Diet And Exercising For Weight Loss

Obesity is now being called an epidemic in the health community. In fact, it will soon be the leading cause of preventable death in the United States, even ahead of cigarette smoking. Obesity leads to type two diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease or stroke and even an increased risk of cancer. With all of these health risks, as well as the general improvement in the quality of life that can occur, losing weight is one of the best things that you can do for yourself.

No matter what we would like to believe, there simply isn’t a magic solution to losing weight. The body will shed excess fat when it needs more calories to function through the demands you place on it in a given day than the amount of calories that you feed it. It’s that simple. So, in order to lose weight, you need to decrease the number of calories that you eat as well as increase the amount that you burn.

There is a wide range of options to choose from when looking for a weight loss program. All of them often spend a lot of time explaining what to eat, in what amounts and even at what times or in what combinations. But few of them emphasize the importance of exercise – not just for losing weight, but for your general health and wellbeing. Exercise is vital when trying to lose weight for several reasons:

First, as you start to eat less, your metabolism will slow down somewhat. Exercising helps to elevate your metabolism back to an efficient level.Second, as mentioned, exercise burns more calories so that you can lose weight faster and stay motivated in your efforts.Third, exercise actually releases endorphins, chemicals that keep your mood elevated.

Exercise doesn’t have to mean spending hours at the gym or straining through exhausting workouts. In fact, in order for you to stick with it on the long run, exercising should be something that you enjoy. Start by increasing your activity level in an overall way. Take the stairs when you can. Park further from the mall door when you go shopping. Go for a walk in the park or through a neighborhood you love and bring a dog or a friend along for company. Take dance or martial arts lessons.

Once you become more active in general, you’ll find it easier and more natural to move into regular exercise. Which you’ll need to do eventually in order to get regular, noticeable health benefits. You need to raise your heart rate to a fat burning level and keep it there for at least 20 minutes, 3 times or more a week. However, if you don’t want to go to a gym, there are other options. Videos and DVDs are now available in all kinds of exercise types. That way you can change your routine whenever you want so that you don’t get bored with what you’re doing. Try a range of aerobics, kickboxing, yoga, or pretty much any activity you want right in the comfort of your own home.

If you have physical limitations that would keep you off from exercising, you can still find a way to increase your activity level. Water aerobics is a wonderful option for those who have joint problems or limited mobility because it relieves the pressure on your body that your weight provides. But you still get the resistance to challenge your muscles from the water. There are even classes and videos available that let you exercise in a seated position.

Whatever kind of exercise you choose, it’s important to stay motivated and keep it fun. Try gathering a group together to make it a social event. Or get a pedometer, a device that tracks how far you walk, and see how many miles you can walk a week. Make a competition amongst your friends or family members and treat the winner with something special (not food related!). Make the experience of exercising something that you look forward to, and it will soon become a regular part of your healthier lifestyle.

28 Days to lean meal plan

You'’re training hard every day with your program, going heavy on the weights and sweating up a storm with cardio. Newsflash: While that'’s critical to your ultimate success, that'’s just not enough for you to lose the fat you want to.

To reach your get-lean goal, you must also follow a get-lean diet. Why? Even if you work out har 

for an hour every day, that still leaves 23 more hours for you to wreck all your hard work in the gym with just one slip-up: a measly handful of chips, a beer with the guys or a burger at lunch. Diet is a huge, so to speak, part of the fat-loss equation. It's the backbone of your entire plan, the foundation of a hard body.

Bodybuilding nutrition consultant Jim Juge says nutrition determines your success or failure, plain and simple. "The diet is 65% of what you need to get in shape,"” he says. Juge would know, as he'’s helped countless dedicated people reach their goals, from achieving their best body ever to placing first in bodybuilding competitions.

You've got 28 days to get to your goal, so we've recruited Juge to help you every step of the way. He'’s adapted a traditional bodybuilding competitor's diet for a non-competitor (that means you!) who wants to look his best, shedding as much fat as possible in a very short time. With just under a month, there'’s no time to fool around, so commit today! Go to the grocery store and stock up tonight. Come breakfast time tomorrow, follow his plan as strictly as you can and get ready to show off those impressive muscles in a month.

