Mike’s Beach Body Diet – Short Term Results That Will Make You will Proud to Show your Body of at the Beach!

Mike’s Beach Body Diet – Short Term Results That Will Make You will Proud to Show your Body of at the Beach!

Aims of the Beach Body Diet:

I think we should agree on our aims first as a good starting point to our Beach Body Diet. Our aims is obviously to look good in our swimming trunks and bikinis but what do we mean buy that exactly:

1) Low enough body fat to show those abs of for the men and to show a slender body for the women;

2) Good shape and muscle definition as opposed to just looking like small or like a bag of bones;

3) A flat stomach as opposed to one that may look toned but still be round and protruding;

4) Cleary visible definition as opposed to looking soft and rounded which can happen from the wrong type of dieting.

The hardest part of attaining that beach body and certainly the part that takes the longest to attain is getting a low body fat through dieting. That is achieved through slow and steady fat loss over a period of weeks, months or even years depending on your starting point. Not much point in discussing that here when it’s summer now and that all important trip to the beach is a week away. That’s where my Short Term Beach Body Diet Plan comes in. Please be warned that the results of this are short term, but what do you expect after a week or less!

The Beach Body Diet Basics that we are going to cover are a Health Warning, Water Weight, Short Term Muscle Gains, A Flat Stomach and Highlighting Your Definition.

Health Warning

Short term weight loss is dangerous, the weight will certainly come back once you come of the diet and using some of the strategies explained within this Beach Body Diet Plan will be harmful if used long term. Mainly the first point on shifting water weight mentioned below.

Step one of the beach body diet: Water Weight

The quickest way to shift body weight and add definition is by getting rid of excess water. I don’t recommend doing this long term or using any specially designed bodybuilding type diuretic as dehydration can be very dangerous. However, most people have excess water that they can shift before that trip to the beach. The difference it makes will surprise you! Did you know that bodybuilders will always shift excess water before a competition as an important way of brining out extra definition. Excess water is also a main cause of cellulite. As far at the Beach Body Diet is concerned I want you to do the following:

Do not eat any ready made micro meals or instant ‘just add hot water’ type meals for 7 days before your trip to the beach;
Do not add any salt to your meals;
Avoid anything else you come across that is high in salt like bacon;
Drink 3 litres of water a day minimum. Spaced out through out the day.

Why? Your body needs salt to store water. By cutting it down for a week the excess water will be flushed away. Drinking lots of water may sound like a strange way of getting rid of excess water but as all the water you are drinking passes through your body it actually takes salt with it. Really helping to get rid of that extra water weight.

Step two of the beach body diet: Short Term Muscle Gains

You can’t gain much muscle in a week but there is a strategy that I know as ‘Carbing Up’ that will bring out your muscles for up to about 5 days. It is best done about 2 days before your trip to the beach. That includes the girls if you want to increase definition lines to your stomach, legs, arms and shoulders.

Our muscles store processed food (known as ATP) to provide them with the energy they need when performing anaerobic exercise (exercise without oxygen). So your muscles aren’t just muscle fibres. By increasing these stores your muscles will look bigger until these stores return to their normal size. For this part of the beach body diet you need to get yourself down to your local gym and work the muscles you are targeting. You will be doing a relatively high rep work out. This will increase blood flow to the muscles you have used for a few hours after the workout. Within those few hours you must eat as many fast releasing carbohydrate rich foods along with a bit of protein. Make sure you continue to eat well for that day and do not do any cardio exercise such as running or any other strenuous activity that may detract from your pump. When you wake up the next day the muscles you worked will look bigger. But remember this is temporary, its not the best way to add muscle permanently and it’s certainly not the best way to loose fat permanently! The weight you lift must be lifted for between 10 to 15 repetitions using a weight that is heavy enough to cause you to not be able to lift the weight up again for another single rep. Weight 60 seconds between each set. Use exercises that target lost of muscles for better results like the bench press and squat. If you don’t experience an almost immediate pump during your workout then you are not working hard enough. If you like the look of veins in your muscles then drinking a full carton of pomegranate juice an hour before your workout will bring them out.

