Built for Show
by Nate Green


I've never worked with a client who couldn't put on
muscle and take off fat. Every client has emerged from our training
looking and feeling better — dramatically better, in many
cases. But there's never a single pattern. Sometimes people
achieve more than I expected, and I'm happy to take credit.
But sometimes they achieve less, and if I'm willing to take
credit for the overachievers I have to accept blame when a client
falls below our mutual expectations.
What I can predict is that your success will be directly
correlated with the effort you put in. And I'm not just
talking about physical effort. You also have to change your
attitude toward your own body and your preconceived ideas about its
limitations, which is the focus of this excerpt from my new book, Built for Show. The
following is by no means a complete list of attitudes that hold
guys back, but it's a pretty good overview of the ones I see
most often in friends and clients.

Things skinny guys believe that keep them
skinny

"If I eat more calories, I'll lose my
abs."
The skinny guy with well-defined abs often calls himself a
"hardgainer." But this type of lifter often refuses to
try the most logical solution to his problem: eating enough food to
build the muscles he wants.
If you're truly a hardgainer — one of those guys
whose metabolism resembles a hummingbird hooked on trailer-park
meth — you need a dramatic increase in calories. Trust me,
I've been there. As a 145-pound 18-year-old, my fork was my
version of an American Express card: I couldn't leave home
without it.


Greased lightning: a portrait of the author as a 145-pound
18-year-old.
The good news is that the weight you gain will mostly be in the
form of muscle. That's what happens when you have a fast
metabolism. Eating more food will actually make it faster. So the
more food you eat, the less likely you are to accumulate fat,
assuming you're also following a solid and challenging workout
program. A lot of the excess calories will get burned off in this
metabolic frenzy, but enough will get to your muscles to make a
noticeable difference.
Thus, if you have abs before you start an aggressive
muscle-growth program, you'll still have them when you
finish.

"I need to do high reps to get more definition."
This type of talk makes me want to at least partially blame the
triathletes and marathon runners who use strength training as
supplemental exercise, but don't understand the basics of
exercise physiology. Performing hundreds of calf raises and triceps
pushdowns while wearing latex shorts and skin-tight shirts will not
make them or you "more defined." It gives your muscles a
nice pump, but that's all.
What's wrong with that?
The science is pretty clear on this point: A pump doesn't
make your muscles bigger, any more than standing on your head makes
you smarter. It's just a bunch of blood in your muscles
— good for your ego, but meaningless to your long-term
muscular development. It comes, it temporarily stretches your shirt
sleeves, and then it goes.
The science also tells us this about muscle fibers: They can get
bigger, they can get smaller, or they can stay the same size.
There's no mechanism that makes a muscle more
"toned" or "defined."
However, there is a simple two-step plan to make muscles appear more "toned" or "defined":

Step 1: Make the muscles bigger.

Step 2: Burn off the fat covering your muscles, if you have
any.

"I'm trying to build size, not strength."
The human body isn't stupid. If it's going to overcome
a genetic propensity toward low body weight, it needs a better
excuse than "I just want to be bigger." Strength is the
excuse. Give the muscles tasks that push their limits, using heavy
weights and smart program design, and they'll get bigger to
meet the increased need for strength.


Same guy, 45 pounds later.

I realize I'm swimming in dark waters here, given that the
title of my book uses the words "built," "for,"
and "show," in that order. The implication, of course, is
that I'm advocating anything but a
"form-follows-function" approach.
But I see no contradiction in acknowledging that all of us
reading this want good-looking, eye-catching muscle, while telling
you the best way to build it is to forget what your muscles look
like and focus instead on what they can do.


You won't regret getting more "go" in pursuit of
the "show." There's no downside to being as strong
as you look, whether you demonstrate that strength by helping your
friends move their furniture or by lifting an intimate friend onto
a particular piece of furniture.

"I do curls because I want big arms."
All of us fall into the muscle-isolating trap, to some extent.
But if you're a skinny guy, with a body that's reluctant
to put on muscle mass, you may have the most to lose when you waste
energy on isolation exercises.
Isolation exercises don't use a lot of muscle mass —
an obvious point when you consider that the goal of an isolation
exercise is to not use the muscles you aren't trying to
isolate.
But here's a not-so-obvious point: When you do a biceps
curl or triceps extension, you aren't even recruiting the most
important fibers within the muscles you're isolating.
That's because you rarely use a lot of weight when you do
those exercises. Your body's biggest, strongest muscle fibers,
the ones with the most growth potential, simply don't come
into play unless you're using heavy weights in low-repetition
sets.
I can't recall ever seeing anyone do low-rep sets for their
biceps and triceps, for one simple reason: As soon as you start
lifting near-max weights, you can't even pretend to isolate
muscles. You have to "cheat" by using less-strict
movement patterns, which brings bigger muscles into the
exercise.
So why bother trying to isolate? If you lift the heaviest
possible weights during exercises that use the most muscle mass,
you'll employ your body's biggest muscle fibers while
doing the exercises safely and correctly.

