Can Glycogen Loading and Eccentric reps Replace Steroids?

GLYCOGEN ECCENTRIC STEROIDS Podcast hosts: Brad Howard and John Barban http://blog.adonislifestyle.com Page 1 of 32 _____________________________________________________________________________ _

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Glycogen, Eccentrics, Steroids

Can Glycogen Loading and Eccentric reps Replace Steroids?

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From The Desk of Brad Howard

Dear Friend, Welcome to the Adonis Lifestyle Podcast! Podcast! Inside this transcript, you’ll find a lot of actionable information that you’ll be able to put to use TODAY to help develop your body for maximum visual impact. With that said, here are a few things to remember as you’re reading through this docu ment. 1. Our training trainingss and opinions opinions are based based solely solely on the end end goal of creatin creating g a body based on proportions and social influence. Just as baseball players, players, powerlifters, and MMA MMA fighters train for a specific purpose, the techniques, tactics, and strategies we talk about revolve around “looks based” training and not “performance based” training. training. (although your average performance across most all regimes will, in fact, increase as a whole with our advice) 2. “Health” “Health” based traini training ng takes a backseat backseat as the the recommendat recommendations ions we give give create bodies bodies that fall within all of the generally accepted “parameters” for good health (blood pressure, heart health, etc) by default. default. And, although we do talk about health and aging from from time to time, realize that “health” comes with the package, without having to FOCUS on it. 3. Our opinions opinions are are strictly strictly our own and sometim sometimes es are about as as un-PC as as you can get, get, but we’ll never hide from the truth or try to sugar coat reality. reality. Our job is to help you get in the exact shape you want, with all all the BS aside. So, if you think we’re we’re a little harsh sometimes… just know we’ve got your best interest at heart. So, with all of that said, dive in and enjoy. If you’d like more information information on our workout systems, just click this link . We guarantee you’ll save a bunch of time and energy in the process. Your friend,


GLYCOGEN ECCENTRIC STEROIDS Podcast hosts: Brad Howard and John Barban http://blog.adonislifestyle.com Page 5 of 32 _____________________________________________________________________________ _ Brad Howard Brad Howard: All right guys, welcome welcome once again to your Adonis Lifestyle podcast. I am Brad Howard and on the phone phone is John Barban once again. And today we’re going to talk about some really interesting things, and we probably are going to get a little controversial toward the end. I know John has got some questions that he wants to go ahead and handle over really quickly up front. We’re getting a lot of questions on these, so why don’t you go in and take it away.

John Barban: Okay, we are talking about glycogen and glycogen loading, glycogen synthesis, glycogen repletion, and the question that was in the forums and people are kind of buzzing around is, “how much glycogen is optimal, for muscle growth?” And then the conversation goes a little further and wondering is it possible to be in a calorie deficit, and then the assumption is you’re also in a glycogen deficit and still build muscle if the amount of glycogen stored in your muscle is somehow rate limiting to muscle growth. So the quick lesson is that glycogen is just the storage form of glucose and basically any carbohydrate you take into your body eventually gets turned into glucose in your bloodstream and then it gets stored as glycogen, and that gets stored in all cells of your body, in your liver and in your muscle cells, with muscle cells being the ones we’re kind of talking about here.

Glycogen gets stored as a different forms so there is proglycogen and macroglycogen and it’s stored in different areas, speaking of the muscles specifically, and it’s stored in different particle sizes. So it’s not a uniformed molecule in its storage form. It’s stored in different places at different sizes and at different densities, so it’s kind of all over the place, and there is a lot of research in endurance athletes, so people who are doing long distance stuff like runners and cyclists that if you do an exhaustive exercise where


GLYCOGEN ECCENTRIC STEROIDS Podcast hosts: Brad Howard and John Barban http://blog.adonislifestyle.com Page 6 of 32 _____________________________________________________________________________ _ you do a lot of exercising, like hours of exercising to deplete your glycogen stores, and then if you force-feed yourself lots of glucose, you can “super-compensate” and your muscles will absorb more glycogen than they had before. So what that means is that there is a standard level of glycogen that the average muscle will be holding at any given moment. If you do a depletion exercise and then drink a lot of sugar basically, like sugar water, you can get your muscles temporarily to absorb more glycogen than they had before. But that doesn’t mean they’re going to be huge, that just means scientifically you can measure more glycogen in them.

