by Dr. Kareem F. Samhouri
Body Sequencing & Fat Loss Expert

Have you ever felt that your body isn’t as responsive to diets and exercise programs as your friends?

The first step in improving your health is learning where to begin. Most people simply start in the wrong place, which leads to disappointment and sub-par results. By learning the proper starting point in your fat loss journey, you are expediting your results and guaranteeing yourself a similar outcome to “everyone else.”

In order to properly assess where to begin, it’s important we go over a bit of preliminary information to help you understand this process — You’ve already heard of this information before, but just not applied this way.:

• Your body has various ‘systems’ (circulatory, nervous, digestive, etc.)
• Every system of your body has a priority level, relative to the rest of your systems, when it comes to survival.
• When you work on your body’s systems in order, you follow the natural path to better health.

In an emergency room, this is exactly how they screen a “Jane Do” when she comes in unconscious and without family to tell the story. They start by looking at her heart, vital organs, and outward. Once the surgeons eliminate the life threatening risk, they move outward towards the rest of the body, ending with your musculoskeletal and integumentary systems (i.e. muscles and skin.)

The thing is… no one is screening all of your systems outside of the ER, but your life is at risk, just slowly instead of immediately.

1. If your heart is struggling, you’re not going to lose fat until you take the stress off of your heart.
2. If you have major digestive issues, your body will respond in the opposite way to exercise until you do one simple exercise first.
3. If your hormones are out of whack and you’re depressed, you have to fix this before you’re going to build muscle or get a flat stomach.

Fat loss, muscle building, and health improvement through exercise is all about understanding what your body needs, and when.

Body Sequencing solves this problem.

If your goal is to lose fat and get a flat stomach, make sure you’re going in sequence. Here are 11 of the most important screening questions I’ve come up with so far to help you make the decision:

I’ve found these 11 questions, when responded to in order, to be the most influential way to progress your health. While the sequence is not exactly the same as what’s used in the ER, it has been proven to work the best this way when it comes to exercise.

Remember, you have to work on question #1 before you go onto question #2, and so on. When you approach your health this way, fat loss is easy, and it’s very natural.

For most people who are otherwise healthy, there’s a major obstacle to losing fat or building muscle:

If your body’s strength and length is out of whack, there’s a simple solution:

As such, here is my formal review of P90x.  You should know that I’d prefer you do my programs, not only because they are mine, but because I review every program on the market before I come out with one.  If I don’t feel that my program is truly better than every other program on the market, I simply don’t release it.

I mean this with complete humility, as I’d only be contributing to the amount of fitness confusion in the marketplace if I didn’t absolutely 100% know that I was offering you something better, or more effective.  There’s enough confusion out there – if you’re getting results, and you’re staying safe, stick with your program.

That said, I do believe P90x to be one of the better programs on the market.  Before I get into the benefits of P90x, let me discuss the biggest objection I have to this program, in my experience training clients who ask me about it:

People get hurt, a lot. The intensity is super high, and many of the exercises are simply unrealistic unless you are an experienced athlete or have a lot of history in the gym.

With that said, I personally find the P90x workouts to be fun and effective.  Please keep in mind that I’m able to spot my own form, monitor my own fatigue points, and realize which exercises wind my joints into unsafe positions.  I also have a spotter around, at all times, if I need one, and I’m as close to 100% neurologically efficient as anyone I’ve ever met.

Again, said with humility, but properly qualified, this program can be extremely effective and fun to do.  P90x works off of a philosophy of ‘muscle confusion,’ which helps your body keep guessing throughout your workout program.  The concept is, if your body doesn’t know what’s coming next, it won’t become efficient, which means you’ll keep getting results.

By alternating phases of your workout program, from yoga to bodybuilding to high-intensity based training, you are working all three energy systems and attempting to balance out your muscles.  While I do not see the specific exercises that yield the largest muscle balancing effect in P90x, I do respect Tony Horton and this organization for improving the quality of fitness workouts in mass-driven workout-at-home DVDs.

P90x will produce results, if you stay safe and you don’t get hurt.

The three main reasons that I decided to create the Double Edged Fat Loss DVDs, although P90x is available, are:

1. Unstable surfaces aren’t utilized fully, and they systematically increase your neurological efficiency over time, while increasing core recruitment, and decreasing your chance of injury.
2. I found the workouts to be too long for most people who want to burn fat.  Likewise, considering the workout length, they were missing aspects like 3 energy system training in every workout, muscle balancing in every workout, and the 5 basic fat loss movements building upon themselves as time went on.
3. I never saw a proper demonstration of intensity during workouts, as this was made to ‘look good.’  I understand the dilemma here, but I’m more concerned with you having the right example in a weight loss program.

This might be a strange email to read, as you’ve probably heard everyone else who sells a fitness program rant about how P90x isn’t as good.  I’d rather be honest.  It’s a great program, and it produces results for a lot of people… but, does it produce the results that you want?

That’s the only important question to me, and the feedback I’ve gotten with over 110,000 subscribers to date is that you want a program that answers the three objections above.  If this is true, it’s time to sign up to Double Edged Fat Loss.  There are 2 options:

1. Grab a lifetime membership to DEFL, and easily follow all the workouts I show you on your own.
2. Grab a set of the DEFL DVDs and work out with me.  I’ll hold your hand and walk you through every exercise, at full intensity, as you watch me train 2 clients at a time, correct form, and work around injuries.

