Friday Mature Muscle Inspiration April 27

Circa 1900 Bodybuilder

Getting Fatter After 50

The reason weight gain accelerates in most people after age 50 is due to pernicious muscle loss, pure and simple. Because most people are so very resistant to engaging in challenging exercise—walking just ain’t gonna cut it—they deny the cold hard fact that they have to get up off their ass.

Our metabolism resides within our lean muscle mass. The less muscle we have the weaker our metabolism. The only way to increase our metabolism is to build back the muscle we have naturally lost with age.

"If we are not actively building muscle then we are actively losing muscle."

Beginning about age 30, we lose between 7% and 10% of our lean muscle mass with every passing decade, unless we are engaged in a muscle-building form of exercise.

With low metabolism we burn fewer calories. This is why we gain weight on the same diet that previously did not have this frustrating effect. Muscle does not turn into fat any more than apples turn into oranges. But fat does replace muscle due to low metabolism.

Some people, especially women, feign repulsion at gaining “ugly” muscle, yet have no problem with gaining ugly fat. This mindset is clearly just a distraction to avoid the challenging work involved in building new muscle. The work to gain fat is leisurely and pleasurable; the work to gain muscle is...well... hard work.  

People over 50 have but one choice if they are to maintain a healthy weight: challenging exercise coupled with a change in their current eating regimen. Think of it this way: your current way of eating has caused you to gain fat, so changing your eating pattern from recreational eating to nutritional eating, permanently, is the key to stop the weight gain and begin returning to a positive state of health.

Fad diets don’t work for the simple reason that people think of diets as temporary. People claim befuddlement when after “going off the diet” and returning to the way of eating that caused them to get fat in the first place, they “gain the weight back.” Lost weight in fact is gone forever, so people don’t “gain the weight back,” they are in truth gaining brand-new weight via intentional fat-gain eating.

Changing the way we eat, permanently, is the logical solution to problematic weight. But without taking up some form of challenging exercise the battle will only be half won.

Mr. Venice Contestant Arthur Hrvatin Jr.

Three bodybuilding contests are held in Venice Beach California each summer: Memorial Day, 4th of July, and Labor Day.

Arthur Hrvatin Jr. competed in the Over 50 category.

Time To Choose: Bodybuilder or Powerlifter?

Massively built and cut champion Chris Bumstead has nothing to prove.

Are you a Bodybuilder or Powerlifter? Don’t confuse the two.

Powerlifting is all about hoisting as much weight as you can possibly move—for competition, personal empowerment, or just plain ego. 

Bodybuilding is all about sculpting your body utilizing specific exercises designed and proven historically to accomplish exactly that purpose.

In every gym there are those who are struggling to perform bodybuilding exercises by utilizing inappropriate and counterproductive powerlifting poundages. For these people, questionable bragging rights (I can bench 400 lbs.!) take precedence over actual aesthetic results.

Many an unremarkable online vlogger likes to brag about performing one-armed biceps curls with a 65, 85, or even 100 lb. dumbbell, yet in a recent video I watched awesome bodybuilding champ Chris Bumstead using just 40 lb. dumbbells for his biceps curl workout.

A champion is someone who doesn’t have to prove anything to anyone else—least of all trolls and insecure know-it-alls.

Mature Muscle Monday April 8

Nobody Cares How Much You Can Lift, So Get Over It.

If I had to choose the number one reason why people aren’t making the progress they should be in their workout routine, it would be that they’re lifting more weight than they can handle. There has never been one day in my entire life when at the gym I did not see multiple—even the majority—of those present making this costly mistake.

People are actually concerned about what complete strangers at the gym think of them! Think about that.

Lifting more than we can handle sacrifices the number one thing that WILL build the kind of body people want: proper form. Many people seem to accept this intellectually, but in practice they will still overload the weight regardless.

This problem is made worse by YouTube videos made by fakers and schysters who are using movie prop weights and trying to pass them off as real. Many viewers do not realize the weights are fake and these types of videos produce negative feelings in some who don’t realize it’s all an act to get “likes.” How sad those individuals are whose “life”, such as it is, exists only while online, and who depend on fakery and electronic “likes” for personal validation.

Learning proper form is as easy as going on YouTube. However the majority of fitness how-to instruction on YT ranges anywhere from merely adequate to absurdly bad. Two of the very best instructors, both of whom have a gift for making things clear, are Jeff Cavaliere and Mike Thurston.

