine is and what kind to take and I would love to open you up to the lovely world of opportunity that is brought to you by creatine monohydrate. To fully understand creatine monohydrate properly, we must first understand the ATP cycle and its significance within the body so we are about to nerd out a little. ATP or in its full name, adenosine triphosphate, is what allows us to contract our muscles and lift weights! In order for our muscle to lift to a certain point of exertion (i.e. the heavier the object lifted), the more ATP must be expended. Much like when you drive a car fast or slow; what’s burning more gas! This process is the deployment of one of the phosphate molecules of the three that are found in ATP; turning the molecule into ADP (adenosine

DIphosphate). In response, the liver must wake it’s ass up and send creatine phosphate molecules to the location (the muscle that is lifting) where they are needed. The creatine pretty much acts as a bonding agent for phosphate and ADP molecules. Therefore, the purpose of taking creatine monohydrate is to allow your body to utilize water to increase the creatine phosphate potential in the muscle, increasing your ability to maximize your muscular potential. In our car example, it won’t necessarily make your engine bigger or go faster but you’d be putting nitro fluid in your gas tank (muscles being the engines). I hope that clears up some of the cloudiness and confusion surrounding creatine. My main goal in this section is to clear up a lot of the funky rumors that go on around taking creatine that I would love to debunk that I hope I was able to do! I have gotten some bizarre questions about taking creatine: “What are the side effects?” Well, other than being a little more athletic, NONE! “What happens if I take too much?!” Well much like your body works with pretty much everything else, it will dispose it as waste! (As long as you aren’t being dumb about it; obviously not going over the 5-10 g/day limit). Otherwise, if you go crazy, your liver won’t like you, but let’s be adults here. Your liver probably hasn’t been your ally since your freshman year of college! “Can I still claim Natural Status aka Steroid free?” (This one is the funniest to me) YEAH; you aren’t altering any hormone production or balances. Just eating more white powder, much like protein powder or pre workout! “Is it true that creatine monohydrate is one of the most clinically tested supplements on the market and has been taken by athletes for decades?” Yes! That is true! And I’ve also never been asked that question by one single human in my entire life. I had to ask it to myself in order to prove

my point for this book! But yes, it is true and is taken by athletes like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Christiano Ronaldo alike. Of course, I want to keep one thing proficiently clear; supplements are made to SUPPLEMENT a real and full diet. They provide additional of what is important but may have slipped through the cracks. They are not meant to be relied upon. This is my professional opinion: Protein should be the only supplement any one should start with as it is the most important. It is much more important to get a consistent and well adjusted diet established before adding anything to supplement it! So what, then, does that leave us with for a jumping off point? There really is quite a bit that must be considered when we are constructing a diet for ourselves! Our body is a temple and yada yada ya… I shall be skipping over all the “holier than thou” speak and get to what’s important to take away from this section. First, more important than ANYTHING else, the calories we are consuming! They must be less than our daily expenditure! Using the equation above or a calculator on google, we must have a baseline for what is too much and what is a deficit! As long as we know how many calories we burn in a day and we eat less than that, we will lose weight! Just as importantly, we must identify who we are eating for! Remember our talk about the mesomorphs, ectomorphs, and endomorphs? Who is the person we are feeding? If we are larger, fewer carbohydrates will be the staple of success in our nutrition. If we are skinny and wanting to increase muscle mass, our lifter will want to consume a lot more carbohydrates! Personally, I am a mesomorph and being in between the two, require a high protein diet! Once and only when we establish those two as the two integral pillars that support our new way of eating, we can being to incorporate supplements to increase performance in the gym and confidence with the

