Hi Guys,
I came across this three part arcticle from a mike mahler interview.
I seem confused about his protein recommendations… Anyway reply’s are welcome from T-members and staff on T-Nation, especially the nutrition guru’s, like shrugs, Dr. Berardi etc.
Why You’re Not Gaining . . .
And What To Do About It!!
Have you ever noticed that most men who take up progressive weight training and change their diet, either fail or fall short of their goals? There are two general reasons for this.
First, no one seems to know what they’re doing.
Second, you don’t make great gains by training and ingesting large amounts of protein. You make great gains by ingesting fat and eliminating what you’ve ingested in the way of starches and other devitalized foods. Anyone who thinks he’s going to achieve 19" arms–without steroids–by swilling gallons of protein is simply deluding himself.
Let’s take it from the top, starting with common training mistakes and common dietary mistakes. Once you understand what won’t work, then I’ll explain what will work.
How do I know all this?
Thirty years of training bodybuilders is how. My star pupil years ago went from 180 lbs. to 225 lbs. in nine (9) months. I’ve trained half a dozen men at once, stuck on a 220-230 lb. bench press and–in 9 months–had them up to 350 lbs.
That’s when I was doing a lot of things wrong. My latest trainee–in thirty days–gained eleven (11) pounds of muscular body weight. You can literally see him grow before your eyes. No steroids.
You can do the same thing–I don’t care if you’re 24, 42, or 60. Let’s list and explain the common mistakes first, eliminate them, and then I’ll explain how to pack on the pounds.
Overtraining
This has to be the most common training (not diet) error. If you can’t finish a workout in 45 minutes to an hour, you’re wasting your time and cluttering up the gym unnecessarily. There is a real easy way to determine if this is one of your problems.
When you finish a workout, are your fingers trembling slightly? If so, you are no longer working on your muscles–you are now working on your nerves, which will then interfere with your ability to digest food.
How? Ever hit yourself on the thumb with a hammer? Notice how you get that sick, queasy feeling in your stomach? The nerves connect.
Overtraining usually consists of either too much weight (it’s an exercise, not a contest) or too little weight lifted too many times. The idea is to exercise and stimulate the muscles, not destroy (weight) or annoy (sets and repetitions) them.
Light Weights and Frivolous Exercises
As you may have noticed, the old Puritan work ethic is gone. Whatever happened to “Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might” [Ecclesiastes 9:10]?
“Work” has become the ultimate four-letter obscenity. Men actually go into the gym thinking they can build big muscles with small weights. I see them all the time–they attempt to bulk themselves up with concentration curls and chest laterals–with light dumbbells.
It takes heavy weights used to stimulate the large muscle groups to build large muscles and gain large quantities of muscular body weight in an hour or less. Arthur Jones tried to point all this out a generation ago but very few people listened. Some of the books in which he pointed this out are now collectors items.
Every time I hear someone in a gym say, “I need another half-hour to work my triceps”, it’s a major effort on my part to keep quiet. I have to bite my tongue.
Improper Sequence
Most men start with the heavier exercises, such as the bench-press, and then work down to the lighter exercises. Then, once in a while, some of them will finish off with a waist exercise or two.
This sequence is half correct, at least. You always–always–start with your waist exercise. Why?
Mits Kawashima taught me this in 1966. I got out of the army in 1964. When I started training, my body weight was 160. Eighteen months later I weighed 190. My body weight fluctuated between 185 and 190 before Mits took me under his wing. Life was really frustrating. I could not get past 190.
Mits started me with four sets of sit-ups, 25 reps per set. Then I went to the weights. In five (5) months I went 190 to 235. My bench-press went from 220 to 340 in the same period of time.
Mits taught me other things, as have other people, that I’m now passing on to you. You may not have heard of Mits Kawashima outside of Honolulu, Hawaii, where he currently lives and operates a health food store.
You’ve probably heard of his partner: Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Improper Form
There are so many exercises and there are so many ways to do an exercise wrong that the only way to avoid these pitfalls is with a personal trainer. Provided, of course, you can find one who knows what he’s doing.
An example of this is a fellow I saw years ago doing an exercise and bragging that he was “using the same weight as Reg Park”. Reg Park at that time was almost as well known as Steve Reeves, having won the Mr. Universe a short time before.
Mac MacFarland, the 1963 “Mr. Hawaii” winner, looked at this guy contemptuously and asked him, “If a pudgy nobody like you is handling the same weight in the same exercise that Reg Park is, don’t you think that maybe you’re doing the exercise wrong?”
Injury
A personal trainer’s first responsibility is to keep you from hurting yourself. Anyone who has trained for any length of time knows how much you lose when you hurt yourself. If you hire a personal trainer and he manages to hurt you–or causes you to hurt yourself–you have a very good idea of how well your trainer is qualified.
