Welcome to Litsy!

Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Sets: These are your muscle-building, or “working,” sets

for the exercise.

Third Warm-Up Set

Your third set is 6 reps with about 70% of your heavy weight, and it should

be done at a moderate pace. It should still feel light and easy. This set and the

following two are to acclimate your muscles to the heavy weights that are about

to come. Once again, you follow this with a 1-minute rest.

Second Warm-Up Set

For your second warm-up set, you use the same weight as the first and do 10

reps this time at a little faster pace. Then rest for 1 minute.

First Warm-Up Set

For your fist warm-up set, you do 12 reps with about 50% of your “heavy”

weight (weight that only allows for 8 – 10 reps), and then you rest for 1 minute.

Don‘t rush this set, but don‘t take it too slowly either. It will feel very light and

easy.

If there is no way that you can split up your cardio and weightlifting, I

recommend doing your cardio after lifting (never before) and doing no more

than 20 – 30 minutes of HIIT. This isn‘t an ideal setup, but it‘s not going to ruin

your strength gains.

I‘ve tried many different intervals and found that a minimum of 2 – 3 hours
seems to be best. Theoretically speaking, the longer you wait is probably better.better. I
currently put about 14 hours in between my weights and cardio because I lift

early in the morning and do cardio around 9:30 pm.

I recommend doing HIIT for all cardio, and keeping your sessions

20–30 minutes long. Here‘s how it works:

You start your workout with 2–3 minutes of low-intensity warm-up.

You then go all-out, as fast as possible, for 30-60 seconds (if you‘re new to

HIIT, 30-second intervals will be plenty, but you want to try to work

toward being able to do 60-second intervals).

If you‘d rather not re-feed, that‘s okay too. You can simply do one cheat meal

per week when dieting to lose weight. A cheat meal is one where you eat more

than you normally would. I don‘t recommend gorging, but don‘t be afraid to

enjoy it, either. Go out with friends, eat some pasta, have some dessert, and

don‘t feel guilty. You‘ve earned it.

Now, your numbers will be less, of course, but the idea is simple. Just double

your carbs one day per week.

A proper re-feed not only won‘t cause any fat storage, but will also prevent

your body from getting sucked into the dwindling spiral I explained earlier.

Eat 30 – 40% of your daily carbs in your post-workout meal. Make sure to

have the rest eaten by the end of dinner. If you train at night, what I‘ve found

workable is cutting my normal post-workout carbs in half, and spreading the

remaining half throughout the day.

As a note, you should adjust your calories down by about 200 for every 15

pounds that you lose. You should subtract these calories by reducing carbs

(reduce by 50 grams per day).

Now, eating this much protein feels unusual at first for most women, but

eating a lot of protein is actually vital to both building and retaining muscle, and

losing weight. Studies, such as the University of Illinois study published in 2005

have shown that, when combined with exercise, high-protein diets help women
retain muscle mass and even, strangely enough, lose more weight in their
midsection.

Here‘s how to calculate your starting point:

Eat 1.2 grams of protein per pound of body weight per day

Eat 1 gram of carbs per pound of body weight per dayIf you find it very hard to keep your fats this low, you can tweak the diet by

reducing your carbs by 50 grams each day and increasing your fats by about 20

grams

Eat .2 grams of healthy fat per pound of body weight per day (1 gram per 5
pounds of body weight per day)

Building a great body requires great eating habits, and you now know what

that means: eating enough calories, protein, carbohydrates, and fats on the right

eating schedule and drinking enough water, ensuring that your body has

everything it needs to adapt to the intense training that you subject it to.

How many cheat meals you should eat per week depends on what you‘re

trying to accomplish.

When you‘re bulking, two or three cheat meals per week is totally fine.

When you‘re cutting, you can have one cheat meal per week, and I

recommend that you make it a "re-feed meal," which I‘ll explain in full in the

next chapter.

What you really

want from a cheat meal is a leptin boost

Eating carbohydrates is the most effective way

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Second to that is eating

protein (high-protein meals also raise your metabolic rate

). Dietary fats aren‘t

very effective at increasing leptin levels, and alcohol actually inhibits it

There are much smarter ways to go about cheating.

The first important point is to think in cheat meals, not days. No sensible diet

should include entire days of overeating, but a single bout of overeating per

week is actually advisable when you‘re dieting to lose weight.When you boost your leptin levels, this can have positive effects on fat

oxidation, thyroid activity, mood, and even testosterone levels.

A slow-digesting protein should be the last meal of the night, and should be

consumed immediately before going to bed. Research has shown that this keeps

amino acids elevated while you sleep, which can then be used to continue to

repair your muscles while you sleep

. This speeds your muscle recovery.

I like egg protein powder or 0% fat Greek yogurt or low-fat cottage cheese

for my pre-sleep protein, but casein is another common choice.

