ii

Dr. Gregory Ellis’s

Maximum Muscle Growth
The Most Advanced and Effective Resistance
Exercise Program Ever Developed

By Gregory S. Ellis, PhD, CNS

Published by:

Dr. Gregory Ellis Publishing

Copyright © 2012 by Gregory S. Ellis

Except for brief quotations included in a published
review or article, no part of this book may be
reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means
or media of any kind, including but not limited to
photocopying, recording, or any form of information
storage and retrieval, without written permission from
the author.
Table of Contents
Introduction ...............................................1
Overview to Dr. Gregory Ellis’s Maximum
Muscle Growth Program .........................................1
Isometrics ................................................................3
Ultimate Diet Secrets: Nutrition ...............................5
Chapter 2 ....................................................7
What is Maximum Muscle Growth ...........................7
Muscle Architecture .................................................7
Muscle Fiber Types .................................................8
Maximum Muscle Growth:
Defined ....................................................................9
Resistance Exercise:
Spectrum of Effects .................................................11
Chapter 3 ....................................................13
The Right Diet for Building Muscles ........................13
Wise Food Selection ...............................................13
Calories Do Count ...................................................19
Calorie Counting .....................................................21
Protein Needs .........................................................27
Exercise and Muscle Building:
Effect of Supplemental Amino Acids .......................32
Cholesterol Concerns ..............................................38

i
Where’s the Beef .....................................................40
Does Diet Modulate Heart Disease Risk .................43
Knowledgeable Opponents Speak Out ...................46
Apply Research Findings Carefully..........................47
Small Benefit ...........................................................48
Cholesterol & Food ..................................................48
Should We Eat Differently........................................50
The Theory Goes Bust ............................................50
Fats and Carbohydrates .........................................52
Complex Carbohydrates .........................................55
Conclusion ..............................................................57
Chapter 4 ....................................................58
Glycogen Loading: Good or Bad .............................58
Other Problems With
the High-Carbohydrate Diet .....................................60
Carbohydrate Syndrome
or the Carbohydrate Trap ........................................62
Chapter 5 ....................................................64
What’s the Best Fuel for Muscles ............................64
Flawed Research ....................................................66
Performance Fuel ....................................................70
Energy Source ........................................................71
Eat Fat .....................................................................73

ii
20-Week Minimum ..................................................77
Chapter 6 ....................................................81
Value of Resistance Training ...................................81
Science Discovers Resistance Exercise .................82
Physiological Benefits
of Resistance Exercise ............................................82
Body Composition ...................................................82
Sports Conditioning .................................................86
Cardiovascular Conditioning
and Reduction of Heart Disease
Risk Factors (Watch Out for that Word Risk)...........87
Bodybuilding Training Builds
the Body and Protects the Heart;
Growing Evidence of Coronary
Protection from Resistance Exercise ......................89
Chapter 7 ....................................................92
Maximum Muscle Growth ........................................92
Isometrics ................................................................92
Isometric Training ....................................................92
Isometric Strengthening Effect ................................97
Establishing the Components
of the Exercise Prescription .....................................99
Tension (Intensity) ...................................................100
Frequency................................................................102
Duration ...................................................................102
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Time to Reach Maximum
Tension Development ..............................................103
Joint Angle ...............................................................105
Modern Research into Isometrics ...........................107
Aging and Muscle ....................................................114
Neuromuscular Alterations
with Training in the Aged .........................................115
Impulse Training by Performance
Health Systems .......................................................118
Isometric References ..............................................126
Isometrics Only Training ..........................................134
How Many Exercises for Each Muscle ....................134
Evolution of a New System
of Muscle Building ...................................................135
Plastic Tubing ..........................................................136
Combining Isometrics and
Multiple Repetition/Exercise ....................................140
Rest and Recovery ..................................................141
Elastic Resistance vs. Free Weights .......................142
The Similarities ........................................................142
The Differences .......................................................143
Final Note ................................................................149
Chapter 8 ....................................................150
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Exercise Program Monitoring ..................................150
Monitoring and Record
Keeping Maintain Motivation ...................................152
Resistance and Effort Evaluation ............................152
Perceived Exertion Rating Scale .............................153
Using the Rating Scale to Monitor
Your Programs ........................................................154
Verbal Instructions in Use of Scale 155
Chapter 9 ....................................................158
Resistance Training Principles ................................158
Maximum Muscle Growth ........................................158
Working Definitions .................................................159
Key Principles for Results
from Resistance Exercise ........................................160
Intensity ...................................................................160
Duration ...................................................................161
Frequency................................................................162
Other Important Resistance
Exercise Principles ..................................................162
Progressive Resistance Exercise ............................162
How Hard Should You Exercise ..............................167
Potential for Improvement .......................................170
Safety for Resistance Training ................................171
Selecting the Proper Starting Resistance ................173
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What is Strength? ....................................................174
Intensity: The Most Important Factor .......................178
How the Maximum Muscle
Growth Program Differs ..........................................185
Functional Training vs. Isolation Training ................185
Chapter 10 ..................................................187
Exercises for Maximum
Muscle Growth ........................................................187
Equipment ...............................................................188
Isometric Exercises .................................................188
Workout A ................................................................188
Workout B ................................................................189
Multiple Repetitions/Multi-Exercises .......................189
Split Routine ............................................................190
Some Photos of Listed Exercises ...........................192
Isometrics ................................................................192
Workout A ................................................................192
Workout B ................................................................195
Multi-Repetition Exercises ......................................198
Some Gym Equipment Exercises ...........................210

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Introduction

Overview to Dr. Gregory Ellis’s Maximum

Muscle Growth Program
Congratulations on your purchase of my book,
Dr. Gregory Ellis’s Maximum Muscle Growth. The
primary focus of this book is to describe a training
program that works over the full spectrum of a
muscle’s function, and the book develops the
mechanisms by which a muscle adapts to different
types of training stimuli.

This book was written and the exercise

programs designed by Gregory Ellis, PhD, CNS, one of
the country’s foremost fitness and conditioning
authorities. This book describes complete resistance
training programs for maximum results.

I describe each of the parts of the program in

detail and I’ve included photographs of the main
exercises of the programs used for muscle building
and body shaping; exercises that you can do in the
privacy and convenience of your own home.

One of the key features of this book is that I

describe and use exercises that are highly effective yet
require the use of extremely low-tech equipment.
That’s the beauty of resistance exercise; it’ll provide
great results with a minimum outlay of money.

i
 You don’t need to buy all of that fancy exercise
equipment seen on TV to get incredible results. One
can easily move into very advanced and more varied
training programs after having gained the basic
knowledge and conditioning supplied by the program.
The focus of this book, therefore, is directed to
anyone interested in improving their body through
exercise and, specifically, by the use of resistance
training.

Beginners and advanced trainers and

competitive athletes will find much useful information
in this book. The physiology of muscle adaptation, for
anyone, at any level of training, is an essential issue in
understanding how to structure a training program.

Here are the key features about the

effectiveness of the design of Maximum Muscle
Growth:

1) A deep understanding about muscle fiber

composition

2) The range of muscle fiber function allowed

the development of a training strategy unlike
anything ever presented before

3) Multiple training types leads to maximum

muscle growth

My philosophy has evolved over the years as I

realized that the approach that I was taking to
understanding how different programs had succeeded
ii
or failed, led me to an understanding of precisely,
exactly, and accurately how the body, itself,
responded. I was learning what the body did in
response to attempts of an individual to induce some
type of change in his body.

So the body, it turns out, has its own game

plan. Once I had learned that it became easy to design
programs of any type because I knew what the
program’s design had to be to elicit the desired
response. This was far different, and more effective,
than me coming up with some idea pulled from the
ether about how “I thought” the body would respond.

This is the technique used by most program

designers and these methods lead to endless
speculation among program users about the
effectiveness of the various “plans.” Further,
proceeding solely on people’s ideas, leads to the
proliferation of more plans and more endless
speculation.

Isometrics
Years ago a technique of training became
popular called isometrics. Much research was
completed from the 1940’s into the 1970’s and it
showed that isometrics was the sure-fire method to
build the biggest and strongest muscles.

In 2009, I had the opportunity to perform

isometric exercises on a new machine called

iii
biodensity. In fact, the company had me write a white
paper about isometrics. I updated all of my research
on the topic and the scientific conclusions were that
isometrics provided the most powerful stimulus for
muscle building ever devised.

So, beginning in September of 2009, I began to

perform four isometric exercises. The results were
stunning, both for increases in muscle strength and
muscle size. I performed each exercise for 5 seconds
of all-out effort and it was recommended to do this
once every 7-14 days. At first my strength was
increasing 5% per workout. So, that’s 20 seconds of
working out!

The research that I completed on isometrics

which we’ll look at soon indicated that one did not
need any other type of resistance training. This was
also the advice of Pete Sisco who wrote a book about
isometric training. I therefore, stopped all the routines
in which I did multiple exercises, multiple sets, and
multiple repetitions which had been the staple of my
exercise training for decades.

When one is new to training, he follows basic

programs while learning the game. After a year or so,
if he has stuck with it, he tends to begin to consider
himself an expert and begins to advise others. In this
“advanced” training stage, he begins to use all manner
of routines and techniques and begins to believe that
precise manipulations of training programs, and diet,
will optimize his results. He researches every little
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thing and begins to develop a menu of ideas of all the
important things that one must do to get great
results.

He’ll lay out detailed nutritional supplement

programs and exercise programs, seriously believing
in the overarching importance of all of his little
“tricks.” If he ever becomes what I call a “truly
advanced” trainer, he learns that all the stuff that he
believes is so powerful today hasn’t really made any
difference at all and he can comfortably return to
some of the basic ideas that he learned as a beginner.

Here, he begins to understand that it’s not that

complicated. Bruce Lee, the martial artist, once said
that when he got into the advanced stages he would
make all kinds of tweaks to improve his punching
style but, finally, when he became “truly advanced,” he
learned that a punch was just a punch and its purpose
was just to knock someone down.

One of the primary functions of this book is to

describe the precise functioning of the human
organism and its response to stimuli designed to
create a positive adaptive response to improve its
function. This “roadmap,” then, will serve to guide
you, effectively and quickly, to reach your goals
without having to constantly suffer from all of the
marketplace hype.

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 No other program exists like this -- it’s simply
the best training program available anywhere.

Ultimate Diet Secrets: Nutrition

In this book, I’ll provide you with an outline of
the proper food intake to increase results. You’ll find
some startling information in the diet section -- some
of it contrary to what you’ve heard before. The
information is based on my extensive research into
the scientific literature. I’ll point out things that I
believe will help you get the best results possible. Use
this chapter as a companion to the information I
provide about my 100% Weight Loss and Weight
Control solution that I describe in Ultimate Diet
Secrets.

vi
Chapter 2
What is Maximum Muscle Growth
Muscles move your body. Motion, work, and
play all require muscular effort. Unfortunately, most of
us don’t have to work very hard anymore or play very
hard either. So to keep our muscles and our bodies in
shape we must exercise them regularly.

Both aerobic exercise and strength exercise

work your muscles. The type of work is different
between these two forms olifef exercise. However,
each provides work that will help get your muscles in
shape and keep them healthy.

Exercise also conditions you for sports and for

participation in active games. The different exercise
activities that you use for conditioning your body
cause changes or adaptations in muscles and the
changes are specific to the type of activity you do.

Let’s take a look at muscle design to see how

muscles work. This understanding will serve as the
basis for Maximum Muscle Growth.

Muscle Architecture
Skeletal muscles make up about forty percent of
your bodyweight. Muscles are composed mostly of
water, representing about 77% of their weight. They
are the largest reserve of protein in your body and
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their primary function is movement; they move bones
via their attachment to the bones by tendons.
Muscle Fiber Types
Small muscle fiber units make up the bulk of
the whole muscle and each muscle fiber unit performs
specific tasks. Similar groups of fibers have identifying
names so scientists can distinguish one from the
other.

Human muscles have three primary fiber types

(although more than eight have been identified but
the technology to do precise differentiation is too
immature to completely define small differences): 1)
red fibers (also called slow twitch) that we use for
light activities like standing and for movements that
don’t require high force output such as slow or
moderate running, 2) white fibers with a touch of red
(called fast twitch A fibers), and 3) very white fibers
(fast twitch B) used in very hard sprints or in activities
calling for a strong force output such as resistance
training. Fiber use depends on the type of activity
required and the wisdom of the body is to function
efficiently and economically.

This is a major purpose of exercise and training

-- to condition muscles to operate efficiently and
economically. Getting in shape and looking better are
side benefits. Of course, for most of us, looking better
is the main goal.

viii
 Many body movements require some
participation by all three muscle fiber types. During
long, exhaustive, aerobic exercise bouts, mostly red
fibers perform the exercise. As fatigue sets in, the
body recruits some white fibers which still have plenty
of juice left in them.

The white fibers help out the tiring red fibers.

With gradually increased training loads the
conditioning of all fiber types improves if the training
program stimulates the different fibers to work.

Maximum Muscle Growth: Defined

The structure and function of muscles provides
a physiological (structure and function) basis for
developing exercise programs. Using this knowledge,
and understanding how to apply it, lets us pick
routines that develop an individual for optimal
function in particular activities.

For most of us, exercise conditions us for

sports, maintains or improves health, or shapes and
alters appearance. Regardless of the goal, a basic
knowledge of muscle physiology is critical to
designing a proper program. Most of the
recommendations given to trainees don’t use this
knowledge. As a result, programs used by most
people don’t achieve the desired goals for the
participants.

ix
 If you know what the need is, and you know
how muscles work, then you can set a plan that makes
the muscles work in a way that fills the desired need.

Muscle is composed of different fiber types, as

I’ve said, and each fiber is designed to perform
specific tasks efficiently. This is the concept behind
the Maximum Muscle Growth, the muscles work over a
wide spectrum of functional capacity.

The body adapts to training by making itself

more efficient, allowing it to perform at any given
training load with less strain. Executed regularly,
properly, and progressively, training results happen
quickly.

Most people don’t realize how rapidly the body

can change when it’s under stress. People are always
telling me that they feel and look better after just one
week of training. They can’t believe how fast changes
happen so they say it must be all in their mind.

Well it’s not just in their mind -- it’s a real

physical change. Just think how quickly a cut begins
to repair itself. Within hours the wound is healing and
in a similar way, your muscles begin their
development very soon after the workout. Within
hours the rate of muscle building increases as the
muscle takes up proteins from the blood and builds
them into additional muscle parts to increase muscle
function.

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 Therefore, the basic premise of the Maximum
Muscle Growth is that a muscle and its supporting
organ systems, including the heart, lungs, tendons, or
whatever, are attacked in a specific way to cause the
desired result. Sound scientific knowledge about
muscle function and physiology is the basis of this
training concept.
Resistance Exercise: Spectrum of Effects
Resistance exercise can provide a wide range of
adaptations, even in the same muscle. One can
accomplish this by varying the training program, both
on a per workout basis or on a weekly, monthly, or
even yearly cycle. Combinations of these types of
periodic cycling are used. Varying workout programs
makes an important contribution to training results
and, therefore, cycling helps to increase results.

For more than twenty six hundred years,

resistance training has been used to develop strength.
A large body of work has been published in the
strength training magazines outlining the programs
used by thousands of different experienced trainers.
Less work, however, has been published in scientific
literature because scientists know very little about
strength training and bodybuilding.

This isn’t surprising considering the disdain

that doctors and scientists have had for weight
training for many decades. The real knowledge base
about training has come from those of us who do it
regularly.
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 For example, my good friend Dr. Al Thomas was
the first person to introduce weight training into
athletic activities such as football. This only happened
about fifty years ago during the mid-1950’s. At that
time, Dr. Al, himself, had been training with weights
since the early 1940’s and had been a student of all of
the early pioneers such as John Grimek, Bob Hoffman,
and all the great strength athletes from the York
Barbell Club in York, PA.

My purpose is to broaden the use of resistance

training so it’ll not only develop strength but any
other physical characteristic in which we are
interested, including heart and lung function, better
known as cardio-respiratory or aerobic endurance.
And it’s capable of doing it.

Let’s begin by establishing some fundamental

nutrition principles which will serve as the foundation
for building Maximum Muscle Growth.

xii
Chapter 3
The Right Diet for Building Muscles
Before describing the new training concept that
I’ve developed let’s talk about what everyone always
wants to talk about: diet.

Everyone talks about proper diet but research

shows that many Americans don’t eat a good diet that
supplies them with all of their essential nutrients.
Government sponsored national nutrition surveys
have found some population groups with intakes of
essential nutrients that are below recommended levels
for one or more nutrients. These surveys conclude
that deficiencies occur for Vitamins, A, C, B2, B6, folic
acid, iron, zinc, calcium, and magnesium.

Wise Food Selection

Before looking at some conventional thinking
about diets, it should be understood that I disagree
with conventional thinking. I support the use of a low-
carbohydrate diet.

In this book I describe how to follow that.

Achieving a balanced diet is possible by using

the Basic Four Food Group system. This system was
originally developed in 1955 by nutrition scientists at
Harvard University. This provides a simple, practical

xiii
method to plan a nutritionally adequate diet.
Remember, this guide gives you only the basics. You
have to choose foods that meet your special needs
and tastes. The Basic Four Food Groups are:

• Fruits and Vegetable Group

4 Servings Daily

Provides vitamins A, C, B, magnesium, and

fiber. Examples are oranges, grapefruit, bananas, leafy
green vegetables, potatoes, and a bowl of salad.

• Bread and Cereal Group

4 Servings Daily

This group includes all products made with

grains (flour) including breads, biscuits, muffins,
waffles, pancakes, spaghetti noodles, rice, and oats.
This group provides a good source of B vitamins, iron,
and a moderate level of protein.

• Milk and Cheese Group

2 to 4 Servings Daily
This group includes milk in any form: skim,
whole, low fat, and dry milk. Also yogurt, cheese, ice
cream, and cheeses. These products are the major
sources of calcium in the American diet. They are
good sources of protein and many vitamins.

xiv
 • Meat and Alternate Group

2 Servings Daily

This group includes beef, veal, lamb, pork,

poultry, and fish. Also dry beans or peas, lentils, eggs,
seeds, nuts, peanuts, and peanut butter. Meats are
good sources of iron and protein.

Recently, the United States Department of

Agriculture (USDA) released the new Food Pyramid and
described its updated views on optimal eating. This
plan is to replace the Four Food Group Plan I
described, above. I won’t reproduce the Food Pyramid
here because it’s available from many sources and
from the USDA web site as well.

Of the two plans, if I had to choose from one of

them, I would reject the Food Pyramid and stick with
the basic Four Food Groups. Fortunately, for a while
yet, it appears that we can still choose freely what we
want to eat. This freedom, however, may not last.

There are loud voices echoing the fear of fat

arising from the Diet Dictocrats who want to protect
us from ourselves. They may ultimately take our
freedom away. For my own eating plan, I reject both
the Food Pyramid and the Four Food Group plan and
have designed my own eating plan that I believe is
optimal for muscle building, fat loss, and health.

For the record, let me state here, as an anti-

institution zealot, that I’m not an advocate of the so-
xv
called “balanced diet.” I presented this information
because I believe in laying out all the information so
each person can buy-into whatever works for him and
mesh it with his own belief system.

I believe that best health arises from consuming

almost entirely animal products including a dietary
mix of about 30% of all calories coming from meat
protein and 70% of all calories coming from saturated
animal fat.

What a dietary heretic I am, huh? I don’t believe

that consuming carbohydrates is either necessary or
healthful and within the carbohydrate group, I believe
that grains and sugar represent the most harmful
elements.

I’m planning soon to write another volume that

describes the detailed mechanisms by which the body
thrives on burning fat as its primary source of fuel,
particularly to power muscular contractions. I’ll follow
that up with a description of the health-giving
properties of an all animal-based diet.

Clearly, I’ve been around long enough to know

that few will believe me and that fewer still will follow
my recommendations. And, it’s not my point to make
converts to some evangelical ideas even though I
think I’m right.

I’ve defined my job to be one as the presenter

of information and consider myself as a liaison

xvi
between the known ideas of scientists and other
highly-educated students of human nutritional needs
and the interests of those in the public who desire
more information but have neither the experience nor
training to understand and access what’s “out-there.”

I’ve been around for a long time and there’s

little that I haven’t tried or studied in relation to diet
or exercise. So, I have taken it upon myself to
“distribute” the things I’ve learned during my decades
of experimentation and study.

The controversy that my ideas may create is of

little concern to me -- I’m only interested in finding
the optimal methods to enhance health and human
performance. If, for example, my vegetarian lifestyle
had met those needs in my mid-twenties, then I’d still
be a vegetarian.

But, alas, it failed, and so I became a complete

meat eater and it succeeded. The choice then, of what
to do, was easily made. No amount of nay-saying
from the so-called dietary experts who had never
experimented with these diets and who weren’t
students of nutritional anthropology could budge me
from my course because it was clear that their
exhortations were built on sand and would never hold
up to real facts.

Because of my belief in what I’ve said, above,

the emphasis on cutting down on red meats is highly
overblown. Trim the fat from the meat (if you’re afraid

xvii
of fat -- I’m not, I consume lots of it; read more later
on about the myth that cholesterol and fat are the
cause of heart disease) and use leaner cuts such as
round or flank steak. After trimming the meat the fat
content of a piece of red meat is equivalent to that of
poultry and fish.

Meat is muscle and animals don’t store much

fat in muscle -- only about 1-2% of the total muscle
weight. Therefore, avoiding red meat may not be a
good idea since it is an excellent source of iron and
protein. This mania for red meat reduction is leading
many Americans, especially women and children, into
serious nutritional deficiencies, particularly for iron
and the B vitamins.

There’s a fifth group made up of Fats, Sweets,

and Alcohol. You should carefully control eating
foods in this group, it’s believed, which includes
butter, margarine, and mayonnaise from the Fat
group. Included in the Sweets group are candy, sugar,
jams, jellies, syrups, sweet toppings, soft drinks,
other sugared beverages, and sugar-laden breads and
pastries. It’s also important to control alcoholic
beverage intake.

The foods in this group, unfortunately, make up

about 25% of the total calories consumed by
Americans. Most of the calories are empty, which
means there’s little nutrition in a serving, and this is
particularly true for sugar which contains no vitamins
and minerals.
xviii
 Following the above guidelines about a
balanced diet will provide you with good, basic
nutrition. My personal dietary recommendations, I
believe, will lead to optimal increases in performance
and health, above and beyond those offered by
conventional dietary practices.

Choose my way if you like, but if you choose a

more moderate and conventional method, that’s OK
too. I just do not believe that the conventional ways
are optimal and have moved in another direction.

So, as I’ve said, I’m not a supporter of the

balanced diet idea presented above and its
recommendations. No, I think that nutritional science
is too young to have defined the ideal diet with its
modern-day emphasis on grains, fruits, and
vegetables and its denial of human dietary history that
relied on the consumption of large amounts of animal
products.
I’m a supporter of a low-carbohydrate diet, as
I’ve said, a diet that’s high in animal products.
Nutrition authorities are appalled by what they call
this diet -- an unbalanced diet. I discuss this topic in
more detail in my book Ultimate Diet Secrets.

Calories Do Count
We’ve discussed how to eat. Now let’s look at
the composition of food and see what can happen to
our bodies by manipulating our foods.

xix
 What’s the most important nutrient? Calories.
Forget the vitamins and minerals -- the
micronutrients. It’s the macronutrients that count --
protein, carbohydrates, and fats. The common factor
to each is calories (energy). Proteins and
carbohydrates provide 4 calories for each gram you
eat and fats provide 9 calories per gram.

People’s need for calorie intake is highly

variable and is dependent primarily upon body size
and physical activity levels. Some people, the same
exact size and sex, have a 50% difference in calorie
needs which can entirely be accounted for by
differences in physical activity, not some metabolic
abnormality.

As a starting point, you can figure that you need

about 16 calories per pound of bodyweight per day.
This could be up or down, but it’s a good starting
point without resorting to a more sophisticated
analysis as I did in my Ultimate Diet Secrets book
where I present very scientifically sound formulas for
calculating these values.

The point to this discussion about calories is

that it’s calories, or energy intake, that’s the most
important thing you must watch. As long as you are
eating a fairly well balanced diet, as described above,
(or the so-called heart disease, health-destroying diet
that I follow) from which you should receive all the
nutrients you need (vitamins/minerals), then what you
must do is maintain calorie balance.
xx
 Once you decide the ideal amount of fat and
muscle that you want on your body, you can
determine your appropriate calorie intake. Your
appearance (and we all know what we should, or
would, like to look like) will be your best guide.

You can also make a body composition analysis

and compare your figures to other known standards
such as those in different population groups such as
athletes (go to Body Composition). The full
instructions for the program’s use are on the site.

This is an excellent test because body

composition is the basis for checking the results of
any exercise program. Take repeat tests every one or
two months to see if you’re achieving the results that
you want. The information you receive guides you in
determining any changes you may need to make in
your diet or exercise program for a complete
individualized program.

If you eat more food than you need, you’ll get

fat. If you eat less than you need, you’ll lose weight --
some fat and some muscle (but mostly fat, particularly
if you follow the resistance training way of life).

Calorie Counting
Although I’ve covered this subject in detail in
my Ultimate Diet Secrets book, a brief summary is in
order here. You can buy books anywhere that tell you
how to count calories. Eat as you usually do and for
xxi
two weeks record what you eat; this gives you an idea
of how many calories you need.

Keep a record of your bodyweight to see

whether you’re gaining or losing. If you’re gaining,
then you’re eating too much; losing weight means
you’re eating less than you need; and maintaining
your weight means that you’re in calorie balance.

