Author: Nick Hawkins

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Do This If You Screwed Up Your Diet

♠️Screwed up your diet ? Here’s a muscle hack to get back on track quickly♠️

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🔹Breaking diets happens to best of us the first times we dieted, and it happens very frequently to beginners but also “advanced” dieters as well. So don’t be alarmed. 

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🔹When it comes to burning fat, we need to create  a calorie deficit of around 3500 calories which is roughly 1lb of fat loss. This means that if we have to eat -500 calories, under maintenance, per day we would need a week of dieting to lose 1lb of fat. ⁣

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🔹So if we were able to do that.. we would lose all the fat right ? Well sort of, yeah, if we don’t take into account any metabolic adaptation, that’s how it would work in theory. ⁣

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🔹But what really  happens is that people… screw it up… And it’s totally fine.⁣

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🔹It’s just life. Whether it’s because you don’t feel like dieting or whether it’s because you were offered something you couldn’t resist saying no… screw ups happen, and “being perfect” is not what we’re looking for. ⁣

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🔹What we need to get better at, is to quickly get back on track in order not to lose the progress made: this means being consistent, not perfect. ⁣

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🔹Something that “clicked in my mind” back in the days, when information wasn’t so readily available and I used to screw up my diets too, was to understand that “if 3500 calories under maintenance” are needed to lose 1lb of fat, then “3500 calories OVER maintenance will result in roughly 1lb of fat”. ⁣

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🔹For how obvious that may sound, you rarely over eat that much over your calories (unless there are other dieting related underlying problems, such as bingeing). ⁣

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🔹The point I’m trying to make is that, even if some days “you screw up” a little and eat a couple hundred calories extra, you’re still good. it doesn’t mean you lost all your progress.⁣

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🔹Even if you went above your maintenance, you would need to eat +3500 calories *over it* to gain 1lb of fat, so a couple hundred calories, for one day, won’t even be worth calculating. ⁣

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🔹But the scale says otherwise ? It doesn’t matter what the scale says: even if it went up by a couple pounds the next day, following a higher calorie day, it’s just water retention, at least most of it. Not gained fat. ⁣

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🔹What’s your favorite foods to eat on your cheat days? Leave a comment… I would like to know.

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Can Melatonin Improve Your Physique

♠️Can melatonin improve your physique♠️

🔹Melatonin is a hormone that controls sleep patterns. However, recent animal data shows that it may also have effects on energy metabolism. Supplementation of melatonin may benefit body composition.

🔹This experiment investigated the effect of melatonin supplementation on the  body composition of 81 women with osteopenia. Subjects supplemented 0, 1, or 3 mg melatonin every night for a year. Body composition was measured with DEXA scan. The data from the groups that consumed 1 and 3 mg melatonin were compared to the control group.

🔹The data showed that melatonin supplementation increased lean mass by 3.4%, while the control group lost 1.9%. Also, melatonin supplementation decreased body fat by 5.1%, while the control group gained an extra 1.7%.

🔹 According to this study, melatonin supplementation can improve body composition.

Reference:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26352863/

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Slow Reps

♠️FULL MOTOR UNIT RECRUITMENT♠️⁣⁣⁣⁣

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🔹Recruiting all muscle fibers is one of the most important conditions that need to occur when striving to grow  bigger muscles. ⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣

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🔹Is it the only one? Definitely not, but it can be a prerequisite. In fact, if we can’t recruit high threshold muscle fibers, which are the fibers controlled by high threshold motor units, we won’t get any meaningful result from strength training, since they’re the ones which grow.⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣

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1️⃣ When lifting heavy  weights, most motor units are quickly recruited and the weight is heavy enough to automatically cause high-threshold motor units to be recruited and actin-myosin bindings to form simultaneously. ⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣

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🔹The same thing happens with moderate and light weights: as effort increases through each repetition, high threshold motor units are quickly recruited to make up for the lack of force exerted by low threshold muscle fibers.⁣⁣⁣

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🔹Bar speed is slow and because of the Force-Velocity relationship (which states that a slower shortening of the muscle fibers produces more force), the force output is greater, allowing the heavy weights to be moved.⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣

