Even the best personal training facilities cannot alter one's genotype.

Most of the clients at Ultimate Exercise are local businesspeople, health professionals, and homemakers who have no desire for massive muscles or any awareness of the fields devoted to this desire. Most of my phone consultation business is composed of individuals who have a passionate desire for massive muscles and are deeply involved in acquiring the latest knowledge in the field. Recently, I have been spending a lot of time on the phone answering objections from several of my personal training clients who were upset because their results were too good. They were upset because they were getting stronger and bigger than they had intended…upset because they could not button their collars or fit into their shirts…upset because they were going to have to buy new suits. Interspersed with these calls were calls from phone consultation clients who were upset because despite showing good progress in strength gains, they were not showing the size increases that they had hoped for…sometimes they noted no size increase whatsoever. It almost seems that the secret to size increases is to desire strongly to stay the same size. My response to the former group was relatively easy. My response to the latter group is the subject of this article.

The Island of the Misfit Toys

In July of 1997 I was the keynote speaker at the annual convention of the SuperSlow Exercise Guild. After my first day at the convention I called my wife to tell her how exciting it was to be amongst people who shared my enthusiasm for this field. I told her…”it’s wierd, we think alike, we talk alike, we read the same novels, we even dress alike”. My wife responded by saying…”face it Doug, you’re a geek”. She asked me if the attendees were all extremely muscular, envisioning a convention room full of bulky guys with the “hello my name is” tags. I responded that, in fact, most were also about my size or smaller. It was then that I realized that the convention was largely made up of people who have a passion for a field despite having little or no natural talent in that field. We were a convention of misfits. It was like the island for misfit toys in Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. As Eric Hoffer stated:

“The permanent misfits are those who because of a lack of talent or some irreparable defect in body or mind cannot do the one thing for which their whole being craves. No achievement, however spectacular, in other fields can give them a sense of fulfillment.”

Eric Hoffer’s painful description of a misfit describes me perfectly…I would love to be extremely muscular but I must joke about it by saying that I hope to achieve my full potential so I can look like the “before” photo of Casey Viator in the Colorado Experiment.

Why Are All You SuperSlow Guys Small?

This is a common response that you hear from your generic musclehead when you try to explain the superiority of the high-intensity approach. The only response to these type of people is to point out the exceptions to the misfit examples in our field. A photo of Joel Waldman (who has a bigger neck than I’ve ever seen on any living mammal) usually does the trick. For those with a functional intellect it is better to ask “can Pat Riley slam dunk?”.

The bodybuilding/strength training field is the only field that judges the validity of an argument by the appearance of the person making the argument. This tendency is perpetuated by a field which has a vested interest in perpetuating the lie that “anyone can do it”. The people who possess the natural talent (consciously or not) perpetuate the myth that others can achieve massive muscles too (provided they keep up with the latest info in the muscle magazines and take the correct supplements), because if they did not perpetuate the myth then they would have to get a real job. This problem does not exist in sports that have spectator appeal because these athletes can make their money off this aspect of the sport. The less spectator appeal a sport has the more the “anyone can do it” myth is perpetuated by those that stand to make money in the field. Of all sports the strength and bodybuilding field has the least spectator appeal; after all, who wants to watch a bloated, bald, shaven gorilla prance around in it’s underwear?

What every truly advanced field recognizes is that the best innovations come from the misfits. The field of medicine has advanced to amazing degrees because of research in the pharmaceutical and genetic engineering fields. If you ever want to find a misfit, walk into one of these labs. In the field of sports Howard Head was an extreme misfit who literally changed the fields of skiing and tennis forever. Gene Landrum in his book Profiles of Genius offers the following insight:

“Howard constantly faced failure in those fields in which he most wanted to succeed. He failed at everything he cherished most. Howard desperately wanted to write and failed miserably. He passionately wanted to master the art of skiing and failed. Tennis was to become his retirement pleasure and he failed at it as well…He pursued tennis and skiing with the tenacity of a hungry animal right up to his death in 1991. He ended up eminently successful, not at the sports, but as the one who changed these sports more than anyone in history.”

The pioneer in our own field, Arthur Jones, can only be described as the ultimate misfit. I bring all this up to simply point out that the best innovators and passionate devotees in any field are likely to be the misfits, so don’t be disappointed if someone with much less passion than you ends up with better results. So don’t open a SuperSlow/HIT facility unless you can deal with the fact that some of your beginning clients will end up much bigger than you in 12-20 weeks of training.

The Relationship of Size and Strength

While it is provable that a given muscle’s strength is proportional to it’s cross sectional area and that a bigger muscle is a stronger muscle, it has not been my experience that a notable strength increase is always accompanied by a notable size increase. Part of this is because it takes a lot of increase in cross sectional area to produce a noticable increase in volume. And the reason may be that what you hold as a passionate goal, mother nature holds as a necessary evil. For a given degree of strength increase, you desire the most increase in mass possible. What mother nature wants is the least amount of increase in mass for a given increase in strength.

