Just One Man

I try really hard, but it feels like a crusade. I am just one man. Fitness magazines are the purveyors of myths. It’s the stuff conspiracy theories are made of: They play on fears, I sell only truth. I can get my clients to agree with what I say. They need to believe it.

I do it too. I want what I want and I want it sooner than now. Don’t ask me to wait. God bless you if you come at me extolling the virtues of patience. I admit the hypocrisy inherent in asking it of the people I train.

That said, here’s the deal: Men would be better off cutting the weights they use in half and paying strict attention to form. And women would be better off applying a little meathead logic to their training, in essence, Lift More Weight!

I see it all day long. Men and boys alike, hoisting weights far too heavy, stressing their joints, destroying their ligaments, all so they can answer the question ‘how much can you bench?’ without feeling like a giant pussy.

Contrarily, filling the group exercise studios, are the women. Buying the myth that cardio will burn their fat, and high reps will tone their muscles. Wrong.

I honestly wish I could turn the gym up-side-down, shake it like a snow globe, and have the men settle in the classes, and the women on the free weight floor. Why?

Back in the 80’s I was a meathead, mullet and all. I wore a thick, tight, gold chain, tapered Levis, high top sneakers, and listened to Motley Crue, Dokken, and Great White. I also buried myself under the heaviest weights I could hold. Now I’m paying the price. My back kills. My neck is all fucked up and my knees protest every time I run more than ten feet. I wish I could sit down with 80’s Bry and tell him his life wasn’t any better bigger. As a matter of fact now, almost thirty pounds lighter, life is a million times better.

When I started personal training for a living, I was perplexed about why it was so hard for my women clients to lose weight. I put them on elaborate cardio programs, low carb, high protein diets, and had them perform hundreds of reps with low weights, but none of it worked. At the end of the day they might have been lighter, but their body fat percentage not only stayed the same, in most cases it went up.

Then it hit me. My certification manual didn’t differentiate between the sexes. It didn’t have separate chapters for training women as opposed to men. It dealt with changing human muscle, not gender specific muscle.

Muscle doesn’t tone. It gets smaller, stays the same, or grows. There is no rep range that’ll tone and not build. It’s a myth that women can build bulky, huge muscles. It’s against their physiology, completely contrary to how their bodies work. Estrogen is anti-muscle building, testosterone builds. That’s why we men can usually whip themselves into shape faster than women.

The benefits of weight training have finally caught up to and are now surpassing cardio and range from increasing insulin sensitivity to preventing and reversing osteoporosis. Several exercise journals have reported recently that resistance training is actually better than cardio at burning fat. Who knew? I try to get my clients to understand that exercise isn’t about racing against calories. Calories in vs. calories out doesn’t always work. My clients get an education on metabolism, how it works, why their bodies are in fat storage mode, and how to get their bodies to start spending what it has saved.

And therein lies the problem. With so many periodicals catching people’s attention with, “Loose fifty pounds of fat in ten minutes,” I can’t compete. My plan of retaking control of a metabolism that has slowed takes at least six moths of hard work, determination, and discipline. Shit!