Month: April 2016

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What Are the Causes of Diet Failure?

Moving on from last week’s piece that didn’t say much, I want to delve into a topic that will be a bit of a mish-mash from a book I started last year from which the woman’s book spun off from.  I will get back to it and this may be a bit disorganized since I’m pulling stuff out of some different chapters but so be it.  But I want to look today at the causes of diet failure.  Now, I’ve written a bit about this before although that was more about how dieters fail their diets but this is all inter-related.

To be honest, and I’ve been saying this for a lot of years, I don’t think that the issue with dieting failure has much to do with diet (or exercise) per se.  That is, we know and have known for a long-time HOW to get people to lose weight/fat (I’m going to use these interchangeably for writing style reasons just understand that body composition is more important than changes in body weight per se and let’s move on). … Keep Reading

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Why Isn’t There More Research on Women?

Since I got behind on writing this week (I had to set up for a 3 hour webinar yesterday), I’m running an excerpt from the forthcoming women’s book  about research on women and why there isn’t more of it.  It’s probably subtly different from what is actually in the book since I did a lot of rewriting but hopefully gets the concepts across.  There’s exactly nothing practical here, it’s just kind of some interesting (I hope) blather to introduce the topic.

Research on Women: Part 1

For a number of reasons, a great deal of early research (with the possible exception of diet research) was done on males. This was especially true in the athletic realm and especially in the early days of sports science research. It wasn’t until about the 80’s when a great deal of the gender specific or comparative research really started to be done. But as more and more research started to develop that either repeated the same studies in women or compared men and women, it became rapidly clear that there were differences, some of which were subtle and some of which were distinctly not so subtle.… Keep Reading

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What is Sprint Training?

I want to continue talking about the idea of training like an athlete to look like an athlete and the fact that when people say that they mean train to look like a sprinter.  The logic here is that the the sprinter’s body type, especially compared to the endurance athlete is due to the sprint training.

And hopefully I’ve divested you of that stupid idea.  The initial body type is genetic, racial and the fact that sports select for certain body types.  Most of what happens physique wise is related to whether or not the athlete lifts weights or not rather than the sprint training per se.

Shall We Play a Game?

But let’s play a game today.  Let’s ASSume that the body types of sprinters is built by their sprint work (I still see this floating around, the idea that you should run sprints to be built like a sprinter even if it’s total nonsense). … Keep Reading

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Some Less Well Known Weider Principles

So I know I was originally supposed to finish off the sprinter versus marathoner series today but then it dawned on me that it’s been one year since I wrote perhaps my most inspired training article where I gave away the Ultimate Training Secret of the Illuminatty (for which I am now in constant danger of repercussions).  And that means that I need to do a followup (inasmuch as I can ever follow that bit of brilliance).  So today I present you with some less well known Weider Principles.

Who is Joe Weider?

For some history, Joe Weider is usually considered to be the father of modern bodybuilding.  Through his magazines (such as Flex and Muscle and Fitness) and Arnold, he truly brought bodybuilding into the mainstream in a way that it simply hadn’t been up to that point.

Previously seen as a niche activity for narcissistic idiots (who’s sexuality was questioned in that they liked to primp around in tights covered in baby oil), bodybuilding became mainstream and fairly well accepted.… Keep Reading