Should Women Lift Like Men – Muscle Tone Myth

Part 2 of 4

If you missed Part 1, click here.

Muscle Tone is somewhat of a myth - lift heavy, eat right to build muscle and lose fat

The Myth Of Muscle Tone

Most women will say they want to

1. Lose weight, and
2. Improve muscle tone

Notice that these are not in the Ultimate Fitness Goals (UFG) list!  Why not?

Because you don’t want to lose weight.  You want to shed fat.  You could lose weight by losing muscle.  Or by cutting off your left arm.  What you really want is less fat.

And there is no such thing as “muscle tone”.  There’s muscle size and there’s the amount of fat surrounding it.  Those two qualities are the only things you control to give birth to the visual impact of your body that some people call “definition”.  (There’s also the genetic traits you have for body shape, bone-length & width, muscle insertion points, body part proportions, etc. but you don’t control those.)

Super-High Reps?  No

The muscle tone myth leads to the misguided workouts of super high repetitions.  You know, going for (more…)

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Last week we talked about basic linear periodization.  But over the past decade, several studies have shown the high value of a different form of periodization:  undulating periodization.

For example, see this.

But it’s interesting to note that comparisons of different periodization models for beginners does NOT show undulating periodization to be superior.  (See this.)

I’ve seen evidence of this myself, so I suggest linear periodization for beginners, and even intermediates.

For more advanced lifters, undulating periodicity is quite valuable.  But you have to do it right.

Undulating Periodization

One of the reasons you might not have ever done undulating periodization – or even heard of it – is that it’s much more complicated to do (not to mention hard to pronounce!).  Some people also call in “nonlinear periodization” but undulating is more accurate.

To save on the typing, I’m going to use UP as the abbreviation.

If you are not keeping a training log, forget about UP.  There’s no way you can keep track of it all in your head week after week.

The basic idea with undulating periodicity is that you switch among strength-hypertrophy-conditioning regimens much more frequently than in linear periodization.

Weekly vs. Daily Undulating Periodization

The original studies of UP were weekly.  Meaning, you’d do a week of low-load, high rep lifts, then a week of medium load, medium rep lifts, then a week of high load, low rep lifts.  Let’s call that WUP.

But when I mentioned earlier that UP is a relatively recent development in the history of resistance training, I was referring to the daily variation (DUP) – here you are changing the protocol within each week.

And since then, when most people talk about UP, they mean DUP.

An example of DUP for someone on a full-body routine lifting M, W and F is (more…)

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By now you’ve probably heard more times than you can count, that to keep progressing with your fitness, you can’t just keep doing the same thing week after week, month after month, year after year.  Your body adapts and thus needs different stimuli to change.

You could randomly change your workout every time you enter the gym.  Of course, you also could spend the day eating ice cream and watching reality TV.  Is it easier than planning your workouts?  Yeah. Is it smart?  No.

What you want is a systematized way of changing your workouts, that helps you progress as fast as safely possible and is still fun.

The term for this is “periodization“.

I’ve previously alluded to an upcoming routine I’ll be talking about (currently calling it the “PPL Workout”) which inherently includes a form of periodization.  But it’s not ready yet.  So today I’ll describe periodization and then tell you how you can apply it using my 6x6x6 Routine (since that’s the routine most of you have already purchased).

There are many ways to periodize your workouts.  For running, we’ll do a separate article but for today I want to talk about lifting.

Aspects To Periodize

The word “period” means “over time”.  So periodization is how you change your workouts over time in order to keep progressing.

For beginners, that time frame is usually 1 to 3 months – you don’t need to change your program more frequently than that.

As you get more experienced, you might need to change every month or so.

But what do you change? (more…)

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I continually have discussions online and offline about what the perfect size for a guy is, in terms of muscle mass.  Is the goal to be like Arnold?  Or to be really lean but having a nice layer of muscle?  Something in between?

Of course, it’s going to vary by individual tastes.

And I suspect that in general, guys will say other men look best with more muscle mass than women would say.

I also occasionally catch flack from some reader because I personally am not huge – of course, that’s fine by me.  Getting huge is NOT my goal!  [By the way, this might be a good time for you to review the WFN Vision.]

