A great many of us have tried every diet on the planet that we could find. The low fat diet was popular once upon a time and the Atkins diet was a giant fad. Between, before, and after those diets were a slew of other mystical ways to lose weight. The problem with most diets is that they are hard to stick with and when you stop, the weight comes back–sometimes with a vengeance. What good are those kinds of diets?

I hate counting calories and having to watch what I eat when I’m eating out. Determining the caloric damage of a restaurant meal is an art form all its own–some menus tell you the number of calories now. How am I supposed to know which choice of entree that I actually want to eat is also not going to be worth two meals in calories? That is way too much work–and mostly guess work–to do when you are out trying to have a good time.

The easiest of all diets to stick to and actually lose weight with is a meal replacement diet. Some people might call it a liquid diet. The idea is to replace certain meals with liquid ones that have a set number of calories, vitamins, minerals, and everything else that you can scientifically control. These shakes are generally a few hundred calories and keeps you satisfied. You are never starving yourself.

A meal replacement diet is simple and fool proof. Studies show that replacing one or two meals a day leads to a consistent loss of 7 to  8 percent of body weight in a year. You can choose to replace your entire diet with meal replacements. That will get boring and you will likely get a craving for real food. Real food is nice. I don’t recommend making every meal a liquid one but, replacing most of them will probably give you the results you want without any side-effects of weight loss drugs. You can replace most of your meals with a liquid one and then make sure that your other meal is consistently in line with your diet so when you go out to eat, it won’t matter what you order. You can consider it a treat.

You can get any number of over-the-counter meal replacement products like Slim-Fast, Met-Rx, or Atkins Nutritionals. You can also buy meal replacement powders from places like GNC. The idea is to look for something that has a good ratio of fats, carbs, and proteins as well as lots of vitamins and minerals. Basically, you want to replace what you would normally get in real food with the liquid stuff. In a lot of case, you’ll probably be eating better–nutritionally–with the shakes if your current diet consists mainly of mass-produced or highly processed chain restaurant foods.

I’ve tried a few meal replacement shakes from making my own using real ingredients in a blender to prepackaged powdered products. For convenience sake, I would go with the powdered products. The one that I am currently using is Muscle Milk Chocolate Milk. It has a the blend of carbs, fats, and proteins that I want plus a handful of vitamins. On top of that, it actually tastes really good. It also has a lot of other things that are supposed to promote fat loss and boost muscle growth. I don’t know if it works but, if it does, great.

There isn’t an easier diet to follow on the planet. It works, usually quicker than most other diets, and it is easy to stick with. There is little preparation work involved once you figure out which meal replacement product you want to use. Mix this diet in with a real workout plan and you’ll be torching fat like nobody’s business.

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Everybody wanna be a bodybuilder, but don’t nobody wanna lift no heavy ass weight!”
-Ronnie Coleman, 8-time Mr. Olympia

Tommy wrote a good piece on the myth of toning. I wanted to write one myself since I once fell victim to this popular misnomer. There is considerable amount of ignorance surrounding this concept of toning. I don’t blame you. The fitness industry has standardized the word “toning” to be synonymous with spot reduction—yet another myth.

Spot reduction is the notion that if you work out a specific muscle, you will decrease the amount of fat only in that particular muscle, or “tone” that muscle. It sounds ridiculous, but the majority of people still believe this.

Let’s begin with toning. The real definition of muscle tone is the sustained partial contraction of your relaxed muscles. In other words, it is a measure of muscle functionality. Most people understand toning as changing the structure of a particular area in your body. There are only 4 ways I can think of that will accomplish this: gaining fat, losing fat, gaining muscle, losing muscle. Most people who tone mean they want to build muscle while losing fat.

Rule #1: You cannot alter the shape your muscle takes as you build more muscle. In other words, you cannot alter your genetic disposition. You can only change the perceived shape of your muscles by either losing or gaining body fat.

This brings us to Rule #2: You cannot lose body fat in one particular area in your body. Doing 500 crunches a day won’t get you a flat stomach and washboard abs unless you lose overall body fat of course. When you gain or lose fat, it tends to occur almost proportionally throughout your body. The reason I say almost is because not everyone is the same. Some have trouble losing fat in particular regions such as the chest, the abdominals, and the gluteus. It is simply due to a genetic selective pattern rather than spot reduction.

