Girl put in work - Why females should lift heavy

If you are wondering about the title, it is from The Morning by the The Weeknd. If you are unfamiliar with The Weeknd, you are missing out on literally the greatest sexy-time music created. He definitely wasn't singing about lifting, but I don't care, it's an absolute tune.

This one will be old hat to anyone that has talked to me for any amount of time on the subjects of health, fitness, physique and looking jacked and tan. My thoughts are pretty straightforward - if you are an adult without any debilitating medical conditions, you should be lifting or at the very least performing some sort of anaerobic exercise on a fairly regular basis. This tends to be an easy message to convey to guys; most fellas want to look significantly more like Arnold and less like themselves and thusly will realise that they should be lifting more and generally being less shit than they currently are. Whether they follow through on these thoughts is entirely up to the mental/testicular fortitude of said male, but at least most know that lifting is the unsurpassed means to the ends of a better body.

No hetero

The fairer sex, on the other hand, present a different challenge. Whilst some females are now warming to the weight room and the idea of women lifting is becoming more mainstream, many woman are stuck in the misguided "weights for men, cardio for women" mindset. What I plan to present here, with my usual semi-factual, highly opinionated, sometimes funny, always obnoxious style, is my treatise on why the world would be a better place if all women lifted weights. If you are reading this and happen to be the proud owner of a cock and balls, then it goes without saying that you might not gain a whole lot from the process, but feel free to pass my arguments on to any and all females in your life, that is assuming you want them to become significantly more awesome in every way.

Men can also stick around for more of this sort of thing

Most females find themselves exercising, whether inside the consecrated ground of the temple of iron or in some lesser venue, with the aim of losing some fat and 'firming', 'toning' or 'tightening'. Firstly a minor aside; the phenomena that are supposedly described by those last 3 words don't mean anything in a physiological sense, they are buzz words, created by advertisers and thrown around by people that don't know their HIIT from their tit. When it comes to changing your physique, there are two process that you need to concern yourself with, the loss of fat and the gain of muscle. That is all; as far as you are concerned, one of these processes should always be your goal. 'Firming' is not the body's response to resistance training, muscle building is; 'tightening' of the midsection will not be the product of endless sit-ups, however fat loss will occur with hard training and proper diet. Minor diatribe over and back to the original programme, if fat loss is your goal, you may mistakenly think that hours and hours of steady state cardio, pounding the treadmill or revolving your life away on the elliptical is the best route to a leaner you. The truth, as you may have guessed, is that weight training, specifically lifting heavy using large compound movements (such as the squat, deadlift and overhead press) is in fact the most efficient use of your time and effort in your quest to lose some wobble.

Take heed.

A weight lifting session will cause 'micro-trauma' to your muscles, this may sound a bit terrifying, however this is a good thing as your body will go about repairing these tiny tears in your muscle fibres and in the process making the muscle slightly bigger and stronger. You might now think this has precisely dick all to do with fat loss, however hold your proverbial horses as we delve a little deeper. This repair of micro-trauma requires an energy input, this means that for a period of around 24-72 hours your rate of energy expenditure (i.e. metabolism) will be significantly increased. This depends on the volume and intensity of your workout with studies showing that heavier weights (in the 6-8 rep range) are the most beneficial.  This essentially means that the day(s) after a hard workout, you are burning fat whilst you are out buying handbags and tampons (or whatever girls do in their free time, I don't know). Another factor to consider is that the new muscle tissue that you will be building is highly metabolically active, with each extra kilo of muscle raising your basal metabolic rate by around 80 calories a day. Over the long term these increases add up, leading to a leaner, hotter you.

