Author name: aaroncurtisonline

Have you ever found yourself stagnating with your progress in the gym? Not losing weight and finding it very hard to be as ‘in shape’ as you once used to? I have experienced this and it was both confusing and frustrating. It was confusing and frustrating because I couldn’t see why it was happening, when in the past, progress in the offseason for me was quite linear and when I said ‘I want to get leaner’, then I easily got leaner also. It actually took me years to see why I was experiencing such results… or lack there of, but when I did realise what was going on, it was rather logical and straight forward. I have written about this kind of thing before, but I feel it is something alot of us overlook. For 23 years of my 37 on this planet, I have eaten, trained with weights and slept. I will assume everyone who trains with weights also eats and sleeps, so essentially we are all doing the exact same things. But, we are not. For periods of my life, I have been more and also less focussed on these three things. It has varied. Depending on my level of focus, my results then vary also. The more time and effort I commit to eating, training and sleeping, the better my results in regards to progressing in the gym and optimising my body composition. I may have been eating, training and sleeping for the last 23 years, but I can’t say I have been 100% soley focused on those three things for that whole time. When I started training in 1998 at 14 years of age, it was just something I started doing because a friend of the family gave me a couple dumbells. I’d seen my father lifting weights, so I thought I may as well lift some also. I had no goals at the time, I was just lifting some weights for the sake of it. Over the years I got more and more into my weight training (mainly due to injury from football and running track) and eventually realised I had to eat more than a sparrow and stop doing ridiculous amounts of cardio if I wanted to grow some muscles. I had never given growing muscles any thought, when I started training, so I only started eating more like a bodybuilder when I stopped playing football and stopped running track as seriously as I used to and actually gave bodybuilding some focus (this was probably around around 2002-2003, so I had been training for 4-5 years already). The day I actually gave up running track completely (March 2008) to focus solely on becoming the best bodybuilder I could possibly be, was the time I made better gains than I had ever made before. Even better than my newbie gains, 10 years prior… I actually never got any newbie gains, so that wasn’t hard to beat! Perhaps just too much cardio and not enough foods back then, for my body to grow excess muscles. From 2008 until I moved out of home in 2012, I can honestly say that nothing got in the way of my eating, sleeping or training. Not work, not friends, not family, not funerals, nothing. I was committed to being the best bodybuilder that I could possibly be, so I never gave myself the choice, of prioritising anything else in front of my sleeps, foods or training. To prioritise anything else, at any time, would just be cheating myself and my goals, so it was not an option. I worked fulltime as a personal trainer still, but I made sure my clients fit perfectly around my eating, training and sleeping. I still saw my friends, went surfing occasionally and would go clubbing quite often, but I never missed a meal or missed out on sleep because of it. I felt I did everything I wanted to do, despite the restrictions people around me may have seen. I loved the ultra focus I had towards my bodybuilding. It gave me structure, goals to aim for and being so routined and disciplined, was something I felt I was able to do better than anyone else… anyone else I’d ever met anyway. In my mind, I was a world champion. Perhaps not on stage in competition, but I knew in my mind I was out sleeping, out eating and out training everyone else and for me, that was a very empowering belief. Despite this very strong self belief that I could out work anyone else on the planet, I actually had quite a negative self belief about my ability as a bodybuilder, competition wise. I knew I could outwork anyone off-stage, but I also knew that so many people I’d seen in the gym and in comps seemed to grow muscle at a much faster rate than I and on the bodybuiding stage, the more muscles the better. I may have been the hardest worker in the room, but genetically, I saw myself as just average. Not shit, I never thought I had bad genetics in regards to muscle growth, but I did not grow like some of my clients were able to grow and especially some of the guys I saw competing. I saw juniors twice my size! I remember seeing Josh Lenartowicz win a junior world title, I think back in 2006 or 2007 in the INBA (Yes, he was actually natty) and his level of musculature was fkn ridiculous. Aaron Smith, Clifford Barnes and I had some mutual friends and again, they were big for open bodybuilding, let alone juniors! So, when this skinny little natural bodybuilder won a national open bodybuilding title in 2010 (see picture), it came as quite a shock. I was confused how every other athlete had let me win. I knew I looked good, but in my mind, I only looked that way due to my work ethic, so how lazy must all these other

If you are on a low calorie diet, it would be wise to get the majority of those calories from unprocessed, whole foods. Those types of foods tend to allow you to eat a greater volume, helping you feel more satiated (full), with fewer calories, a greater amount of micronutrients and more fibres (very important for gut health) than their more processed friends. If you are on a very high calorie diet, then you are much more likely to be hitting your micronutient and fibre requirements anyway, so including more calorie dense, nutrient poor, processed foods in your diet is obviously fine and possibly even required to fit enough foods in, to hit your caloric intake needs. I personally focus alot on consuming the vast majority of my calories from whole, unprocessed foods and only start adding more calorie dense, processed stuff when my calories are high enough to satisfy my usually very ravaging appetite. That’s me though and I am generally very hard to satisfy hunger wise. If you get full very easily, then as stated prior, including more processed, calorie dense things in your everyday diet would be wise. Eat well, train hard and sleep lots.

