03-22-2024, 02:42 PM
The fourth thing that worked for me was the thing that gave me more results than anything else in terms of getting lean while keeping the muscle. I had been living the "wild" life (loads of fast food, drinking and some pot smoking) for a good while and accordingly I had gained a ton of weight. Me and my so-called friends still hit the gym infrequently and we all managed to lie to each other and to ourselves that we were getting more muscular. But then the day came when I realized that too much of our precious time was sacrificed for stupid things and we were actually all fucking fat.
I then pretty much cut my relationships to my so-called friends and started to figure out how could I get lean. I weighted over 90 kgs / 200 lbs at the time and im little short of 180 cm / 5.9 ft tall. Now that Internet was a thing, I was able to search stuff more easily than from books. I ended up with one ebook, Tom Venuto’s “Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle”. Venuto’s approach really gave me the tools to achieve my goals at the time, which were pretty much what the book’s title says, to burn the fat and feed the muscle.
Venuto’s approach was and is very thorough, and it is a bodybuilding approach. He is a former competitive “natty” bodybuilder who had written the book during the years of coaching others. I think he still updates the book. But anyway, the book goes through not only diet and exercise (strength training and cardio), but every other aspect of weight loss. So it includes goal setting, motivation, emotional things etc. For me the diet was the big thing. To list things, here are only some of the things what the book recommended and what I did (at least what I remember):
Diet
- Calculation of the caloric expenditure by using a formula (age, gender, activity levels, fat percentage etc. was needed, the book showed couple of different formulas)
- Calculating the caloric deficit needed to drop a safe amount of weight per week while keeping muscle as much as possible
- Calculating a surplus days caloric need
- Pre prepping meals for the week during the weekend according to the plan
- Cycling of calories to keep muscle mass during the cut, so basically 2-3 days of deficit ,then a surplus or a maintenance day, idea was to not stay in deficit for too long periods of time
- 1-2 cheat meals during the week, so no cheat days or weekends, but meals. Ideally in the mid week and during the weekend
- Adjusting the calories / meals every week according the weight / fat percentage results of the week (weight and fat percentage were measured daily)
Tools
- Body fat calipers for measuring the bodyfat
- Basic scale
- Food scale
- Spreadsheet for the endless counting, Internet calculators work well too
Cardio
The books has limitless options for the cardio, so you can choose what you want to do and how. But the recommendation is in the HIIT type of thing. So I did that. For me it meant daily 20-30 minutes rowing sessions. One day a week was off if I remember correctly. I think rowing was seen as the best overall option for cardio, because of the muscles involved and because it’s more doable for most people than for example running. The HIIT was done to burn more calories in a short time, and to burn more with the afterburning effect. So high intensity took a lot less time, and it burned more after the session than low intensity cardio. There was an option to do the cardio during the strength session or as a separate session. I did it as a separate session because at the time I had an easy situation, I lived alone and the gym was at the office I was working in.
Strength training / bodybuilding
The books has probably one of the shortest chapters about the strength training. The idea is that it goes through the basic concepts but the reader should find out by him/herself what the different exercises really are and how to do them. Venuto’s thought is that there already are so many books about strength training exercises that it was not really needed. Funnily to me it was the perfect chapter in its simplicity. It shows the basic bodybuilding splits, full body, upper/lower, three day split and four day split. Venuto saw the 4 day split as the grandaddy of all bodybuilding programs so I used that. A great thing about the chapter for me was that it only gave you a simple table that had different muscle groups, and for every muscle group it gave you 5 different exercises. So then you can build the program, just pick the exercises you want put them to the the split you want. This also meant that I could decide what I do when I’m in the gym and I see what is available. With the 4 day split the options for weekly training were basically 4 or 5 days training, so 2 on 1 off, 2 on 2 off, or 2 on 1 off, 2 on 1 off. Otherwise what I remember are the following:
The split:
Day 1: Chest, biceps, abs
Day 2: Back, calves
Day 3: Shoulders, triceps, abs
Day 4: Quads, hams
- 9-12 sets for bigger muscle groups, so 3-4 exercises
- 6-9 sets for smaller, 2-3 exercises
- mainly 8-12 reps, maybe a bit higher for the calves and abs
- 60-90 secs rest in between sets most of the time
- shitload of supersets, I’m not sure if the book says a lot about these, but the author talked about those a lot in his own site. Supersets were also familiar to me from Franco’s program. I also tried to maximise the burning effect during the weight training so supersets were the thing
- Twice a day training was an option, so I did often that because I went to the office early in the morning, so I could basically exercise in the morning, during the lunch and / or after work
- The idea was to keep sessions fairly short, don’t remember the science but at least after an hour the muscle building effect starts to decrease. Because I did often two sessions a day, they didn’t really take much time, and I could really push. most of the time I was out after 30 minutes.
