Guaranteed muscle guide: Part 1 The basics

Guaranteed muscle Part 1 the basics

By Richard Baker

Copyright 2012 Richard Baker

Smashwords edition

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Table of contents

Chapter 1 Foreword

Chapter 2 Understanding the adaptive body

Chapter 3 Embracing failure

Chapter4 Useful definitions

Chapter5 Repetitions and muscles in depth

Chapter6 Perfecting your reps

Chapter 7 Routines and sets: How many, why and what order

Chapter 8 Change is good

Chapter9 Rest, avoiding overtraining and injuries

References

Further information from this author

Chapter 1 Foreword

Dear reader, you more than likely fall into 1 of 3 possible groups. You're possibly reading this and thinking ok here we go another book pretending to know all the secrets to a perfect muscular body. Or perhaps as a more advanced bodybuilder you want to look for new ideas and methods for packing on the meat. Or (cue the sad music) you're a new starter to body building or you have tried a little bit but don't seem to be getting any results. Well first thing right now I will say what this book is not!

This book is not an endless list of secret ingredients for your diet that will turn you from a stick insect into a hulking mammoth. Like most people interested in resistance training I have fallen for all the silly gimmicks in the popular magazines: eating chilli raises your metabolism so you get super slim and ripped and add blueberries to your after workout shake for enhanced slow release vitamin C the list goes on. Pick up any popular muscle magazine today and you will find article after article telling you things like a recent study showed 5mg of coffee in an after workout meal raised testosterone 15% and a scientific study recently showed that green tea cleanses all the free radicals out of your muscles. Trust me here, if you took notice of all of these silly studies you would end up eating a veritable ‘witches brew’ of substances and make yourself sick and no further forward in your quest for muscle. Unfortunately this is what most magazines want, shock horror! Did I just say that? Yes, it is actually in their business interests to have you running around in circles getting poor results for as long as possible. If they encouraged people to keep it simple and make slow constant progress then you wouldn't need to keep buying their magazines and they go out of business. I’m being harsh but I believe I’m being truthful (although there are some genuine and useful magazines out there). Remember if you own a business you have to maximise profits and the best way to do that is to get customers to continue to return to you time and time again. This is one of the reasons you get the strange phenomenon of companies telling you dumbbells are now useless and you have to buy kettle bells! Then once everyone has bought kettle bells they then tell you that kettle bells are old fashioned and now you must buy dumbbells again. Then the same companies tell you that if you really want to get big then you must buy special self-adjusting selectable weight dumbbells that for reasons that still elude me cost hundreds of pounds, (that’s not a joke, they really do cost hundreds). I’m sure that if you bought all of these they would then tell you that the reason you are still small is because you now need to buy special shaking weights or some other useless contraption. I hope to give the reader of this book a scientific and logical look at building muscle, whilst entertaining them by showing the abundance of useless devices and techniques and old wives tales that seem to attach themselves to the bodybuilding industry like some horrible leeches.

If there is one bit of advice I can give you right now it would be to try the best you can to stay away from silly magazines which use outrageous claims on the covers. If I see one more magazine promising me a set of six packs in 2 weeks I will scream. It’s absolutely hilarious to see the nonsense claims on the covers month after month. Let me say there are, and always will be good magazines out there, and it’s a matter of looking for ones which are not making silly claims on the cover. Look for magazines which contain solid information and try to avoid ones which have claims like learn how to add 3 inches to your arms in 1 week, and six pack abs by eating bark extract. If you see a claim and it simply seems too good to be true, then you’re probably right in thinking it’s too good to be true. These claims are designed to make you pick the magazine up, they then enhance this effect by adding a picture of a man with perfect six pack abs on the cover, who has been working out for 10 years and so has never done the secret workout or took bark extract in his life. Also avoid magazines which have a picture of the latest movie star on the front telling you they look the way they do because of a simply 10 minute workout, its simply not likely to be true is it?