After last weeks post about swapping certain foods to similar options, taste and texture wise, but also lower calorie, this week I thought I would list a couple absolute poverty calorie foods, that I find handy during times of extreme calorie restriction. I have never managed to get a client to gain bodyfat from eating too much zucchini or cauliflower. More foods and less cals, that’s a win when you are on poverty calories. Eat well, train hard and sleep lots. <3

Whilst reducing calories in an attempt to lose bodyfat, one can often struggle with feeling satieted (full) after meals. Being overly hungry is a big reason many people cannot remain compliant to their diet and tend to binge on excess calories. Here are a few little things I tend to do whilst dieting on lower calories, to help keep my food volume up, whilst keeping my meals very similar to what i had been doing (textrure/taste wise), but my calories down. I find all these alternatives allow me to psychologically and physically feel like I am maintaining my usual diet, but also drop my calories considerably at the same time, allowing me to lose some body fat. Time to get shredded. Eat well, train hard and sleep lots. <3

One of the most common mistakes i see people make when they are attempting to diet down to single digit bodyfat levels, is a complete lack of intensity in the gym. Training intensity can decline a little, after an extended period of extreme calorie restriction, or if the person starts doing excessive amounts of exercise (cardio) than what they were used to, but not after the first day of their diet, having dropped their calories from 3000/day to 2750! I see this as more of a psychological issue, rather than a physical one. I feel the ability to continue to smash fkn weights, whilst dieting down, helps immensely, in regards to maintaining your muscle mass, strength and that overall full, muscular look, even when going through an extended period of calorie restriction. The people I see, who lose the ability to train hard and can never hit any personal best lifts, just because they have removed a few calories from their diet, also seem to struggle moreso with their fat loss. Those that are able to maintain their maximal intensity in the gym are also able to lose more fat, more quickly and more consistently, over the course of their cutting phase, leading to a much more successful end result. Stay bigger, stronger and fuller, by maintaining more muscle. Lose more body fat, by maintaining the metabolic stress that an intense, productive training session yields. Eat at a calorie deficit and progressively overload. …for as long as humanly possible. Until you are really fkn lean and depleted. Only then will I accept the fact your training will suffer a bit… but you would be surprised how little strength you actually lose, when you eat well, sleep well and really focus on maintaining it in the gym. Train hard (not too much cardio), eat well (all the proteins) and sleep lots (8+hrs/night). Time to get shredded.

