We just got  a fresh batch of Lynx Performance Grips into Active Nutrition and I had to try this alternative to my trusty gloves.  From the Lynx packaging:

“Lynx Performance Grips allow for greater strength gains by increasing the recruitment of the muscles in the hands and wrists, improving your overall performance. Lynx Grips also reduce forearm tension, hand cramping, slipping, and eliminate calluses.”

Sounds good so far. I tested my new pair on back day, a workout that really depends on grip strength and endurance. Starting out with dumbbell rows, I noticed that the Lynx grips are ridiculously easy to use. Pop them in your palms and grab a bar. Done. The grip felt really comfortable and slightly padded. Starting with a lighter warm-up weight they felt great. Moving up to a working weight set, I really started to feel the effects of an increased diameter bar. These little guys definitely work the forearm grip strength! I had to drop my max weight down a bit on the dumbbell rows to keep my forearms from burning out and dropping the weights. No problem, I’ll gladly work my way back up to that weight but with much stronger forearms to show for it.

The Lynx grips worked very well for all of my back exercises, and really shined on one in particular. I’m a big fan of the old school pull-up, and like to work my way up to the widest grip possible. The only pull-up bar in my gym that is more than a few feet long isn’t knurled for grip, so whenever I try a really wide grip set, my hands start slipping back towards the center. Even with my nice lifting gloves, a good set of wide grip pull-ups was impossible to do. Lynx grips to the rescue! With the grips in hand, I could easily do as many ultra-wide grip pull-ups as my back could handle without worrying about my grip slipping.

I really like the Lynx Performance Grips. The only disadvantage I see them having over traditional workout gloves is that they are much more easily lost or misplaced at the gym because they aren’t attached to your hands. But hey, no sweat, at $8.95 for the pair at Active Nutrition, they are no problem to replace. Highly recommended!

Since 2007, Magnum Nutraceuticals has been a premier brand for Active Nutrition. Our customers have come to trust Magnum as a company who will always put quality first with their pharmaceutical grade supplements that get results. The foundation of Magnum’s product line is the Quattro protein. It is a blend of whey protein isolate, milk protein isolate, egg protein isolate, and micellar casein. It has been a customer favorite for three years at Active Nutrition because of its fantastic taste, ease of mixing, and most important, its lactose-free digestibility. Active Nutrition’s owner Phil Rennick spoke with Magnum’s founder and president Markus Kaulius recently and asked for a brief introduction to himself and his great company. We have never met a supplement company owner with such a great passion for his products and the results they provide. Expect BIG things from this great Canadian company in the future!

“I have been in the “supplement game” for close to 15 years (half my life)!  I started by selling brand name supplements out of my house – I wanted my friends to have someone to turn to for information and for products that worked.   I never sold anything I didn’t believe in, hadn’t tried myself or couldn’t guarantee – I put my name on every sale.   I took my home-based business into a storefront and built a small chain of 3 stores that sold with the same uncompromising integrity that made my home business so successful.   My problem was that I never had a brand that I trusted and believed in 100% – and some products just didn’t work for everyone – I was taking back too many returns for my liking!

Magnum Nutraceuticals was started with a simple concept – we will supply the best quality supplements without compromising.  Integrity is the best thing we can offer, and you can find it in every bottle!     As we compete in a completely unregulated industry, we wanted to set apart the way we were judged, so we

contracted a Pharmaceutical Manufacturer to blend every product.    This manufacturer has a Pharmaceutical License and is federally regulated – the quality standards are like nothing seen in the health industry – these are Pharmaceutical standards!  Every ingredient purchased is Pharmaceutical Grade – bioactivity and purity levels that are off the charts.   We make good products!

We are in our sixth year in business and Magnum can now be purchased in 34 countries worldwide!   It is nice to see that people do actually care what they put in their body and they are demanding quality – thus Magnum is being called for.

I sold my stores more than 4 years ago, but you will still find me answering emails and phone calls (at times) from everyday clients – I love to talk about the Magnum difference and help clients get the results they are looking for.

Feel free to drop me a line and I will be happy to help you reach your goals!”