But all of this type of research is done in endurance athletes and the amount of glucose that they’re taking in is really high. It’s like it would be an extra thousand calories, if not more, per day on top of what you’re eating just in sugar, so it’s kind of a lot. So anyone who is focusing on trying to lose weight, I don’t know that you all of a sudden want to be taking in another 500 grams of sugar just to try to get your glycogen levels up in your muscles. It would be kind of defeating the purpose of at least trying to lose weight, weight, and then none of this really has even been shown to have anything to do with actually building muscle.

Another study was done trying to see if low glycogen levels in one muscle (and this is on the same person they tested one leg versus another). If having low glycogen on one leg before weight training exercise changed its anabolic response. When they say anabolic, they were just measuring various RNA levels of different genes that promote muscle hypertrophy, and it seemed to be a bit of a muted effect, like nothing really happened and if anything, the low glycogen leg had a more favorable response by knocking down the gene expression of the genes that cause muscles to shrink. I know that was a lot to take in. So basically the low glycogen leg may have genetically turned down muscle degradation, but not really upped muscle synthesis. But if you can turn


GLYCOGEN ECCENTRIC STEROIDS Podcast hosts: Brad Howard and John Barban http://blog.adonislifestyle.com Page 7 of 32 _____________________________________________________________________________ _ down degradation, that still results in muscle growth. So basically, my overall point here is there is not much we can really do with glycogen in our muscles as far as making them grow.

Brad Howard: Right.

John Barban: I mean, if you’re eating enough, and even if you’re just eating to maintenance or just eating a mixed diet, that’s probably all you need to do. And if your goal is fat loss, it’s your primary goal, if your muscles feel a little flatter and they feel not quite as bloated, they probably aren’t, but it doesn’t mean that you’re not going to be able to gain it. It doesn’t mean to just give up on going to the gym. It just means for those few weeks or months, you’re going to have to kind of deal with not feeling as big while you’re losing fat, and then when you can go back to eating maintenance, you can have that sort of big feeling again. And if strength in the gym is an issue, I don’t think any amount of glycogen can compare to just caffeine caffeine and ephedrine. If you actually want to feel super-strong, a caffeine tablet and an ephedrine tablet is way beyond any amount of sugar you can drink.

Brad Howard: Right. Yeah, it’s pretty interesting because we hear a lot of people in the forums and just questions we get on the blog and even emails to support asking these types of questions especially, and especially talking about losing strength while on a diet and things like that. I think from my perspective, from what has happened to me when I cut down, a lot of times when I’m eating a lot less, a lot of it’s in the head, too. I just don’t feel it, I guess you can say. Like I just don’t have – I don’t want to say – the energy, but it’s almost a little more of a lethargic feeling sometimes. And I know that carries over into the gym.


GLYCOGEN ECCENTRIC STEROIDS Podcast hosts: Brad Howard and John Barban http://blog.adonislifestyle.com Page 8 of 32 _____________________________________________________________________________ _ John Barban: Oh, yeah, for sure. I’m not saying that there is not actually a response there where you may not be as mechanically strong simply because the muscles are not as bloated. But for weight training, glycogen glycogen is not really limiting. It’s because weight training doesn’t burn that much. It might just be a mechanical thing. It might just be it doesn’t feel as bloated because it actually isn’t as bloated because glycogen stores a lot of water water with it. Your body can only store so much glycogen because it needs two parts of water for one part of glycogen, so you couldn’t. Otherwise, you would be just enormous if you just kept storing up glycogen. That’s why your body switches any excess calories to fat because fat can be stored with virtually no water, so it takes up way less space.

