Bodyweight Exercises

I saw another of those stupid “how to eat right during the holidays” segments on the news today. Oh, man! The way this lady talked, you might as well carry a bag of carrots and a shirt that says “Don’t Feed The Pariah” when you go to holiday parties.  Because according to her, you WILL overeat! You WILL drink too much! You ARE doooooomed unless you follow her advice on eating.

Baloney.

Eating during the holidays is like eating every other day of the year.  Staying fit during the holidays is like staying fit every other day of the year.

So what’s the answer? Eat right and exercise well during the rest of the year, and the holiday season won’t be any different.  Conversely (that’s professor-talk for “on the other hand”), beginning to eat right and exercise well during the holiday season will carry over into next year.

So how do you start? Click HERE. No kidding.

Hi all.  Hope everyone had a happy Thanksgiving holiday.  We spent the day with friends, and had some good German wine and played cards and watched football.

So then I see this article on “Avoiding A Holiday Attack.”  Always good advice.  Basically, it says to stick to your fitness routine (in the midst of holiday parties), eat breakfast, and eat small meals during the day (instead of snacks, I guess).  Sort of :how to get a flat stomach” and still have those Christmas treats!

Pretty good advice.  Not much to add, really.  It’s overall a good article, but - obviously - short on the details.

So, to get the whole scoop on how to eat right and lose weight without drugs or dieting, check out Burn The Fat!  The author, Tom Venuto, said in an intervierw that you coudl have a diet that consisted entirely of pizza and still lose weight! (I think it was pizza. It might have been cholcolate, but I’m pretty sure it was pizza).  Anyway.  This is MY kind of nutrition book.

Life is full of surprises and moments so exciting that by simply looking at them, we miss ourselves. We are so busy doing unremarkable stuff – on the phone, on the PC, in front of the TV and radio, adventuring, and endlessly seeking power and status. This is when car racers feel alive and excited – when they are in a near death opportunity! Imagine that. Actually, that is when we also feel enthusiastic – with adrenalin-pumping, hair-raising incidents or when one is over excited, showing off, or risking fearful flights – that we cannot see what’s real in our lives. We make mistakes. We miss turns. We lose or forget things. And this is all because we lose reign of our senses. Only when there are accidents, a thump on the head, a slap in the face, a comment, a synchronized moment, a glance from a beautiful person, song of a sweet bird, the rising or setting of the sun, a shooting star, or the rhythm of the waves do we stop for a second and appreciate and reflect on these things with our minds. Time seems to slow down in moments of awe, devotion, speechlessness, and high spirits. We become aware of beautiful, fresh, sweet, shining, and glowing moments.  It seems that only at these times are we awake, truly alive, and with a calm and serene mind.

So what does this have to do with bodyweight exercises and how to get a flat stomach?  Simple. It’s a lot easier to survive that accident, take a long walk through the woods, or climb a mountain, and find that moment fo awe, if you’re in shape.  Carrying 15 or 20 flabby pounds around your waist is not conducive to doing these actions that make us aware of beautiful and shining moments. It’s better to have the sunset take your breath away than just walking upstairs.

Check out “Burn The Fat, Feed The Muscle” by Tom Venuto, and you won’t miss a moment of awe because you’re too busy huffing and puffing.

Hi. Is alcohol turning your fitness program into a bad diet?  You know how to get a flat stomach.  But are you defeating your six-pack with the occasional six pack? I know that I used to enjoy hitting the bars after a really hard work out. Key words: “used to.”  Check out the Q&A from guest contributor Tom Venuto, author of “Burn The Fat, Feed The Muscle,” the best manual on integrating nutrition and exercising on the web.  How long does it take to get in shape?  A lot quicker is you aren’t doing the 16-oz curls…

QUESTION: Tom, what about alcohol? How does that fit into your burning fat program? I am not talking binge drinking, just one or two a day.

John

ANSWER: Hi John. A couple drinks on the weekend and or on special ocassions probably won’t have any major impact on your fat loss results (although I would encourage you to consider the mindset that EVERYTHING you do either helps or hurts).

A drink or two on ocassion is a part of enjoying life for many people, and it’s important to find lifestyle balance for the sake of your long term happiness and success.

However, I do not recommend drinking every day.

