Does Organic Really Matter?

As organic foods have gained more popularity over the years, it’s worth discussing whether or not it really matters.

Let’s first clear something up before we get into it. In this article, I will be speaking in regards to lower body fat percentages and sound health, as that’s why most of us exercise and eat well. We do it to look and feel better.

In the realm of nutrition, there is a hierarchy. When it comes down to it, some things matter more than most. The nutritional hierarchy I’m speaking of has a few different levels

LEVEL #1: Calories

When it comes to losing body fat, calories matter most. You must be burning more calories than you are consuming in order to lose body fat. I wish I didn’t think I could beat this when I first started working towards my fitness goals.

I was eating so healthy. My diet consisted of meats such as lean turkey, lean beef, and chicken breast. The carbohydrates I consumed came from oats, rice, potatoes, and vegetables. I was getting plenty of healthy fats in from nuts, seeds, avocados, and whole dairy. My diet was loaded with veggies. I wasn’t doing anything wrong. But I kept gaining fat.

It wasn’t until I began tracking my food intake that I realized I was doing something wrong. I was eating way too much food. I came to the realization that you really can eat too much healthy food. Eating too much caused me to gain body fat, making more unhealthy despite all of that healthy food. Frustrating.

After learning that calories in vs. calories out was the main factor, I made a dramatic swing. We’ll get back to that story in a bit.

LEVEL #2: MACROS

Macros is short for macronutrients. Macronutrients are nutrients that our body needs in high quantities. They contain calories. Proteins, carbohydrates, and fats are all macronutrients. Our body needs proteins and fats to survive, meaning they are essential macronutrients. We do not need carbohydrates to survive, however carbohydrates do play an important role, especially when it comes to fat loss.

Back in the day when we first realized the importance of calories and how they play a role in fat loss, tracking calories became all the craze. Make sure you’re not eating too many calories, and you won’t gain body fat. Which is true, but there is more to it.

Although calories are important, we need to understand what nutrients those calories are coming from. Proteins and carbohydrates have roughly four calories per gram. Fats contain nine calories per gram. These three nutrients offer us the calories our body needs, but in different fashions.

Proteins help our body build and repair tissue. Fats help our body regulate hormone function, and provide sources of energy. Carbohydrates supply our body with easily accessible energy in the short term. Because each nutrient plays a different role, it’s extremely important to understand where your calories are coming from.

If you want to lose body fat, you can eat fewer calories. But, you also need to make sure you’re eating enough protein to at least preserve your muscle tissue. You need to be sure you’re taking in the right amount of fat to support your hormone function, and using the optimal amount of carbohydrates can support your recovery as well as your effort in the gym. Let’s return to my story.

When I came to this realization, I jumped on the IIFYM (If It Fits Your Macros) train. If the food I ate fit within the protein, carb, and fat targets I was aiming to reach, I was going to eat it, no matter how unhealthy it was. I justified this as a way to eat whatever I wanted (as long as it fit my macros, and still get leaner and healthier.

I got a hell of a lot leaner (because I was finally focusing on meeting my macro and calorie goals), but I was not getting healthier.

My sleep wasn’t great. I felt extremely sluggish and my energy levels would crash constantly. My digestion was shit (pun intended), and my relationship with food made a turn for the worst.

Lesson learned. During that period of time I remember coming to another realization. Eating clean could potentially lead to gaining fat if I was eating too much. Eating whatever I wanted within my macro targets wasn’t serving my overall health. It was then I realized that there had to have been a happy medium. We’ll wrap that story up later.

LEVEL #3 MICRONUTRIENTS

Micronutrients are nutrients that our body needs in smaller quantities. Micronutrients include vitamins and minerals such as vitamin C, sodium, potassium, and vitamin K. We get a lot of these nutrients from whole, natural foods.

Although our bodies don’t need the same amount of vitamins and minerals in comparison to proteins, carbs, and fats, they are still extremely important and deficiencies in micronutrients can lead to poor health.

