The Tom Venuto - Jimmy Smith “Physique Formula” Interview Excerpt and My ‘Boiled Down Fat Loss Bullets’…
April 30th, 2008 · Filed Under: Podcasts
Howdy,
I recently uploaded a really great Written Interview between fitness professionals Jimmy Smith and Tom Venuto to the Burn The Fat Inner Circle…
I posted a small excerpt from this interview here and I created a special audio with my “Boiled Down Fat Loss Bullets” from this written excerpt so be sure to listen to that audio after you read this excerpt…
Here is the excerpt:
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Jimmy Smith: Tom how do you structure your training differently from someone who’s trying to bust through that 10% body fat plateau? Suppose you have someone stuck at 10% body fat and they can’t seem to get through it, what do you do training-wise?
Tom Venuto: That’s really going to depend on the person. It’s very individual, because if you ask me, “Tom, what do you do personally in your own training, being that you’re a competitive bodybuilder?” I might give you a completely different answer compared to what I would recommend for Suzy the soccer mom who’s trying to break her fat loss plateau.
Jimmy Smith: Ok, alright, well let’s compare both of them. Let’s start with Suzy the soccer mom, then go to Tom the bodybuilder.
Tom Venuto: Ok, well Suzy the soccer mom, she’s got three kids running around, plus a husband (sometimes that makes four kids!) Maybe she’s a housewife and that alone keeps her hands full, or maybe it’s a two income home and she’s working full time, but either way she’s busy, so time efficiency is going to be a big concern. You’re going to have to create a plan that’s time efficient but also gets her the results that she wants. Sometimes there is a compromise because on one hand you have the ideal program that would give great results and on the other you have the realistic program that will give good results, but there’s no way she will follow the ideal program, so the good realistic program is the right choice. It doesn’t have to be perfect because she’s probably not trying to get shredded and she has no intention of doing a figure competition, but maybe she does want to put on a bikini.
So we have to take all of these things into consideration. What we’re seeing with most of the weight training program trends right now in dealing with time efficiency issues is using a lot of super sets for one thing. If they’re not doing super sets they’re doing some kind of high density training, and by “high density,” I just mean that they’re putting a whole lot of work into a short period of time. They’re not doing a traditional bodybuilding workout where they hit a set, a rest of two minutes, hang out, hit another set and so on. The workouts are fast in terms of the work to rest ratio and we may even use increasing density as a progression tool. I think a super set program is a great way to do that. Supersets are used a lot in bodybuilding — I love em’. The difference in the time restricted situation is you might do fewer exercises, only compound exercises, not many isolation exercises. And you might do unrelated body part supersets like back supersetted with legs which is something bodybuilders usually wouldn’t do. Your soccer mom could explore circuit training too if she wanted to, but I’ll tell you, I really like the super sets because I think circuit training sometimes dilutes the strength training and muscle building benefits a bit too much.
The next thing you’ll do for Suzy soccer mom is be sure to choose the highest bang for your buck exercises like squats, lunges, deadlifts, Romanian deads, presses, chins and rows. Maybe that’s not what Suzy had in mind, but she’s not going to get there if she stays on the inner thigh machine and in pink dumbbell “toning” classes and never gets under a barbell. Again, this is good advice for everybody, but especially for the time efficiency scenario. If you take a compound exercise, it’s going to knock off more muscle groups in one fell swoop. You do a chin up, you can call that a back and bicep workout, right, and you’re going to save time. These exercises are also going to give you a higher energy expenditure, so if you stay with an 8-10 rep range or so with enough resistance, you can build muscle, stimulate metabolism and burn fat at the same time. You might burn more calories lifting than you do in your cardio.
The way it’s different with a body builder like myself is I’ll stay with the split routines and hang on to some of my isolation exercises. There has actually been a lot of negative sentiment towards that type of bodybuilding training from the main stream training community today and they’re not wrong, if that kind of training is used in the wrong context, but I have absolutely no objections to staying with body part specific training for the body builder because that’s how bodybuilders get the best results for their goals.
The way I approach my training different: Obviously there are major fat loss benefits to all weight training programs, but I don’t even look at my weight training as fat loss training, I look to nutrition and cardio for breaking fat loss plateaus and when I’m in the gym lifting weights, fat loss is the furthest thing from my mind. I’m training that muscle, like a sculptor slapping clay on a statue. I’m trying to slap on muscle in this place and that place to develop the right symmetry because bodybuilding is about physical appearance and aesthetics. Some trainers say form always follows function, and everything has to be functional, but I don’t necessarily agree completely. What would the definition of function or functional training be for a bodybuilder anyway? To look like a bodybuilder, you train like a bodybuilder. Basically it’s all a matter of picking the right program based on each person’s goals and taking in some lifestyle and time efficiency considerations as well.
Jimmy Smith: Right. I think about how many people do not understand the context thing like you said and you are a hundred percent correct, bodybuilding at the contest level is about physique and it’s about sculpting and I think that’s where the notion of lift the weights to build the muscle, and do the cardio to burn fat comes from. Like everything else, when taken out of the context it came from, it gets misunderstood when it’s generalized to the masses. You just gave a great little illustration of how fat loss training would differ and the similarities in it between you know, a housewife, or regular average Joe and a bodybuilder, that was a great example.
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End Of Excerpt…
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Here are my ‘Boiled Down Bullets…’
Just hit the Play Button below to listen to my take-aways from this excerpt:
Train with purpose,
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Kyle Battis, NSCA-CPT, CSCS
www.SecretsOfBurningFat.com
www.FatBurningInnerCircle.com
PS - See that Play button there??? Just hit play my friend…. (after you listen share your take on this topic…)
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