clothes off ;) Supplements have been made unnecessarily complex in recent years and can be very much simplified to identifying what is essential and necessary and what isn’t. By doing this, we don’t get pulled in to fat loss schemes or fancy ingredients or shiny bottles. Essentials can be boiled down as such: are we eating enough protein every day? Probably not and recovery is where the progress is made! Anything else, I would say is elective or could be deemed “unnecessary.” Although I mentioned supplements like BCAA’s and creatine are two that are very standard supplements that are often sold with protein powders and are often added together as ingredients to many preworkout powders in inadequate doses but can be extremely beneficial when taken together with protein supplements and all being done so with a calorie restricted and well rounded adjustment to our old diet! I want to include one little section that is exclusively dedicated to snacking SMART! Most humans on Earth love to snack and they are particularly important to address it with people who struggle with their weight! We must know how to snack properly so that we avoid to major pitfalls! The biggest part of our success depends on our diet and we must be able to know how to deal with temptations and how to curb them and satisfy them (intelligently). First, we must understand that our Gastrointestinal Tract has a bacterial biome that is responsible for the break down and absorption of nutrients. The foods we eat either feed or kill certain bacteria! Our mission on our diet is to keep a healthy gut biome by feeding good bacteria and allow the bad bacteria. The way we do that (obviously) is most predominantly to limit the amount of processed foods we eat. Read that again but replace “limit” with “replace”. If we truly are looking to transform ourselves, we have to find snacks that satisfy our cravings WITHOUT undermining our nutrition requirements! I will start with my personal favorite snack! Whenever I have a craving for

something sweet, which by the way, is BLOODY ALWAYS, I have the same snack almost every time. The healthiest and sweetest snack is fresh fruit in a cup of greek yogurt and 2 tablespoons of honey! Additionally, blueberries are RICH in antioxidants and natural sugar that are energizing and revitalizing! Greek yogurt is a probiotic snack which only means that it is fermented and contains healthy and happy little bacteria to improve digestive health and restore a healthy digestive biome. This will result in better nutrient absorption and a quickened metabolism and a happier camper (i.e. you). I also, personally, LOVE peanut butter. An amazing snack for before the gym to get you ready to be a beast in the gym is a peanut butter and honey sandwich! Peanut butter is loaded with healthy fats and honey is amazing at restoring glycogen levels! Glycogen is what our muscles will use as fuel in the gym, therefore, the better job we do at restoring glycogen, the better our muscles will perform in the gym! Imagine a car being given a certain kind of gas that makes it drive faster! For those still thinking, “Come on. Logan! I need something better than this!” There are plenty of snacks that we can have that will allow us to stay in our caloric requirements and won’t be horrible for our bodies! One sweet that I can always rely on to keep me satisfied is dark chocolate! We must remember to stay aware of our serving size but dark chocolate has many more benefits than milk chocolate does! First of all, antioxidants called flavanoids help support blood flow, particularly to the brain, and can help support improving memory and focus! While on the topic of probiotic and healthy snacks, we can’t ignore the healing powers of cottage cheese or avocados! Cottage cheese mixed with fruits, honey, or just plain, is a delicious snack that will give us energy and fuel our bodies and our brains to keep us feeling powerful mentally and physically throughout the day! Although, avocados are NOT probiotic, they are loaded with healthy fats that fuel our brain to help us stay focused and reduce inflammation; therefore, avocado toast is an ABSOLUTE GAME

CHANGER! It’s so delicious! What we must keep in mind is that is tasty and satisfying as all these snacks are, they are not quite as enticing as cheese chips or nachos or candy. They never will be because processed foods are literally engineered to be made as cheap and as addicting as possible. They are as addicting as they are unhealthy. So, even though you might be rolling your eyes at me thinking that none of these snacks or any other healthy variation of them might not seem super exiting, remember this: snacks made in a lab are made to be fab’ and snacks from nature will nurture your future.

ONE LAST THING TO REMEMBER: I mentioned knowing your body type earlier but it is important to know your mental type, as well! In my opinion, perfection is for nerds and athletes! If we are trying to live a healthier life and be in good shape (not great shape/model status), we don’t need to have everything perfect in order to be good and be better! I might get a lot of back lash for that but let me explain… I don’t want anyone to be scared away by the amount of thinking that goes in to cleaning up a diet. I feel like many people believe that most people live on the two extremes of nutrition; either it’s a free-for-all or its meal prep in tubs. I want to make it clear that all the Tupperware can be used on an asneeded basis. I used to HATE measuring all my chicken and rice and vegetables out to the milligram and packaging them all up in these shipping crates of Tupperware and doing it week in and week out for months drove me insane. Therefore, if we are not in a competition or getting paid to be at peak physical ability, everything can be “rounded.” Servings, as long as they are within a reasonable amount in relation to your calorie count. Quality over quantity is a serious consideration for our nutrition adjustment! We are better off eating too much chicken and green beans than any junk food at all! On that principle alone, I do not