Brad Howard: Right.

John Barban: Per unit of calories. That’s the difference, so it’s always a transient storage system. I mean, super-compensation super-compensation happens over two or three days, but it happens in different forms and it’s going to go back down to normal if you don’t do it again, if you don’t train again. So you have to view the size of your muscles as a transient thing. It’s kind of like for the entire time in your life that you’re working out, you’re sort of always in a perpetual muscle pump state, and then the moments right after workout where you have that even a little bit extra pump. And then let’s say you just stopped working out, a year later your just in your sort of non-pumped state and that’s kind of the way to look at it. It’s like you will eventually shrink back down to what you were before you worked out, if you stopped working out all together.

Brad Howard: Right. I know we’ve kind of talked about muscle memory memory and things like that and I don’t know if we kind of discussed on whether we’ve actually figured out


GLYCOGEN ECCENTRIC STEROIDS Podcast hosts: Brad Howard and John Barban http://blog.adonislifestyle.com Page 9 of 32 _____________________________________________________________________________ _ where that comes from or the actual protein actually leaves the muscle, when you don’t work anymore if it really atrophies that much or if it’s still there and it’s just not pumped.

John Barban: We know that if you’ve been training for 10 or 15 years and you break a limb, the muscle shrinks up. It looks like a 12-year-old girl’s, like my buddy, it happened to his arm, it just shrunk right up. It looked like his arm when he was 12 years old, and then the minute his cast came off, within six months it was right back up to its full size, but obviously not as like as if he never trained size, but all the way back to 15 years of training size. So there is obviously some lasting adaptations that happened in the muscle, but it still shows you that if the muscle is full sized, it still is transient state.

Brad Howard: Yeah.

John Barban: Do you see what I’m saying? So something structurally or something genetically has changed but you still need to train the freaking muscle all the time to keep it bloated.

Brad Howard: Right.

John Barban: Because the minute his arm was in a cast, the 15 years of training just disappeared, but it all came back in six months, so it’s not like it took him 15 years more to get back.

Brad Howard: Sure. I guess that’s the reason I never worry about losing muscle while dieting down. I mean I went a month without training just to work on my my shoulder a little bit and I was still eating decently low.


GLYCOGEN ECCENTRIC STEROIDS Podcast hosts: Brad Howard and John Barban http://blog.adonislifestyle.com Page 10 of 32 _____________________________________________________________________________ _ John Barban: Yeah, sure.

Brad Howard: I don’t look very different, especially when I get out of the gym and get ready to take a shower. I look at myself in the mirror. I mean, I’ve noticed that I have less body fat on me.

John Barban: A month isn’t long enough to do much.

Brad Howard: Right, but I guess before it would be like, “Oh shit, my muscle is disappearing.” But now, it’s just, “Oh well, my body fat levels are lower. Yeah, that makes sense.” Or “You know, I haven’t worked out in a month, yeah, that makes sense.” Or “I haven’t eaten that much today, so I don’t have as much water or there is no pump in there. I mean, this all makes sense now.” It’s not like this scary thing; it’s just this big transient thing that I know one day will be back.

John Barban: Yeah, well, I guess it’s just accepting the fact that it is. I guess people who have never been through a cut down or never coached or never been around fitness or bodybuilders who go up and down like this, they don’t realize how transient it all is. It’s really day to day, and especially when you’re trying to really manipulate things that it changes a lot and it becomes more more apparent the leaner you are. Like if you’re 50 pounds overweight, a fluctuation of ten pounds of water doesn’t really show up because there is just so much mass covering up the muscles. It’s really hard to tell what’s going on. I mean, you just won’t notice it.

