The Primal Blueprint (48 page)
Read The Primal Blueprint Online
Authors: Mark Sisson
While my view that 80 percent of your body composition success is determined by your diet is difficult to prove scientifically, the anecdotal evidence is overwhelming. Go to the starting line of a major marathon or ironman triathlon and take note of the surprising level of excess body fat sported by many of these very highly trained athletes. The same goes for the droves of gym rats and aerobics queens with flawed diets and physiques that belie their tremendous devotion to fitness. There’s no better proof that regardless of how many calories you burn, consuming excessive processed carbohydrates ultimately inhibits your ability to access and burn stored body fat efficiently around the clock. Instead, all that arduous training results in an increased appetite, again thanks to insulin-driven sugar cravings from poor food choices combined with, or as a consequence of, overly stressful workouts. Unless you are a gifted, extremely devoted endurance athlete, it’s a vicious cycle that you cannot escape no matter how hard you exercise.
While it’s true that exercise moderates the insulin response (i.e., a sugary energy gel consumed during a tough workout will be burned quickly and not prompt an insulin release like it would if you sucked it down at your desk), burning lots of calories (particularly with Chronic Cardio) and eating lots of carbs throughout the day will simply make you carb-dependent for energy. Invariably, left to its own devices, your body will want to overcompensate by tempting you to eat slightly more than you need to refill the tank, as if it’s actually thinking, “What if this clown decides to do this again tomorrow? I’d better be ready!” Chronic Cardio folks have programmed their genes over the years to battle recurring depletion and fatigue with an increased appetite.
The bottom line is that you will not lose fat effectively with exercise-driven weight-loss efforts unless your eating habits moderate insulin production. Of course, a sensible exercise program will improve your health, sense of well-being, and muscle tone and somewhat minimize the negative effects of the high-carb diet, but it won’t get rid of that spare tire. On the flip side, I have been able to maintain my ideal body composition effortlessly, even working out only one-tenth as much as I used to, since I evolved to eating very lowcarb
Primal Blueprint
foods (getting increasingly observant over the past 10 years and eventually reaching “very strict” Primal beginning in 2002). During my recovery from knee surgery in 2007, I was able to maintain my exact weight and 8 percent body fat on zero exercise for a month and very limited exercise for a few more months after that.
“The bottom line is that you will not lose fat effectively with exercise-driven weight-loss efforts unless your eating habits moderate insulin production.”
Of course, we all have genetic differences that create the reality of “results may vary.” Regardless, you must focus on the concept of triggering the ideal expression of your own genetic potential through the combination of
Primal Blueprint
diet and exercise behaviors. Consider an age when you were pleased with your fitness level and physique. It
is
possible to approximate your appearance and energy levels at age 18 or 21, reversing years or even decades of suboptimal diet and exercise practices, in a relatively short time.
Be content with uninterrupted gradual improvement in your body composition and a wholehearted enjoyment of the process. This improvement may not be a linear “pound or two a week” experience. Instead, you may have some months, or seasons, when you will really lean out. At other times you will experience inevitable plateaus, which I’ll discuss how to handle shortly. With the mind-set that you are taking care of your health and constantly progressing toward your goals (at a speed you determine, mainly by controlling your carb intake), your motivation and compliance levels will be strong even years down the line.
By the way, you are welcome to pursue weight loss with more enthusiasm and discipline to produce accelerated results, but you must align your efforts with your fitness level. A serious athlete who has added a few pounds in the off-season can ramp up training easily and return to ideal weight relatively quickly. An old-time pro triathlete I coached was once asked how long it took to drop the typical seven pounds gained over the off-season after resuming training: “‘couple long rides,” he deadpanned. On the other hand, a novice unaccustomed to regular exercise must follow a more patient approach to avoid burning out. Following are some Primal exercise recommendations to turbocharge your weight-loss efforts.
“Be not afraid of growing slowly, be afraid only of standing still.