If you want to gain or lose, then eat either more

or less. Not a lot, just a few hundred calories per day
and see what happens. If you’re very much
overweight, then you can cut some more. Regularity,
over the long haul, is the key to success.

Control your energy (calorie) intake. This is the

basis for training results and good health. Too often,
people take vitamins or watch their fat intake, but
overeat carbohydrates and get fat. You can reduce
your risk of getting disease, caused by overeating, by
reducing body fat to desirable levels. Overweight (or
over-fatness) is a big factor in becoming diseased.

Nothing galls me more than to see someone

who’s fat sitting down to a meal of low cholesterol
foods but eating as much as he wants. He can watch
his fat and cholesterol intake all day long and it won’t
do him any good. He must lose weight and keep it off,
which will do more for him than anything else will ever
do. Think about calories first.

xxii
 Today there is a Raging Calorie Counting War
going on and many argue that the whole calorie
theory is wrong. Without doubt these nay-sayers have
no clue what they’re talking about.

Following, below, are charts listing some of the

most common foods we eat each day. Values for food
weight (in grams), calories, protein, fat, and
carbohydrates are given. Portion sizes are based on
common household measures such as 1 cup, 4
ounces, and 1 tablespoon.

If you have a household kitchen scale, you can

actually weigh the food item to see how it compares
to the weight listed. With the actual weight, you can
determine the correct nutrient content for your food
item.

The values are for the parts you eat. This

doesn’t include the bone and fat in meats unless fat is
listed. Meat values are for cooked meat.

Fruits & Vegetables

Food Weight Cal. Pro Fat CHO
(gm) (gm) (gm) (gm)

xxiii
Apples 150 80 .3 .8 20.0
Apricots 38 18 .4 - 4.5
Bananas 119 101 1.3 .2 26.4
Grapefruit 285 (1/2) 58 .7 .1 15.1
Grapes 454 (1 lb) 197 3.7 2.9 45.0
Nectarines 50 (1 lb) 39 .3 - 7.9
Oranges 180 60 2.0 .2 16.0
Peaches 114 35 .7 .1 10.0
Pineapple 140 (1 c) 73 .6 .3 19.2
Juice 8 oz 100 1.5 .4 23.0
Beans 130 (1 c) 33 2.1 .3 7.0
Beans 170 (1 c) 170 12.0 .7 33.0
Broccoli 150 (1 c) 39 10.0 .9 16.3
Cabbage 90 (1 c) 21 1.2 .8 22.0
Carrots 50 (1) 21 .5 .1 4.8
Cauliflower 83 (1 c) 22 2.2 .2 4.3
Celery 40 (1) 7 .4 - 1.6
Corn 140 (ear) 71 2.6 .8 16.4
Lettuce 74 (1 c) 10 .7 .1 2.1
Onions 110 (1) 40 1.6 .1 9.6
Peas 163 (1 c) 116 8.8 .7 19.7
Potatoes 100 (1) 93 2.6 .1 21.1
Tomato 150 35 1.6 .3 7.1
xxiv
Breads & Cereals
Food Weight Cal. Pro. Fat CHO
(gm) (gm) (gm) (gm)
Bagel 55 165 6.0 2.0 30.0
Bread 23 60 2.0 .5 12.0
Cake) 114 430 4.9 20.1 63.4
Cereal 28 (1 oz) 100 2.0 1.0 24.0
Cookies 28 130 1.5 6.0 21.0
Doughnut 28 125 1.5 6.0 17.0
Flour 114 400 10.0 4.0 85.0
Noodles 160 200 6.6 2.4 37.3
Pancakes 45 91 2.7 2.5 15.0
Spaghetti 130 (1 c) 192 6.5 .7 39.1
Waffles 50 127 3.6 3.1 21.0
Macaroni 130 (1 c) 192 6.5 .6 39.1
Rice 168 (1 c) 185 4.0 .5 41.0
Pizza (1 114 279 10.8 8.1 40.4
slice)

xxv
Milk & Cheese Group
Food Weight Cal. Pro. Fat CHO
(gm) (gm) (gm) (gm)
Am. Cheese 28 105 6.6 8.5 .5
Cot. Cheese 28 30 3.8 1.2 .8
Cream 28 106 2.3 10.7 .6
Sw. Cheese 28 105 7.8 7.9 .5
Milk-Whole 244 159 8.5 8.5 11.9
Milk-Skim 246 88 8.5 .2 12.5
Milk-2% 246 145 10.3 4.9 14.8
Ice Cream 133 260 6.0 15.0 27.0
Yogurt-Skim 250 130 8.0 4.5 12.9

xxvi
Meat
Food Weight Cal. Pro. Fat CHO
(gm) (gm) (gm) (gm)
Beef (av) 100 200-400 17-30 10-35 0
Chicken 100 190-300 18-30 5-25 0
Pork 100 180-300 18-30 10-30 0

Fats, Sweets & Alcohol Group

Food Weight Cal. Pro. Fat CHO
(gm) (gm) (gm) (gm)

xxvii
Beer 360 151 - - 13.7
Whiskey, 42 110 - - -
Wine 103 87 - - 4.3
Butter 14 100 .1 11.3 -
Candy 28 120 1.8 4.0 20.0
Milk Choc. 28 147 2.2 9.2 16.1
Fudge 28 113 .8 3.5 21.3
Choc. Syrup 20 66 1.0 2.7 10.8
Jelly 20 55 - - 14.3
Margarine 14 101 .1 11.3 -
Mayonnaise 15 108 .2 12.0 .3
Oil 14 124 - 14.0 -
Soda 245 100 - - 24.5
Syrup 20 50 - - 13.0
If needed, purchase a more complete listing
from the Department of Agriculture or at local
bookstores.

Protein Needs
Protein builds muscle. But, how much do you
need? As expected, everyone has a different opinion.
The US-RDA (Recommended Dietary Allowance) for
protein is 0.8 grams per kilogram (2.2 pounds) of
bodyweight per day.

xxviii
 The recommending committee who developed
the daily allowance guidelines feels this is enough to
cover our protein needs for repair of body tissues and
enzymes, maintenance of the immune system, and
body growth if necessary (although adults are not
usually continuing to grow).

It also says that this is an adequate amount for

athletes as well and it suggests that an athlete may
need a little more protein, but that athletes will meet
their needs as a result of their increased food intake
to meet the increased calorie burning due to their
activity. The extra protein required comes from this
increased food intake.

Most athletes and bodybuilders don’t agree.

Now, I ask you, who’s in the gym building muscles --
the scientists or the athletes? Just because the
scientist has a diploma and can use words no one
understands, does this mean that he’s privy to
specialized information? And, does it mean his
theories are correct? The answers are: No.

Dr. Peter Lemon is a research scientist

specializing in the protein needs of athletes, one of a
handful of scientists who knows what he’s talking
about. He recently published an article in the science
journal, Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise,
questioning the current thinking that scientists have
about the protein needs of athletes. He found after
analyzing the research data that athletes need more
protein and this need varies among different athletic
xxix
types with resistance athletes requiring more than
endurance athletes.

Other researchers feel that athletes probably

need 2.2 grams of protein per kilogram of bodyweight
per day (this is about 1 gram of protein per pound of
bodyweight). For example, if you weigh 165 pounds
then you need to take in 165 grams of protein during
the day to optimize training results. This is almost
three times the US-RDA.

But, does this high amount provide the most

growth or response? Clearly it doesn’t. Studies have
shown that this level of protein intake was not
adequate to meet the protein needs of athletes even
in a general weight training program.

In one study, researchers increased the protein

intake of the trainees to different RDA levels. In the
groups consuming more protein, the response to
training improved with increases in both endurance
and muscle mass. In this study, Dr. Consolazio had
subjects working with weights in a general
conditioning program. After a forty day period, the
group receiving 2.8 grams per kilogram bodyweight
increased Lean Body Mass (muscle, maybe, could be
some organ mass too, but we don’t know for sure) by
over four pounds more than the group on 1.4 grams,
an amount still above the RDA of 0.8 grams. He
concluded that the higher protein intake group lost
body fat and added muscle.

xxx
 Dr. Vernon Young has recently reported that the
recommended needs for necessary amino acids (the
ones that you must eat, not the ones your body can
make) for the general population is possibly three
times more than believed.

You should place more concentration on eating

sources of complete proteins: meat, eggs, and dairy
products, if you want to make sure that you eat
adequate amounts of protein to meet the health and
muscle building needs of your body. And, active
participation in exercise further increases your need
for protein.

Proper eating habits, with an adequate calorie

intake, can usually provide the protein you need
through your diet. If athletes need higher levels of
protein, then it becomes difficult to get that much
protein without concentrating on eating good protein
foods or taking a protein supplement.

I have personally analyzed the diets of many

people, including adults and teenagers. With their
current eating habits many people are not getting
enough protein. A 1984 study completed by
researchers at the United States Department of
Agriculture confirmed my analysis showing that many
adults who weren’t physically active and who ate a
normal U. S. diet weren’t getting enough protein.

Of course, these findings are in conflict with the

current thinking among professionals and lay people

xxxi
alike. I guess they haven’t reviewed the scientific
literature. I have.

There are many people who argue that too

much protein is bad for your health: it’s supposed to
damage the liver and kidneys and deplete calcium
from the body.

The first question is, “How much is too much?”

The research conclusively shows that strength/power
athletes need more protein. Rarely is there an excess
and even if there was “too much protein,” your body
harmlessly converts it to carbohydrate and excretes
the nitrogen. Most important, there’s not one shred of
scientific evidence showing that a high-protein diet
damages the liver and kidneys.

How about this one?

In 1986, Dr. David Kronfeld published in the

journal, Kidney International, a research study that he
performed as to whether protein damaged the
kidneys. This landmark study lays to rest, once and
for all, this majestic myth used by so many to damn
high-protein diets. He studied 21 dogs who had a 75%
reduction in renal (kidney) mass. Imagine, they’re
functioning on only 25% of what they should function
on. For four years, he fed them either 56, 27, or 19%
of their total daily calories as protein. No pattern of
deterioration was found in the kidneys of any of the
three groups. There were no changes in kidney

xxxii
function tests and no changes in the histology
(structure) of the remaining kidney mass.

So, even, under the influence of a very high-

protein diet, animals having available only 25% of
normal kidney mass demonstrated no harmful effects
after four years of a high-protein intake. You couldn’t
ask for a more clear and definitive answer as to the
question about whether or not protein damages the
kidney. And, I’ll tell you what: if you’ve never done it,
try to eat 56% of your daily calories as protein, it’s
almost impossible to do.

Research shows that protein powders may cause

calcium loss, but whole foods, including red meat,
don’t leach calcium from your body. I cover this
information thoroughly in my chapter about the low-
carbohydrate diet in my book Ultimate Diet Secrets.

I’m a scientist and an athlete/bodybuilder and

I’ve been training with weights for fifty six years
starting with a spring set in 1956 when I was nine
years old. I trained at the world famous Muscle Beach
in the early 1970’s and have tried every diet known. I
can tell you, without reservation, that if you want to
make rapid gains in building muscle then make sure
you increase your protein intake during training.

I try to get 2.0 grams per kilogram, but rarely

make it. I always watch my calories first. So if I’ve
eaten too much junk that day and my calories are up,

xxxiii
then I just don’t force the protein in because, most
important, I don’t want to get fat!

How do I do it? Mostly with meat, eggs, cottage

cheese, and powdered protein supplements. Presently
I use whey protein which is derived from milk. My
total cholesterol-high density lipoprotein (HDL) ratio
is 2.2, which is very, very low risk for heart disease.
And I keep my body fat below 10%, which is also low.

Most bodybuilders do the same thing. And every

time I put someone on the program, they get dramatic
responses -- quickly. Increases in muscle and loss of
fat. Isn’t that what you want?

Exercise and Muscle Building: Effect of

Supplemental Amino Acids
Among athletes and weight trainers there’s a
constant (and endless) discussion about protein needs
and muscle building. One way in which individuals
attempt to “micro-manage” their training and diet is
to discuss the timing and amount of their post-
workout protein feedings.

Exercise has a profound effect on muscle

growth, particularly resistance training. Within a
muscle, there’s a constant turn-over of muscle
protein, a breaking down and building up. Growth will
only occur if there’s a greater rate of protein synthesis
than protein degradation. Resistance exercise builds

xxxiv
muscle, but in the absence of food intake the rate of
muscle degradation exceeds that of muscle synthesis.

The response of muscle protein metabolism to a

bout of resistance training lasts 24-48 hours. The
interaction, therefore, between protein metabolism
and diet will set the rate of protein synthesis and
determine the amount of muscle hypertrophy. Keep in
mind, however, that there are genetic limits to muscle
growth, and the growth response will only continue
until such time that the individual has attained his
maximal growth limit. The rate of response will slow
from the very first workout onward as the individual
approaches his genetically set limits within several
years of training.

Although years of speculation have accrued

about the timing of protein ingestion to optimize
muscle growth, it’s only recently that some of these
questions have been answered. Many athletes have
argued that protein intake should occur either
immediately after or within one hour after the exercise
session.

The most recent research, using newly

developed analytical tests, has shown that growth will
occur up to 48-hours after the exercise bout.
However, in experiments designed to determine the
rates of protein synthesis after a resistance exercise
training bout, compared to resting values, the rates of
synthesis did vary over the 48-hour continuum: 3
hours @ 112% over rest, 24 hours @ 65%, 48 hours @
xxxv
34%. The muscle balance of protein synthesis against
degradation was a 5% higher rate of synthesis @ 3
hours, 3% @ 24 hours and 4.4% @ 48 hours.

It appears, therefore, from the above, that a

training stimulus lasts for up to 48 hours and impacts
muscle growth. It is a wise choice, therefore, to make
sure that protein intake commences soon after the
exercise bout and that regular feeding of protein food
occurs during the 48-hour period until another bout
of exercise is imposed.

In attempts to more effectively micro-manage

and optimize training responses, many have argued
about the type of protein to eat. The rage today in
protein supplementation is the use of milk-derived
whey protein. More effective, however, is the use of a
powdered amino acid mixture.

In a recent study, it was shown that less of the

whey protein was incorporated into muscle protein
compared with a mixture of essential amino acids
(EAA). Researchers also tested the effect of using an
oral amino acid mixture vs. infusing the amino acids
directly into the blood. The oral ingestion worked just
as well as the direct delivery to the blood and proved
that oral supplementation of EAA would benefit
trainees.

The next test was a comparison between an oral

amino acid mixture of a full complement of all 20
amino acids known to exist or just EAA, the ones the

xxxvi
body cannot make and must consume. The essential
mix (EAA) had an amino acid ratio equal to that of the
composition of human muscle. It was found that the
EAA mix proved adequate.

Here’s the mix:

Amino Acid Grams

Histidine 0.65
Isoleucine 0.60
Leucine 1.12
Lysine 0.93
Methionine 0.19
Phenylalanine 0.93
Threonine 0.88
Valine 0.70
Total 6.0

The amino acids were mixed in 500 milliliters of

doubly-distilled water (not likely necessary for a
home-made product), with an added artificial
sweetener and 20 milliliters of lemon concentrate,
along with the 6 gram total load of essential amino
acids. The number in the second column indicates the
number of grams of that amino acid added to the
liquid.

The researchers believe that the amino acids are

better taken-up by muscle if insulin is present. They
xxxvii
stimulated the insulin response by adding 35 grams
of sucrose (white table sugar).

It’s my belief, however, that this isn’t necessary

in a person who consumes a low-carbohydrate diet
because the hormonal pattern created by that type of
diet is far more positive to muscle growth than a diet
that’s high in carbohydrate. It must be remembered
that insulin is a fat-storage hormone and its presence
in the blood leads to more accumulation of fat than of
muscle. More growth hormone is present on a low-
carbohydrate diet and this will create a favorable
environment for the uptake of amino acids and the
stimulation of protein synthesis and a reduction in
protein degradation.

The precise timing (1 or 3 hours after exercise)

was not of consequence to the improvement in the
rates of protein synthesis. Insulin was not a primary
regulator of protein synthesis rates either. The
combination of resistance exercise, amino acid
provision, and insulin release stimulation, led to an
increase of protein synthesis rates by 400% above
pre-drink values.

Other tests revealed that insulin, by itself,

increased rates by 50%, resistance exercise by 100%,
amino acids by 150%, and amino acids plus resistance
exercise by more than 200%. I believe that the low-
carbohydrate diet will outperform the additive effect
of insulin. It is, however, unlikely that these

xxxviii
carbohydrate-loving researchers will ever test that
situation.

It appears that EAA are the primary stimulators

of muscle protein synthesis and that non-essential
amino acids aren’t necessary as a part of the amino
acid mix. The time course of increased protein
synthesis is closely parallel to the absorption of the
drink. Timing didn’t affect the rate of protein
synthesis but it seems that it would be wise to take
some of the drink right before the exercise session
and repeat drinking the solution in frequent intervals
during the next 48 hours, although some research
shows that the drink was more efficient when
consumed after exercise rather than during rest. But
efficient only means better than not that there was no
effect from taking the drink during rest. Again,
maintain an environment that keeps EAAs readily
available.

I’d make a bigger drink with more grams of

amino acids and drink it before exercise and split the
rest into 6 drinks during the next 24 hours and then
rely on food intake to cover the rest during the next
48 hours.

For those who want to invest the energy, time,

and money in micro-managing and optimizing their
training, the timed use of an EAA supplement seems
to be one of the most powerful contributors to muscle
growth yet discovered. If one is a steroid user, then
the EAA supplement would be even more effective.
xxxix
One source of commercially available amino acids is Jo
Mar Laboratories, 800-538-4545,
info@JoMarLabs.com, JoMarLabs.com.

Cholesterol Concerns
Cholesterol. Most Americans echo the same
refrain, “Cut down on cholesterol. Eat more
vegetables, fruits, whole grains, and complex
carbohydrates.” Newspapers, television, radio, and
national magazines all push the idea of reducing
cholesterol and fat. Cholesterol intake should be less
than 300 milligrams per day. Fat should be cut to 30%
or less of total caloric intake.

Everywhere you turn these days someone is

yapping about the dangers of a high-fat or high-
cholesterol diet. These same people are also singing
the health praises of the natural-carbohydrate, low-
protein, low-fat diet. Food manufacturers hawk
cholesterol-free foods, or foods like oatbran, reputed
to lower cholesterol. Proclamations abound that
cholesterol and fats increase the risk of heart disease.

What has prompted these recommendations?

Led by the American Heart Association’s 1982
publication entitled The Rationale of the Diet-Heart
Statement of the American Heart Association and the
1984 National Institutes of Health (NIH) Consensus
Development Conference on Lowering Cholesterol to
Prevent Heart Disease, the scientific and medical

xl
community has been educating all Americans to adopt
the “prudent diet” as recommended by these agencies.

The National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute

and the American Heart Association exhort everyone
to follow a low-fat, low-cholesterol diet. Many
physicians and nutritionists blindly support these
recommendations without examining the actual data
on which the recommendations are based. These
recommendations include a diet consisting of less
than 30% of total calories as fat with less than 10% of
that amount as saturated fat (saturated fats are those
that are solid at room temperature, like butter). Also,
you should not take in more than 300 mg of
cholesterol per day. We’re told constantly to eat less
red meat and fewer eggs, and consume more chicken,
fish, fiber, fruits, and vegetables.

What you don’t hear is the widespread

disagreement among scientists on whether these
recommendations are appropriate for all Americans.
Some scientists suggest that even if people make
these changes in their diets that it won’t reduce the
risk of cardiovascular disease. And some feel that an
increased consumption of carbohydrates to at least
55% of total calories may be harmful.

xli
Where’s the Beef
I ask, “Where’s the evidence”? Is there any
conclusive data to suggest that Americans should
change the types of food that they eat? I say no. Back
in 1985, a debate about whether fat and cholesterol
consumption damages our health began to heat up
among scientists. The origins of this debate reach
back to the late 1940’s and early 1950’s. Presently,
the overwhelming consensus is that high blood
cholesterol levels correlate positively with heart
disease. Agreed, there’s a suggestion that very high
blood cholesterol (above 300) levels relate to heart
disease, but there’s a real debate as to the threshold
level of cholesterol where real danger begins.

The National Cholesterol Education Program

recommends that all people, regardless of sex and
age, lower their blood cholesterol to below 200 mg
per deciliter. Cholesterol levels of 200-240 mg/dL are
considered borderline for increased risk of heart
disease and anything above 240 mg/dL is considered
high and at risk. By these criteria (with which I
disagree), 25% of the American population would be
at risk.

Recent reports show that the diets of many

women and children are deficient in some B vitamins
and iron, as I’ve said. The cause of these deficiencies
is the reduced consumption of meat, eggs, cheese,
and other dairy products due to our national delirium

xlii
to cut out red meat, fat, and other cholesterol
containing foods from our diets.

The reason I’m even discussing cholesterol is

because you may be concerned about my
recommendations to maintain a higher protein intake
during training through the use of meat, eggs, and
milk.

As we’ll see, it’s possible that the protein needs

of the average person are higher than realized. The
protein requirements for optimal gains from an
exercise program, particularly a resistance program
intended to shape your body and sculpt it to your
desired proportions and to enhance strength for
sports or recreation performance is dependent on
enough protein intake to allow the high rate of muscle
development that’s possible from resistance training.

Red meat, eggs, and dairy products are almost

absolute necessities in your diet if you want to attain
an adequate protein intake. Chicken and fish are
almost, but not quite, as good as red meat, in my
experience, for making gains, but people aren’t eating
enough of these foods either. And besides, eating just
chicken and fish all the time can be boring.

Recent studies show that Conjugated Linoleic

Acid is a good stimulant to muscle building and that
beef and pork are better sources of this fatty acid than
chicken and fish.

xliii
 Mixed sources of vegetables, legumes, seeds,
and nuts will provide complete proteins, but the
quantities of protein will be too low to provide
maximum muscle growth. Only with extraordinary
planning will you get enough protein when you eat a
low animal protein diet. Planning a diet like this
requires a lot of time and knowledge. Do you have
either?

I’ve trained for many years with resistance

exercise and because of the hard work required in its
performance, I’ve decided that I don’t want to waste
the training session’s time and effort. Therefore, I
provide my body with the proper amounts of calories
and protein necessary to get good results.

Only a small number of people are at risk for

getting high cholesterol from eating high amounts of
cholesterol and fats. It’s not a good idea to cut out
good sources of nutrition when the evidence linking
fats and cholesterol to high blood levels is so weak.
My book, Ultimate Diet Secrets, provides a
comprehensive discussion of this subject as well. But
here’ I’ll review some other facts not covered in that
book.

If you’re concerned about cholesterol, then get

it checked and make sure they measure your HDL-
cholesterol (the good cholesterol). You can then be
treated on an individual basis if you are at risk, a word
that you must be very careful about interpreting.

xliv
 If not, then eat meat and don’t worry about it. In
fact, you should probably worry if you aren’t eating
meat because of potential nutritional deficiencies.

Does Diet Modulate Heart Disease Risk

Let’s look at two major studies, the Multiple
Risk Factor Intervention Trial (MRFIT) and the Lipid
Research Council Coronary Primary Prevention Trial
(CPPT). Both studies screened and recruited their
subjects from a pool of middle-aged males with high
levels of blood cholesterol. They were already at high
risk; certainly not representative of the average
American. MRFIT subjects also had several additional
risk factors including smoking and high blood
pressure. Again, the test subjects were unhealthy
males to begin with.

The MRFIT study used two groups, an

experimental group that received treatment and a
control group that received no treatment. The
treatment group ate low-fat and low-cholesterol fare.
Additionally, drugs were used to lower blood pressure
and smokers were encouraged to stop. Weight
reduction programs were used for overweight
subjects.

The results? The trial failed as there were no

significant differences between groups in the number
of deaths due to heart attacks over the seven-year
xlv
study. While the treatment group lowered their
cholesterol, blood pressure, and body weight, and
some even quit smoking, their final average
cholesterol levels were only slightly lower (and not
statistically significant) than those of the control
group.

What about the CPPT study? This study was

supposed to prove demonstrably that lowering
cholesterol reduces the incidence of heart disease.
This trial is the flag ship for recommendations that
Americans should lower cholesterol by adjustments in
their diet. However, unbeknownst to most, the CPPT
trial was not a diet trial -- it was a drug trial.

This study used cholestyramine, a powerful

drug that assists the liver in clearing cholesterol from
the blood to make bile. In this study, 1,906 men did
reduce cholesterol by 8.5%. Thirty heart disease
deaths occurred in the treatment group and 38 in the
control group.

The researchers called this a 24% reduction in

heart disease deaths. But was it? Unfortunately, their
statistical methodology was severely flawed. Their
calculations didn’t include the number of men in the
total group, and just compared the number of deaths
between groups. The numbers by themselves are not
important; only an actual rate measurement is
important.

xlvi
 What I mean by this is that the thirty deaths in
the treatment group should have been divided by the
total number of subjects (1,906). The rate of death in
this group was then 1.57%. In the control group, 38
deaths divided by 1,900 subjects, yields a 2.0% death
rate. The actual difference in deaths between the two
groups was 0.43%. Quite a difference from the
reported 24%!

In the CPPT study, the total deaths in the two

groups were similar. While fewer men died of heart
disease in the drug-treatment group, more of these
men died from other causes, including
gastrointestinal cancer, a fact which wasn’t released
to the general public. Instead, the press statements
read, “for each 1% fall in cholesterol, a 2% reduction in
heart attacks can be expected.” This statement is
ludicrous and unfounded. Yet, it’s repeated to the
public by physicians, researchers, health educators,
and the media.

No evidence supports this statement and the

statistics suggesting that conclusion are weak. Do you
realize that it implies that by reducing cholesterol by
50%, that you’ll completely eliminate the risk of heart
disease! This isn’t possible because almost half of all
heart attack deaths occur to people who have
cholesterol levels below the so-called safe level of
200 mg per deciliter!