I'm not a big fan of Crossfit, but I am a big fan of Crossfit girls

Whilst aerobic cardio training has it place, and can be effectively used for weight loss, the result is tends to be just that: the loss of weight, from both fat and lean tissue. It should go without saying that this is not a favourable situation as the hours of time invested in the treadmill lead to you becoming a smaller version of yourself; you may weigh less but there will likely be no significant improvement in body composition, with all the jiggly bits you didn't like probably remaining jiggly. This mainly comes down to hormones; low intensity long duration exercise gives little to no boost (or even drops) to endogenous testosterone and growth hormone levels. As previously explained, these hormones are vital, even for females, if looking lean and sexy is your goal; this is because these hormones promote the growth of lean tissue and the burning of fat. To add insult to injury, long duration aerobic activity causes a large increase in your bodies cortisol levels. Cortisol is a stress hormone which serves to break down tissue, this includes fat, which of is nice, but also includes lean muscle tissue and as we all know, there is nothing more tragic than the loss of sweet, sweet gains. It also causes an increase in appetite, so the fat loss effects might well be negated if you succumb to the cravings for delicious, sweet, comforting carbs that tend to hit as the product of excessive cardio exercise.

If there's two things I love...

Anaerobic exercise (i.e. lifting or high intensity work such as sprints), on the other hand, promotes the specific loss of fat and gain/sparing of lean muscle tissue. This is because, as previously mentioned, there is a large calorie burn effect on the hours post-exercise (which isn't achieved with aerobic exercise) but also importantly because of the hormonal milieu that is created in your body. When it comes to changing your body composition, you cannot think of the body as purely a calorie in vs. calorie out 'furnace', hormones are highly important as they essentially signal to your body what tissue should be broken down and what tissue should be built. High intensity weight training will not raise cortisol as much as extended duration cardio, as such the environment which leads to breakdown of muscle tissue is not reached. As I have written in past articles, heavy weight training will serve to increase your testosterone and growth hormone levels, which are key to a lean, muscular, 'tight' physique, rather than the small soft physique which is regularly the product of endless hamster wheel aerobic training.

This photo of a hot girl standing near a barbell totally proves my point

So we have established that weight training is a hugely beneficial route to losing fat and keeping it off, but the reasons that damsels should get acquainted with the dumbells don't end there. To state the completely bloody obvious, lifting heavy weights will build muscle; to state the slightly less obvious, muscle building is something females should be looking to achieve. Now I know, I know, you aren't trying to be a bodybuilder, you don't want to get 'huge', you are scared of 'looking manly' and so on, so on. In truth, building muscle will add curves, make you look 'toned' and 'firm' (shoot me now for using those words) and add to a more feminine, shapely overall appearance. Legs, bums and tums end up looking far better from a diet of heavy squats deadlifts and hip thrusts than they ever will from hours on the elliptical; arms and shoulders will look much more shapely from diligent training of heavy presses and rows than they will from spending hours waving around 1kg dumbells in some terribly named aerobics class.  Instead, heavy weight training will force your muscles to adapt to the stresses you are imposing on them and grow stronger, denser and slightly larger, leading to a more firm, sculpted body.

As she's doing strongwoman, she undoubtedly lifts heavy as hell and damn is it doing good things.

World record holding powerlifter Caitlyn Trout lifts more than almost every guy you know.

If you are still worried about somehow getting too big, consider that no one has ever had a couple of weight sessions and suddenly realised they are fucking jacked; building muscle is a very slow process, so the chances of accidentally waking up one day and being 'too big' are about as likely as Rick Ross waking up with healthy blood pressure. Furthermore, as a female you have at least five times less testosterone than the most effete man, with typical values more like one tenth to one twentieth. This means that the muscle building potential for females is significantly less than that of men; women literally don't have the balls to get huge.

It's only fair to give the ladies something to look at.

There are also veritable ass-loads of peripheral health benefits that are the product of lifting (or the accompanying fat-loss and muscle gain), these might not be as sexy as the prospect of fat loss or building a great booty, but being a bit healthier is always nice. Lifting has been shown to decrease resting blood pressure and be cardio-protective as well as warding off type-II diabetes due to increasing glucose and triglyceride uptake by muscles. Heavy weight training also increases bone density and protects against osteoporosis, which is nice as it will stop you falling apart as you age. Furthermore, lifting leads to post-exercise endorphins releases which help combat stress, in addition to heavy lifting itself acting as a perfect venting mechanism for those that require a stress release. High stress levels can wreak havoc on your body so finding a way to combat stress is important; heavy lifting is pretty much like meditation for people that aren't hippies.