count my calories much like I don’t count my protein or carbohydrates. However, I am always very conscious of my daily requirements and am always very aware of the calorie values of what I eat. Here is what I mean by “knowing your mental type”: Much like me, we all have one common weakness when trying to lose weight or be healthier. I share the obsession with food many of us have! Therefore, when I chose to get my diet dialed in and really get lean and muscular physique, I must be dialed in. Doing this is much more of a mental component for me than it is physical. I said it once and I’ll say it again, Perfect is for Nerds! Using scales and perfectly weighing and measurements are for NERDS! I am a nerd. Many of you are nerds. Many of you will experience being a nerd (hopefully after this book!) A nerd is someone who Needs Everything Really Dialed. I have NO discipline with junk food. If I want to clean up my diet, it must be all or nothing. If I’m having a slice a pizza, it’s followed by 7 more, for sure. Which is why when everything is “dialed,” it allows me to control my cravings by forcing my appetite to solely consist of foods that fit in my current macronutrient requirements! It is much more difficult initially but is easier to keep consistent for longer term goals, in my opinion. Knowing yourself in this context will be the difference between you succeeding and failing, I promise! Most of us have an inner voice that usually stops us before we eat something that we know we shouldn’t or about to do something we know is wrong. My challenge to all of you reading this is to start to take that voice more seriously! That is usually the voice that is retaining all of THIS information and will likely know what is best. Your “animal” brain will tell you to go out to eat or to have sweets when you know you shouldn’t! Your angel on your shoulder, so to speak, will likely try to convince you to do something you know is the proper and healthier option. Everyone will hit a point that they feel it’s no longer appealing to be someone who allows themselves to suffer at the expense of their own fork and knife and it will only be at that point that we begin to

take our shoulder angel more seriously. Now some people have a healthy balance and respect for sweets and “non-sense food” and those people may be allowed to sneak bits here and there. Having the foods we seem to enjoy so much, the fried, cheesy, butter, sugary, or whatever cranks your handle, in moderation is okay! Let’s define moderation, real quick: SOMETIMES! Moderation does not mean that you can do it once a day. Moderation is not even every other day. Moderation is not even a few times a week. Moderation can be once a week or less. Yes, getting take out only one time in a 7 day period sounds about as appealing as un-bending a paper clip and sticking it underneath your big toe. You’re welcome for that visual, if you are a visual person. The point being that I know it’s a pain in the ass to have to prepare all of your food and I know it isn’t always super convenient but it must be an investment. This book was your financial investment. Now we must provide the real world application; the real investment.

CHAPTER V The Snap Back to Reality Ope, there goes gravit… ya know what, I don’t know how much of that I’m going to get away with so let’s just get to the nitty gritty, eh? I’ve given you all the necessary information that I can muster from my brain of years of teaching, training, working, reading, watching, listening, and within the confines of these words, there exists every bit of information to realize a goal that has lain dormant in your brain since college (some of us, even high school). We, together, have awakened a beast that has become unleashed and his potential is bound by no one but himself. That beast is that burning and uneasy feeling you get when you feel the power of your own potential and what you are able to accomplish when you have actively suffered for something and reaped its rewards. The beast that wants to accomplish this mighty task is the same one that will drive you when you hurt and will remind you when you lie to yourself or those around you of what it is your doing, why you’re doing it, and who will hurt the worst if I am to fail. The beast feeds on sacrifice and the more you GIVE UP (i.e. junk food) and the more you DO (exercise) and the more all of that SUCKS, the stronger the beast gets within you… so without further adieu, let’s find out how to tame that damn beast. I want to spend this final section covering adequately what everything looks like that I have covered but in a daily routine! There was a lot of information dumped in a short amount of pages and it can be difficult to