Recent studies show that Americans with

cholesterol levels below the so-called good level of
xlvii
200 mg/dL have heart disease. For these Americans,
low levels of cholesterol aren’t preventing heart
disease. This is because they have reduced their good
HDL cholesterol.

Much more work needs to be completed before

answers to the question of risk is available.
Cholesterol is only part of the risk picture. Smoking,
overweight, and lack of exercise are all far more
important risk factors than cholesterol. Lack of
exercise affects more Americans than any of the
others.

Knowledgeable Opponents Speak Out

Dr. George V. Mann, M.D., retired professor of
medicine from Vanderbilt University, is a harsh critic
of the current diet and cholesterol recommendations
to Americans. He has analyzed all the important
research and shown that the low-fat, low-cholesterol
diet recommended by the National Institutes of
Health, the American Heart Association, and many
other authorities is not effective for lowering blood
cholesterol levels, even if lowering cholesterol was an
effective preventative for heart disease, which it isn’t.

He has shown further that many cultures, even

though they eat a much higher level of fat and
cholesterol than Americans, have low cholesterol
levels and virtually no heart disease. People in these
cultures often live almost exclusively on a meat and

xlviii
milk diet. He says that we must conclude that we
don’t know the true cause of heart disease.

He has recently given his dietary advice:

1) Eat the traditional American diet of 40%

energy or calories as fat.
2) Seek seafood, especially cold water fish.
3) Avoid hydrogenated fats (margarine). Read
food labels.
4) Avoid sodium and eat potassium.
5) Never add salt and have five servings of fruit
per day.
6) Don’t smoke.
7) Exercise three times per week with a warm-up
and cool-down.
8) If you have high cholesterol (above 275 mg/
100 dL of blood)-don’t marry a person with
the same level. If you are over 50, ignore
cholesterol measurements.
9) Avoid carbon monoxide.

He closes his argument by stating, “that our diet is

the best in the world in availability, variety, quality,
hygiene, and cost. The evidence that our diet causes
disease or death is trivial. Those who make those
claims are working a selfish scam on our citizens.”

Apply Research Findings Carefully

Little information suggests that “normal” people
can significantly alter their blood cholesterol via diet.
xlix
Most of the data on this subject have come from
studies of high-risk, high-cholesterol middle-aged
males. Therefore, the suggestion that for most
Americans a diet low in fat and cholesterol will result
in significantly lower blood cholesterol is unfounded.

Dr. Yvonne Jones conducted a study with

healthy adult women where one group ate the
standard diet in which fat comprised 40% of the total
calories while another group consumed a diet of 20%
fat calories as a percent of the total daily calorie
intake. The different diets produced no differences in
cholesterol levels between the two groups. Changing
the diet of one person may have a completely different
effect from changing the diet of another person.

Small Benefit
A recent medical study conducted by Dr. William
Taylor showed that for low-risk people, reducing
blood cholesterol as much as it can be reduced by
dietary means would only increase life expectancy
from three days to three months! High-risk people
can expect slightly better results with a longer life to
the tune of 18 days to 12 months!

These figures are based on the so-called

impressive diminution of blood cholesterol by 20%.
They aren’t very impressive. For most of us, diligent
attention to lowering our cholesterol by diet

l
adjustment will result in a longer life of 3-90 days. Big
deal!

To achieve this kind of modification (20%

cholesterol reduction through diet), one must follow a
lifelong adherence to dietary modification (and
possibly drug therapy).

Unfortunately, several studies have shown an

increased risk of dying from other causes in the
pursuit of cholesterol reduction to below 200 mg per
deciliter. Cancer is one of those risks. Die fast with a
heart attack or die slow and painfully with cancer.
That’s the option provided by cholesterol reduction
efforts.

Cholesterol & Food

Cholesterol in food barely affects the levels in
our blood. Reductions in dietary saturated fat,
however, will lower many people’s cholesterol levels,
but will not affect others. Vegetarians have levels, on
the average, 50 milligrams lower than meat eaters.
Simple reduction of meat or elimination of red meat
lowers most people’s cholesterol levels by about 12%,
which isn’t a significant difference. And even with
that vegetarians don’t have fewer heart deaths
than meat eaters, contrary to what you hear all the
time.

Most Americans have cholesterol levels below

260 mg dL. Only 5% of the population has levels in
li
excess of 295 mg/dL. This is the high-risk group. A
reduction by 12% via diet would not do much for most
Americans.

Even high-risk people cannot do much about

their cholesterol levels through diet alone. Research
bears out that only a slight decrease in cholesterol
occurs with a decrease in fat intake and replacement
of some saturated fat with polyunsaturated fats. The
minimal reductions don’t correlate with decreased risk
of heart disease! I think that until we have serious
evidence we shouldn’t change our basic American
diet. Instead, we should all exercise much more and
quit smoking!

The important point to understand is that no

data will become available showing that cholesterol
and fat increase heart disease since we have already
studied the pants off of the idea that fat and
cholesterol intake and blood cholesterol levels
increase the rate of heart disease. The studies have
been on-going for more than 50 years with nothing to
show for it except that there’s no connection between
fat and cholesterol intake, blood cholesterol levels,
and rates of heart disease. No amount of future
studies will change these facts. It’s been settled!

Should We Eat Differently

Results from the famous Framingham heart
study concluded that egg consumption within

lii
standard ranges (0-24 per week for men and 0-19 for
women) was unrelated to blood cholesterol levels and
to heart disease. Bodybuilders have been known to eat
a dozen eggs a day for months on end (yolks and all)
without significant increases in cholesterol levels.

Red meat is called unhealthy by many today.

Just because red meat has saturated fat in it does not
portend that eating it will automatically raise your
cholesterol level. Studies have borne this out. Actually,
trimmed of visible fat, lean cuts of red meat don’t
have much more fat than chicken, turkey, or fish.
Human fat is highly saturated. When you lose fat
weight, fat pours into the blood, yet it doesn’t raise
your cholesterol. Instead, cholesterol levels usually go
down. Interesting. I think sugar excesses are much
more detrimental than fat!

The Theory Goes Bust

I don’t expect much agreement with my
opinions, but my opinions are based on facts
accumulated over the last fifty years. I insist that the
facts speak for themselves. My review of the scientific
literature shows misinterpreted data, misquoted
research, poorly analyzed and manipulated statistics
designed to fit preconceived hypotheses.

Many critics of the fat theory of heart disease

have painstakingly researched volumes of scientific
literature and have concluded that the vast majority of
the research implicating fat and cholesterol with heart
liii
disease is flawed. Certainly, when the risk of heart
disease is high, effective treatment should be
undertaken. But drugs have adverse effects and diet
hasn’t really been studied well yet -- especially for
the average American. And what about athletes, like
bodybuilders?

Only one study has explored blood fat levels in

bodybuilders on either a low-fat or high-fat diet. In
this study, the high-fat diet group ate only 20% of
their total calories as carbohydrates, yet they had a
significantly better lipid (blood fats) profile than the
other group, who ate less fat. Plus, they added seven
pounds more muscle. How do you explain that one,
medical doctors?

Athletes needn’t worry about fat in their diet, in

my opinion. In fact, based on my research, athletes
should consume significantly more fat to enhance
performance and to improve body composition.
Recommendations that the average person and/or
athlete watch his or her diet are unfounded. To those
who keep insisting that diet causes heart disease and
that eating less cholesterol and fat prevents heart
disease, I must say that every evangelist is entitled to
his beliefs, but every scientist is entitled to ask for the
evidence!

Fats and Carbohydrates

These two macronutrients provide the major
sources of energy for our body. The way you hear
liv
most people talk, mostly athletes, you would think
that carbohydrates are the most used. Nonsense. Your
body prefers to burn fat; fat is the preferred fuel of
the body -- not carbohydrates. Throughout the day,
during your normal activities, and in light to moderate
exercise, your body supplies fuel to your muscles. Fat,
not carbohydrate, provides up to 80-90% of total
energy supplied at rest and 75% during exercise.

Now, you can drive your body to burn more

carbohydrates, but it still prefers to burn fat. And,
given a chance, it will burn fat all day long.

The body burns fuel by processing it through

enzymes systems. Like a bucket brigade of fire
fighters, enzymes shuttle food along and as each
bucket is handed down the line, some water spills out.
In the same way as water spills from the passing
bucket, certain enzymes take out some energy from
that molecule of food until all of its energy is used up.

The cells of the body have different enzyme

pathways for burning fats and carbohydrates. The
controlling pathway is for fat use which, in turn, sends
a signal that slows the rate of carbohydrate burning.

There are two ways in which you can stimulate

the fat burning process: exercise and diet. Exercise
causes the body to increase the enzymes that release
fat from the fat cells and it also increases the enzymes
in muscle that burn fat. This process reduces the
amount of carbohydrates burned. You have no control

lv
over it; your body is on autopilot and does it all for
you automatically.

The second way to induce fat burning is to eat

fat. Incredible, isn’t it? And after everyone has been
telling you to eat less fat, here comes this nut telling
you to eat more. Oh well, it takes all kinds.

By the way, if you think you can escape getting

fat by not eating fat and eating carbohydrates instead,
forget it. Fat cells love carbohydrates; they suck them
up and turn them into fat. And the liver participates in
this carbohydrate-to-fat conversion as well, but 98%
of the fat-making-from-carbohydrate occurs in the
adipose tissue and 2% in the liver. It’s believed that
either fat or carbohydrates will lead to increased body
fat but only if you eat more than you need. But, this
has proven false as one can actually eat fewer calories
than he needs and can still increase his amount of
body fat if the diet is high in carbohydrate. This
process of body fat accumulation doesn’t occur from
eating a high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet. This one’s a
shocking surprise, huh? You can read all the details in
my book Ultimate Diet Secrets.

These processes are controlled by hormones

and diet affects hormones. Dr. Thomas Merimee of
the University of Florida’s School of Medicine reported
that high-carbohydrate diets reduced the amount of
growth hormone secretion by 32%. Both high-fat and
high-protein diets increased growth hormone by

lvi
about 6%. This change, caused by carbohydrates,
leads to low blood levels of growth hormone.

Growth hormone is a powerful lipolytic (breaks

down fat) hormone causing fat release from fat cells
and causing muscle growth by stimulating the uptake
of protein by muscle.

I’m now going to give you a “you heard it here

first” theory. Resistance exercise stimulates muscle
growth. It can do this even during starvation --
animal studies have shown this. High-protein and
high-fat diets (at the right calorie level!) stimulate fat
burning and muscle building and hormones control
both processes.

High-carbohydrates diets lead to a change in

the hormonal mix that pushes the body towards fat
gain and muscle loss. This is a complex process and
depends upon the different amounts of calories, mix
of foods, total percent of carbohydrates, and exercise
type and level.

And, aerobic exercise causes a condition

leading to the breakdown of muscle tissue. Studies
show that male long distance runners have lower
testosterone levels than non-running males and levels
lower that that seen measured in bodybuilders.

Therefore, the combined effects of diet and

exercise as now practiced in the US; that is, high-
carbohydrate, low-fat, low-protein, with an over-

lvii
emphasis on aerobic exercise cause people to lose
muscle and to become fatter.

Complex Carbohydrates
Eating complex carbohydrates is recommended
because it’s thought that fats are bad and
carbohydrates are good. We’ve already looked at
evidence showing that not all scientists agree with this
idea. I certainly don’t.

In the past, everybody pretty much agreed that

sugar, a simple carbohydrate, isn’t very good for you.
Unfortunately, because of the over-emphasis on the
dangers of fat, people no longer pay attention to the
hazards of sugar as they did before the 1970’s. Now,
most people believe that complex carbohydrates, such
as whole grains and potatoes, are good. Complex
carbohydrate foods are also high in dietary fiber, a
current health rage.

It’s suggested that the body digests complex

carbohydrates slowly which is thought to provide
health benefits by reducing the rate of release of
sugar to the blood and preventing a rapid rise in
insulin levels. Insulin is an important hormone that
comes from your pancreas and one of its jobs (not its
primary job) is to control your blood sugar level.
Control of blood sugar levels is important to health.
Poor control of blood sugar level causes problems.

lviii
 Research has recently shown that complex
carbohydrates can increase blood glucose (sugar) and
insulin levels which, if chronically stimulated, can lead
to obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. Therefore, an
outcry has occurred by some in the scientific
community that carbohydrate-containing foods need
to be tested for their “glycemic index.”

This is a measure of how they affect blood

glucose (sugar). It’s believed by many that the
glycemic index is also a measure of the body’s insulin
response too but that isn’t true; it’s only a measure of
the response in blood sugar levels.

Research by Dr. Gerald Reaven and his group at

Stanford University has shown that in non-insulin
dependent diabetes mellitus patients, the glycemic
index of mixed meals containing high levels of
complex carbohydrates provided no benefit to the
patients. Blood glucose and insulin levels rose as
much by eating “healthy” complex carbohydrates as
they did by eating “unhealthy” simple sugars.

Much more work has to be completed before

broad based recommendations can be made to the
American public about the so-called health benefits of
eating higher amounts of complex carbohydrates. As
an example, fruits such as apples, oranges,
grapefruits, and peaches are simple, not complex
carbohydrates. Therefore, they should really kick up
your blood sugar and insulin levels. They don’t -- the
glycemic index for these foods is actually very low and
lix
not high, as you’d expect. It’s believed that these
foods are good for you, but with an emphasis on
complex carbohydrates, such as potatoes and cereals,
people may not eat these fruits often.
Conclusion
The thrust of this information provides you with
a different view of macronutrient use (protein, fats,
and carbohydrates). Based on scientific research, the
data provides insights into calorie use and calorie
needs. Central to this notion is that the body prefers
to burn fat and that its metabolic machinery is geared
to burn primarily fat. Any treatment which increases
this in-born programmed capability will improve
performance and the results from exercise programs.

Most experts’ recommendations give

information based on misinterpretations of the
scientific data or to incomplete research: research that
doesn’t consider all conditions such as specialized
needs from following strenuous exercise programs.

Few experts have the necessary training to even

understand the data. Without this background it’s
difficult to interpret research findings. As a result, you
suffer. Progress is less than it should be and your
efforts go un-rewarded.

This chapter can serve as a guideline for

experimenting. By working with a scientifically proven
diet type, although not well known, you’ll make the
fastest results.

lx
Chapter 4
Glycogen Loading: Good or Bad
In the late 1960’s, Swedish researchers
developed a new dietary protocol to increase exercise
performance. It went like this: cut way down on
carbohydrates (breads, sweets, fruits, and some
vegetables) and eat nothing but protein and fat for
three days. Then, on days 4, 5, and 6 (game day is day
7), load up on carbohydrates. In this way, it was
thought, endurance performance would increase.

And, it worked. So glycogen (or carbohydrate)

loading became the dietary king and still rules today.
The trouble is that many people missed the point:
carbo loading only works for events (or competitions)
where the athlete must perform for long periods of at
least 90 minutes or more. For other athletes, and
that’s most sports (including football and
bodybuilding), the time of activity is short and muscle
and liver stores of glycogen are not performance-
limiting factors.

Glycogen is the storage form of blood sugar or

glucose. Your liver holds about 3/4 of a pound and
muscles about 1/4 of a pound. The primary purpose
of liver glycogen is to supply glucose for the blood. As
glucose enters the muscles, brain, and other organs,
the blood sugar levels drop and the liver releases
additional fuel in the form of glucose that’s released
from stored glycogen.

61
 The primary fuel that the body burns for energy
is fat: at rest 80% of your energy comes from fat. Most
scientists don’t understand this fact. With the
assumed relationship of fat consumption to obesity
and heart disease, very few scientists have researched
the “fat-as-fuel” studies.

As exercise intensity increases, the body uses a

higher percentage of carbohydrate to supply the
energy for the event. This notion has led to an
emphasis on carbohydrate as the primary fuel for
exercise. The percentage of total calories consumed
each day as carbohydrate has risen from about
40-45% years ago up to as high as 70-80% today.
Some of the popular sports performance drinks and
sports bars are 70-100% carbohydrate.

The increased use of carbohydrate has led to a

decrease in protein intake and this shift to a low-
protein, high-carbohydrate intake has led to changes
in body composition: less muscle and more fat.
Conventional wisdom has it the other way round: most
athletes believe they need lots of carbohydrate to
build muscle tissue. Wrong!

In a study of bodybuilders, one group of

athletes ate about 270 grams of protein per day,
including eating up to 82 eggs a week. Compared with
the low-protein/high-carbohydrate group, the high-
protein/low-carbohydrate group had 7 pounds more
muscle and 4 pounds less fat on their bodies. The
high-protein group also ate a diet higher in saturated
animal fat and contrary to popular belief the blood fat
62
levels of these athletes was excellent. Their risk
factors for heart disease were also very low.

The movement to a high-carbohydrate diet is of

no value to strength/power athletes. A typical
professional football game is about 9-13 minutes of
physical activity. A recent study showed that this
amount of playing time hardly reduced muscle
glycogen levels. Further, the high-carbohydrate diet
may actually decrease performance in several ways: 1)
decrease energy, 2) decrease muscle mass, and 3)
decrease strength.

New research presented in 1996 showed that

high-fat diets (less carbohydrate) increased
performance in endurance athletes.

In short, high-protein, moderate-carbohydrate

diets will enhance athletic performance in strength/
power athletes. My recommendation is to reduce
carbohydrate consumption to less than 25% of total
calories to gain optimum athletic performance. (Zero
carbohydrates may even be better!)

Other Problems With the High-Carbohydrate

Diet
The high-carbohydrate diet that’s in vogue
today doesn’t represent a balanced diet. Dr. Jan
Karlsson, one of the original developers of the
carbohydrate-loading regimen so popular among
current-day athletes, has argued vehemently against a
high-carbohydrate diet as a regular, everyday
63
regimen. He claims that such a diet is only acceptable
for two or, at most, four days within the framework of
the carbohydrate and muscle glycogen loading
program.

The carbohydrate-enriched diet leading to

muscle glycogen loading has been widely accepted
since the late 1960’s as an important way to prepare
for endurance sports and training. The dietary
program, however, was to be applied only
occasionally. Unfortunately, it was developed into a
long-term treatment program and was used, not only
by elite cross-country skiers and long-distance
runners, but also by professional athletes in many
different sports.

Even international organizations such as the

International Olympic Committee Medical Commission
recommended the use of the high-carbohydrate diet
for athletes. Dr. Karlsson has stated that such long-
term dietary regimens are synonymous with
malnutrition. It has been shown that the intake of
lipophilic (fat-loving) nutrients such as vitamin E is
linearly related to fat intake.

Other risks are associated with such an extreme

high-carbohydrate diet if followed for a long time. In
fact, this dietary regimen means that individuals may
actually sacrifice their own structural lipids (fats) for
energy needs. Vitamin Q and vitamin E are significant
factors for the health of white blood cells; they’re the
cells that are richest in antioxidants and,
consequently, enhance the immune system.
64
Significant immune system suppression is a possible
result of low dietary intake of fats and the consequent
use of one’s own fat stores as an energy source.

Athletes, with an extremely high intake of

carbohydrates and, hence, subsequent impaired
intake of lipid-based or lipophilic nutrients, have been
in a situation referred to as the Carbohydrate
Syndrome.

Carbohydrate Syndrome or the Carbohydrate

Trap
The high consumption of carbohydrates will
lead to a condition in which free radical elimination is
hampered and this leads to damage in muscles,
increases in cell injury, and an inhibition of the body’s
inflammation and healing process in response to
injury and infection. Hard-training athletes, who
follow a high-carbohydrate diet, will suffer from
overuse injuries due to a decreased ability to repair
and rebuild damaged tissues. Vegetarians and others
who consume a low-fat diet are also at serious risk for
the same type of damage.

People who have extreme energy needs, such as

athletes and those involved in manual labor, must be
very careful about the sources of their daily food
intake. If foods rich in carbohydrates come to serve as
their primary source of energy, their risk of suffering
from an insufficient supply of nutrients will increase.
Fats contain many of the essential nutrients we need

65
each day to maintain our health. As I have proposed
for many years, the low-fat diet is dangerous.

Sports medicine authorities have just recently

recognized the existence of the Carbohydrate Trap
or fat-phobia. The Carbohydrate Trap represents a
stage of malnutrition imposed by unprofessional
advisors and followed by unknowledgeable clients.
This is one of the major difficulties in nutrition today:
the emphasis on the low-fat diet in contrast to a diet
that maintains an adequate fat intake. How long will it
take until our medical and scientific “experts”
recognize the folly of their recommendation of low-fat
eating?

66
Chapter 5
What’s the Best Fuel for Muscles
The debate between carbohydrates and fats: An
interview with Gregory Ellis, PhD, CNS, by Dr. Al
Thomas

The information presented by Dr. Gregory Ellis

flies in the face of everything that the American Heart
Association has been saying about a good, healthy
diet. Dr. Ellis makes some very interesting arguments.
If you think carbohydrates are the best fuel for
muscles and help them grow the fastest and perform
the most effectively, it’s time to rethink your position,
according to Dr. Ellis!

67
Al: Dr. Ellis, is there really any debate at all? Everyone
knows that carbohydrates are what bodybuilders and
athletes need, right?

Ellis: Despite what everyone thinks, carbohydrates

aren’t the preferred energy source for the body. Fat is.
The common belief that carbohydrates are used most
often and provide the best calories for powering
muscle contraction is erroneous.

Al: For discussion’s sake, I’m going to buy that

argument temporarily. So tell me, why is everyone so
misinformed about the role of carbohydrates and fats?

Ellis: Well, there’s been substantial debate about the

role of fats and carbohydrates in muscle contraction
for years. In the late 1800’s, and even up until the late
1960’s, the prevailing view was that carbohydrates
alone fueled working muscles. In the first 25 years of
the 20th century, research supported this view.

However, research since then has shown

conflicting results. Zuntz found that muscle used both
fats and carbohydrates, and others confirmed this.
During starvation (which some ill-informed
bodybuilders actually begin to approach during that
last four weeks before a contest), fats provide the bulk
of energy for muscle, both at rest and during exercise.

Fat, as a fuel, is found in the bloodstream,

where it’s joined with a protein called albumin. This
complex was named free fatty acids. Free fatty acids

68
are one of the primary sources of fat that the body
uses as fuel.

Al: Where do the current terms “glycogen-loading”

and “muscle sugars” fit in then?

Ellis: In the late 1960’s, Scandinavian scientists

showed that glycogen is important in endurance
exercise and that glycogen is the body’s storage form
for glucose (blood sugar). Several studies revealed
that when glycogen stores in the muscle become
depleted, exhaustion follows.

The Scandinavian scientists studied the effect of

diet modification on endurance exercise. They put
athletes on three different diets. The first was a
normal diet of fats and carbohydrates. The second
and third diets began with three days of protein and
fat, but with no carbohydrates. Then, during the next
three days, athletes in one group ate loads of
carbohydrates and the other group stayed with the
high-fat and high-protein diet. All groups exercised
on indoor stationary cycles to exhaustion. The high-
fat and high-protein diet group came in last, riding
for the shortest time. The mixed diet group was
second, but the group who stoked up on the
carbohydrates rode the longest. The researchers
claimed that a person’s ability to perform exercise is
dependent upon the glycogen level of the muscles.
These studies have formed the basis for the glycogen-
loading theory.

69
Flawed Research
Al: Excuse me, Dr. Ellis, but what you’ve just told me
seems to refute your thesis about the importance of
fats as fuels.

Ellis: The problem is that these studies suffered a

flawed design. They didn’t consider the long-term
effects of the high-fat/high-protein diet. And further,
like the blind leading the blind, almost no studies
since these in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, have
experimented with different designs and protocols.
So, even though there’s continued evidence
supporting these original conclusions that are based
on the flawed design, researchers are unable to
uncover the energy-enhancing effects of the high-fat/
high-protein dietary mix because they haven’t tested
it! The continued use of the flawed design leads to
questionable and limited results.

Al: Well, glycogen loading and the need for lots of

carbohydrates seem to have gained universal
acceptance, your views notwithstanding.

Ellis: Yes, the idea is universally accepted by athletes,

coaches, and scientists. These groups are even more
convinced today of this than they were back when the
original studies were published. In 1977, the Senate
Select Committee on Nutrition published their
conclusions and, of course, the final report suggested
that Americans should eat more fruits, vegetables,
and grains while reducing their intake of meat, eggs,
and dairy products. They advocated that carbohydrate
intake should provide 60% of the daily calorie
70
allotment and that complex carbohydrates form the
base of that 60%. So, fueled by the desire to minimize
heart disease (this is why the committee presented
their findings), athletes and scientists have been
giving up fat as if it were poison.

Al: Well, isn’t it? Isn’t it bad to have too much fat
cruising through our systems or accumulated in our
body?

Ellis: Sure, too much. But that isn’t coming from

eating fat if one is, also, at the same time, consuming
a low-carbohydrate diet. It’s actually a mixed diet,
both high in fat and carbohydrate that leads to high
fat levels in both the blood and in the body fat. The
reason for this is that the high-carbohydrate diet
stimulates the conversion of carbohydrate into fat.

The muscles can control how much of the two

fuels, fats and carbohydrates that they use. The body
has a complicated biochemical control system with
pathways that are now well understood. The pathway
discoveries have been made in the last 30 years. The
major finding that should interest you and your
readers is that fat use controls the rate of
carbohydrate use. This is not guesswork, but a
biochemical fact.

If fat burns as fuel, then carbohydrate burning

slows. This is controlled through a complex enzymatic
process dictated by the type of chemical fuel that’s in
the blood and the subsequent hormonal profile
arising from the food one eats. Both fats and
71
carbohydrates have their own enzyme systems that
convert fat and/or carbohydrates to an end product
used to make ATP (adenosine triphosphate), the
chemical used to provide energy for the cell’s
metabolism.