—
Chinese Proverb
”
As discussed previously, when you exercise at moderate heart rates, you run little risk of fatigue or burnout. Increase your daily activity level in every possible way—walking or cycling instead of driving for nearby errands, taking the stairs, parking at the edge of the lot, strolling the neighborhood after dinner, and enjoying leisurely hikes on the weekends. One friend of mine makes business calls while walking briskly on a treadmill (a great icebreaker, by the way: “Hey, what’s that hum in the background?”). Considering that the average American watches 28 hours a week of television, we could possibly cure obesity if we all casually pedaled stationary bikes during our viewing time (and of course regulated our insulin production by eating Primally)!
Focus on intense strength training and sprint sessions, ensuring that you are well rested and fully recovered between efforts. Remember, it’s not frequency of your intense workouts that matters as much as quality. When you exercise a muscle to short-term exhaustion at 12 reps or deliver a max effort for 10 pull-ups, you’d be surprised what your body can do two minutes later if you repeat the effort. If you think you’ve pushed it to the limit at your typical 25-minute intense workout, take a five-minute water break and then go back out there for another 15 minutes of high intensity. If you pat yourself on the back after your typical eight sprints, rest five minutes and go back and do a few more!
I cannot emphasize strongly enough how important it is for you to reject the Conventional Wisdom mind-set toward weight loss that obsesses on daily calories burned, strictly controlled portion sizes, and other anal-retentive nonsense. If you are hungry, eat (the right stuff). If you are motivated, exercise (the right way). And if you are tired, rest! When you are dragging, your energy is going toward rebuilding broken-down muscles and energy systems. Pushing a fatigued body through exercise will only lead to depletion, burnout, and undesirable sugar cravings.
The key to the exercise component of weight loss is in expertly balancing stress and rest to allow for peak efforts to be reached in conjunction with adequate recovery and rebuilding. With my athletes, I call these peak efforts
Breakthrough Workouts
—sessions that are difficult and challenging enough to help you “break through” to a higher fitness level (or, in our context here, stimulate a reduction in body fat). Whether you want to reduce your 10k time or drop 10 pounds, it comes down to directing optimal gene expression, primarily through diet, and secondarily through an effective workout plan with occasional Breakthrough sessions. From our understanding of the selection pressures of evolution, it’s clear that taking fat off is more difficult than packing it on. Only by harnessing your energy with careful attention to stress management and the occasional bouts of brief, very intense, good old-fashioned hard work can you expect something different than the “same ol’ same ol’”: scale numbers, clothing sizes, race times, and so forth.
Sisson’s Six-Pack Secrets
“How to have washboard abs on a high fat diet, no cardio and no ab exercises” was the title of one of my most popular
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posts ever. (In the weeks after the post, my shirtless photo accompanying the article was “tagged” and spread all over Facebook, necessitating my taking a crash course on the amazing technology of cyber social networking in order to protect my name and likeness!) While a “six-pack” is the universal hallmark of a lean, fit, well-toned man or woman, getting there following Conventional Wisdom protocol (grueling crunches and sit-ups to the point of nausea, burning endless calories on a treadmill, and then obsessively limiting what you take in—especially those high-fat foods so reviled by diet and fitness personalities) is too daunting to be a realistic goal for all but the most devoted gym rats. The truth is, we all have washboard abs…underneath whatever fat might currently be obscuring them.
Remember, 80 percent of your body composition success comes from how compliant you are with
Primal Blueprint
eating. A possible genetic predisposition to storing extra belly fat might indeed limit your ultimate potential to land on a magazine cover, but I’m willing to bet many times the price of this book that you can bring to the surface impressive ripples you never knew existed (or at least haven’t seen since your college intramural days) by hitting the sweet spot with your carb intake and naturally engaging your abs throughout daily life. In fact, washboard abs can be considered an effortless side effect of living Primally.
