Accomplishment

Over the past two days I listened to a podcast on the Joe Defranco Industrial Strength show. Joe was interviewing Christian Thibaudeau. Christian has been training athletes for over two decades. He has written for books and written over 700 articles, many of which you can find on the website T-Nation. The interview was 1:34:00 long and I spent almost 3 hours listening to it. There was so much great information that I had to re-listen to sections 2 and 3 times just to get the most out of it. What it boiled down to was two things. What are you trying to accomplish? Are you trying to build muscle and strength or are you trying to build strength and longevity. Based on our weight lifting and workout programs that we do here at Big Tree Fitness either one of these goals can be accomplished. But where the big difference lies in two areas.

The first is your willingness to amp up your intensity level during your workouts. This means taking less breaks in between exercise movements. Pushing yourself to lift heavier weights for strength building. All this means being willing to keep your heart rate elevated during the workout and not let yourself drop into the resting heart range. Most gains that are missed in the gym are because the things listed above are not done. Too often we underestimate the effort we are putting into our workouts. This is usually caused by a mental barrier when we feel fatigued, meaning we don't want to work as hard or push ourselves when we feel fatigued. You must push past this mental barrier.

The second piece and probably most important for most of us is how we choose to eat and what we choose to eat and drink. It comes down to how many calories are being consumed throughout the week, not during each day. The reason for this is that most of us without realizing it will fluctuate our daily caloric intake throughout the week. Combined with your workout program and your weekly caloric intake will determine whether you are losing weight or gaining weight. If you want to gain muscle weight you need to eat at a slight caloric surplus per week and when I say slight, that would be an average of an extra 150 to 200 calories per day which equals 1000 to 1400 per week. This is based on doing 3 days of lifting and a couple days of steady state cardio. If you are looking to get lean and build strength you will need to do the reverse and eat at a caloric deficit throughout the week by about the same amount that you would do muscle weight gaining. When we eat and workout to get lean and strong we increase our life longevity because we are doing cellular recycling at a higher rate which promotes fat loss and cellular regeneration.

For those of you who are looking for more information on this, talk to me during your next scheduled workout. In the meantime check out this article on High or Low carb diets. This article helps solve a lot of the myths behind carb intake. https://www.spartan.com/blogs/unbreakable-nutrition/low-carb-vs-high-carb-diet