Nutrition
Nutrition is a vast field. There are truckloads of books on the subject. Read them if you like. What you’re about to read here are the facts that the popular books will not tell you.
Unclean Food
By this I don’t mean food that has dirt in it. I’m referring to food that simply wasn’t designed to be processed by the human digestive system, primarily certain types of meats.
Yuk, you’re thinking, a “veggie”. Wrong. There are clean meats and unclean meats. Clean meats are those that come from herbivorous mammals that divide the hoof and chew a cud. In seafood, clean meats are those that have fins and scales. Clean and unclean food is a study in itself. E.g., turkey and chicken are clean, ostrich and vulture are unclean.
In mammals, unclean meats are the scavengers, or predators. I.e., you’re eating second-hand garbage. Pork is perhaps the worst. In addition to what a pig will eat–in our Civil War, pigs chewing on dead and wounded soldiers was a real problem–pigs carry the trichinosis worm and its meat is extremely greasy. This grease coats your digestive organs.
The problem with grease coating your digestive organs is this: protein is a large molecule. An intestine coated with grease (fat) will allow a small molecule to pass into the bloodstream. The large molecules are kept out.
Fish that have fins and scales have a filtering mechanism to keep impurities out of the meat. Those that don’t have fins and scales don’t have this filtering mechanism. Going one step further, lobster and shrimp are the cockroaches of the oceans. Without them, there’d be miles of muck on the ocean floor.
Never heard any of this before? It’s in one of the most published books on earth. Most people have a copy, or easy access to one. Few ever read or apply it. It’s the Bible. The clean and unclean food descriptions (but not the scientific reasoning) are found in Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14. Try it for 60 days and see for yourself.
Soda and Beer
I can train someone who smokes. My 11 lbs. in 30 days trainee–at the moment–smokes a pack a day. He’s trying to quit. I simply cannot train someone who swills carbonated beverages. Here’s why.
The carbon dioxide in carbonated beverages is the same substance that your lungs exhale. The oxygen you breathe in is diatomic oxygen (two oxygen atoms bonded to each other). That oxygen then gets into the bloodstream, picks up waste, and exits the body as carbon dioxide. Carbonation is a waste product. You might as well drink urine.
Further, carbon dioxide immediately halts protein digestion. Prove it to yourself. Eat a steak with a carbonated beverage. You’ll notice the next morning that the meat is not digested, it lays there in your stomach. Now do it again a few days later, substituting orange juice for the carbonated drink. You’ll feel the truth of this the next morning.
Pasteurized Milk
Much has been written about the advantages of raw milk over cooked (pasteurized) milk, how cooking destroys enzymes, vitamins, etc.
What I haven’t seen addressed is the problem with plastic milk containers. The formaldehyde in the plastic leaches into the milk and you ingest it when you drink the milk.
Formaldehyde is also known as embalming fluid. Undertakers use it to preserve dead bodies. If you think this stuff just passes through your body, think again. A lot of undertakers these days will tell you that when they embalm people today who died in their 20’s and 30’s, they need to use only half the usual amount of embalming fluid that they use on older folks.
The plastic milk container manufacturers have supplied the difference.
Sugar
Refined sugar depletes B vitamins. B vitamins are your growth vitamins. Sugar also interferes with the gastrointestinal tract, causes baldness, makes the body a better place for parasites to thrive in, and brings numerous other deleterious circumstances to the body. Some years back William Duffy wrote a book titled Sugar Blues that explains all this and more in fascinating detail. Most health food stores carry it.
And read the label when you buy the high-protein food bars in the health food stores. Many contain sugar and lots of them are chocolate covered. Why be concerned?
If refined sugar had been discovered in this century, it would by a controlled substance, just like heroin or cocaine. Sugar is highly addictive. Food processors add it to the processed foods (often labeled as glucose, corn syrup, etc.) in order to addict you to their product. Read the labels on the packages and weep.
Remember when Surgeon General Everett Koop stated that tobacco was a harder habit to break than heroin? He was half right. All tobacco in America is sugar-cured. That’s the habit people are trying to break–not tar and nicotine.
White Flour
This is a tricky subject. A lot of us just can’t quit eating white flour products and live happily ever after. White flour is far more dangerous than anyone imagines.
As I’m sure you’ve noticed, a man in his 20’s normally make more progress on weight-training than a man in his 40’s or 50’s. The standard wisdom is that the digestive system of adult American males begins to degenerate in his early 40’s. “Degenerate” in this context means the digestive system begins to lose its ability to digest food and convert it to energy, muscle tissue, etc. By the age of 70, the digestive system plainly cannot fulfill its function. A 70 year old man ingests food but his digestive system fails to process it properly in any way, shape, or form. In essence, the person whose digestive system isn’t working properly is starved to death.