“A couple every day” adds a LOT of extra calories to your daily diet. If you’re talking about two 150-calorie beers, thats 300 calories extra a day or 2100 extra calories a week.

Multiply that out for a year and you have 109,200 extra calories! WOW! That’s potentially 31.2 pounds of fat in a year.

If you DO account for the calories in those drinks, then you have another conundrum - the alcohol calories displace good valuable food calories…

Drinking gives you empty alcohol calories with virtually no nutritional value (and some negative value in more way than one), while pushing out important vitamins, minerals, phytochemicals essential amino acids, essential fatty acids, fiber and other good stuff.

Alcohol also inhibits fat burning. While your liver is busy metabolizing alcohol, it puts your fat metabolism on hold. That’s why I do NOT recommend any drinking when you are on a fat loss program (at least if you are serious about it).

When you are on a regular, year-round lifestyle/maintenance program I recommend that if you drink, you do so in moderation, keep it to special occasions or weekends and remember to factor in those calories to your daily intake.

By the way, there’s a major risk to drinking every day - even just one or two - that most people don’t even think about:

Daily drinking is habit forming. Anything you do every day easily becomes a habit that is difficult to break later.

On the other hand, if you could establish the habit of eating 5-9 servings of fruits and vegetables and getting some exercise every single day, those would be habits worth forming!

let me know how else I can help. This question comes up often, so I did cover alcohol and fat loss in much greater detail in chapter 13 of the Burn the Fat book: www.burnthefat.com

About the Author:

Tom Venuto is a lifetime natural bodybuilder, an NSCA-certified personal trainer (CPT), certified strength & conditioning specialist (CSCS), and author of the #1 best-selling e-book, “Burn the Fat, Feed The Muscle.” Tom has written more than 200 articles and has been featured in print magazines such as IRONMAN, Australian IRONMAN, Natural Bodybuilding, Muscular Development, Exercise for Men and Men’s Exercise, as well as on hundreds of websites worldwide. For information on Tom’s Fat Loss program, visit his website.

Even though there is so much information available about weight loss, the same diet mistakes are being made over and over every day. We are not talking here about little slipups where you ate a slice of pie that was not on the plan, but big mistakes that lead to failure to lose the weight that you want to lose. Understanding these errors can help you develop the attitude that will lead to permanent weight loss and not just how to get a flat stomach.

1. The All Or Nothing Attitude

All or nothing dieters will often pick out a complicated diet that is almost impossible for them to maintain. Before beginning, they will search the kitchen for anything that does not fit the plan and throw it in the garbage. They are planning to be the perfect dieter, and so they will be, for one day, three days, seven days or even a couple of weeks. Then, inevitably, something happens that means they cannot keep to the diet one time. Immediately the whole thing is ruined in their eyes and the diet is over. They go to the store and buy all the things that went into the garbage last week and proceed to gain back all the weight that they lost, as fast as possible.

If you are this kind of dieter you need to ask yourself some tough questions. Do you really want to lose weight permanently, or just lose a few pounds so that you can enjoy putting them back on again? The way forward is to make small changes to what you eat so that you have a slow but steady weight loss.

2. The Attitude of Sacrifice

Another common mistake is to view your diet as a period of sacrifice. You do not allow yourself the foods that you enjoy most while you are on your way to your target weight. You may have a great diet plan and be very successful in losing weight, but what happens when you reach your goal? You have not learnt to eat ‘bad foods’ in moderation so as soon as you start, you are likely to go out of control. It is better to include a little of everything in your diet and learn to enjoy it in small quantities. Yes, even chocolate!

3. Goal Failure

Setting achievable goals is vital in any weight loss plan. Goals should be clear, realistic and set out in writing. While you probably do have an ideal weight in your mind, unless you are only very slightly overweight it is probably too distant to be useful. A more useful goal would be to lose two pounds per week for the first five weeks and then one pound per week after that. Some weeks you will lose more and some less, some weeks you may even gain, but if you track your progress on a graph you will see that ups and downs are natural and do not stop you progressing steadily toward your major goal.

If you have been making these mistakes, do not worry. The most important point in dieting as in so many other things is to move on. Learn from your failures as well as your success and do not use a mistake as an excuse for giving up. The only way to achieve your goal permanently is to make a commitment to become a healthier person. Remember that eating normally includes eating more some days and less others. Learn to enjoy food in moderation and you have every chance of avoiding these bad diet mistakes.