They are both great options, and each one has its own advantages.  If you want to work out at the gym sometimes, certainly #1 is best.  If you know that you prefer to follow-along workouts or you’re worried that you might be committing form mistakes like some of my other clients, then #2 is clearly a better choice.

Here’s what I’m going to do for you, so that you don’t have to worry about the expense with this decision — I’m going to discount both options by 66%:

• Option #1 <— Lifetime Membership to DEFL 66% OFF
• Option #2 <— DEFL DVDs Follow-Along Workout DVDs 66% OFF

Good luck, and please keep me posted!

Cut sugar, rehydrate and do high-intensity exercise anytime you make a mistake; plus, find time for 5 minutes of exercise 3x per day.

The rules are simple, and you can be there before you know it. Eliminate sugar from your diet, entirely, and cut out the possibility of putting on fat; you’re addressing the hormonal imbalances your body has brought on since you developed insulin sensitivity, and you’re re-stabilizing your body without all of the inflammation that processed sugars create in our bodies.

Eliminating sugar, while rehydrating, stimulates an increase in cellular metabolism while simultaneously eliminating energy crashes, excess-sugar fat deposits that happen when you consume more sugar than your body can process, and abnormalities in blood pressure and heart rate response that take place with dehydration. In turn, your body realizes its ready for change, and it responds.

There is a lot of controversy about whether or not you should do cardio, interval training, build muscle before you lose fat, or do high repetition-based exercise. The fact of the matter is that all approaches help people with weight loss, but let’s compare and contrast these four methods for a greater understanding and increased likelihood of success:

Now that we’ve listed out the various benefits of each form of weight loss exercise, let’s discuss the importance of each row above in your weight loss efforts:

*NOTE on ‘Nutrient Density’: All calories were not created equally. At the end of the day, calories in vs calories out will let you know if you are in a caloric deficit, which leads to weight loss. However, protein-based calories are known to consume 20% of themselves, so these calories don’t count for as much. Also, all excess calories derived from any macronutrient group that go unused ultimately turn to sugar and get deposited as fat. Therefore, if you ate 2000 calories of only carbs, your body would store much more fat than if you ate a blend of carbs, proteins, and fats.

Awesome! So now you know that cardio can be an effective way to burn calories in the moment, and it helps you get rid of carbs, but it might not be the best way to burn calories long-term. Also, it is not the most efficient way to lose weight, although it does work.

Next, you understand that interval-training is an effective way to burn calories both now, and after you go to the gym; but alone, it will lead to plateau. The reason for this is because your body needs to build muscle to sustain an increased metabolism. There are two ways to increase your metabolism:

1. Lower your bodyfat
2. Increase your muscle mass

Interval training does a great job of lowering bodyfat, as you rid your body of all of its excess sugars, bias protein and fat-burning for days to come, and increase your exercise tolerance. However, it will not lead to increasing your muscle mass, whatsoever. So, interval-training, alone, is not the answer.

Building muscle is great for #2, above, but often times these workouts force you to increase your caloric intake in order to grow the muscle. Also, long rest breaks are important for muscle building, so you need to factor in the decrease heart rate response to exercise that would take place in interval training.

To come full circle, let’s discuss high repetition/intensity-based exercise as a plan to lose 10 pounds as fast as possible. In this case, we’ll eventually plateau if we don’t build muscle, but we will accomplish both #1 and #2, albeit more of #1 than #2. Your body will have the same response as interval training, in terms of bodyfat response, because you can actually train with intervals while lifting lighter weights. Naturally, since you are lifting weight, you will build a bit of muscle as well.

When it comes to losing 10 pounds as fast as possible and sustaining those results, high intensity-based exercise is the way to go. Your body needs to crave an increased exercise tolerance, consume its own carbs on a daily basis, and bias protein-breakdown for increasing your muscle mass over time. Ultimately, you should periodize this type of program to alternate with muscle building every 4-6 weeks for best effect, but this is the fastest path to weight loss.

Here is a sample ‘High-Intensity Based Weight Loss Workout’ I created using Create My Workout that I’d like you to do:

Instructions for workout: Intensity is everything. If you don’t go ‘easy’ enough during your resting intervals, it’s impossible to utilize all three energy systems of your body and get the effect from this exercise program. By forcing your body to rest properly, you are allowing it to push harder on the ‘work’ part of every set.

Choose a weight that allows you to hit ‘Momentary Muscular Failure’ (MMF) with every exercise. In other words, you should always aim to hit complete fatigue on an exercise by the end of the time-interval associated with that exercise. Please note that breaking form is never acceptable, so choose your weight accordingly.

As for the exercise, here we go – this is exactly what I’d like you to do:

Instructions for a Flat Stomach: You will be creating 8 workouts, utilizing 2 workouts for 2 weeks before progressing to the following 2 workouts, as you see listed below. Each workout will be 25 minutes in duration, and the most important thing you can do is hit momentary muscular failure in every set that you do. This means that you go until your last ‘good’ rep, with perfect form, on every exercise, and you have to adjust the weight accordingly.

Also, keep your core ‘on,’ meaning that you should always be stabilizing your spine and working out in the posture you’d like to stay in. If your abdominal muscles are stretched (belly expanded) while you work out, you’re more likely to train the muscles to stay this way. Instead, keep a light, voluntary contraction in your “don’t let me twist you” muscles.