Guys who go to the gym and do crunches to lose their gut must understand that they have to lose overall body fat and it will tend to occur proportionately. Same thing goes for girls who go to the gym and want to lose fat under their arms or in their butt and thighs. While doing tricep extensions and thigh abductor exercises certainly don’t hurt, it’s not the only or most important thing that will give you a more “toned” look.

It’s better to think in terms of overall muscle growth and overall body fat loss. Muscle growth is crucial for those with this toning goal for 2 reasons. One is that having more muscle indirectly increases your basal metabolic rate. Some studies indicate that a pound of muscle burns about 50 calories a day while a pound of fat burns only 10. While these figures are questionable in other research studies, it’s still conventional wisdom that muscle burns more calories than fat.

Furthermore, other than having little impact on muscle development, light-weight and high-repetition toning work outs have only a minor impact on your post-workout metabolic rate compared to higher intensity workouts. This is simply because you will manipulate more hormone release. Higher intensity workouts will most likely also burn more calories for you directly. One reason is because higher intensity workouts are usually coupled with compound movements, which obviously take a greater toll on your body than simple isolation movements. What do you think burns more calories: 50 repetitions of light-weight bicep curls or 5 repetitions of heavy dead lifts? I’m willing to bet dead lifts would win. Another reason is that people who perform light-weight, high-repetition workouts usually don’t lift to failure, which is a crucial component to resistance training. You don’t pick up a random weight and decide to do 3 sets of 8 and stop at the 8^th repetition on every set. You pick the weight so that on every set, the 8^th repetition is almost impossible. This is just an example. Same thing goes for most other resistance training programs.

Here comes the I-don’t-wanna-lift-heavy-because-I-don’t-wanna-look-bulky posse. Listen, I’m just trying to help you achieve your goals faster. I’m just going to simply explain why lifting heavy weights is not necessarily going to give you a “bulky” look. First is testosterone (assuming mostly females are worried about this phenomenon). Testosterone is the most important muscle-building hormone in your body. Men have this abundantly and women don’t, so it is far easier for men to build muscle. Second, as Tommy mentioned before, it takes years of dedication to have that full-fledged, bodybuilder-type body you see in those fitness magazines. You might even offend some fitness models if you think you’re going to go to the gym and automatically get big if you lift heavy weights. It would be a dream come true if that were to happen.

So next time you go to the gym and decide you want to tone your arms and decide to do bicep curls and tricep extensions mindlessly for 30 minutes, think about how much faster you could achieve your goals if you has a proper weight training regimen.

First, high repetitions are really not as effective as heavy-weight, low-repetition workouts unless you do them correctly, which most people don’t. Repetitions should not go any higher than 15. Any higher and not enough muscle fibers are recruited to innervate increasing levels of anabolic hormones that will make your muscles develop. Also, higher repetition workouts mainly recruit your slow-twitch muscle fibers, which are great for your endurance, but not great for achieving hypertrophy.

Second compound exercises should really be your priority if you’re looking to make a real change in your physique. I’m not saying isolation exercises should be completed removed from your program. I’m saying you should think of them as a supplement to your main program for making minor tweaks. There are a number of reasons why compound exercises will benefit you more. I will discuss a couple. First, far more muscle fibers are recruited from compound exercises. This is obvious. But more muscle fibers being recruited means more hormone stimulation, which is a good thing. Second, you spend less time in the gym. You can pretty much have a full body workout and distress your central nervous system enough to achieve great results with 3 to 6 compound exercises. The same can’t be said for isolation exercises.

I hope I even somewhat enlightened some people regarding this toning and spot reduction myth. I’m not saying that everyone should be doing the same program. Certain programs work best for only certain people. But doing 20 repetitions of anything is certainly not going to give you the results you want.

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This is a 100 in 100 Challenge. The idea is to capture yourself on video doing 100 push-ups within 100 seconds. There isn’t any real prize except the reward of knowing that you were able to accomplish a pretty difficult feat. I will gladly make a list of all the people who decided to accept this challenge, achieved it, and provided a link to a video on YouTube or some other Internet video service.

Here are the specifics:

Deadline: December 31st, 2008

Who Can Participate: Everyone. You can be from the United States or any other country on Earth or in space. You can be a man or a woman or an other. You can be any age, ethnic group, religious group, or political party. Who you are makes no difference. What matters is whether or not your are up to the challenge.

