The quality goes in before the name goes on…

Quality Supplements

Tin Head,

You always talk about how Parrillo products are the best. So what makes Parrillo products any better than any other products? Looking through the muscle magazines, your stuff looks pretty damned dated – with all the new breakthroughs out there in supplements, how come you folks are still championing stuff like beef liver tabs and caseinate protein powder?! That stuff went out of style back in the seventies! Are you the company for aging baby boomers and has-beens?

                      Ross, Atlanta  

Breakthroughs!? Name me a single new supplement that has been introduced and gained widespread traction since the introduction of creatine monohydrate back in 1993? That’s sixteen years and counting….while plenty of ‘breakthrough supplements’ have been introduced, none have changed the supplement landscape one iota. None of the new ‘breakthrough’ products comes within a country mile of producing the results they claim! Meanwhile, as PT Barnum once observed, “there is a new sucker born every minute.”

At Parrillo Performance we make our own products: 90% of the supplement industry has their products ‘jobbed out.’ At PP we have a supplement factory right in our HQ building. We also have a laboratory and test kitchen; we create our own custom blended powders and bars and a production crew creates Parrillo products from scratch. From conception to inception, every phase of product production is overseen by John or Dominique Parrillo. At Parrillo Performance, the quality goes in before the name goes on. The Parrillo production facility is spotless: the raw ingredients used are the best money can buy. For this reason John Parrillo has created a supplement marquee that is the equivalent Ferrari or Rolls Royce of the supplement industry. His devotion to purity, quality and effectiveness stands in stark contrast to the ‘how can we fool the suckers today?’ mindset of the high-gloss supplement industry. The supplement shysters purchase inferior core ingredients from China, mix anemic nutrients with chemically-drenched filler to create impotent products in foul sweatshop factories that owners have never even visited. The high-gloss supplement industry spends all their time, money and effort on advertizing – they create glossy ads for easily-fooled guys like you. They use steroid monsters (who did NOT build their massiveness using the slick supplements they enthusiastically tout) or scantily clad beach bunnies.  

The supplement hucksters lure in suckers (like you) that fall hook, line and sinker for hyped-up ads. Get a grip man; supplements need potent ingredients to be effective. Insofar as beef liver tabs and caseinate protein, these products are still being made by Parrillo for one reason: they still get results for users! Do you really think that Parrillo makes these products out of some misty-eyed sense of nostalgia? We sell these “antiquated” products to super serious individuals that understand what you obviously don’t: supplements are designed to supplement a solid, scientifically-based nutritional game plan, a game plan based on the expert use and consumption of real food. Guys like you chase one ‘magical’ supplement after another, looking and searching for an over-the-counter supplement that will give you steroid-like effects and allow you to shortcut all the blood, sweat, tears and effort needed to truly transform the human body. It is a waste of my time to tell you the harsh truth – so keep looking for that magic bullet, keep spending money on here-today-gone-tomorrow supplements and keep believing that trash with names like ‘super nitrous turbo X cubed hyper-growth formula # 7 – now with deebol-enhanced crystallized bat turds’ will give you the body you are unwilling to work for. Meanwhile, over at Parrillo, we’ll continue to make our fossilized products for the hardcore professionals and serious amateurs, men and women that actually make gains and actually compete – and win. Meanwhile you can watch the Parrillo athletes onstage as you sit in the audience and tell your seatmates how you’re going to kick everyone’s ass – next year – always next year. 

Vic,

Teddy G here in Atlanta – I know you are down on the ‘average’ personal trainer and their lack of creativity in getting results for their clients – you should make like a restaurant critic and sneak into gyms and write about some of the crazy tactics you’ve seen. I have laughed out loud at some of the antics I’ve seen used by personal trainers at the gym I train at. I am sure you could write a book about the insanity you’ve seen. It would be funny if it wasn’t so ridiculous. I too have a pony-tailed Swiss Ball trainer at my gym and I am quite sure your head would explode if you were to see some of the ridiculous exercises this moron teaches. What a joke!                 

                  Teddy, Georgia   

Restaurant critics surreptitiously sneak into dining establishments, order up a wide variety of dishes, then slip away to write their reviews. This sneaky practice is done for a reason: the critic wants to experience the food exactly as a regular paying client would. Any chef worth his salt can serve up a fabulous dinner when they know they are cooking for a critic – but can the chef and his staff put out great food consistently for regular folks who happen to walk in off the street? I think I have become the PT version of the restaurant critic. I have recently been frequenting fitness establishments in my region to work with a high paying client that uses my very expensive services. While working with my client (he gets fabulous results following my hardcore advice) I have been surreptitiously observing lame personal trainers putting their clients through lame workouts. Unfortunately most of what I secretly observe is uniformly horrific: clients are alternately babied or beaten to a pulp by personal trainers exhibiting what I would term a spaced-out New Age persona, or alternately, the “Fitness Hitler” persona. The former talks goo-goo baby talk and the later screams pompous platitudes. While incredible, result producing personal trainers exist, they are, apparently, as rare as three star Michelin Chefs. 