Markus Kaulius

President, Magnum Neutaceuticals Inc

http://www.hardmagnum.com/

If you don’t have that kind of attitude in the gym (or in your life for that matter) it is going to be difficult to achieve goals, what ever they are.  We have to realize it takes more energy to go somewhere than to stand still.  It takes more effort to walk up stairs than to walk around the third floor.  Therefor, achieving this goal is going to take effort, more effort than your current exercise plan.  Have you noticed that the majority of people exercising in the gym have not really changed in the last year.  Their bodies are at the same point when they started or slightly better.  Why?  Either they have no goal to change or they don’t have the information to get there.  The information presented here will develop lean muscular abdomen in everyone.

You have to be committed to apply the information for it to work and you have to set a date to have this accomplished.  Without a timeline you’ve effectively entered a race with no finish line.  No thank you.  I want know when I’ve arrived.  The light at the end of the tunnel is what drives me through the tunnel.  The choice is yours.  Are you going to be one who uses good effective nutrition and exercise to improve the quality of your life or are you going to be part of the gym membership that pays their monthly dues and it doesn’t make a difference whether they show up or not.?

There Are Less Trim Waistlines Now Than In The Past!!

It is common knowledge obesity is a rising epidemic in the United States. In a world of advanced medical knowledge and technology, why is this?  The accepted and promoted modern lifestyle is bad for our health.  The style of eating and the activity generally accepted as healthy is not.  We need to rethink and reorganize the way we live from the time we get up in the morning t the time we fall asleep.

The Science Behind Great Abs.

What are the physiological changes that need to occur in order to have a lean muscular waistline?  The first is to lower the levels of fat over the top and around the abdominal wall.  This will make the muscle underneath more visible and trim inches off your waist.  The second step is to simultaneously grow defined, tight abdominal muscles underneath.   This will taper your waistline further, promote good posture and relieve lower back pain.  This is the general plan.  Now let’s work out the specifics

STEP1: Lowering Abdominal Fat.

Client after client have said no matter what ab exercise they try, they can’t reduce their waist.  Even my elite athletes who’s athletic performance is outstanding speak of immovable waistlines despite strong abdominal muscles.  The problem here is in most cases is that there ab muscles, developed or not, are hidden behind a thick curtain of subcutaneous fat.  Removing that fat will thin the skin and expose the muscle underneath.  This fat is easier to burn than visceral fat.  Visceral fat is deep fat that accumulates underneath the abdominal wall.  This is commonly referred to as a “beer belly.”  Intestinal fat as well as liver fat can stretch the trunk and abdominal muscles.  This can thin the abdominal wall increasing the chance of abdominal hernia.  It can also increase the pelvic tilt, causing back pain and low back strain.  Drinking alcohol is not the only cause of visceral fat accumulation.  Genetics also influence the rate and areas of the body you store fat.  Men are more likely to store around the waistline causing an apple shape, while women are more likely in the hips causing a pear shape.  Apple shapes have been shown to increase the chance of developing heart disease.  Therefor, it is not only a matter of looking good and feeling better.  Triming your waistline is now a matter of disease prevention and longevity.

No matter where you store your fat, the process of eliminating it is the same.  Removing fat from one specific area of the body is impossible except in the case of surgery and even that is not effective for the best results.  At conception the rate of storage and location of your fat stores is genetically determined.  This means your body has an image of how you are going to look at age ten, twenty, thirty and so on throughout your life.  Environmental factors such as lifestyle influence this picture either positively or negatively.  If you are genetically lean but, binge constantly on high fat, high sugar foods, eventually you will become fat.  If you are born on the fat side and have been overweight most of your life, through proper diet and exercise, you can lose a significant amount of body fat.  Fact of life no. 1: In most cases, it is very difficult but not impossible to appear genetically lean or even genetically fat if you are not born that way. Fact of life no. 2: You cannot spot reduce.  This means that in order to remove fat from your abdomen, your total body fat percentage must drop.