So glycogen and all of that, there is not really a whole lot going on there. You just have to be clear with your goals. If you’re trying to lose weight, weight, lose body fat, you kind of have to accept the fact that maybe along the way down you’re not going to be breaking


GLYCOGEN ECCENTRIC STEROIDS Podcast hosts: Brad Howard and John Barban http://blog.adonislifestyle.com Page 11 of 32 _____________________________________________________________________________ _ records in strength. You may, but it is okay if you don’t quite feel like it’s the biggest your muscles have ever been on the way down. You’ve got to kind of have to let one go to get the other one that really worked, but again, again, that’s a psychological thing. You have to remember that you’re not losing muscle, they just don’t. don’t. The transient state of how bloated they are might not quite feel the same, that’s all.

Brad Howard: Yeah, it’s like the black box of whatever the muscle is for that day, and because there are so many inputs and outputs and things that can change and not change and things out of your control and in your control that it’s kind of random.

John Barban: Yeah.

Brad Howard: I remember back in the day, this is back when I was maxing out and stuff like that. I might have been 23 or 24, and we walked into the gym. We had no business walking into the gym because we had just gotten in at 3 or 4 AM the night before. I mean, we were hung over. Good God hung over. I mean, it was bad. I was like, “How in the hell are we going to max out today?” And literally I lifted more that day than I lifted ever before, but I’ve never been able to repeat that.

John Barban: Oh probably not. It just worked for you.

Brad Howard: Yeah, just that day, for some reason, I was able to lift more even in that state, but every other time I’ve tried it, it was nowhere even close to that.

John Barban: The strength is day to day, and the look of your body actually is day to day, too. I mean, generally, you will know what you look like. Everybody knows it’s got fluctuations day to day.


GLYCOGEN ECCENTRIC STEROIDS Podcast hosts: Brad Howard and John Barban http://blog.adonislifestyle.com Page 12 of 32 _____________________________________________________________________________ _ Brad Howard: Sure, right.

John Barban: So the glycogen and muscle thing, it’s a day-to-day thing, and if your goal is fat loss, just accept the fact that you can’t always feel as bloated as maybe you would like.

Brad Howard: Right, right.

John Barban: And when I say bloated, I don’t mean your gut. I mean, it’s your muscles. Your muscle bloat.

Brad Howard: Sure. Okay, I think you wanted us to talk about rep speed, too. We’re getting questions about rep speed, concentric and eccentric reps and things like that.

John Barban: Yeah, eccentrics, just for people that aren’t sure of the terminology that is just the negative, so that actually means the lengthening of the muscle and then concentric is the contractions contractions or the shortening of the muscle. So whatever exercise you’re doing, there is typically a push and then – well, not really a push and a pull, but there is – the lengthening and the shortening, and those are the two, eccentric and concentric. And then there is this idea that time under tension and and all of that stuff, if you take longer on the eccentric, that’s where more muscle damage is done (and not in a bad way, but in a trauma to the muscle that it forces it to remodel way), which then in turn supposedly forces it to grow, but there has never been any scientific proof to say that eccentrics alone can cause muscle growth, so there needs to be some concentric, too, where you’re shortening the muscle.


GLYCOGEN ECCENTRIC STEROIDS Podcast hosts: Brad Howard and John Barban http://blog.adonislifestyle.com Page 13 of 32 _____________________________________________________________________________ _ And then the other side of that is if you believe in time under tension, then why wouldn’t you just do one super-long slow rep with like really light weight? But that doesn’t work either because the longer the rep takes, the lighter the weight has to get. So eventually you’ll get to a weight that’s so light that it won’t stimulate muscle growth, so you can’t just go overboard with the rep speed either. So the idea of three reps, two reps, five reps, 8-13 or whatever the rep range is, it will dictate the weight you can handle because you basically want to be able to do that many reps in good form with that particular weight, and that in turn determines the speed of your concentric and eccentric. So the heaviest weight you could possibly lift, by definition, will move super slow, and if you can move it any quicker than just really, really slow, it’s not the heaviest; because by definition the heaviest is the weight that like one ounce heavier you won’t be able to move it all. So the heaviest weight you could possibly move will move by definition very slow both on the concentric and eccentric, and then as you slowly get lighter from that, you can start pushing it up faster and taking longer to lower it. And then somewhere between your one rep max and your 21 rep kind of pump sets are all of the other concentric and eccentric speeds you can force weight to go.