Al: Could you explain that in more detail?

Ellis: Muscles produce energy from food. Essentially,

muscles take cake or meat or whatever and convert it
to carbon dioxide and water. Along the way, the
chemicals making up food are degraded and their
energy is extracted to make ATP. This ATP production
takes place, of course, during the enzyme action in
which food is converted to carbon dioxide and water.
Some enzymes are regulatory or rate-limiting. They
act just like a bend or pinch in a water hose. Bend the
hose and less water runs through.

Al: I see how it works. Continue, please.

Ellis: Like the pinched hose, the flows through the

different carbohydrate and fat paths affect each other.
As fats move along their path of use, production of a
chemical called citrate (an end product of fat burning)
increases. The citrate attacks a regulatory enzyme in
the pathway that breaks down carbohydrates into a
usable source of fuel. The net effect of the action of
citrate is to slow down the movement of
carbohydrates through their metabolic pathway. It’s
just that simple: as more fat burns less carbohydrate
burns.

72
 So citrate regulates the muscle’s choice of fuel.
In reality, it’s much more complex than this as there
are a number of regulators acting on multiple
enzymes within the pathway of carbohydrate
degradation. Many other chemicals can dramatically
slow or stop the breakdown of glycogen in liver and
muscle. They can slow the rate of blood glucose entry
into the muscles.

The fuel used by each muscle fiber sends a

message to the energy depots throughout your body.
This is accomplished through hormones. Of most
importance is that the level of blood glucose and fat
in the blood signals the liver and fat cells either to
send more or less fuel to the muscles. It’s a constant
supply and demand situation and, remember, fat use
in muscle controls carbohydrate use, further affecting
not only muscle, but the whole body.

Performance Fuel

Al: So fat use controls carbohydrate use; that still

doesn’t really tell me that carbohydrates are not
better than fat for superior performance.

Ellis: OK, most athletes and scientists believe that

exercise endurance is governed by how much
glycogen is in their muscles. But how do they explain
the fact that muscle exhaustion can occur despite
having ample glycogen supplies in the muscles? That
is, plenty of glycogen is left, yet exhaustion takes
place. Furthermore, glycogen depletion affects only
73
athletes who train nonstop or compete in events
lasting more than several hours. For most sports
performances, for weight lifting and bodybuilding
routines, glycogen depletion is not a factor in muscle
fatigue, not at all.

Let’s look at some specific evidence. In 1986,

scientists studied the effects of a difficult weight
training workout on the fuel used by muscle.
Nationally ranked competitive bodybuilders did five
sets of front squats, five sets of back squats, five sets
of leg presses, and five sets of leg extensions. Each
set lasted about 30 seconds, with a one minute rest
between sets. The weights were heavy enough so that
ten repetitions proved to be their maximum effort.
That is, each set was to momentary muscular failure,
where the successful execution of another repetition
proved impossible.

It was an extremely difficult program, and the

blood lactic acid levels were sky high. By their own
admission, it was the hardest program any of them
had ever undertaken. And this was stated by top-level
bodybuilders already well conditioned and used to
breaking their balls!

To the surprise of the scientists, muscle

glycogen decreased only 40% from the resting values
(this was in the thigh muscles). Where did the fuel for
energy come from? The immediate stored energy
sources that are available include ATP, which is
probably not stored, and some creatine phosphate.
However, the amounts of these are very small and
74
barely account for enough energy production to meet
the energy demands of one set of one of the
exercises, if that. Glucose shunted from the liver
supplies some energy. However, this study showed
that there wasn’t a significant uptake by the muscle of
liver-derived glucose. The authors were forced to
conclude that a large portion of energy came from a
source other than carbohydrates.

Energy Source

Al: And now for the $65,000 question, where did it

come from?

Ellis: The $65,000 answer is that it came from intra-

muscular triglycerides. These are fat globules that are
stored inside the muscle cells. They’ve received very
little attention although I studied them extensively for
my Ph. D. dissertation. Most body fat is stored in the
subcutaneous layer and some is stored in other sites,
especially around internal organs. But, approximately
0.5-2% is stored within the muscles as intra-muscular
triglycerides.

Al: That isn’t much.

Ellis: That’s right, it isn’t. But, these triglycerides are

quickly broken down to acetyl-CoA, which is the
chemical that leads to the manufacture of ATP. As
intra-muscular fat burns, carbohydrate burning slows.
The key is this: as free fatty acid levels in the blood

75
increase, this source of fat enters the muscle and is
shunted into storage within the muscle as triglyceride.
Fat, from inside the thigh muscles and from the
blood, is what supplied the extra fuel for the
bodybuilders’ leg program.

I have also performed an intricate experiment

with rats treated with estrogen, a hormone which sets
into motion a biochemical process that supplies more
fat to muscle for burning as a source of fuel. The rats
ran for two hours on a treadmill, and the results
showed that they used much more fat than
carbohydrate for fuel.

Al: What can one do to make the body burn more fat
and save glycogen? Certainly we shouldn’t take
estrogen?

Ellis: Well, women in endurance events might be wise

to select events that were timed with their estrogen
peak if that were possible. Remember, the body
prefers fat over carbohydrates as a source of fuel. It
only burns carbohydrates as a supplement to fat use.
Most scientists, however, believe it is the other way
round. Unfortunately, they haven’t done their
homework. Carbohydrates make up the difference
when fat is not immediately available or if the
enzymes for processing fat are too low in quantity.
That’s the critical point -- whether or not the
enzymes for fat use are at maximum levels.

Two things make this possible. Training is the

first because training conditions the muscle to burn
76
fat by increasing the enzymes that process fat. This is
like being on auto pilot. The enzymes that burn fat
increase and the body also changes its hormone
balance so that more fat gets to the muscles from the
fat cells. And fewer carbohydrates are used because
fat burning spares glucose and glycogen use.

Of course, the second thing to do, in addition to

the training program, is to eat fat.

Eat Fat

Al: Now wait a minute; that seems like an awfully

strange idea. We get enough hidden fats in our foods
anyway, don’t we? Do we have to go out of our way to
chew the fat?

Ellis: The foods you eat determine the types of fuels

you use. If you eat fat, you burn fat, and if you eat
carbohydrates, you burn more carbohydrates, but a
significant proportion of those carbohydrates are
converted to body fat. Everything re-organizes from
the smallest parts of the muscle cell to the larger
parts, including the output of hormones that influence
your whole body and the genes that manufacture the
enzymes. Four major hormones influence fuel use:
insulin, cortisol, glucagon, and growth hormone. They
are anabolic (build-up) or catabolic (break-down).
Glucose, derived from dietary carbohydrates, also has
a direct effect in determining whether fuel is
partitioned into storage or burned. Glucose has a
direct effect on all of the enzymes involved in the
77
conversion of glucose into fat with its subsequent
storage in the body fat depots. Further, it directly
affects the expression of genes that are involved in
stimulating the production of the enzymes throughout
the body that convert dietary carbohydrate into body
fat. Although the low-carbohydrate advocates argue
that insulin is the primary agent driving the storage of
carbohydrates into fat, it’s actually the glucose itself
that acts as the primary signal and this effect is
increased by insulin.

Insulin is anabolic, but all the way, to both fat

tissue and to muscle tissue. This means that insulin
makes you fatter while, at the same time, it also
stimulates muscle growth. But the rate and amount of
fat accretion is greater than the amount of muscle
accretion. So this is clearly not the way to go.

Insulin fluctuates, and the type of food you eat

determines the amount of insulin released as well.
Guess what? Carbohydrates push insulin up. With a
chronically high-carbohydrate intake, you have a
chronically high insulin response. This doesn’t do
your body fat level any favor. While it might be OK for
your muscles, this makes it difficult, impossible even,
for your fat cells to release fat into your blood. The
primary function of insulin is to control the release of
fat from the fat cells, not to clear the blood of
glucose, as most scientists believe. High insulin levels
stop the release of fat, and low insulin levels permit a
rapid release of free fatty acids from the adipose
tissue.

78
 Growth hormone is anabolic to muscle, and
catabolic to fat. Protein and fat diets increase the
output of growth hormone. And guess what? High-
carbohydrate diets lower growth hormone output.
However, growth hormone, as a normal hormone in
the body, is permissive to body balance in terms of
muscle and fat quantities in your body. Changing the
amount of hormones artificially, like growth hormone
(or insulin), inextricably alters this balance.

Al: Bodybuilders seem to disregard logical statements

like that though. If you tell them that insulin and
growth hormone are anabolic to muscle, some of the
less intelligent ones will take them artificially,
regardless of health risks. So what should the smarter
ones do?

Ellis: Bodybuilders strive to increase muscle mass and

lower body fat. Yes, you can reduce fat with dieting,
but you almost always lose muscle too. A balance
between calorie reduction and changes in hormone
levels through dieting and exercise is the goal. At any
level of calorie intake, you’ll have more building, or
maintenance, of muscle, and loss (or no net gain) of
fat on a higher-protein, high-fat diet compared to a
high-carbohydrate diet.

Al: Yikes! That statement is going to turn some

heads.

Ellis: It shouldn’t if people look at the decades-old

research and results. We knew, scientifically, as early
as 1852 that a high-carbohydrate diet stimulated a
79
carbohydrate-to-fat conversion with its subsequent
storage in body fat depots. Observations by farmers
were that high-grain diets fattened their animals.
Much more research through the 1940’s and 1950’s
cleared this up and determined all of the basic
biochemistry on which these processes were based. I
detail thoroughly the history of these facts in my
book, Ultimate Diet Secrets.

Later, with the glycogen depletion studies,

athletes on high-protein and high-fat diets did have
reduced performance, but the studies lasted only 7
days. The athletes were simply unable to use the fat
supplied to the muscles because their fat-burning
enzyme levels were so low. There weren’t enough
enzymes in the fat burning pathway to process the fat
now made available to muscle both by the diet and by
the release of the free fatty acids from the adipose
tissue. The athletes couldn’t process fat and the
alternative fuel -- carbohydrate -- was drained out of
the muscles by the previous 7 days’ low-carbohydrate
diet. As a result, fuel requirements of the exercising
muscle were unable to be met.

Al: So what would have happened if the bodybuilders

remained on the high-protein/high-fat diet for more
than a week?

Ellis: I have some of the answers in my research.

After one week on a high-fat diet, a group of rats ran
8% longer than rats on a high-carbohydrate diet. After
another four weeks on the diet, the high-fat group ran
33% longer than the carbohydrate loaded rats!
80
 The run times were on the order of 40 minutes,
which would normally have required less glycogen as
compared to runs lasting more than an hour.
Therefore, the results of the study are even more
impressive because of the short run times. It’s funny
-- the glycogen levels stored in the muscles naturally
fell in the rats on the high-fat diet. However, this did
not adversely affect performance. To the contrary,
performance improved -- a lot.

In another study, rats were adapted to the high-

fat diet for 12 weeks. At the end of that time, a
treadmill endurance test resulted in the high-fat fed
rats running 68% longer than another group of rats
fed a high-carbohydrate diet!

20-Week Minimum
Al: So what should athletes do in your view?

Ellis: Bodybuilders, and all athletes, and all those

interested in increasing physical performances for any
type of activity, should avoid mindless brain washing
and give fat a chance. It takes time. Other studies
suggest that it may take 20 weeks for the human
metabolism to adapt fully to a high-fat diet. The
maximum performance-improving capacity will only
begin to be realized after an adaptation period
exceeding several weeks. Alaskan sled dogs perform
very poorly on carbohydrate diets. In fact, their racing
times are best when they eat at least 32% of their

81
calories as protein and the rest as fat! We must ask
why carbohydrate diets decreased their performance.

Al: I suppose the dogs aren’t talking. I can’t believe

you’d issue a simple recommendation to radically
increase the consumption of fat. What about heart
disease?

Ellis: The notion that cholesterol and fat are the

primary cause of heart disease is one of the greatest
scientific deceptions of our time. A discussion of this
topic requires a more detailed exploration. I’ve
provided that detailed discussion in my other writings.
In the case of bodybuilders, they are at an extremely
low risk of heart disease due to their vigorous and
regular exercise. Their blood fat levels are very low. A
recent study of bodybuilders, as I’ve said, who ate a
diet thought to put them at risk for heart disease
showed that, despite the diet, they showed no signs of
risk at all. And you know what else? Those
bodybuilders who ate a high-fat diet had 7 pounds
more muscle on their body than another group of
bodybuilders who had ingested a high-carbohydrate
diet!

Al: What about cholesterol levels?

Ellis: Less than 5% of the American population really

has a cholesterol problem, and this is a medical
problem; these are sick people. People who aren’t sick
don’t have the problem, and diet is simply not a part
of the problem. The fat in food affects only a small
percent of people in terms of having a significant
82
effect on their blood cholesterol. And blood
cholesterol levels for more than 95% of the population
aren’t, in any way, related to the rate of heart disease.
Eggs and beef may be high in cholesterol, but for the
vast majority of people, especially bodybuilders, these
foods don’t raise cholesterol. For example, a recent
study showed that people with high cholesterol ate a
diet of only rib-eye steaks, lowered their cholesterol
significantly. Cholesterol values dropped from a pre-
diet level of 263 mg to 189 mg. Low-carbohydrate
eating almost always leads to a decrease in
cholesterol and triglyceride levels.

I don’t think that bodybuilders, or anyone else

in regular training, (or, actually, anyone at all,
exercising or not) need to worry about cholesterol,
unless the values begin to exceed 275 mg. And, first,
HDL levels should be checked because they may be a
large proportion of the total cholesterol reading
thereby negating any fear of a high total cholesterol
reading. Most other people could easily maintain
normal, healthy levels by reducing their overweight,
over-fat condition.

I think the threshold for dietary carbohydrate

reduction to make a positive effect in increasing
muscle mass and decreasing body fat begins when
carbohydrate intake is reduced to a level lower than
25% of total daily calorie intake. I believe that this
level is still too high to realize optimal benefit. I don’t
know at this time if a 0% carbohydrate intake is more
effective than, say, 10% or 15% of daily carbohydrate

83
intake as a caloric percentage of the whole day’s
calorie intake.

Many people argue against a high-protein diet

as dangerous to the function of the liver and kidneys.
There’s absolutely no research to support this belief,
and in fact, there’s an abundance of research
indicating that a high-protein diet is very effective in
improving liver function. Too often in the area of
nutrition many studies are done on sick individuals
and there are too few studies on athletes.

Al: Do you have any final piece of advice for our

readers?

Ellis: I realize that a lot of this is different from

anything your readers have read or heard. However,
the risks are non-existent, and the benefits are high. I
wish bodybuilders and other athletes would
experiment for an appreciable time with a high-fat
diet and get off the ultra-high-carbohydrate diet. If
they’re concerned with their blood fat and cholesterol
levels, they can monitor them. I do know that a diet
somewhat higher in fats and proteins will not only
make your muscles grow faster, but will also give you
better endurance. Give it a try.

Al: Thanks, Dr. Ellis, this sure was interesting.

84
Chapter 6
Value of Resistance Training
Resistance training (lifting weights) has taken it
on the chin for many years. No more. Once the
dominion of football players and pure muscle
builders, it’s now a popular exercise activity for the
general population. Personal trainers are the stars of
the current-day fitness trends, pushing their protégés
through muscle pumps and chanting the new T-shirt
slogan of “no pain, no gain.”

In the early days, this type of training was called

progressive resistance exercise or PRE for short. This
is the key feature to this type of exercise: it’s
progressive. In other words, as you become stronger
and the weights you’re currently lifting no longer
challenge you, then you increase the resistance to
further challenge your muscles thereby stressing them
and causing an adaptation that makes you stronger.

The beauty here is that you don’t need fancy

equipment to achieve fantastic results. An inexpensive
barbell, used in the privacy of your own home, is all
that you need for success. Purchasing a few optional
pieces of equipment will allow some variations in
exercises that will be very productive. But none of
these are very expensive. Later on I’ll lay out a
complete home exercise barbell program for you.

85
Science Discovers Resistance Exercise
In the past, the scientific and medical
community paid little attention to resistance exercise
and its effects on the body. They, like everyone else,
considered weightlifting something that makes you
muscle-bound while inflating weak egos. With the
growth of running and the fitness boom of the mid to
late 1970’s, a whole new breed of exercise research
scientist developed.

These young scientists are now exploring the

benefits of resistance exercise, measuring its effects
on the body and showing exactly what physical
changes occur. The scientific exploration of resistance
exercise is just beginning. Yet, despite this present
lack of scientific work, the benefits of resistance
training have been known since the days of the Greek
athletes.

Physiological Benefits of Resistance Exercise

Body Composition
Resistance exercise can cause a rapid growth of
muscle tissue in both men and women. Although
there are sex differences, primarily because of the
anabolic hormone testosterone, women, as well as
men, will readily respond to the growth stimulation
provided by resistance exercise, but with not as much
muscle growth.

Regular training allows continual stimulation

and response. Muscles take on shape, appearing in
86
places that had precious little muscle before. You are
able to craft a completely new appearance and
persona. Finally, when you’ve achieved your desired
shape and look, you simply embark upon a
maintenance program, using the same resistance that
triggered the transformation. Little further growth
occurs at this juncture. It’s like a water spigot; you
can turn it up to get a stronger stream or turn it down
to reduce it. The good news about resistance exercise
is that you can decide what to build or what to leave
alone.

For women this is particularly helpful. Women

often get fat from the hips down, a pattern of weight
gain called “gynoid” or female pattern obesity. Overall
weight loss, unfortunately, usually fails to help such
women look significantly better than they did before
they started their weight loss program.

The body loses fat from areas where it has the

most to lose. This is probably hormone-mediated and
controlled by an enzyme in the blood vessels of the
fat and muscle cells, lipoprotein lipase (LPL). LPL is
responsible for grabbing fat as it circulates in the
blood and depositing it in fat or muscle cells. Women
have more LPL in the fat cells of their hips and thighs
than in their waist; men have more in their waist.

As a woman loses weight, she loses it from both

her upper body and her lower body. However, since
she has less to lose from her upper body, she often
looks increasingly gaunt in the torso area because of
muscle loss occurring along with her fat loss. This
87
occurs at the same time that her hips and thighs
remain far fatter than she would like.

A woman can avoid this sort of unbalanced loss

by concentrating on upper-body muscle building
exercises. With this type of exercise, she can replace
the lost fat with muscle, permitting her to maintain
her upper body size while preventing a drawn,
emaciated appearance. As a result, she can afford to
continue losing fat from her lower body until she
reaches her desired shape. And please note that I said
body shape, not bodyweight. The new muscle that she
acquires weighs something and contributes to a
bodyweight that is inevitably higher than she thinks it
should be.

Aerobic exercise can’t equal the body-shaping

effect of resistance exercise. The nature of aerobic
work is that it doesn’t build significant muscle size
because enhanced girth of muscle isn’t needed to do
repetitive, low tension exercises. And that’s what
aerobic exercise is -- repetitive and low tension.

Just look at the physique of women joggers.

They have small, almost emaciated upper bodies, with
no shoulder, chest, or arm development. Usually, they
have wide hips and thighs dotted by “cellulite” that
jiggles with each stride. Running does little to improve
their appearance or to enhance athletic muscle tone.

Over-eating carbohydrates, combined with

non-muscle-building endurance exercise, leads to the
loss of upper body muscle. Sure, fat is lost, but so is
88
muscle too, and it’s lost in the very places that women
don’t want to lose it.

Aerobic exercise is good because it can help

you lose and control weight, but only resistance
exercise is capable of transforming your appearance
to one that you desire. I’ve counseled many women to
reduce the amount of running and endurance exercise
they do and to substitute resistance training for it
instead. In less than a month they begin to reshape
themselves in response to a basic resistance training
program and an adequate protein intake.

They proclaim all this a miracle. After years of

pounding the roads, they have effected very little
improvement in their shape. Often they blamed
genetics. Then, after only thirty days, or so, of
training, they’re stunned by the beauty wrought in
their very own flesh by resistance training: Not
bulging muscles, but shapely and voluptuous ones.
Muscles fill in, creating the right contours in the right
places. The enhanced upper body development
creates the illusion of smaller hips and thighs.
Continued training eventuates in the reduction of hip
and thigh size, further enhancing the beauty of the
feminine physique.

Body fat is an independent predictor among the

risk factors for heart disease. Even if you don’t smoke,
or have a family history of heart disease or high blood
pressure, body fat all by itself can increase your risk.
Resistance exercise is an effective method to rid your
body of fat but, better yet, is that the increased
89
muscle mass, along with the loss of fat, dramatically
changes your appearance. Without changing your diet
or anything else, you can strip-off fat and build
muscle by means of resistance training. If you want
faster results, you can add a reduced calorie intake to
your regimen. During the first month, you can
possibly expect a pound or two of fat to go and a
pound or two of muscle to appear -- with little or no
change in diet.

At one time, just as an experiment, I decided to

give up all aerobic exercise and concentrate
exclusively on resistance training. I followed some of
the guidelines in this book and included some
strenuous workouts that pushed my heart rate to its
maximum level. I added two pounds of muscle in the
first month and another pound the next month while
dropping two pounds of fat tissue. These body
composition changes were documented by hydrostatic
weighing (underwater weighing which is the most
accurate body composition test).

Now, there was a slight increase in total calories

burned during the session compared to my endurance
programs and the changes were a function of the way
resistance training stimulates the body’s muscles to
grow. Scientists have recently shown that resistance
training causes an increased output of hormones
causing muscle to grow and causing lipolysis (break
down) of body fat. Fat is then used as energy.

The change in the hormonal pattern leads to an

increased use of fat as I’ve described. What’s the
90
result? Fat deposits get smaller because less is taken
in and more is released. Muscles then burn it for fuel.

Sports Conditioning
Most sports conditioning requires that muscles
be in good shape: for good performance and to
prevent injuries. In most activities in which we
participate, muscle strength and muscle endurance
are more important than cardiovascular endurance.
Skiing, boating, team sports, mountain climbing, all
require good muscle strength, endurance, and
flexibility. Resistance exercise meets the requirements
of conditioning for these activities.

Achieving specific conditioning goals comes by

varying the number of sets, repetitions, and rest
periods in a resistance program. This is the concept
behind this book of resistance exercise which I’ll
outline in detail in later chapters.

Cardiovascular Conditioning and Reduction of

Heart Disease Risk Factors (Watch Out for that
Word Risk)
Scientific studies tell us that the conditioning
effect of exercise on the heart is dependent on the
intensity, duration, and frequency of the exercise. The
heart responds to exercise by increasing its rate and
force of contraction. More blood gets pumped to the
exercising muscles to meet their demands for oxygen,
nutrients, and waste removal. The rate at which the
91
heart beats is a measure of the intensity of exercise.
The heart’s rate of beating shows how hard the work
of exercise is to perform. The heart, of course,
doesn’t have the slightest idea as to what is making it
do more and more work: running, swimming, bicycle
riding, climbing steps, or sex. It only knows that it
must pump more blood to meet the demands of the
body for more blood.

Any exercise that causes the heart to increase

its output will condition it. By now, most of you have
been conditioned by the media to think that aerobic
or endurance exercise is good for your heart and
what’s good for your heart is good for your health.
Strengthening your heart, we’re told, leads to life
extension and to improving its quality.

Why is aerobic exercise good for your heart and

your body’s health? What does such exercise actually
do or cause to happen that provides these healthful
benefits? Aerobic exercise makes the heart work
harder. And the heart, a muscle just like your biceps,
responds by strengthening itself. It contracts more
forcefully, pumping more blood with each beat. As a
result, it beats less often, a sign of good heart health.
These changes all cause the heart to become stronger,
and a stronger heart can better withstand stress,
whether physical or mental.

Most important, aerobic exercise reduces the

risk factors connected with heart disease. Decreases
in bodyweight and blood pressure occur. You process
sugar better, a change that reduces the risk of
92
diabetes and its harmful effects on the heart and on
the body generally. The blood lipid (fat) profile
improves, with a lowering of triglycerides and of
cholesterol. You also experience increases in the
“good cholesterol” called high density lipoproteins or
HDL for short. These are the primary effects of aerobic
conditioning.

Improved health accompanies everything that

exercise affects in the chemistry of your body. Its
effects are measurable and quantifiable. Doctors can
compare one person’s values to others’: those who
either have disease or are free of it. In this way,
physicians can predict your chances of disease based
on your profile.

Therefore, we can say that any exercise that

makes the heart work harder and leads to a reduction
in cardiovascular risk factors is good for you.

How does resistance training fit into the picture

that I’ve painted? Early studies of resistance exercise
showed that reduction in many of the primary risk
factors for heart disease occur in response to
resistance training. These responses appear to be at
least as good as those which occur in response to
aerobic exercise.

This is exciting news and means that you get

the cardiovascular benefits associated with aerobic
exercise while also getting, at the same time, the
strengthening and body shaping benefits of resistance
training.
93
Bodybuilding Training Builds the Body and
Protects the Heart; Growing Evidence of
Coronary Protection from Resistance Exercise
Dr. M. Faber and his colleagues studied
seventy-six male bodybuilders to determine the effect
of their diet and exercise program on heart health. He
divided the athletes into two groups. One group ate
few eggs and the other group ate up to 81 eggs a
week. Most physicians would consider 81 eggs a week
a death-blow to the heart and to the blood lipids. The
average daily consumption for this “high egg” group
was six eggs per day -- and very few carbohydrates.
Indeed, carbohydrates comprised only 20% of the total
daily calorie count, a percentage below even the low-
carbohydrate threshold of my dietary protocol.