How to Participate: Accepting the challenge is an agreement you make with yourself. You just need to work towards being able to perform 100 push-ups in 100 seconds and post a comment or send an e-mail with your name and a link to a video proving it.

Prizes: All participants will be awarded an impressive story to tell! Those who provide a name and video by December 31st, 2008 will be honored in a special section on this blog so that the world will forever know of their triumphs. You will also likely get in better shape than you are now–score!

The Video Proof: The video doesn’t need to 100 secs in length. From the time you start your first push-up all the way up to your 100th will be 100 seconds. You can choose to put anything else you want in the beginning or end. The videos will be critiqued by the power of the Internet to determine if it was faked or if any other form of cheating occurred. You will want to film yourself from a side view showing your entire body. The Internet will be your judge and it is damn smart.

So what are you waiting for? Start making a plan of attack to kick this challenge in the ass. You have over 3 months to get from however many push-ups you can do now to doing 100 in 100 seconds.

Are you up to the challenge?

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The idea of doing 100 push-ups in 100 seconds came to me one day out of the blue. I have never tried doing it simply because such an idea had never crossed my mind. The idea of doing timed push-ups is certainly nothing new in the world. My first experience in doing exercises competitively was in high school. I took a lot of co-ed advanced weight training and one of the teachers liked to do competitions in push-ups, pull-ups, dips, max bench press, etc.

The only event that was timed was the push-ups. No one was really able to do as many pull-ups or dips as they did push-ups. In a pull-up or dip, you are generally moving almost your entire body weight while a push-up only involves about 60% of your body weight.

I never did win a push-up competition in those high school gym class days–I blame my counter. I did win a dip competition but, not because I did an insane amount of dips. Everyone else was just fairly weaker in that department. I won with about 25 - 30 dips–not that impressive.

The greatest number of push-ups I have ever done was 104–I counted 105 in my head but upon video review it was only 104. It took a lot more than 100 secs and the form could have been better at some points. After coming up with this 100 push-ups in 100 seconds challenge, I sent a text message to my closest workout buddy to see what he thought. He thought it was possible. So maybe this idea is more than just an impressive sounding marketing line.

I haven’t been doing push-ups as much as I used to. I used to be able to easily drop and punch out 50 in the past but now, I’m pretty sure I can’t just do that at will. I started training to accomplish this challenge a few weeks ago. My most recent test runs shows that I can do 50 push-ups in under 60 seconds. There is still quite some work to be done to reach 100 in 100.

So far my training has consisted of doing push-ups using a Door Gym–it’s a product that allows you to do pull-ups on a door frame. It provides elevation for my push-ups so I can increase the range of motion and work more muscles. I don’t do these push-ups fast. I have been trying to build strength and endurance so that I could do 100 push-ups for a whole 1 minute and 40 seconds at a constant pace.

In order to build strength and endurance with these push-ups, I pause for 2 seconds at the bottom of the push-up and 2 seconds at the top of the push-up without locking my elbows. It was fairly hard to do just 10 of these at first but, I can do 20 of them now. I have switched to elevating my feet above the floor to increase the difficulty.

I also do chin-ups with the same 2 second pause technique as part of this training. It might seem completely unrelated to do a back exercise but, a strong back will help keep your form when doing push-ups. I also want to make sure I keep things even so I do a back exercise as well.

The last thing I do are plyometric push-ups. I’m trying to build explosive power with these so that I can make sure each push-up will only take 1 second to finish on average because that is all the time I have. Plyometric push-ups are ones where your hands come off the floor because you pushed up with such explosive force.

I have not officially set a deadline for when I want this accomplished. Unless I set a date, this is all meaningless and will probably never get done because I have forever to accomplish it. As I am writing this, I decided that November 1st, 2008 is as good a date as any other–today is the 5th of September. I am not yet half way to the goal and there is less than 2 months until the deadline.

I will continue to report on the results. Assuming I can actually accomplish this, I will provide a video showing it. Otherwise, how will anyone know that I’m not just talking out of my ass? :)

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I never stretch before a workout. I do warm up before a workout. There is a popular myth that claims stretching will help prevent us from injury during a workout. Every gym class I had in high school taught that you should always stretch before any physical activity. The stretches were mundane and didn’t feel like it did anything to prepare me for the coming activity.