And so there are various calculations to what the maximum power (‘power’ being able to move a combination of somewhat heavy weight quickly), is. There is some calculation for what the max weight out of your one rep max you can do that with, but it’s not actually that heavy. There is only so much weight you can can lift with speed until the weight itself stops you from pushing it that fast, and you can’t just train with ballistic power like throwing medicine balls or taking a light barbell and literally throwing it. There is only so much of that you can do that will translate into how much you can lift in the other rep ranges, it’s neuromuscularly specific. I mean, there is strength-speed and speed-strength. That’s how much much they split it up when when they’re measuring it, when exercise physiologists are measuring it. So you can train them all, you can do ballistic


GLYCOGEN ECCENTRIC STEROIDS Podcast hosts: Brad Howard and John Barban http://blog.adonislifestyle.com Page 14 of 32 _____________________________________________________________________________ _ lifts if you want. You can throw medicine balls if you want. You can lift super, super, heavy weights. You can do forced negatives where you put a weight on the bar that you can’t even lift up at all, and then you get somebody to help you lift it and then the both of you lower it, and you can do all that stuff, but what I’m saying is all of those are kind of not the core, but the sort of addition to a core program. And then you can sort of sprinkle those things in here and there and that’s kind of the quick and dirty on the eccentrics and concentrics.

It’s okay to do some slow rep, and even in the ATS, in the advanced workouts, we actually have an entire four-week module where it’s all about controlling ups and downs. It’s like controlling the eccentric and the concentric. So we have that in there. It’s not the basis of an entire routine though. I guess the point is the rep range you pick, so if you’re in the five rep range or if you’re in the 13 or whatever, the speed that you can likely move that weight at, it’s already calibrated for you by how heavy it is.

Brad Howard: Right.

John Barban: Like you shouldn’t be moving five rep weight very quickly, nowhere near as quick as you can move 13 reps and so on.

Brad Howard: Right, and if you can, obviously, you’re not doing it right.

John Barban: Well, if you can, it’s not heavy enough.

Brad Howard: Right, this is one of the things we talked about time and time again, but I guess this is one of the things we really can’t show, so I guess that’s why we have to bring it up a lot. We’re talking about intensity and getting the intensity right, so


GLYCOGEN ECCENTRIC STEROIDS Podcast hosts: Brad Howard and John Barban http://blog.adonislifestyle.com Page 15 of 32 _____________________________________________________________________________ _ especially when people are talking about their workouts being easy or something like that. I mean, it’s always every single time someone says, “You know, oh man, these workouts are easy.” I’m like, “man they’re not easy.” I just had somebody tell me the other day, and you actually showed me the forum posts and I actually talked to the guy on Facebook. He was saying another muscle building guy jumped in and did our workout and he was thrashed halfway through. He couldn’t even finish, so that was kind of funny because I know that guy.

John Barban: Well, that tells you two things. He was at least lifting the right amount of weight and he was lifting heavy obviously.

Brad Howard: Right.

John Barban: And then the other thing is he’s just not used to the pattern.

Brad Howard: Yeah.

John Barban: Like whatever he does isn’t similar to what we’re doing.

Brad Howard: Right, yeah, exactly. exactly. But like I say, I like the guy. He’s a real cool dude, so I hope he won’t mind if I gave him a hard time. And literally, I probably can’t do what he does just because it’s different.

John Barban: Yeah.


GLYCOGEN ECCENTRIC STEROIDS Podcast hosts: Brad Howard and John Barban http://blog.adonislifestyle.com Page 16 of 32 _____________________________________________________________________________ _ Brad Howard: I think he does a lot of body weight stuff. I’d probably be just completely thrashed like one arm about to fall off or something, so all of this stuff is very specific to what goal you have and what you’re “practicing in,” I guess.