If that is the case, why don’t we track our micronutrients?

Well, individuals with deficiencies may need to track and make sure their daily intake gives them the proper amount of vitamins and minerals they need. Most people, though, find that they get all their micronutrients in when they focus on hitting their macronutrient targets while whole natural foods. When you eat foods that are minimally processed and come straight from a plant or animal, you’ll likely get all of the vitamins and minerals you need.

LEVEL #4: FOOD QUALITY: STANDARD VS. ORGANIC

When it comes to fat loss, eating organic food isn’t going to make a difference, especially if you’re eating more calories than you are burning on a consistent basis. You can eat all the organic food in the world, and still gain fat.

Organic doesn’t mean healthy, either. I see people in the grocery store getting organic cheez-it like crackers instead of traditional Cheez-It. Both of those foods (organic or not) are still highly processed, and you’re talking about a microscopic difference in food quality when everything else (calories, macros, micros) are dialed in. I would say about 1% (at most) of the human population has all of those things dialed in. For most of us, it won’t make much of a difference.

Does that go to say that organic is a waste of time, resources, and money? Absolutely not. Organic foods are usually better options when they are whole natural foods like veggies, fruits, nuts, seeds, dairy, and meats.

So what gives? The key is balance.

Eat a diet that consists of whole, natural, healthy foods. Enjoy a treat or a dessert here and there. Unhealthy foods have some value, too.

THE TAKEAWAYS

At the end of the day, losing body fat and living a healthy life consists of a few different things.

• If you eat too many calories, you can gain body fat.

• Each macronutrient serves a different purpose. Make sure your body gets the right amount of proteins, carbs, and fats.

• Those foods that contain macronutrients also contain important micronutrients. Eating lots of whole natural foods can ensure you are getting enough micronutrients.

• Organic plays a role, but organic doesn’t always mean healthy.

Eating a diet that serves your body well through natural foods is one of the best ways to stay lean and live a long and happy life.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Adam is a fitness professional, baseball fan, and cookie fanatic based in Fort Collins, Colorado. After hanging up the cleats, he found a strong interest in the human body and how it performs. Since then, Adam has been transforming lives through fitness in a fun and encouraging atmosphere. As an ACE CPT and Fitness Nutrition Specialist, he is constantly moved to help people improve in all walks of life.

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How to Build 6-Pack Abs

Have you heard of the four stages of learning? If not, here they are:

1. Unconscious incompetence

2. Conscious incompetence

3. Conscious competence

4. Unconscious competence

The first stage means you don’t know what you don’t know. At stage two, you are aware of what you don’t know. You are aware of your incompetence. The third stage comes when you are aware of what you now know. The fourth and final stage signifies a place of learning where what you now know is automatic.

The four stages of learning applies in health and fitness just as much as any other realm in this world. When you first start exercising, there is a lot you don’t know, and you don’t know that you don’t know it. There is also a lot that you do know, and it’s automatic. Along a health and fitness journey, you can be at stage one with some things, and stage four with others. That is where I find beauty in health and fitness. There really is no state of arrival. There is always something to learn and improve upon. There is always room to improve, meaning you can get better and better and better.

I see the four stages of learning come to play when I am observing other people in the gym. Most people in the gym are at the first stage of learning, especially if it is a new exercise or if they weren’t taught how to do the exercise or workout properly in the first place. They don’t know what they don’t know.

This is especially true when it comes to ab training, and building abs that are lean and defined. Abs that pop require you to be at stage three and four, and that’s why we are here today. We’ll be going through three different steps that will get you to those stages of learning as well as abs that you’ve never had before.

STEP #1. Train Your Abs Like Any Other Muscle Group

You have to remember that your abs are muscles. That means they respond to exercise the same way your other muscles do. If you want to make your abs pop, you need to make them grow.