Step three of the beach body diet: A Flat Stomach

Good digestion is important but it also affects the shape of our body from our stomach to the end of our intestines. For the seven days running up to your trip to the beach no bread, no buns or anything starchy that will remain in the intestines. Get yourself some Activia Yogurts and eat two of them a day to give your digestion a real kick. Drinking coffee helps to and also helps lower your water retention. Lower the amount of carbs you eat each day to help make the stomach look better and again this helps with reducing water retention. Finally, obviously don’t pig out the day you go the beach!!

Step four of the Beach Body Diet: Highlighting Your Definition

You may be going the beach to get a tan but the more of a tan you have before you get there the better your shape will look. Pale skin reflects bright light making it look smoother and rounder. Darker skin looks more hard and defined so a trip to the sun bed shop won’t hurt.

The best and final tip is what I class as no less then a wonder supplement. I use it all the time and it helps bring our my abs more then all the sit ups I could ever do. It is called CLA (short for Conjugated linoleic acid). It helps shift fat specifically from the abs as well as whole load of other useful features. I’ve tried a lot of supplements over the years and CLA is the best safe and legal supplement. It won’t make you any lighter on the scales, it redistributes that fat. Unless you are on a fat loss diet in which case it does help lower fat. If you are trying to gain muscle it helps build muscle too. I noticed the results within days and have recommended to other people who have experienced the same. Including my Girlfriend! If you want to buy some you can get if online from Holland and Barrett. You should also do some research on Google if you are unsure.

And that is it for the beach body diet plan. It is more useful information that will help you take the right steps then a step by step plan that may limit you to foods you don’t like and meal times and amounts that are not right for you. Any feedback would be much appreciated. Especially if you have tried the plan for a whole week. Any feedback would help me write better articles in the future.

Bodybuilding and Fitness Aims and Targets

I was suppose to be writing the second part of my overtrainning post. Don't worry I haven't forgot, just a slight detour. I was having a think about my own body building aims and targets. Every now and then I have a moment of weakness where I want to completely change my aims, but luckily I don't. I manage to pull myself back together. I'm half way through a bulk at the moment and during these 'moments of weakness' I'll think to myself:

• maybe I should just try and get really cut instead
• maybe I should work on strength instead of mass and try my hand at powerlifting
• maybe I'd have more time to do well at other stuff if I didn't so much time working on the gym and eating properly....!

I was hoping for some comments back from readers on this. Do you have long term aims and short term targets? Do you write them down? Do you ever change your mind about them?

Overtraining Symptoms

My Personal Experience of Overtraining Symptoms

The damage caused by overtraining is seriously underestimated by a lot of athletes and bodybuilders. Looking back I can identify over a whole year where I was in a state of overtraining and didn’t realise. I was recently advising a friend in the gym that he was overtraining and his response was:

Me: “You’re overtraining”
Friend: “So?”
Me: “You won’t grow any more muscle.”
Friend: “I just want to get stronger.”
Me: “You won’t get any stronger, you’ll loose muscle and strength.”
Friend: “You don’t loose strength from overtraining” (look of disbelief)
Me: “Never mind…..” (me giving up on a lost cause)

From my own personal experience I did not know I was overtraining. I was struggling to make gains at the gym and spent a whole year hardly gaining any strength or muscle and not losing any body fat. I was sucked in to a vicious loop and was unable to recognise my own overtraining symptoms. Then I took a week of because I had a cold and gained more muscle in that week despite having a cold then I had in any of the 52 weeks before. Ironically enough getting ill more often is one of the overtraining symptoms but it was the only one that made me realise what I was doing wrong. I’d like you to compare the two scenarios set out below and identify the overtraining symptoms.