John Barban: Well, yeah, like I could have sworn we were talking about building muscle, not speed specific strength. Are we just talking about building building muscle here? Like where is this discussion going? It just seems like it’s so easy to get caught up talking about things that when you bring it back to the bigger picture it’s like what did that ever have to do with the goal of why I’m working out in the first place anyways.

Brad Howard: Yeah, and the big question is, are you making it more difficult on yourself than it needs to be?

John Barban: Well, yeah. Like if there is something. I mean, I get that the overall goal seems to always land back on it, but I guess this just brings me back to the third point I want to talk about today is what is the goal and what is it that you’re after. It’s the concept of are you trying to get somewhere that these techniques can’t get you. It’s kind of like exercising to manipulate hormones, like people think that squatting and dead lift actually increase testosterone and those sorts of things. Well, I’ll just come around and say it. If what you’re after is a steroid-induced look, but you don’t want to use steroids, well, there is no way around that besides using steroids. There is no fancy rep scheme. There is no glycogen-loading protocol. There is no exercise manipulation of your hormones to get you into a steroid looking like growth pattern.

You just can’t recreate steroid growth without steroids, and that seems to me to be where all of these discussions are coming from, not that anyone who has opened these discussions thought that. They’re like, “Well, I don’t want to use steroids, but I want


GLYCOGEN ECCENTRIC STEROIDS Podcast hosts: Brad Howard and John Barban http://blog.adonislifestyle.com Page 17 of 32 _____________________________________________________________________________ _ those types of gains…” That’s where the rhetoric comes from. That’s when you read supplement ads, when you’re in different forums, I mean, most of all of that is people avoiding using drugs and trying to find another way around getting a drug-like effect, and not realizing that. Like maybe they have an image in their head of a size they think they should be, and they’re like, “Well, you know, how come it’s not happening?” Or they just don’t have patience. Like somebody was posting in the forum of just being a little bit skeptical of where the program is going to get them and things like that and then he said he’s only been training for two years, and I’m like, “Well, I’ve been training for 15, so what makes you think you can get get to where I am in two.” It’s like there is a lack of patience there. Like the total volume of exercise you do isn’t just specific to within a week or a month, but it’s specific to your life.

So I’ve been training for about 15 years, someone who has been training for two, even if we’re the same age or no matter what their age is, I still have 13 years of lifting on them. I have thousands, tens of thousands of more reps done, like what would make them think that they could get to where I am at in one-seventh of the time. It’s like it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but then people start thinking about all these other things like is it glycogen, is it rep speed? Do you know what it is, is you’re missing out on 13 13 years of training, that’s what it is.

Brad Howard: Yeah, it’s time.

John Barban: It’s time over your life. That’s one thing that no one ever talks about, and the perfect example of that is my buddy buddy who broke his arm. He’s my age. age. Our birthdays are actually like the same day, and he’s the same same age as me. He’s been training for about 15 years and he broke his arm. His arm shrunk. He came out of the cast and six months later, he still has a huge arm, like he brought it right back. Now, if


GLYCOGEN ECCENTRIC STEROIDS Podcast hosts: Brad Howard and John Barban http://blog.adonislifestyle.com Page 18 of 32 _____________________________________________________________________________ _ somebody else who has only been training for two years (and that person’s arm is two inches smaller than my buddies) and breaks that arm, and then it comes out of the cast, it will only come back to whatever size it is and still being two inches smaller than my buddies arm, like you still need to spend the next 13 years to build that up to my friends arms size. But the point is the total amount of time spent with the number of reps over your life also matters. If you’ve been training for seven years and I’ve been training for 15, it’s not necessarily on par, like you can’t really compare yourself to me and I can’t compare myself to someone who has ten years of experience more than me because that’s just ten years more reps they’ve done than I haven’t.