The Fat loss Plan:

The first step is to cause your body to use your stored body fat as a fuel source.  The only way to lower body fat is to burn it.  It cannot be released through sweat.  It cannot be urinated out or excreted.  Forget the fallacies marketed to you.  Burning body fat as a fuel source is the only way.  The first step in causing your body to look inside itself for a fuel source is to eat slightly less than what you burn.  This means using more calories than you eat over the course of the day.  Your body is a perpetual furnace.  It must constantly burn calories to sustain life.  If you stop burning calories for an instant, you stop life.  If you eat less than you need, your body is resourceful enough to look inside itself to make up the difference.  It will sustain life this way in the case of lack of available food.  It is our goal to cause your body to choose fat tissue to make up the calorie difference.  This means limiting the size of the meals you eat in order to prevent a “calorie overflow” and subsequent fat storage.  Limiting meal size could also limit the amount of nutrients you consume.   If you are malnourished for a couple of meals, your body will be more likely to use nutrient rich, lean tissue to make up the difference and satisfy its need for nutrients for metabolic processes.  This is why starvation diets do not work.  Loss in lean tissue decreases fat burning capability in the body because, lean tissue is where fat is burned.  Therefor, frequent, small, well balanced meals are key principles in “Great Ab Nutrition.”  It is difficult to obtain all your nutrient needs at a calorie deficit.  This is why people utilize the talents of a sports nutritionist.  We need to “nutrify” the lower calorie menus your eating.  It is impossible to do this without supplementation, specifically sports supplements that balance nutrient intake as if you were consuming  enough calories without a deficit

Cardio for Fat Loss

The second step to burning abdominal fat is specific cardiovascular exercise to improve your bodies ability to burn fat and to put your body in a state where it is primarily using a significant amount of fat for fuel.  Without proper nutrition at a negative energy balance (calorie deficit).  You will not lose body fat no matter how good your body is at burning fat.  This is because you will be burning dietary fat rather than adipose tissue.  For this reason, it is of primary importance first set your body in a nutrient rich energy deficit.

The first type of cardiovascular training is interval training.  This is hill type exercise where your heart rate continues to rise and recover, rise and recover.  This improves cardiovascular fitness levels, making your heart and lungs more efficient at burning fat.  A fit athlete can burn more calories at a steady pace, jogging longer and faster than an untrained individual.  The second type of cardio is sustained steady pace cardio.  This type of cardiovascular exercise uses fat as its primary fuel source.  As long as you can maintain a steady heart rate, you will be burning a significant number of calories, the majority coming from fat.

STEP 2: Increasing Abdominal Tone and Shape

There are four different sets of muscles that make up the abdominal wall.  They are, from deepest to most superficial, the internal obliques, the external obliques, the rectus abdominus and the transverse abdominus.  Each muscle group must be trained progressively in order to “sculpt” or hypertrophy the muscle.  This means that all movements of the trunk should be executed under resistance and then slowly returned to the starting position.  The most basic trunk movement is flexion commonly known as a crunch.  The key to this exercise is to recognize proper muscle contraction and then do it at an optimal pace.

Proper flexion of the trunk occurs when the bottom of the front of the rib cage moves closer to the top of the front of the hip bones.  You are not contracting the “six pack muscles” if this does not occur.  This should be executed at a slow two count pace each direction.  This will ensure no momentum influences the force of the movement.  Don’t be like the guy in the gym that looks like he is having a seizure every time he does his crunches.  The last concern in toning and sculpting abdominal muscle is to vary the resistance of the exercise.  Just doing crunches for hundreds of repetitions will not effectively define your waistline.  Challenge your abs to do various sets at different resistance.  This maximizes muscle fiber involvement and ensures that you are training the whole muscle effectively.  This means that some of those ab machines are an effective part of ab development.  They just definitely aren’t the only part.

To sum up the best way to develop a sexy, strong trunk, you need to combine proper nutrition at an energy deficit with proper cardiovascular and strength training that challenges your strength and endurance as you develop.  Good luck and I hope to see those abs this summer.  If your willing to show them off, you’ve probably done well (unless your proud of your fat)!  Be healthy and be lean.

