Image Credit: Gio Foto
I hate the basics.
It doesn’t matter what it is, we simply don’t want basic things in life. Nobody wants to go out and buy a basic car if they could afford something nicer. We don’t like to have basic computers or basic cameras either… we want the fast computers or the cameras will all the hi-tech features.
There’s nothing wrong with wanting more than the basics. We don’t want to live basic lives, we don’t want to buy things that are the bare-bones basics, and we naturally want something more than a basic workout that gives basic results.
In addition, no matter how important it can be to learn the basics rules about whatever you are doing, learning the basics can be a real pain.
I remember taking a basic golf course in college. The teacher made us learn the basics of each golf swing by having us practice every day without a golf club in our hands. I became so frustrated by pretending to play golf each day that I wish I had a real club just so I could smash something with it.
Everybody in my golf class felt that way. We all wanted to learn how to play golf, and just sitting around all day looking at the most basic movements was a real frustration. It’s the same thing with anything we pursue; we naturally want to move beyond the basic level as quickly as possible.
Going to the gym isn’t much different either. You don’t want to have a basic body — you want an amazing body, right? So why would you do the basic exercises if having a basic body isn’t what you want?
That’s why I don’t like using the word “basic” to describe the most useful exercises… it’s very misleading.
The Accelerated Course
It’s just too easy to get caught up in all the details of what we’re trying to do in life. We often waste our time doing all the little things when there’s something big that needs to be done first.
It’s like trying to sweep the floor in your house when there’s a big elephant in the living room that won’t stop crapping on the floor. Take care of the big things first, and then the small details will be easy.
I get the feeling that a lot of us are doing the same thing in the gym. We’re trying to focus on the little details of our workouts like putting some little line on our biceps or a little “cut” in our shoulders. These types of exercises do have their place, but focusing on the details doesn’t get you very far in the beginning.
So why not take the accelerated course when you’re in the gym? You’ll get where you’re trying to go much faster, and you’ll even pick up a lot of the details along the way.
The strange thing is, everybody is calling the best exercises the “basics”. They are the exercises that work the most muscle groups together, and they are usually the most difficult to do. Don’t be fooled though, because these exercises also are the most rewarding.
But maybe we really need to get away from calling these the basics, since nobody wants to have a basic body. Some people will call these exercise “compound movements”, which actually sounds better to me (click here to see which exercises are “basic” or compound movements).
After all, compound interest is a really good thing when you make an investment, but then again, you can get a compound headache and compound stress in your life.
So I thought long and hard about a better name for these movements. I’m looking for a name that truly expresses how important these compound movements are in our workouts – so at length I finally decided that I will now call them Your-Workouts-Will-Always-Suck-Without-These (YWWASWT) exercises.
Darrin lists the specific exercises and calls them The Big 7.
Sure, there might be some situations where you can get a decent workout without the YWWASWT exercises, but this name helps people to understand the importance of these types of exercises.
And so going forward, I’ll refer to these exercises in this way. It helps beginners to understand how important they are instead of just calling them the “basics”. YWWASWT exercises will work many muscle groups together, and by doing these exercises that are so tough to do, you’re actually taking the accelerated path to obtaining your goals. Besides, if it isn’t difficult at first, it’s probably not that great for you anyways.
So stop trying to sweep up little bits of elephant crap — take the accelerated course and get yourself a better workout. And remember: YWWASWT!
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This post is part 2 of a 2 part series. In part 1, Starvation is Not the Answer, we talked about how under eating can slow down your metabolism and make you fatter.
Here’s a piece of information that some of you will be glad to hear – Eating enough food each day will help you to keep fat off of your body. You are going to have to forget the idea that cutting fat comes from just eating less food; it’s simply not the truth.
This is the part that is hard for many people to accept when you are trying to cut some fat. Switching to smaller and more frequent meals throughout the day will actually cause your metabolism to stabilize.
You might be eating more food overall throughout the day, but eating even amounts of food throughout the day will help you to keep your metabolism higher. The key will be to make the following things happen:
1. Feed your body: Like we discussed before, the amount of food you give your body will affect your metabolism. If you don’t want your body to go into survival mode and save all the fat on your body, don’t starve it.
Sometimes we think we are so clever.
We think we can just fool our bodies into looking the way we want it to. It’s funny what people are willing to try just so that they can lose fat without having to exercise.
This is the lazy way to try to lose weight, and it doesn’t work for very long. Whether you’re trying to lose a lot of fat or just remove that stubborn bit of fat on your gut, you’d better read closely, because the same rules will apply.
Contrary to what you might be thinking, people don’t always become overweight simply because they are overeating – there’s more to the story than that. I remember feeling so surprised when I once talked to an overweight person who told me he never eats breakfast, and then only eats a small salad for lunch.
I remember thinking “Sheesh, I really feel bad for this guy. His genetics must be terribly unfair to him”. But then I started to notice that this was a common theme among many overweight people.
Yes, fat can be gained by overeating huge amounts of food all the time, but it can also be gained by eating less food and slowing your metabolism down. I’ll explain what this means.
It’s Not That Simple
Let me start off by saying that how much fat you have on your body is not simple math. If you keep your energy expenditure constant but you lower your calories, you’ll lose weight. So it seems that if you lowered your calories even more, you would lose even more weight… it’s simple math, right?
Well, actually it’s not simple math. Your body doesn’t know the rules of your little calorie calculations, and frankly, it doesn’t really want to follow them either. Your body worries about survival first, and when you don’t give it enough food, your body does what will help it to survive — it saves what you eat as fat.
This is because humans haven’t always lived in a world where food was so abundant. The human species has had to endure a world where food may or may not come on any given day… or even week for that matter.
If weight loss really were simple math, and people could really burn 10 pounds of fat every week forever, then humans wouldn’t have been able to survive the hunting and gathering days of our past. They would have all starved to death long ago.
Fortunately for them (and unfortunately for us), our bodies are smart enough to adapt to the amounts of food we give them. When we eat less food, our metabolism slows down so that we can survive off of less food.
So let’s take a look at what happens to us when we severely cut our calorie intake to lose fat:
1. Loss of fat, muscle, and water: This is the part of most diets that gets all the attention. You start your diet and you lose a whopping (more…)
This article is a special guest post written by RT from Real Muscle Online. When you start to learn about bodybuilding and weight lifting you also start to hear a lot of myths. People will tell you all sorts of thing to either make themselves sound expert or to try to sell you something. So for (more…)
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