Brad Howard: Well, it’s the reps, but it’s also the knowhow. I mean, you will will learn a lot of knowhow in that time where if you fall off the wagon or something, you can bounce back and get back to where you need to be, not only just physically because all of the muscle memory and stuff like that, but just by knowhow and knowing what to do to get to the way you want to go.

John Barban: Oh, yeah, all of that stuff. I think it is just impatience. Everyone is just looking for another w way ay around it. Like it was unbelievable when Jason’s pictures went went up and people were actually finding reasons to shoot him down, like, “Oh, well, Jason has got machine-like intensity and dedication in the gym, and oh, well, Jason has been training for a long time.” Exactly, and he’s an example of the body you can get to, and it’s like some people want it to happen in a third of the time without the intensity or the effort.

Brad Howard: Yeah.


GLYCOGEN ECCENTRIC STEROIDS Podcast hosts: Brad Howard and John Barban http://blog.adonislifestyle.com Page 19 of 32 _____________________________________________________________________________ _ John Barban: So I don’t understand how you think that’s going to be. Here’s an example of how you do it, and then people look at that and go, “Okay, well, I don’t want to do that. I want to find another way to do that.”

Brad Howard: Sure, yeah, you don’t get a body like that, I mean, ripped. I mean, you don’t get that without deciding that is exactly what you want.

John Barban: It doesn’t happen by accident; otherwise, everyone would have it.

Brad Howard: Yeah, I mean, it surely doesn’t. Especially in weight loss and stuff like that, you hear a lot of people talking about how they use stuff and they’re losing weight, and we see this all the time with all these different protocols. But the fact is that all these different protocols that people are talking about in the mainstream, nobody is ripped. I mean, none of these people are ripped using all these different protocols. I mean, they’ve just lost some weight. Maybe they’ve lost a hundred pounds, which is great. Don’t get me wrong. It’s fantastic, but getting ripped, I mean, I’m telling you right right now I’m going for it, it takes more than just coasting. It is an active decision.

John Barban: Oh, yeah.

Brad Howard: It is every single day, and then every single day you have to decide.

John Barban: Each new level of leanness you get to that’s sort of on the way, you just have to remind yourself there is still more to go. In general, I get the feeling that there is a lot of people who are impatient with how long muscle building takes, and even to some degree with fat loss. And that impatience is where the diet and fitness industry and the supplement industry and the magazines and all of those things get you because


GLYCOGEN ECCENTRIC STEROIDS Podcast hosts: Brad Howard and John Barban http://blog.adonislifestyle.com Page 20 of 32 _____________________________________________________________________________ _ they’re promising speed. They’re promising something that takes years to happen in months or weeks, and then people become skeptical when after four weeks of training on a particular system, they’re like, “Well, you know, I’m not as big as I thought I’d be.” Like four weeks, what do you expect to happen in four weeks?

Brad Howard: Yeah.

John Barban: I just don’t get it. I mean, I guess it’s been a while since I’ve believed that you can do things that quickly and the newbie strength gains that you get and the muscle gains you get when the first time you trained, no matter how old you are, and once those go away and juvenile muscle growth goes away, it starts to just take a lot longer and that’s when you settle into getting that, “Oh, this is just the life I live, like I live a life of to slowly just chipping away at it.” I even posted my general strength on different exercises as a comparison for guys who were saying, “Well, you know, I thought I would be bigger and stronger.” I said, “Well, this is the weights I lift now.” And a lot of this is splitting hairs. People asking “Well, what what about post-workout repletion and this and that and the other?” In general, I can always always put two plates on the bench press and do it for at least 6 or 8 reps per sets and I always use 100-pound dumbbells, you know, flat, maybe 90-95s inclined. With squatting, I’ve made it up to three plates for reps and somewhere around two plates now for more reps. I can curl 60-pound dumbbells, not that this is impressive, but that is just where I’m at, but it took me a long time to get here. If you’re not as big as me and you’re trying to at least get as big as me, I’ve managed to get all the way here without knowing anything about glycogen loading or trying that or messing messing around with rep speed or any of that stuff. So you can at least get to as big as me without doing any of that stuff, and then from there maybe there is something else to do, but I don’t see where it fits in. To me, it just seems like


GLYCOGEN ECCENTRIC STEROIDS Podcast hosts: Brad Howard and John Barban http://blog.adonislifestyle.com Page 21 of 32 _____________________________________________________________________________ _ people are looking for ways around the truth that it just takes consistency and hard work.