Grok had to have a great set of abs in order to be an effective thrower, climber, runner, jumper, crawler, and lifter. Not that abs themselves lift, throw, catch, or push—but the whole complex of abdominals (rectus and transverse abdominis, internal and external obliques, and pyrimidalis) provides the foundation for nearly every athletic and everyday movement you do. Thus, they are part of today’s popular “core” training—the ultimate functional muscle group. But rather than isolating them on some fancy $4,000 machine or getting rug burns on your butt from doing a bazillion crunches in your living room (you know who you are), the best way to work your abs is to involve them in routine functional movements and brief focused engagements throughout the day.
When you do push-ups, you should make a concerted effort to tighten your abs (pressing the navel toward the spine); the same is recommended during pull-ups, squats, lunges, curls, and other complete body exercises. Raking leaves, carrying your toddler, reloading the bottom drawer of the copy machine, lugging groceries out of the trunk and onto the kitchen counter, and infinite other daily activities—including simply sitting at your desk or in your car—can all be considered opportunities for a mini abs workout. I bet I did more than a thousand of these efforts sitting at my desk writing this book!
When you are engaged in basic movement, sitting or walking, you should tighten your belly as if you are going to be punched in the gut while blowing out the candles on your birthday cake. Hold it for 10, 20, or more seconds a few times every hour. Now do it while slightly tilted to one side. Repeat for the other side. For even better results and a stronger core, you can also simultaneously contract your buttock muscles. Do these short exercise bursts while you are watching TiVo or driving to pick up the kids. After a
while, it will become second nature to squeeze your abs spontaneously. I do some of my best abs work while bent over doing sprints on the stationary bike. It’s really all about squeezing, tightening, and trying to isometrically shorten the distance between your sternum and your pubic bone. Engage your abs, eat Primally, you’ll soon notice improved muscle tone in your core. Furthermore, a strong, functional set of abs will help you avoid back problems as well as perform all outdoor activities safely and with less risk of injury.
Walk, walk, walk. Hike, hike, hike. Move, move, move. This might seem like strange advice to help you get lean and ripped like our primal role model. However, by now you should have a clear understanding of why ill-advised frequent moderate- to high-intensity workouts simply burn glucose and increase appetite and that your exercise program on the whole is only dealing with the 20 percent slice of the weight-loss pie. After all, walking around the block or hiking up to the water tower doesn’t burn enough calories to contribute notably to weight loss. However, increasing your daily movement will build you from the inside out—toning muscles, joints, and connective tissue to enable you to thrive on the high-intensity workouts that strongly influence body composition.
Coupled with
Primal Blueprint
eating habits, your active lifestyle will refine your fat-burning skills so that you become an efficient fat-burning machine around the clock and easily reach your ideal weight in a matter of weeks or months, as seen with the Korgs’ case studies. Best of all, as you scan the suggested daily meal plan (earlier in this chapter) and the weekly exercise plan (next), you’ll see that it’s easy to eat and exercise in a Primal manner for the rest of your life. Here’s a sample of what Kelly and Ken can do to “go Primal” with their exercise program:
Sunday:
Two-hour hike at low intensity. (The Korgs can do this together and enjoy quality time as well.)
Monday:
Easy 45-minute spin on stationary bike and 15-minute walk after dinner.
Tuesday:
30-minute intense strength-training session. Go for an 8 to 10 effort on a 10 scale. Choose gym routine, body resistance routine, or Grok workout from the
Primal Blueprint
Strength Workout Suggestions appendix at
MarksDailyApple.com
. 15-minute walk after dinner.
Wednesday:
Rest.
Thursday:
Easy 45-minute stationary bike ride or hike.
Friday:
Sprint session at grass field, school track or even the beach. You can also sprint indoors on a treadmill, elliptical or stationary bicycle. Duration, including warm-up and cool-down, is about 20 minutes. Choose from the recommended sessions based on ability level from the
Primal Blueprint
Sprint Workout Suggestions appendix at
MarksDailyApple.com
.