American health experts recommend a

carbohydrate intake that’s 55% or more of total daily
calories. Faber pointed out that the athletes in this
study were eating a highly atherogenic (heart disease-
causing) diet, according to the guidelines established
by the American Heart Association. The protein intake
of the high egg group was almost 300 grams a day,
100% more than that of the low egg group and four
times higher than the US-RDA for protein intake.

These dramatic intake differences, however, led

to a surprising result. The high egg group had 1% less
fat on their bodies and 7.5 pounds more muscle than
the low egg, low-protein/high-carbohydrate group!
94
The differences in the blood lipid (fat) profiles were
also surprising. The HDL level was 55 mg/dL
(milligrams per deciliter) in the high egg group;
experts consider anything over 45 mg/dL good.

The low egg group’s blood fat profile was less

good than the high egg group’s, with an HDL of 50
mg/dL compared with the 55 mg/dL of the high egg
group. Triglyceride levels are another marker for heart
disease risk. Lower values are better than high values
(upper normal range is 160 mg/dL). Triglycerides
were 124 mg/dL in the high egg group, compared
with 172 mg/dL in the low egg group. Remember,
carbohydrate eating leads to rises in triglyceride
values.

Experts consider the total cholesterol/HDL ratio

one of the best predictors for heart disease. It was low
in both groups: 3.4 for the high egg group and 3.5 for
the low egg group. According to the experts, anything
lower than 4.5 for males and 5.0 for females is good.

These findings emphasize the effectiveness of

resistance exercise in lowering the supposed risk of
diet-induced heart disease. Of course, we also have to
consider the contribution of the low-carbohydrate diet
to this excellent blood profile.

These positive changes, above, allow us to think

in a completely different way about resistance
training. It’s argued that a primary effect of aerobic
exercise is the reduction in our risk of developing
cardiovascular disease. Dr. Faber’s study, as well as
95
studies by other researchers, demonstrates that
resistance exercise is as valuable as aerobic exercise,
in effecting overall health improvements.

As a bonus, resistance exercise provides many

other benefits to the trainee that aerobic exercise
doesn’t, including increased muscle mass and
improved body shape. Other bonuses derived from
performing resistance exercise are protection against
sports-related injuries and, of course, the reduction
of body fat.

The bodybuilders who followed the high-fat,

(so-called heart disease-causing diet) did not, in
fact, demonstrate any increased risk for heart
disease. It can be argued, therefore, that resistance
training protected them against the so-called
negative penalties of this type of diet. Another
alternative answer, however, is that this diet may
not be the villain it’s purported to be, a point I’ve
already established in my writing.

I’m not a supporter, as you know by now, of

the “risk factor” predictions of heart disease. You
may disagree with me and still buy into the
American Heart Association’s nonsense-filled
campaign as to the superiority of the high-
carbohydrate diet. If you still do, it has to be at the
cost of acknowledging the manifest safety of the
much-decried egg and that even-more-decried
whipping boy, red meat, which aren’t just safe, but
protective, against heart disease.

96
 If the main purpose of exercise for some is
to reduce their risk of developing cardiovascular
disease, then resistance exercise appears to be as
capable as aerobic exercise, or more capable, to
provide improvements in health.

Following the routines outlined in this book

will help you take advantage of the benefits of
resistance exercise. The Maximum Muscle Growth
provides maximum results for each of your desired
training goals. By proper needs assessment and
program outline, specific physical changes occur.
Each person can get both the fitness and body
figure that only resistance training can provide.

97
Chapter 7
Maximum Muscle Growth
Now, we’re at the heart of what this book is all
about.

I want to start here first before introducing the

most comprehensive muscle building program ever
developed.

Isometrics
Earlier I described my experience with doing
isometric only exercise at a health club in Delaware
using a new machine called biodensity.

I was also asked to write a white paper on

isometrics. The following is the complete piece that I
wrote

Isometric Training

There are multiple strength training modalities:

1) Isotonics: Resistance training with weights,

machines, bands, and bodyweight as the
resistance type; included in this category are the
subdivisions of heavy, progressive, and variable
resistance exercise, speed loading, eccentric
(training by allowing the muscle to lengthen
against a load versus shortening or contracting

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 against a load), plyometric training, and other
hybrids
2) Isokinetic: in this style of exercise a machine
is used that controls the speed of movement
against which a muscle contracts and offers
only concentric, or positive, movements (muscle
shortening)

3) Isometrics: muscle contraction against a

force that is greater than a muscle’s maximal
force generating capacity thereby allowing no
movement of the applied load.

It is this third type of muscle contraction,

isometric training that will be described in detail in
this section of the white paper. Isometric training was
created in a laboratory, in contrast to isotonics which
evolved in the field over many years. The main
principles of strength training have been known since
the days of the Greek city-states.

First identified in the late 1920’s (1), isometric

training was studied extensively by scientists since the
mid-1940’s (3) when Hellebrandt discovered that
controlled, high muscle tension generation increased
muscle strength to high levels quickly. This discovery
was commercialized by Charles Atlas in his Dynamic
Tension Method of exercise.

Isometrics was little known other than Atlas’s

salesmanship and remained ignored until 1953 when
Hettinger and Muller’s classic paper was first

93
published (3). The author’s research conclusion: a
maximum muscle strengthening effect was produced
by one daily isometric contraction, lasting six
seconds, using an effort level of two-thirds of the
muscle’s maximum contractile power.
This claim raised some skepticism, but led to
much general interest. Further research by Muller (5)
reaffirmed the earlier work confirming that these
maximum training effects occurred even if
contractions were very brief and exceeded little more
than one-third of the maximum possible effort.

The idea that so little time and effort would lead

to such a profound response in so short a time led
some to argue that years of dedicated resistance
work, lifting weights totaling tons each year, had been
a needless effort. This opinion shook the foundations
of the strength establishment and it has not abated
today.

But, in fact, today, there is little interest in

isometric training by exercise enthusiasts and it is
little talked about in public. There are few research
publications: in science, isometric training is used as a
method to study the effects of exercise on cellular and
physiological functions, not to define training
methods to optimize its usefulness.

With isometric’s explosion on the muscle

strengthening platform in the 1940’s and early
1950’s, previous training practices dating back to the
times of the Greeks and Romans were now open to

94
question and previous beliefs about muscle
strengthening suddenly appeared dated.

The lack of a sound scientific basis to training

had previously concerned few people, but now it was
clear there were no sound theoretical insights or
adequate experimental grounds to support old ideas.
In the past, studies of strength had been made; and
strength had been measured for centuries. However,
evaluations of techniques, methods, principles,
training outcomes, relative needs, explanations, and
theoretical considerations were lacking.

A review article, written about the time the

research on isometrics appeared, discussed 89
studies of strength completed since the turn of the
century, but only mentioned four studies of strength
training (6). The years that followed produced few
research papers dealing with strength training. Most
of the work in this area was then, and now, conducted
by lay people outside the laboratory setting.

Commercial concerns have always spearheaded

research into these areas, not to suggest there is
anything untoward about that since these efforts were
directed by people who had a passion for this field. It
is rather unusual to find many scientists who have an
interest in the strength training field, studying optimal
methods of training, although that is now changing.

Spawned by the aerobics movement in 1970

and the introduction of the Nautilus machines, also in

95
1970, a fitness revolution developed and more
passionate young people developed a scientific
curiosity and pursued PhD degrees in exercise
physiology and then went on to pursue academic
careers.

This, however, has not led to studies specifically

directed to the optimization of strength training via
studies testing one method versus another, i.e.,
choosing the winner, say A beats B, and then
introducing test C to run against A. There are, no
doubt, many programs, but they evolved no differently
than did the field programs during the last centuries.

Between the years of 1950-1960, 57 papers

were published on isometrics and 45% of those
appeared after 1953 (1). Many of the authors of these
papers carefully analyzed the work of Hettinger and
Muller, as did they themselves (7), but support for the
positive results they presented overshadowed any
negative disagreements against their claims of rapid
and powerful increases in strength from brief, intense
isometric muscle contractions.

The questions that did arise related to issues

such as repetition frequency, percent of effort needed
to maximize strength increases, and comparisons
from one muscle group to another (8). Questions also
arose about the comparison to isotonic training
methods, effects on muscle hypertrophy (growth), and
responses to training among a wide variety of people.
In 1970, Muller gave little ground to any of the

96
differing opinions and stated: “that repeating the
isometric stimulus a second time within 24 hours
produces very little additional benefit to that resulting
from the single contraction” (9).

By the 1970’s, isometrics had been so

thoroughly studied that it seemed there was no need
for further investigations (10).

During those early decades, investigations

about isometrics included studies about it and its
effects on: the cardiovascular system, use with
steroids, use in industry, use with electrical
stimulation, use in hospitals to help fight disease, and
laboratory studies to determine its effect on
stimulating muscle growth (1,11).

Isometric Strengthening Effect

The result of isometric training on strength

development was first reported to provide a 5% per
week increase (12), but later it was reported as 1.8%
per week in their subsequent publications. There was
some outcry as to the accuracy of the work by
Hettinger and Muller (13,14).

1n 1962, against mounting criticism, Muller

argued that strength increases depended upon an
individual’s current state of conditioning, with those
who were less fit, gaining more rapidly, and those
who were more fit, less rapidly.

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 The following table indicates the resultant
strength increases based on a subject’s initial level of
conditioning.

Table 1
Weekly Gains in Strength Expected from Isometric
Training for Muscles in Different States of
Training*
State of Training Rate of Gain Training Time to
Reach Limiting
(percent of (percent per
Strength (weeks)
limiting week)
strength)
98 2.0 2
95 3.6 -
80 5.6 3-5
85 7.5 -
80 8.6 -
75 10.0 5
<75 12.0 -
*(9)

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 The weekly gains vary from 12% (2.4% per
session) assuming five training sessions per week for
those in a poorer state of health to less than 2% (0.4%
per session) for those close to their limiting strength.

Therefore, according to Muller, even for the

untrained, very few weeks are needed to reach
limiting strength. Muller believed the results depicted
in the Table explained why the results of other
studies may have been at variance with his own:
“Contrary findings are distorted by comparing unequal
states of training.”

They (Hettinger and Muller) later defined the

training state operationally: the state of training of a
muscle is its initial strength (Pi) expressed as a
percentage of its end strength (Pe). Limiting strength
is defined as the final value to which strength can
reach at its maximum potential regardless of how
long training goes on, i.e., training can go on forever,
but it is believed that strength increases have a limit.

So the final value depends on two things: 1) the

strength capacity of the muscle and 2) the efficiency
of the training method adopted. Therefore, if the
training program chosen is of little value, then end
strength would occur rather quickly since the method
cannot serve to increase strength because of its
ineffectiveness.

There is an inherent weakness to assessing

strength in this manner and certainly one way around

99
this is to establish a database of age and sex-related
norms to qualify an individual’s initial fitness status.

Establishing the Components of the Exercise

Prescription

Here, I want to review the exercise prescription

as it serves as the basis for understanding strength-
increasing protocols. I will review this again later due
to its importance.

An exercise prescription has three main

components:

1) Intensity: how hard one exerts himself

2) Frequency: how often one exerts himself

3) Duration: how long one exerts himself

The application of the exercise prescription to

isometrics has received particular attention. The
purpose of the studies was to define if any of the
three conditions was more important in providing the
fastest and most significant improvements for muscle
strengthening.

Tension (Intensity)

The isometric tension (intensity of muscle

contraction effort) required to elicit maximum
100
strengthening effects has been carefully examined,
but limits to these examinations exist due to the
paucity of formal studies. This is even true for the
hectic period during the 1950’s with the rise in
interest about isometrics and, even more recently,
during present times.

One of the exceptions was the original study by

Hettinger and Muller (3) from which the authors
decided that once a threshold tension of about 30% of
maximum tension had been reached few extra
strength gains could accrue by inducing further
increases in tension. Others agreed, but Cotten found
that strength increases with 50%, 75%, and 100% of
maximum tension produced marked yet similar
increases in strength (15) beyond those induced by
tension levels of 30% maximum.

In some studies, workers varied tension,

frequency, and duration by doing more repetitions in
the same session, experimenting with changes in
tension, and varying training sessions per week.
Obviously, the total number of potential variables to
test made it difficult to test all possible conditions.
Muller (9) re-evaluated his own work and found that
the rate of strength improvement did appear to
correspond “roughly to the strength of the training
contractions.”

Coleman also decided that “increases in

strength are related to the intensity of the training
stimulus” (16). Coleman, however, compared strength

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increases for two separate groups: one using
isometrics and the other using isotonic training. He
used similar loads in the two groups and drew his
conclusion from that and never tested them (or other
groups) across a wide range of loads. Coleman did
believe that strength increases were related to the
percent of maximum tension applied to the muscle.

An earlier study also concluded that tension was

the predominate factor in attaining the best increases
in muscle strength because increases of 4.5% per
session resulted from maximum tension whereas two-
thirds maximum tension output provided only 2.8%
increases per session (17).

From these results, it appears that the increase

in strength from isometric training is probably not a
simple one-step function that turns-on when one
reaches a threshold of tension, but is an increasing
function based upon an ever-increasing tension
during contraction.

Frequency

Both session frequency and repetition frequency

have been studied (19). Hettinger calculated that
training on alternate days is 80% as effective as daily
training, and training once per week is 40% as
effective as daily training. He also found that training
once every two weeks produced no gains at all, but
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did maintain strength. More research is needed to
clarify training session frequency.

Disagreements exist about the needed number

of contractions per session and there have been many
trials of different combinations (1). In 1972, Berger
compared the effects of 1, 2, or 3 repetitions of 6 to 8
seconds for each contraction, during 8 weeks of
training. He found no evidence that more contractions
were better than fewer (19).

In summary, it seems that increasing the

number of repetitions helps to increase strength, but
the advantage is not significant. In isometric training,
the duration of contractions likely has an effect, but
no studies exist that manipulated this factor.

Duration

The length of the duration of a contraction is

less well studied than that of repetition frequency.
Hettinger and Muller (3) used 6-second contractions.
Others have tested contraction times ranging from 1
second to as many as 100 seconds. No study,
according to Muller (9), provided any evidence to favor
longer contractions over shorter ones. Hettinger
claimed that 1 second contractions had a negligible
value, and that to be effective, a contraction must last
about 10-20% as long as a maximum contraction can
be held.

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 He further observed that a comparison between
1 second and 6 second duration contractions not only
accelerated the increases in strength, but carried them
to a greater height. The shortest duration of
contraction for a threshold stimulus and the optimum
duration for maximum strength increases are
unknown within the database of scientific
publications.

Time to Reach Maximum Tension Development

The production of a maximum tension output in

muscle takes time; it is not instantaneous and
requires between 200-300 milliseconds (ms) to reach
almost maximal tension. Once contraction is initiated,
motor units must be recruited, muscle shortening
must begin, slack must be removed from the muscle
fibers, activation of the structural proteins must occur
(myosin and actin cross-links must fire: these are
proteins that cause muscle shortening and
contraction), and fuel requirements must be met.

Different muscles have different times to peak

tension output, for example, elbow flexor muscles can
carry out the process of full tension development
more quickly (1.6 seconds) than lower limb extensors
(4.4 seconds).

104
 The above cited studies were nearly unanimous
in the conclusion that the most important factor
inducing maximum increases in muscle strength was
a maximal contraction. Muscle contraction times to
peak output would negate the idea that 1-2 second
contractions would be effective since muscles are
unable to reach maximal tension output that quickly.

A question arises: Is the increase in muscle

strength related to both the initiating excitation-
contraction coupling process and the process of
sustaining maximum tension for a period of time? In a
study to address this question, researchers trained the
elbow flexors of human subjects for three weeks. The
observed strength increases were associated with no
change in muscle activation rates (20).

When selecting the duration of contraction,

consideration to the differing rates of a muscle’s
105
ability to develop maximal tension output must be
part of the planning process.
Joint Angle

It has been argued that isometric exercise to

increase strength, which is most often conducted at
one fixed joint angle, has little transferability to other
muscle/joint angulations. The training position for
isometric contractions is defined by the joint angle
across which the muscle contracts.

The angle of the joint sets muscle architecture

and length. Depending on the joint angle, there will
be changes in mechanical advantages, modifications
of neural input, and alterations in opposing muscles
by way of synergistic actions. The force that the elbow
flexor muscle can generate varies throughout its
range of motion (as it does for any individual muscle)
so, as such, joint angle is associated with varying
levels of force production.

The forces produced at joint angles between 50

degrees and 140 degrees for elbow flexors have been
predicted from the force recorded at one angle with
high accuracy (21). Predictions for the elbow
extensors were less accurate.

Garg and Chaffin demonstrated this same

predictability on a broader scale (22). By using
multiple mathematical equations in a computer
model, they predicted the force output of the hand in
18 widely differing positions. Comparing the

106
predicted forces with the actual measured forces, they
recorded validity coefficients ranging from a very high
r=0.93 to r= 0.97, a consistency which suggests that
training effects should be consistently transferred
from one to other joint positions.

There were opponents. Some studies (9)

indicated joint angle specificity effects. Lindh saw the
same specificity when training knee extensors. He
concluded that the joint-angle dependent effects were
of neuromuscular origin and as a result argued that
effective isometric training should be conducted at
multiple joint angles (23).

This training methodology had already been

adopted, but it produced no significant general
increase in strength (24). Others found the same
result. Hetherington employed a measuring procedure
designed to remove the effects of differing lever
positions as a result of varying joint angulations so he
could measure pure tension (25).

Further research to address the issue of joint-

angle-specific-training-adaptation continued until the
question was resolved with the use of sophisticated
methods. Rosentswieg measured muscle action
potentials from elbow flexors and found the potentials
to be constant and concluded that: “differences in
strength at divergent angles are a function of the lever
and not of muscle activity” (26).

107
 In 1967, Whitley found that increases in muscle
strength occurring at one fixed angle of training did
transfer to all joint angles (27). He convincingly
showed that strength gained at one joint angle is
usually available for the provision of muscle power at
other un-trained joint angles and finally put the issue
to rest.
Modern Research into Isometrics

The early research concerned itself with issues

related to defining the elements of the exercise
prescription and how each contributed to the training
stimulus. Striking to this research was the failure of
researchers to set up split testing models to evaluate
the outcomes of strength increases from varying
protocols. Certainly some tests were made, but the
number pales in comparison to the enormous number
of programs that could be studied.

What did become clear was that tension

development to maximum levels was the primary
factor in strength increases. The future research path
that followed after this early period was to test
protocols characterizing the differences between
isometrics, isokinetics, and isotonics.

Invariably, a single protocol was used within

each modality. There was no split testing of specific
programs. For the most part, the evolution of testing
programs, A versus B for example to see which is
better, was relegated to the pages of muscle
magazines as “gym experts” extolled the virtues of a

108
particular style of training. There were none more
vociferous than Arthur Jones, the developer of the
Nautilus equipment.

Included with the Nautilus equipment was a

specific style of training deemed “one-set-to-failure.”
Jones was also a proponent of negative and isometric
training and developed specific pieces of equipment
so one could train in such a manner. Some
researchers published papers on the effects of Jones’s
training methods and arguments and discussions
were a common occurrence in the muscle-head
periodicals of the day.

In the modern era, the sophistication of

explorative technology has given way to an
investigation of the physiological responses to
isometric training rather than more research into the
superiority of one method of training versus another,
a split test if you will.

For example, a recent 2007 article characterizes

changes in the activation of muscle and determined if
there were “linked” neural adaptations in the motor
pathway following isometric training. The training
protocol was 12 sessions of isometric training of the
foot plantar flexor muscle over a four-week period
(28).

To estimate spinal changes, the researchers

used the Hoffman reflex to detect evoked spinal reflex
responses. They tested the subjects at 50%, 75%, and

109
100% of their maximal voluntary contraction strength
(MVC). MVC increased by 20.0% in these young
healthy subjects during 4 weeks.

The rate of increase was, therefore, 5% per

week, a figure comparable to the results found in
early research, although more than expected for those
in a healthy state. An explanation for this is that few
people train their plantar flexors so that particular
muscle may have been relatively deconditioned.
Interestingly, in contrast to work already cited, this
study showed an increase in efferent neural drive
(nervous system) of 57.3%.

The results suggest that increases in MVC

observed in the first few days of isometric training can
be accounted for by an increase in the rate of
activation of muscle at the onset of contraction. These
increases in muscle activation may arise from
increased volitional drive from supraspinal centers.

In a recent study, researchers looked more
extensively into the components of the contractile
muscle-tendon complex for insights into the
contribution of each component to contractile force:
tendon versus muscle (29).

The purpose of the study was to investigate the

relationship between the mechanical properties of the
connective tissue and muscle performance in maximal
isometric actions. Sixteen trained men consented to
participate. Maximal isometric strength was

110
determined. The mechanical properties of the muscle,
vastus lateralis (outside of the thigh), were determined
by ultrasonography.

The rate of torque development was positively

related to the mechanical properties of the tendon
structures and showed that tendon mechanical
properties might account for up to 30% of the
variation in the development of torque. Power, force,
and velocity measurements were correlated to tendon
stiffness. The results of this study demonstrate that
the stiffness of the tendon structures affects the
development of force transmission from the
contractile machinery to the movement of bone.
It is obvious from the above that the
sophistication of the analytical methodologies and the
advances in technological assessments allow a
significantly more refined understanding of the effects
of training programs.

That statement, however, shows only the

evolution in the understanding of the physiological,
biochemical, and molecular basis of the effects of
isometric training regimens. We realize no further
advances in the identification of optimal procedures
for increasing muscle strength.

The intention of physiologists is not to identify

optimal training procedures, but to identify changes
in tissue structure and function. Optimization of
procedures is of little interest to the academic
scientist.

111
 In another recent study of isometric training,
researchers from York University, Toronto, Canada,
studied the changes in maximal voluntary (MVC) force.
They evaluated the percentage maximal activation,
and maximal surface EMG (electromyography, a
measure of muscle fiber activation), and M-wave
characteristics of the EMG.

They also acknowledged that few studies have

measured motor unit firing patterns during training.
The purpose of this study was to measure average
single motor unit firing rates during almost maximal
and submaximal (50 and 75%) of MVC.

The training protocol was three sessions per

week for three weeks, providing a total of nine
training sessions. Subjects were males, average age
25, and were untrained. Each participant warmed up
and then the training was 3-5 attempts to reach MVC,
each with superimposed twitches (reach MVC, back
off, and go for it again) with 90 seconds rest in
between. Then the training protocol followed which
consisted of 10 MVCs with 3 minutes rest between
sets. Each MVC was held for 3 seconds with 3 second
rest intervals in between.

For the training group, the absolute MVC in the

knee extensor muscles increased significantly after
only four of the nine sessions and the end value
increase was 35%, equal to an increase in strength of
3.88% per session after just nine training days. Single

112
motor unit firing rates were higher at 75% versus 50%
and at 100% versus 75%.

They concluded that the adaptive response in

the neuromuscular system to resistance overload is
rapid since increased muscular strength was
significantly increased after just four sessions. They
highlighted the fact that this rate of increase is not
uncommon, citing work showing a 15-18% increase in
MVC during the first four weeks of training (30,31)
and up to 36% by 8 weeks (99).

One of the purposes of this study was to define

both the neural contribution and the hypertrophic
(muscle size) contribution to increased muscular
strength. The desired outcome, to attribute
percentage contributions for each, was not realized.

They did conclude, however, that a combination

of mechanisms including increased protein synthesis,
changes in muscle activation characteristics, changes
in muscle agonist versus antagonist activity (extensor
muscle increased activity as a result of neural
inhibition of its opposing flexor muscle, example leg
extension versus leg curl), may all contribute to the
increase in maximal muscle force output during the
first few weeks of resistance training.

In an earlier study by Cafarelli, the purpose was

to define more clearly whether increases in strength
arose because of contributions from neural
adaptations and/or muscle hypertrophy (33). An

113
experimental group of fifteen female university
students trained knee extensor muscles in one leg
using isometric exercise.

Training consisted of 30 MVC per day, 3 times

per week, for 8 weeks. After 8 weeks of training, MVC
increased by 28% and muscle cross sectional area
increased by 14.6%, but the amplitude of the
electromyogram was unchanged.

The conclusion drawn by the researchers was

that there was no evidence of a strength increase that
was unrelated to an increase in muscle size. In other
words, all of the increase in strength came as a result
of increases in the growth of contractile proteins:
because of muscle hypertrophy.

Both the historical and modern-day literature is

clear: isometric resistance exercise leads to rapid and
dramatic increases in muscle strength. These
increases slow with time and they are relatively high
and rapid the more deconditioned a subject is at the
beginning of training. According to early research,
most of the muscle strength gains occur within five
weeks of beginning training, but the hallmark of
strength increase studies is that they are constrained
by time limits and there are no studies available that
extend beyond 8-12 weeks.

The most effective isometric program has not

been defined by scientific investigation. It is clear
that a maximal contraction, held for brief seconds, is

114
the most effective stimulus for inducing strength
increases, and, most likely, hypertrophy. Optimal
duration and frequencies have not been clarified.

Another important area of incomplete research

is recovery. Of course, this issue relates to the
exercise prescription. The overarching issue, however,
remains the fact that there has never been a
systematic test of the many possible isometric
combinations of exercise protocols that are possible
over the wide range of the components of the exercise
prescription and, in and for, many varied human
population types.

As I have shown, research is far more interested

in the physiological, biochemical, and molecular
changes that occur as a result of training. The
development of training optimization programs and
protocols has always been the subject of public
conjecture. Not to say that those in the public are
unable to make a significant contribution. As a
society, we lie at the altar of the scientist and medical
man as if they, and only they, can divine the
mysterious answers that mere mortals are not capable
of divining.
Aging and Muscle

The muscle wasting and weakness that occurs

with aging have been of interest since early Greek and
Roman history. Muscle loss and decay, at the opposite
pole of our interest in muscle strength, both have a
long history of human interest. The Greeks despised

115
aging as it represented a deterioration of youthful
vigor. If the problem of physical frailty in aging is to
be effectively slowed, we must have a full
understanding of the causes and mechanisms
underlying muscle weakness (34).