This is much cooler than listening to whale song.

An overlooked benefit of females taking up lifting is getting strong. Many girls might not have getting strong at the top of their 'to do' list, but being strong is awesome, whoever you are. Just think of all the jars you can open with your new-found strength! No need to call a man again. In all seriousness though, being fit, strong and muscular makes you a generally more useful person to yourself and others. Seeing yourself get stronger month-to-month is a great feeling, knowing that now you can throw around weights that you couldn't budge half a year ago is empowering and gives you a great boost in confidence. Not to mention that there is literally endless variation and progression possible once you get comfortable with the weight room, so you should always be able to keep moving on to bigger and better things. There are loads of reasons to lift, but personally, I'd say start lifting just because it is fun.

and because a girl lifting is super damn hot.

If my rambling has somehow convinced you to get under some iron, check out my free guides in the top right of this page.

No doubt, see my stacks are PHAT, this is what it's about - PHAT workouts to get stacked

I'm content to not write anything more in this article as I finally worked a line from Illmatic into a title. If you're unaware, Illmatic is probably the greatest album ever. This particular line is from track 9, Represent (that is what the track is called, I'm not ending my sentences with 'represent' and a raised fist quite yet).

Pictured: Not me.

You are now probably wondering what PHAT is; according to Urban Dictionary and 90s black people, it is both a synonym for cool and an acronym for 'Pretty Hot And Tempting'. According to myself and various jacked dudes (the most eminent of whom is Layne Norton, who is probably to thank for popularising the system), it is also a acronym for 'Power-Hypertrophy Adaptive Training'. In practice this means it is a training system with the dual aim of building maximal strength whilst developing size.

This is Google Image's idea of 'PHAT'. I approve.

Without further adieu here are 2 sample programmes:

Strength Bias PHAT programme

Day 1: Pulling Strength (Deadlift 5 sets x 3-5 reps, Hamstring movement 3 x 6-8, Row variant 3 x 6-8, Chin/Pull-up/Machine Pull-down 3 x 6-8)
Day 2: Pushing Strength (Bench Press variant 5 x 3-5, Overhead Press variant 3 x 6-8, High Incline Press or Behind Neck Press 3 x 6-8, Dip or Close Grip Bench 3 x 6-8)
Day 3: Squat Strength and Accessories (Back Squat 5 x 3-5, Front Squat or Leg Press 3 x 6-8, Calves 3 x 6-8, Abs 3 x 6-8, Shrugs 3 x 6-8)

Day 4: Rest

Day 5: 'Torso' hypertrophy and dynamic effort [DE] (DE Bench Press 5 x 3 (for DE work, use ~50% of 1 rep max), DE Chin or Row 5 x 3, Bench variant 3 x 12-15, Chin 3 x 12-15, Overhead Press variant 3 x 12-15, Row variant 3 x 12-15, Face Pull or Upright Row 3 x 12-15, Dip or Close Grip Bench 3 x 12-15)
Day 6: Legs and Arms hypertrophy and DE (DE Squat or Deadlift 5 x 3, Squat or Leg Press 3 x 12-15, Romanian or Stiff-Leg Deadlift 3 x 12-15, Hamstring Curl 3 x 12-15, Calves 3 x 12-15, Curl variant 3 x 12-15, Tricep Extension variant 3 x 12-15)
Day 7: Rest


Hypertrophy Bias PHAT Programme

Day 1: Upper Body Strength (Bench Press variant 4 x 3-5, Barbell Row variant 4 x 3-5, Overhead Press variant 3 x 6-8, Chins/Pull-ups/Machine Pull-down 3 x 6-8)
Day 2: Lower Body Strength (Back Squats 5 x 3-5, Deadlifts 3 x 3-5, Front Squats 3 x 6-8, Hamstring movement 3 x 6-8)