Jeff Kotterman is the recommended Sports Nutritionist for several fitness based businesses, nationwide.  He  is an experienced instructor whose research has benefited the health of over 2,000 clients.   If you have questions or would like a program developed specifically for you call (858) 694-0317, e-mail:  jeff@TriSystem.com or at www.TriSystem.com.

The first step in losing bodyfat while growing lean body mass is to eat less than what you burn.  If it was as simple as that, everyone would be shredded.  In order to figure this out you need to keep track of what you eat in a typical training day and compare it to how many calories it takes to get through that day.  There are several software programs that are inexpensive to do your nutrient and calorie counting for you so, put that calculator and food labels away.  Determining total calories expended per day is a little harder.  Most nutrition texts will use your weight multiplied by some number to determine this.  This is way off base for athletes.  Two people with the same weight could have totally different body composition and training regimes.  Be sure to use a formula that first takes into account your basil metabolic rate (BMR) based on lean body mass (LBM) not total body weight.  If you really want to be accurate, it should include specific amounts of calories burned for not only your training session but, how much sleep you get, and the other activities you do throughout the day.  What about age, gender and race.  These physical attributes all have an effect on metabolism or the rate you burn calories through the day.  There are formulas today that will even account for the “thermic effect of food” or the amount of calories it takes to digest and use your food for energy.  So you can’t find the original scientific research.

Here is a simple formula you can use if you don’t see yourself coming to my office in the near future:

BMR in calories = 10*(LBM in lbs.) + 500

Now compare the amount of calories you burn with how much you eat.  For proper fat loss you should be eating 10-25% less than what you burn.  This should be spread evenly throughout your day.  Too much at one time will cause an overflow, increasing fat stores and too little per meal or too long a time span between meals will put you into starvation mode, decreasing muscle.  So how much is enough?  Divide your new daily calories (what you burn minus 20%) by six.  The answer is your calories per meal.  Eat them with the same amount of time between meals and your off to a good start.

Eating less than what you burn will cause your body to look inside itself  to make up the difference.  It’s either burn something or cease to exist, so when there is not enough food, your body consumes itself.  The trick is to make it more likely to burn fat than anything else.  Therefor, you should teach your body to use fat for fuel. Cardiovascular exercise trains your body to be a “better fat burner” and at low to moderate levels, primarily uses fat for fuel.  If you are at a 20-25% calorie deficit, you will most likely burn bodyfat. That’s progress.

Now for the other half of the equation.  If you increase lean body mass while trying to lose bodyfat, you will actually increase the factory space that burns the fat thereby, making it easier to burn even more fat per minute of exercise.  How can this happen at a calorie deficit.  It can because, nutrient intake is what drives the ability to create more LBM.  If you use resistance training and exhaust specific muscle groups, they will try to become more efficient in accomplishing the next workout by increasing muscle size or density or both.  All they need is the right amount of nutrients to accomplish this.  This means balancing each meal with the right amount of protein, carbs, fats, vitamins and minerals.  That is the most difficult part of this whole equation.  There are so many food choices that don’t have the nutrient density for proper lean growth.

Here are some basics.  Your minimum protein requirements are to eat one gram per pound of LBM per day.  Some of my clients successfully eat up to double that.  This should come from a variety of sources to include ionized whey around your workouts.  Carbs are most necessary around you workouts and vitamins and minerals should accompany most whole food meals.  This means that if you have a sweet tooth, the best time to satisfy yourself is with a small (that’s S-M-A-L-L) piece or portion early in the day within a half hour after you workout.  A multi vitamin/mineral formula is the only way to increase nutrients without increasing calories so take them.  They are just as important as that creatine supplement you take so religiously.

It seems like a great deal of effort but, if you want to successfully lose fat and gain muscle you have to eat less the proper nutrients to make it happen.  The trick is to put it all together.  If you are training hard but, not eating right, your probably burning dietary fat and not bodyfat.  If your eating right but not training properly, you’ve probably stopped storing any additional fat but, your not burning what you already have.  It takes proper eating with supplementation and proper exercise all working together to get you there.  These three components form a “TRI System” that is the only strategy for simultaneous fat loss and lean body mass gain.