Scenario 1:

I always feel tired when it comes to time to go the gym but I see my self as a dedicated athlete and force myself every time. Once I’m in the gym I wake up and I’m glad I forced myself to go. I train with weights and do cardio in the same session believing this will help me to gain muscle and loose fat without any knowledge of catabolism. I feel as though I’ve had a good workout, I haven’t made any big gains in a while but I believe I may just be at a stage where gains are harder to make. I also come up with some other beliefs like people who are bigger then me MUST be on steroids or have some sort of superior genetics. I get home and as usual don’t feel that hungry after a work out. The next day I feel fine. I very rarely get sore from a workout as I’m used to them now.

Scenario 2:

When it comes to gym day a hoard of wild horses couldn’t keep me out of there, I’m bursting with energy before I even get in there. I manage to make a gain every work out weather it be an extra rep at a certain weight or I go on to the next weight for a particular work out. After my work out I eat like a horse to feed the muscles. The next I feel pretty rubbish! It’s what I call being “Gym’d Over” because it feels like a hangover. I start to feel more and more sore as the day goes on (this is called Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness or DOMS for short). The second day after my work out I still feel a bit gym’d over and sometimes the muscles are still getting sorer, especially if it was a leg workout. A hoard of wild horses COULD NOT drag m into the gym! I wait until I’m recovered and bursting again before I enter the gym.

Some of the overtraining symptoms were easy to spot but some were not! I want to tell you about the harder ones to spot. Scenario 1 was obviously me when I was overtraining. I felt proud of the fact that I was forcing myself in to the gym! The truth was I was an over trained endorphin addict! The feeling of being gym’d over where I feel tired and dry, this was probably what I felt like all the time when I was overtraining but it is something that build up gradually so you know no different!

The DOMS I attribute directly to muscle growth. If I only give my muscles enough time to repair but not to grow before I jump back in the gym I short circuit this growth and therefore no DOMS. Eventually the overtraining is so much that I can’t workout intensely enough to create the stimuli needed for muscle growth. My body in a way has protected me from further over training by gradually reducing my ability to train!

I have come a long way since then but the reason I tell you all this is to help you recognise overtraining symptoms that took me too long to recognise. Now I work out less, gain more and feel better, that’s what working out should be about.

For my next blog I will take a more general look at overtraining, it’s symptoms and how to recover from over training. How you feel and your psychological state as you may grasp from what I have written above is the best way to diagnose if you are overtraining.

Fitness Nutrition: What is the best nutrition for good fitness?

The answer to this will vary depending on your exact fitness goals but I will try and give a general answer here. I will start with a definition of terms.

Fitness

Fitness means that you posses:

• body-composition within a particular range (not too much or too little fat or muscle),
• cardiovascular fitness (the ability to perform exercise that places stress on the cardiovascular system) ,
• flexibility
• muscular endurance (or muscular stamina), and
• strength

If you possess fitness then the benefits of this are believed to include better health, stamina, speed, reaction times, balance, coordination and agility.

Nutrition

There are 2 categories of nutrition, they are macronutrients, meaning “large nutrients” (mainly fat, carbohydrates and protein) and micronutrients “meaning small nutrients” (mainly vitamins and minerals).

Macronutrients provide us with energy to fuel our metabolism as well as for exercise. They are also used to make up our body composition as too much or too little results in too much or too little stored fat.

Micronutrients do not provide us with energy but are used as part of chemical reactions that take place within our bodies. Deprivation of macronutrients over time prevents the body from functioning properly and can cause serious health problems and even death.

Good Fitness Nutrition

Now to connect the two! The first point of good fitness was body composition. This is quite easy to relate to your nutrition – you need to eat the right amount of food, the right types and at the right times to have the correct body composition. If you are at a point where you’re fitness is poor then you will need to alter your nutrition to alter your body fat and or muscle mass to create the body composition we associate with good fitness.

To achieve all the other points on the list you will have to embark on regular exercise. I’m not going to go in to exercise programmes in this article but I am going to talk about how this affects your nutritional needs. Your nutrition needs to be even better if you are going to provide your body with what it needs to adhere to a good exercise programme as well as not end up with incorrect body composition. If you compete within a particular sport then you can look at successful athletes in that sport to see what body composition they have. Try and look at someone that is the same gender, similar height and bone structure. Then ask these questions:

• How muscular are they?
• How much body fat do they have?
• Is there a particular muscle group that is disproportionately large or small e.g. large legs or arms for sports involving power or smaller arms or legs when stamina is required?
• How good is their stamina?
• Can they generate a lot of power?