extract what is actually important and what takeaways can be applicable and how. Y’all can be like my lost boys and I’ll be your Peter Pan. Your sister can be my Wendy. I’m just kidding; I don’t even know if you have a sister. Don’t be a Captain Hook! JOKES! K, no more screwing around! All the information in this book means bupkis if we don’t know how to function with a newly redesigned and higher functioning lifestyle. I will be honest, it will be a very challenging and trying experience when making these changes but it is something we MUST DO! Here’s the way that I look at it; we realistically have literally only three options. We can read this book and change nothing and always wish and aspire to being healthier and sexier but always sit on the potential by procrastinating or by being afraid of judgment by our peers. Either way, life doesn’t care which excuse you pick. Time will continue to march onward whether we do our workouts and follow our routines or not. Without the courage to just begin and start to fight our daily battles our momentum will increase. Day after day and week after week, we must stay focused because the longer we stay on path; the harder it becomes to fail. There are a bunch of smart people that say that it takes one full year to create a habit that will stick with you for a lifetime. Good, bad, or indifferent, we must be aware of our actions today, that way, we can reap the benefits of weight lost and confidence gained and it will feel soooooo good. We have to choose one of the three options, there is physically nothing else; one is a complete 180 degree change of behaviors and habits which puts us on the FAST TRACK to being fit! The other of our two options is to “half-ass” it and hoping like hell we see some results. Our final option is to read this book and become uninspired at how simple the process is and do absolutely nothing. That last one is my biggest pet peeve as a personal trainer. A majority of the people that I had the pleasure of meeting as a trainer DID NOT buy personal training… these are simply stats. They have an altered perception of what it takes. Many people I would visit with that

would decline personal training would insist on “doing it themselves” and end up failing due to lack of discipline or knowledge. It is very easy to get discouraged when you stop seeing results or even not see any gains to begin with! POP QUIZ! How much of your fitness success comes from the gym and how much of is the kitchen/diet? 60/40? 70/30? 80/20? 90/10?! None of the above! A common principle of thought in fitness is that your success in losing weight is 80% diet and nutrition and only 20% what you do in the gym. I disagree. I believe that many people that adopt this idea are severely under playing how important your caloric expenditure is. Caloric expenditure is 100% of your success. I am by no means trying to undermine the diet because the whole idea of that 80/20 concept is to emphasize the importance of diet. It definitely over emphasizes diet, though, and underemphasizes the physical work is required to truly be in better physical condition. PSA: TO BE IN BETTER PHYSICAL CONDITION, YOU MUST PHYSICALLY ENDURE THE THINGS THAT WILL CHANGE YOU! The whole idea of being healthier is to improve the physical condition of your body! Improve the health of your heart by conditioning your blood to utilize oxygen more efficiently and strengthen your heart to pump more blood through cleaner arteries to muscles that are capable of correcting posture and keeping your skeletal system appropriately supported, which is the function of muscles to begin with! The only way we are going to be able to achieve this standard is to execute the movements and activities that force our body to adapt, change, and IMPROVE! Not to mention (again) that the more muscle we have, the more our metabolism will help us in burning body fat and carbohydrate and caloric expenditure and as we know, the better we are able to burn calories and carbohydrates, the more weight we are able to lose. As long as we are filling our body with the proper fuel (i.e. meeting macronutrient targets) I would say that diet and gym are NOT 80/20 respectively, but more appropriately, 50/50 because we cannot commit entirely to one or the other because we know

if we do so, one or the other will be neglected and will inherently end with us being frustrated and wanting to quit! With that being said, I have found it better to start by establishing a sufficient diet! The reason being that when you are properly fed, you will begin to feel better, almost immediately! Most of the garbage we fill our body with leaves us feeling bloated, unmotivated, and drained. This will result in allowing ourselves to cut corners and becoming complacent with our gym routine! Therefore, we want to start with a strong foundation. Creating a good dietary foundation must start with our caloric expenditure. How many calories in a day are we burning? For all intents and purposes, we will say 2,000 calories a day. The most important part of your caloric deficit is the amount of deficit you want to commit to. When deciding this, keep in mind our goal to build a foundation of muscle. The amount of muscle we pack on to our frame will be directly correlated to our body composition. The more calories we eat (with the appropriate amount of protein), the more muscle we can build. On the contrary, the larger the deficit we eat and the fewer calories we eat, the quicker we will lose body fat! In my professional opinion, I like to insist upon a deficit of 80-90% of our maintenance caloric intake. In other words, assuming our daily caloric burn is 2,000 calories; our goal would be 1,600 to 1,800 which will allow us to lose about a pound a week consistently. Before we get discouraged and realize how “appealing” it is to begin to starve ourselves in order to speed up the process, we must remember this method is what will allow us to keep our body healthy! Not eating is just as unhealthy as eating unhealthy foods. Your internal organs, more specifically, your liver and kidneys, work to keep your body clean and healthy. Just like a natural filter, any boozing you do or sugary foods you eat must be filtered through such organs and can easily cause issues. This can result in hormonal imbalances and slow metabolisms. Side Tip: Intermittent Fasting is a powerful weight loss method that has been popularized within the past decade! There are a few variations of