It should come to no surprise that the stretching probably did nothing to prepare you or help prevent injuries in your workout. The right idea is to warm up. You want your muscles to be ready to do work. You are better off doing a quick job on the treadmill or some shadow boxing than stretching. You can also try a better warm up stretch. Doing warm up sets isn’t a bad idea either. The point is to prepare your muscles for the activity.

I do like to promote good flexibility so I would certainly encourage doing stretches after a workout or at other times throughout the day. As a precursor to your workout, it isn’t going to do much and could possibly have a negative effect.

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Sometimes you just don’t have access to a gym. Usually, this is when our brains gives us an overwhelming reason to skip a workout. After all, we don’t have access to the equipment we need. I’m going to help you neutralize that excuse with this total body workout that only uses your own body weight.

A lot of guys believe you can’t build serious muscle without going to the gym. This is obviously not true unless you are a modern day bodybuilder. Humans have built hard bodies since ancient times without all the equipment that we have today. Your body weight is more than enough to allow you to pack on some serious muscle. You just need to understand the physics of using your body weight to its maximum potential.

With body weight exercises, you can’t increase the resistance unless you gain weight or are able to adjust gravity. However, you can still make your muscles do more work by increasing the distance it has to move. For example, a regular push-up ends at the floor. You can only go as low as the floor. To increase the distance in this case you can just start higher by putting books or some other object under your hands. Now the floor is further away and you can go lower.

The less contact you have with the floor, the more work your muscles need to do to stay balanced. In a push-up, we have four points of contact with the floor–our hands and feet. To reduce our contact with the floor we can just lift a leg or do one-handed push-ups.

Another simple way to add complexity to a simple workout is to add a twist. Most exercises are done in a single plane meaning we move in one direction. Throw a twist into any exercise and you’ll work more muscles.

Body weight exercises can be just as challenging as weighted exercises. I certainly recommend alternating between the two disciplines. Using your body weight to improve your body has the wonderful advantage of keeping muscles in balance. It also ensures that you’ve built a body that is completely functional. Still, there is nothing better than free weights when it comes to putting on pure muscle.

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Sticking to your workout is no easy task. There is always something else that you could be doing or not doing. A movie/TV show to watch instead. Maybe your brain is trying convince you that you had a long day or you are tired. Excuses to skip a workout are a dime a dozen. Only about 20 percent of the population engages in high levels of physical activity defined as three 20 minute workouts a week.

I am no stranger to skipping workouts. I have gone months without skipping a workout and I’ve gone months without doing a workout. It always feels good when you finish a workout plan that you set weeks in advance and know that you didn’t miss a single day. The best way I’ve found to keep from falling for that moment of weakness is to have a calendar of some sort where you cross off the days you did your workout. You cross off a day for each workout you finish.

So when your brain decides to tell you one day that you could miss this one workout, you’ll have something to see that shows your consistency. Do you really want to break that? You’ll feel bad about later when there is no X in that square. This usually works well for me. I like to see that I was perfectly consistent at the end of the plan and that is enough to overcome the urge to skip.

There are other tricks you can use too. Here is a list of 20 from Men’s Health. Another one of my favorite ways to stay consistent is to use competition–I love competition. Have a friend workout with you or make a bet with them to see who can reach a certain goal the fastest. Hanging around friends who are in shape and consistently go to the gym is also a good way to stay motivated. It is hard to avoid talking about working out or any sort of physical activity when all of you do it often. If its in frequent conversation, it’ll stay at the forefront of your mind.

I also have a personal goal or life mantra that fits in with this. I don’t particularly like mediocrity. I want to be able to know that I’m better than the average in as many aspects of life and living as I can be. The only way to be confident of that is to consistently do what the average don’t. I had a Chemistry teacher in High School who talked about rising above mediocrity. He was a good guy and I wholeheartedly believe in what he preached.

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I am in favor of going to the gym a few days a week for about an hour each session. I’m not a bodybuilder in training or a professional athlete so why mimic their schedules? A lot of people like to split up their workouts into body parts or groups. I prefer doing a total body workout that lasts about an hour three times a week at most. There are times when I’m starting a new routine where I have to take longer than an hour and that’s fine but certainly no more than 90 minutes.