Let’s say you wanted to build better arms. Would you grab really light weights or bands and do 30 reps? Probably not. odds are you would grab heavier weight and focus on building the muscles. You have to do the same thing with your abs. They respond best to heavier weight and lower reps.

Instead of doing sets of 30 crunches, try really slow and controlled decline sit-ups for 8-10 reps. Instead of doing 50 bicycles, try 10 slow reps of kneeling cable crunches.

Train your abs just like any other muscle group, and focus on strength training. As a result, your abs will get thicker, and they will pop a lot more.

I want to note that this is not always true. More often than not, our muscles respond best to what they’re not used to. So, if you’ve only trained your abs with really low reps and super heavy weight, they may respond from lighter weights and more reps.

STEP #2: Train Ab Movements Properly

Misunderstanding the design and purpose of the abs is one of the more common mistakes out there. Many believe that the abs are designed to bring your upper body closer to your lower body. This isn’t quite true.

Your abs are designed to bring your ribs closer to your pelvis, and your pelvis closer to your ribs. When you contract your abs, the distance between your ribs and pelvis begins to shorten, and your spine should begin to curl.

When doing ab movements, especially sit-ups, many people make the mistake of keeping their back straight, and sitting all the way up with the goal of brining their chest to their knees. When doing this, they rush the most important part of the sit-up, which is the initial crunch. It’s that initial portion of the sit-up where your spine curls that is extremely important.

Another mistake that most people make (even outside of ab training) is moving way too fast. Each rep should be slow and controlled, done with intent and focus on getting maximum squeeze out of the abs to bring the ribs closer to the pelvis, and the pelvis closer to the ribs.

There are a few cues I like to give when doing any sort of ab work.

• Press your lower back against the bench, ground, or whatever surface you are lying on. Do not let your lower back leave the ground. This will help you fully engage those abs and prevent you from having any strain on your low back.

• Tuck your tailbone in like a scared dog. This will help you contract the abs, taking your hip flexors out of the equation.

• Think about slowly curling each vertebrae of your spine off the surface as you contract your abs on the way up, and slowly placing each vertebrae back on the surface as your let your abs lengthen on the way down.

When you are training your abs with heavier weight and lower reps, be sure your intent is sound. Don’t focus on getting as low and high as you can. Focus on moving as much weight as possible by brining your ribs closer to your pelvis, and pelvis closer to your ribs.

Check out this video from Muscle and Motion on the difference between using your abs and using your hip flexors.

STEP #3: Get Leaner

Do you have to get absolutely shredded to have visible abs? Absolutely not. This is why I emphasize the importance of building your abs. The thicker your abs are, the more visible they will be at higher body fat percentages. This will make your life so much easier when it comes time to be beach/summer ready. Instead of having to lose 10% body fat in order to see your abs, you may only need to lose 2 or 3% body fat. The thicker those abs are, the more body fat you can carry while still being able to have those abs pop a bit.

However, this does not mean you don’t have to worry about being lean in order to make your abs visible. You can have the thickest abs in the world, but if you have too much body fat, they’re not going to show. Getting leaner is one of the most surefire ways to have those abs pop.

There are tons and tons of different ways to get leaner, but I have found that what has worked best for the hundreds I’ve trained is building a faster metabolism. When you have a faster metabolism, it is easier to lose body fat.

To lose body fat, focus on these things

• Strength train. Strength training will promote a faster metabolism

• Eat less than you burn in the day. This does NOT mean hours of cardio and very little food. Slow and steady, my friend.

• Use cardio as a last-resort. The more you expose yourself to chronic cardio, the slower your metabolism can get. If you’re not used to cardio, it can be a very good tool for fat loss. If you abuse it, it may slow your progress down.

• Focus on eating whole, natural foods and eat when you’re hungry. Stop eating when you’re satiated, not full.

• Get enough protein. .6-1g of protein per pound of bodyweight is a good range. Stay on the low end if you are overweight, and the higher end if you are leaner and training hard/often. This will help promote lean muscle growth/preservation and keep you feeling fuller for longer periods of time.