Day 3: Rest

Day 4: Back and Shoulder Hypertrophy and DE (DE Chin or Row 5 x 3, Chin/Pull-up/Machine Pull-down 3 x 12-15, Row variant 3 x 12-15, Overhead Press variant 3x 12-15, Face Pull or Upright Row 3 x 12-15, Lateral Raise 3 x 12-15, Shrug 3 x 12-15)
Day 5: Legs Hypertrophy and DE (DE Squat or Deadlift 5 x 3, Squat or Leg Press 3 x 12-15, Romanian or Stiff-Leg Deadlift 3 x 12-15, Hamstring Curl 3 x 12-15, Leg Extension 3 x 12-15, Calves 5 x 12-15)
Day 6: Chest and Arms Hypertrophy and DE (DE Bench Press 5 x 3, Incline Press 3 x 12-15, Close Grip Bench Press or Dip 3 x 12-15, DB or Cable Fly (vary angles) 5 x 12-15, Barbell or EZ Bar Curl variant 3 x 12-15, Tricep Extension variant 3 x 12-15, Dumbell Curl variant 3 x 12-15)
Day 7: Rest

If you are looking at this and thinking "What the bloody ef does any of this mean?" then this programme is not for you. This is not a beginner programme; you have to know your way around the gym. You don't have to be the most jacked and tanned guy there, but you should have good form on all the basic movements. Preferably you should at least a year or so of training under your belt, as this programme may well require some tweaking to personal needs, it is good to know how your body reacts to certain stimuli. For example, for me personally, I deal with high volume squatting and pulling pretty well; high volume pressing, on the other hand causes my dodgy right shoulder to hurt like hell and as such causes me to hate everyone and everything around me. Time spent training hard lets you learn ways in which you can and can't push your body and as such it would be prudent to amass some of that knowledge before taking on this programme.

I didn't know what to put here, so tits.

You will also notice that not every exercise is a set-in-stone prescription, many are broad movement guidelines. This means you will need both the knowledge of weight training movements to breakdown the exercises that may fit these guidelines and also the knowledge of self to know which of the applicable movements suits you best. For example where I have written 'Row variant' there are a lot of exercises which fit the billing - 45 degree barbell rows, Pendlay rows, Yates Rows, Cable rows, Meadows rows, Dumbell Rows - knowing which exercise works well for you (whether that is in terms of maximum weight lifted or feeling maximum contraction and pump in the target muscle, depending on day) is up to you. So feel free to play around, stick to the principles and basic structure, but don't be afraid to change things a bit to suit your preferences; maybe you don't like Close Grip Bench or Dips and would rather do JM presses? They are a great exercise so go for it. Maybe you hate front squats? Firstly you are stupid and I hate you, but you might put in Olympic style back squats or narrow stance leg press instead. Learning what does and doesn't work for you is an important and underrated factor (and one I'll probably write an article on sometime). However, there is one caveat: if you suck at something and deep down you know it is important, don't skip it on the pretence that it doesn't work for you; if you can only do 2 pull ups it's probably because you're weak and/or fat, embrace the suck, work hard and get better.

Neither fat nor weak.

Even for those that know what they are doing, there does need to be some further clarification and guidelines. On the strength days (that is Days 1-2/3) you want to have long rest periods, usually around 3 minutes, enough to make sure you can exert near maximum effort on each set, especially for the first exercise in each workout. For these days, the weight that you move for the first exercise is of primary importance, you want to be aiming to beat your numbers from the previous week in each session.

Matt Kroc didn't get this huge from lifting baby weights

On hypertrophy days (Days 2/3-6), shorter rests are required, both because shorter rests are optimal for maximal hypertrophy stimulus and because otherwise, the workouts would take a fucking age; 90 seconds or so is a good guideline. Consequently, the weight that you move is not of the utmost importance, you should be aiming for stimulation of the muscles and 'the pump'. At the very least, this will make you look really good in the gym so you can eye-fuck yourself in the mirror and hold on to the hope that maybe, just maybe, an attractive member of the opposite sex is also doing an eye-fucking on you. Converse to my usual recommendations, on these days where the focus is work volume and pump for a targeted muscle group, machines are fine. I know, I know, this goes against everything I usually preach and I need to wash my filthy mouth out; however, there is a time and place for almost everything, and this is one of the very few times or places for the use of machines, if you so wish. Supersetting exercises, preferably from opposing muscle groups might also be a good idea as it can lead to a large decrease in the time in the gym necessary to get your required lifting volume in. If you find the workouts are still taking longer than you would really like, even with honest short rest periods and supersetting, drop the dynamic effort work first and perform a pure pump style workout.