For more information on proper diet and nutrition,see “Burn The Fat, Feed The Muscle” by Tom Venuto.

(This post, and this blog, do not dispense medical advice.  If you think you are at risk for diabetes, check with a doctor.)
With obesity levels being at an all time high, the epidemic of type 2 diabetes is growing at an alarming rate, and will only get worse. Between 2001 and 2002, the diagnosis of diabetes went from 5.5 percent of Americans to an alarming 6.5 percent. In just one year! The sad fact is that many people want to know how long does it take to get in shape, but almost none know how long it takes to get diabetes.

Overall, twelve million Americans have been diagnosed and another 5 million Americans have diabetes and don’t know it. And yet another 12 millions are on their way to type 2 diabetes because of impaired glucose levels.

Not knowing is the worst because risks of untreated diabetes puts us at a terrible risk of complications
including but not limited to blindness, amputations and ultimately death.

The stickler is, that type 2 diabetes is almost completely preventable. Doctors say eat less, eat better and exercise. And it means more than just how to get a flat stomach.  The numbers show just how many Americans are currently overweight.  Bodyweight exercises are an excellent way to achieve this goal. And combining this type of fitness program with good nutrition should increase your chances of avoiding Type 2 diabetes.

Statistically, people are now living longer, and it has been on the rise for years. But this will not continue if
type 2 diabetes is not put under control. We are a gluttonous society and ultimately it is affecting how we live and how long we live.

And unfortunately, the diabetes epidemic is not just a US problem. It is spreading worldwide with epidemic reports in Asia, the Middle East and the Caribbean. It is estimated that by 2025, the number of diabetics worldwide will rise to 380 million. And diabetes is now affecting more of the young and middle-aged population in developing countries between the ages of 40 and 59.

Type 2 Diabetes prevention begins with proper nutrition. You don’t have to follow a diabetic diet.  But you do need to follow a plan of eating that focuses on natural weight loss and weight maintenance, without being a drag.  “Burn The Fat, Feed The Muscle” by Tom Venuto really nails this. It is not a diabetes prevention manual. But it lays out and explains how to eat, and knowing how to eat is a major step in preventing type 2 diabetes.

Click HERE for more information.

Hi all. I saw this article in the Toledo Free Press website: Can exercise reduce your risk of catching a cold?  Now, before you read the whole thing (and it is well-written.  I encourage you to read it, AFTER reading this post), note that they recommend a balanced diet and avoiding rapid weight loss.
The best way to do this is to eat right - in combination with your fitness routine - most of the time. 
This doesn’t mean measuring every piece of grilled chicken with a micrometer, to make sure it is exactly the 4.22786 gms recommended by the goof-ball “diet of the month” book.  It means knowing the proper mix of foods that make up balanced food intake, and how it relates to the calories your burning (and the muscle you are building) in your fitness routine.
So check out “Burn The Fat, Feed The Muscle” by Tom Venuto.
Then read the article.

Right now, my toy-of-the-month is “Burn The Fat, Feed The Muscle” by Tom Venuto.  This superb manual explains something that sounds so simple, it sounds almost stupid: how to eat. Now let’s face it.  Everyone knows how to eat. Open your pie hole and fill it. And that’s the problem. WHAT do you fill it with?  Tom explains (and it’s NOT a nutritionist’s tome of jargon and science mumbo-jumbo) how to eat food so that you lose fat and gain muscle.  It’s not a diet book, since diets don’t work.

Seriously. Check it out.  Here’s WHY Tom is different: in an interview (and I have heard the interview, so this is not an “urban myth”) that you could eat 100% pizza and still lose weight. But then he said he didn’t recommend it.  So if you have ever wondered “how long does it take to get in shape” - this is the answer.

Here’s a review.  Check out “Burn The Fat, Feed The Muscle.”

Burn The Fat, Feed The Muscle By Tom Venuto

“Burn The Fat, Feed The Muscle,” The #1 best-selling diet ebook on the Internet (as rated by clickbank.com), is completely unique and different from other programs on the diet market because it’s not a weight loss program - it’s a fat loss program. Once you’ve read just the first three chapters, there will be no doubt in your mind that pursuing weight loss is not only the wrong goal, it may be the reason why you’ve failed to reach and maintain your ideal body weight

“Burn The Fat” shows you exactly why it’s fat you must lose, not weight, why you cannot succeed with starvation diets, and then shows you exactly how to burn off fat, step by step, in one of the most detailed fat loss nutrition books ever written.