1. Beginner Fat Loss A & B - Weeks 1 and 2
   
   Build two workouts that are whole-body based and moderately dynamic. It’s important that you rest one body part while working another, and then only take ‘true’ rest breaks after every 10-15 exercises. By alternating between squats, pushes, lunges, pulls, and planks, you will definitely hit everything you need.
   
   Your second goal in creating these workouts will be to make the exercises more complicated as your workout goes on. For example, your first exercise might be a ‘squat,’ but your 6th exercise would be a ‘squat and press,’ thereby building 2 movements into a single exercise. This will enhance the metabolic effect of your workouts and prepare you for Weeks 5 & 6.
   
   Last, alternate high reps and low reps for opposite muscle groups on Workout A & B. If you lift heavier with ‘Squats’ and ‘Pulls,’ for example, then I want you to lift lighter and higher rep ranges with ‘Lunges’ and ‘Pushes.’




2. Muscle Building A & B - Weeks 3 and 4
   
   Now, we’re going to mix things up a little bit. For each of these workouts, I want you to pick 6-8 exercises, honing in on exercises that allow you to lift a lot of weight. Next, pick an additional 6-8 exercises that work on muscle balancing, as this should be a part of every muscle building workout.
   
   HINT: Muscle balancing exercises work the smaller muscle groups, as well as the main recruiters of your core, which turn ‘off’ the muscles that are overworking and shouldn’t be. Exercises for your rotator cuff, main postural stabilizers, hip rotators, etc. all qualify.
   
   Again, you should alternate muscle groups of emphasis on these workouts, and you should aim to hit between 6-10 reps on every ‘strength’ exercise you do.




3. Intermediate Fat Loss A & B - Weeks 5 and 6
   
   This is just like Weeks 1 & 2, but the exercises are more complex from the very beginning. Now, the goal will be to build as many movements into a single exercise as possible, while adding dynamic surfaces like dyna discs, exercise balls, vertical dumbbells, Bosu balls, medicine balls, or any other unstable surface to the mix.
   
   By forcing your body to stabilize with these high-intensity exercises, rather than focusing on the amount of weight you’re lifting, you can increase intensity in a different way. This is great for building an amazingly strong body that has incredible tolerance to exercise.
   
   With increase ‘exercise tolerance,’ you lose fat faster.




4. Lean & Healthy A & B - Weeks 7 and 8 (recovery phase)
   
   Go light to moderate on all workouts and aim for continuous movement. Hit all muscle groups in all workouts.

Recently, I’ve been seeing great results by creating ‘dynamic and focused’ periodization phases. Essentially, that’s what you see above. The periodization phase is focused on fat loss, as the overall objective, but we’re taking a rest from super high intensity, whole-body based exercise, and shifting our focus to muscle recruitment and increasing the load in weeks 3 and 4. This allows us to ‘rest,’ in a  sense, and produce better results on Weeks 5 and 6… at least that’s what I think

The main reason I’ve been able to test out so many different workout methods recently to find the methods that work best is because I have a tool that writes the workouts for me – it’s called Create My Workout, and it’s awesome.

Here’s a special link where you can grab all 8 workouts for less than $0.99 each, in case you’d rather save the 3-4 hours it would take to write them all out:

Hope this helps!

Your colon, intestines, and entire digestive tract are ridden with build-up of toxins mixed with bile, inflammation, and food deposits.

This is mostly because of the immobility of our intestinal tracts that takes place over time.  We inflame ourselves and end up having a difficult time excreting bowel contents, suffer from constipation, and even worse, stop absorbing the nutrients that matter most to our health.

There are a ton of things you can do to improve your digestive health, including, but not limited to:

• Quarterly 3 Day Detox
  • Make sure you stay away from radical methods such as ‘Master Cleanse,’ in my opinion.  I really don’t believe at all in depleting your body 100% of all the nutrients it needs for an extended period, as this cleanse asks you to do.  It’s dangerous, in my opinion, and it only leads to poorer health in time, although the philosophy is to give your digestive tract a break.
  • Instead, consider checking out a much more natural and less extreme cleansing method, like the 3 Day Detox.  In my professional opinion, this is much more effective and removes the danger or radical cleansing.

• Increasing fiber intake
  • My favorite thing to do here is carry around a bag of baby carrots all day long. For the entire day, every time I’m hungry in between meals, I’ll first consider filling my belly with carrots, before moving on to other more tempting foods.

• Balancing hydration and electrolyte consumption
  • if you don’t get a lot of electrolytes naturally from fruits, make sure you include this as part of your hydration strategy)

• Consuming digestive enzymes, specifically designed to help you process food more easily.
  • I get my enzymes through my superfood cocktail.

• Supplementation – the best Digestive Supplement I know of is:  Ultimate Digestive Health
  • This helps with regularity, if that’s a concern.

• Exercise designed to improve intestinal mobility.
  • Lower intensity, longer duration on Day 1 and Day 3 – promotes circulation.
  • High intensity, super short duration on Day 2 and Day 4  – promotes reciprocal nervous system response by hyper-stimulating your Sympathetic Nervous System during your exercise so that your Parasympathetic Nervous System takes over after you exercise and naturally results in increased digestive prioritization.