GAIN 10 POUNDS OF MUSCLE IN 4 WEEKS

It’s a lofty goal: Gain 10 pounds of muscle in just one month. While such results are aggressive and can’t continue at the same torrid rate indefinitely, we’ve seen firsthand individuals who’ve followed our mass-gaining programs and reached double digits in four short weeks, averaging gains of 2-3 pounds a week. Trust us, it can be done. But if there’s one thing such a bold goal needs, it’s an ambitious training and nutrition strategy. In regard to nutrition, don’t even think about taking that aspect lightly. You can work out all you want, but if you don’t ingest adequate calories and macronutrients, you won’t build muscle. What and when you eat is paramount to your results, and you’ll find all you need to know about gaining mass in a short amount of time in our bulking diet meal plan.

First up, however, is training. Our two-phase program is designed to build muscle via the right balance of mass-building exercises, sufficient volume and intensity-boosting techniques. It’s time to get started on your next 10 pounds.

WEEKS 1-2: HEAVY HITTER

The first two weeks of the program are all about lifting heavy with mass-building compound exercises. For everything but abs and calves, reps fall in the 6-8 range; for those accustomed to doing sets of 8-12, this means going heavier than normal. There are very few isolation exercises during this phase for chest, back, shoulders and legs because the emphasis is on moving as much weight as possible to add strength and size.

The volume here isn’t excessive. You’ll do 11 sets total for large muscle groups (the one exception being shoulders, for which you’ll do 15) and train each bodypart once a week. Reason being, to pack on tons of mass you need ample recovery time. Doing endless sets in each workout can easily put you in a catabolic (muscle-wasting) state in which lean tissue is broken down, not built up. Gaining 10 pounds of muscle in such a short period requires the right balance of adequate volume to rest and recovery.

The four-day split pairs a large bodypart (chest, back, shoulders, quads/hams) with one or two smaller muscle groups (tri’s, bi’s, traps, calves, abs) in each workout. This helps ensure that you’re fresh when doing your heaviest compound exercises.

WEEKS 3-4: INTENSITY BOOST

The second half of the program is all about maximizing size with slightly higher reps and an emphasis on intensity. Rep ranges move up to 10-12 for most exercises, which is ideal for promoting muscle hypertrophy (growth). Overall volume increases slightly during these two weeks, mainly due to the addition of isolation exercises that you’ll perform before compound movements for your chest, back, shoulders and legs. Called pre-exhaustion, this technique dramatically increases workout intensity. You fatigue the main target muscle with an isolation exercise, then hit it in this fatigued state with a compound move, which if done right will lead to your main muscle failing before assistance muscles give out. (For example, for chest the dumbbell flye hits the pecs directly, so your triceps shouldn’t end up being the weak link and cause the termination of the set during the bench press).

This phase continues to employ a four-day split, but bodyparts are paired differently - namely, chest and back are trained on the same day (Day 1), as are biceps and triceps (Day 4). This is little more than a means of changing things up, giving your muscles a slightly different stimulus to spark new muscle growth. Each workout includes drop sets to increase intensity, but for only one set per bodypart, so as to avoid overtraining and muscle catabolism.

As a parting thought, we can’t emphasize enough the importance of consistency and staying focused. Your workouts shouldn’t be two-hour affairs - each visit to the gym needs to be fast-paced and intense. With that as your guide and following the heavy-duty blueprint laid out here, we can’t promise it’ll be easy, but the results should be worth every drop of sweat. Just think, 10 more muscular pounds may be a mere month away.

THE COMPLETE 4-WEEK BEGINNER'S WORKOUT PROGRAM

Body Building

In the realm of fitness, three-month programs dominate the landscape. You’ve even seen plenty of them in this magazine over the years. Are they effective? Absolutely. But we’re going to let you in on an interesting secret: It doesn’t necessary take eight or 12 weeks to get your feet wet in the gym. Not that you’ll be a seasoned vet after four weeks, but if you can just get that first month under your belt, you’ll get yourself over the proverbial hump where so many fail and give up, and set the stage for a lifetime of gains.