Reference To The effects of consuming a high protein diet (4.4 g/kg/d) on body composition in resistance-trained individuals https://jissn.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1550-2783-11-19 I tend to keep my nutrition and training advice fairly simple. Q1: How do I gain more muscle?A1: Eat a calorie surplus and progressively overload. Q2: How do I lose more body fat? I’ve lost 10lbs over the last 8 weeks on 2540 calories, but now my bodyweight won’t budge!?A2: Eat less calories. Generally, that’s all that needs to be said, if the person asking the question is following a good diet already, which if they are a client of mine, I would certainly hope is the case. Lets create a hypothetical scenario though, from Q2 above. Client: GettingShreddedBrahGoals: Get shredded (fat loss)Starting body weight: 192lbsCurrent body weight: 182lbsMacros: P200 C300 F60Calories: 2540 This client is eating 2540 calories and has plateaued with his fat loss. So what do we do? Drop calories of course! As I stated earlier, generally that’s what i would do. Simple. But this post isn’t about what I would generally do, it’s about when a calorie is not just a calorie and that all calories are not actually created equal. Instead of dropping calories, we could increase protein and drop carbs, keeping calories the same. Don’t be silly, 2540cal is 2540cal. It will make no difference. Or will it? I had a weightloss client recently ask if we could substitute some protein for carbohydrates, as his protein was rather high and carbohydrate intake was getting fairly low. Off the top of my head, protein was abit over 300g/day and carbohydrate abit over 200g/day. I said sure, happy experiment if you wish. So, that week we swapped 100g of protein with 100g of carbohydrate. One week later, this client checked in 3lbs heavier. We then decided to swap the extra 100g of carbohydrates back to protein. =P Throughout my own weightloss phase, over the last 40 or so weeks and having played around with amounts of protein during past contest preps, as well as many clients, over the years, I can guarantee that consuming excess protein from things like chicken breast, Turkey breast, kangaroo (lean unprocessed animals, etc), has no negative effect on body composition and is a great was to increase satiety (feeling full/satisfied), as long as you equate for the extra fats you will then be consuming also. For example, even though chicken breast is very lean, if you ate an extra 1000g of it per day, that’s an extra 20g of fats also, so you need to adjust the rest of your diet to decrease 20g fat somewhere else, to make up for that. So, when I say weight gain/weight loss is purely about calories in Vs calories out, that is generally true, but there are always exceptions to the rule. For those of us that lift and enjoy carrying around excess muscle tissue and lower levels of body fat, high protein diets are great when it comes to a combination of fat loss/muscle gain/muscle retention and feeling satiated. If you are currently maintaining your bodyweight on fairly low calories, whilst trying to stay lean, but struggling because you feel hungry and weak, I say try increasing your protein intake from any lean, unprocessed animal source and see what happens. For example, lets use GettingShreddedBrah again. We could take his current maintenance calories of 2540, which consist of the macros: P200 C300 F60, chuck in a heap more chicken breast and kangaroo steak, adding extra 100g of protein per day, increasing is calories to 2940, macros: P300 C300 F60 and he will feel more full/satisfied after his meals, probably feel stronger in the gym and not gain any body fat. Winning all round if you ask me. High protein FTW. ^_^ https://jissn.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1550-2783-11-19

I had a client a little disheartened recently, about his progress in the gym. We had just started working together on his nutrition and training and after a couple weeks, he mentioned he was feeling alright in the gym, but his strength wasn’t really increasing and that he was only getting an extra 1 or 2 reps on most exercises, each week. Getting an extra 1 or 2 reps, on most of your exercises, every week? Sounds pretty average to me. Or does it? Let’s just expand that out over a 12 month period. Let’s say you are currently bench pressing 100kg/225lbs for 6 reps. Let’s also say that you cycle this exercise throughout a 6-12 repetition range and that everytime you hit 12 (or more) reps on a given weight, that you chuck an extra 2.5kg plate on each end of the barbell the following week and that then takes you back down to 6 reps, at which point you work your way, 1 rep per week, back upto 12. Sticking to the conservative end of the 1-2 increases in reps each week, Let’s say we gain just 1 extra rep on the bench press, every week. Thats 52 reps over the course of the year, but obviously we don’t just keep repping out on the same weight, we need to increase load also. Gaining 1 rep per week, it takes us 7 weeks, to go from a 6 rep set to a 12 rep set, on any given exercise, at which point we then increase the weight on the bar by 5kg. We have 52 weeks to work with, so lets divide 52 by 7 and that will give us the number of times we have cycled through the repetition continuum and added an extra 5kg to our bench press. 52 divided by 7 equals 7.43. We will round that down to 7, as we only deal with whole numbers here, so that’s 7 times that we have cycled through the 6 to 12 repetition cycle and added an extra 5kg to the bar. Now let me explain what all these little numbers represent in a real life gym setting. 52 weeks ago you benched 100kg for 6 reps. Every week you trained, you gained only 1 rep on the bench press. Everytime you reached 12 reps on that given weight, you added 5kg to the bar and performed 6 repetitions on that new weight the following week. You then worked your way back upto 12 reps on that new weight, over the next 7 weeks, at which point you increased the load by 5kg again and the cycle continues! After 52 weeks of apparently very average strength gains (one extra rep per week), you have now gone from bench pressing 100kg/225lbs for 6 reps, to 135kg/297lbs for 6 reps. For those of you who aren’t too savvy on what’s good and bad, in regards to progress in the gym, for any intermediate or advanced trainer to gain 35kg/72lbs on their 6 rep max bench press, in a 12 month period, is absolutely, fucking amazing.So, your crappy, little, 1 rep extra per week gains in strength, were in the end, perhaps not so crappy. Eat at a calorie surplus, progressively overload in the gym, get plenty of sleep and you will grow muscle tissue. One extra rep, in isolation, means almost nothing. No one develops a great physique with only one more rep. But, extend that little extra rep each week, out over the course of a whole year, or even many years and then that crappy, little, extra rep, means everything. Progressive overload. It’s a beautiful thing. <3 Train hard, eat well and sleep lots.