If you are suffering from poor digestive health, make sure you implement as much of the above as possible.

However, if you’re not even sure about your digestive health, but you’re feeling fatigued, weaker than you should, and under-nourished considering your otherwise healthy nutritional intake, it’s time to cleanse.  Do this the right way with the Easy 3 Day Detox:

1. Workout Efficacy
2. Recovery Periods
3. Nutritional Strategy

In order to build the most efficacious workout possible, you’ll need to customize the workout to your specific needs.  Think about your body type (more endurance or sprinter), what’s worked for you in the past (swimming, weights, etc.), and how much time you have to offer.  As closely as possible, design a workout program that will meet your needs.  Here are a few examples of workout customizations that are possible based upon answers to the questions above:

Example #1: Endurance-based man who likes to swim but has lost weight before while doing sprinting and lifting weights.

Dr. Kareem’s Recommendations: Mix it up to lose fat.  Fat loss is about shocking your body, over and over again, until it molds itself into a leaner, more capable version of yourself.  Sprinters get leaner, and they get there faster.  There’s a reason for this.  Short duration, high intensity workouts will serve you perfectly.

Example #2: Endurance-based woman who only has a little bit of time, but has seen success by doing things like cardio or other endurance-based activities that she no longer has time to do.  Unfortunately, whenever she’s lifted weights in the past, she’s felt like she was bulking up, rather than trimming down.

Dr. Kareem’s Recommendations: This is a really common, and valid concern.  Instead of thinking about endurance-based activities like cardio as opposite from ‘heavy’ lifting, consider the alternative.  What about contrasting endurance-based activities from sprint-based activities that use very little or no weight.

When you workout with lighter weights and increase your rep range, whether you do this by time with interval-based training, or by reps, you naturally build more muscle fibers that are specific to muscular endurance.  However, when you do this at a very fast pace, or you add sprints, you bias the muscle fibers to the ones that consume sugar, even though you’re not putting on size.  Therein lies the answer:  Sprint, but stick to lighter weights and higher rep ranges.

Instead of thinking about your workout, or a particular exercise, I’d strongly suggest that you consider the impact of the rest of your day, and your days off.  It’s not a matter of burning calories in the gym that will make the difference for you.  Instead, it’s a decision to burn fat all the time.

Calories In – Calories Out = Calories For The Day
3500 calories = 1 pound

So, let’s consider two scenarios:

Workout #1: Burn 350 calories in a 30 minute workout, either on a treadmill or doing circuit training, for example.

Workout #2: Burn 300 calories in a 30 minute workout, interval training with weights.

Obviously, Workout #1 wins by 50 calories, right?

Wrong.  In point of fact, workout #2 may burn 2-9x more calories than workout #1, although it may take up to 72 hours to finish counting the calories burned.  In other words, Workout #2 will temporarily raise your metabolic rate; your body will burn more calories for every day its ‘recovering’ from a workout of this type.

With workout #1, when you leave the gym, you’re done burning calories.  With workout #2, you leave the gym and burn even more calories.

Recovery periods are as important as the workouts themselves.  Perhaps the most well-spoken on this topic is Tim Ferriss, from the 4 Hour Body.  He talks about using the concept of Minimum Effective Dose (MED), taken from pharmacology, and applying it to exercise.  This is, in fact, what I’ve been focused on for a long time, but he’s hit the nail on the head in his description.

You see, when you do the proper exercises, and you sequence them properly, your body requires time to heal.  This is how torn muscle fibers repair themselves, lactic acid is taken from the muscles and absorbed back into your normal circulation, and your body seeks guidance through nutrition.  From a nutritional standpoint, during this healing time, you can do one of four things:

1. Increase your caloric intake substantially, often times telling your body you’re ready to build muscle.
2. Increase your caloric intake modestly, igniting a fat-burning state in your whole body.
3. Maintain your caloric intake, slowly sending your body into starvation mode.
4. Lower your caloric intake substantially, ultimately destroying your fat loss potential.

Let’s take it one step further – Nutritional strategy, not just calories.

From a nutritional standpoint, the fastest way to lose fat is to create a raging metabolism.  So, it stands to argue we should eat anything that helps us build muscle, affecting our muscle to fat ratio (muscle:fat), or that signals our bodies to speed up.  With the simplest logic, we need to consider what the human body was made for.  Our bodies were designed to be able to eat animals in the wild, leaves from the wildlife around, fruits and vegetables, and possibly beans/sprouts.

If we were to just eliminate everything else besides the list you see above, we’d lean out instantly.  Fat would melt away, and our bodies would prepare themselves for intense physical activity.  For a lot of people, this just seems like too much… or too much to ask.  I get it… there are A LOT of temptations out there, and I fall victim to them just as quickly and easily as you fall.

It’s a constant struggle, or it’s something you can see from another angle.  Several years ago, I learned to view my food as an energy source, and I totally shifted my nutritional strategy.  Instead of seeing food as a reward, I began to view food as a chance to feel great.  This totally changed my perspective.

Now, when I choose a food that’s not so good for me, I see the energy crash to come.  Sure, it takes away a small amount of the pleasure, but not really that much.  When I don’t care about my energy level, and I’m feeling like eating pizza or Skittles or something else, I go for it.

On the other hand, when it makes more sense to second guess myself, this perspective makes all the difference.

