Episode 60: The great ‘how many meals?’ debate

A BODYBUILDER IS BORN: Generations

Episode 60: The great ‘how many meals?’ debate

As a writer for bodybuilding magazines for over twenty years now (don’t ask me where the time went), I’ve had the privilege of being able to speak to all the great champions and learn their personal opinions about training and nutrition. Not long ago, something 4-time Mr. Olympia Jay Cutler told me got me thinking. Jay feels the need to eat a minimum of four solid meals before he will work out, which has him hitting the gym anywhere from six PM to as late as 10 PM at times. If he can’t get that minimum number in, Jay won’t even train that day as he feels it would be a waste. The quality of the workout would suffer due to insufficient ‘gas in the tank.’ But Ronnie Coleman, 8-Time Mr. O, used to eat just one big breakfast of eggs and cheese and grits before blasting the iron. Arnold Classic Champion Branch Warren eats twice before training. All three of these men have incredible physiques and attacked the weights like ferocious beasts, so which one of them is ‘right’ about how many meals a bodybuilder requires prior to a workout? I think the answer to that depends on various factors.

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Episode 57: An Attitude of Gratitude

“Stop looking at what you ain’t got and start being thankful for what you do got” – Rihanna featuring T.I, ‘Livin’ my life.’

Thanksgiving is still exactly a month away as I write this, but here I am counting my blessings anyway. Tomorrow marks four weeks since the surgery to repair my torn right triceps, and it also happens to be the day of my second and hopefully last procedure for many years, on my left shoulder. I’m having what’s called a ‘decompression,’ which involves scooping out some of the acromion, or the underside of the shoulder socket, to free up more room. Thanks to an MRI, I learned that I had worn away nearly all of the ligaments in there over the course of a quarter-century plus of heavy training. Read more

What would Branch do?

Many Christians subscribe to a very simple directive in seeking the proper course of action in any situation: What Would Jesus Do? You sometimes see it abbreviated on bumper stickers as WWJD? Since we are here to talk about bodybuilding and not religion, I have a similar helpful guide for those of us who visit the iron church every day:

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F*** the scale!

If there was ever a tool that could either do good or cause harm depending on the person using it – that would probably be the gun. But trailing just behind is something else that many Americans have at home – the scale. Most of us are caught up in that number we see staring up at us, and it’s almost never a number we are happy about. It’s either too high or too low. The problem with using bodyweight alone as any type of yardstick is that it says nothing about body composition. This has led to the popularity of hundreds of fad diets over the decades. People, usually women, set weight-loss goals rather than fat-loss goals. They then proceed to embark on the most nutritionally vacant diets imaginable. Various diets have you subsisting only on lemon juice, grapefruit, or some other random thing. When the body is starved, it will drop weight rapidly. Unfortunately, most of this weight is in the form of lean muscle tissue rather than stored bodyfat. The various no-carb diets such as Atkins also give an instant reward to those seeking to see a lower number on the scale. When you take carbs out of your diet, you will quickly lose a substantial amount of water weight, since carbs attract water. In neither of these cases has actual fat been lost. But mainstream folks,

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Episode 54: Postpartum Blues

With all due respect and apologies in advance to all you woman who have given birth, competing in a bodybuilding contest is a little bit like having a baby. Many weeks and months go by in preparation for and anticipation of the big day. Along the way there is plenty of discomfort, mood swings, cravings, and constant attention, comments, and questions from everyone around you as to ‘how it’s going,’ how far out you are from the big day, and what your expectations are.

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Be Your Own Guru

This has become a standard question posed to any bodybuilder preparing for a competition over the last few years. The assumption is that most now enlist the services of a nutrition coach, also known in our little world as a ‘guru,’ which may give some of these people a bit more credence than they warrant.

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Episode 52: You’ll never know ‘til you try

 

Young Jared had asked me these questions before, and I always replied with the same thing:

“Who the hell knows?”

I know that could easily be interpreted any number of ways: flippant, sarcastic, callous, or uncaring – but it was totally sincere. And today, as Jared joined me on the only other StepMill in our gym after we had both trained back on a rainy day in late May, I decided to finally elaborate and make him understand that his ultimate potential was still so far from being realized that trying to estimate now was futile.

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Two steps forward, one step back

I hadn’t seen a whole lot of Jeff since our epic leg workout almost two months ago where I tortured him on the leg press with ‘Centuries,’ a series of sets where you add weight and increase the reps over and over again until somebody quits, pukes, or passes out. Interestingly, I had seen him at the bank much later that week and he had still been hobbling. Incredulous, I asked him if he was still sore and he had merely fixed me with an icy stare. Proud of my work, I had queried when the last time his legs had been that sore.

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In Praise of the Underdog

We all love to see underdogs beat the odds and succeed. It’s why we love sports movies like Rocky, Rudy, and about a thousand others with nearly identical plots. Our hearts swell at the end of movies where the kids from the ghetto win the big math tournament and full scholarships to college, and we vote for the spunky youngsters with hard-luck stories trying to win American Idol or one of the dozen other TV talent shows. It’s inspiring to see somebody triumph over adversities and obstacles and beat the odds stacked against them. It makes us feel like we can achieve our dreams too. That’s why I was overjoyed to see pro bodybuilder Branch Warren win the Arnold Classic.

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Episode 49: ‘Fun days’ to fry a bodypart

A Bodybuilder Is Born: Generations

Episode 49: ‘Fun days’ to fry a bodypart

By Ron Harris

Being highly self-motivated, I train just as well on my own as with a partner. Actually, I do a lot better on my own than I do with a partner I don’t ‘click’ with. You’ve all heard the cliché about how you’re better off alone than you are in a bad relationship, right? As far as I’m concerned, that’s just as true in the gym. My workouts are extremely important to me, because each one is a one-time chance to improve my physique that will never come again. Because we are mortals and not like those pasty stylish vampires from the Twilight movies, we will have many workouts in our lives; but the unarguable fact remains that there is a finite amount of them. I don’t like to waste them.

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