The Secret

Coach P's Corner

Article one: The Secret

YOU CANNOT FOOL OR TRICK THE PHYSIOLOGY OF THE HUMAN BODY. If you are running: keto, paleo, carb cycling, south beach, atkins, intermittent fasting, the starvation diet, vegan grass-only and positive vibes-only diet and/or whatever the buzz word (s) diet is for the week; and you are getting results - you have not found some secret key or a magical diet! What you have done is position yourself with a set of nutrition guidelines that fulfill what needs to be done to meet the calories in/calories out equation, and have met or achieved some sort of macronutrient balance/ratio that fits the previously mentioned circumstance. In some way you have probably eaten less shit and exercised more OR eaten less shit and exercised the same amount to put yourself into a calorie deficit to see a loss. Now there are a few instances where the stars have aligned and you have plunged your body into a terrible metabolic & hormonal state where the physiological responses of the body are severely dulled down... For example: Let’s say you have done massive amounts of clenbuterol, cut for a bikini show, done 12 hours of fasted cardio per day, and got yourself on a protein shake and coconut oil-only cut diet 36 weeks out from your show while screaming at yourself and crying in the mirror every night trying to lose the stubborn belly fat....then you might be “special”...maybe, just maybe your thyroid has packed up, retired and moved to Florida, but probably not.

Whatever nutrition/diet you choose. If it WORKS for you, it WORKS. Just follow it, feel good, and do what you have to do to achieve the goals you have laid out for yourself. Just understand that you aren’t reinventing the wheel. I love “Carb cycling,” but I don’t believe it’s anything fancy. It's just a name given by the fit-community to a set of nutrition principles that have matched my daily needs and lifestyle to achieve what i need to inn and out of the gym. I believe in eating to match the days physical demands and recovery needs. Many, many, many people that come to me say they like carb cycling, but what I see is a random amount of high to low carb days where they eventually land on a low carb day where their workout split calls for an intense lower body day. They go to the gym and get buried under the smith machine at planet fitness while doing 1/4 squats because they don’t have any carbs in their body. You can't race a mustang without gas in the tank....or to more closely match this example: you can’t drive a smart car through the parking lot of Whole Foods without any E-85 ethanol in the fuel compartment! The above scenarios are just a few examples. There are many ways to ruin an awesome diet with poor training and/or ruin awesome training with a poor diet. At the simplest form: you need to fuel your performance and the subsequent recovery needs. Many of my clients want to eat for a bodybuilder physique but want to lift like a powerlifter doing heavy singles in the gym. Because of the fact that they have no time under tension in their workouts, they take 3 hour rest periods and leave a note saying “be back at 5pm” on their squat bar, and they do nothing to elevate the heart rate for any extended amount of time: they do not expel the same amount of calories as a bodybuilder - hence they should not eat exactly like one. (Side note: should everyone eat clean??? Hell yes, the less processed shit you put in your body the better it will perform) The point is that you have to try stuff out to see what works for you, and when it does just go with it until you hit some roadblocks. When this eventually happens, and it will happen, educate yourself further and change things to kickstart your results. Rant over. Now I’m going to Red Robin to get 15 baskets of fries to add to my Power Dome!