My Top 5 Muscle Building & Fat Loss Tips
I was interviewed for a big name fitness magazine recently and they asked for my top five training tips. Here’s what I told them…
Train like an athlete- You should be training for enhanced performance and your strength work and conditioning/ cardio should be hard, heavy and fast. None of the light weight, slow motion nonsense, and no medium intensity, steady state cardio that drowns your fast twich fibers in lactic acid, turning them slow.
Use big, full body exercises and add in some throws, jumps or strongman training whenever appropriate. Always strive to increase your performance from one workout to the next by lifting more weight, doing more reps, jumping higher, running faster or getting done in less time. Everybody wants to look like Georges St. Pierre or Gabrielle Reece so why not start training like them?
Use exercises that allow you to move your body through space- When you move your own bodyweight (or bodyweight plus resistance) like you do in a chin up, pushup, squat, etc. you activate more muscle fibers, thus you will get bigger, stronger and leaner a whole lot faster. As far as conditioning and cardio goes, you have to realize that the human body wasn’t designed for repetitive steady state activity but rather short bursts with a wide variety of different movements. This is exactly what you do when you play most sports. When you pump away on a machine for 30 minutes you are fighting evolution.
So focus on bodyweight and free weight exercises like chins, dips and sprints, play as many sports as possible, and avoid all strength or cardio machines like the plague.
Less is more- When training for size, strength and speed, quality is always more important than quantity. If you undertrain you will make some progress, albeit slowly. If you overtrain you will make zero progress. When in doubt, do less. Limit your workouts to 45 minutes (excluding warm up) and 12-18 (and sometimes up to 24 depending on the type of training) total work sets.
Eat only organic, anti inflammatory, plant based whole foods- If a caveman couldn’t eat it you shouldn’t eat it. Nothing that comes in a box or plastic wrapper or that contains any artificial ingredients whatsoever should ever touch your lips. Focus on getting the majority of your calories from vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds and legumes. Add in extra protein where you need it and drink nothing but pure water. Also, try to avoid dairy, corn, wheat, sugar and saturated fat as these cause inflammation throughout the body leading to pain and disease.
Sleep- Getting 8-10 hours per day of high quality sleep is simply the best thing you can do for recovery, building lean muscle, burning bodyfat, improving insulin sensitivity, enhancing immune system function, repairing damaged tissues/injuries, improving brain function, etc, etc, etc. If you are not sleeping you have a major problem and it needs to be addressed with high priority.
For complete 12 week workout programs, premade diet sheets, a detailed list of the greatest exercises on the planet and a ton of helpful tips on improving your sleep quality and recovery ability get on over to http://www.MuscleGainingSecrets.com/ now.
Train smart,
Jason Ferruggia
Strength & Conditioning Specialist
Chief Training Adviser, Men’s Fitness Magazine
Author, Media Spokesperson, Consultant
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Comments on My Top 5 Muscle Building & Fat Loss Tips
Excellent advice Jason. It’s always difficult to whittle training/nutrition science down to 5 tips, you did a great job here
I think that the following advise, “Use exercises that allow you to move your body through space”, is truly exceptional. I was already well aware of the importance of compound exercises, but Mr Ferruggia’s emphasis on exercises that allow one to move one’s body through space is, well, state of the art…
“Use exercises that allow you to move your body through space”
Logically, that just means “do non-isometric work.”
What other exercise doesn’t move your body through space?
I liked your article about Interval training and why it sucks. You also recommended to do some endurance in that article. Here you are bashing endurance work again. What’s your position on this actually?
When he says “move your body through space,” he’s talking about closed-chain exercises like deadlift, squats, power cleans, push-ups, pull-ups, dips, and inverted rows. While bench press, bent-over rows, and overhead press are all decent exercises, they are open-chain, meaning the body isn’t “moving through space,” so they’re not as good as their closed-chain counterparts (listed above).
Since switching to organic food for a majority of my diet I have descreased my injuries and recovery time. It took about 3 months to notice but it works.
I also came accross this amazing research group that test diffrerent organic products for quality and production. Soy, dairy, etc… Check it out. http://www.cornucopia.org/
All organic is not created equal…
Great stuff Jason,
If most people just followed those 5 simple tips they could dramatically change their body.
It’s funny how so many people now are looking at these methods as the new way to workout but it’s nice to see things are coming around full circle from the past on how are bodies were meant to perform.