There are a lot of celebrity trainers out there and for the most part they are partially or totally full of shit. Their biggest talent is taking money away from people who are looking for shortcuts. The combination of lazy people with money and good salesmen willing to exploit it goes back a long way.
That said, if you look hard enough there are a few good guys out there. One of the people I think actually knows his stuff is Jim Stoppani. His workout programs are smart, well thought out and goal oriented. His knowledge of musculature, anatomy and the science of bodybuilding is beyond reproach and his dietary knowledge is excellent.
Rarely seen out of a beater, we know he is one of us.
At 50 years old Jim keeps his weight between 200-220 with a 5% body fat percentage while standing 6’1 and does it year round through a drastic workout regimen and dieting which is focused on intermittent fasting. Stoppani has a doctorate in exercise physiology and undergraduate training in bio chemistry from the University of Connecticut and did a post doctoral fellowship at the John B Pierce Laboratory and Department of Cellular and Molecular Physiology at Yale University School of Medicine.
Stoppani worked on the editorial staff at Weider Publications as the Senior Science Editor for Muscle & Fitness and Flex magazine. He has his own supplement company, has written several books and was a personal trainer and nutrition coach to LL Cool J, Dr. Dre, The Rock and Mario Lopez amongst others. So lets start out by admitting that if nothing else, this guy knows his stuff.
I could mention a lot of things Jim does that I think are really excellent, but I want to talk to you today
These guys know what they are talking about
about what he calls the 30/60 rule. In a study earlier this year put out by the Mayo Clinic, Dr. Edward Laskowski compared the health risks of a sedentary lifestyle, specifically sitting too often, to smoking in harmfulness.
When the human body sits for 30 consecutive minutes or longer it basically turns off the genes that regulate metabolism, fat burning and blood glucose while at the same time it down regulates the activity of lipoprotein lipase, the dominant fat burning enzyme and also reduces the amount of blood glucose metabolized.
In a nutshell, after you are sitting for 30 minutes you burn less fat and begin to store more fat which leads to metabolic issues such as type 2 diabetes, heart disease, etc.
Working out is not enough.
Yeah, we wake up in the morning and kill it. This is great. But what then. We go to an office and sit on our ass essentially turning off all the systems that the workout just fired. This makes it harder to shred fat, build muscle and generally stay healthy. Even if we kill it in the gym in the morning AND after work we still spend 8 hours or more just letting our bodies turn off. This is a huge fucking problem.
The good news is that combating this problem is incredibly easy and I plan on following Dr. Stoppani’s advice and implementing his 30/60 rule into my day every day all through our season and even before.
Don’t care if he moved 1000 pounds of weight and did 2 hours of cardio…if he spends his downtime doing this he will not reach his potential.
The plan is simple. No matter how much you work, your body begins to shut down all the after burn if you are sitting for just 30 minutes. So for every 30 minutes of sitting you should do 60 seconds of exercise — whatever that is. Get up and do some functional stretches, jog in place, do jumping jacks, run a few flights of steps — just do whatever it is you can do to be physical for 60 seconds every 30 minutes sitting.
Add to this built in inconvenience where possible. Park further away from your destination in order to walk, take stairs rather than escalators, use the 30/60 rule even at
Hey, if it gets you up and moving go for it.
home when watching tv. Being sedentary is bad for us and especially bad for our goals. The more you move the better. Skip activities like video games or just potatoed out tv watching and instead do something productive. If you are going to sit in front of a tv have a goal. Pick a show or a movie you want to watch and watch it. Just aimlessly flipping through channels will not help you. If necessary just take a walk around the block. But most importantly, make sure you get 60 seconds of physical exercise for every 30 minutes sitting on your ass.
You work hard for your gains, do not just give them away. Remember, this is a multi pronged attack. There is the weights, there is the cardio, there is the diet. That we know. Then there is the mental change, focusing in on our daily lives as well as our workouts and approaching everything we do with more intention is a very big part of this as is learning all we can about the game and about our bodies so we can make smart decisions. However, there is also the aspect of changing our lifestyles, removing those sedentary behaviors that kill our gains, cause our diets to work less efficiently and cause harmful mindsets.