Let’s back up. Almost all of you were raised on white flour products–white bread and rolls, pasta products, doughnuts [an especially effective combination of white flour, sugar, and stale fat], pizza dough, pastries, and the like. Here’s where the difference comes in.
Your digestive system consists of more than just the stomach. “Chew your food slowly”, saliva begins to digest food in you mouth, etc., need not be repeated here.
We all know the function of the stomach.
Some of you know that many digestive processes occur in the small intestines.
If you’re one of the few who understand the functions of the large intestine, or colon, congratulations. You won’t need the crude analogy I’m about to use to illustrate my point.
It never ceases to amaze me how many men will go to the gym with a cold, minor muscle injuries, or the like and go through a workout thinking they’re building muscle.
That’s like cramming a 1,000 hp engine in your hot rod that has a bent front axle, bad tie-rod ends, and unbalanced tires.
Now let’s add one other problem to our hot rod analogy. Install the finest carburetion and air-intake system available–the best 4-barrel carbs, a high rise manifold, a turbocharger. Be able to pack that fuel and air in.
Then install an exhaust system designed for a 150 hp engine on your 1,000 hp power plant. Do you think you’ll have problems getting your engine to realize its full potential?
Now watch all the bodybuilders who stuff themselves full of every protein and vitamin supplement known to man and don’t gain. There are two reasons for this.
First, as Mits taught me over 28 years ago, one spoonful a day of a good protein is all that’s required. Mits formulated and sold his own for a while.
Second, if white flour, processed and at least partially undigestible, has encrusted itself all your life on the walls of your colon [as it has most of us over the age of 30], your exhaust system simply isn’t going to handle the intake. Here’s what happens.
Processed white flour, denuded of the food elements that aid in digestion, glues itself to the walls of your colon. This encrustation builds and builds over the years. The colon ceases to function as designed and becomes, essentially, a sewer pipe with a progressively restricted passage.
First, the colon secrets mucus. If this mucus can’t be secreted into the colon itself, it backs up–just like a sewer. The toxins [poisons] that would normally be carried out with the feces back up into the body and get back in the bloodstream. If you’re one of those who keep succumbing to pulled muscles, minor injuries, and the like, that’s a very good indication that your problem is your plugged-up colon.
Second, when the body runs short of water, it pulls what it needs from the colon. The plaster-like coating in your colon, caused by undigested food staying behind, is a known breeding-ground for some of the 500 different types of bacteria and 200 different types of parasites known to inhabit the human colon. As your body pulls needed water from the colon, these bacteria and parasites can come along for the ride. One of these bacteria is candida (or yeast). It can multiply so extensively that the water from a colonic irrigation is recognizably yellow, there is so much candida.
Colonic irrigation is how you solve this problem. This is not to be confused with an enema. It take 15 enemas to accomplish what one colonic irrigation accomplishes. Colonic irrigation soaks the plaster-like coating of undigested food off the wall of the colon and removes it from your body.
As stated, the B vitamins are the growth vitamins. What you may not be aware of is that the “good bacteria” in your colon synthesizes vitamin B1 (thiamine), B6 (niacin), B12 (cobalumin), and vitamin K.
Got any idea how these particular B vitamins are supposed to get into your bloodstream when the walls of your colon are plastered with 15 year old feces.
As an interesting aside, the average adult male in America has between 8 and 35 pounds of undigested food in his colon. Notice all the “beer guts” on so many of our middle-aged men?
A word of caution before you run out to solve the problem this way. Find someone who has experience with colonic irrigation and who uses the finest equipment–disposable tubing, filtered water, etc. People have been killed at the hands of amateurs.
If you’re in your 20s, you might not need many colonics. If you’re in your 40’s, it’s virtually certain that you need colonics.
Why this emphasis on the digestive organs and the abdominal cavity? Bodybuilding is 80% nutrition. If your digestive system isn’t working properly, then it should be rather obvious that you’re wasting at least 80% of your effort.
Water
It’s real easy to sweat off from a pint to a quart of water in a good workout. Sip water between sets. Most of the “muscle building” drinks I see carried into the gym are saturated with sugar. What tastes good sells.
Steroids
Thirty years ago, body-building and health were synonymous. Not anymore. Today most body-builders seem more concerned with cosmetic appearance, even at the expense of kidney and liver damage. For bulk, steroids simply aren’t necessary.
Coconut Milk
Protein burns up one and one-third its own weight in fat. Why do you think people lose weight on high-protein diets?
Therefore, if you want to gain muscular body weight via protein, you have to take in more fat than protein. This obviously isn’t going to work with animal fat, for reasons already stated. Coconut milk contains a large percentage of vegetable fat.
About 20 years ago I met Bob Sorge in New York. Bob was slightly over 6’ tall and slightly over 250 lbs. He looked good. He told me the best gains he had ever made were on coconut milk and coconut meat mixed together in a blender.
