Has anyone used the Parrillo system successfully?
About 10 years ago, being new to weightlifting, I naively assumed Parillo might be correct. I tried his ideas and quickly became quite overfat.
Most men cannot consume nearly the amount
of calories he consumes (including with the
specific recommendations he makes) without become fat, very rapidly.
I agree. It overtrained me and made me fat. I followed it exactly for one year and gained 10 lbs of muscle and 25 lbs of fat.
There are better systems out there. He (Mr. P.) has some great ideas and some really good exercise equipment, but the idea that if you eat more you can not over train does not work for most people.
Bill…were you taking body stats as John recommends every week or two? Were you training as John recommends? Apparently, you didn’t or you went too high in calories. You don’t just start at 6000 calories. It’s a gradual process as you build your metabolism. Your body stats will let you know if you need to up your calories or lower them. John and his staff helped me a lot when I was competing and his system worked better than anything I’ve ever tried. John has been around a very long time now and has stood the test of time. He has had great success with numerous bodybuilders since the 80’s and his methods still work. To answer your question, try it for a few months and see for yourself, but try his whole program. I think you’ll like the results. You’ve probably tried everything else. You’ve got nothing to lose and muscle to gain.
I’ve obtained good results using some aspects of his system. He does have a lot of good info. to offer but if you decide to follow his program 100% just don’t think you can immediately jump up to eating 8-10000 a day without putting on a lot of fat.
In the early 90’s Parillo was getting a lot of press,he and others like Colgan were recommending low fat diets with copious amounts of carbs.I did gain some muscle but this pattern of eating eventually made me bloated,often lethargic,and I also found it difficult to keep up my apetite.When I measured my blood pressure it was slightly elevated,it was normal before beginning this diet.I switched to a higher fat,lower carb diet and all these problems quickly disapeared.I also think his anti-fruit stance is off-base,he qoutes some study where rats were fed a fruit diet and developed a copper deficiency-woopee,eat just one food group exclusively and it will be no big surprise if a deficiency occurs.
I do like his emphasis on stretching,he kind of pushed that a lot,but overall I think they are better systems.
There is no such thing as overtraining only undereating. Yeah right.
Parillo was not then recommending
adjusting the diet down based on ongoing
body composition results. In fact his
writings declared repeatedly that it was
IMPOSSIBLE to gain fat on his diet.
Perhaps – I haven’t read anything by him in many years – he has since adjusted his recommendations in some sort of recognition of reality. I’d certainly hope so.
He has seemed to calm down in his demeanor, he doesn’t make Mentzer-like “this is the only truth” statements anymore. If you look at his publications, it shows a wide variance of caloric ranges for all the athletes, although he still pumps MCT’s pretty hard in his articles. I like the ideas of high calorie diet, but all the super low fat stuff gets tiring. I like his ideas about cardio as a must have for offseason conditioning, however.
T-People
To even look at that parillo site made me sick…that guy said shit that is literally physiologically abusurd. anabolic and catabolic simultaneously without roids…and the list continues…we should know better…thats why we have each other i guess.
That guy is batshit crazy.
Peace out up in this hauaaaaaase