When People Ask

Often people at work, especially doctors, ask me for training advice. Being a physician usually means one is an expert in a certain area of disease, not an expert in exercise physiology or training but a lot of doctors seem to have trouble accepting that. I don’t claim to have a lot of knowledge about how to train and I usually tell people to pay for advice from a trainer and to find a trainer by personal recommendation from someone who has been happy with their results.

I know what works for me, more or less, and I have tried to find quality research in the area of bodybuilding but there is almost none. It’s possible to make a few general statements which are likely to be true but the detail of how to train successfully is largely empirical.

Getting bigger and more muscular is achieved by eating more, doing heavy resistance training and resting adequately. Looking more muscular also requires not having excessive bodyfat. What can be achieved in terms of appearance is also limited by bodyshape: long limbs don’t look as muscular at a given circumference and a thick waist reduces apparent shoulder and thigh width.

Eating more to get bigger is relatively simple. I try to minimize “empty” calories by eating mostly real food. My diet is relatively high in animal protein, usually with three or four serves of chicken or fish and none or one serve of red meat each day plus a whey protein shake twice a day. I have most of my carbohydrate as complex carbs: from one to six serves depending on the proximity of a beach holiday. It’s also important to enjoy what you eat, so we don’t stress too much when eating out socially.

Heavy resistance training is something you should learn with a trainer or more experienced friend. We train four or five times a week for about 90 minutes, but the workout can be done in less than 60 minutes without chatting. We do a four-way split because in order to train hard enough to get fatigued and sore afterwards when your body is used to weight training it’s necessary to focus on a small number of muscles for the duration of a workout to achieve that. In the beginning, when the body is less accustomed to training, it’s possible to get good results with a whole-body or half-body workout a few times a week.

Assessing progress should be according to the endpoint that is being aimed-for. For many people the aim is to look better, and so the right measure is using a mirror or camera (and maybe a tape-measure or bodyfat measurement). I try not to weigh myself very often because weight isn’t a useful measure without body composition as well, unless you’re actually aiming for a specific weight. Another aim is cardiovascular fitness, and that is assessed best by objective performance in cardiovascular exercise: running times, VO2max measurement or whatever is available.

When it comes to supplements, there is some evidence for creatine, especially in the presence of a diet fairly low in meat. For micronutrients such as vitamins, they’re potentially useful if your diet is deficient, but the real answer if your diet is deficient is to fix your diet. Most of the “trials” of supplements use small sample sizes, subjects inexperienced in weight training (who show good progress because they’re inexperienced), and are poorly controlled.

Drugs such as androgens and peptides are banned in sport and regulated in most jurisdictions because they’re either effective and/or have significant risks. They can certainly move the limit of what you can achieve with diet and training, but not so much that there aren’t gifted natural athletes who look better than many non-natural ones. Indeed a well-executed cutting diet will turn more heads than an average steroid cycle.