The take home for this is that I’d like you to shift your focus with food.  Consider it’s effect on you, and you may just find yourself choosing other foods.  Then, make sure to give yourself regular breaks, or cheat days, where you can be human and fall victim to your temptations.  If this happens, look at it as a cheat day, rather than a lack of self-discipline.  You’ll be much happier.

From an exercise perspective, consider what’s going to have the greatest effect with the least amount of time.  Do what your body is not used to, and watch your results explode.  Decide you’re going to rest in between workouts, and make sure you do.  Shock your body every time, and then let it rest.

Your body can and will morph.  It’s about consistent, and strategic effort.

If we make things really simple, here’s how it works:

1. Pain medication blocks the nerve signal that is letting you know something is wrong.
2. Pain relief comes from fixing whatever is wrong, but oftentimes this is difficult to do when you’re in so much pain and can hardly get anything accomplished.

Pain medication is great if you simply cannot function without it, or you just underwent something traumatic like surgery and there’s no physiological reason to be in pain outside of this direct trauma and now you’re sore. In other words, the pain is not protecting you in any way, because you know to be careful in this area, and it’s only temporary.

Pain medication works through various mechanisms such as hormonal and neurotransmitter releases, or even as extreme as triggering the opiod mechanism in our bodies, which is 1000x more powerful than morphine. In all cases, there is an increase use of our livers to filter this toxin from our bodies, and our bodies are smart enough to stop producing pain relief on their own, after awhile, when they know it’s being supplemented.

The biggest trouble with pain medications over time is that our bodies will adapt, and our pain tolerances will become lower. It’s really important to understand that if you choose to use pain medication for anything outside of really acute pain, do so with caution. It’s best to “use” pain medication, in the sense that you’re using it to buy you a window to exercise and fix the problem.

Once you begin to observe this philosophy for pain relief, you’re planning to actually heal. Now, it’s time to start figuring out the root cause of your pain, and how you’re going to plan to eliminate it…

Identify The Root Cause Of Your Pain:

This is most difficult if you’ve had a ton of issues over the years, and you’re not even sure when your body started to fall apart, but I want you to think through this, anyway, and get as close as you can. Your body began a process of self-deterioration as a result of a disease process, or an internal conflict that put your body into a process of self-destruction.

This is hard to wrap your head around, I know, but think about this from a logical perspective. If there wasn’t one major trauma to your body that totally changed the game and your body has never been the same since, or there’s no insidious process taking place that’s slowly eating away at your organs, then why are you in so much pain?

Your body is trying to tell you something. It’s explaining to you that something is wrong, and it’s asking for your attention. Wait long enough, and it will demand your attention. That’s what I’m here for… to teach you how to communicate back and ask the right questions, while you listen for answers.

Communicate With Your Body & Learn What’s Holding You Back:

Communication with your body is through a very simple experimentation process, provided that you’re already seeking proper medical care. If you were to come into my office and get an evaluation, I’d ask you specific questions as they relate to your injury. Here’s a list of some of those questions:

1. Why are you here right now? What’s causing you discomfort of some kind?
2. How long has this been going on?
3. How intense is it?
   On a scale of 0 to 10, where:
   0 = no pain whatsoever
   10 = worst pain imaginable

   How intense is your pain right now?

4. How would you describer your pain, if you had to select from one or more of the following words:
   

   Sharp, shooting	Deep
   Sharp, but stays in one place	Numb
   Dull and achy	Electrical/Shooting
   Superficial (close to skin)	Throbbing or Pulsating
   Cold	Hot

5. What increases your pain/symptom?
6. What decreases your pain/symptom? In other words, what makes it feel better?
7. Have you had any medical exams performed, such as a doctor’s visit, X-Ray, MRI, etc.?
8. Do you have any allergies that might affect your treatment? Or any other special considerations?

Once you begin to gather this data, you can start to find the best path to pain relief, and reverse engineer the process to get ultimate relief.

I’d like you to take the time to answer each question above on a separate piece of paper, or in the comments section below. When 150 people comment, I’ll randomly be selecting people who comment as ‘case studies’ and demonstrate some of the possibilities for optimum treatment and outcomes.

Good luck!

Muscle building exercise theories vary from emphasizing only one muscle group per day or per workout, all the way to doing Turkish Get-Ups as your entire program. I’ve heard it all, and there’s merit in ‘almost’ all of it. The fact is, stress your muscles and they will grow; ‘stressing’ them means that you are taking them just past their failure point, and gaining either:

1. Muscular endurance or
2. Muscular strength

More muscle is your natural adaptation response when you take muscle just past it’s physiological threshold. The question is between muscular endurance (slow twitch muscle fibers) and muscular strength (medium and fast twitch muscle fibers.)

Generally speaking, if you perform greater than 8 reps of an exercise, you’re in the muscular endurance zone. There are plenty of exceptions to this when it comes to burnout sets, synergistic sets, and a bunch of other things that sound complicated but really are not. We’ll talk more about those in a moment…

When you want to build muscular strength, you’ll need to keep your repetitions low (8 or less), and keep your rest breaks long (2-5 minutes before repeating this muscle group.) By forcing your muscle to quickly and fully exert itself a few times until it is exhausted, your body identifies that you were attempting to lift something too heavy, and it grows bigger muscles to help you get it the next time. In other words, it pulls the quickest energy source, sugar, and demands energy from it right away. When it runs out, your body builds more sugar-consuming muscle fibers so that you can lift more weight the next time.