feeding patterns people will follow. Feeding patterns are only referring to when to NOT eat and when we want to break our fast. Being in a fasted state allows our body to function without the consumption of carbohydrates or calories. This forces our body to utilize its natural reservoir of stored energy (body fat!). Some typical dietary fasting patters are something like 18 hours of fasting with a 6 hour eating window which is a more aggressive than this next one. Others follow 16 hours fasted and eat for 8 hours or even 14 and 10. If you are a person who is successful with structure and precision, this might be the way to go! For me personally, I prefer to keep my fasting as simple as I possibly can! I have a pretty consistent daily routine, much like I assume many of my readers do! However, my system works whether your daily routine is consistent or sporadic! I will not eat a single calorie for the first waking hours of my day. No matter if I wake up at 5 am or noon, my first eight hours of my day will consist of black coffee and a lot of water. This allows me to keep control of my appetite and eviscerate body fat as well as keep great control of my blood sugar and wake up attentive and focused! ANYWAY, now that we have established our caloric limit, we know what we are going to eat when we break our fast, and we know when to eat it! As long as we can stick to this regimen for two or three weeks, it will begin to solidify as routine and begin to become habit and the longer we can sustain this, the more momentum we will pick up and the less we will want to cheat (on the gym or our diet). There is a point we will reach, that is different for everyone, where our old shitty diet will slowly become less and less appealing and sustaining a steady diet will become more and more sustainable with less effort! Especially once we start reaping the fruits of our labor and get to visually enjoy the results! With that established, the food is only one part of our journey; we must not neglect the importance of our physical condition. Good food makes for great fuel but like a race car in a pit stop, we must fuel up with expectations to use it and win!

For most people, finding a gym is about as appealing as filing their taxes or even going to the DMV. I bet most people would rather go to the DMV than a gym! I must urge you to stare the devil in the face, tell him suck nuts, and face your fear because that’s who you are now! We are no longer someone who will shy away from a challenge no matter how uncomforting or nerve racking! I share very little sympathy for those unwilling to take that brave first step to embark on this new and necessary journey. Unless you’re like Dwayne Johnson and are able to just buy your own home fitness facility, which, not to sell y’all short, but highly doubtful. You will have to invest in a monthly membership to a fitness facility or gym. “But Loooooogan, I don’t want to pay for a monthly membership!” Well we have only one other option. Go to every location of any gym in your living area and ask for free trials and use the free trial until it expires and move to the next location. Sounds like a lot of work, huh. Well, that’s also illegal, I think, probably. Don’t be afraid, however, to do a little bargain hunting! Most gyms have a basic set of equipment that will allow us to do all of our movements. It is simply a matter of finding a gym that fits our budget. Shit, even Planet Fitness is only $10 a month! Those close to me will know that I could go on and on and on and on about how Planet Fitness fosters an environment of mediocrity and is probably the worst gym ever but it is a nice gym for those of us who are very shy and hesitant to enter a gym for maybe the first time ever! Really, don’t be afraid of anything in the gym! The people that you think are judging you are really much MUCH more focused on themselves and will not pay attention to anyone but themselves. As for anyone who does dare to judge you, keep this simple fact in mind. **Explicit Warning** the reality of it all is if someone does judge you, FUCK THAT PERSON! They are a hater and they are a dick and you have zero reason to want to impress them or even like them and shouldn’t tolerate such dumb ass behavior because you are not here for them. You are not even here for your friends who you DO like.