Remember my trainee who gained 11 lbs. in 30 days? I put him on one can of coconut milk, an equal amount of pineapple juice (not from concentrate, no sugar added), one banana and five (5) scoops of desiccated Argentine beef liver per day, mixed in a blender. I supervised his 3-day-a-week workouts while he drank 3 glasses of the above concoction each day.
Doesn’t sound like much? Back in the pre-steroid days of body-building, 3 pounds per month gain was considered “maximum theoretical.”
Pick up a 10 lb. roast. A lot of meat isn’t it?
11 pounds of muscle gained in one month is not a bad gain for someone who smokes a pack a day.
(Editor’s note: This was written in 1996.)
There are a lot of excellent books and courses on the market containing instructions for the gaining of muscular bodyweight. You may have bought some of them. The question is, why haven’t those programs and instructions worked for you?
The answer is probably simpler than you think. What it boils down to is this: the men who wrote those books all started out with the assumption that your body - as theirs was when they started - is in perfect operating condition. If your body is in perfect condition, all parts functioning the way the Great Architect of the Universe designed them (even if you do have only a 13 inch arm) then you can follow the diet and exercise instructions in books, become a 250 lb muscular monster, have voluptuous women hanging all over you, and live happily ever after.
If you’re one of those, read no further. This article isn’t for you. On the other hand, if you’re one of those unfortunate individuals who eats and works out and gets nowhere then let’s try to diagnose your problems which in turn will tell us why you are not receiving the benefits your efforts would seem to indicate.
The problems with the human body can be divided into two basic areas: structural, or mechanical, and chemical. An example of a structural defect would be an individual who has one hip a quarter of an inch higher than the other. Imagine a ladder leaning up against a building with one leg an inch shorter than the other. Now imagine some poor slob trying to carry a heavy bucket of tar, paint, tools, or the like up the same ladder.
It isn’t hard to imagine how easy it is for this guy to get hurt, is it? If you’re one of those unfortunates who have one hip higher than the other (a problem far more prevalent than anyone can imagine) you can now understand why the King of Exercises-the squat-does nothing for you. In fact, it is probably doing you more harm than good.
Other common structural problems are a rotated spine and scoliosis (spine weaves from left to right and back). The standard methodologies for such problems consist of chiropractic adjustments, massage therapy, and physical therapy. Some of these may not work either, depending upon your problem. A man by the name of David Scott Lynn did come up with a new method of working on structural disorders that he demonstrated to me one night-the next day my reps in the alternate dumbbell press went up by 3, my squats went up, I became a believer. I was one of those hips one quarter inch off people and he straightened me up in 45 minutes. More on his methods in a later article (he is scheduled to spend a week with me to teach me “how it’s done”).
The chemical problems all take place at the cellular level. They can be divided into three areas: sanitation, radiation, and nutrition. A cell has two basic functions: the ingestion of nutrients and the expulsion of effluvia (or waste products). If the cells are functioning properly, you have no structural defects, and you are training and eating properly you will gain: it’s that simple. Let’s use a crude analogy and then address each area in turn.
Imagine you have an automobile engine that isn’t running properly. The malfunctioning can only be caused in one of three areas: ignition, compression, or fuel. If the spark plugs are firing, the valves are closing at the proper time (assuming not too much is leaking past the pistons), and fuel and air is being delivered to the cylinders, the engine has to run, not even maybe.
Why the comparison to automobile engines? The human body, like a car engine, operates on heat engine principles. For example, consider the first law of thermodynamics, energy equals heat plus work. When fuel and air enter an engine the more energy converted to work, the less heat there is in the exhaust.
When exercising, dress warmly. A thin t-shirt, as opposed to a sweatshirt, causes you to lose energy. A large amount of your body heat escapes into the atmosphere. Heat energy is measured in calories. Calories are part of what you ingest in order to gain weight. One of the functions of the skin is to serve as a radiator for the body, the reason elephants have large ears.
Mac MacFarland, Mr. Hawaii 1963, once told me of an experiment with rabbits in which one ear of each rabbit was wrapped in wool and the other was left to flap in the winter cold. Through the winter the wrapped ear of each rabbit grew twice as long.
All other things being equal, and this bears repeating, if you have no structural problems, and if the cell is ingesting nutrients (nutrition), expelling waste (sanitation), and oscillating at its proper frequency (radiation), you have to gain, period.
Let’s take each area and explain it.
Sanitation
Everyone thinks with modern technology that this is something no one needs to concern themselves with these days. We’ve come a long way from the days when catholic priests stopped the Black Death from spreading by reimplementing the sanitary laws concerning the covering of human excrement found in the Book of Leviticus.
As an interesting aside, that disease was not caused by rats carrying infected fleas disembarking in Genoa. What had actually happened was the widespread practice of folks taking dumps in chamber pots at night in their houses and then flinging the contents into the streets the next morning caused the problem. Folks walking past in their boots would track the stuff into their own houses, take off their boots and lick their fingers afterwards, etc.