Sarcopenia, the loss of muscle mass with aging,

is the main cause of muscle weakness in old age. This
process begins around the 6th decade and by the 8th
decade muscle mass attains a value that is 40% less
than the whole body muscle level that one possessed
in his 2nd decade (35).

The causes of sarcopenia are multi-faceted, but

are mainly driven by neuropathic changes leading to
motoneuron death (36) along with cell death
(apoptosis). During the aging process, the number of
muscle fibers decreases, as well as fiber size arising
from changes in hormonal growth factors (37), and a
decrease in the level of physical activity (38).
Malnutrition in aging is quite common due to a
progressive loss of appetite and the consequent
reduction in food intake.

The loss of muscle size occurs along with the

inability to generate force based on a muscle’s cross-
sectional area and this is referred to as a decrease in
muscle quality (39). These factors affect both the
neuromuscular system and the tendon connective
tissue system.

116
 Among the muscular changes is the inability to
generate as much force output as one could perform
when younger. There is a decrease in the myosin:actin
cross-bridge connections which are responsible for
creating contractile force. Further, there is less neural
drive (40). There are also changes in the shape of the
muscular architecture that contribute to the loss of
force that account for about 50% of the loss in muscle
function in the elderly.

Neuromuscular Alterations with Training in the

Aged

Since the early 1990’s resistance training has

been shown to slow and even reverse the detrimental
effects of aging (41,42,43,44). What is most
significant about this body of work is that it shows the
adaptability of human physiology and implies that the
losses attributed to the aging process are not fixed
and unalterable.

Skeletal muscle has the capacity to regenerate

when exposed to an appropriate stimulus. With the
use of specialized technology such as computerized
tomography, ultrasound, and magnetic resonance
imaging, muscle cross sectional area under the
influence of resistance training has been shown to
increase significantly from resistance training.

Increases in muscle cross-sectional area after

3-month’s training, range from 5-17%, a figure

117
comparable to the changes seen in young adults
during similar periods of training (46). In order to
assess the true maximum force-producing capability
in response to training programs, isometric strength
testing may be the most appropriate choice (34).

Changes in tendon stiffness also accompany

changes in muscle size and the force-generating
capability of trained elderly muscle (47). The
implications of these findings is that functional
activities requiring a rapid generation of joint torque
force may benefit, such as an attempt to recover from
a slip or fall.

In contrast, the work demonstrating that neural

factors are little involved in strength increases in the
young, studies with the elderly indicate that maximal
muscle activation (neural factors) played a dominant
role in the strength increases they experienced (49).

Their data suggest that the effect of muscle

training in the old may rest entirely on neural factors,
presumably acting on various levels of the nervous
system, which act to increase muscle activation
(neural) in the absence of significant hypertrophy
(muscle growth). Of course, as we have seen, above,
hypertrophy does occur. And, as we have also seen,
increases in neural input will be a factor since
sarcopenia is characterized by diminished neuronal
stimulation of the contractile proteins.

118
 This is an interesting observation in comparing
muscle adaptations in old versus young and brings
into play the long-standing question of the percent
participation of neural versus hypertrophic changes in
muscle in response to training. In the preceding
discussion of sarcopenia, I outlined the predominate
characteristic of sarcopenia that is motoneuron loss, a
neural aspect of muscle function decline.

Of course, there is also a loss of muscle fiber

size and muscle fiber contractility function. Since fiber
function is quite dependent on neural input, it is clear
that neural activation is an important component of
the maintenance of muscle size and its contractile
properties.

Several studies, that used conventional

resistance training in the elderly, have shown
significant increases in muscle strength in 8-12
weeks: 107.4% (49), 113.0% (42), and 174.0% (45).

The only conclusion that can be drawn from the

above studies is that increased muscle strength in the
elderly occurs as a result of the combined
improvements in both activation (neural) and
hypertrophy. These two mechanisms, acting in
tandem, demonstrate the extraordinary potential for
rehabilitation of the loss of muscle strength and
function in the elderly and the associated potential to
prevent falls, improve the quality of life, and maintain
independent activities of daily living (ADL).

119
Impulse Training by Performance Health
Systems

A very interesting recent development in the

science of exercise training was the creation of the
bioDensity System of training. Founders of
Performance Health Systems, Paul Jaquish and John
Jaquish, have gone back in time to the early days of
isometric training and tied the understanding of its
extraordinary effectiveness to the technology of our
current times. They have produced a device and
system of training that will revolutionize exercise
science as we know it.

Neither of these men are scientists in the strict-

sense of that definition, toiling away in some
laboratory in an ivy-covered university for the sake of
scientific discovery. In contrast, here are two
innovative and brilliant men trying to develop
something for the health of humanity. Their passion
for strength training and its impact on human health
led to the development of the machine and system of
training.

In doing so, they rewrote the science of muscle

strength as pioneers in cutting-edge technology. Not
since the days of the introduction of the Nautilus
machines and system of training by Arthur Jones in

120
1970 have we seen such a dramatic improvement in
exercise training science.
What is uniquely different between bioDensity
and Nautilus is that Performance Health Systems fully
realized the power of isometric training and produced
a unique device to tap its potential. Nautilus relied
upon conventional training ideas using isotonic
resistance training as its recommended format.
Nautilus sniffed around the edges of isometrics with
some of its machines, but never really embraced
isometrics as the king of training methods.

As I discussed earlier, there are many

limitations to the science underlying isometrics. In my
view, the only solid piece to what has been uncovered
about isometrics is that intensity (tension
development) is the most important factor for
realizing maximal increases in muscle strength. Much
of the other areas of interest in identifying the
combinations of the exercise prescription (intensity,
duration, and frequency) are largely unknown.

121
 I identified the reasons for this: scientists are
much more interested in identifying the physiological,
biochemical, and molecular changes that occur from
following an exercise training program. In general, the
identification of optimal training programs is left to
the laity and those involved in training that may, or
may not, possess a PhD and have employment in a
university.

This does not imply that no one other than a

PhD can divine elegant truths and realizations.
Thomas Edison did not have a PhD, but was a
magnificent entrepreneur and this is often where
great ideas arise. Bill Gates never finished Harvard,
but his work revolutionized the world.

So, it is also the same way with Performance

Health Systems and bioDensity training, and when it
spreads across the nation and world, the impact upon
people’s health will be revolutionary as well.

We all know that the decay in physical fitness is

an epidemic. We all know that people are unwilling to
devote time to maintaining their fitness. The “disuse
syndrome” is now well-known as one of key features
of the aging process that leads to falls and loss of
independence. Loss of muscle strength is one of the
main predictors of falling.

How can we help the frail and weak maintain

their quality of life? The only way is to improve their
strength and all other aspects of physical function.

122
The elderly are so concerned about their financial
strength, but pay scant attention to their physical
strength. The bioDensity system can dramatically and
quickly change muscle strength.

So, what did Performance Health Systems do? It

developed a device that revolutionizes muscle
training. By using modern-day load cells that precisely
and accurately measure tension output, Performance
Health Systems was able to collect and develop a
database from more than 35,000 workouts since
2005. With this enormous amount of analyzable
information, Performance Health Systems filled in the
blanks leftover from the hey-day of scientific
investigation into isometric exercise. Performance
Health Systems could now define all the elements of
the exercise prescription and from that develop,
finally, the optimal training program for the
development of human strength.

Let’s review the following table and then apply

the results to a comparison between early isometric
research and the accomplishments of Performance
Health Systems.

Strength Gains During Three Years of bioDensity

Research
Average Age Strength Gain (%)
Active 2005 52 123
Clients
Active 2006 46 63
Clients
123
Active 2007 51 42
Clients

As you may recall from my earlier discussions,

researchers found that strength increases using
isometrics were rapid and also depended on the
existing conditioning level of the subject. Muller (9)
argued that most subjects reached maximal strength
in about five weeks. I argued, in contrast, that we
could not know that because no one ever conducted
studies over longer periods of time, until now.

Look at the amazing contribution of

Performance Health Systems research. In 2005,
strength increased by 42% representing an increase of
0.8% per week. I do not have the weekly breakdown
on all clients since this is proprietary data, but
previous research would support a much higher
weekly increase early with slowing as time went on
(see chart below for more analysis). But, strikingly,
strength never reached a maximum and it just
continued to increase during the year(s).

Now, look at 2005 clients who continued to

train and realized increased strength levels to 123% of
starting strength! There was no leveling off. What an
incredible contribution to an understanding of the
development of human strength.

This data is an extension of the research during

the early days and clearly resolves many unanswered
questions. John Jaquish told me (personal

124
communication) he based his beginning work on the
initial studies of Hettinger and Muller (3) and that he
tried many variations in the training regimen.

Because he accurately measured every training

session’s tension output and collected and analyzed
the data, he was able to begin to answer questions
related to frequency and duration. He could easily see
the tension output in real time while the trainee
exercised.

125
 From this he could deduce optimal contraction
times relative to the fatigue properties of the muscle.
He could also test recovery time and determine the
amount of rest required between training sessions.
The bioDensity system made all this possible.

The chart below shows how one subject’s

strength improved during five months of continuous
training during which time his whole body strength
increased by 35% equaling 7% per month and 1.75%
per week.

126
 In the following slide, Performance Health
Systems demonstrates the effect of maximal
contraction development during isometric training
and its effect on muscular adaptation in comparison
to conventional training and individuals living freely
and doing no exercise.

127
 Intensity is clearly the most important factor in
the development of maximal strength and endurance
(50,51,52,53,54). What is less well understood is the
time course of metabolic adaptations (51,525556).
The interest of scientific investigation is often about
changes in cellular enzymes or other changes at the
cellular level and, most often, changes at the whole
body level are of little interest (53).

What is unique about Performance Health

Systems research is that it was able to arrive at whole
body reactions to exercise to define, for the first time
ever, optimal muscle strengthening protocols and the
most viable form of training for increasing muscle
strength.

In doing so, Performance Health Systems arrived

at answers for the exercise prescription. For example,
by varying the work:rest ratios, Performance Health
Systems could define the length of time required for
full muscle recovery. If subjects trained again before
full muscle adaptation occurred, Performance Health
Systems could easily see that the subject was unable
to generate maximum tension because full recovery
had not actually taken place.

Performance Health Systems extended the work

of the early pioneers by developing the perfect tool to
gather and assess the results of 35,000 exercise
sessions. We now possess the optimal training tool
and the optimal program to maximize human
muscular strength. The functional outcome is optimal

128
benefits to human health including muscle strength
and power that lead to improvements in the activities
of daily living and reduce the risks of falling and injury
in the elderly. BioDensity training is truly a great
contribution to exercise science and to humanity.

Isometric References

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2. Hellebrandt FA. Recent advances in methods of

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3. Hettinger T, Muller EA. [Muscle capacity and

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4. McCloy CH. Something new has been added.

The Journal of the Association for Physical and
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5. Muller EA. Training muscle strength.

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6. Hunsicker PGG. Studies in human strength. Res

Q 1957;28:109-22.

7. Hettinger T, Muller EA. Progress of increase in

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10. Clarke DH. Adaptations in strength and

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11. Komi PV, Viitasalo JT, Rauramaa R, Vihko V.

Effect of isometric strength training of
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12. Hettinger T, Muller EA. [Muscle capacity and

muscle training.] Arbeitsphysiologie
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13. Bonde-Petersen F. Muscle training by static,

concentric, and eccentric contractions. Acta
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14. Royce J. Re-evaluation of isometric methods

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15. Cotten D. Relationship of the duration of

sustained voluntary isometric contractions to
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 16. Coleman AE. Comparison of weekly strength
changes following isometric and isotonic
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1972;12:26-9.

17. Walters CE, Steward RC, LeClaire JF. Effect of

short bouts of isometric and isotonic
contractions on muscular strength and
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18. Hettinger T. Physiology of Strength. Springfield,

IL: Charles C. Thomas, 1961.

19. Berger RA. Effect of varied sets of static training

on dynamic strength. Am Correct Ther J
1972;26:52-4.

20. Sukop J, Nelson RC. Effects of isometrical

training on the force time characteristics of
muscle contractions. In: R.C. Nelson & C.A.
Morehouse, ed. International Series on Sport
Sciences, Biomechanics IV(1). Baltimore:
University Park Press 1974.

21. Singh M, Karpovich PV. Isotonic and isometric

forces of forearm flexors and extensors. J Appl
Physiol 1966;21:1435-7.

22. Garg A, Chaffin DB. A biomedical computerized

simulation of human strength. AIIE Transactions
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 23. Lindh M. Increase of muscle strength from
isometric quadriceps exercises at different knee
angles. Scand J Rehabil Med 1979;11:33-6.

24. McKethan JF, Mayhew JL. Effects of isometrics,

isotonics, and combined isometrics-isotonics
on quadriceps strength and vertical jump. J
Sports Med Phys Fitness 1974;14:224-9.

25. Hetherington MR. Effect of isometric training on

the elbow flexion force torque of grade five
boys. Res Q 1976;47:41-7.

26. Rosentswieg J, Hinson MM. Comparison of

isometric, isotonic and isokinetic exercises by
electromyography. Arch Phys Med Rehabil
1972;53:249-52.

27. Whitley JD. The influence of static and dynamic

training on angular strength performance.
Ergonomics 1967;10:305-10.

28. Del Balso C., Cafarelli E. Adaptations in the

activation of human skeletal muscle induced by
short-term isometric resistance training. J Appl
Physiol 2007;103:402-11.

29. Bojsen-Moller J, Magnusson SP, Rasmussen LR,

Kjaer M, Aagaard P. Muscle performance during
maximal isometric and dynamic contractions is
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 30. Cannon RJ, Cafarelli E. Neuromuscular
adaptations to training. J Appl Physiol
1987;63:2396-402.

31. Griffen L, Carafelli E. Neural excitability

following resistance training studied with
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32. Moritani T, deVries HA. Neural factors versus

hypertrophy in the time course of muscle
strength gain. Am J Phys Med 1979;58:115-30.

33. Garfinkel S, Cafarelli E. Relative changes in

maximal force, EMG, and muscle cross-
sectional area after isometric training. Med Sci
Sports Exerc 1992;24:1220-7.

34. Narici MV, Maganaris CN. Adaptability of elderly

human muscles and tendons to increased
loading. J Anat 2006;208:433-43.

35. Abate M, Di IA, Di RD, Paganelli R, Saggini R,

Abate G. Frailty in the elderly: the physical
dimension. Eura Medicophys 2007;43:407-15.

36. Degens H. Age-related skeletal muscle

dysfunction: causes and mechanisms. J
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37. Doherty TJ. Invited review: Aging and

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 38. Hollmann W, Struder HK, Tagarakis CV, King G.
Physical activity and the elderly. Eur J Cardiovasc
Prev Rehabil 2007;14:730-9.

39. Ryall JG, Schertzer JD, Lynch GS. Cellular and

molecular mechanisms underlying age-related
skeletal muscle wasting and weakness.
Biogerontology 2008;9:213-28.

40. Lynch GS, Ryall JG. Role of beta-adrenoceptor

signaling in skeletal muscle: implications for
muscle wasting and disease. Physiol Rev
2008;88:729-67.

41. Bassey EJ, Fiatarone MA, O'Neill EF, Kelly M,

Evans WJ, Lipsitz LA. Leg extensor power and
functional performance in very old men and
women. Clin Sci (Lond) 1992;82:321-7.

42. Fiatarone MA, O'Neill EF, Ryan ND et al. Exercise

training and nutritional supplementation for
physical frailty in very elderly people. N Engl J
Med 1994;330:1769-75.

43. Fiatarone MA, Evans WJ. The etiology and

reversibility of muscle dysfunction in the aged. J
Gerontol 1993;48 Spec No:77-83.

44. Fiatarone MA, O'Neill EF, Doyle N et al. The

Boston FICSIT study: the effects of resistance
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physical frailty in the oldest old. J Am Geriatr
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 45. Fiatarone MA, Marks EC, Ryan ND, Meredith CN,
Lipsitz LA, Evans WJ. High-intensity strength
training in nonagenarians. Effects on skeletal
muscle. JAMA 1990;263:3029-34.

46. Brown AB, McCartney N, Sale DG. Positive

adaptations to weight-lifting training in the
elderly. J Appl Physiol 1990;69:1725-33.

47. Reeves ND, Maganaris CN, Narici MV. Effect of

strength training on human patella tendon
mechanical properties of older individuals. J
Physiol 2003;548:971-81.

48. Moritani T, deVries HA. Potential for gross

muscle hypertrophy in older men. J Gerontol
1980;35:672-82.

49. Frontera WR, Meredith CN, O'Reilly KP, Knuttgen

HG, Evans WJ. Strength conditioning in older
men: skeletal muscle hypertrophy and improved
function. J Appl Physiol 1988;64:1038-44.

50. Capaccio JA, Kurowski TT, Czerwinski SM,

Chatterton RT, Jr., Hickson RC. Testosterone
fails to prevent skeletal muscle atrophy from
glucocorticoids. J Appl Physiol 1987;63:328-34.

51. Hickson RC, Heusner WW, Van Huss WD.

Skeletal muscle enzyme alterations after sprint
and endurance training. J Appl Physiol
1976;40:868-71.

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 52. Hickson RC, Bomze HA, Holloszy JO. Linear
increase in aerobic power induced by a
strenuous program of endurance exercise. J
Appl Physiol 1977;42:372-6.

53. Tsuzuku S, Shimokata H, Ikegami Y, Yabe K,

Wasnich RD. Effects of high versus low-intensity
resistance training on bone mineral density in
young males. Calcif Tissue Int 2001;68:342-7.

54. Tsuzuku S, Ikegami Y, Yabe K. Effects of high-

intensity resistance training on bone mineral
density in young male powerlifters. Calcif Tissue
Int 1998;63:283-6.

55. Hickson RC, Foster C, Pollock ML, Galassi TM,

Rich S. Reduced training intensities and loss of
aerobic power, endurance, and cardiac growth. J
Appl Physiol 1985;58:492-9.

56. Hickson RC, Hagberg JM, Ehsani AA, Holloszy

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136
Isometrics Only Training
I was thrilled with the results I was getting with
isometrics: four exercises each performed for five
seconds once every 7-10 days.

Of course, after writing the research paper I

understood why the results were so fantastic.

After about 9 months I observed that I was

losing something in my muscular self despite the
arguments that isometrics would provide all the
benefits I wanted.

Many muscles were growing but some muscles

were actually downsizing. Since you now know what I
know about muscle architecture, I theorized that some
aspects of muscle function across the spectrum of
muscle fiber were no longer stimulated.

The maximum tension realization was valid but

what was now missing was training that stimulated
other aspects of muscle function, for example, doing
multiple repetitions using less resistance that would
hit fibers in a whole different way.

How Many Exercises for Each Muscle

The most common way to train is to pick an
exercise and repeat multiple sets. But experience had
taught me that a more effective method was to do one
set of one exercise and then pick another exercise
and do one set of that. You could, say, do one set
each of four different exercises.
137
 I then ran into a short book written by one of
the great trainers of all time: Vince Gironda. I wasn’t
aware of the book he wrote in 1982 called A Muscle
has Four Sides in which he described the exact
procedure that I just wrote about.

Evolution of a New System of Muscle Building

So, it was now clear that the optimization to
attain maximal muscle building consisted of a
thorough understanding of muscle fiber architecture
and performance.

It was not long ago when I was first introduced

to the idea of using resistance tubing to do strength
training. These tools are primarily used in the
development of what is called functional fitness: the
improvement of your fitness in doing activities of
life.
This was really of no interest to me as my
training program was purely involved with getting
stronger and getting bigger. Many of the functional
fitness programs have little concern for increasing
muscle size which has the possibility of interfering
with functional performance.
The next step was to determine how I could
perform isometric exercise without going to the gym.
Of course, the other issue is that one can develop
phenomenal force outputs. Because of this the
weights that one might have to use would be very
heavy and would probably require the use of 2 or
more training assistants.

138
139
Plastic Tubing

In the early years of using an isometric

program, the trainee needed a large amount of
equipment including benches, weight racks, barbells
and dumbbells, and additional equipment to perform
the program.

After World War II several companies began to

develop multi-station gym equipment. After about
1970, the production of fitness equipment exploded.
These machines, however, were primarily gym grade.
Many companies focused on the production of
equipment for the home. The equipment for home use
required a reasonable amount of space and the cost of
outfitting the home-gym was often considerable.

Some of the earliest home equipment used

springs attached to handles for muscle building. Only
during the last two to three decades have we had the
availability of using plastic material for our
conditioning needs. Several companies now
manufacture a complete line of resistance bands. The
trainee can attach the plastic tubes to a wide variety of
parts that make them useful for a wide variety of
exercise activities.

The company that I recommend is Lifeline USA

International. They manufacture a wide assortment of
products that will meet the needs for a wide
assortment of individuals. My training program works
perfectly when using Lifeline’s equipment for a

140
serious athlete all the way up to improving
conditioning in a deconditioned senior.
The plastic tube is a serious and effective tool
to provide resistance training. The plastic tube when
stretched provides an ever-increasing amount of
resistance. The individual tubes are color-coded and
increase in resistance in 10-pound jumps, starting
with 10 pounds and rising to 100 pounds. The user
simply inserts one end of the tube into various
attachments such as handles. The design of the
handles is such that one handle can hold up to three
tubes.

The quality of the Lifeline tube is of the highest

order. Lifeline uses a continuous dipping process in
which they repeatedly dip a flexible rod in rubber
latex, followed by curing. Many tubing companies use
an extraction process where they extrude the rubber.
This process leads to an inferior product that is more
easily broken during training.

The training programs that follow use several of

the Lifeline products. The use of just one of Lifeline’s
products, the Train Station, provides a vast array of
exercises for both strength building and
cardiorespiratory conditioning. The Train Station
requires the use of a door upon which the user places
a strap and a movable clip that holds the resistance
tubes.

The clip moves easily up and down the strap

providing multiple exercise angles that provides the

141
user with pulling down motions, pulling upward
motions, and horizontal type exercises. Two handles
come with the unit and an optional plastic bar is
available.
In contrast to the barbell or to any machine that
holds weight plates, making changes or adjustments
in the resistance you want to use is quick, easy, and
safe. You can remove the tube very easily from its
holding place in the handle and replace it with a tube
offering more resistance or less resistance.

During your actual training session, there are

multiple ways to alter the resistance. The tubes
provide their maximum resistance when they reach
two times their starting length. Adjusting the position
of your body in relation to how close you stand to the
door is quick and easy way for changing resistance. As
you move away from the door, you stretch the tube
which increases resistance.

If, for example, you are facing away from the

door and performing a pushing exercise such as the
bench press, you decrease resistance by moving
closer to the door. This functions to decrease
resistance by decreasing the stretch in the tube.
Moving your body further from the door increases
resistance by increasing the stretch in the tube.

Another way to decrease resistance is to drop

one handle and its attached tube and grab the
remaining handle with both hands.

142
 This system provides an infinite number of
resistances to meet the training goals for any
individual.

The Train Station also comes with a cardio belt

that quickly attaches to the handles. You place the
cardio belt around your waist and adjust the clip on
the strap to provide any angle that you desire. Using
this attachment provides many types of resistance
exercises that you can perform to meet your cardio
needs. In the case of performing cardio, you will use
less resistance than for strength training. Simply use
one of the lower resistance tubes, attach it to the
handle, and attach the handle to the cardio belt.

Face away from the door, locate yourself so you

can feel the resistance pulling on you and walk or jog
in place. There are an unlimited number of positions
so you can perform different exercises. You could turn
at a right angle to the door and perform resisted
lateral movements.

A great exercise for your legs and hips is a

lunge. In this exercise, you take a long step with one
leg while bending your knee. If you face away from
the door, the tube will actually pull you back,
providing assistance in performing the exercise. This
may be helpful for people in a rehabilitation program.

I’m recommending the use of several Lifeline

products:

143
 • Train Station with optional plastic bar
• TNT tubes
• PowRWalker
• Push up Bar
I also recommend the use of one of the aerobic
steps readily found in any sporting goods store.
Stepping is a great cardio tool.
The Train Station weighs 1½ pounds and travels
easily for use on any door in any location. You can
place the clip anywhere on the strap which allows the
performance of many exercises that would be
impossible without the availability of this equipment.
Free weight equipment can’t even come close to the
versatility, portability, and affordability of tube
training.

As stated, the goal of this exercise book is to

help people attain a healthy life through exercise. I
want to provide tailored, doable programs that make
sense for the specific needs of any individual. This
book is not about getting abs or helping individuals
become a newer, sexier self in four weeks. We believe
that those programs and advice are unrealistic and
not doable for the majority of individuals.

Combining Isometrics and Multiple Repetition/

Exercise

The Lifeline products seemed like an ideal way

to do both isometrics and multiple repetition exercise.
144
I first tested this with several of the Lifeline products
including the TNT cable and the push-up piece of
equipment.

The TNT cable holds three bands. One places a

holder over the bands and positions it anywhere on a
door making sure that the door opens away from you.
Close the door on to the door strap and test to make
sure it is secure. I bought a nice adjustable incline
bench to do the different exercises.
The first session was pretty interesting because
I could position the TNT cable and bench in such a
manner where I could create an isometric position in
that I was unable to stretch the cable any further.

I now had the isometric portion of my exercise

session worked out. From there I chose a number of
exercises for different muscle groups such as my
chest, back, shoulders, legs, and arms. I could use the
same exact pieces of equipment as I did for my
isometrics by simply removing the bands thereby
reducing the resistance.