On the other hand, by repeatedly being able to do something, but running out of gas after 25 or 30 repetitions, your body identifies that it needs to get better at ‘pacing’ itself, so it builds more muscle fibers that thrive on oxygen; this way, your body can stop your muscle from ‘getting out of breath’ for awhile longer.

• Muscular endurance is great for running marathons.
  • These are slow-twitch muscle fibers.
• Muscular strength is great for ‘building muscle.’
  • These are fast-twitch muscle fibers.

Converting Muscle Fiber Type:

So, if the goal is to pack on some extra muscle, you’re going to need to either work with the muscle fibers you’ve got, or convert as many of them over to medium twitch as possible. Unfortunately, there’s nothing you can do about the number of fast-twitch muscle fibers you have, although you may want to pick your parents better next time

Slow muscle fibers (endurance) can be converted to medium (consumes both energy sources, oxygen and sugar), and fast twitch (sugar consumers) can also be converted to medium.

Converting fast-twitch muscle fibers to medium twitch is never a good idea if your goal is to get lean or build muscle.
It’s very hard to switch back.

As a result, you’ll want to always incorporate some fast-paced strength training as a part of your workout program, independent of the periodization phase you are following. Even part of a workout every 2 weeks is enough to maintain muscle fiber type.

Conversely, once you change muscle fiber type over from slow-twitch to medium-twitch, do your best to preserve this metamorphosis. Continue this form of training for at least six weeks to stabilize the switch.

Preservation of Muscle Fiber Type:

This is where things can really take off and start to accelerate your results. Instead of looking at ‘burnout’ sets as an opportunity to burn everything ‘left’ in your muscle, look at them as an opportunity to preserve fast and medium-twitch muscle fibers. So, sprint through these reps, cleanly keeping form, and stop when you slow down.

Pretty simple, huh?

Exceptions, Muscle Building Secrets, & Set Variety:

The rules listed above are correct, but with any good science, we learn of new and innovative ways to produce results. Then, we do our best to explain them with new areas of research. As a clinical Doctor of Physical Therapy (DPT), it’s my job to observe what’s happening clinically, read any studies that support this, or convey my findings for others to start performing the studies. Furthermore, I believe it’s my job to discover new methods.

In my opinion, research is lacking in most of the exceptions listed below, or it could at least be done much better to offer scientific proof. Many of these techniques I’ve borrowed from others’ ideas, and some of them I’ve created on my own. From the training floor, we know these work:

1. Reciprocal Inhibition Supersets & Giant Sets
   

   Reciprocal Inhibition is the concept that suggests when you use one muscle group, the neurological signal to the opposite muscle group is turned off, temporarily. So, in the case of wanting to exert as much effort as possible through a muscle contraction, it stands to argue that following every ‘strength’ exercise, you can use the opposite muscle group to ‘turn-off’ the signal to the muscle you have just worked. Thereby, you’ll get more from each of the following sets.

   Superset Example: Biceps Curls (strength set) x 6 reps, followed by Assisted Dips x 25 reps as your rest period, then repeating Biceps Curls.

2. Angular Supersets & Giant Sets
   

   Angular supersets (2 exercises back to back) and Giant Sets (3-5 exercises in a row, without rest) are extremely useful for muscle groups that have multiple actions or a large variety of muscle fiber direction. For example, your pecs have three muscle actions: internally rotate shoulder/arm, aDduct your shoulder/arm, and flex your shoulder/arm in front of you.

   Each muscle action has corresponding muscle fibers that are directionally-oriented such that when they shorten, the muscle action is performed. So, there are certain positions that work well to get almost every muscle fiber, but they often miss others at the same time.

   Likewise, other exercises are really only meant for one section of one action of a muscle, like Bench Press. This is really only doing a good job of getting the middle and outside regions of your pec, but not necessarily the upper, lower, or inner.

   Angular supersets and giant sets can be used to get the ‘missing’ sections of the muscle from an exercise, thereby increasing the number of reps you’re doing, but not necessarily for the ‘missing’ muscle areas.

3. Synergistic Supersets & Giant Sets
   

   Synergistic muscle groups are muscle groups that work together to perform a common movement. An easy example to envision would be your lats (on your back) and biceps. In order to perform a pull up, you have to use your lats to pull yourself up, but your elbows are bending at the same time, so that’s your biceps. These muscles are working together, or synergistically.

   Since it’s very difficult to do a strength-based pull up set without getting your biceps involved, anyway, it makes sense to finish off the work you’ve been doing. So, biceps, and related muscles, are next in line, and without a rest break. Cumulatively, this adds up to more than 8 reps for your biceps (say 6 pull ups + 6 biceps curls = 12 reps for your biceps.)

   On other days, you’ll want to work your biceps first, even though you’ll sacrifice pull up strength. This way, you can hit a lower number of overall reps and cause faster muscle growth to take place.

   This type of set is important and relative for all closed-chain exercises, or exercises that look like squats, push ups, pull ups, and lunges; exercises where your hands or feet are fixed and your body is moving towards them.

4. Pyramid and Reverse Pyramid Sets
   

   This is where you start with a single rep of an exercise or movement, and then you do two reps, then three, etc. Often times, the rest breaks are minimal, or you are doing 2 or 3 exercises in a row before proceeding to the next rep range.