Let’s just call this the accelerated beginner’s guide to bodybuilding. In this plan, your first month of training will be demanding, but not so demanding as to cause injury (or worse yet, burnout), and progressive in the sense that each week you’ll graduate to different exercises, higher volume, more intensity or all of the above. After four weeks you’ll not only be ready for the next challenge but you’ll have built a significant amount of quality muscle. In other words, one month from now you’ll look significantly better with your shirt off than you look now. (How’s that for results?)

This program isn’t just for the true beginner who has never touched a weight before; it’s also suitable for anyone who has taken an extended leave of absence from training. How long has it been since you went to the gym regularly? Six months? A year? Five years? No worries: The following routines will get you back on track in — you guessed it — just four short weeks. Let’s get to work.

Whole in one

You’ll begin the program with a full-body training split, meaning you’ll train all major bodyparts in each workout (as opposed to “splitting up” your training). Train three days this first week, performing just one exercise per bodypart in each session. It’s important that you have a day of rest between each workout to allow your body to recover; this makes training Monday, Wednesday and Friday — with Saturday and Sunday being rest days — a good approach.

The exercises listed in Week 1 are a collection of basic moves that, while also used by advanced lifters, we feel are suitable for the beginner as well. Notice we’re not starting you off with only machine exercises; a handful of free-weight movements are present right off the bat. Reason being, these are the exercises you need to master for long-term gains in muscular size and strength, so you may as well start learning them now. Carefully read all exercise descriptions, starting on page, before attempting them yourself.

In Week 1 you’ll perform three sets of every exercise per workout, which over the course of the week adds up to nine sets total for each bodypart, a good starting volume for your purposes. With the exception of crunches for abs, you’ll do 8–12 reps per set. This rep scheme is widely considered ideal for achieving gains in muscle size (the scientific term is hypertrophy) and is commonly employed by amateur and pro bodybuilders alike.

Notice in the workouts below that your first set calls for eight reps, your second set 10 reps and your third set 12. This is referred to in bodybuilding circles as a “reverse pyramid” (a standard pyramid goes from higher to lower reps), where you decrease the weight each set to complete the higher rep count. For example, if on your first set of lat pulldowns you used 140 pounds for eight reps, try using 120 or 130 pounds on set two and 100–120 pounds on set three.

Split decision

You’re only a week into the program, yet you’ll begin to train different bodyparts on different days with a two-day training split (meaning the entire body is trained over the course of two days, rather than one as in the first week). You’ll train a total of four days this week; the split includes two upper-body days (Monday and Thursday) and two lower-body days (Tuesday and Friday), and each bodypart is trained twice. Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday will be your recovery days.

Several exercises from Week 1 are carried over to Week 2, but one move is added to each bodypart routine — with the exception of abs — so you can train all muscle groups more completely from multiple angles. Chest, for example, includes two exercises: One is a compound movement (dumbbell bench press) that involves multiple joints (both the shoulder and elbow) to work the largest amount of muscle possible, and the other is an isolation exercise (dumbbell flye) that involves only one joint (shoulder) and targets the pecs to a greater extent. (When doing presses for chest, the deltoids and triceps are involved to a degree, meaning presses don’t isolate the pecs as much as flyes do.)

You’ll again employ a reverse pyramid scheme of reps, though in Week 2 you’ll go slightly higher in reps (15) on your third set of each exercise. Fifteen reps may be just outside the ideal muscle-building range, but these sets will help you increase muscular endurance to provide a solid foundation on which to build size and strength going forward.

Three on three

In the third week of the program we step it up to a three-day training split: Train all “pushing” bodyparts (chest, shoulders, triceps) on Day 1; hit the “pulling” bodyparts (back, biceps) and abs on Day 2; and work your lower body (quads, glutes, hamstrings, calves) on Day 3. As in Week 2, you train each bodypart twice a week, so you’ll hit the gym six days this week.