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2️⃣ Full motor unit recruitments occurs on high velocity movements too, however, because of the fact that the contraction is so fast or ‘explosive’ not enough tension is experienced by each fiber. This means no meaningful tension to cause muscle growth. ⁣⁣⁣

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🔹So, while both movements show high levels of effort and full motor unit recruitment, only one will cause growth!⁣⁣⁣

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⁣Resources:

1) https://medium.com/@SandCResearch/explaining-how-hypertrophy-works-using-only-basic-principles-of-muscle-physiology-48beda5fbf1b⁣

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2) https://medium.com/@SandCResearch/what-can-jumping-teach-us-about-muscle-growth-5bef1865246b⁣

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Wisdom From The Matrix

Greatness has a formula

Habits that improve your physical health.

Habits that improve your mental health.

Habits that improve your spiritual health.

The secret is to implement them in that order.
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4 Workouts For Massive Arms

🔹 If you want to get bigger arms, you need to be training both Triceps & Biceps exercises to maximize your growth.⠀⁠

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🔹 On the left side of the diaphragm, you’ve got two Bicep exercises, the Incline Curl which targets the long head of the muscle and the Hammer Curl, which targets both the long head and the Brachialis which will help to increase the size of your bicep. On the eccentric part (lowering the weight), try to do it slowly, at around 5 seconds or so, to allow of greater activation of the Brachialis.⠀⁠

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🔹 On the right side, you’ve got Triceps Pushdown, which will be targeting your lateral head of the triceps (change to a rope if you want to target your triceps medial head instead).⠀⁠

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🔹 And the second exercise is the Skull Crusher, which is great for activating the long head of the tricep.⠀⁠

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🔹 What’s your favorite arm exercise? Leave a comment below.

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Hip Thrust

♠️Hip Thrust♠️

🔹Many experts believe that the hip thrust might be the best exercise to target glutes specifically.. ⁣⁣⁣⁣

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🔹Butt why?⁣⁣⁣⁣

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🔹When the exercise is performed, there’s a great shift of weight from hip muscles to the gluteus maximus, which is one reason why they experience high levels of mechanical tension through this specific workout: ⁣⁣⁣⁣

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🔹As we extend our hips and maintain knee flexion, hamstrings over-shorten to the point in which they don’t produce meaningful levels of force. ⁣⁣⁣⁣

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🔹Adductors have their best leverage through hip flexion (which is why they are worked greatly with squats): therefore, as we extend our hips, even adductors end up not producing that much force. ⁣⁣⁣⁣

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🔹On the other hand, the gluteus maximus works best at hip extension, which is why, as we extend the hips during the exercise, it ends up taking most of the weight.⁣⁣⁣⁣

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🔹On top of this, the exercise is very challenging both at the top and at the bottom of the movement because the hips and the knees don’t move that far away from the weight: while at the bottom other muscles can help synergistically to push the weight up, as we extend our hips, the glutes end up experiencing the most tension.⁣⁣⁣⁣

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🔹Do you do hip thrust when you workout? I personally find it to be a great carry over to lower body movements, and should definitely be included in a strength training program. ⁣

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Time Under Tension

♠️Time Under Tension and Muscle Growth⁣⁣♠️

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🔹There’s a lot of misconception among Time Under Tension (TUT) and its relationship with muscle growth. ⁣⁣

🔹I’ve noticed many articles say that slowing reps down and increasing the duration of the muscular contraction can create greater hypertrophy. And while there’s some truth to this statement, there’s still more to it. 

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🔹Why ? Because time under tension (TUT) matters, but mostly for the volume that counts as  effective  for hypertrophy. 

🔹TUT can help maximize two specific components of training that are related to muscle growth with the first being volume. Studies show that training volume has been shown to have a dose-response relationship with muscle growth, so increasing training volume should increase gains. 

🔹The second component is tension. When a muscle contracts to lift a weight, the muscle fibers experience mechanical tension while they shorten to move the joint. Mechanical tension is probably the main determinant of muscle hypertrophy, so the more tension you can create, the more gains you’ll get.