   Naturally, you are doing many more cumulative reps than 3 sets of 8 reps, but you are allowing short rest breaks in between. This requires both endurance and strength, so it’s beneficial for medium-twitch muscle fibers more than anything else.

5. “Twitch” Sets
   

   “Twitch” Sets are used for purposeful selection of movement speed for the targeting a particular muscle fiber type. In other words, this is another form of muscle balancing, in that you are specifically targeting all muscle fibers your ‘strength’ program might be missing. So you’re taking time out to work on the ‘rest’ of your muscle by working muscular endurance back into the picture, but only for a portion of your workout.

   Here, you are generally using these 3 speeds:

   1. Superslow Method – 10 seconds, both directions
   2. Normal Speed – 2 seconds concentric, 1 second isometric, 4 seconds eccentric
   3. Sprint Sets – as fast as you can go, cleanly and with good form
6. Power-based Movements
   

   Power-based movements are incredible for building strength, especially functional strength that requires the use of your core to succeed with the movement. By slowly loading your muscle (eccentrically) and then exploding against gravity (concentrically), you are teaching your muscle how to generate massive amounts of work in a very short period of time.

   This is great for building muscle, but it comes with some inherent risk. If you are not an athlete and you’re not doing this for sport, it’s generally better to stay in the higher rep range and decrease your weight significantly. Aim for 12-15 reps, and sacrifice a bit of speed in muscle development for safety. You are already biasing your fastest-twitch fibers, so you’re good to go.

   Likewise, certain muscles in your body aren’t meant to get huge. For example, movements that require back stability are often, at least in part, endurance-based movements. For example, power-based pull ups are functional to do at a higher rep range, as this is pulling your bodyweight quickly. Think about this functionally — do you really ever have to pull more than your bodyweight quickly? If you do, you should train lower reps, but if you don’t, you have your answer.

7. Plyometrics for the Non-Athlete
   

   Plyometrics are bodyweight exercises that work on reaction speed and muscle timing. Muscle timing, in this sense, is the ability to fire opposite muscle phases, back and forth, as quickly as possible. For example, as you load your quads eccentrically when you land from a jump, how quickly can you get back off the ground, or use your quads concentrically?

   The faster you can change the phase of muscle contraction, the more you are biasing the fastest-twitch muscle fibers that you have. The goal in plyometrics is to run out of steam quickly, in just a few reps, so you are only utilizing one muscle fiber type when you selectively recruit them.

   This is amazing for power and athletic development, but there’s another hidden benefit here: Joint Stability.

   Joint stability increases as you train plyometrically, as there are many moments when your muscles are just a tad late, and your ligaments and capsules take a small, but repeated stretch. In time, they respond by strengthening, and being able to withstand more. The end result is improved joint stability.

   In the non-athlete, there’s no reason to risk injury by going absolutely as fast as you can, which would lower the number of repetitions you’d do. So, I usually recommend that you aim for 8-12 reps if you are not taking on this risk for increased performance for sport. Athletes are very well accustomed to taking on a controlled amount of risk for their sport, and they are also well adept at getting injured. If you’re just looking to build muscle or get lean, there’s no point in getting hurt…

8. Tonic Muscle Groups
   

   Your ‘true core’ is comprised of a different type of muscle tissue than other muscles in your body. These muscles have the job of stabilizing your spine and pelvis, so they need to be able to work at all times, instead of turning on and off, depending upon the action you need to perform.

   ‘Tonic’ muscles are postural, or ‘core’ muscles, while ‘Phasic’ muscles are reach and grab type muscles, that turn on and off repeatedly, and do so well, but they cannot sustain a maximal contraction for more than 10 seconds.

   Your tonic muscles are:

   1. Internal Oblique
   2. External Oblique
   3. Transversus Abdominus
   4. Multifidus
   5. Psoas
   6. …and depending on the source you read, Quadratus Lumborum

   These muscles should be trained with all phases of muscle contractions, and at all numbers of repetitions. In the case of isometrics (like a plank), work on building as much time as you can without losing form. This is the most functional way to train your ‘tonic’ musculature.

9. Postural Phasic Muscles
   

   As mentioned above, ‘Phasic’ muscles are your reach and grab muscles, as they do a great of turning on and off. Examples here might include your delts, biceps, triceps, quads, etc.

   However, what about muscles like your lats, pecs, erector spinae, rotator cuff, etc.?

   In these cases, your muscles are used throughout the day, but they don’t have the characteristic of tonic muscles that allow them to contract nonstop. Instead, they need to have incredible levels of muscular endurance in order to perform in real life. Simultaneously, because they are so important in daily life, they require adequate strength to perform.

   Postural Phasic Muscles should be trained both high repetitions and low repetitions, but low always comes first (8 or less). You can alternate days, or you can choose to always superset with high rep based, multiple speed-based exercises.

10. Functionally-Based Exercises
    

    At the end of the day, we’re talking about exceptions that have been tested and implemented to adapt to functional demands of daily living. This includes movements that require power, alternating motions, quick muscle recovery, or prolonged holding of posture or position. There are all sorts of functions of muscles that take place outside of the gym.