• Slowly increase your steps. Increasing your daily steps is much easier and more realistic than adding another 30 minutes of cardio. Slow and steady wins the race. Make small achievable increases to your step goal each week.

THE TAKEAWAYS

If you want to build better abs, here’s what you gotta do.

1. Move more weight for less reps. Take your focus off of feeling the burn, and put it on building strength in your abs.

2. Control each rep. Go slowly and focus on the task at hand which is contracting your abs.

3. Get leaner by slowly implementing more of the bullet points I discussed above.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Adam is a fitness professional, baseball fan, and cookie fanatic based in Fort Collins, Colorado. After hanging up the cleats, he found a strong interest in the human body and how it performs. Since then, Adam has been transforming lives through fitness in a fun and encouraging atmosphere. As an ACE CPT and Fitness Nutrition Specialist, he is constantly moved to help people improve in all walks of life.

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3 Steps to a Better Butt

In a world where fitness '“influencer” numbers are increasing, it’s becoming more and more important to be able to distinguish good advice from bad. It seems that anyone can hop on instagram, post a few half naked pictures, and begin giving fitness advice even if they have no clue what they’re talking about.

This is especially true when it comes to building a great butt. Any good-looking girl with a decent bum will attract all sorts of attention and begin selling programs on how to build a better butt. Is there anything wrong with this? Well, it depends on what we’re talking about. But in my opinion it is our responsibility as consumers to be aware of what is being marketed to us. It is our job to understand what is sound advice and what is myth or hype.

Believe it or not, glute training is one of the most common places to find false information. The recommendations that most of these instagram models give simply don’t work. They may have the right intention when they are giving the advice, but they aren’t delivering the right message.

Because of this, I wanted to take the time to talk about three steps you should take to build bigger, stronger, better looking glutes based on years of experience coaching hundreds of clients. This stuff works.

STEP #1: Lift Heavy Using Compound Movements

Building better glutes simply means adding muscle order to make them look they way you want to. In order to build lean muscle, the body has to be put in an environment where it has no choice but to build muscle.

Our bodies were made to adapt to the environment we put them in. Take a look at long distance runners. They are on the skinnier side, not carrying much muscle as it is a disadvantage to run such long distances with lots of muscle. Take a look at sprinters. Sprinters are typically much more muscular, as sprinting and explosive movement requires lots of fast-twitch muscle fibers. Our body adapts, and we need to ask it to adapt by building more muscle in our glutes. We do so by sending a loud signal to the body.

Lifting weights sends that signal to our body telling it to get stronger and put on more lean muscle. The greater the load is, the stronger the signal is. Therefore, it is beneficial to use compound (multi-joint) movements to build your butt.

This is the biggest mistake I see on social media. Exercises that are promoted are things like pulse squats, jump lunges, and band work. There is nothing inherently wrong with those exercises, they’re just not going to send the butt-building signal we are looking for.

If you want to build a bigger, better-looking butt, you should program your workouts around squats, lunges, deadlifts, and thrusts. These lifts allow for the loudest muscle-building signal to be send to the glutes.

Think about it this way. If you knew a guy that wanted to build bigger arms and he spend his time bicep curling the air, you would say that’s ridiculous, right? He would be better off doing curls with heavier dumbbells or barbells. The same concept applies here. If you want to build your butt, focus on getting stronger and adding more weight to your squats, deadlifts, lunges, and thrusts using barbells and dumbbells.

Moves like banded kickbacks, jump lunges, and pulse squats will only make you feel the burn. Feeling the burn does not equate to building your butt.

STEP #2: Use Other Exercises to Improve Your Connection

Here is where it can be tricky.

You can do all the big lifts (squats, deadlifts, lunges, thrusts) you want, but if you don’t have a good connection to your glutes, you may not see them grow.