The pump: it's as satisfying as coming, at least according to Arnold.

This might also be a good place to throw in a quick description on what exactly dynamic effort work is to those that think 'the Westside Method' is one of Tupac's early albums. Dynamic effort work, as popularised by Louis Simmons et al. at Westside Barbell Club, refers to lifting significantly sub-maximal weights with as much speed and acceleration as is possible. Many, many articles have been written on the whys and hows of DE training, but to summarise and greatly simplify: the point of throwing around weights that are much lighter than you could lift is to increase your rate of maximal force production, that is, your power output. Adding in dynamic effort work will lead to increased power which will in turn allow you to lift greater weights in the long run.

He may be fat these days, but you will never be 'two tomahawks on your chest' cool.

Finally, know that this programme is not for the lazy and half arsed, the stressed out and short on time or the tiny-eating, "I just want to tone up" girly men. If you want to get the most from this programme you need to commit, hit it hard in the gym, rest and recover well when out of the gym and make sure you are getting sufficient amounts of quality calories. If you fulfil these criteria then this programme is the unabashed balls for packing size on your frame and getting you stronger than a black guy on PCP.

How do you make a hormone? - Part 3: Growth hormone and IGF-1

Back with the third instalment of this series with new information on all the great things your hormones do and the the same shitty joke as the last two articles.

This one has taken me a while for a couple of reasons, first I thought I'd do a surface skimming article that didn't really say a whole lot, then, being a perfectionist tool, I refused to let myself do that and endeavoured to research deeper. Upon doing this I realised I was in way over my head in terms of endocrinic knowledge and decided to revert to the originally planned, superficial, easy-reading article. At this point the perfectionist tool side of me chirped up again and I lost approximately 9 days of my life learning about growth hormone, the functioning of the HPTA axis, exogenous HGH use, general PED use, AAS, SARMs, Myostatin Inhibitors, SERMs, peptides and any and all other science shit that gets people huge.

That's science. Trust him, he's a Doctor.

In short, I nerded. I nerded really hard. Now my head is full of loads of information ranging from the mundane to the really quite exciting, from the legal and advisable to the shady to the down right scary. Now, armed with these masses of information, I feel equipped to write a magnum opus, DC's War and Peace on natural and chemical hormone optimisation, a work more seminal to the development of the human race than the The Bible, The Qur'an, The Bhagavat-Gita, On The Origin of Species, Principia Mathematica, Relativity: Special and General Theory, Nuts magazine and the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle comics, all rolled into one. That, however, is not what you will be getting here; what you are getting will in fact be a brief skim over the topic at hand, hopefully with a few little funnies and some inappropriate photos thrown in for good measure. Shall we?

Human growth hormone (usually just called HGH, but also known as somatotropin or somatropin; I'll probably be using different names as my mind meanders) is a 191-amino acid long single chain peptide that is secreted mainly by your pituitary gland. It gets released in 'pulses' every 3 to 5 hours when the pituitary is stimulated by growth hormone-releasing hormone which is in turn released from your hypothalamus.  As implied by the name, it is responsible for the growth and regeneration of your body's cells, as well as promoting the breakdown of fat. Without HGH you would never get jacked and tanned, which of course would be devastating, but it's also important for your brain, bones, regulating your metabolism, stimulating your immune system and other stuff that doesn't really matter as much as good looking muscles.

Obligatory picture of good looking person to somehow prove my point

When it comes to muscle building, it isn't HGH itself which gets the magic done; GH is only active in your blood stream for a matter of minutes before your liver sucks it all up and spits out a bunch of 'growth factors'. Of these, insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1) is the star. It's like Nicole Scherzinger to the Pussycat Dolls; it does all the important stuff that actually matters, the others just dance around in the background looking pretty. IGF-1 is anabolic as hell, so goes ahead and does it thing: making your muscles big and making your life better.