Things fat guys believe that keep them fat

"If I eat before and after workouts, my body won't
burn as much fat."
Skipping meals is the best way I know to prevent your
body from using its stored fat for energy. Counterintuitive as it
seems, regular meals, including pre- and post-workout nutrition,
will promote steady fat loss. It works the same way whether
you're lean or lardy. The more often you eat while you're
doing a serious training program, the more fat you lose.
Your body needs fuel, pure and simple. A pre-workout meal of
protein and carbohydrates will actually enhance blood flow and help
deliver nutrients to the muscles when they need it most: when
you're breaking them down by working out. Similarly, a
post-workout meal will help speed muscle growth and help you
recover quicker before your next formal (weight-lifting) or
informal (girl-lifting) training session.
That said, I'm not particularly militant about pre-workout
meals. I don't think it's a good idea to work out on an
empty stomach, so I tell my clients who like to work out in the
morning that they should eat something first. What they eat, and
how much they eat, is more of a personal thing.
Later in the day, do what works best for you. If you can't
train hard without eating something right before your workout, make
sure you have something ready to eat. If you can get in a good
workout two or three hours after your most recent meal, that's
cool. I'm not going to tell you to ignore your body and follow
some arbitrary guideline.

"I need these carbs for energy so I can have good
workouts."
Here's the flip side of the first belief: Some XXL lifters
think they have to eat like skinny runners in order to get through
their workouts. This means an abundance of carbohydrates in the
form of food (bananas, bagels), drinks (Gatorade, Red Bull), and
gels.
My advice: A guy with excess flesh should never ever eat
or drink carbohydrates unless they're accompanied by protein.
The combination of carbs and protein gives your muscles what they
need to work and grow. Carbs by themselves provide energy that, in
the absence of protein, can get stored as fat if it isn't
needed for your workout.
You could say this is a contradiction of the point I made
earlier about calories speeding up your metabolism. It's
really not. Some types of calories speed up your metabolism more
than others. Protein calories speed it up a lot; calories from
carbs speed it up only a little.
I'm not a fan of working out on an empty stomach, as I
said. So if you work out first thing in the morning, I think you
really should eat something first, even if you aren't
particularly hungry.
But at other times of day, use hunger and personal comfort as a
guideline. I don't see the point in pumping excess pre-workout
calories into your body if you aren't hungry and are only
doing it because you think you need the energy. As long as
you've eaten something in the past couple of hours, and
don't feel especially hungry, you have enough energy to work
out.
Just make sure that whatever you eat has a mix of protein and
carbs, and that you aren't adding more calories than you could
hope to burn off in your workout.

"I don't need to do squats. I'm already
big."
Right. And porn stars don't need to perform Kegel
exercises, either.
A lot of guys are naturally big, and some of them put on muscle
easily. I'm not one, and you probably aren't either, but
we both know they're out there. Despite that fundamental
difference, though, they still need to focus on the moneymaker
movements to get the results they want.
I've lost count of the number of wide-bodied guys I've
come across who skip the big-muscle exercises and instead spend
their time in the gym working their biceps, triceps, and deltoids.
I understand the temptation; if you build muscle easily, you build
it easily everywhere, including your arms and shoulders.
They forget women will notice a big gut sooner than big guns. If
you don't believe me, ask any woman you know if she's
more turned on by 19-inch arms than she's turned off by a 40-inch waist.

The beauty of the moneymaker exercises — squats,
deadlifts, chin-ups, rows, presses, cleans — is that they help
anyone, no matter how thick or thin, develop a more
athletic-looking physique. The process of building muscle speeds up
your metabolism, and in the quest to whittle down your waistline, a
faster metabolism is the best friend you can possibly have. Your
shoulders get wider while your waist slims down, and you burn off
some of the fat covering the muscles you want to show off.


Little-known fact: Your squat increases 15 percent when you wear
a Testosterone Muscle T-shirt with the sleeves cut off. (Well, it
works for Nate, at least.)