In the 19th century Ignatius Semelweiss made medical students in the hospital he ran wash their hands after handling cadavers and before they went to assist women in childbirth (another law found in the Mosaic Code). Up until his policy was implemented one woman in six died during childbirth. Semelweiss was ridiculed so heavily by fellow medical doctors he had a mental breakdown and finished his life in an insane asylum.
If you think things are so much better in the late 20th century, I have a couple of ugly surprises for you.
First, over 300,000 people a year in this country die from diseases contracted in hospitals. Almost nothing is as filthy as the air in a hospital. The infections people exhale don’t just evaporate-they are inhaled by other people.
Second, you think airborne diseases aren’t a problem in a commercial health club? If it is properly ventilated, you’re right. What I will not allow someone I’m training to do is sit in a wet sauna. In a wet sauna, you inhale water. A lot of that same water has been exhaled by other people with lung infections, flu, colds,and the like.
A dry sauna, on the other hand, will actually clear many mucus and lung problems.
Third, you need to shower right after working out. Some gyms expect you to work out, drive home, cool off, and then clean up. Not a good idea. Sweat can be reabsorbed through the skin. One of the main purposes to working out is to eliminate waste products. Perspiration carries toxins out with it. Bear in mind that the skin is the largest organ of elimination the body has. Once the toxins are out, keep them out.
Notice all the bodybuilders with acne all over their backs. Acne simply tells you that the internal organs of elimination are overloaded and waste products that should have gone down the toilet are coming through the skin.
A final note on sanitation: there are some really strange ways to clean things out. One example would be ear candles, a paraffin cone that you light with a match and stick in your ear. The smoke and heat loosen up the wax in the inner ear while the vacuum created sucks it out. Ear candles have been around as a home remedy for earaches, ear infections, and the like since before our Revolutionary War.
Radiation
Most of us think of radiation as something that leaks out of nuclear power plants. Obviously the stuff isn’t good for you but you may have a problem closer to home.
A few years ago a medical doctor by the name of Becker and a co-author, Selden, wrote a best-seller titled The Body Electric. Becker pointed out that our whole society is awash in electromagnetic radiation and blamed a host of today’s illnesses on it. He also pointed out that some frequencies of radiation are good for you, some are harmful.
The reason for the foregoing statement is that all living cells oscillate (the electrical term for vibrate) at a particular frequency. So do harmful microbes.
Becker’s work was pre-dated by Nicola Tesla in the 19th century and Georges Lakhovsky in the 20th. Lakhovsky authored a book in 1935 titled The Secret of Life: Electricity, Radiation and Your Body, in which he attempted to explain cellular oscillation, instinct in animals, the migration of birds, and other phenomena according to electrical principles. Lakhovsky was an electrical engineer.
Both authors maintained that high frequencies are beneficial to the human organism, low frequencies are harmful. Lakhovsky went on to postulate that high frequency radio waves would energize malfunctioning cells due to the spiral helix or coil found in each cell (today known as RNA-DNA) that acted as a receiving antenna for the radio waves.
Once the cell was energized waste would be expelled, nutrients would be ingested. He developed a device he named a Multiple Wave Oscillator for that purpose. Theoretically, since the device could raise the cells from a state of fermentation (cancer) to oxidation, he believed he could cure cancer with the device.
Boring you to death, am I? One of the worst frequencies to radiate into the human body is 60 hertz, or 60 cycles per second. It’s the frequency you run all your electrical appliances on. However, your Maytag and your blender aren’t going to do you in. There you are protected by what is known as the inverse square law, which simply states that every time you double the distance from a radio transmitter of any sort the amount of voltage actually being received is one fourth-not one half-of what it was originally.
Some of you may wonder why it’s so hard to get up in the morning and why you don’t have the energy your diet and exercise regimen should be producing. You may not have to look any further than your electric blanket: it’s radiating 60 hertz into you all night long at point blank range.
Nutrition
Bodybuilding is 80% nutrition. You simply cannot gain muscular bodyweight on a diet of sugar, soda pop, and swine’s flesh, no matter what type of a super duper routine you’re following.
Further, nutrition includes eliminating waste products just as much as it does ingesting nutrients. It isn’t how much you eat, it’s how much you use.
For example, my trainee who gained 11 lbs the first month on coconut milk, pineapple juice, and desiccated liver gained another 11 lbs in the following two months on the same diet and routine, for a gain of 22 lbs muscular bodyweight in approximately 90 days. That’s ingestion.
Thanks to a host of problems (candida, old army injuries, etc.) my own gains had been non-existent for years.
As I was fond of telling people, I’m a coach, not a competitor. On exactly the same diet and exercise routine my trainee was following I was going nowhere.