    If you can think of an activity that you currently do as a part of your daily living, albeit your career or at home, and there isn’t an exercise in your routine that specifically addresses this issue, you need to add that movement to your program and train it for muscular endurance. Equally important is to add any strength-based movements to your routine that simulate activities that require you to have strength.

    For example, an endurance-based daily activity you may perform:

    Cleaning the cabinets – overhead position, prolonged time period holding core in this position without arching spine, simultaneously lifting moderately-weighted objects from above.

    A strength-based example might be:

    Landscaping. Jumping into and out of the truck to grab supplies, up to 12 times per day. In this case, that sort of propulsion-based movement that requires coordination between your upper and lower body for jumping into the truck would belong in your exercise program, but for reps, and with specific form cues. You’d do less reps of this, because you only really need to be able to do it 1-3x every time its asked of you.

You’ll often hear conflicting views on fat loss. Some people will claim that the only way to lose fat is to build muscle and affect your muscle to fat ratio (muscle:fat); others will insist that it’s a matter of alternating intensities and high repetition-based exercise.

I’d like to put this fire out, once and for all, and then talk about the newest discovery I’ve seen in fat loss: Fat Loss Metamorphosis

The easiest way to understand if you should concentrate on building muscle or doing high rep-based exercises is to ask yourself the following question:

“Am I a ‘skinny-fat person’ or am I just overweight?”

If you are thin, but you have high body fat percentage, it’s a solid bet that you’ll need to build muscle to see a demonstrable fat loss result. You’ve probably tried dieting, eaten less calories, and done tons of cardio. Unfortunately, your metabolism has fallen as your body fat percentage has stayed about the same while your muscle dwindled away.

In order to lose fat, you’ll need to first prioritize your metabolism. Build muscle to lose fat, and watch it melt much faster.

Example two: You are just plain overweight. In this case, your body is well-adapted to carrying the extra weight, you’re fairly strong already, but your body hasn’t adapted well to fast-paced movements and repetition. This is where interval-based training comes in really handy.

On the topic of interval-based training, please don’t limit yourself to training only on a cardio machine or on a walk/run outside when interval training. Instead, consider following this specific sequence of exercises, alternating high and low intensity with each one and then changing the order:

1. Squat
2. Push
3. Lunge/Bridge
4. Pull
5. Plank

On Day #2, for example, this would become:

1. Push
2. Lunge/Bridge
3. Pull
4. Plank
5. Squat

Thus, you’d always be alternating the high intensity muscle groups with each workout.

For a great example of a Giant Set that follows this format, please check out the first video that comes up on this page:

Fat Loss Rehab Videos

You’ll notice that we need to adjust the intensity with each exercise in order to sustain energy output. The key is to go slower on your low intervals, drop the weight dramatically, but keep moving. You’re not trying to reduce your heart rate, necessarily, but you are trying to reduce your respiratory rate as much as possible.

Think about recovering your breath on every other exercise, and then sprinting. By pushing hard and then going easy, you’re naturally building an interval-based workout program, but your exercises are much more dynamic and practical.

Enter Fat Loss Metamorphosis…

Fat Loss Metamorphosis is a specific-training process I’ve been experimenting with, through which you purposely periodize your program to change your point of emphasis and ‘shock’ your body even further. Allow me to explain…

Instead of saying, “Well, I guess I’m a skinny fat person, so I have to do muscle building exercises to lose fat,” you’d say something like this:

“Since I’m skinny-fat, I’m going to trick my body into thinking it’s building muscle, and then shave fat off every time I sense growth.”

In the second example, your program becomes periodized around intensity-alternation based fat loss, with intervals. However, in order to get to this point, you undergo a short period of intensive muscle building, followed by alternating workouts.

Let’s chart this out:

• Name: Jenny
• Age: 32 years
• Gender: Female
• Weight: 125 pounds
• Height: 5′ 5″
• Bodyfat %: 32%

Obviously, we’ve got a problem. The only way to raise Jenny’s metabolism is by building a bit more muscle. However, we’re only going to prioritize ‘muscle building’ for the first 6 weeks, instead of 16. Here’s how we can periodize Jenny’s program with the use of the Fat Loss Metamorphosis concept:

1. Weeks 1-6: Build Muscle (4-5 days/week)
2. Weeks 7-12: Alternate Interval-Based Workout & Muscle Building Workouts x 2 each/week (4 total workouts per week)
3. Weeks 13-16: Alternate interval-based workouts for one week, and then muscle building workouts for the next week. (4 workouts per week)

Phase I is pretty straightforward. Work on your priority.

Phase II is where we mix things up a bit… instead of switching goals entirely, we’re not alternating. This is providing a ‘muscle growth stimulus’ every other workout to enhance testosterone production, growth hormone production, and the initiation of muscle repair. While the muscle is repairing, we are challenging it with high-intensity, high rep-based exercises that hit it from all different angles and force an increase in lactic-acid production, but relative to a lesser amount of trauma to the muscle. Instead, lactic-acid production is happening by reaching your whole body VO2 max, or maximum oxygen uptake.

Phase III we change things up again and really hone in on what’s possible through an entire week of interval-based training. Your bodyfat sheds like crazy, but then you pump yourself up for another week of results by resuming your normal muscle building activity every other week. In this case, your body is constantly confused, so it grows muscle and leans out at the same time.

3 Phases to Fat Loss Metamorphosis.

It’s yours for the taking.