You are here for YOU and YOU alone and we must never forget that you are doing yourself a favor by making yourself better every day! Now that we know what we are eating, we know when we are eating; we know where we are lifting… what’s left? When do we work out?! The excuse I get more than ANYTHING shouldn’t surprise you. Mainly because I just said it; “I don’t have enough time in the day to do EVERYTHING!” Therefore, more often than not, television and video games take priority over utilizing our brand new gym membership! The hell, dude?! You would never see a football player run up to an end zone and just sit down! Except that ONE time but that was only ONCE! You would never see a race car driver smash the brakes right before the checkered flag! We have done our grocery shopping and planned out our meals. We have also financially committed to a gym membership! Why in the hell would we bail now?! I see it happen literally all the damn time and it makes me want to pull my hair out. The sheer irrational and illogical thoughts that have to be accompanied with these actions can only mean one thing. You have to learn to control your “bitch voice.” I want you to know that I use that term as endearing as possible but I also have been around long enough to keep things as real as possible and I call it like it see it. The only thing that can bring you this close to finally being in shape and going to the gym only to bail out at the last second can only be due to the same part of your brain that put us in this situation in the first place and is what allowed us to slip so far into a seemingly impossible return. The “bitch voice” is what gained us the weight or put us out of shape in the first place and I love you all with all my heart but stop listening to the “bitch voice.” It is that same voice in your head that tells you that you can afford to eat that junk food or that you can afford to skip the gym today. It is that same voice in your head that will make you weaker and weaker if you let it. Aaah and thus the key words are revealed; “if you let it.” Let me explain; everyone on planet earth, from you and I to Jeff Bezos or Tom Brady. We all have the “bitch voice.” Where the contrast really comes in to play is that

the people like Bezos and Brady is that they don’t let their “bitch voice” dictate any part of their behavior. It’s not like it’s any less talkative, so to speak. These titans of industry; these men among boys, simply have mastered their ability to tell that “bitch voice” to shut the hell up and they dictate their own days. They are men who dictate their own behavior. They are men who, because they have developed this skill, dictate their own success. This is why they are such notorious winners. This is also why YOU are also a notorious winner, because you’re about to tell that “bitch voice” to kick sand and get out because it doesn’t determine your success and it doesn’t determine your worth. Something that will determine your worth is yourself and the better you feel about yourself, the more confident you will be and the happier you and the people around you will become! It’s having a nice Double D. Now all you perverts out there can slow your roll because I am not referring to Kim Kardashian’s botched water balloons jammed in to her rib cage. I am referring to Discipline and Dedication. Discipline is an inner conflict every single day. You know what you should do every day and you also know what you shouldn’t do every day. So if we know what’s right and wrong, why do we find ourselves doing the wrong things all the time! The answer is dopamine. In all reality, our brains are fairly stupid. It is capable of amazing things, yet, is easily tricked, duped, and fooled. It works much like a computer’s programs with 1s and 0s. In this example, 1s mean pleasure; anything that releases dopamine. Things like eating junk food, playing video games, and watching dirty internet videos. Those are all what are referred to as “false hits.” See, the reason why dopamine is released in the body is because, typically speaking, is to reward ourselves with a sense of accomplishment. Having done something challenging, productive, or enjoyable, the brain is flooded with 1s to make us feel good. With that being said, the reason why we don’t want to do the things we know we should do is because our dumb animal brain is tricked in to NOT

wanting to do those things. Because of the excessive amounts of false hits, our brain learns that it is not hard to find those dopamine hits. That is all your animal brain wants; as much dopamine as possible. Your animal brain doesn’t care if that comes from eating shitty food or playing with your doodad. It is because of this, we must limit ourselves to the amount of false hits we receive! We must limit the video games. We must limit the crap food we eat (duh, for infinite reasons), and we must limit our lonely naughty times. We must teach our brain discipline. I cannot stress enough how important it is to take back control of your mind and body. The more we do this, the more we will begin to enjoy everything we used to enjoy but grew numb to. We can enjoy things like reading, going on walks, and learning new things, as well as working out. It is all due to the fact that the brain will stop craving things that it knows we won’t allow it to cave to. That is, of course, if we really are dedicated. Something that I STRONGLY recommend is meditation. Now, before you start thinking that ol’ Logan is preaching hippy prayer circle kumbaya crap, hear me out! A lot of people that struggle with maintaining a healthy weight have one thing in common; using food as a coping mechanism. When we get stressed or scared, we look to food to comfort us. That is completely normal. It is actually so normal that EVERY HUMAN ON EARTH will do it at one point or another, but a giant chunk of us do it every single day and it must stop. So the way that I usually go about fixing this is by finding out what the problem is at its source. We must find out what our triggers are and address them, which is what meditation is all about! Many times throughout the day we have thoughts that provoke certain actions and we don’t even notice because we often suppress thoughts that we don’t want to address! Meditation is all about having those thoughts come to you and when we