Along with movement, maintenance of a stable body temperature is one of our most protected biological functions. Think about it, if it is 102 or 15 degrees outside, your core body temperature will be very close to 98.6 degrees. In most environments the development of hyperthermia is our biggest threat to survival. We produce heat in direct proportion to our body mass and dissipate heat in direct proportion to our body surface area. As one becomes more muscular the ratio of body surface area to body mass (or more precisely volume) becomes smaller, and, thus, one’s cooling efficiency is very negatively affected. Every time your body decides to grow, it is weighing the stimulus for muslce growth against this fact…that is why it takes such a high stimulus/intensity to induce muscular growth in most subjects. A person who makes small gains in size for a given increase in strength is a very efficient organism metabolically…a superior product of natural selection. There are a few unfortunate creatures who slipped through the cracks of natural selection who must suffer a disproportionate increase in mass for a given increase in strength, and let me tell you, it has nothing to do with creatine. These poor creatures incorporated a negative adaptation. Why would mother nature allow such a thing? Well, because somewhere in the distant past or a remote area of the present world this is considered from a biological vantage point to be a positive adaptation that, in the balance of things, is worth the negative consequences. Doesn’t make sense you say? Well then why does sickle cell disease exist when it’s only apparent effect is to make you anemic, succeptable to strokes and bone infarctions as well as overwhelming infection? Why is this negative adaptation persisting today if it brings early death to it’s victims? The answer can be found in tropical countries that exist in proximity to the equator. In these areas sickle cell disease protects you from malaria. It seems sickling red blood cells will not support the falciparum organisms that parasitizes normal red blood cells. I suspect a similar relationship exists in the relationship between size and strength.

Skeptics of my theory have always accused me of making excuses for my own shortcomings as well as the apparent lack of massive SuperSlow devotees. But I know the training techniques that we use at Ultimate Exercise work because we have clients with no bodybuilding desires producing results that most bodybuilding enthusiasts would kill for. Recently, however, I came across excellent scientific evidence to bolster my argument. A paper by H.E. Montgomery et. al. entitled Human Gene for Physical Performance details a genetic basis for the response to physical training. (Nature. Vol 393, 21 May 1998. Pg 221). The paper was sent to me by a friend outside of the field who thought I would be proud that the researchers used time under load (TUL) as their standard of performance measurement rather than repetitions or one rep maximums. While I was proud of this fact (although I don’t know if I had any influence on this choice at all) the core content of the paper provided even more exciting information. I quote from the paper:

“A specific genetic factor that strongly influences human physical performance has not so far been reported, but here we show a polymorphism in the gene encoding angiotensin-converting enzymen does just that…after physical training, repetitive weight lifting is improved eleven-fold in individuals homozygos for the ‘insertion’ allele compared with those homozygous for the ‘deletion’ allele.”

I strongly advise readers of Body By Science to acquire and read this article as it explains the spectrum of response to exercise that we see in our clients. Most intriguing to me is the possibility of manipulating this allele through genetic engineering as polymorphic alleles are fairly easy to locate and insert or delete. Maybe in the future we can really alter our basic potential and be misfits no more.

What Can You Do to Improve Your Results Now?

Really, there is not anything new to report. Unfortunately the laws of physics and biology do not change over time and thus neither should good workout advice. Such advice is already well known to readers of this article. Body By Science offers such advice with some new concepts and medical insights that we hope will help turn the field of exercise toward a more rational approach and offer intellectual ammunition to those trying to advance our field. 

In the meantime, I can offer a couple of suggestions unrelated to HIT/SuperSlow techniques that may improve your progress. I came to these conclusions by reviewing client records and the detailed workout journals I have kept over the years. Several non-training circumstances seem to offer the milleue in which proper training can be most productive. While non-scientific and anectdotal at best, these factors were universally present during my own periods of rapid progress as well those of my clients. Personally, I was able to make these observations because my growth seems to occur all at once on a very intermittent basis. It usually occurs in the early morning and will actually awaken me from sleep because I can feel it occurring. It can best be described as “feeling like rice crispies sound when you pour milk on them”. I’ve had as much as 3/4 inch arm growth overnight. Such results never seemed to correlate to the previous workout, but several factors over time can be noted in my journals.

1. Happiness-in general I was not elated or extremely happy. Rather, I was simply contented with life in general and had a sense of peace. There was no current issue that was troubling me or occupying my mind.

2. Lack of preoccupation with training-universally I was involved in activities that precluded me from thinking about my training or progress. I hadn’t looked at a muscle magazine in months or read any books, articles or visited any internet sites related to training.

3. Busy Professional Life-usually I was fairly busy with my professional life and absorbed in it. However, I was not overly stressed by this absorption…it was truly immersion rather than anxious rumination.

4. Laziness-it seemed I retained the skill of being able to lay around and do nothing for at least an hour each day.

5. Sleep-in general I was getting about an hour and a half of extra sleep per night during a period when I was on the same shift rotation. In addition my sleep seemed to be filled with pleasant dreams.

6. Lack of body awareness-in general I had recently spent very little time assessing my appearance in the mirror or taking measurements. My only impetus to do so was after the sensation of sudden growth had occurred.

7. Season-gains seem to occur in early Spring and late Fall. I seem to be dressed in such a way that my body awareness is less, and I also think the lack of heat stress is more conducive to growth.

8. Hydration-this is without exception the strongest correlate I have found. I originally noted this when I tried Ellington Darden’s recommendation for superhydration (drinking at least a gallon of water a day). My largest growth spurt ever took place while superhydrating and every subsequent improvement has occurred during periods when I used this technique. Recently one of my clients began superhydrating and added an entire minute to her TUL’s for every set of her workout.

In general I think the best most concise advice (other than superhydration) that can be offered to most HIT enthusiasts is the following: First, stop obsessing about training. Stop spending hours on the internet discussing and debating training. Stop having arguments with people. Stop visiting all the web sites and calling the facilities around the country on a daily basis. Second, decrease your level of body awareness. Take some time off from tape measures, skin fold calipers and scales and wear clothing that conceals your body from your concern. There is truth in the old saying “a watched pot never boils”. Finally, be content and happy with the hand that nature has given you and achieve within your capabilities.

- Doug McGuff, MD