- I think the book didn’t really recommend that much big lifts, especially when cutting the weight, so I didn’t do a single deadlift, and I didn’t really do too heavy squats either. Most of the stuff I did were with dumbbells, they were easiest to use for supersets even if the gym was busy. I also already had a bad shoulder injury, so the dumbbells were safer to use than barbells.
Positives:
- Weight came down according to the plan
- Same was with the fat percentage
- Training and eating was easy because everything was planned
- I wasn’t really never hungry
- Results came very quickly
- Self esteem got better, I felt supergood
- People noticed my change, this was the only period in my life that I actually was approached by women
- Some friends that met me for the firs time then, still remember how I looked, which is also a negative today
- There was a feeling of control, I even knew very well how much my food is going to cost all the time
- I didn’t really live that healthy life all time, I was actually smoking at the time and I was drinking pretty often during weekends. But when it comes to looks, this was by far the best I’ve ever looked in my life. Maybe not bi, but lean.
- The baseline diet macronutrient ratio followed general health guidelines, so I was always eating a mixed diet and more than half of it was carbs (which isn’t that popular I guess). The books goes deep with different diet options if you are not getting results.
Negatives:
- A lot of time and motivation was lost doing the food preparation and all the calculation
- I had to do laundry all the time because all of my training clothes were sweaty because of all the training
- Life circled a lot around this, so it was difficult to suddenly changes plans. Although even if I did change something, I still seemed to maintain a high level of fitness, so a drink here and there didn’t do much, same with added cheat meals, they didn’t really wreck the ship
- I broke the training in to too many pieces, I could’ve done cardio sessions during my strength sessions to save time but I decided to do everything separately to maximize results
- The program is an overkill for the job for most people, especially for a regular Joe
Overall this was and still is THE program for me. I didn’t have too good of a fat caliper, but the one that I had showed that in the end I was hoovering at around 10%. At that point I felt and looked good enough for me to stop. My biggest regret is that I never really got to use these principles in to bulking. I initially thought about doing it after the cutting phase, but It didn’t happen because life got on the way. I moved to another city and didn’t really have enough money to eat or excercise properly. I managed to try the bulking for a brief moment of time, and I realized that it would cost a ton, and I would have had to eat a shitload of food. Especially the protein was kind of a problem for me already during the cut. I’m just very bad at eating a lot of protein, and because of that I had to use protein powder to get my protein high enough even during the cutting. And that was the case even though the book recommended to get as much as possible of the calories from real foods, and that was what I tried to do.
After I had moved to another city, I tried to keep up with my training and diet. I couldn’t afford a gym membership, so I started doing bodyweight stuff at home. I also tried to keep up with the diet instinctively although I didn’t have the money to really properly follow the kind of a diet I wanted to. But funnily enough, I still got a bit leaner, I don’t know why, but it felt that the program even worked for some time after I had quit it. The leanest I’ve ever been was probably about 6 months after I had quit calculating calories etc.
One caveat about the program is that it’s an overkill for the job for most. It’s like the author said about the program himself: “it’s like shooting a squirrel with a bazooka”. And that is the truth, for a regular Joe, it just a lot more than what is needed. Venuto has also written a more approachable book and program for average folks training with weight loss goals called “The Body Fat Solution.”. I haven’t really properly read it, but I’ve skimmed it through and it is good stuff too.