I keep meticulous records, both for bodyweight and strength increases (no one has the time to take measurements constantly, which are meaningless anyway because-as Arthur Jones pointed out 25 years ago, almost everyone lies about their measurements anyway).
As an interesting aside, pick up a copy of THE RING or other magazine on professional boxing. When you can find them, read the measurements of professional heavyweights, like Muhammad Ali. Notice all the 16 inch arms on men weighing 220 lbs. and more? Notice how those arms look compared to bodybuilders claiming 18 and 19 inch arms?
All of a sudden I noticed my weight starting to increase at a rate I hadn’t experienced since Mits Kawashima trained me in 1966 at the age of 24. I’m 52 years old. By checking back through my records I saw that I had gained 10 lbs of muscle in a single month–though I hadn’t changed my diet or exercise routine in the slightest.
The only variable that had been introduced, according to my records, was my weight started to shoot up after my fourth colonic irrigation.
The bodyweight increase started just a couple of days before an unusual experience I had in the law library where I was working (I’m a suer, pronounced “sewer,” by profession). I had to take a pause in my labors to visit the little boy’s room. A thing (there is no other way to describe it) came out of me that looked like a 5 foot rope. My colonics expert told me later that such an elimination is normal after about 40 to 60 colonic irrigations.
Apparently all the effort I spent throughout the years working out and running, even though I hadn’t wound up looking like Arnold, was of considerable benefit.
That’s elimination. That is, after cleaning a sufficient amount of petrified plaster off my colon wall I was now able to utilize and eliminate nutrients as well as a 24 year old.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t end there. You still have to supplement your diet with extra protein your body can utilize. That means commercial supplements. Theoretically, you could simply eat enough. It wouldn’t even cost much more than the supplements. However, the amount of time you would wind up using to prepare food would probably cost you your job.
The problem is that using some commercial supplements can turn out to be counter-productive.
Let me give you some examples.
First, there are the protein powders containing soy powder. Vegetables are a source of incomplete protein. What soy powder does, in many cases, is give you gas.
Second, there are powders that are simply frauds. A chemist in Honolulu analyzed one of the more popular brands. What Mits Kawashima passed on to me was that the chemist found salt (salt causes water retention, an easy way to gain weight), hydrogenated coconut oil (when anything is hydrogenated it becomes almost impossible to digest), FDC yellow dye 5 and 6, and gypsum board (gypsum board!) in the powder.
Another supplement is such a fraud that the Attorney General of one State has apparently already gotten after the people promoting it. The problem here is that if I explained why it is a fraud anyone with two brain cells to rub together would recognize the company and its advertising. As the old saying goes, better to speak after the event as a historian than before it as a prophet. When the Federal Trade Commission lands on this particular company and puts it out of business I’ll be more than happy to explain, “why it couldn’t work.”
Another protein powder gave my wife acne all across her back. Since nothing else she ate caused such an outbreak it had to be the protein powder. I never used the stuff and everything else we ate was the same.
Powdered desiccated Argentine beef liver is hard to go wrong on. It always seems to work. It may not work as well for bulking up as some protein powders, but at least you know what you’re getting.
Mits Kawashima gave me the formula for the protein powder he used to make (and no, he gave it to me, not to the world, I’m not passing it out to the public) and I’m mixing some of it up on my kitchen table. If my theory is correct concerning coconut milk, colonic irrigation, David Scott Lynn’s work, and Mits’ protein, I am about to create a couple of monsters.
My trainee and myself.
We’ll keep you posted.
(Editor’s note: This was written in 1996.)
Why You’re Not Gaining:
The Final Piece of the Puzzle
Repairing Injured Muscles
David Scott Lynn was an ironworker. His father was an ironworker before him. His father was one of the few men in the business who understood that a beam put in an inch or two off would affect the entire structure of the building. David inherited his father’s eye. From over a hundred feet away he could tell if a beam was only an inch or two off.
What, you are thinking, has this got to do with bodybuilding and weightlifting?
Everything.
The human body is a structure. Almost no-one involved in various aspects of the health field understands this, from medical doctors to strength coaches. Chiropractors probably come the closest.
Nobody has ever come as close as David Scott Lynn.
David was on a job in Minnesota, working outside in the winter, about 15 years ago. The cold was too much for him. He walked off the job and went to Florida. Shortly afterwards he began applying what he knew about structures to the human body.
What he developed is what I have been looking for, for almost thirty (30) years. When it comes to figuring out why you’re not gaining, this is another piece of the puzzle.
Let’s start with some of the basics. Once you get a “feel” for what he does (the word in quotation marks is probably far more accurate than you can imagine at this point) we’ll cover some of the basics. You can then, on paper, follow us through a workout and build on your basic knowledge. By the time you’re through with this article you will then understand how and why I can make the statement: today’s world record poundages are the warm-up weights of the future.