If you’re interested in learning exactly what to eat to lose fat the natural way - without supplements, without drugs and without slowing down your metabolism - while also learning the why behind it all, then this program could truly change your life. Get more information HERE.

For this blog, I am posting an article by Tom Venuto, who is one of the internet’s top experts on natural safe weight loss. Because Tom explains this stuff better than anyone I know. Read through this post, then check out his book “Burn The Fat, Feed The Muscle.”  It’s not a diet.  It’s a better way of eating.

QUESTION: “Tom, on your Burn The Fat website, you wrote: ‘Who better to model than bodybuilders and fitness competitors? No athletes in the world get as lean as quickly as bodybuilders and fitness competitors. The transformations they undergo in 12 weeks prior to competition would boggle your mind! Only ultra-endurance athletes come close in terms of low body fat levels, but endurance athletes like triathaletes and marathoners often get lean at the expense of chewing up all their muscle. Some of them are nothing but skin and bone.’”

“There seems to be a contradiction unless I’m missing something. Why do bodybuilders and fitness competitors have to go through a 12 week ‘transformation’ prior to every event instead of staying ‘lean and mean’ all the time? If they practice the secrets exposed in your book, they should be staying in shape all the time instead of having to work at losing fat prior to every competitive event, correct?”

ANSWER: There’s a logical explanation for why bodybuilders and other physique athletes (fitness and figure competitors), don’t remain completely ripped all year round, and it’s the very reason they are able to get so ripped on the day of a contest…

You can’t hold a peak forever or it’s not a “peak”, right? What is the definition of a peak? It’s a high point surrounded by two lower points isn’t it?

Therefore, any shape you can stay in all year round is NOT your “peak” condition.

The intelligent approach to nutrition and training (which almost all bodybuilders and fitness/figure competitors use), is to train and diet in a seasonal or cyclical fashion and build up to a peak, then ease off to a maintenance or growth phase.

I am NOT talking about bulking up and getting fat and out of shape every year, then dieting it all off every year. What I’m talking about is going from good shape to great (peak) shape, then easing back off to good shape…. but never getting “out of shape.” Makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it?

Here’s an example: I have no intentions whatsoever of walking around 365 days a year at 4% body fat like I appear in the photo on my website. Off-season, when I’m not competing, my body fat is usually between 8 – 10%. Mind you, that’s very lean and still single digit body fat.

I don’t stray too far from competition shape, but I don’t maintain contest shape all the time. It takes me 12-14 weeks or so to gradually drop from 9.5% to 3.5%-4.0% body fat to “peak” for competition with NO loss of lean body mass…using the same techniques I reveal in my e-book.

It would be almost impossible to maintain 4% body fat, and even if I could, why would I want to? For the few weeks prior to competition I’m so depleted, ripped, and even “drawn” in the face, that complete strangers walk up and offer to feed me.

Okay, so I’m just kidding about that, but let’s just say being “being ripped to shreds” isn’t a desirable condition to maintain because it takes such a monumental effort to stay there. It’s probably not even healthy to try forcing yourself to hold extreme low body fat. Unless you’re a natural “ectomorph” (skinny, fast metabolism body type), your body will fight you. Not only that, anabolic hormones may drop and sometimes your immune system is affected as well. It’s just not “normal” to walk around all the time with literally no subcutaneous body fat.

Instead of attempting to hold the peak, I cycle back into a less demanding off-season program and avoid creeping beyond 9.9% body fat. Some years I’ve stayed leaner - like 6-7%, (which takes effort), especially when I knew I would be photographed, but I don’t let my body fat go over 10%.

This practice isn’t just restricted to bodybuilders. Athletes in all sports use periodization to build themselves up to their best shape for competition. Is a pro football player in the same condition in March-April as he is in August-September? Not a chance. Many show up fat and out of shape (relatively speaking) for training camp, others just need fine tuning, but none are in peak form… that’s why they have training camp!!!