What does it mean to have a good connection to your glutes? It means you have the ability to feel your glutes working as you are doing the exercise through its entire range of motion. This is one of the areas that most people need improvement in. They do a bicep curl but feel it in their shoulders. They do a row but feel it in their arms rather than their back. They don’t know how to squeeze and work the muscles that need to be working.

If you have a hard time feeling your butt do the work, you need to improve your connection. There are a few things I recommend you do to make that happen.

1. Practice flexing. Seriously. If you are sitting down and I ask you to flex your glutes, you should be able to. If you are standing and I ask you to flex your glutes, you should be able to. If you are lying down and I ask you to flex your glutes, you should be able to. Practice flexing your glutes in order to teach your mind how to connect with the muscle. From there, reduce the weight on your bigger lifts, and practice squeezing your glutes throughout the full range of motion. For example, do a squat but practice squeezing your cheeks as you bring the weight up.

2. Use isometrics to help you focus on your glutes. Isometric movements happen when you hold a weight in a fixed position. So an isometric bicep curl would look like you holding the weight midway through a bicep curl for a certain period of time. To use isometrics to connect to you glutes, you could use a hip thrust and hold the weight at the top, squeezing your glutes as hard as you can for a set amount of time.

3. Slow down your movements and focus on the negative. A negative is when you slow down tremendously on the eccentric portion of the movement. This is when your target muscle is lengthening. For your glutes, you could do a lighter deadlift and focus on feeling your glutes squeeze as you come down from the top of the lift very slowly.

Use these methods to practice connecting with the muscles that should be working. Once you have that down, you will be able to send more of that muscle building signal to your glutes.

STEP #3: Use Frequency and Volume to Your Advantage

One of the ways we can measure growth is through muscle protein synthesis. When MPS is higher, more muscle building tends to occur. It is shown that MPS stays elevated for about 24-72 hours after training, varying from individual to individual.

If MPS stays elevated for 72 hours at most, it would be wise to train your glutes more than once per week. That way once MPS begins to fall back down to baseline, another training session can bring it back up.

Another thing that is important to discuss is volume. Volume in exercise is weights x sets x reps. Multiply those three numbers and you get your total volume for a muscle group. Slowly increasing your volume week by week has been shown to improve muscle growth. I recommend that you increase volume by aiming to lift more weight than you did the previous week.

More frequency and more volume can certainly help you build a better butt. However, this is one of those scenarios where more isn’t always better. The key here is finding the happy medium, the balance. You want to be at a place where you are not overtraining and have plenty of room to improve. The goal is to illicit the most amount of change with the least amount of work.

The best thing to do is start where you are, and incrementally add a little bit more. If you have never lifted before, going to the gym one day per week is more than enough. If you have lifted three days per week consistently for the past 6 months, you can either add a bit more glute work to those days. There really is no right or wrong. You just want to make sure you add a tad bit more than what you’re doing now, but not too much to the point of overtraining. You know you’re going too hard if you’re really sore the next day.

TAKEAWAYS

This can be a lot to take in, so let’s strip things down to some key takeaways.

1. Build your butt by lifting heavy with movements that will send the loudest muscle building signal to your body. This includes squats, lunges, deadlifts, and thrusts.

2. Use the above methods and accessory movements to develop a good connection to your glutes, ensuring that they are the muscles doing most of the work in those heavy lifts.

3. Slowly add more volume to your week, and use frequency to increase the volume incrementally. A simple way to do so is by adding five pounds to your lifts each week to slowly increase volume.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Adam is a fitness professional, baseball fan, and cookie fanatic based in Fort Collins, Colorado. After hanging up the cleats, he found a strong interest in the human body and how it performs. Since then, Adam has been transforming lives through fitness in a fun and encouraging atmosphere. As an ACE CPT and Fitness Nutrition Specialist, he is constantly moved to help people improve in all walks of life.

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Download any of our ebooks or guides for FREE in the “free” tab at the top of the page.