In a recent magazine I read an article about a fellow who, at the age of 31, has bench pressed over 700 lbs. at a weight of 335. His diet consists of peanut butter sandwiches, pizza, hot dog, hamburgers and Budweiser. If this young man lives to be my age (I’m 55) I will be more than a little surprised. If this same individual could count on another twenty (20) years of injury-free training a 1,000-pound bench press for him would be a certainty sometime within that time frame, probably sooner than later. For him, it won’t happen. His diet will probably kill him first.
In the same magazine one of the foremost strength coaches in the country knocks most of us out of the competitive box by referring to certain genetic/leverage/lifestyle advantages that the average lifter doesn’t have.
If you’re between 5’4" and 6’8", a normal adult male with all parts in place and functioning (even if not functioning well), you have all the “advantages” necessary to do anything with your body - whether you want to build size or strength - that anyone else has.
Let’s learn to look at the body the way David Scott Lynn does: as a structure. A lot of chiropractors look at it the same way: the bones should be balanced, the hips even, the spine in its proper configuration with no rotation, etc. A chiropractor attempts to achieve this with adjustments, a massage therapist by working the muscles. In many cases, they fail.
First, bones are substantially passive. The muscles are active. Bones cannot move of their own accord. Imagine someone with his neck tilted to the left side. The common practice is to either adjust the neck (chiropractic) or work on the right side of the neck, making the assumption that the muscles on the side opposite the tilt are weak (physical therapy).
Each joint in the body is surrounded by a joint capsule, an area filled with fluid. Proprioception signals tell the central nervous system where the joints are in space. When pressure increases on the joint, a signal travels to the central nervous system. As pressure increases on the joint, an “I must protect” signal is sent back from the central nervous system to the joint capsule. The muscles surrounding the joint capsule then contract to protect it. This is known as a splinting action.
The common wisdom is that the weak muscle is the long one, the stronger one is the short one (contracted). A lot of physical therapists will then try to work on the long muscle to strengthen it.
In either case you can have a problem. Muscle fibers don’t stretch: they either contract or they don’t. You simply cannot tell whether a muscle is strong or weak by whether it’s contracted or not.
Chiropractors adjust the joint to break the splinting action. Physical therapists attempt to strengthen the longer muscle. Massage therapists nurture the painful side, which is usually the long and (so called), “weak side.” This worsens the imbalance.
Problems can arise in all three cases.
If a chiropractor adjusts your neck and your neck muscles don’t lengthen in the process your muscles can spasm and traumatize the joint capsule even further. The other two disciplines applied in the normal fashion can also make the problem worse.
What David Scott Lynn does is simplicity itself, at least when you first develop the ability to comprehend it. What he does is look for contractions in the muscle that need to be released. You detect a contraction in the muscle by simply looking for a hard spot (or two or three) in it. You look by probing with your fingers. A hard spot in a muscle will feel to your finger tips like a pebble, a rope, a brick wall, or something else unlike pliable muscle.
Have someone press on the muscle to effect a release. If the pressure causes any discomfort, press lighter. What happens is that the contraction is released and the muscle is returned to its normal operating condition. Press too hard and a defense mechanism is triggered. This procedure simply won’t work if you grit your teeth and try to be a macho stud.
If you have a short (or contracted) muscle, work on it. Do not work on the long or so-called “weak” muscle. Once you have released the contraction and your body structure is balanced you will then be able to utilize what you have to its fullest extent. Most bodybuilders are so full of contracted muscle fibers and microtraumas that there simply isn’t any way for them to realize their maximum potential.
Rather than bore you to tears with a lot of abstract theory, follow us around the gym. David Scott Lynn spent a week with me in Chicago applying what he knows to what I know as he followed us through a workout.
Sit-ups
A bunch of people in our society are running around with contracted stomach muscles. Their back pain is actually caused by the muscles of the stomach wall pulling down and forward on the rib cage, which in turn brings the head down and forward. While David was here in Chicago a young man (21) came to him who had been in an automobile accident a couple of years before. Some mornings his back pain was so severe he couldn’t bend over when he got out of bed. This fellow looked a little puzzled when David laid him out on his back and applied fingertip pressure to his abdominal muscles. David then worked on his hamstrings and glutes. Three hours later he stood up and his back pain was gone. Three weeks later it was still gone.
A lot of people you might think have osteoporosis simply have the same problem. Try to correct it by using the back muscles to improve your posture and, with two sets of muscles pulling against each other, what you wind up with is exhaustion.
The proper way to do sit-ups is to let the tension go out of the muscles (relax) and lengthen the abdominal wall between reps. This probably takes more patience than most of us have.