have them, looking at them objectively! I always say, meditation is all about being okay with doing nothing. With that being said, we must look at ourselves judgment free and see what parts of our lives provoke us to look to food as a crutch! We then have two options! The first of the two options is to avoid or cut out the things that trigger us to find food! This is mostly affective to the stimulus if it is toxic. Things like toxic relationships, poor working environments, or daily stressful situations, if they are avoidable. In the event that they are not characterized by that category, they will fall in to the second, which are confrontational stimuli. These are ones we cannot/ really shouldn’t cut out. These could be stress from our children or family or (depending on the career) could also be work related. It is important to know which kind of trigger we are dealing with and make sure we are able to address it. We must understand WHY it is that we are feeling stressed and we must understand WHY we want to use food to soften the impact of a heavy day. The primary reason, scientifically speaking, is the instant gratification we get. It is a very easy dose of dopamine that alleviates much of the days stress and makes it feel all better. In all reality, all it is really doing is deflecting and redirecting our issues from one unavoidable stimulus to another completely avoidable one. Since we are typically able to care less about our health than we are our finances or family, it is a seemingly easy choice. What meditation will have a tendency to do for us is allow us to look at things a bit more objectively. Instead of having certain thoughts and immediately letting them pass, we can now have them and “chew on them a little” so to speak. We can have thoughts that provoke feelings that cause decisions we make and finally understand them a little more by trying to understand them and ourselves a little bit better! It is an exercise that can be done very simply but will take plenty of time to become good at! Don’t get too frustrated if the inaugural session is a

bit bumpy. Simply find a place to get comfortable, sitting or lying down, it is not important, whichever you prefer! All we will do is close our eyes with no distractions and allow ourselves to be at rest and be peaceful for 10 minutes a day, allowing thoughts to come and go as they wish, not forcing anything. The energy in your body and the thoughts in your mind will flow much like a stream across a meadow. It will feel a little bit more like water pumping down a waterslide at first but the more we persist, the more affective we will be in our practice. It is doing a practice like this daily that will help temptations and poor habits begin to subside over time. We know better when we act out but this will help us do better and be better as long as your faith in the practice works! I don’t want you sitting there and have one of your constant thoughts be, “this feels like a load of crap.” Those thoughts will become ingrained and we will not see the change we are looking for! Allow yourself the opportunity to use this down time productively and genuinely try to fix mental hiccups that we continuously find ourselves hung up on! Dedication and commitment to a task is clearly important. I don’t have to tell any of you that because that’s pretty obvious. I just want it to be on your radar every second of every day. Temptations will be around every corner and will be a struggle with every step. This is not news to anyone. We, as human beings, know every one of our own personal imperfections. Even the ones no one else knows. Dedication, in my own definition, is the commitment to a task or challenge, regardless of external conditions; i.e. I don’t give a rat’s fuzzy little ass if it’s raining or shining, if you are tired one day or excited the next. I don’t care if your out-of-shape friends tease you for eating healthier or if you feel alone on this journey, because you aren’t. There are plenty of others feeling the exact same way. Guess what; there are two kinds of people that come out of the other side of the drama and bull shit. One person will be 50 lbs lighter and feel better than they ever have before in their LIFE! The other will have given up because their

friends talked them out of it and took the easier path because… well… it was easier. They gave up. They gave up on pride. They gave up on feeling accomplished. They gave up themselves. The result of such is that they will be another one of their dumb ass “friends.” They became another lowly stupid hater. They were feeling sorry for themselves because they couldn’t hack it! This results in feeling like shit for long periods of time, low self-esteem, and zero confidence. Even though, all the information is right here! The previous 50 pages have LITERALLY ALL THE INFORMATION YOU NEED! Someone with that kind of knowledge gives up because it was a little too hard. They are now the people who will talk all kind of shit about those who will try after them. “Good luck, bro. You’re gonna need it” “It’s way too hard, dude. You’ll never get down to that weight.” “If I couldn’t do it, there’s no way you can do it.” Or worst of all, “You’ve changed, man. You used to be fun.” Yeah, if you need 30 beers a week to be fun, you probably just aren’t as fun as you think you are. My point is, no one likes this person who is constantly negging and dragging people down just because their faith in themselves has dwindled. Don’t let yourself become this person. All it takes is the dedication to see this thing through and be willing to put in the work. This is pretty cliché but it is for a reason; you get out of this what you put in to it. I promise you if you take my word on this and have some faith in yourself, you can’t be disappointed. Let’s address something for those of you who might already be a little jaded. I’m assuming there are some of you who I convinced to give me a try who have already tried to lose weight. You might already be a Negative Nancy and have pretty strong emotions about me calling you a hater earlier (my bad). Here’s the good news, this is a very easily reversible process! You don’t have to live the rest of your life in resentment and