Friday Mature Muscle April 6

Scott Holmes before and after.

c.1909 Big Gut Warning

Don’t Risk Injury By “Cheating” Up The Weight

©-Jaimie-Duplass-Fotolia.com

Watching people struggle valiantly to squeeze out one or two last reps by calling into play every available muscle in their body to help move the weight adds nothing to muscle size or shape, but the practice does open the door to injury.

When your biceps (or any other targeted muscle) fail, it’s because they’re done. They’ve done all they can do. Adding momentum, bouncing up and down, engaging shoulder muscles, back muscles and more, bending and twisting and contorting the body in a desperate effort to get one or two more reps —these things do not help build and shape the biceps.

"Only working the biceps in ISOLATION builds and shapes the biceps."

This being so common tells me how few people follow—or even understand the dictum of mind-muscle connection, of “putting your mind in the muscle.” 

If you can't feel the muscle working, it's because the muscle isn't working. If after a set of biceps curls you don't feel the biceps engorged with blood and the unpleasant feeling that comes with lactic acid buildup in the biceps due to correctly performing the exercise, it's because you're doing it all wrong.

mature Monday Inspiration April 2

Got Lower Back Pain? The ORTHOPOD is a Game Changer

The miraculous OrthoPod

We all have “woke” moments throughout our lives when we realize something we didn’t previously. When I was working for the Los Angeles Times while in my 30s there was a very talented writer I admired named Bob Sipchen. He would be assigned often complicated articles to write that required a lot of research. The subject matter often was originally unfamiliar to him, so in order to school the reader as to the subject matter he had to learn on short notice some intricate and sophisticated scientific or medical material. Thus he came across an a trusted expert, when in fact he was not at all —by his own admission. I often wondered why the Times didn’t just delegate such assignments to experts in the field, but there you go.

When we read articles we assume the writer has a high level of expertise, when in fact they might know little of that which they speak.

In reading this (CLICK) article in GQ magazine, “4 Simple Ways To Prevent Lower Back Pain…” I was troubled that the most obvious and natural technique to prevent and treat back pain, stretching, was not even mentioned. If the writer indeed had any history of back pain herself, she most certainly would’ve put this first on the list.

Hopefully you have a chinup bar securely installed in a doorway at home or work so you can hang by your hands to help undo the compression we all suffer as a result of the daily effects of gravity. But hanging upside down by our feet or knees is the ideal decompression move to stretch our spine and relax the muscles in our lower back. 

For many, hanging upside down is frightening.

Understandably, with the methods/apparatus available today, many people are hesitant to hang by their feet/ankles due to fear of falling.

For decades I have used a wonderful apparatus called an OrthoPod that I bought used from a classified ad. Unfortunately it has ceased to be manufactured. I have seen these occasionally in storefronts for hospital supply rentals, such as hospital beds, that exist in most large cities. An online search today turned up quite a few of these for sale secondhand around the country, but I doubt if many sellers would agree to ship it, since it is both heavy and unwieldy.

The Totalback System looks similar to the discontinued OrthoPod, but I have not personally used it. This is the same position your body will be in on the OrthoPod. VISIT.

However this OrthoPod gizmo has saved my ass, so to speak, and I highly recommend it. Allowing the user to hang unrestricted from the hips/quads provides multiple ways to comfortably position ones self. Daily use basically halted the degradation of my intervertebral discs. These discs act like pads or shock absorbers for your spine as it moves, and two of mine were getting perilously thin. It also stopped cold the incessant pain caused by sciatica. The sciatic nerve runs from your lower back down the back of your leg to the knee, and the dull torture you suffer during such inflammation of the nerve can be totally debilitating.

The OrthoPod allows one to stretch one’s spine while being held securely in place, and many times I don’t even have to hang completely upside down to get relief from my now-rare bouts with sciatica or lower back stiffness due to overextending myself at the gym. Opposed to boots designed for hanging upside down from an overhead bar, or a platform on which you lie that pivots to ease you into an upside-down position, the OrthoPod suspends the user from the hips rather than the ankles, you feel much safer and more secured in place. A much fuller range of movement is possible making it possible to “seek out” where the problem is by subtly twisting and torquing while in a suspended position. But in fact, simple remaining upright while secured with the pads which rest against your hamstrings.

If you have chronic back pain, especially sciatica, this machine could be a total game-changer. I know how tortuous sciatica is. My life was miserable when I suffered bouts of sciatica. On rare occasions when it flares up, it takes hanging for two minutes anywhere from once or twice to ten times over a 24 hour period to completely erase the pain.

An additional bonus is the ability to work abs to great benefit and result, in my case, performing crunches while in a suspended position.

This style of apparatus restricts the ability to torque from the midsection which helps loosen compressions.