This also raises a good question that I’ve often thought about. Would I actually experienced the exact same results by doing a full body session 2 times a week followed by a brief cardio session, provided that the diet would have been as strict as it was. I’ll never know but somehow I think that that I probably would have ended in about the same place that I did with the four way split and daily HIIT-sessions. But anyway, I really, really, really highly recommend this approach for people who want results and have the time, money, energy and dedication. And it’s a great book even if you don’t want to make it as complicated as I did.
I then pretty much cut my relationships to my so-called friends and started to figure out how could I get lean. I weighted over 90 kgs / 200 lbs at the time and im little short of 180 cm / 5.9 ft tall. Now that Internet was a thing, I was able to search stuff more easily than from books. I ended up with one ebook, Tom Venuto’s “Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle”. Venuto’s approach really gave me the tools to achieve my goals at the time, which were pretty much what the book’s title says, to burn the fat and feed the muscle.
Venuto’s approach was and is very thorough, and it is a bodybuilding approach. He is a former competitive “natty” bodybuilder who had written the book during the years of coaching others. I think he still updates the book. But anyway, the book goes through not only diet and exercise (strength training and cardio), but every other aspect of weight loss. So it includes goal setting, motivation, emotional things etc. For me the diet was the big thing. To list things, here are only some of the things what the book recommended and what I did (at least what I remember):
Diet
- Calculation of the caloric expenditure by using a formula (age, gender, activity levels, fat percentage etc. was needed, the book showed couple of different formulas)
- Calculating the caloric deficit needed to drop a safe amount of weight per week while keeping muscle as much as possible
- Calculating a surplus days caloric need
- Pre prepping meals for the week during the weekend according to the plan
- Cycling of calories to keep muscle mass during the cut, so basically 2-3 days of deficit ,then a surplus or a maintenance day, idea was to not stay in deficit for too long periods of time
- 1-2 cheat meals during the week, so no cheat days or weekends, but meals. Ideally in the mid week and during the weekend
- Adjusting the calories / meals every week according the weight / fat percentage results of the week (weight and fat percentage were measured daily)
Tools
- Body fat calipers for measuring the bodyfat
- Basic scale
- Food scale
- Spreadsheet for the endless counting, Internet calculators work well too
Cardio
The books has limitless options for the cardio, so you can choose what you want to do and how. But the recommendation is in the HIIT type of thing. So I did that. For me it meant daily 20-30 minutes rowing sessions. One day a week was off if I remember correctly. I think rowing was seen as the best overall option for cardio, because of the muscles involved and because it’s more doable for most people than for example running. The HIIT was done to burn more calories in a short time, and to burn more with the afterburning effect. So high intensity took a lot less time, and it burned more after the session than low intensity cardio. There was an option to do the cardio during the strength session or as a separate session. I did it as a separate session because at the time I had an easy situation, I lived alone and the gym was at the office I was working in.
Strength training / bodybuilding
The books has probably one of the shortest chapters about the strength training. The idea is that it goes through the basic concepts but the reader should find out by him/herself what the different exercises really are and how to do them. Venuto’s thought is that there already are so many books about strength training exercises that it was not really needed. Funnily to me it was the perfect chapter in its simplicity. It shows the basic bodybuilding splits, full body, upper/lower, three day split and four day split. Venuto saw the 4 day split as the grandaddy of all bodybuilding programs so I used that. A great thing about the chapter for me was that it only gave you a simple table that had different muscle groups, and for every muscle group it gave you 5 different exercises. So then you can build the program, just pick the exercises you want put them to the the split you want. This also meant that I could decide what I do when I’m in the gym and I see what is available. With the 4 day split the options for weekly training were basically 4 or 5 days training, so 2 on 1 off, 2 on 2 off, or 2 on 1 off, 2 on 1 off. Otherwise what I remember are the following:
The split:
Day 1: Chest, biceps, abs
Day 2: Back, calves
Day 3: Shoulders, triceps, abs
Day 4: Quads, hams
- 9-12 sets for bigger muscle groups, so 3-4 exercises
- 6-9 sets for smaller, 2-3 exercises
- mainly 8-12 reps, maybe a bit higher for the calves and abs
- 60-90 secs rest in between sets most of the time
- shitload of supersets, I’m not sure if the book says a lot about these, but the author talked about those a lot in his own site. Supersets were also familiar to me from Franco’s program. I also tried to maximise the burning effect during the weight training so supersets were the thing
- Twice a day training was an option, so I did often that because I went to the office early in the morning, so I could basically exercise in the morning, during the lunch and / or after work
- The idea was to keep sessions fairly short, don’t remember the science but at least after an hour the muscle building effect starts to decrease. Because I did often two sessions a day, they didn’t really take much time, and I could really push. most of the time I was out after 30 minutes.