Seriously, can anyone name any of them?

You don't have a whole lot of this magic HGH juice circulating in your body post-puberty (which if you remember, was a time when a lot of things grew a lot and was generally fun for all involved); 20-something men have around 5 nanograms per millilitre of blood between pulses and women have about twice that amount because something to do with having children (sometimes I'm bad at science) and levels only decrease as you age. Anyway, they are average person levels. Who wants to be average? Not me, and hopefully not you, so lets look at how we can supercharge our growth levels, and by extension IGF-1, levels.

"The worst thing I can be is the same as everybody else. I'd hate that." - Arnold. Enough said.

As I said before, growth is released in pulses; the largest and most predictable of these pulses occurs about an hour after you hit the hay, with further pulses through your sleep accounting for over 50% of total release. This leads to our first strategy for optimising HGH release. Sleep. Sleep long enough and sleep well. Cutting your sleep short or having your sleep disturbed means you are likely missing out on these growth pulses and all the benefits that come with them. Learn to develop your own bedtime routine to help you relax and get quality sleep, humans tend to respond well to learned patterns, whatever it is, glass of milk, little meditate, rub one out...

Put your issues in some tissues.

Intense exercise is a factor we can easily control, which signals the body to release HGH. The exact nature of the exercise you are partaking in will affect how your GH levels respond. As is almost unanimously the case, hitting the weights is the best option here, with heavy lifting using compound movements (those which involve multiple muscle groups) shown to spike GH. If we are going for absolute optimal hormone manipulation, it appears that pump style training consisting of lower rest periods (in the region of 30-60 seconds) and reps in the 10-15 range leads to larger GH spikes. There is also evidence that supplements which help induce the pump (and are likely included in your standard pre-workout formula) such as arginine, betaine and taurine, will facilitate a larger GH response to exercise (and also probably give you spontaneous erections).

I thought a picture of Frank McGrath's ridiculous forearm pump was more appropriate than a picture of a boner.

There is some good news here for the cardio lovers too, aerobic training, when done right, can lead to GH releases, which lead to a healthier and better looking you. What constitutes 'done right'? Studies suggest that performing exercise above the lactate threshold for at least 10 minutes leads to the largest HGH releases, but long duration, steady state, hamster-in-a-wheel type cardio can actually decrease GH levels. In practice, this means that HIIT is potentially a smart way to go, as is just hopping on a piece of cardio equipment and going balls-to-the-wall for 10-15 minutes then getting out of there.

Somewhat counter-intuitively, fasting can increase the frequency and amplitude of GH pulses. It may seem a bit strange that after not eating, your body releases a hormone to make you grow, but when we remember that HGH also stimulates the break down of fat and reduces liver uptake of glucose (preventing you passing out from super low blood sugar), this makes a little more evolutionary sense. So if we use controlled fasts (which luckily for you, I've written all about here) we can reap the gains of all natural boosts in GH.

In a way hand-in-hand with the last point; studies have shown that hyperglycaemia (high-blood sugar) severely blunts your natural GH pulses. This means (as has been mentioned many times before), stuffing your face with carbs all day is a poor, poor idea from a hormonal optimisation standpoint, and as such a body composition standpoint, and as such a getting laid standpoint. Carbs aren't the devil, but a constant, sustained intake of carbs does you absolutely no favours. As such, carb intake should be controlled and preferably targeted around the time of your workouts.

Lastly, don't be fat. This one again. Fat people have lower circulating GH and weaker GH pulses. I'm not trying to be mean, biology just doesn't like fat people and seems intent on really kicking them when they're down. For any readers wishing to lose weight, this is a good place to start.

Twins may be one of the best songs ever, but Big Pun and Fat Joe should only set an example of impeccable flow, not body type (or fashion sense).

There we have it, another article on the board; I hope you enjoyed it. My apologies if you didn't, or if you thought this was a little too similar to the last. In truth, some minor nuances aside, most hormonal optimisation boils down to things that we already think of as 'healthy'. Eat well, exercise, sleep. Get lean, get jacked, get tanned, get money.