The last three also relate to your training more so then nutrition but you need to make sure that you provide good enough nutrition to get the most from your training.

To maintain your weight you should consume an amount of calories equal to your daily metabolism plus any extra calories burnt off through exercise. Here is an example of a metabolism calculator you can use to work out your metabolism.

If you want to lose body fat long term then it should be done slowly by eating less then you need. Eating 500 calories a day less will equal 1 lb a week. 1000 calories less will equal 2 lb weight loss a week. You shouldn’t really try and lose fat any faster than this. If you want to gain weight then add on 500 calories a day.

Now that you know how many calories you should be eating you need to know when to eat them and what to eat.

3 square meals a day is not how you should be consuming all these calories. That would leave long gaps between meals and it would mean you have to eat lots of calories at each sitting. This would cause peaks and drops in your blood sugar and you metabolism. It makes it a lot harder to manage your weight and to fuel your exercise.

For ideal fitness nutrition you should be eating the required calories spread out into at least 6 meals a day if not more. You can still make the main ones larger and the in between ones smaller for convenience but the more even the meals are the better.

All meals should contain protein, fat (healthy fats if possible) and carbs. The carbs should be mostly slow releasing carbohydrates that have a low GI. These types of carbs are usually within food that contains fibre such as oats and sweet potatoes. You should also include fibrous carbs (most veg) and fruit as sources of carbs. Here is a good list of proteins, fats and carbs (at the end of the page).

You should try and balance your meals so that your totally calories come from 50% carbs, 25% protein and 25% fat. Fat contains twice as many calories per gram as carbs so don’t forget to take this into account.

Fruit will be your main source of micronutrients but it may also be beneficial to supplement with a multi vitamin and then a vitamin C straight after intense exercise.

An example of a good meal would be:

Pilchards (in red sauce) with peas, sweet potatoes and a glass of pure orange juice. You have to work out the quantities depending on how many calories you need a day and how many meals you’re going to have each day.

A good breakfast would be oats with one or two whole eggs and a little bit of milk, cooked in the microwave. Use sweetener if you have a sweet tooth.

These are just examples but you should be able to put together lots of different combinations using the list I mentioned earlier.

I hope you found this article on fitness nutrition useful.

Bodybuilding Myths, Nonsense and Lies!!!!

This article is not going to list all the nonsense and myths that are out there, as there seems to be more of that on the internet then there is reliable information. It is an article about why there is so much nonesense out there.

If anyone has any ideas that I have not touched on below then please email me at mike@proteincomparison.co.uk.

When I first started becoming interested in fitness and began scouring the internet and bodybuilding magazines for useful information I was under the impression that there was a big conspiracy regarding bodybuilding information. I knew a lot of what I was reading had to be garbage because it was so inconsistent. I thought people were lying just because they didn’t want to share valuable information that would create more competition in the bodybuilding world. Now I know there are a whole host of reasons which I have listed below and I hope you find enlightening.