This book is not a long list of silly little special secret techniques for showing you the perfect arm curl re-discovered from a banned training manual found in the old soviet bloc. Nor is it the book which blows the lid off the secret method for doing side deltoid movements where you tip the dumbbells slightly at the top of the repetition to give secret and huge growth to your muscles. The simple and plain fact of the matter is this; you cannot just pick up a copy of a workout done by some huge guy and automatically expect that if you follow this you will also be huge in no time. I’m really sorry to burst some bubbles here I truly am and I don’t want to start complaining about having an idol but it must be stressed that what suits one guy will not suit the next. There are some constants which will work for all which I will cover in this book at great length but there is no secret workout that will turn you into a monster sized person in a few weeks. The idolised bodybuilders in magazines are of course amazing, and they are also hard working, and they deserve all the fans they get, but get real for a second. Think about it logically, they train intensely day in day out and have done for at least 15 years and they also have fantastic genetics enabling them to get even better results in a shorter time. They represent less than 1% of what the population look like and indeed are capable of ever looking like. They are the absolute elite in bodybuilding, and on top of that pictures can be ‘photo shopped’ very easily further enhancing the look they have. They also have perfect eating plans combined with powerful supplements and massive amounts of rest. Are you starting to get the picture? Instead of looking at them you need to be looking at yourself for once and working out how you can get muscles in a safe a sustainable way to the maximum of your abilities and genetics. And most importantly understand how you can continue this growth over the weeks, months and years ahead.

This book is not a super-secret fast track way to endless gains that would put Hercules to shame in muscle size and mass. I won’t insult your intelligence by simply telling you what to do, in my opinion that is not what a good teacher does. In my opinion a good teacher explains what needs to be done and explains why. A fantastic teacher also demonstrates, in the absence of me being in your room I will have to use words and pictures for exercise demonstration part, but I’m sure you get what I’m saying here. If you follow what I cover in this book you will continue to make great but realistic gains in a logical, scientific, achievable way. Beware idiotic magazine articles about putting 2 and 3 inches on your arms in a week and outrageous workout plans. I’ve seen books telling readers things like ‘One 16 year old kid who tired this method put on 40 pounds in 2 months!’ First things first, when you read silly claims that sound too good to be true, they generally are too good to be true! It is impossible to put on that much weight as pure lean muscle in that amount of time unless your dad was Zeus and your name is Hercules! It has to be fat, water and just maybe some muscle. You need to ask yourself how much of that weight was from fat, how much was from water, how much of that weight gain was from the natural growth a 16 year old would have made naturally regardless of the exercise regimen. Who conducted that study and was it peer reviewed? Was the result repeatable? Who funded the study, was it a supplement company? Without good scientific method and a full detailed explanation you should ignore silly spurious promises, it’s so easy to be sucked in but please try to ignore them. People going all the way back to the Wild West have been suckering people in to buy snake oil and it’s still going on today. The biggest trick ever invented to increase sales is the simple task of leaving information out. If you leave information out you are not telling lies but you are also not fully informing people. Let me give you a simple example. What would you say if I told you I could sell you a device at a reasonable low cost that allowed you to see right through solid walls? Interested? What if I told you that this device can allow you to see right through metal, stone, wood, no matter what the wall is made from you can see through and on top of that you can use it to actually move your hand right through the wall as well. Want one? I know I would, now how much will you pay for this device? It’s easy to get swept up in only the specific facts presented by the seller isn’t it? Want to know the name of the amazing device I just made you want to buy? It’s a window. Yeah it’s funny but it’s exactly what advertisers do when they only give you one side of the story. They tell you all the brilliant things their product is, and never tell you the basic facts and downsides; it’s the opposite of impartiality. This sort of thing goes on all the time, easy examples are things like ZMA supplements and sit up machines. The results of ZMA look brilliant, it’s not until you look at the small print to see why that is the case that you realise you’re not getting the whole picture, I will cover this in more depth in the diet chapters in a following book so read on. Also sit up machines are a huge pile of garbage, they tell you over and over what this machine will do, and that’s all true, but the information they always miss out is "you can do all the abdominal exercises in the world and still not get a six pack unless you lose fat to see them, I will cover this in more depth later in guaranteed muscle books and I will also tell you that sit up machine manufacturers never tell you, that sit-ups are free, just use a floor!