I now had a full-fledged program to stimulate

muscle growth throughout the full spectrum of
muscle fiber composition.

Rest and Recovery

Whenever you perform maximal isometric

contractions the rest period has to be significantly

145
longer than those rest sessions used in conventional
multiple repetition exercises. Mostly, I've been using a
7-10 day rest model from isometric session to
isometric session.

For the multiple repetition exercise session I've

been doing two to three of those per week. I call
multiple repetition exercise a "fatigue" model. One
never reaches close to maximum tension output and
as fatigue sets in the tension created is far less than
maximal. This type of training, however, hits other
aspects of muscle function leading to a much broader
development of muscle.

The use of multiple exercises, one set of each,

using about 8-12 repetitions is another important
feature of this exercise regimen.

Elastic Resistance vs. Free Weights

The Similarities
Elastic resistance exercise, such as the use of
elastic tubing equipment, has been used for almost a
century. It originally was used as a fitness technique,
but eventually progressed to be used as a
rehabilitation device. Today it is used in both fitness
and rehabilitation facilities.
Both elastic resistance and free-weight
resistance (such as barbells and dumbbells) have
several similar properties: a) both provide resistance,

146
b) both allow a free range of motion, c) both allow
variable speed of movement, and d) both allow
progressive resistance. All four of these properties are
critical for the benefits offered by effective resistance-
training programs.
Despite the similarities between elastic
resistance and free-weight resistance, people would
assume, due to the lightweight and “flimsy
appearance of elastic resistance equipment such as
elastic tubing, that free weights are clearly the better
resistance equipment. However, studies have shown
that muscle activity and peak load during elastic-
resistance exercise is similar to free-weight resistance
exercise. This means that when comparing the same
exercise performed with an elastic resistance device
or with free weights, the amount of muscle fibers
activated is similar and the amount of force provided
by the muscle fibers is similar.
Studies on elastic resistance training have also
shown that programs using elastic tubing, elastic
bands and similar devices increase muscle strength
and muscle size and decrease body fat in a similar
manner to free-weight training programs.

The Differences
In addition to the similarities that elastic
resistance shares with free-weight resistance, there
are several benefits that elastic resistance offers that
free-weight resistance does not.

147
 One of the most important benefits of elastic
resistance is that, unlike free weights, it does not rely
on gravity to provide resistance. This increases its
potential for use in more functional movement
patterns that mimic both everyday activities and
sport-specific activities.
Because free weights rely on gravity to provide
resistance, they can only provide resistance in a
vertical plane —the direction of gravity. This means
that if you do an exercise with a free weight in the
horizontal plane, such as moving your left hand (while
holding a dumbbell) from the left side of your body to
the right side of your body, there is no resistance to
that movement. With elastic tubing, on the other
hand, you can have resistance when doing exercises
in a horizontal plane.
This means you can perform exercises such as
twisting your body from side to side, side kicks and
punches, as well as movements that mimic a baseball
swing or basketball pass with elastic resistance.
Performing exercises with resistance in a
horizontal plane better prepares the individual for
performing daily tasks—such as turning his body
while carrying a heavy box—much easier and with less
risk for injury. It also better prepares athletes for
competitive movements that take place in a horizontal
plane, such as swinging a baseball bat, and helps to
prevent sports injuries.
A study published in a 1998 issue of American
Journal of Sports Medicine, reported that collegiate
tennis players who trained using elastic bands
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increased their shoulder strength and the speed of
their tennis serve.
Another study, from Louisiana State University
(New Orleans), discovered that an elastic band training
program strengthened the rotator cuff muscles of
collegiate baseball pitchers better than a program that
used free-weight dumbbells.
Because elastic resistance does not rely on
gravity to provide resistance, it is possible to change
the emphasis placed on muscles during certain
exercises. This is made possible by changing the
direction of pull of the elastic tubing or bands. For
example, research from Brigham Young University
reported that it was possible to change the emphasis
placed on the quadriceps and hamstrings during
squatting or stepping exercises by changing the
direction of pull of the elastic tubing.
The ability to change muscle emphasis is
important for those who want to target specific
muscles either for aesthetic reasons or for
strengthening for sport competition. It is also
important for those with injuries, as shifting the force
more to certain muscles can help protect certain
associated joints.
For example, greater hamstring emphasis
during squatting or stepping exercises helps to
protect certain structures around the knee. This is
difficult to accomplish with free weights because, as
previously stated, they require the direction of force
to be vertical, due to the reliance on gravity for
resistance.
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 Another benefit provided by the fact that elastic
resistance does not rely on gravity is that it provides
continuous tension to the muscles being trained.
When you lift a free weight like a dumbbell in any
direction other than straight up and down, the tension
on the muscle can actually be removed at certain
points in the range of motion.
For example, when doing a biceps curl with a
dumbbell, as you curl the dumbbell up towards the
shoulder, at the very top of the movement the
dumbbell is literally falling towards the shoulder.
This means that the tension on the biceps has
been removed because the dumbbell is no longer
being lifted up against gravity by the biceps. When
doing a biceps curl with elastic resistance, the tension
is present throughout the entire range of motion
because the elastic material provides resistance due to
its own properties.
The fact that elastic resistance equipment does
not rely on gravity also means that the elastic
resistance equipment used can be inexpensive,
lightweight and easily stored and transported despite
its ability to provide strong resistance. On the
contrary, free weights must be heavy and
cumbersome to provide strong resistance. In addition,
free weights tend to be expensive as they are typically
priced by the pound.
Another unique benefit of elastic resistance that
free weight resistance does not offer is linear variable
resistance. What this means is that, as the range of
motion of the exercise increases, the resistance
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provided by the elastic equipment increases. For
example, when doing a biceps curl, as you curl your
hand up toward your shoulder, the resistance of the
elastic tubing increases.
This is due to the physical properties of elastic
material. As its length increases (from being
stretched), it provides more resistance. One of the
benefits of this is that as the range of motion
increases and the resistance increases, the number of
muscle fibers that are being used in the exercising
muscle increase.
The more muscle fibers being used the greater
the adaptations in muscle strength that can be
achieved with the training program.
This benefit is not offered by free-weight
resistance. Another reason linear variable resistance,
as provided by elastic resistance, is beneficial is due
to what is known as the strength curve of muscles.
The linear variable resistance provided by elastic
tubing better mimics the strength curves of most
muscles. A strength curve refers to the way a muscle’s
or muscle group’s strength changes over a range of
motion. Because of their anatomy, most muscles
increase in strength over the range of motion until a
certain point.
Again using the biceps curl as an example, as
you curl the hand toward the shoulder, the muscle
gets stronger up until about the halfway point of the
range of motion. Thus, the biceps muscle is weakest
at the start of the exercise and strongest at the
halfway point of the exercise. When doing a biceps
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curl with a free weight, the individual is limited to how
much resistance he can use by how strong the biceps
are at the beginning of the exercise (its weakest
point).
That means that during the biceps curl, the
muscle is not receiving adequate resistance when the
muscle is in its strongest point in the range of motion.
When performing a curl with elastic tubing, however,
the resistance increases as the range of motion
increases. This means the muscle is receiving greater
resistance at its strongest point in the range of
motion and therefore is receiving more adequate
resistance to better stimulate strength adaptations.
Many individuals using elastic resistance report
that they can feel a difference, such as a stronger burn
in the muscles and greater muscle fatigue, as
compared to when they use free weights. This is due
to the linear variable resistance that the elastic
resistance equipment offers. This allows a greater
number of muscle fibers to be used and taxed
throughout the range of motion.
Anecdotal evidence aside, research studies also
confirm this difference. One study performed at
Truman State University (Kirksville, MO) found that
athletes who included elastic resistance bench press
training in their regimens had a significantly greater
increase in bench press strength and power as
compared to those who only utilized free-weight
resistance training. Another study, performed at the
University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, reported in a 2006
issue of the Journal of Strength and Conditioning
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Research, that when athletes used elastic band
training in addition to free-weight training they had
significantly more leg power than when they only
utilized free-weight training.
A critical benefit of elastic resistance is that it
prevents the user from “cheating” on the exercise
being performed. This is a common practice,
especially for beginners, when using free weights.
Cheating involves the use of momentum to get the
weight moving.
Once the weight has built up momentum, the
muscle fibers do not need to be maximally activated
to continue moving the weight throughout the rest of
the range of motion of the exercise. This is due to the
fact that the physics of momentum have taken over to
move the weight.
The physical properties of elastic resistance
devices do not allow the user to cheat by using
momentum. This is because the resistance from the
elastic equipment comes from the stretching of the
elastic material and not the mass of the elastic
equipment. The only way to continue a movement
while performing an exercise with elastic resistance is
to utilize more muscle fibers in the exercising muscle
to continue stretching the elastic material.

Final Note
The research performed on elastic resistance
suggests that not only does elastic resistance offer
similar benefits to free-weight resistance, but it
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actually has several benefits that outweigh (pun
intended) those of free weights. This means that a
program using elastic tubing resistance can provide
similar benefits to a program that uses free-weight
resistance, such as increased muscle strength,
increase muscle tone and size and decreased body fat.

In addition, a program that uses elastic tubing

resistance can also provide benefits that are not
offered by free-weight resistance programs, such as
more functional strength, better injury prevention,
greater ability to change muscle emphasis during
exercises, greater muscle power development and
easier use.

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Chapter 8
Exercise Program Monitoring
A little used practice in exercise programs
and activities is to check and record what is
happening during the training session. The
intensity, duration, and frequency of training
sessions are related to the amount of physical
changes that occur. Therefore, I recommend that
you keep records of your workouts.

One of the critical points about exercise

training is that you should strive to make continual
progress until you have reached your desired level
of fitness and body composition or your genetic
limit, whichever comes first.

Results can sometimes be much less than

expected because of poor record keeping and
monitoring. Resistance, or weight selection, may
be too little or too much, rest time may be too
short or long, or training periods (the weeks or
months that you follow the same program) may be
too long to get best results.

It just doesn’t make any sense to spend time

and effort and not be rewarded with results. This is
particularly true as training time goes on. Physical
changes are very rapid during the first few months
of a beginner’s exercise program. After that, things
slow down and frustration can grow -- especially if
his goals haven’t been reached.
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 The following are the key features of an
effective, result-producing progressive resistance
exercise program.

1) Overload training. This concept is based on the

idea that a muscle must work at a minimum load
(resistance or weight) for a physical change to
occur. Once the change or adaptation to that
resistance occurs, then no further improvements
will be made with that load or resistance. To
keep making improvement, a higher stress
(resistance) must be used.

2) Specificity of training. This concept means that

changes in muscles are specific to the type of
exercise you do. For example, if you train to run
a marathon, the muscle changes that occur
condition you to run a marathon and not to run
100 yard sprints. Changes are specific to the
type of stimulus applied. Little change occurs in
muscles that aren’t involved in the training
activity. As I’ve discussed this is because there
are different muscle fibers in each muscle, each
designed to do special activities. If you want big
muscles then don’t do marathons because you
don’t get big muscles from running marathons.
Big muscles make no sense to your body for
running marathons.

We use these principles to design an exercise

prescription based on your goals. You can design an
exercise program once you know what you want to

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accomplish, whether it’s big muscles or loss of body
fat, based on the knowledge of how muscles work.

Unfortunately, most people who direct exercise

programs don’t understand these basic principles.
Overload and specificity will, if properly used, provide
the most results compared to worrying about small
details such as the angle of your grip on the barbell.
Believe it or not, I see many instructors telling their
trainees to turn their hand or foot in this direction or
that as if this makes a large difference in training
responses. It doesn’t, it’s all nonsense.

Monitoring and Record Keeping Maintain

Motivation
Constant evaluation, both during a session and
over a training cycle, will lead to the best gains and
make for more interesting workouts. The process of
monitoring your progress also helps to maintain
motivation which is one of the hardest things to do
after the initial enthusiasm wears off.

Resistance and Effort Evaluation

Since monitoring is so important to success, we
must have a simple, yet effective method for rating
effort. This allows you to determine the proper
resistance to use when beginning the training
program, and also to know at what point you need to
increase the resistance for continued progress. True

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for both aerobic exercise and resistance training, this
provides a framework for an exercise prescription.

In the early 1960’s, Dr. Gunnar Borg from the

University of Stockholm in Sweden, developed the idea
of a scale for rating the trainee’s sense of how hard an
exercise was to perform. He called this the “perceived
exertion scale.” He designed the scale so that
scientists, practitioners of the health sciences, and
individuals could simply, yet accurately, and without
the aid of sophisticated equipment check how hard an
exercise was so that the proper level of effort for each
person could be determined.

Perceived exertion is a description (or rating) of

your effort during exercise. It’s a measure of how hard
you think the exercise is for you. Your brain can tell
how hard you are breathing or how hard you are
straining to lift a weight and it processes those
feelings of effort that you have during your exercise.

When you say that an exercise is hard, then you

are verbally stating your perception of the effort you
made. The good thing about this is that we can use a
scale to measure exactly how hard you think the
exercise is for you. This scale is then used to pick the
correct resistance or weight to use to get good
results.

Perceived Exertion Rating Scale

The scale has numbers from 0 – 10, with 0
being the “no effort” level and 10 representing the
“very, very hard” level. Most of the numbers have word
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labels that are easy to understand. The layout of the
scale is as follows.

0 No effort at all
1 Very, very light (just noticeable)
2 Very light
3 Light
4 Moderate
5 Somewhat hard
6 Hard (heavy)
7
8 Very hard
9
10 Very, very hard (almost maximal)

When using the scale, you can rate effort by

decimals, that is, 3.5 or 5.5. As you can see, 10 is
listed as almost maximal. Therefore, you can rate a
10.5 or 11 if the effort you just made was the hardest
you’ve ever done.

Using the Rating Scale to Monitor Your

Programs

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 How do you use the scale? Let’s use aerobic
exercise as an example. The American College of
Sports Medicine recommends that aerobic training be
done at 65-90% of the maximum heart rate.

This heart rate has been shown to be highly

related to the 3 (moderate) to 6 (hard) level on the
scale. So, scale ratings of 3-6 can estimate training
ranges for proper exercise based on scientific
guidelines. Dr. R. J. Shephard and others have shown
that the scale is effective for both men and women.

Dr. Borg’s research showed that the scale is also

capable of accurately rating anaerobic (resistance)
exercise. In an article published in Medicine and
Science in Sports and Exercise in 1983, Dr. Bruce
Noble confirmed this.

Verbal Instructions in Use of Scale

Dr. William Morgan has provided verbal
instructions for understanding the scale based on
aerobic exercise:

When you do aerobic exercise, try to estimate

how hard you feel the work is; that is, rate the degree
of perceived exertion you feel. Think of perceived
exertion as the total amount of exertion and physical
fatigue, combining all sensations and feelings of
physical stress, effort, and fatigue. Try to concentrate
on your total, inner feeling of exertion. Estimate as
honestly and objectively as possible.

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 Sometimes an exercise will be hard for the
whole body. You’ll feel worn out all over; this is
usually the case with an activity such as running.

With resistance training, an individual muscle

may get very tired before the whole body does. This
also happens in biking, especially to people who are
not yet in shape with the thigh muscles becoming
worn out before the whole body gets tired.

When this happens, rate how hard that exercise

is for that muscle group. For example, with resistance
exercises for the arm muscles, the arms usually get
tired or can’t do any more work well before your
breathing rate or heart rate increases to higher levels.
Your whole body doesn’t feel tired but your arms may
hurt a lot. Just rate how hard the exercise is for your
arms and don’t worry about your whole body.

The purpose of the scale is to compare a

particular routine to itself when repeated in the next
training session.

Below is a sample laboratory prescription sheet

so you can see how people use the scale for an
aerobic exercise program based on the 65-90%
maximum heart rate exercise prescription.

The 3-6 level serves as the training zone. This

doesn’t mean that you cannot exceed this level.
Certainly, athletes do it all the time. Many of my
sessions rate a 10, on both individual exercises and
on the total workout.

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 As an example, let’s say I’m going to do five
sets of bench presses, ten repetitions per set, with 15
seconds of rest between sets.

I select a resistance that’s heavy enough so I

can’t make the last few repetitions of the fifth set. (By
the way, this is a hard workout). Using the rating
scale, the first set rates 4, the second, a 5, the third, a
7, the fourth, a 9, and the fifth, a10.5.

This serves as a guide for me to know when I

need to increase the weight. If my cutoff point is 8,
then when that fifth set rates only an 8, it’s time to up
the weight. Or, if you like, just rate the last set. That’ll
make it even easier.

Take the time to get into the habit of using the

scale. We explored it in detail because it will be very
handy for your program, but it’s really quite simple to
use. And later on, we’ll see how to use it to help
determine if one is entering into an over-trained
state.

It’s also fun to play with and exciting to see how

your perception of effort changes as you condition
yourself. What was once an 8 soon becomes a 6.

And, if you aren’t improving, you’ll know that

too, so you can make the necessary changes. Most
important, the scale provides an exercise prescription
for you. This personal program helps prevent over-
training, injury, and increases results.

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163
Chapter 9
Resistance Training Principles
Maximum Muscle Growth
The Maximum Muscle Growth program is a
scientific way of conditioning muscles. Knowledge of
the composition of the individual muscle fibers and
sound scientific principles create a solid base on
which to design effective programs of exercise. From
this base, proper training methods are developed and
followed, leading to optimal muscle responses.

I described in an earlier chapter the differences

in muscle fibers (slow twitch and fast twitch). Specific
exercises or work activities use the type of fibers
suitable for that motion. Knowing this work pattern
allows us to set up an exercise format that attacks
specific fiber type groups.

The specific format determines what happens to

the whole body and at what place on the conditioning
spectrum changes occur, at one extreme of the
spectrum purely aerobic training or on the other end
of the spectrum, pure strength exercise. Most
exercise programs are combinations of both types of
conditioning.

Therefore, the Maximum Muscle Growth

program is based on the knowledge of muscle
structure. The different designs of specific fiber
groups allow each to carry out specific tasks. These
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tasks run the spectrum of potential muscle activity
and function.

Working Definitions
I want to define some basic terms that are the
jargon of resistance exercise.

Repetition is the completion of a full, single

movement of an exercise. Pushing a bar from
shoulder level to above your head and then lowering it
back to the shoulder position is the performance of
one complete repetition.

Set is the total number of repetitions performed

consecutively. If you perform the shoulder press, as
described above, 10 times, that is 1 set of 10
repetitions.

Repetition Maximum (RM) is the maximum

number of repetitions you can perform at one time.
This test is usually performed to evaluate initial
strength and endurance levels and, later on, it’s used
to measure levels of improvement. We also use a RM
test to get an idea of the initial starting resistance to
use for an exercise. Most times we don’t use a 1 RM
(most resistance or weight you can lift one time)
because this requires a very high force output and
increases the chance of causing an injury. A 10 RM is
better and safer. A 10 RM uses resistance that is
heavy enough so you cannot do it 11 times. A 10 RM
set equals about 75% of what you can do just one time
(1 RM).
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 An exercise prescription is simply a formula of
reps (repetitions) and sets. For example, if you
performed the shoulder press exercise, I would
prescribe a certain number of sets of X reps per set. I
would write it as: shoulder presses -- 3 sets, 10 reps,
or 3 x 10. That’s 3 sets of 10 repetitions for each set.

Key Principles for Results from Resistance

Exercise
The next step is to provide you with the basic
principles. These are common to all exercise
programs.

1) Intensity
2) Duration
3) Frequency

Descriptions of each principle follow.

Intensity
This is simply how hard the exercise is to
perform -- how much effort does it take. A maximum
effort would rate at or above 10 on the RPE scale.
Intensity is an important factor to determine because
it’s the main factor that leads to the fastest rate of
improvement or gain from a training program; it’s the
most important principle.

Remember, maximal effort is difficult. It’s good

to do for sports training but isn’t necessary for

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progress in a fitness program. Even athletes don’t
always train at top effort because of the chance of
over-training. You can get good rates of progress at
lower levels of effort (3–6 on the RPE scale). But to
perform above a previous high, you must, on
occasion, try to exceed the previous best
performance; you must apply a stress to exceed any
existing high point. Doing this, however, is at the
heart of training philosophy. This is where the heated
arguments arise amongst sportsmen and trainers
about what are the ideal methods to improve
performance limits. We’ll discuss this in more detail
later on.

Just remember, if you still want to improve,

continued progress occurs by increasing the
resistance that you use on an exercise when that
resistance becomes easier. If you rated the exercise at
5 and it’s now a 3, then it’s time to increase the
resistance. Maintaining your training RPE level is the
way to keep progressing as you get in shape. This is
consistent with the overload principle.

Duration
This is how long an exercise session takes to
do. Programs that produce results should range from
20–40 minutes and advanced, high result producing
programs should range from 45–90 minutes.
However, it takes a special effort to exercise up to 90
minutes. My sessions (and I still train hard and for
progress) sometimes last about two hours. Isometric
sessions are often over in 30 or less seconds.
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Frequency
This is how often you exercise and it’s based on
a weekly schedule (or longer for isometrics). Base
programs are a bare minimum of 2 times per week
but more often they are 3 times per week. Athletes’
training programs are often done 5–7 times per week
(sometimes even twice a day).

Many variations exist within these three factors.

Almost anyone can benefit (and make continued
improvements) exercising 30–40 minutes, 3–5 times
per week. Remember, intensity will make the most
impact on your rate of improvement. Keep in mind
though, higher intensity makes workouts harder and
requires strong motivation.

Other Important Resistance Exercise Principles

Progressive Resistance Exercise
For continued improvements from an exercise
program, one must increase the resistance when the
present resistance becomes easy to perform. Use of
the RPE scale in grading your exercise efforts will aid
you in knowing when to increase the resistance.

For example, at the start of the training

program your 10 RM for shoulder presses might be 70
pounds. Since you may not need to work at maximum
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effort, you select 50 pounds for the resistance during
your first workout. After you do 10 reps, you rate the
effort on the RPE rating scale as a 6. Then, after 2
weeks of training, the RPE is down to 4.5. The
shoulder muscles are now easily performing the
exercise. If you don’t increase the training load at this
point, you won’t make further progress. A decreasing
RPE is your sign to increase the resistance.

There are several methods to keep the training

program progressive (overloading the muscles).

1) Increasing Resistance: You can increase

resistance while doing the same number of
repetitions. For example, if you are training
for RM’s (repetition maximum), then a 70-
pound RM may increase to an 80-pound RM
after several weeks of training.

2) Increasing Volume: Another method for

overloading the muscle is by increasing the
volume of training. This can be done by
increasing the number of repetitions
completed, or you can increase the number
of sets performed. And, you can increase
both if you’ve got time and energy.

There’s a difference of opinion as to what the

ideal volume of training should be for good results.
Proponents of the Nautilus system have said that one
set of an exercise done to momentary muscle failure
using between 8-12 repetitions is best. Momentary
muscular failure means that no matter how hard you
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try, you just can’t budge the weight anymore -- the
muscle is completely exhausted at that moment.

This type of training has become very popular

during the last 30 years and its modern day disciples
call it HIT, for high intensity training. I, however, am
not one of its proponents, having trained this way for
more than 7 years with less than optimal results after
having been able to look back over my progress with
it in comparison to my progress in using other
methods.

As an aside, a new form of resistance exercise

grew out of the Nautilus experience and this program
was named, “super-slow.” This is likely the dumbest
innovation in the history of the “Iron Game.”

The idea of super-slow is to avoid accelerating

the movement of the weight and proponents argue
that this maintains the load on all of the muscle fibers
throughout the full range of the exercise. The
problem is that the movement is performed so slowly
that only a small percentage of the muscle is involved
because the contraction forces are too little.

The exercising subject must decrease the

amount of weight he uses so that he can move the
exercise device at the very slow speeds required.
Unfortunately, the under-loaded muscle performs well
below its maximum capability as the intensity of
exercise decreases. The use of resistance bands will
overcome the acceleration issue.

170
 Amazingly, the supporters, who know little
about muscle physiology, interpret the painfulness of
the exercise as an indication of its intensity. What they
don’t realize is that the resistance, although not
enough for causing maximal contractile forces, is
enough to shut down muscle blood flow and oxygen
transport.

The fuel needs must now come from the

conversion of carbohydrate fuel to lactic acid instead
of the combination of the carbohydrate with oxygen.
Carbohydrate, if combined with oxygen, provides 13
times more of the cell’s energy currency, ATP, then
when it is converted to lactic acid.

Further, the rising acid level impairs muscle

performance. The end result is that the exerciser
suffers from serious muscle pain and “burning” but
derives little training effect for his pain. Avoid, at all
costs, the performance of super-slow exercise. And
stay away from the proponents because they are all
close-minded zealots believing that their way is the
only way.

Bodybuilders believe something very different

than the advocates of the Nautilus training method
about the best way to build muscles. They do 3-4
exercises for a body part. For example, when working
the chest muscles, they would perform 4-5 sets of
each exercise using between 4-20 repetitions per set.
The total sets performed will number between 15-25
sets per body part compared to 1 or 2 sets used by
the Nautilus, or HIT, proponents.
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 Recent research has shown that 3 sets of an
exercise are better than a single set for gaining
strength and muscle size. Endurance gains are better
as well. Also reductions in body fat are more with
higher volumes of training. The Nautilus principles
are, therefore, in my view, incorrect. The plan in
Maximum Muscle Growth is to do one set of two-four
exercises for each on the repetition training days.

Both duration and frequency (as discussed

above) are parts of volume. Scientific research hasn’t
studied the higher number of sets used by
bodybuilders. Obviously, higher volumes of training
work. Look at the size of some of these people. And
not all of them take steroids.

