The Triad of Fitness: Mind, Muscle and Metabolism By Jim Robertson At Isnare.com Ezine Articles

Look closely around any weight room, and you’ll see four types of lifters. The first type is your average joe getting in his thrice weekly sweat, doing things pretty much by the book, spending a lot of time jawing about the upcoming game with another guy who looks like he works in the next cubicle. The second type is your more senior lifter who shouldn’t be wearing that tank top to show off his military tattoo, and who does every exercise absolutely wrong and leaves all his plates on the machines for others to put away. The third type is your ex-lineman frat boy turned UPS driver, who can lift a ton but couldn’t spell the word definition if you bought him a game of Scrabble. And the fourth type – the star of this little comparative overview – comes off like a loner at a glance and spends a lot of time standing in front of the mirror as he lifts, and you notice he moves very slowly and deliberately, using a little less weight than it appears he could handle easily. He’s up to something, he knows stuff the rest of these guys don’t know, and he’s not telling because he’s too busy watching the sweat run in tiny rivulets down between deeply-carved muscle striations that make him look like a poster-boy for an anatomy class.

That’s the guy you want to talk to, even if that’s not precisely the guy you want to be. Because this guy, the defined lifter with significant muscle mass but even more conspicuously absent body fat, is on to something. It may be easy to write him off as an accident of genetics or a suspect for anabolic substance abuse, but the more likely truth is that he’s been working both sides of the fitness equation for years now, and his body shows it. He’s jacked his metabolism to a level that allows him to eat pretty much anything he wants – and ironically, what he tends to want is usually pretty healthy – without gaining an ounce of fat, and he obviously knows his way around a Smith machine. If you asked – and you won’t, because this guy is so focused on his workout there’s no way he’s open to a little gym chit-chat with a stranger – he’d tell you it’s all about a holistic approach, one that combines serious diet and exercise, and one that brings a new way of thinking to both.

Where weight lifting is concerned, the difference between this guy and the equally strong ex-pulling guard with his hat on backwards is their mind-muscle connection. The guy with the deep cuts lifts differently, he understands that the objective is not to move iron, it is to contract muscle. His head gets into the center of each muscle group as he lifts, and he executes the moves slowly enough to virtually feel each muscle fiber squeeze to its maximum effort. His workouts are disciplined, his sets are longer and the weights are a few percentage points less than his one-rep maximum in comparison to the bigger boys. He isn’t interested in personal bests, he’s interested in the work itself.

Watch and learn. Lift with your mind, and the rest will follow. Study the anatomy of the lift and execute like a surgeon, with the slow, deliberate grace of a ballet dancer on point. Do this in conjunction with a metabolism-jacking diet that has you eating five to six smaller meals a day, with plenty of protein, and you too may soon be this guy. Just don’t expect anyone to start a conversation with you, since you’ll be the intimidating one that everyone else watches and admires.

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