So let’s make this a fun post today.  I want you to vote for one of 4 pictures below.  You vote by simply posting a comment here (it’s really easy – if you’ve never posted a comment before, don’t be intimidated – it takes 20 seconds).  Just add a comment with your vote, and your own gender – I want to see if women rate the pictures differently than the men.  If you want to add other comments, that’s fine but keep it pretty short.

Oh, and I’ve intentionally chosen pictures of guys that are pretty lean, but not unrealistically so.  I want these pictures to be within the realm of possibility for just about any guy reading this site.  All these guys are in the 8 to 10 % bodyfat (so, not competitive bodybuilders by modern standards).  But of course, given our focus on the site, they all have great muscular development.  And do NOT vote based on how handsome the guy is – we’re talking about the ideal muscle mass, not what his face looks like…

Ready?  Here are the four: (more…)

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I know how much you all love Tom Venuto’s articles so this is a fun one!  Now, don’t feel bad if you discover that YOU are making some bonehead mistakes!  Just take it as a learning lesson…

By Tom Venuto, NSCA-CPT, CSCS
www.burnthefat.com

“Common workout mistakes” has always been a very popular topic in fitness publications. But no matter how many times this subject is re-hashed, you almost always hear about the same half a dozen or so mistakes, including poor form, overtraining, going too heavy, not stretching, not warming up, yadda, yadda yadda. Ironically, you seldom hear about the biggest mistakes of all. I call these humongous bloopers “bonehead mistakes” because once you start to analyze and think about them, they’re really just common sense and they all seem so obvious… except of course to the person doing it… who is often quite oblivious until someone else points it out to them… then the light goes on and it’s like… “Doh!”

Before I begin the countdown, (in no particular order), there’s one more gripe I have about the treatment this subject has been given in the past: Most of the attention has been put on the mistakes, but very little on the solutions. It’s all too easy to point fingers and say, “Don’t do that” and “Shame on you, dummy” but only 1% of your time should be spent on problems. 99% should be spent on solutions. So in that spirit, after I bring each mistake to your attention, I’ll give you a solution-oriented training tip to help you avoid boneheadedness and join the elite group who “kick butt” in the gym at every workout…

Bonehead workout mistake #1: “Winging it”

“Winging it” means having no written goals or plans, no training journal and no way of “keeping score.” It’s when you just show up at the gym day after day and do whatever strikes your fancy, whatever machine happens to be available, or whatever you’ve become habitually accustomed to doing. Winging it is when you don’t know where you are, where you’re going or how you’re going to get there – but you start your journey anyway – no compass, no roadmap. It’s been said that “Action without planning is the biggest cause of failure,” and I believe that statement is 100% accurate.

Kick butt workout tip #1: Develop a strategic plan

Successful people never “wing it,” they always have a plan. Strategic planning is a never ending process and includes: Assessment (where am I now?), goal setting (where do I want to go?), creating a plan or strategy (How will I get where I want to go?), executing the plan (what action steps must I take daily to reach my goal?), and measuring results (how will I know if I’m moving towards my goal and how will I know when I’ve reached it?). Boneheads “wing it.” Butt–kickers have a master plan and goals for every workout.

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Bonehead workout mistake #2: Repeating the same workouts… without progressive overload

In one respect, repeating the same workouts is important – it’s called “continuity.” Continuity means that to experience an adaptive response (more muscle, more strength, less fat and all that other good stuff), you must a repeat a certain modality or exercise consistently over a long enough period of time to allow the adaptive response to occur and to reap the full benefits (rather than changing exercises at every workout). That type of repetition is good. The bonehead mistake is when you do the same exercises, same reps, same weight, same everything, week after week, without ever challenging yourself to do more than you’ve done before. If your muscles could talk they would say, “Yawn…. Did that, done that, been there… we’re just going to stay exactly the way we are… no need to get bigger or stronger today.”