I believe, today, that isometrics and repetition

based plan using one set of several exercises makes
for bigger muscles, if bigger muscles are what you
want..

3) Rest Periods: A little-used method of

overload is to change the length of time that
you rest between sets and exercises. The
amount of rest time (days) between different
exercise sessions is another method.

For pure strength building (the ability to lift

maximum weights 1 or 2 times), athletes take longer
rest periods of 2–4 minutes between sets, or longer.
This type of training, using long rest periods between
sets does little to reduce the risk factors for heart
disease. Short rest periods, as practiced by
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bodybuilders, lower risk factors similar to that
provided by aerobic training!

4) Cycling (or Periodization): Finally, one of

the exciting new areas of training research
is cycling which includes manipulating all of
the above principles.

A simple cycle uses variations in the resistance

that you use so you complete a cycle of light training
for a period of time.

As training continues, you gradually shift to

heavier sessions. You could use more resistance or
more volume or combinations of both. At the peak of
the heavy training portion of the cycle, you cut back
just before you become stale or over-trained.

For example, you begin a progressive resistance

program with moderate resistance and each week
increase the resistance until you are working at
maximum levels. You may also increase the numbers
of sets and decrease the time of the rest period as you
move toward the heavier portion of the cycle. Keep
this up for 2–3 months and then cut back to a lighter
cycle using different exercises.

Cycling avoids staleness and allows continued

improvement. A key factor for continuous gains is
variation in the training program. This may prove to
be as important as intensity (maybe more so).

You can now see the basis of the Maximum

Muscle Growth program as it includes the use of these
173
scientific principles to design a program that gives
maximum results to fit your individual training goals.
Use of the principles also maintains the motivation to
train regularly by creating interest, excitement, and
results.

How Hard Should You Exercise

Based on the above principles, you can see that
intensity and variation are the most important factors.
Yet, an important question needs an answer. The
question is: Do you have to train at the maximum
effort level? The answer is NO. In fact, training at
maximal levels during each set and each session may
reduce results because of over-training.

And, for general conditioning, you don’t ever

have to train at a maximal level. You should train at
the so-called threshold level which is a point of effort
required to make progress. Training at a level less
than threshold provides little results.

The threshold point is at about the 3 level on

the RPE scale. Even though maximum effort is not
critical to making progress, increasing your effort as
you get stronger and your workout becomes easier, is
necessary for continued improvement.

The Eastern Europeans are working extensively

with cycling. Only during the last part of a three or
four part cycle, lasting a couple of months, does the
training reach maximum levels.

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 Research in the U. S. has shown that it takes
about 21 days for the body to adapt completely to a
new resistance. This means that when you increase
the resistance, continued improvement occurs for the
next three weeks at which time progress stops unless
you increase the load (resistance). As you reach your
genetic limits, you will simply stop getting
stronger. Unfortunately, there are limits to human
size and strength.

The U. S. research proves that you don’t have to

increase resistance each training day. In fact, you
shouldn’t increase it until several weeks have passed
and your muscles have fully adapted and responded
to the workload. Then, and only then, is it time to
increase resistance. In one experiment, athletes who
increased resistance too quickly exhausted
themselves completely in just six weeks. Performance
decreased and training was stopped. Recuperation
took a few weeks.

I’ve found this to take about 1-3 weeks,

depending upon whether one is new to training or is
reaching his upper limits in strength development. For
example, if I follow the same program for several
years, I fail to get any stronger -- I’ve reached my
limits. The best way to check this is by use of the RPE
scale and use your own self-selected number as a
guide. The chart shows the RPE level at which different
groups train:

Once you’re happy with the way you look and

feel, then further increases aren’t necessary. At this
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point, you can begin a maintenance program, and to
maintain this level of improvement, you use your
current resistance as the maintenance load.

An important key is to change exercises once

every one to three months to maintain the motivation
to keep up the program. There are many barbell
exercises to choose from without even considering
the purchase of any additional equipment. I’ll show
you at least 20 different but very effective exercises at
the end of the book with a complete description of
each one and how to do it. But the variety of exercise
equipment and of exercise routines that will all work
will boggle the mind.

Even if you are not an athlete, levels of effort in

the athlete RPE range will challenge you and are fun to
try every so often. If you are a beginner, then wait
until you are in good overall condition before
exercising at higher RPE levels. Follow the general
program for a few months and experiment with some
of the principles before working at high levels of
effort.

Potential for Improvement

Your potential for improvement depends upon
your genetics and environmental factors and your
current lifestyle also play important roles. Your age,
sex, present fitness level, the consistency of, and
regularity of exercise performance, all determine how
much you’ll improve. Desire and motivation are very
important too. But, no matter what, even if your
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motivation and desire reach to the moon, your upper
limit is determined by genetics.

Reasonable expectations for improvements

without major diet changes are that during the first
two months of the general fitness program you will
add a few pounds of muscle and decrease body fat by
1–3 percent. For those who are overweight, the use of
a weight reduction diet as outlined in the Ultimate
Diet Secrets will provide more rapid loss of body fat
and faster improvements in body shaping.

Athletes will improve strength and muscle mass

quickly by working at high RPE levels with the training
programs described. Adequate intake of protein of a
least 1 gram per pound bodyweight assures rapid
progress.

Safety for Resistance Training

Result-producing resistance training programs
have one prominent feature in common -- safety. If
you injure yourself, you won’t be able to train. And
you won’t feel well either. Never do more than you
should and follow the guidelines below.

1) Proper Breathing -- Never hold your breath

while doing an exercise. This is called a
Valsalva maneuver. Doing so increases
blood pressure to high levels. By breathing
during your exercise, much lower increases
in blood pressure occur. Additional research
has shown that the waste products from
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 muscle work, such as lactic acid, increase
much less with continued breathing.
Increases in lactic acid decrease
performance. I recommend that you exhale
during the lifting of the resistance and
inhale during the lowering of the
resistance. This means that as you start the
exercise you want to have your lungs full of
air. During particularly difficult exercises,
when in the last few reps you are breathing
very hard, you may take a few quick, deep
breaths before starting the next repetition
so you maintain proper oxygen and blood
flow.
2) Speed of Motion: The proper speed of
motion to complete one full repetition
depends on how far you are moving the
resistance. Usually a full rep will take 2–4
seconds to complete. Very fast movements
will lead to pulled muscles because the
acceleration of the resistance gives a false
sense of strength. Avoid acceleration
movements. These cause you to use more
resistance then you should. Move the weight
at a speed that doesn’t cause throwing or
jerking. I’m not a supporter of fast, or
ballistic, training. I think it is dangerous.
Many would disagree with me. For example,
there is a style of training called plyometrics
and the whole basis of this type of training
is the use of ballistics. Of course, one can
always try all of these different styles and
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 learn for himself what works and what
doesn’t work. Who am I to say not to try
something since I have tried everything out-
there.
3) Proper Form: Proper form prevents injury
and helps you place the load on the muscle
that you want to exercise. The biggest break
from proper form is caused because you
want to lift more weight than you can. High
speed of motion (which is related to lifting
too much weight) leads to improper form.
Training results are reduced at best and
injury occurs at worst.
4) Full Range of Motion: This means that you
do the exercise from a position of full
muscle stretch to full muscle contraction.
Muscles also develop more fully and can
exert more force when they are pre-
stretched. And finally, flexibility improves.
Studies during the 1968 Olympics showed
that the weightlifters were the most flexible
athletes attending. So much for the theory
of the muscle-bound weightlifter. On the
other hand, I’ve already described in the
section on isometrics that the exercise can
be performed at one joint angle and you’ll
still get results.
5) Warming Up: Loose muscles rarely get hurt.
Before using a heavy load, properly stretch
your muscles. In a multiple set exercise, the
first set can be a warm up. Never use the
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 heaviest load or effort until you are sure
everything is good and loose. You can bend
and twist, jog in place or lift a light weight
for about five minutes before you begin the
workout. This will provide a good warm up.

Selecting the Proper Starting Resistance

The selection of the proper resistance is trial
and error. The large muscles of the back and legs are
the strongest muscle groups. Use more resistance for
exercises with these muscle groups. Later I’ll list the
exercises so you can see which specific ones I’m
talking about.

Use the RPE scale to select the resistance. To

start, particularly if you have no training experience,
either use a barbell with no plates on it or just 5
pounds on either end. Most barbells weigh about 20
pounds unless you’ve purchased an Olympic bar
which usually checks in at 45 pounds. After selecting
your initial weight, try to do 10 repetitions of the
exercise you picked.

Rate your effort. If your rating is well below your

target RPE level (3–5 for general fitness/health and 5–
10 for athletes), then put on 20, 30, or even 40 more
pounds for your next set of 10 reps. By repeating this
process, you will discover the right resistance for each
exercise. This process of trials may require that you
do the evaluation over several different sessions and
the testing period may require a week or two of time

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until you know what weights you need to use for all of
the exercises that you’ll perform in your workouts.

Mark down the proper resistances on an

exercise card so you can keep records of your
programs and progress. Good record keeping
techniques are important for progress and motivation.
You will quickly find your proper levels by the use of
the RPE scale. This is the reason I spent so much time
introducing it to you as it serves as a guideline for
much of your exercise effort.

What is Strength?
This is argued endlessly by many who train.
There’s no single definition of strength, but rather
there are as many “strengths” as there are conditions
of measurement. This is true only if muscle strength
and muscle force are defined as synonymous. In my
view, strength can be defined simply as the ability to
develop force against an unyielding resistance in a
single contraction of unlimited duration.

It’s argued that weightlifters (power and

olympic lifters) are “stronger” than bodybuilders.
Weightlifters train to lift as much weight as possible
and hone their skills so that coordination and strength
work together to hoist the large weights.
Bodybuilders, most often bigger than weightlifters,
don’t train to lift as much weight as possible, but train
to build the biggest muscles possible.

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 Volume training, as performed by bodybuilders,
seems to be the most effective method for building
large muscles. Again, we see the effects of specificity
of training. Now, it’s well known that the strength of a
muscle is directly related to its size. Many would like
to argue that point because it’s often observed that
people can become stronger without getting bigger.

This is only true, however, in the early stages of

training or, during the time an advanced trainee
changes routines or exercises. There’s a learning
curve during which the muscle/nerve system learns
how to work efficiently. This process reaches its peak
after about 4-6 months of training. Any further
increases in strength arise because of increases in the
size of a muscle. It’s unlikely that much more
coordination will develop. Slow twitch fibers are the
ones that most readily increase their activation,
whereas white fibers are more difficult to activate.
This is defined as the “size” principle.

The main principles of strength training are not

new and their origins have been traced to the ancient
Greek city-states. Prior to World
War II, MacFadden, through his Encylopedia of Health
and Physical Education had compiled, during a thirty
year period through the efforts of five MDs and two
PhDs, all of the historical ideas known about strength
training.

Even in 1895, the belief in intensity of work,

rather than frequency, was already established and
had been for almost a century. Solid agreement about
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how to strength train, therefore, existed long before
World War II. Indeed, it’s doubtful if the views held
then were very different than those under which the
centurians had trained many 100’s of years before.

As the 20th Century opened, it was clearly

known that it was the amount of resistance used and
not the total amount of work that led to increases in
muscle size and strength. The differences, therefore,
between the modern and ancient world’s
understanding of the development of muscle size and
strength were realized as scientists were now using
the scientific method to learn about the actual
mechanisms that training triggered in the body.

It takes about 21 days to adapt to a new load. In

this way, you constantly try to reach higher levels of
performance by increasing your intensity in small
increments, thus avoiding over-training. New trainees
are often able to increase their weight each session
for a while. Intermediate trainees may have to spend
several weeks using the same load, allowing for a
complete adaptation, before increasing the weight.
When one approaches his genetic limits, it may take
months to adapt and be able to increase the weight.
And when one reaches his genetic limits the increases
simply end and you’re done.

That’s how I recommend using increased

intensity to make continued progress. I have, for
example, not increased any of my weights during the
last year. I’m done. It’s all over and after 57 years of
training I would hope that I’ve reached my limit. If I do
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a new routine, however, with new exercises, I can
actually increase my resistance each workout, just like
a new trainee, but after several months, that ends too.
I’ve reached my limit and I if I do a new exercise, I
reach my limit with it far sooner than would a new
trainee. One way to further improve would be to
design about 10-15 different regimens with varied
exercises, reps, sets, and rest period combinations.
Talk about attacking the Spectrum.

Nah, too much work. I just don’t want to bother.

I look and feel and can perform OK.

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Intensity: The Most Important Factor
Weight trainers use weights to obtain results
specific to their goals, which range from using
weights for rehabilitation and strengthening of long
dormant muscles to the loftier goals of god-like
development, great strength and power. In each case,
and for every point in-between extremes, basic
physiological and biochemical principles apply. These
are simple rules -- but are often misinterpreted and
incorrectly understood and applied.

A large body of scientific research data has

accumulated over the years related to what is known
as endurance exercise. Many conclusions have been
drawn, but controversy still exists. One reason for this
is that so much is happening in your body and so
many systems are involved that the situation becomes
very complex.

Therefore, the multiple effects of these

programs are said to result from the interaction of
only three major variables of the training program --
intensity, duration, and frequency. Much work has
been done by researchers who have changed one of
the variables and kept the others constant and so on
and so on. You get the picture.

One important thing to understand is that

there’s not much scientific research that was
performed on athletes comparing the effects of
different training programs. Most scientists study
heart patients, college students, and rats. Why?
Because there isn’t any money available to do the
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work on athletes. And if there were, it would take
many years to unravel it all due to the complexity. But
so far, it looks like of the three, intensity is more
important than the others when you want maximum
improvement.

In general terms, intensity can be defined as

how hard something is -- psychologically,
physiologically, or both. I want you to be concerned
with how hard it is on your body -- on your heart
muscle, especially how it affects breathing, sweating,
etc. What’s interesting is that I cannot describe
intensity without considering time -- and time means
duration. As an example, suppose I ask you to run
400 yards in 60 seconds. Well, that’s intense!

If you’ve ever done it, you know what I mean. It

really hurts. Now, I ask you to run 400 yards in 120
seconds -- twice as long. Not too bad on you. But
don’t stop -- keep running a series of 400 yard runs,
15 if necessary, until it takes an all-out effort to keep
doing them in the allotted 120 seconds. About two
hours, three -- until you can’t do it anymore? Is that
intense? You bet it is! Another definition refers to
intensity as the percentage of momentary muscular
effort being generated: and the closer one gets to
100% momentary muscular effort, the higher the
intensity.

OK, so you’re worn out from each one -- a

different kind of tired, but tired nonetheless. What
happens inside your muscles? Many different things.
But one thing is for sure -- what happens from
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running one 400 is not the same thing that happens
from multiple 400’s. Why? Your muscle is composed
of different fiber types: for the sake of simplicity these
fibers are categorized into two fast types and one
slow type.

These different fibers are recruited to perform

work in response to different patterns of activity so
your body can function in the most efficient way. Easy
work, such as standing, uses predominantly slow
twitch muscle fibers. As work intensity increases, fast
fibers come into action and the slow fibers are not
involved to the same degree.

When things get really rough, heavier duty fast

fibers are called into action. Whether or not slow
fibers come back into full action is determined by how
hard the work is to perform and how long it lasts. The
bottom line is that the fiber that’s used is determined
by the force output of the muscle -- low force uses
slow fibers; high force uses fast fibers. Slow fibers
produce little force and can continue working for long
lengths of time. They’re also smaller in size than fast
fibers.

Fast fibers produce high force and burn out

quickly. They grow to a larger size (wider and thicker)
than slow twitch fibers. The reason for this is that
each has a different percentage of parts. The fast
fibers have more units to produce force and slow
fibers have more units to produce energy. Picture this:
a sprinter and a marathoner; high force versus low
force; short-term vs. long time; big muscles (fast/
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high force) vs. smaller muscles (slow/low force). You
create the changes and adaptations that are required
for the activity you perform. It also seems that the
harder you work (train) the better improvement in
performance you will achieve regardless of the fiber
type involved.

I bet you’re now asking what does all this mean

to your workouts and training programs? A great deal.
By understanding muscle fibers and the way they
adapt to exercise, we’ll have an idea of how to design
the training program. Before we go on, you should
know that even though fast fibers are bigger than
slow fibers, they both grow in response to training.

Most research using weightlifting has been to

study how weightlifting muscles are different than
running muscles. Almost nothing has been done in
the research lab to find out what training program is
best or even if A is better than B, and if so, is B better
than C, etc. Most of the information in this area comes
from bodybuilders, and unfortunately there are so
many variables that we really can’t draw many
conclusions. But there is one conclusion that we know:
intense exercise seems to produce better results than
less intense exercise.

Some authors have recently suggested that

high-intensity training is something that is not, and
cannot be, high-intensity if high repetitions are
performed as these are deemed to be “endurance”
type training. This is to say that high-intensity cannot
be produced using a high repetition workout. The
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definition many have used for high-intensity exercise
implies the use of a resistance (weights) that is very
close to maximal (85-100% of 1 RM [repetition
maximum]), therefore the repetition of the set, by
necessity, must be limited to 1-8 repetitions. But, by
returning to our earlier definitions, you can readily see
that you may use less weight and increase the
repetitions and, most important, still train with very
high intensity and receive all of the benefits of this
type of exercise. Also, by using less weight, you’ll
tend to fatigue some fibers thereby forcing your
muscle to recruit more fibers to assist the tiring ones
so that you can complete the exercise work.

It’s not usual for this to happen while using

heavy poundage’s for a few repetitions. Usually, when
using heavy weights, you’ll make a repetition but the
next one will lead to you being unable to generate
enough force to complete the rep. This result, caused
by ballistic action training, won’t enable you to
produce maximal contractile force or maximal
endurance performance by the continued forcing of
muscle contractile activity. The repetitions must be of
a limited number so you can still use a high
percentage of the 1 RM resistance.

For example, it has been measured in an

individual using maximum effort while pedaling at a
high resistance on an exercise bike at 80 rpm’s that
they are only using about 20% of their maximal
voluntary contraction force. A recent review of the
strength training research has been completed and
the scientists concluded that you need to exert over
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60% of maximal voluntary contraction force to
stimulate increases in strength. It has been
demonstrated by Ultrasound studies of human muscle
that the size of the muscle is directly related to the
strength of that muscle. Therefore, the limit you use
for the number of repetitions to still maintain a high-
intensity workout may be as high as 30, 40, or even
50! You do not have to limit yourself to a range of 1-5
repetitions.

Due to the complexity of the muscle’s

adaptation to exercise, each individual must define his
goals and use a specific training regimen to achieve
them. Much work needs to be completed before a
definitive statement can be made regarding what
amount of weight, how many sets/repetitions, and
how often workouts should be repeated to achieve
maximal results.

Recently, many bodybuilders have elected to

perform sets and repetitions of high numbers -- 6-10
sets and as high as 30-50 repetitions with maximal
possible weight so that extreme fatigue and the
inability to continue occur during the final repetitions.
This form of training has produced some startling
results in terms of muscle size (and muscle
endurance). But, be aware, it’s hard and painful and
requires an almost fanatical desire for the possible
result to push oneself through these demanding
sessions.

Other athletes have previously, and are

presently, demonstrating that this type of exercise is
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very productive in respect to muscle size increases.
No one can deny that the legs of most speed skaters
(and hips, buttocks, and calves) are powerful and
enormous. Their repetitions are extremely high and
repeated many times. The chronic crouched position
puts a continual force (not maximal in terms of all-out
effort) on the involved muscles leading to a dramatic
hypertrophy (growth) of all the muscle fibers. Under
these circumstances, the slow fibers and the fast
fibers are heavily involved. They respond by
increasing their performance capacity which, as I’ve
already discussed, means growth.

Any workout that uses high intensity will be

productive. But, it should be stressed that intensity,
itself, is not defined by any single variable. It’s defined
by the stress that’s created by performance and this is
regulated by time (duration), resistance, and effort.
Any form of exercise or program of exercise which is
intense will produce results. But generally, for muscle
building, a threshold level of percent of maximal force
should be reached and for a sufficient length of time,
and repeated, to achieve maximal muscle size gains.
Unfortunately, it appears that intense workouts
cannot be repeated continuously, on a daily basis.
Cycling workouts, and a plan for increments in
resistance, sets, etc. should be used. But the unique
idea of viewing intensity as I’ve described, is that it
affords a development that’s more complete because
more intense workouts can be used more often.

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 As you rest from a high force, intense workout,
you can use a low force, intense workout in between
that will develop other parts of the muscle and yield a
different overall physiological response because you
attack other muscle fibers. Repeated high-intensity
efforts using only a few of the possible muscular
performance dimensions is limiting and ultimately
defeating because of physiological breakdown and
frustration at the failure to attain goals and a
concommitant loss of motivation, both physical and
psychological.

How the Maximum Muscle Growth Program

Differs

The unique aspect of this plan is that it covers

all muscle fibers. Other important factors include:

• We’ve learned that 1 set of an exercise for a

muscle is good enough. For more stimulation
we do more exercises, not more sets of the
same exercise
• We use isometrics as part of the muscle growth
program and less of the “fatigue” model
• We realize that the intensity of the isometrics
demands more rest and that between session
rest times may require many days and even
weeks

Functional Training vs. Isolation Training

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 When you look at the programs offered by
Lifeline USA, you’ll discover that the whole focus is on
functional fitness. Before the movement to functional
fitness, exercises using resistance focused on
isolating a muscle.

In functional fitness many compound

movements are used to improve, shall we say, the
overall, coordinated function of the body. For me, I’m
mostly old school and I believe that isolating a muscle
and making it stronger is perfectly good for improving
performance.

It’s not really possible to improve isometric

strength performing functional types of training
movements but what’s really important to me is to
improve a muscle through it wide range of functional.
The point is, however, that it’s all good – it all
contributes. As I’ve stated, you need to define your
own goals and then design the training program
around that.

Let’s now look into some of the routines and

exercises.

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Chapter 10
Exercises for Maximum Muscle Growth
Let’s quickly review the rationale for Maximum
Muscle Growth and then look at some exercises.
The key understanding is about muscle fibers
and that for Maximum Muscle Growth we must work
over all these fibers. The features of the program are:
• Isometrics
• Isotonics
• Rest/recovery intervals
• Multi-repetition and exercises
• Repetition variation

Rest duration after isometrics will be longer and

the more intense those sessions become will require
longer rest times. You’ll need to experiment with the
number of training sessions that you’ll do per week
for the Multi-repetition and multi-exercises sessions.
Repetitions should be between 8-12. Exercises
per body part should be between 2-4, one set of each.
Vince Gironda’s A Muscle has Four Sides program
does 4 exercises per body part and he recommends
two full sessions per, six days per week.
That's a little much for me and there is no
isometric component. In fact, most programs today do
not use isometrics and work mostly off the multi-
repetition, multi-exercise fatigue model.

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 As I’ve learned, intensity and maximal force
development are the most effective way to build
muscle and that means isometrics.

Equipment
You can use many different tools but I’m setting
this up to be a home program but you could do it in a
gym with training partners if you like.
Following are some exercises in which I used a
barbell. We’ll also look at some exercises using plastic
tubes.
I’m going to suggest some exercise for the
isometrics and for the multi-exercises per body part.
If you buy any of the Lifeline USA products each one
comes with a DVD describing many different
exercises. Because the plastic tubes provide resistance
in any plane compared to a barbell, whose resistance
depends on gravity, the tubes are more versatile.

Isometric Exercises
Let’s start out with two programs, A and B
Workout A
1.Squat to Press
2.Biceps-seated curl
3.Shoulders-seated press
4.Trapezius
5.Triceps-close grip bench press

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Workout B
1.Lats-lat pulldown
2.Chest-bench press
3.Lower back-deadlift
4.Legs-single leg
5.Lats-low pulley row

MultipleRepetitions/Multi-Exercises
Next, let’s look at your repetition workout. I’m
going to keep this simple and manageable and then
you can tweak if for your own needs. Do one isometric
session per week and then two sessions for the
multiple repetitions.
In most training programs we break the body
down into the following groups:
1. Back
2. Chest
3. Legs
4. Shoulders
5. Biceps and triceps

Bodybuilders may also look at forearms and

calves. I don’t bother with them anymore. I’ve already
described Vince Gironda’s program which is a killer.
You can buy his book on the internet. Let’s start
with one set of two exercises for each of the above
listed body parts. You could do the same exercise for
each of the two workouts or you could vary them. I
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like the variation because we can attack more muscle
fibers for more growth.

Use the equipment in the gym or set yourself up

with the plastic tubing.
Back:
1.Lat Pulldown
2.Rowing
Chest:
1.Bench Press
2.Incline Dumbell Press
Shoulders
1.Overhead Press
2.Upright Rowing
Legs
1.Lunges
2.Squats
Biceps
1.Two Hand Curls
2.Single arm alternate curls
Triceps
1.Triceps Pushdown
2.Triceps Kickback

Split Routine

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 You could do back, chest, and shoulders in one
session and legs and arms in the other weekly
workout. The various options are endless and you’ll
need to design the routine to meet your own
personal goals.
Ultimately, it’s the mixture of the isometrics
with the multiple repetitions and multi-exercises that
will produce the most effective muscle building
routine.
When you reach your desired appearance just
go on a maintenance plan.

Here’s how to do the isometrics. You’ll need an

incline bench, the Lifeline USA TNT cable and door
strap, the Power Push UP.

During the first week, you’ll need to find the best

resistance cables that when stretched, you can’t
lengthen them any farther. Here, you contract as
hard as you can for five seconds. During the first
few weeks, contract less than 100% while you’re
getting in shape.

The TNT comes with 3-30 pound resistance cables

that are 5 feet long. I suggest that you also order
the 40 and 50 pound cables as well.

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Please see the WORKOUT PDF for images on all the above
exercises and more !

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