There’s another reason you wouldn’t want to maintain a “ripped to shreds” physique all year round – you’d have to be dieting (calorie restricted) all the time. And this is one of the reasons that 95% of people can’t lose weight and keep it off –they are CHRONIC dieters… always on some type of diet. Know anyone like that?

You can’t stay on restricted low calories indefinitely. Sooner or later your metabolism slows down and you plateau as your body adapts to the chronically lowered food intake. But if you diet for fat loss and push incredibly hard for 3 months, then ease off for a while and eat a little more (healthy food, not “pigging out”), your metabolic rate is re-stimulated. In a few weeks or months, you can return to another fat loss phase and reach an even lower body fat level, until you finally reach the point that’s your happy maintenance level for life – a level that is healthy and realistic – as well as visually appealing.

Bodybuilders have discovered a methodology for losing fat that’s so effective, it puts them in complete control of their body composition. They’ve mastered this area of their lives and will never have to worry about it again. If they ever “slip” and fall off the wagon like all humans do at times … no problem! They know how to get back into shape fast.

Bodybuilders have the tools and knowledge to hold a low body fat all year round (such as 9% for men, or about 15% for women), and then at a whim, to reach a temporary “peak” of extremely low body fat for the purpose of competition. Maybe most important of all, they have the power and control to slowly ease back from peak shape into maintenance, and not balloon up and yo-yo like most conventional dieters!

What if you had the power to stay lean all year round, and then get super lean when summer rolled around, or when you took your vacation to the Caribbean, or when your wedding date was coming up? Wouldn’t you like to be in control of your body like that? Isn’t that the same thing that bodybuilders and fitness/figure competitors do, only on a more practical, real-world level?

So even if you have no competitive aspirations whatsoever, don’t you agree that there’s something of value everyone could learn from physique athletes? Don’t model yourself after the huge crowd of losers who gobble diet pills, buy exercise gimmicks and suffer through starvation diets like automatons, only to gain back everything they lost! Instead, learn from the leanest athletes on Earth - natural bodybuilders and fitness competitors…

These physique athletes get as ripped as they want to be, exactly when they want to, simply by manipulating their diets in a cyclical fashion between pre-contest “cutting” programs and off season “maintenance” or “muscle growth” programs. Even if you have no desire to ever compete, try this seasonal “peaking” approach yourself and you’ll see that it can work as well for you as it does for elite bodybuilders.

If you’re interested in learning even more secrets of bodybuilders and fitness models, visit the Burn The Fat website.

About the Author:

Tom Venuto is a lifetime natural bodybuilder, an NSCA-certified personal trainer (CPT) and a certified strength & conditioning specialist (CSCS). Tom is the author of the #1 best-selling e-book, “Burn the Fat, Feed The Muscle,” which teaches you how to get lean without drugs or supplements using the secrets of the world’s best bodybuilders and fitness models. Learn how to get rid of stubborn body fat and increase your metabolism by visiting HERE. To learn more about Tom’s Fat Loss Support Community, visit: www.burnthefatinnercircle.com

The last thing you want to do on Christmas Day is spend it in bed because you can’t get up and walk around easily.  Or spend it watching the kids play with their toys because you can’t get down on the floor with them.  Or be so doped up on painkillers that all the fun and excitement pass right by you.  Because your sciatica pain is ruining your holiday.

You’ve got about 1-1/2 months until Christmas.  Think about HOW you are treating your sciatica pain - or your back pain in general - right now.  Okay?  Do you really believe that you will be pain free by Christmas Day by staying on your current program?  Are you tired of the drugs and so-called therapies that jusst mask the pain, but don’t solve the problem?

Treat Sciatica Now is a drug-free, surgery-free program to treat sciatica pain quickly.  Best of all, it only takes 8 minutes a day.  Let me repeat that: 8 minutes a day.  Now, when I was suffering from sciatica - it took me over 8 minutes to crawl on my hands and knees from my bedroom to my living room to call in to work and take a sick day.  So Treat Sciatica Now’s super-fast super-safe program is almost a miracle.

Check out Treat Sciatica Now.   Not only is it guaranteed - but it is at a special limited-time only sale price.  And what a price! It’s less than your painkillers and trips to the doctor (which aren’t doing you any good, or you wouldn’t be reading this blog, right?).  So go HERE now for the cure for your sciatica pain.

OR go to the couch on Christmas Day.  Your call.