Why Our Fitness Efforts Fail

Why Our Fitness Efforts Fail

Easy training and undisciplined eating are fun, easy -and a complete waste of time

By Duke Nukem

People bitch all the time about how hard and difficult the Parrillo system is. Many people tell us, “If you people (Parrillo trainers) would just make the physical training a little less difficult, if you would allow the nutrition to be a little less demanding and a lot less strict – then you’d be able to get a lot more folks to follow your methods.” Point-in-fact: the demanding, difficult strictness of the Parrillo system is what elicits the results. Everyone else in the wider fitness world purposefully makes fitness easier and more user-friendly in order to make a sale. This is a classic “Devil’s Bargain.” Make any system of fitness purposefully easier in order to appeal to a wider segment of a potential audience and it loses its effectiveness, assuming (and that’s a big assumption) that it had any effectiveness to begin with. Unfortunately easy and physical improvement is an irresolvable contradiction. There is no such thing as an easy dramatic physical transformation. The reason people continually fail in their fitness renovation efforts is they continually buy into the idea that somewhere there exists an effortless way with which to obtain the dramatic changes they seek without the dramatic effort. This is the biggest lie in all of fitness.

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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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Dan Root – Up and Coming MMA Fighter Chris Toland used Parrillo products to pare down Dan from 205 to 169

By Marty Gallagher

The fastest growing sport on the planet is Mixed Martial Arts. MMA grew out of a need to see who were the best fighters and what were the best fighting systems. Up until the advent of the MMA format, anyone could claim anything and fight schools everywhere proclaimed loudly that their style of fighting would and could whip any other style of fighting. This all ended when Rorian Gracie and Art Davey devised the octagon and created an essentially no-holds-barred format and invited loud mouth fight style braggarts to show up or shut up. The Ultimate Fighting Championship was created and soon established what fight styles were most effective and which ones were completely bogus.

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Just Get Back on the Wagon

Twas the late morning two days away from Christmas, and I was navigating my shopping cart around Costco Wholesale. This was a rare occasion. For one thing, my wife had worked there for ten years and she could always pick up anything we happened to need before heading home. The other reason I rarely did the Costco shopping is that I have the terrible habit at places like this, Wal-Mart, and Target, of coming in for one or two items and leaving with about thirty.

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The Amazing Story of Jim Kipp – From fat to fit to national champion in less than three years

Wesley James (Jim) Kipp lives in Clifton Park, New York and like so many individuals in their mid 40s he awoke one day and discovered he was woefully overweight, out of shape and a bit confused about what to do about it. He was a few biscuits shy of 200 pounds (196) and standing five feet five inches tall, he was drastically overweight. The bodyweight had come on gradually. “I had gotten into some bad eating habits over the years and suddenly I was a fat guy. I have two wonderful children who want their Dad to play with them. I could play – but not for long. I would get embarrassingly winded. I couldn’t keep up with them.

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Carrie Rapp

A Look At Her Amazing Weight Loss Transformation

“What inspired me to become a bodybuilder? An episode of the short lived FOX show “The Adventures of Brisco County Jr” which guest starred Cory Everson as a blacksmith.  I thought to myself “Wow! She’s beautiful and powerful and so confident! I wanna look like that someday!”. But it would be at least another 10 years before I competed at a college bodybuilding show in

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What are those judges looking at?

I have been to a couple hundred contests since the late 1980’s, all the way from local shows to the Arnold Classic and Mr. Olympia. There’s a common saying that goes, ‘the only person who’s happy with the judging at the end of the night is the winner.’ I would extend that to include the winner’s friends, family, coach, and fans if we’re talking about high-level amateurs and pro’s. As for everybody else, the words disgruntled, angry, and confused often come to mind. Many people are upset when they or the person they came to support does not win, and they blame everything from incompetency and favoritism on the part of the judges to outright politics and conspiracies.

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Barb O’Dell – Loses 180 pounds of body weight; 110 of those in 365 days!

Parrillo Extreme Training Camp

^{INTENSITY &
MENTAL ACUITY}

^{Recognizing that the big gains lie within “the pain zone”}

^{By Duke Nukem}

Then being introduced to the Parrillo approach, two Parrillo concepts are most often cited as defining the Parrillo philosophy: the complex sophistication of the Parrillo Nutrition Program and the intenseness of Parrillo-style training, both in resistance training and aerobic training. The Parrillo nutritional approach is detailed and specific and has been refined and honed to perfection during its 40 years of existence. Parrillo-style training is all about extending the athlete’s current limits and capacities. No matter how adept, no matter how strong and fit, regardless if you can run a Marathon in under three hours or bench press 500 for 8 reps, when you train under John Parrillo’s direct supervision he is going to find your threshold limits in strength and endurance and then very systematically, very precisely and very painfully take you past those limits into new territory. “The big gains occur when the body is taken past capacity – only then are muscles forced to grow and only then is the body forced to burn its stored body fat.” John Parrillo is the absolute master at forcing muscles to grow and forcing the body to give up its body fat.

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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

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