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In Pursuit of Perfection, Can We Change the Shape of Our Muscles?

Despite our muscle gains and the conditioning we are able to achieve, many of us remain unhappy with our physical ...

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Optimize Your Carb-Up Day

A common nutrition plan we use with clients involves rotating low carb days with higher carb days. Low carb days ...

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Fat Burners: Shedding Light to Shred the Fat

Building and maintaining muscle mass while concurrently stripping body fat to reveal the separation and conditioning which defines the elite-level ...

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Cinnamon: The Surprising Spicy Advantage Sitting on your Shelf

Cinnamon, one of the most undervalued, underestimated, and under-appreciated supplements around. When taken at effective doses, it packs a very ...

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MI40 Strength: Hypertrophy & Strength Periodization Programming – Part 2

The process of muscle growth is best stimulated with high volume using relatively moderate weights. But to get stronger faster, ...

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Chelation & Why It’s Important for Mineral Supplementation

Minerals like zinc and magnesium are necessary for us to properly use energy, detoxify our bodies, and hundreds of other ...

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  • All
  • Back / Lats
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  • Coaches Corner
  • Delts
  • Exercise Execution
  • Hormones & Physiology
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  • Supplements
  • Training
  • Triceps

Protein Rotation …why?

One of the best strategies you can apply with success to a bodybuilders diet is protein rotation. In essence, eating ...

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Glycine

Glycine is unique in that it is the most simple amino acid and makes a base-building block for many other ...

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Metabolic Flexibility: What It Is, and How Can You Improve Yours!

The ability to switch between glucose and fats (our two major energy sources) based on the foods we consume and ...

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Seven Muscle Building Mistakes Exposed!

An ability to build thick layers of lean muscle indefinitely is one trait no bodybuilder will ever possess, despite any ...

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Deconstructing Dopamine

In the quest for the perfect physique, hormones often take center stage. Testosterone, estrogen, cortisol, insulin…they get all the glory ...

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Shopping Guidelines: Meat & Dairy

Grocery shopping can be a daunting task. Organic, cage-free, grass-fed, non-GMO, certified, fortified, petrified…there are so many choices and so ...

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Interview Q&A Series with Ben: Tips for Maximal Recovery

Question:

“We all know that it’s essential for anyone who trains hard to recover sufficiently to continuously improve their performance and physique.  What do you recommend for optimal recovery between one workout and the next, and is there anything special you like to do?”

Well, the idea is that the second you get out of the gym, you do everything in your power to initiate the recovery and growth process.  One simple thing that people don’t often look into, or most widely don’t even know about, is modulating your nervous system.

While you’re training, you’re stimulating your sympathetic nervous system.  After training, you want to stimulate your parasympathetic nervous system, the relaxation aspect of your nervous system.

RecoveryShakeFirstly, you can do that with insulin, so with an appropriate intake of carbohydrates.  You can do that with minerals.  You can do it by alkalizing your body.  There are actually many ways to basically ignite and initiate that recovery process immediately after you train.  These are the primary ones.

So, post-workout, get your protein in, get a substantial spike of insulin, some magnesium and some things to decrease inflammation like fish oil or cumin.

…Now, there are though some other modalities beyond what you’re actually just putting into your body that are beneficial and that I love to do.  Things such as spending time in a cryogenic sauna, and FSM, which most people will never have heard of.

FSM, Frequency-Specific Microcurrent, is an amazing tool that stimulates the parasympathetic nervous system.  It involves attaching electrodes to extremes of your body and puts you to sleep in around three minutes.  Obviously sleep is the ultimate form of recovery.  So if you can do that right after a workout, that’s about as close you can get to initiating the recovery process optimally.  And provided your insulin levels are elevated, a cryogenic sauna, a spike in insulin, and an FSM are probably like the triple play, the ultimate combo for post-workout.

Not that everybody has access to all of this stuff of course, but it’s an ideal scenario for a pro-bodybuilder… and it’s actually what I’ll be doing going into the Arnold Classic and the Olympia.

RecoverySleepFor someone that perhaps doesn’t have the luxury of all of this, or even most of it, the top tip for what to do immediately post-workout, is to spike your insulin, spike your amino acids, take some magnesium and go to sleep.  That would be the ideal scenario after every single workout.

And that nap doesn’t need to be a tremendously long nap either.  I mean, 30 to 45 minutes is probably sufficient just to basically recharge your body, stimulate your parasympathetic nervous system, and modulate your sympathetic nervous system.

Long term, obviously, if you’re taking days off, that’s going to be the best way to modulate your nervous system.  But again, it needs to be scheduled, it needs to be strategic in the sense that you don’t just take days off whenever you feel like you’re tired, because then you’ll never make changes.

With this approach you’ll never do the things you’re not used to doing, that you’re not comfortable doing.  You should want to get uncomfortable, to push when you least want to push.  I always say, “dig a hole and then recover”.

 Now, there are times when you want to dig a hole, and there are actually some times when you even want to dig a trench.  You don’t want to dig a trench often, but sometimes extreme overreaching is when you get your most extreme recovery, and your most extreme growth.

If your capacity to recover isn’t great however, then I would never suggest overreaching or digging a trench.  You MUST have the recovery capabilities.  I mean, if your nutrition isn’t optimal, your sleep isn’t optimal, your supplementation isn’t optimal… if you’re not putting all those things in place, then you’re unlikely to benefit from an overreaching protocol and so should avoid it.

One of the things you can do to help avoid digging a trench, is to take a carbohydrate during your workout for example.  However, there are actually times when strategically, and intentionally, I don’t even do this so that I can purposely overtrain.

 In fact, there’s actually an interesting thing I’ve been trying to apply recently…

So, obviously, enough carbohydrates and amino acids taken during a workout will prevent your body from breaking down muscle, but maybe there’s actually a benefit to breaking down muscle, really fatiguing your body, making it really, really depleted of nutrients, and then spiking them back up.  So like a cyclical bulking type of approach where there’s a depletion phase, I’m actually not taking carbs, and I’m not taking aminos during the workout.

I should point out that I might however make an exception and include just some aminos, especially if I’m training hard enough, but for around seven days I won’t take anything during the workout, or even after the workout.  The intent is to help improve my insulin sensitivity, dig a bit of a trench, over-train a little bit, get to the point where I’m feeling very tired and almost on the brink of being over-trained, and then at this point have a MASSIVE surge in calories and carbohydrates etc.

This is a GREAT way to optimize growth and recovery.

 The goal here is to send your body into a super-compensation mode.  The more often you can do that, the more your body is really going to benefit.  The problem is, people just don’t plan enough.  People aren’t strategically planning how to do this stuff.  And if you just try to wing it, it’s realistically not going to work.

I mean, I’ve been guilty, just like everybody else, of hoping that you’re going to get an overreaching effect, hoping that you’ll over-recover.  But it needs to be strategically planned out, which is why a program like MI40-X for example is a great program for people, because it’s strategic-overtraining.

SuperCompensationMI40X

The nutrition plan is written for you.  The workout program is written for you.  So we can literally dictate exactly what’s going to happen with your body as soon as you recover, or as soon as you stop.  And you’re going to get this MASSIVE super-compensation effect after recovering from the overreaching phase.

Always always always intelligently plan this stuff out, or follow an intelligent program designed to cause the effect.