Occasionally in life, someone will blurt out something that
verbalizes your exact thoughts at nearly the precise time
you're thinking them. I experienced this one afternoon when
I was twenty years old and undergoing the most physically
demanding military training ever devised (at least it was
then; I can't speak for it now). It was spring of 1984. I
was in U.S. Navy, Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL Training
as I stood shirtless in front of the bathroom mirror on the
first floor of the beach-front barracks in Coronado,
California. I felt slightly disappointed from a standpoint
of pure vanity when a fellow trainee blurted out to his
buddy:
"Damn... my body has hardly changed a bit since I've been
in this training."
Oh, wow; my sentiments about myself exactly. I looked
around to see that a group of them had stormed into the
other end of the room and this guy had pulled off his shirt
to see whether the inhumanly arduous training had sculpted
something better out of his physique. It hadn't. He was
visibly bummed.
Did we have a lot of "functional strength"? Oh... you bet.
I was able to run up a steep hill of jagged terrain on San
Clemente Island while holding a heavy pallet on my
shoulders. A lot of what we did was impressive feats of
endurance and strength.
Yet I'm actually stronger now, sans some of the endurance.
And believe me; my current gym-built strength is fully
functional. The term "functional strength" is oftentimes
meaningless, esoteric jargon. You're either fully
functional or something's amiss. You're either relatively
strong or you're not. There's not a special kind of muscle
strength that's "functional".
Can you "master your own bodyweight" from this type of
training? Uh... well, this might be more jargon. When I
started the training, I was probably capable of six
pull-ups. When I was well into the training, I could do
thirty. I'm not sure at what number I would have been
considered a master of my own bodyweight. But if you'd
compared me to the guy who could only do two, I guess I was
a master of it all along. HOOYAH! (That's a BUD/S saying)
Yet... how come my physique didn't appear much better?
There are really three simple reasons:
1) Very high-rep exercise (bodyweight stuff) most
effectively burns body fat with eating habit improvements.
2) Very high-rep exercise ("mastering" bodyweight) hardly
adds any muscle size.
3) We're obviously limited in scope of exercises we can
perform with the bodyweight, combat conditioning stuff
(unless we start military pressing our buddies, like the
U.S. Marines do). This can cause whatever miniscule muscle
gains we can acquire from it to be aesthetically unbalanced.
Let's face the facts: It's really only some visually
noticeable muscle added to the body along with major drops
in body fat that significantly augments one's appearance.
You can make an improvement with just one or the other
(some additional muscle or some reduction of fat), but it's
both together that creates exciting, head-turning physique
results.
'Combat conditioning' (i.e. training the body purely for a
combat situation), using only one's body weight for
resistance, will build the mitochondria fibers of the
muscles. These are the slow-twitch fibers that possess the
least potential for growth. With only negligible increases
in muscle size, it's pretty difficult to improve the shape
of one's body very much.
Yet this type of training will also cause the body to
deplete the energy stores of the muscles. This effectively
creates a repletion process that includes the breaking down
of triglycerides that can be drawn from fat stores within
the body. What you're doing, in effect, is taking energy
from stored body fat and converting it to stored muscle
fuel. That's a good thing.
But this positive effect can easily be negated if one's
eating habits aren't controlled. What happened to us within
the combat conditioning context of BUD/S Training is that
we became hungrier and simply ate more carbohydrates and
dietary fat to compensate for the intense training. So,
although we were capable of incredible endurance feats (the
utility of which off the combat field can be debated), we
didn't possess the "hard body" appearance some of us were
expecting from such rigors.
Would I ever go back to using 'body weight exercises' as my
fitness regimen? Let's face it; they're convenient ' right?
A travelling person can do them right there in the hotel
room after rolling their groggy butt out of bed.
Yeah, I'll go back to them when some wacko blows up every
gym in the world. You see, most people engage in natural
bodybuilding in a time-wasting and ineffective manner. I've
discovered a way to do it that keeps me getting exciting
(and thus motivating) results while not having to live in
the gym.
What's more, regardless of the controversy surrounding "how
many BMR calories are burned by a pound of muscle", I've
noticed my body fat is much easier to keep down since
putting on appreciable amounts of natural muscle. A picture
speaks a thousand words ' and anyone can see the contrast
at the very top of my web site.
----------------------------------------------------
Scott Abbett is the author of HardBody Success: 28
Principles to Create Your Ultimate Body and Shape Your Mind
for Incredible Success. He is a certified fitness trainer
and a Master Practitioner and Trainer of NLP. To see his
personal transformation visit http://www.hardbodysuccess.com
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