Hyperextension
If you’re trying for lower back development, keep your feet as close together as possible on this one. The more your feet are apart the more the gluteus maximus is affected. You can also pull your lower back out via glutes and hamstrings. Dewaynn Rogers, one of David’s students, worked on me one day after I had pulled my lower back out. After he applied elbow pressure to the outside of my glutes he then went to my thigh biceps, or hamstrings. My left thigh bicep was taut as a bowstring. He loosened that up, simply by applying gentle pressure. This was on a Wednesday.
Thursday the pain had traveled from the lower center of my spine to my right lower back. Friday I was back having a light workout. Previously such problems had taken weeks to go away.
Squats
We don’t need to belabor the point that someone doing squats with one hip higher than the other is going to have problems. What we do need to point out are common misconceptions concerning lifting belts and the spinal column.
Supposedly a lifting belt gives support to the spinal column in a normally functioning body. That simply isn’t where the support comes in. Think of the abdominal cavity as a large water balloon. The abdomen is a sealed unit: for the most part, water does not migrate in or out. Now think of the spine, rib cage, and everything on top of them as being held up by hydrostatic pressure. David proved this to me one night by working on my abdomen. Before he started I was 6’1". When he measured me at the end of the session I was 6’1 and 1/2".
Once David or one of his students work on you and then you do squats you are in for a treat: they actually become enjoyable.
Lat Machine Pulldowns
Here I had no problems. However, while we were discussing the muscles of the upper back, David did point out some poorly designed equipment in the gym. Certain rowing machines appear to affect the small stabilizing muscles of the upper back, the rhomboids. Whoever designed the machines apparently wasn’t aware of the difference in capabilities between the lats, the traps, and the smaller back muscles. If you tear one of the smaller ones loose, you can’t say you weren’t warned.
Alternate Dumbbell Press
Up until David observed me and worked on me on this one I had been having problems with soreness in the left shoulder. His moves here were classic.
First, he located an area in the junction of the lats and rib cage and applied pressure to it. Once those sections ( lats, teres, delts, traps) released there was nothing to “drag” the deltoid muscle down. Then he went to the left deltoid, in which I had a section that felt like a rope. He put pressure on it until it disappeared. Finally, he applied pressure to the left side of my neck to release the nerve energy from the neck to the shoulder.
Right after that I cranked out 18 reps in the alternate dumbbell press with each hand, nonstop, with 75 lbs. in each hand. I could have done more if I hadn’t run out of breath. I realize that these may not be impressive poundages to some of you young turks but bear in mind that I was 52 years old the day David was in the gym with me. I weighed in at only 202.
When I get to the end of the dumbbell racks, 150 lbs in each hand for a similar number of reps, then you can be impressed. By using David’s system to make a higher percentage of muscle fibers available such an accomplishment is almost a mathematical certainty.
David did point out that the reason I ran out of breath was due to abdominal wall contraction. The lungs can expand down into the abdominal cavity much more easily than they can move the rib cage outward. Create a whole bunch of microtraumas in the abdominal muscles (as I apparently had done) and breathing is going to be more difficult.
Bench Press
The two schools of thought on the bench press are divided into strict and loose. Forget strict. The body functions as a unit and you lose versatility when you try to isolate muscles. Fact is, someone who bridges and bounces is going to increase his ability to do strict reps anyway.
Nautilus Neck Machine
Strengthen the neck and you strengthen the entire upper body. Ever notice that no-one ever works their necks?
My primary problem here was that I had piled so much weight on the machine that I was no longer exercising my neck: I was using my entire upper body. As I’ve told people for over 30 years, it’s an exercise, not a contest. You’re not here to impress anyone. It’s no disgrace to go down in weight to do things correctly. The people sneering at you today won’t even be there tomorrow. Also, as I tell the people I train: do as I say, not as I do.
Side Deltoid Dumbbells Laterals
Do this one with a jerking movement and you create a shearing action in the neck vertebrae. Slow and easy does it. In order to take the pressure off the joint capsules during the exercise, relax the shoulder and elbow joints between reps by letting them drop down and then move the arms out to the side in a pendulum movement.
Seated Alternate Dumbbell Curls
Same principle. Before beginning the movement, relax the shoulder and elbow joints by letting them drop down. Bring the weight up in a scooping movement.
Bear in mind that muscle comes in layers. Just because you find a pebble in one layer doesn’t mean that you’re not going to find a rope further down. The principles David Scott Lynn works from are fairly simple. However, in order to use them effectively in all sorts of different situations, you need training. David has a short seminar he gives and a more extensive training program he conducts.
Why would you want to take this training? As Dewaynn Rogers pointed out to me, there’s a lot of value in helping bodybuilders reach their maximum potential and helping those in pain.
The first female I tried this on (in a health food store), a gorgeous brunette my wife calls “Muscles,” agreed to be worked on in about three (3) minutes. I found a “rope” in her right deltoid, released it in about another three minutes, and she remarked how I had restored circulation to her right hand.
As I left the health food store she called out, “Good hands.”