Kick butt workout tip #2: Strive to beat your previous workouts

Muscle growth and strength increases occur when you place demands on your body above and beyond what it has experienced in the past. Your body responds to this progressive overload by getting stronger in order to handle this type of demand in the future. Your objective at almost every workout is to set goals to beat what you did during the previous one. If you can’t add more weight, it could be as simple as one more rep with the same weight or the same sets/reps/weight in less time. It could also mean one more minute of cardio, one level higher on a stairclimber, or half a percent steeper incline on the treadmill. Continuous and never-ending improvement is the name of the game.

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Bonehead workout mistake #3: (more…)

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Should you be training to failure?  What does that even mean?

See, for strength and muscle growth, frequency trumps volume, but intensity trumps both volume and frequency.  And so the absolute most important thing you can do with lifting is to do so intensely.  This is true pretty much no matter what your lifting goals are.  This chart shows you why [explained below].

There are a ton of ways to increase the intensity of your lifting (see here and here) but almost all of them involve dancing around with “failure” on your set.  There are two basic forms of failure I’ll talk about today:  form failure and muscular failure.

Form Failure

Think of form failure as the point where you are no longer able to do the movement with good form.  Good form means proper alignment, proper tempo, using the muscle rather than momentum (unless it is a power movement).

This is also very mental – when you “think” you can’t do another one properly, you are probably right.  In my experience though, most people fail mentally before they should (but I won’t describe mental failure here).

Here’s an example.  Let’s say you are lifting alone.  Your target rep count would be 8 for this exercise.  You just finished your 7th rep and you are feeling a little shaky but confident you can get one more done safely.  So you start the movement.  But at the bottom of the move you realize you can’t finish it without sacrificing form.  At that point, you’ve reached form failure.

Muscular Failure

Muscular failure is when you (more…)

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I love running.  I love bodybuilding.  I keep hearing that you “can’t ride two horses”.  But I do.  True, my gains in each are probably more moderate than if I gave one up.  But being fully human means making choices to move up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

If you get past the conditioning phase of cardio (whatever kind of cardio you choose, not just running), you too may learn to love it as much as you love pumping iron.  You’ll find ways to do progressive cardio.  You can have your cake and eat it too.

People who are cardio haters have recently glommed on to the HIIT craze (high-intensity interval training).  I’m working on a more elaborate article comparing HIIT to steady state cardio for fat loss, but here’s a preview:  HIIT is not necessarily better for fat loss.  Like any modality of exercise, HIIT has pros and cons.  One con is that it is really hard to do properly and so most people only think they are doing HIIT – actually, they are just doing intervals.

While I think HIIT could make some sense, for some people, some of the time, I’m one of those freaks who likes long, steady-state cardio.

Regardless of HIIT vs. steady state, there’s a movement afoot that says “If you are lifting weights, you don’t need to do any cardio at all.”

Huh?

Fitness Gurus On Crack

Lots of fitness experts are saying that you should stop cardio altogether! Why?

I think part of it is a combination of fad, lemming behavior, and marketing.

You see, people want to believe they can skip cardio.  Most people hate cardio and will believe any argument that tells them what they already want to hear.

Wouldn’t it be great to hear that you can be healthy and lean without having to do any work?

So these fitness gurus play “you can skip cardio” on their flutes, and many people start following them.

And these guys are in great shape to be sure.  So if they look that good without doing cardio, it must be the ticket, right? (more…)

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There are surprisingly many scientific studies comparing machines to free weights.  You have to be careful about who is sponsoring them of course, but generally you’ll see pros and cons start to emerge if you read many of them.  I’ve done my best to summarize them in Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 of this series.  Now, in Part 4, I want to share a few of the better studies and go a little deeper into each one.  These were some of the studies I used as the basis for the earlier parts of this article.

Smith Machine Squats Inferior To Free Weight Squats

In a recent study (see Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research: December 2009 – Volume 23 – Issue 9 – pp 2588-2591) researchers figured that the Smith Machine was probably better for activating certain leg muscles because the lifter wouldn’t be focused on stability so much.  The logic, like most people would have thought, was that attention to stability reduced activation of the leg muscles in free weights, whereas the Smith Machine users could focus more on the leg muscles.

Well, turns out they were wrong!  They measured the same lifters (i.e. people) using a weight on each exercise equal to 8 reps maximum.  And they measured 7 different muscles (including some abs and lower back).

Surprisingly, (more…)

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