matthearn.com

When last we left the narrative, I was eating enough rare red meat that I was becoming ruminant, while doing an odd variety of exercises designed to keep me interested and build muscklez. I did some poking around on the Men’s Health TNT Diet, and discovered the Men’s Health Forums, which led to significant changes in my diet and exercise routines. Here are the things you need to know about the forums:

1. there are separate forums for weight lifting, running, miscellaneous cardio, diet, injuries, general health, as well for specific Men’s Health diet plans (TNT, Ab Diet, Huge In A Hurry) and also a few “off-topic” forums where folks espouse remarkably narrow-minded conservative political philosophies;


2. there is a lot of good information on the forums, particularly in the “stickies” (post threads that have been deemed especially useful and always appear at the top of every forum);


3. there are a lot of well-meaning folks on there with anecdotal experience but not a lot of actual fitness or diet expertise;


4. there are five or six smart, knowledgeable people who want to help you, particularly if you demonstrate some intelligence and ability to comprehend science; and


5. there are five or six utter douchebags who, while they may be knowledgeable, simply crap on everything with which they disagree.

I tend to put the douche-bags on “ignore” and just don’t respond, because I’m tired of arguing with trolls.

Having gotten that off my chest, I will say that the forums are a great place to find a whole wealth of information (even if it’s just links to other sites) about how to lose fat, gain muscle, proper exercise form, a whole host of stuff. It also alerted me to the fact that the rinky-dink routines I was doing as part of the TNT diet may have been effective, but they weren’t ever going to be as effective as barbell training with big ol’ compound movements (even though much of the TNT stuff was still basically compound movements, many of them involved dumbbells or just bodyweight, which is less effective).

A “compound” movement is an exercise that involves more than one muscle group (such as deadlifts, back squats, and bench presses); exercises that target a specific muscle (like bicep curls, or calf raises) are called “isolation” movements. Compound movements are the foundation of any serious muscle-building routine, for the simple reason that you exercise a whole lot more muscles at one time. For example, a leg press machine works primarily the quads; doing a barbell squat exercises the quads, the hamstrings, the lower back, the upper back, and the abdominals.

(Squatting is rad. I’m a fan.)

Now, my focus is to try and get big ol’ muscles. Getting strong is handy, but to be honest if I could get big ol’ freaky muscles and not really gain any strength, I’d take it, because I’m no professional athlete and a 500-pound deadlift doesn’t really have any use in my daily life. So, I started googling up hypertrophy plans, which is where I made my misstep, about which I’ll talk later this week.