One new exercise is added to each bodypart routine to provide even more angles from which to train your target muscles to promote complete development. You’ll hit each muscle group with two exercises of 3­–4 sets each: four sets for large bodyparts (chest, back, shoulders, quads, hamstrings) and three sets for smaller bodyparts (biceps, triceps, abs, calves). The result is 16 total sets for the week for large bodyparts and 12 sets total for smaller ones — again, working in the 8–15-rep range — which is a substantial increase in volume from Week 1.

Thinking up the volume

In the fourth and final week of the program, you’ll train four days in a four-way split that hits each bodypart just once (except for calves and abs, which are each trained twice). Four-day splits are common among experienced lifters because they involve training fewer bodyparts (typically 2–3) per workout, which gives each muscle group ample attention and allows you to train with higher volume. As you’ll see, chest and triceps are paired up, as are back with biceps and quads with hamstrings, each a very common pairing among novice and advanced bodybuilders. Shoulders are trained more or less on their own, and you’ll alternate hitting calves and abs — which respond well to being trained multiple times per week — every other workout. No new exercises are introduced in Week 4 so that you can focus on intensity in your workouts instead of learning new movements.

Rep schemes remain in the hypertrophy range this week, but overall volume increases by adding more sets to individual exercises: up to five sets per move for larger bodyparts, and even 10 sets of calf raises on Thursday. This bump in volume will ensure that your muscles are overloaded sufficiently to continue the growth they’ve already begun experiencing in the first three weeks. Completion of this four-week program now entitles you to go to the next stage.

The Guy's Guide To Great Glutes

Women aren't the only ones who want better backside curvature. So we interviewed an expert, Bret Contreras, for his take on building your glutes...er, legs.

Since the dawn of bodybuilding (or at least the last few decades), most articles dedicated to building glutes were for women. Estrogen, it seemed, was the necessary factor for wanting a better butt.

For guys, the focus was always on legs. Even though we all knew those multijoint exercises muscled up our posteriors, we just didn't want to admit our desire to fill out the backside of our jeans a little better.

Bret Contreras, PhD, CSCS, aka "The Glute Guy," is considered one of the world's foremost experts on glute training, having authored hundreds of articles in fitness publications, research papers, and even two books, including "Strong Curves: A Woman's Guide to Building a Better Butt and Body," with Kellie Davis. I sat down with him to ask everything I've ever wanted to know about glute 

training.

There's A Pretty Significant Emphasis In Women's Training On The Glutes, But Rarely In Men's. Why Do You Think That Is?

This question has baffled me for years. I suppose it's grandfathered in from the classic bodybuilding era. The classic leg day trains quads and hams, but glutes never seem to be mentioned. I guess people assume that the glutes get adequate stimulus from quad exercises like squats, lunges, leg presses, and hamstring exercises like deadlifts, Romanian deadlifts, and back extensions. While I agree that these are good glute exercises, I think you get better results by adding in barbell hip thrusts, lateral glute exercises, and high-rep work in general.

I do think it's improving, but not that fast. After all, we're dealing with decades of tradition. But at least it's heading in the right direction. Men should proudly train their glutes and shouldn't shy away 

from performing exercises that might not appear "manly" at first.

You're Known For Training Women, Especially Their Glutes. Would Your Approach To Guys Be

 Any Different?

My male workout partners and I train very similarly to how I train my female clients, so I wouldn't change it very much. I tend to program around 36 glute sets per week for women and a bit less—around 24 sets—for men. That way, the men can dedicate more volume to the various upper-body muscles they tend to like hitting hard.

Big, strong glutes come with the territory when following challenging leg workouts. What exercises specifically emphasize the glutes that a guy can do without compromising his...how should we say...testosterone?

I gotcha. I'd go with heavy barbell hip thrusts. I've given this a lot of thought and have come to the conclusion that how "manly" an exercise appears to be has more to do with tradition than the actual value of the movement.

The most popular glute exercises involve hip extension. For someone completely naïve to weight training, dropping into a squat might seem weird, as would bending over into a hip hinge or thrusting from a bench. So we can't worry about what exercises look like to others. We need to judge exercises on the basis of scientific evidence, focusing on those that do the best job building glutes—whether they appear manly or not. I think once we do that, those exercises will join the mainstream.

