…pounds that is.  And lots of them.

Building is a myth of epic proportions for women.  Not so much for men, but for women–oh yeah it is.  Whenever I talk to a woman who’s in a building phase, I normally stand there silent, in awe of what she thinks is going on vs. what really is going down.  Typically her trainer has her taking more pills than a senior in assisted living, eating enough food for a small army and lifting like a psycho while she “builds” this ginormous amount of muscle in 8 to 10 weeks.  On the surface, some of that is true.  You will build some muscle in that time period; but nowhere near the amount that you think you’re going to build if you are doing it naturally and you will be left wondering if the price was worth it.

I want to remind you that I am all about all natural before I go on any further.  I mean no fat burners or hormonal help in any way other than all natural sources.  I have no issues with things like creatine and bcaa’s but I will not even entertain the idea of anything else you can dream up that’s on the market today that serves as some type of precursor to testosterone or the like.  This makes a huge difference as you read on because I’m sure you are going to say in your head that this isn’t true and that you know of such and such who did so and so in 10 weeks and she looks amazing.  And then you find out she took xyz and that just killed this comparison.  And trust me; if she looked like that in 10 weeks, she was taking xyz.

As a coach, building in the traditional sense is a kiss of death.  If you tell me you want to take time to build, you are essentially telling me you are preparing yourself to walk the plank and end your fitness training right then and there.  Why the drama?  (Besides the fact that that is my middle name?) Read on…

WHAT IT IS

Building is a period of time where you lift heavy and eat in a caloric surplus to support your lifting.  Recovery is essential during this time in terms of both food and rest and ample attention needs to be paid to how much you are gaining weekly vs. how much you originally weighed so you are not just gaining fat during this time.  This is done through carefully increasing the amount of food that you eat over a period of time while watching the scale for major increases in weight.  Extra activity is cut back and becoming a hermit is a must.  Short of not shaving your legs anymore and letting your eyebrows grow out, you basically adopt a life of baseball hats and big sweatshirts.

TECHNICAL FACTS TO CHEW ON

Training:  Heavy.

Food:  A lot.  Like a wicka-lah.

Supplements:  Expensive. No seriously.  Don’t buy a house or condo before you embark on a building program.  You may not make the payments.

Rest:  Minimum 8 hours of sleep but really, you’ll need more than that.

THE FINE PRINT

Honestly, the program itself is not the thing that I want you to focus on.  You can find a great building program from some of the most notable names out there so there’s no need spending time quibbling those facts.  What I want to talk about is what you WON’T find on the web about building, being natural and being a woman.

First, if you are interested in a building program, you most likely have already gone through a dieting program of some kind and realized you ain’t got no muskel.  NONE.  If you did, you would not be so concerned with building.  You probably lost a good amount of body fat and realized that you were all lower body and no upper and you need take 12 weeks to “build some shoulders”.   This is pretty straight forward, just eat a little extra and lift a little heavier and you’ll be on your way to the new and improved you.  Only it doesn’t go down that way and the amount of weight you can gain in the first few weeks of building can send you into a tailspin that sets up the next 16 weeks of dieting to get it off.

Second, if you are natural and female and you spent the entire year lifting in a building phase, you’d be lucky if you put on 2 pounds of muscle.  Go read the titles of your average man’s magazine:  “Gain 5 pounds of muscle in a year!”, “Follow this protocol for the ultimate gains”, “Max gains in minimum time” and “Gain X pounds of muscle in 6 months”.  Now that’s for men…on the cover of a non-natural man’s magazine…that’s what they’d gain in a year…and they are genetically predisposed to gain muscle.  So stop and think about what this says about you…a female…who wants to build for 10 weeks…naturally…while you have the genetic disposition of a noodle.  So you put on say 10 pounds of weight only to gain less than a half pound of muscle.  Yeah…good luck with that.

Lastly, you have no idea what  you are about to take on emotionally.  This all sounds fine and dandy on paper, but when you put this into practice—you lose your mind.

• You eat more so you feel full.  Feeling full makes you feel fat.  It doesn’t make you fat, you just feel fat.

• You typically eat more carbohydrate than normal.  You don’t have to go crazy with it, but you have more ST than you normally would.  This means you carry more water and you will feel it all over.  Instantaneously your thighs are bigger.  In real life they aren’t, but as far as you’re concerned they just became water filled Lincoln logs.  You will think that everyone can see that you just swallowed a baby beluga and you are ready to deliver it at any second.

• Eating becomes a full time job and it begins to wear you down.  You will hate chewing, chicken and choices.  Everything seems the same and all you want is a break from eating another meal.

• You become stressed from the amount of pills you are swallowing.  Every meal is just another reminder of the pill sac sitting in your purse that you need to chug down sometime during the day and you look like you have a major illness when you’re out to lunch with a friend popping them all.

• Every time you go somewhere and run into someone who saw you when you were leaner, you say hi to them with a caveat attached:  “Hey girl, how are you?  I’m good.  I’m building right now.”  As in…that’s-why-I-am-in-a-baseball-cap-and-sweat-suit.  Soon you’ll just put a name tag on yourself and carry a picture of what you used to look like before you started building.  Really right now?

Once you are lean, stay lean.  Tomorrow we talk about what this really needs to look like for you to make it happen, how it varies by your age, how much you can truly gain before you are setting yourself up for failure and how to get around constantly making an excuse for how you look.  Cool?  Woop woop! )

So unrelated to this post but so worth sharing, this morning my husband was in the kitchen making my youngest son’s lunch (yes, read that and weep—woop woop!) when he dropped some of what he was putting in the lunch box on the floor.  My son, in the sweetest tone and facial expression said to him, ”It’s ok daddy.  It’s your fault, but it’s ok any way.” 