Resource: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3861774/#sec1-1title

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https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02640414.2016.1210197

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Training To Failure

♠️TRAINING TO FAILURE♠️ 

‘𝘐𝘧 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘥𝘪𝘥𝘯’𝘵 𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘪𝘯 𝘩𝘢𝘳𝘥 𝘦𝘯𝘰𝘶𝘨𝘩.. 𝘥𝘪𝘥 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘯 𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘪𝘯 𝘢𝘵 𝘢𝘭𝘭?’⁣⁣

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🔹’Training to failure’ has been a topic of discussion since I was in high school… but what does it even mean? ⁣⁣

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🔹Technically, training to failure can be defined as “the inability to complete the concentric portion of a given lift without substantially deteriorating your technique.”⁣⁣ 

🔹When we refer to ‘failure’ we actually mean ‘task failure’ and not ‘muscular failure’ because in reality it’s not our muscles that fail, but rather our ability complete the given task with a given weight. ⁣⁣

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🔹Is it important to train to failure?⁣⁣

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🔹While it’s certainly not optimal to ‘always’ train to failure, the opposite isn’t true either, let’s dive in… 

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🔹For any given set, there’s an amount of adaptation stimulus and fatigue that comes along with it. Training to failure definitely increases the amount of CNS fatigue we may experience, which could be sub-optimal for future workouts – HOWEVER – if we never experience true (task) failure, we may never be able to reach the required amount of effort threshold that we need to stimulate growth, because we wouldn’t be as precise at dictating it.⁣⁣

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🔹Of course this comes more with experience, and the more advanced you’ll get the more precise you’ll be at performing the exercise correctly under high intensities.⁣⁣

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🔹Personally, as a fitness coach, I believe it’s important to understand what failure actually is and what it feels like, so that we’re more likely to be precise in how we rate our perceived effort exertion within a given set. Because we’ll still need to train close to it, for the stimuli to be meaningful. This means that here and there, it’s actually a good idea to be prescribed a set of X reps to RIR 0 for a set of an exercise. Feel it. Understand it. Learn it. ⁣Don’t hesitate to message me if you have any questions. 

🔹If you want to transform your physique to the next level message the word “Discipline” and I will set up a consultation call. 

References:

1) https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphys.2016.00010/full

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Leg Curls

♠️The Laying Leg Curls♠️

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🔹A machine like the leg curls works great for developing the hamstrings through knee flexion/loading the eccentrics, and it’s a versatile exercise that works great with overloading. ⁣

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🔹To perform it, simply lay face down on the bench and grab onto the side handles, and think about performing the movement by bending your knees. Down to full extension to maximize the tange of motion, and then back up. ⁣

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🔹The hamstrings can be divided into two main groups (medial and lateral), with slightly different origins and insertions. Both the medial and lateral hamstrings can extend the hip and flex the knee, however, the medial hamstrings can also internally rotate the hip, while the lateral hamstrings can externally rotate the hip. ⁣⁣

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🔹What happens if we try to rotate our feet when training them?⁣⁣

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🔹Well, it turns out that rotating the foot outwards during hamstrings exercises can preferentially activate the lateral hamstrings, while rotating the foot inwards can be used to preferentially activate the medial hamstrings.⁣⁣

🔹Message me the word “FREEDOM” for consultation on transforming your physique. 

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References: ⁣⁣

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18331800/⁣⁣

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https://medium.com/@ SandCResearch/how-can-we-best-train-the-hamstrings-1307fc6be59c⁣⁣

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Eat Like The Rock

♠️Eat Like The Rock♠️

🔹Recently The Rock has been going through a cutting phase for his new role in Black Adam. 

🔹He’s been manipulating water, sodium, and cardio while pushing  and pulling serious iron to have a dense, dry, detailed physique. 

🔹This is science at its greatest; conquering months of dialing in on strength & conditioning while constantly fine tuning a daily strategy.

🔹There’s no surprise that taking on The Rock diet and workout plan isn’t a matter of course as much as it is a matter of conviction. Not to mention a decent budget on food with a grocery list just under $50 per day, or around $1500 per month.

🔹 For more exclusive content and free monthly fitness ebooks join the muscle hackers club: https://mailchi.mp/aa9bea26a029/musclehacking