What About Lunges. Are Some Variations Of The Movement Better Than Others?

Yes. If you want to lunge for maximum glute development, go with either walking lunges or reverse lunges. Take a fairly long stride, step slightly out to the side on each step, lean forward slightly, sink deep, push through the heels, and power yourself out of the hole without letting the hips shoot up faster than the shoulders. Don't allow your torso to become more horizontal—or parallel to the ground—as you rise upward.

What Kinds Of Adjustments In Foot Placement Can Make Leg Exercises Like The Leg Press Or Hack Squat More Glute-Friendly?

The glutes actually receive a fairly similar training stimulus whether you place your feet high or low on the foot platform. What does change with foot placement, though, is the level of quadriceps versus hamstring stimulation. A higher/wider foot placement hits the hammies more, whereas a lower/closer foot placement hits the quads more.

We've Heard That Going Deeper Into The Hole On Squats And Other Multijoint Movements Hits The Glutes Harder. Is That True? And If So, How Does It Work?

It is true, but it requires further explanation. Glute EMG activity actually doesn't increase when moving below the parallel position. My lab recently confirmed this, as did a lab in Brazil. But there's more to the story than muscle activation. Range of motion factors into the equation too.

Quadriceps studies show that the deeper you go during leg extensions, the better it is for hypertrophy. If this same trend is true for the glutes, then full squats would indeed be better than parallel squats for stimulating glute growth.

Having said that, only those with the hip anatomy for it should do deep squats. If your hips just weren't built for squatting deep, rest assured that you're not leaving much on the table by squatting to parallel.

Can Cardio Machines Help Develop Your Glutes?

If you give cardio to beginners, their glutes will grow. But they won't grow that much unless they start with world-class glute genetics. The vast majority of people—those without the "right" genes—need resistance training for their glutes to undergo substantial growth. If they're performing the right glute exercises regularly, they'll hit all the fibers in their glutes—including the type I and type II fibers—and see some real growth.

I don't think steady-state cardio does much to add stimulus to the glutes. In fact, cardio can hamper glute development if done excessively. Runners and swimmers have markedly less glute development than ground-sport athletes and powerlifters, for instance.

HIIT training, though, would definitely be effective for building glutes. Even so, it still can't build glutes like resistance training does. For the best glute growth, stick with hip thrusts, squats, deadlifts, lunges, and back extensions.

We Know Guys Tend To Store Body Fat Around Their Midsections, But Does That Extend To Their Glutes, Too?

There are always exceptions to the rule, but most men don't store excessive amounts of fat on their glutes. The good news is that strength training and a good diet will both build glute muscle and lean out your entire body to reveal your athletic, powerful, and manly appearance.

Get big and ripped twice as fast!

To star in your own body transformation, master the five steps for rapid-fire fat loss.

We've all seen hundreds of those 90-day makeovers showing side-by-side pics of an out-of-shape guy who has transformed his physique into that of a rock-hard stud. In every case, the body on the right looks far bigger and better. That's one of the illusions competitive bodybuilders and fitness buffs have known about for decades: the magic of looking bigger by becoming more ripped.

The steps to make it happen are:

Re-jiggering a diet to burn more fat while consuming fewer calories

Doing smart cardio to burn more fat and total calories

Tweaking your training to retain muscle size in a calorie-deficient environment

Focusing on smart recovery to ensure you're ready for your next bout

It's virtually impossible to get bigger and leaner simultaneously. Most people who attempt both end up accomplishing neither.

It makes sense, then, to do what every physique athlete or bodybuilder does pre-contest: drill down to reveal their inner ripped, lean physique. What makes this article different from others, however, is that we're aiming to do it in half the time! That means amplifying some of the major variables, which we discuss below.

One final note before we dive in. You need to have some muscle already to reveal said muscle during fat loss. If you embark on a get-ripped plan without any foundation of muscle, you're going to end up 

..looking like a prisoner of war—probably not the look you're after.