- I think the book didn’t really recommend that much big lifts, especially when cutting the weight, so I didn’t do a single deadlift, and I didn’t really do too heavy squats either. Most of the stuff I did were with dumbbells, they were easiest to use for supersets even if the gym was busy. I also already had a bad shoulder injury, so the dumbbells were safer to use than barbells.
Positives:
- Weight came down according to the plan
- Same was with the fat percentage
- Training and eating was easy because everything was planned
- I wasn’t really never hungry
- Results came very quickly
- Self esteem got better, I felt supergood
- People noticed my change, this was the only period in my life that I actually was approached by women
- Some friends that met me for the firs time then, still remember how I looked, which is also a negative today
- There was a feeling of control, I even knew very well how much my food is going to cost all the time
- I didn’t really live that healthy life all time, I was actually smoking at the time and I was drinking pretty often during weekends. But when it comes to looks, this was by far the best I’ve ever looked in my life. Maybe not bi, but lean.
- The baseline diet macronutrient ratio followed general health guidelines, so I was always eating a mixed diet and more than half of it was carbs (which isn’t that popular I guess). The books goes deep with different diet options if you are not getting results.
Negatives:
- A lot of time and motivation was lost doing the food preparation and all the calculation
- I had to do laundry all the time because all of my training clothes were sweaty because of all the training
- Life circled a lot around this, so it was difficult to suddenly changes plans. Although even if I did change something, I still seemed to maintain a high level of fitness, so a drink here and there didn’t do much, same with added cheat meals, they didn’t really wreck the ship
- I broke the training in to too many pieces, I could’ve done cardio sessions during my strength sessions to save time but I decided to do everything separately to maximize results
- The program is an overkill for the job for most people, especially for a regular Joe
Overall this was and still is THE program for me. I didn’t have too good of a fat caliper, but the one that I had showed that in the end I was hoovering at around 10%. At that point I felt and looked good enough for me to stop. My biggest regret is that I never really got to use these principles in to bulking. I initially thought about doing it after the cutting phase, but It didn’t happen because life got on the way. I moved to another city and didn’t really have enough money to eat or excercise properly. I managed to try the bulking for a brief moment of time, and I realized that it would cost a ton, and I would have had to eat a shitload of food. Especially the protein was kind of a problem for me already during the cut. I’m just very bad at eating a lot of protein, and because of that I had to use protein powder to get my protein high enough even during the cutting. And that was the case even though the book recommended to get as much as possible of the calories from real foods, and that was what I tried to do.
After I had moved to another city, I tried to keep up with my training and diet. I couldn’t afford a gym membership, so I started doing bodyweight stuff at home. I also tried to keep up with the diet instinctively although I didn’t have the money to really properly follow the kind of a diet I wanted to. But funnily enough, I still got a bit leaner, I don’t know why, but it felt that the program even worked for some time after I had quit it. The leanest I’ve ever been was probably about 6 months after I had quit calculating calories etc.
One caveat about the program is that it’s an overkill for the job for most. It’s like the author said about the program himself: “it’s like shooting a squirrel with a bazooka”. And that is the truth, for a regular Joe, it just a lot more than what is needed. Venuto has also written a more approachable book and program for average folks training with weight loss goals called “The Body Fat Solution.”. I haven’t really properly read it, but I’ve skimmed it through and it is good stuff too.
This also raises a good question that I’ve often thought about. Would I actually experienced the exact same results by doing a full body session 2 times a week followed by a brief cardio session, provided that the diet would have been as strict as it was. I’ll never know but somehow I think that that I probably would have ended in about the same place that I did with the four way split and daily HIIT-sessions. But anyway, I really, really, really highly recommend this approach for people who want results and have the time, money, energy and dedication. And it’s a great book even if you don’t want to make it as complicated as I did.