1) A lot of people are trying to make money of you. There are no bodybuilding secrets that you can buy in an ebook for $49.99 that will give you rock hard abs in 6 weeks. There is no information contained in these books that isn’t already out there and no one can tell you how long it will take you to gain rock hard abs with out you telling them first your weight, percentage of body fat, metabolism and current diet and training regime
2) A lot of people are trying to make money of you! But this time they are doing it by writing an article that they think is useful info that they just picked up from other websites. They are hoping lots of people will visit the article and then click on adverts or affiliate ads and therefore they make money. Not all people doing this won’t know what they are talking about but a fair share won’t have a clue. Tomorrow they’ll be writing about how to change a bicycle tire and setting up affiliate schemes with bike retailers. [I don’t have any websites on changing a bicycle tire just for the record :-) ]
3) Some people, usually those who have not had much success in their half hearted attempts at fitness prefer to try and become coaches on the subject instead. Trying to help people where they think they went wrong without having any actual success.
4) The human body is immensely complicated so a lot of the time people are just wrong. If you had designed the perfect workout and did it every week the laws of diminishing gains would kick in and anything else you tried no matter how bad an idea it is would appear to work better, just because it is a change. Sometimes people experiencing this think they have made some sort of great fitness discovery.
5) People are in different circumstances, the main one being that the majority of successful bodybuilders are on steroids. Look at a bunch of massive bodybuilders and tell me how many still have hair on their heads. You think it’s a coincidence that they all prefer to have short or no hair. It’s a side affect of serious steroid abuts. A better thing to do is to look at pictures of natural bodybuilders. They are the biggest bodybuilders that can pass a drugs test and they are not very big at all compared to professional bodybuilders! A workout regime that works for someone on steroids will not work for someone who is training naturally. Steroids is just one example that makes a big difference to how we should train and eat, there is also age, gender and lots of genetic factors including natural testosterone levels, how fast you recover from a workout and your metabolism.
6) Some people have already been paid to write the nonesense they are going to write e.g. ‘scientific studies’, especially studies sponsored by supplement companies. There is nothing worse then reading about two studies that come to the opposite conclusion. This is insanity at it’s worse. Usually this relates to supplements. I once seen a study where a product designed for providing you with protein through out the night had a graph comparing the product with the affects of having a cup of hot chocolate before bed. I assumed the hot chocolate was made with milk. You’ll be please to know it did a little bit better then hot chocolate.


Please email me with any more reasons you can thing of and I will happily add them. Sorry for the negative article!

No Whey, Why Whey Protein Powder is not Worth your Money.

This is the first post on my first ever blog so bear with me....the aim is to share useful information that will help other to lose fat, gain muscle, be fitter, feel better and in this post, save money by stopping you from spending too much on Whey Protein.

Whey protein is designed to be fast absorbing. It is true that is has a great amino acid profile, about the same as eggs for most commercial products. This is means that the makeup of the protein in Whey is similar to the protein in our muscle so therefore in theory we should be able to utilise lots of it.

The problem is that Whey protein is too fast absorbing. It is absorbed at a rate of about 10 grams per hour. Compare this to Casein which is 6 grams per hour and eggs which is only 1.6 grams per hour.

The problem is, absorbing protein is not the same as utilizing it. If our bodies utilised 1 gram of protein every hour then that would be 24 grams of protein gain per day, which is 8.7kg or about 20 lbs of protein per year. Muscle is about 30% protein so this would mean you would gain over 60 lbs of muscle a year and be ready for your first professional bodybuilding competition at the end of 2 years.

Some protein absorbed is used for repairing damaged muscle so the above isn’t completely true but you get the idea, we don’t need much protein per hour but you do need a consistent supply.

Let’s say you have a shake that contains 20 grams of whey protein. That protein will be gone in 2 hours. It will have been used either for energy or converted and stored as fat. Protein shakes are not a cheap way of supplying yourself with energy and you are better of using a slow releasing source like oats anyway.

A 20 gram shake of casein protein on the other hand will provide protein for 3 and a bit hours at which point you can top up so you are able to build muscle through more of the day and even more importantly at night which is when the most muscle repair and growth takes place.

When our bodies use protein for energy it also causes increased dehydration which is bad for your health and fitness.

Ideally whenever you take protein it should be with carbs as our bodies will always break down protein if it needs the energy so it is best to have some carbs to get your blood sugar levels up at the same time.

The counter argument for whey protein is that is apparently has an anabolic affect on the body and that more of it is absorbed when we perform weight training workouts so I personally use a shake with Whey in before and after a workout but that is the only time.

I’ve tried to keep this short and hopefully gave you enough information for it to be useful. All feedback is welcome, I could do with some as it is my first blog!

Thanks for reading.