Sumo wrestler...your ideal physique?

Todays blog posting comes courtesy of Chris Shugart over at T-Nation. The following excerpt from his most recent article may be an "a-ha" moment for a few people.

Fat Americans vs. Sumo Wrestlers

If we were to make a list of the behaviors that lead to the fattening of Americans, it might look like this:

1) Skipping breakfast: This leads to catabolism (muscle loss) and thus metabolism damage. It also leads to binge eating later in the day.

2) Eating lots of unhealthy food and drinking lots of nutritionally worthless calories (soft drinks and alcohol).

3) Eating only two or three giant meals a day.

4) Going to bed right after eating a big, high carb meal.

5) Not moving around much.

Here's the interesting part. In their training stables in Japan, sumo wrestlers are taught to eat in a manner that leads to massive weight gain. Here's what they're taught:

1) Skip breakfast.

2) Eat lots of mostly unhealthy food and drink lots of alcohol.

3) Eat only two or three giant meals a day.

4) Go to bed right after eating a big, high carb meal.

Does that list look familiar? Yep, the average overweight American eats like a sumo wrestler whose goal is to weigh 500 pounds! And truthfully, rikishi probably get more activity than the average fat American. And their main type of meal, chankonabe, probably contains more vegetables than the typical American gets too!

We can learn several lessons from this. First, going to sleep after eating a high carb meal is so effective at causing body fat accumulation that sumo wrestlers usually do it twice per day. Maybe, just maybe, we should avoid eating too many carbs at night if we want to have visible abs. What do ya think?

Second, if men trying to get massively fat purposefully skip breakfast, drink beer, and eat only two or three large meals a day, maybe it would be a good idea to eat breakfast, lay off the booze, and consume five or six smaller meals per day if your goal is to get shredded.

Just a thought.

Finally, I think personal trainers should relate these facts to their clients. Maybe it'll act as a wake-up call. Most average people would be pretty surprised to find out they're eating like sumo wrestlers, especially those who skip breakfast thinking that this is an effective weight loss method.

Flexing in the Mirror

I'm not buddy-buddy with any of my roommates. I ended up stuck in a house with a bunch of randoms some of whom may be better off inhabiting a zoo or prison. Nevertheless, I caught one of them last night engaged in one of his favorite pastimes (along with cheating on his girlfriend and doing everything 20 decibels louder than necessary)...checking himself out in the mirror.

He called me in.

"Josh...Josh! Look at what the gym gave me!"

The way he's running his hands over his upper body makes me uncomfortable. The guy definitely has some great genetics, I've seen his "efforts" in the gym which includes more socializing than actual lifting anything and he's had a definite improvement in body composition. However...

"I like this!"

He rubs himself some more.

"But, I want to get my pack!"

He shakes his sizable gut.

After trying to explain to him he needs to clean up his diet he decides to tell me what he eats.

"I eat good...I eat curry goat, rice and fried plantain...you know plantain...okay...I eat that once a day."

"And that's ALL you eat?"

"Yeah."

"You only eat once a day?"

"Yeah."

I felt like a nuclear physicist speaking to a room full of preschoolers trying to explain to him that he was destroying his metabolism and sabotaging his results.

"You should be eating more often."

"Really? Like 2 or 3 meals a day?"

"That's better than 1 but the more often you eat the better."

It's 1am and I feel like I'm being forced to solve some sort of riddle before I'm allowed to pass through and use the porcelain throne he's so uselessly defending.

"You can't out train a bad diet."

I chuckle at the ridiculousness of the entire conversation.

"Really? You think so eh?"

I've had enough of him questioning my advice. I head back into my room and lock the door.

There's got to be a lesson to this blog posting right? Well I didn't really have one in mind when I decided to write this, I just had to share my precious late night encounter. I'm sure most of you could glean something from my musings however. ;)

Taking the work out of working out.

The one and only John Mahler recently posted the following quote in a thread over at the JP Fitness forums.

"The problem is that too many people who workout are trying to take the work out."

Now, I have no idea if that gem was bore of his own brilliance or if he borrowed it from someone else but I sure thought it was awesome.

When you think about it, it's a phrase that has perhaps never held so much truth. How lazy has our society become? The original thread was about an exercise "machine" if I may call it that, (it looked more like a futuristic torture device) that promised a hell of a workout in a fraction of the time.

We've all heard that before...and for some of us it might have made our mouths water...I'm sure there have been some of us...consistently overweight, out of shape, sitting on the couch day after day just waiting for another infomerical to come on promising us washboard abs and a "tight, toned" physique in just minutes a day! Your mouth waters. Pavlov smiles.

What has caused this gullibility, this distortion of reality in which we actually BELIEVE we can achieve some exceptional by putting in a less than exceptional effort to get it. Perhaps we don't actually believe it at all. Perhaps we're just lying to ourselves, massaging our fracture self esteems, telling ourselves "We're doing SOMETHING...that's better than NOTHING......right?" But at the end of the day deep down we know it'll get us nowhere. We know it will leave a taste in our mouths that too few of society is tasting these days. Success. Accomplishment.

The other day at work I sparked a friendly conversation with a young man doing bench press on the smith machine. I'd seen him before...every workout...same thing. So I asked him why. Why not barbell bench, it's 3 feet away? Why not dumbbell bench, you just said you rarely do that anyway? It was because he was in his comfort zone, he had found an exercise that he felt safe doing. Safe as in he had a built in spotter sure, but safe as in there was little chance he'd make himself look foolish (If he only knew!), little chance he'd need help from someone else, little chance he'd see the results he was looking for. I did my best to straighten him out...I haven't seen him on the smith machine since.

I use a phrase at least once daily at work. "If it's not difficult it's probably not worth doing." Now, that phrase could easily be picked apart, I can hear the keyboard coaches now!

"Someone may overexert themselves and get injured!"

"You don't always have to train to failure!"

I was thinking earlier today about an Alwyn Cosgrove article on developing a training philosophy and figured I'd pen mine as something like "Keeping it simple". "If it's not difficult it's probably not worth doing" is a very simple phrase and what it boils down to is that if you're not putting in the effort you're not going to see the returns.

This means...

-LADIES! Quit wasting your time! Ask for help! Find a qualified trainer! I've seen waaay too many groups of girls doing typical girl exercises that my testosterone levels have left me closer to Xerxes (in the new film 300) than Ah-nuld. Please stop the triangle ritual! The triangle ritual as I see it in my gym.

I'd estimate total calories burned during the triangle ritual at 37. What's more difficult? Dumbbell kickbacks or decline dumbbell tricep extension? Then why are you still doing kickbacks?

-GENTLEMEN! If I hear another male utter the words "I do pulldowns instead of pullups because pullups are too hard." I may throw up my own testicles. Men are just as guilty when it comes to lacking intensity in the gym as the women are. In fact I have female clients who could probably kick the ass of half the guys in my gym.

I wasn't sure where I was going when I started this blog. I haven't written one in awhile but I like where this one went...even if it wasn't exactly where I thought it was headed.

Stop trying to take the work out of working out.