I’ve tried splitting my workouts into body parts–I never liked it. With a split body part plan, you usually only workout each body part or group once a week. With a total body plan, I hit every muscle three times a week and I do it in half the time. It looks to me that three total body workouts ends up being better than one body part a day.

Working more muscles also leads to more hormones being released which helps your muscles grow even faster. Bodybuilders naturally scoff at this idea and if you asked them for advice, you will more than likely get pointed in the direction of split body parts. Even for bodybuilders, I always encourage them to look into High Intensity Training which advocates less work for better results.

Trying to fit a total body workout into an hour is no easy task. My personal strategy is to have two different routines that I alternate. Each routine is similar in their goals–total body–but, employ different exercises to work some muscles more than others. This keeps things fresh and makes it more difficult for my body to adapt so it will grow even faster.

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If you only had time to do three exercises, what would they be? My natural response would be to hit as many muscles as possible. Right off the top of my head I would pick deadlift, squat, and bent-over row. With those three moves I would have worked the biggest muscles and since they are all compound moves, I would have also worked a lot of muscles.

As much as I like my picks, Men’s Health’s Muscle Guy, Mike Mejia M.S., C.S.C.S chose three different exercises. The idea is pretty much the same but, his moves have a stability factor. I’m all about training your small stabilizer muscles because they are so often ignored. Mike picked the squat and press, swiss ball push-up, and inverted row.

There is a special place in my heart for those three exercises. The squat and press is amongst my favorite compound moves with a pair of dumbbells–add a torso twist in there and it gets even better. The swiss ball push-up is great because it forces you to use a whole bunch of muscles you didn’t even know existed to stabilize yourself. If you’ve never done a push-up on a swiss ball, it’ll take some time to get used to it. It also isn’t easy. The inverted row is one of those exercises that I see few people ever do. It is a great move for your back and all it uses is your own body weight.

There are probably a ton of three exercise groups you can create depending on your objective. The idea behind my picks is to hit the biggest muscles and as many muscles as possible to allow your body to release the most amount of hormones into your body for maximum muscle growth. If I can only do three exercises, I’m going to make sure they accomplish as much as possible.

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The first question out of most guy’s mouths when we discuss working out is “how much do you bench?” A kid asked me that question recently so this epidemic is not just limited to adult males. I admit that I am guilty of bench press love at times–pushing heavy weights on the bench makes me feel strong. Because of this fascination with the bench press, a lot of guys have an upper body imbalance. This imbalance manifests itself in the form of “rounded shoulders” or it makes your shoulders more injury prone.

There are levels of severity to the imbalance. I’ve seen guys at the gym who have a very visible imbalance. Their posture looks off and you can tell that is not what fit human body is supposed to look like regardless of how much you can bench. My upper body imbalance was never too severe–being an avid reader of Men’s Health helps a lot. Ever since I discovered this problem, I’ve made sure to work my back harder than my chest. I also recommend putting back exercises before chest exercises in your routine–back muscles are bigger anyway.

There are mathematical ways to measure if you have a back/chest imbalance with rulers and lines and other semi-complicated things. Here is a way to figure out if you have an imbalance by comparing exercises. You should be able to chin as much as you can bench. Unless you want to strap a bunch of weight to yourself and find out your max chin, you can do as many chin ups as you can and then see if you can bench your body weight the same number of times. If all is equal or fairly close, you are probably okay. If your chest is significantly stronger, get cracking on improving your back.

Lucky for your back and shoulders, it is amongst the least favorite places for fat to hang out so getting them defined is a lot easier than getting your abs defined. Every guy wants the coveted V-shaped torso and women love it. The best way to get your body into balance and improve your shoulder strength is to put as many total body compound exercises into your routine as possible. My favorite one of them all is the deadlift. The more muscles you activate during a workout, the more growth hormones your body releases. This will help every muscle in your body grow faster.

Rows are also fantastic for building your back–bent over row, single arm row, etc. I’m not the biggest fan of shrugs but, they’ll work your traps. Shoulder presses with a barbell or individual dumbbells are good. You can end all your workouts with a few sets of chin-ups. Instead of doing them quickly, count and hold for two seconds at the bottom and top of each chin-up. It’ll be a lot harder and you’ll get a much better workout. If you are a bit weak in chin-ups, try the reverse pyramid technique that I mentioned a while ago.

Don’t ignore your back. It’s awesome!

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