bitterness at the fact that being healthy is something that is challenging and can be very hard! There SHOULD be a chip on your shoulder! You let yourself lose! That is perfect. You have something to prove. The only person you need to prove it to being yourself and no one else. With this book’s knowledge under your belt, you finally have all the tools to finally be successful and make yourself the version of yourself you’ve always wanted! Regardless of any past attempts or outlooks, this is the time. This time is different. This time we must acknowledge the reality of our situation! We, realistically, have two options! We can fix ourselves now in this current moment and opportunity we are currently looking at. Regardless of if we are 20, 30, or 50, we must know that we are unable to change our past which has put us in the present condition and all we can do is fix our future. Our present may not be what we like to see or feel but understand that our choices of the present is what affects our future so that when our future is now our present, what we do today, tomorrow, and next week, will dictate which present we like better. This one we are in now where we WISHED we had changed or the one where we already did change and can feel a million times better. The choice is literally as easy as saying yes I commit or nope not for me it’s too hard. This time must be different because the older we get, the more fragile we are and the more shit goes wrong. Just like a car needs oil changes and regular maintenance, so do you. Except your body needs one every day and every day that we don’t do ANY form of maintenance, your body is opening a window of opportunity for something bad to happen in the future. Mainly, I want the takeaway to be that if you never start, you will never get better. I don’t want it to feel like I get all “best version of you” and preachy (even though if you don’t want to be that person, no judgment but you only say that because being the best will take a lot of work and

that’s scary). Inversely, though, if the “best” version of you is one that has constant arthritic pain and are in a constant battle with achiness in the joints? If you are content with always being lethargic and tired? If you think your peak in like is having your belly hanging over your pants and haven’t seen your belt since 2010 and you’re okay with that? Then, this is not the book for you because this will be the book for the ones who are sick and tired of settling for that standard and want to raise their standard and feel amazing for a change. This time, I’m betting on you! This time, we can’t quit. This time, you, as the reader of this book, are now FULLY equipped with all the necessary information you need to succeed. There is one last thing I want to instill in you as a reader that is potentially the MOST IMPORTANT factor and that is patience. When I hear the words “be patient,” you might as well tell me to run off a cliff. I am about as patient as a white wick black cat fire cracker (if you’re from the Midwest like I am, you know) but for those of you that don’t, white wicks burn off and pop REAL effin’ quick. Patient is a borderline bad word so I know most of you will be looking for those results tomorrow. Some of you will get discouraged because you will have certain expectations for how much you want to weight next week. When next week comes and you aren’t where you want to be, I will suggest two things. 1. Work a LITTLE harder! I understand the frustration of not being where you want to be after all the hard work that has been invested. If you are frustrated after a certain amount of time and haven’t seen what you want to see yet, push yourself across that line of what you think you are capable of. Push yourself across that threshold of pain and do just a LITTLE bit more every time you go to the gym! I promise you that all stress and anxiety from this can be resolved with

execution. You will only feel bad if you feel like you are leaving “chips on the table” so to speak. If you think you have a little bit more effort to give, you will feel guilty or ashamed that you aren’t winning! Those feelings will fester and externalize as feelings of frustration and wanting to quit. If (more accurately when) this happens, because we will all experience this, we must draw our line of potential and know what we are truly capable of so we know when we need to bear down and really squeeze out every ounce of effort. Once we do that and truly drain ourselves of everything we have, that is when we will feel more confident, regardless of the scale because the numbers will come with time. Being able to bring yourself to your limit week after week will build a foundation of character so strong, you won’t be able to recognize yourself, and neither will others. I promise.

2. Falling in love with the process