Last week I saw a ‘head exploding’ example of a reckless, dangerous personal training session that personified everything that is wrong about the current state of the profession. I arrived at 6am to put a client through a high intensity workout. I have a special place in my heart for highly motivated individuals determined to improve. The truly motivated will hire an expensive personal trainer, wake up at 5 am to drive to the gym in order to catch a PT supervised workout before heading to their stress-filled jobs. This particular facility was charging $100 per hour and the client I saw on this particular day was a good looking, 30-something woman. She was 30 pounds overweight and looked like an ex-athlete that had had a few children and was now determined to create a beautiful physique to go with her beautiful face. Her personal trainer was a typical 20-something female PT that likely had a college degree in Physical Education. The “workout” administered was a stone cold disaster on a multitude of levels, veering from inept to dangerous, from ineffectual to inattentive – but allow me to allow you to draw your own conclusions…  

It was a “Back day” and the PT supervised session commenced the back workout with prone hyperextensions. Hyperextensions are a fabulous exercise assuming they are done properly. My secret observations made my skin crawl: the dark haired PT started things off by handing the client a 45 pound plate with which to perform her partial rep hyperextensions. If a hyperextension is done correctly it uses a full and complete range-of-motion. Bodyweight alone will give the average trainee a terrific erector workout. Strong men will use a 45 pound plate on their final set of hypers and only after a few warm-up sets. Handing an untrained woman a 45 pound plate on set one of a workout at 6:05 am is fitness malpractice. Since the client weighed maybe 150 pounds, she was handling 1/3^rd of her bodyweight in an exercise that is tough with NO poundage. Naturally the poor woman could only manage to move her torso a few inches in each direction. But that was A-OK with the incompetent PT. Somehow the client made it through without popping a disk. Onto the second back exercise: seated cable rows using way too much weight and way too short a range-of-motion. The PT lamely demonstrated this exercise with zero poundage then loaded half the stack for the client’s first set. Needles to say the client could only manage to pull the poundage about four inches. The rounded bow in her spinal column made me wince. The PT counted reps. This ridiculous exercise was alternated with dumbbell rows using a way-too-heavy dumbbell that was rowed perhaps six inches. Lat pulldowns to the front were next, and again the poundage was moved about ten inches in either direction. Then onto upright rows on the Smith Machine; these looked like machine reverse curls. This four set sequence was repeated four times.  

Done, the client staggered to the locker-room. Her spinal column received one hell of a beating while her back was muscularly unaffected. This is not atypical: I have seen worse workouts administered by worse personal trainers…partial reps, too much poundage, ineffectual exercises done using crazy techniques all done in long sequences. This may be all the rage on The Biggest Loser and Celebrity Fit Club – but for effective muscle stimulation, for invoking tangible results, for building muscle, nothing trumps compound multi-joint basic barbell and dumbbell exercises pushed or pulled over a full and complete range-of-motion. Fitness facility owners need to understand that the best form of advertising is a renovated client. Partial reps, lame-O exercises administered by zoned-out PTs are ineffectual, dangerous and deliver zero results for customers paying top dollar. Watching all this made me remember why I quit the commercial gym scene and do my own training in my garage. A restaurant critic might have to periodically eat a bad meal – watching incompetent personal trainers ply their incompetency on well-meaning clients puts me in a state of psychological turmoil. I fear for the poor client, oblivious to the danger they are being subjected to. Buyers beware!  

Victor,

I heard a personal trainer tell me the other day that ‘stretching between sets is a terrible idea.’ He had seen me doing my Parrillo fascial stretches between sets and asked me what this was all about. I have a 19” arm and a 34 inch waist – this idiot has a 40 inch chest and a 14 inch arm. He tried to begin lecturing me about the ‘dangers’ of lifting without warming up. When he started the lecture I told him to shut his mouth or I’d beat his ass. He slinked away with his fat tail between his chubby legs. This same trainer insists that his clients ‘stretch out’ before weight training ‘to prevent injury.’ The funny thing is I can get through an entire shoulder workout (15 sets) in less time than it takes his clients to get through their pre-workout ‘safety stretching session.’ Needless to say, none of his clients ever makes any gains. He has a legion of middle-aged women that are gaga over his movie star looks and actually has a waiting list for his services. He spends more time lecturing his clients than training his clients. Comments? 

              Jumbo, California 

First off, the absolute worst time to stretch is when muscles are cold and stiff. The best time to stretch a muscle is when the muscular core temperature is raised through exercise. This old myth, that a weight training session should be preceded by stretching, is ridiculous. I have all my clients use the Parrillo fascia stretching procedure: pump, stretch, flex on each and every set. Not only are they loosening up tight muscle fascia, thereby making muscle growth easier, they are also radically improving their flexibility and making valuable use of the dead times resting between sets. Hell, instead of just sitting around waiting for muscles to recover before hitting the next set – why not use the rest time to engage in some muscle-building, flexibility improving fascia stretching? The results for those that include fascia stretching are dramatic: not only do trainees experience dramatic muscle size increases using this amazing protocol, they also become limber as a contortionist and lay waste to that old muscle-bound myth. Too bad you didn’t kick his ass.