The fact of the matter here is I am essentially shooting myself in the foot writing this book. Why? Simple, rather than tell you a whole load of lies and pseudo-science rubbish which would make me money as you would fail and have to buy yet another book. I am attempting to inform you the best ways to eat train and rest which will in my opinion guarantee you will make gains, regardless of your genetic background. I will also fully explain why I am telling you the things I am, and I will try to explain scientifically why they work. And when I refer to people’s genetic background I refer to the well know somatotypes. (That’s posh for body type, for example: tall and slim, short and stocky or falling between these two). Without going too far into Somatotype classifications, when you look at the population you will notice that you see 3 main body types:

Ectomorph: These people show easily the visible signs of being slim with very low fat storage and small thin muscles. You might hear these people being refer to as skinny. A good example of these people are long distance runners and everyone knows a person who seems to be able to eat all day and never put on any weight that's an Ectomorph due to their metabolism.

Endomorph: These people tend to show signs of being large framed and by that I mean they appear to have much more fat stored with a large bone structure and a wide waist, don't mistake my description here for obese people (that’s an extreme level of fat storage above and beyond a simple body type). But they will show visible fat storage, they will also be the people who you know that seem to be able to put on weight by just eating a lettuce leaf! This again is predominantly due to metabolism. This body type is not best suited for endurance sports.

Mesomorph: This body type is the one that most men strive for as it is associated with having low fat levels with a slim waist but the appearance of a wide shoulder frame and a good amount of muscle, these people tend to find it easier to put on and keep muscle and for that reason it is the most apt body type of top body builders as this gives them a natural advantage for obvious reasons.

I will touch on the subject of body types and genetics later in the book but the above quick guide to body types should give you a basic awareness of the body types out there and what they tend to be good or bad at. While on the subject of body types I would like to say straight away I was born and lived most of my life as an Ectomorph (skinny guy). In fact as a way to prove the point I will tell you that every morning I used to buy at least 5 bars of chocolate and then spend the morning eating them at work I would then have a huge ‘fast food’ dinner followed by more chocolate in the afternoon then I would have a large evening meal followed by another meal before bed and I found it impossible to put on weight. It infuriated my work colleagues who were on diets but I was able to do that. Although I was not adding any muscle at all despite doing a billion biceps curls a week. Of course I no longer sit around eating masses of chocolate which is nutritionally poor for anything other than raw calorific content. Now I eat healthy, but still in large amounts which is one of the hallmarks of the Ectomorph. Despite not being able to grow any bigger by eating alone after using my methods I have so far done the impossible. I am now a muscular guy even though I should ideally be a runner or involved in sports that require a slim light frame like running. I have done it, and if I can then I believe that anyone can! Your genetics are not an impregnable wall to stop you getting the body you want, you just need to know how to train and use your genetic advantages when you can. I will explain the method of using your genetics to your advantage later in the book. So before any skinny guys put the book down let me tell you, you are going to find it so easy to get a six pack using the books in the guaranteed muscle guide. And on top of that you will love the fact you can eat tons of (nutritious) food.

This book will not give you the so called perfect routine that if followed will keep on giving you massive muscle growth for years, and you will never need to use any other routine ever again. Trust me there is no secret routine that will work the best and forever, anyone who tells you otherwise is misinformed and although they may think they are helping they are not. I find the best way to tell when advice given in a gym is good or bad is as simple as asking one question. Why? If they cannot give you a scientific and/or reasonable answer then it's probably just an old wives tale or they are repeating something they have heard or assumed to be right. This is tantamount to passing on folklore, it might sound good, hell it may even sound plausible at times but without a sensible scientific reason to it its usually a load of old garbage. Let's face facts here, if you went to see a doctor and they advised you to take a certain drug but when asked why he said I don't know or well it just works, my friend told me once, alarm bells would be going off in your head! Now I’m not asking people to be super critical of everything but please remember when someone tells you a weight lifting tip you need to think a little and look at the facts, does this person know what he is talking about for a start? Even if they are well wishing, people tend to be repeating a myth or a long held belief that has no scientific basis. You need to be critical of the facts when it comes to weight training. Ask yourself why can’t he or she tell me why a particular thing is good or bad? It sounds like common sense but you would be so surprised how many people fall into the trap of believing anything they are told. A classic example for the advanced body builder would be people in the gym telling you to do a circular shrugging motion when working on your trapezius muscles. It’s quite simply a complete nonsense movement which does absolutely nothing extra what so ever for the muscle in question as opposed to correct form. A simple up and down is sufficient to work the trapezius (the muscles of the upper back/base of the neck). So then why is it still passed around like a dark secret from body builder to body builder to this day? Quite simple, they don't know any better and they have not stopped for one second to ask where this information is coming from or why doing it that way should be better. For