Honestly, don’t you wish you could have someone like that follow you around in life and just make you feel better about anything you may do “wrong” knowing you’d have that kind of support? 

Jail clerk, “It’s ok Ms. Jones.  You did take a baseball bat to the car in front of you at the light because it cut you off at the previous intersection—so yes it is your fault, but it’s ok any way.  Let me get you a soft pillow for your cell.”  *Sigh*

On to other things like six pack abs and a stellar performance!

“Ordering” your food (and I don’t mean, “I’ll take a large steak and cheese with pickles and tomatoes”) can make the difference in the outcome you want to achieve either aesthetically or performance-wise.  There are many different ways to align your food choices to elicit a different effect such as more definition, greater muscle gain and excellent recovery.  The following will give you some guidance as to how to put your menu together to get the most out of it:

Six Pack Abs:

I am constantly asked not ‘how can I get six pack abs?’ or even ‘can I get six pack abs?’ but ‘Can I have her six pack abs?  I want hers.’  I say the same thing every time I am asked, “Sure, go find her parents and ask them if they have any spare DNA.”  When it comes to definition, musculature, symmetry and etc. you are at the mercy of the genetic gods.  Get over it.  Wait…you missed this…

GET OVER IT.

If you have abs, you have them.  If you don’t, you don’t.  If you are female and 10% bodyfat and smooth as smooth in the belly but ripped up shoulders—guess what…you missed the ab boat.  If you are 18% bodyfat, large on the bottom, nice shoulders with a visible outline of a 6 pack—guess what…you just hit the lottery.  Where you wear your bodyfat is specific to you.  You can alter this (although be careful of what you wish for sometimes) if you stick with it long enough, but it requires due diligence.  So how can you maximize the chances of getting 6 pack abs?  Do not mix your starches with your fats. 

When you order your foods for the day, put a protein and a fruit/veggie in every meal and then decide which meal will get the starch that day and which meal will get the fat.  i.e.

MEAL 1                        ST

MEAL 2                        ST

MEAL 3                       

MEAL 4                        GFAT

MEAL 5                                               

Do you need to have your starches all in the morning?  Not necessarily, depends on when you are working out.  But I would separate them from your major serving of fat by at least one meal.  This does not kick into effect until you get within 5 to 10 pounds of goal weight.  If you have 30 to lose, head over to Order In the Court.

Stronger, Faster:

I am sure you have figured out by now that I do not believe that you need to sacrifice your physique to perform well.  I believe you can go for both without having to have to choose until you want to go to the highest level for either.  Whenever I say this I always get the person who points out many an athlete who is on the national circuit who looks fabulous.  These athletes are always the elite athletes who again, were blessed by the genetic gods in both talent and body.  They don’t count.  However, their parents DNA is for sale–hurry up and get it while it’s in stock. 

Now, if you’re reading this you are not one of them therefore you must think about you and your situation which requires a bit more attention than theirs does.  If you want to perform beautifully, then you need to think in terms of recovering and in terms of dieting.  So you end up with a hodge podge of days:

                    TRAINING                    TRANSITION                    DIETING

MEAL 1             ST                                ST                                ST

MEAL 2             ST                                ST                                ST

MEAL 3             ST/GFAT                      (GFAT)                        

MEAL 4                                                ST                               GFAT

MEAL 5             ST/GFAT                      (GFAT)                                    

MEAL 6 (TR)

Training is a day where your activity extends longer than 90 min. and you need maximum recovery.  Transition is an active day where your training is 90min. or less so you need to fuel but not too much.  Dieting is a day where your activity is an hour or less and you are just like everybody else doing cardio. 

When you mix up your days like this, you are truly serious about performing well and looking good both at the same time.

Behemoth:

Muscle gain.  Man is this a loaded subject or what?  It’s the hardest thing to get folks to understand–even more so than the elusive 6 pack abs.  If you want more muscle you need to eat more food. Simple as that. You know and I know there is more to it than that but 9 out of ten times when I get a client, male or female, who wants to get “bigger” and I check out their diet they are not eating enough.  Why?  “I want to get bigger but I don’t want to gain any weight.”  Really?  I want to pay my mortgage but I don’t want to use my money.  Do you think the bank wants a great diet plan to help them out instead?

I don’t know where this started but I honestly would pay money to make it go away.  Please, resign yourself to the fact that if you want to put on muscle, you will have to gain some weight.  Do you need to go up 25?  No, total waste of your time because you will lose much of what you gain in muscle having to diet that long to get off all that extra poundage.  But you will need to go up by *something*.  That means you cannot have 6 pack abs during a building phase.  So…

GET OVER IT.

Same concept as stronger faster but no transition day:

                        TRAINING                               DIETING

MEAL 1               ST                                          ST

MEAL 2               ST/GFAT                                ST

MEAL 3               ST                                                       

MEAL 4                                                            GFAT

MEAL 5               ST/GFAT                                                         

MEAL 6(TR)     

I Want What I Want

I do understand how this may seem easy to me because I do this all day long and so much work for you because this is the first time you are seeing it, but I cannot stress enough that if you want something more than what you have right now you are going to have to WORK for it.  If you want to do this on your own, you will truly have to learn how to do it.  There are short cuts and diet programs and etc. but they are made for the masses.  If you want to just complete the goal then please go that route.  It will simplify things and give you a foundation for you to build upon.  But if you have done that already and are looking for more, take the time to learn about what works for you and what does not.  You can do it with someone’s guidance or without.  To me, that’s a preference thing. Regardless, it will be work for you none-the-less.  Remember, there is JOY in the completion!

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