By Pete Ryan
The world is full of ideas, whether these are diets,
exercise, business or lifestyle, you can read a new idea everyday for a year and
still hardly of scratched the surface. The secret to discovering the ideal programme
for you is to hold it up to consensus. Does this idea share the basic principles
of the majority of other programmes out there?
If we look at training, the idea is obvious. Firstly the
system should progress, it should do every major facet of the body, it should
have an ‘outcome based result’ (that is as you do the routine you are actually
moving towards your goal), it should not cause injury or pain, it should allow
you to recover between sessions, and it should be enjoyable.
For diets we need to look at commonalities between what most
experts say. The first thing is it needs
to contain enough calories to survive, but tailored to whether you are trying
to add muscle (higher calories), or lose fat (lower calories), secondly you
need to minimise junk food, thirdly increasing the amount of vegetables you eat
is common amongst many diets.
If you look at the above examples you can see that many,
many system can fit within this framework. If you want to lose fat, you need to
eat less calories than you burn, minimise junk food and be eating a variety of
vegetables. To add lean mass, you need a
surplus of calories, while still minimising junk food and eating a lot of
vegetables. For exercise a routine the results will depend upon your goals, so
it should actually improve you athletic prowess, your strength, your muscle
size...or whatever your goal is, while avoiding injury, also allowing you to
recover and have some fun doing it.
Within the boundaries above you can do whatever you
like. If you have been online then you
have seen exercise routines and diets that do not follow these rules. I am not
suggesting that these never work, it is just that the vast majority of experts
in the field do not agree with those ideas as being the ideal for the majority
of people. What I am suggesting is that you follow the advice that will work
best for most people, while keeping you as healthy as possible.
My advice for diet is to eat as much whole food as you can,
eat a wide variety of plant foods, minimise junk foods and eat enough calories
to achieve your goals. There are special
points, like I suggest a B12 and vitamin D supplement, but apart from a few
minor tweaks, I do not care if you choose potato, sweet potato, yam or rice;
tofu, seitan or beans; nor do I care if you want spinach, kale, pak choi or
another green vegetable. All that
matters is overall calorie intake and not eating too much junk and that you are
enjoying your food.
For exercise I do not care if you do HIT training, DC
training, German Volume, Matrix training, supersets or Bulgarian style
exercise. The important factors are that
you are doing the whole body, you should have a system that progresses as you
exercise (gets harder over time by adding reps, sets, weight lifted, or
lowering rest times between sets or other ways to increase the difficulty), you
should be moving towards your goal, you should not be suffering injuries, you
should be recovering between sessions and enjoying the process. If that is
happening then your routine is sound.
Let’s look at some good and bad examples of diet and
exercise
For a bad diet I would like to suggest the “All meat
diet”. This is a relatively new dietary
idea, you eat no vegetables and only survive on meat, so far the exponents of
this diet have shown several negative symptoms; low testosterone, high blood
sugar levels, high LDL cholesterol, but the people adhering to this diet swear
that it is a magic formula for health despite having such bad blood markers.
For a good diet let us look at a mainly whole food vegan diet. This gives you
ample nutrients, increases health and vitality, lower inflammation and aids in
the overall goals of health.
For bad training let us look at ‘bros’ who do biceps and
chest every session. Over time this will cause imbalances in the body, lead to
shoulder issues and the lack of leg and hip exercise will lead to the person
developing ‘Chicken leg syndrome’, not ideal if their goal is an overall
aesthetic look. For a good routine we could look at a full body routine done
several times a week. This will hit the whole body every time you work out, you
could have a focus each session, so day 1 lower body focussed (followed by all
the upper body work), day 2 upper body pull focus (followed by legs and upper
body push movements), and day 3 you could have an upper body push focus
(followed by legs and upper body pull movements). You could use a double
progression system to slowly ramp up the intensity, and 3 days a week allows
you plenty of time to recover.
One thing to avoid is to hop programmes too often (with
either the diet or the exercise). Give
something 8-12 weeks to really see how it is working and stick to it longer if
you are enjoying it.
Above are a few suggestions, if you need more advice or help
sorting out how to approach your training or diet then download the book
“Introduction to vegan health and fitness” and use some of the resources below
to work your way through the option available to you.
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