Jeff Kotterman is the recommended Sports Nutritionist for several fitness based businesses, nationwide.  He  is an experienced instructor whose research has benefited the health of thousands of clients.   If you have questions or would like a program developed specifically for you call (858) 694-0317 or email to:  jeff@TriSystem.com or at www.TriSystem.com

Lets concentrate on the basics for successful changes in body composition.  Walk into a sports supplement store and you’ll get conflicting testimonials concerning the shelves and shelves of fat reducing products.  Why do some products work for some and not for others? The answer is simple.  The science behind manipulating your bodyfat percentage is closely linked to your genetics and your lifestyle.

Genetics

A certain percentage of the population is naturally lean.  Their bodies maintain above average fitness on processed, seemingly empty calories.  Genetic variance allows some to get away with a fast food diet.  When someone who is gifted with these genetics “cleans up” their nutrition and exercise plan, they naturally shed more bodyfat.  It doesn’t matter if they’re taking 250 mg of saw dust, their bodies magically transform.  This was very evident when one of my clients (a contract model for a major sports supplement company) prepared for photos in an ad that would show the progression of how his body changed over twelve weeks.  In order to take the starting photos he had to literally force feed himself sweets and stay away from cardio.  This guy naturally walks around with about seven percent bodyfat.  Once he stopped actively trying to get out of shape, his body rapidly recovered.  The advertisement (I’m sure you’ve seen it) was impressive and true.  The transformation did occur but, genetics were the overwhelming factor.

Lifestyle

Whether you are blessed with genetics or not, your eating habits and activity level influence your health.  In the example above a temporarily terrible lifestyle influenced body composition negatively.  He got out of shape.  But, because it happened in a relatively short amount of time, he got back into shape rather quickly.  Thus, his body moved quickly to the physiological state that it has been at for some time.  This is an important observation.

The Set Point Theory states that at conception, genetics determine what your weight and body composition is going to be as we go through life. This means that before your born, what your going to look like through your life is already determined.  So why fight it?   Although it may seem impossible, we can win over our genetic set point.  For the same reason my lean client can force himself fat, we can force ourselves lean.  The reason his body composition reverted back to lean so quickly is because he  didn’t maintain the eating habit and lack of exercise for very long.  His body naturally gravitated towards where it has been steady for the longer time.

Therefore, we can fight our body’s genetic set point by diligently changing our eating and exercise habits.   These changes must be very consistent.  They also have to be progressive.  If you don’t continually manipulate your food and your workouts, your body will not continue to change.   This is the easy part for my clients.  Everyone gets results from applying proper nutrition and exercise planning.  The hard part is maintaining a regime long enough to get to a point that is healthy and permanent.  How do we make a lower bodyfat and a leaner body permanent regardless of our genetic set point.?  We maintain it for longer than our body was at its previous condition.  This is the most challenging goal in fitness and sports nutrition.  Its also the most rewarding. Everyone has been in good shape at one time or another.  To force yourself to stay in that shape is the difficult part.  Once you plateau at a healthy, lean weight and body composition and really solidify that plateau for a long time, you can decrease your consistency and “splurge” once and a while.  The longer your body is at that percentage, the more it will act like you have a genetically lower set point.

So there is a way.  When you feel like you’ve been preparing too many meals and getting up way to early for to long to get to the gym, remember one thing.  Those who stick to it the longest have the biggest pay off.  Its not how much you can bench press or even how big your pecs are.  Its how long you’ve been properly training those pecs and how long you’ve consistently fed them well.

There is a catch, though.  You have to set very realistic goals.  Very few men can maintain a seven percent or less bodyfat all year round, for the rest of their life.  Very few women can maintain sixteen percent or less.  Usually the select few who are the exception to the rule already have a low genetic set point.  So what’s a realistic goal? A good general goal for men is around ten percent. A good goal for women is about nineteen percent.

Jeff Kotterman is the recommended Sports Nutritionist for several fitness based businesses, nationwide.  He is an experienced instructor whose research has benefited the health of thousands of clients.   If you have questions or would like a program developed specifically for you call (858) 694-0317,  or email to: jeff@TriSystem.com or at www.TriSystem.com.