THE PRE-WORKOUT MEAL: 30 – 20 – 20

About 30 minutes before training,

you want to eat about 20 grams of high-GI

carbs and

about 20 grams of fast-digesting protein (such as whey).

You should be eating protein every 3 – 5 hours. You never want to go more

than 5 hours without eating protein, as studies have shown that the body‘s

anabolic response to protein consumption lasts about 5 hours. This means you‘ll

need to eat protein 4 – 6 times per day, and enough each meal to meet your

dietary targets

It‘s also worth noting that ensuring your body gets enough potassium is

important, as it helps balance fluids in the cells (sodium sucks water in,

potassium pumps it out).

According to the Institute of Medicine, we should be

consuming sodium and potassium at about a 1:2 ratio, with 4,700 mg per day as
the adequate intake of potassium for adults.
—one
teaspoon of table salt per day is the recommended upper limit of sodium intake.
A teaspoon of table salt
contains a whopping 2,300 mg of sodium.

I recommend
eating a fast-digesting protein like whey after working out to quickly spike

amino acid levels in your blood (and stimulate muscle growth
), and eating a

slow-digesting protein like egg or casein thirty minutes before going to bed, as

research has shown that this improves muscle recovery

For the rest of your

supplement meals, you can do whey or egg. I like to use egg supplements

because too much whey tends to bloat me.

Whey protein is also digested quickly and

its “net protein utilization” (the scientific term referring to the body‘s utilization

of the protein) is between 90 – 95% depending on which study you read. Egg

protein digests much slower than whey and beef, and its NPU also falls in the

same range as whey.

Well, your body should have no trouble

absorbing upwards of 60 grams in one sitting.
Another thing to know about protein is that different proteins digest at

different speeds, and some are better utilized by the body than others. Beef

protein, for example, is digested quickly, and 70 – 80% of what‘s eaten is

utilized by the body (the exact number varies based on what study you read, but

they all fall between 70% and 80%).

average person gets about 80% of their water from drinking it and other

beverages, and about 20% from the food they eat.

The Institute of Medicine reported in 2004 that women should consume about

91 ounces of water—or three-quarters of a gallon—per day, and men should

consume about 125 ounces per day (a gallon is 128 ounces).

As the old proverb

goes, “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.” This is very true with diet.

This insight is actually very applicable to training and dieting. If you can

measure your progress (or lack thereof) and express it in real numbers, then you

know if you‘re going in the right direction or not. If you don‘t have any way to

measure progress, then you‘re going it blind, hoping for the best.

Sir William Thomson, also known as Lord Kelvin, was an ingenious physicist

and engineer, and he said that when you can measure something and express it in

numbers, you know something about it; but when you can‘t measure it or

express it numbers, your knowledge is lacking.

So, while 4 – 6 smaller meals per day (or even 6 – 8) may or may not provide

a metabolic boost, it will certainly make it easier for you to stick to your diet,

and will prevent the dreaded pangs of starvation that are usually associated with

trying to lose weight.

It doesn‘t even matter what you

eat—if your calories are right, you‘ll lose weight.

THE FIRST LAW OF FAT LOSS

Eat Less Than You Expend = Lose Weight

. While there‘s a never-ending debate as to

what rep ranges are best for hypertrophy (muscle growth), research has shown

that doing more than fifteen reps causes little to no improvement in muscle

power or size due to insufficient overload

. It only improves muscle endurance

(the ability to contract over and over).

Building lean muscle is, in essence, just a matter of following these four laws

religiously: lift hard, lift heavy, get sufficient rest, and feed your body correctly.

That‘s how you build a strong, healthy, lean body. As you see, it‘s much simpler

than the marketing departments of supplement companies and their magazines

want you to think.

In a meta-analysis of 140 related studies, Arizona

State University found that a progression in resistance optimizes strength gains

and muscle growth. Researchers also found that working in the 4–6 rep range

(80% of 1RM) is most effective for those that train regularly

4

.

. If you‘re new to weightlifting and want

to build a solid foundation, you will be doing the same exercises every week,

and they will include things like Squats, Deadlifts, Bench Presses, Dumbbell

Presses, Barbell Curls, and others. If you‘re lifting correctly, your strength will

skyrocket, and you will steadily gain lean, sexy muscle…so why would you change your routine.

You‘re in the gym to improve

your muscle tone and get stronger, and that requires three simple things: lift

progressively heavier weights, eat correctly, and give your body sufficient rest.

Charles Poliquin, trainer to world-class athletes like Olympians and

professional sports players, is fond of saying that in order to gain an inch on your

arm, you have to gain ten pounds of muscle. His point is the most effective way

to build a muscular, strong body is with systemic overload, not localized

training.

The bottom line is that if your exercise program is built correctly, you can

achieve stunning gains by training for no longer than 45 to 60 minutes per day.

Brain food