Brad Howard: Yeah, but the thing that sucks about the Internet is that once somebody puts something out, with even books, once some research gets done and this gets published and people take it and run with it there is really no way to go back and say, “Oh, yeah, I was wrong.” I mean, so many people do it, but they don’t go back and edit that blog post they put out four years ago that talked about this protocol being the next best thing, because all this stuff changes. Just like milk was bad ten years ago, and now it’s good. It’s like all of this stuff changes. I mean, one of these days, maybe we’ll find out like low carb is the cause of cancer or something…

John Barban: Oh, it’s cyclical. This stuff started in the late 1800s. It’s not like it’s new. Nothing has changed. Ironically, the only people I know who do mess around with glycogen loading before and after exercises are guys who are already on steroids.

Brad Howard: Right.

John Barban: The guys who are competing, guys who have already maxed out everything else, guys who have been training for years who are using drugs and using insulin and using growth hormone, and only those guys are the ones that mess around with this carb and protein manipultion.

Brad Howard: Right.

John Barban: Actually, I was talking to one of my buddies who is a bodybuilder and he has a coach (which is more or less the guy who sells him his drugs and works on his


GLYCOGEN ECCENTRIC STEROIDS Podcast hosts: Brad Howard and John Barban http://blog.adonislifestyle.com Page 22 of 32 _____________________________________________________________________________ _ nutrition/drug routine), and I don’t know if I’ve said this before on a podcast, but he was just saying, “Why doesn’t anyone try that stuff (glycogen loading etc) without using the drugs?” He’s of the opinion that, “It’s not really going to do much for them.” So it’s another one of those things where you’re trying to do something, and maybe it does matter if you take in 400 grams of carbohydrates after a workout while you’re on 2 grams of testosterone and taking like 4 IUs of insulin a day. Maybe it really does and really makes a big difference, but it probably doesn’t matter at all for the average guy who is clean.

Brad Howard: Oh, yeah, I could see that mattering, especially with insulin.

John Barban: Yeah, so what I’m saying is substrate, (substrate would be glycogen here) the substrate, the thing that you’re putting into your muscle is same with protein, those things probably make a big difference when you’re using drugs because you’ve got an altered metabolism. Basically, things are growing quicker, things are adapting faster, certain genes are turned on and certain enzymes are moving at different rates when you have that much drugs floating through you.

Brad Howard: Sure.

John Barban: So some or a lot of the stuff we hear about is at least adapted or borrowed from that culture. Now, some of it comes from clean athletes too, and in normal research, but most of the research on a lot of these things, at least for glycogen and stuff like that, it’s from endurance athletes and I don’t think anybody listening into our stuff really cares about being able to run a marathon faster. People are just trying to build muscle.


GLYCOGEN ECCENTRIC STEROIDS Podcast hosts: Brad Howard and John Barban http://blog.adonislifestyle.com Page 23 of 32 _____________________________________________________________________________ _ Brad Howard: Right, and the other thing about the hormones is like everything that you’re trying to do and from what I’ve talked to you and Brad about it is just anything that you could possibly do is still going to put that hormone within the normal range.

John Barban: Oh, yeah, yeah, you can’t train your way to steroid-like testosterone levels.

Brad Howard: Right, it’s still in the normal range of testosterone, like if you got tested, you wouldn’t test positive.

John Barban: And you said it right, that’s a range. There is high normal and and normal and then there is low normal and then below low normal is when you’re diagnosed with low testosterone.

Brad Howard: Right.

John Barban: But you might be able to maybe move it around into the higher end of normal, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to just burst with muscle. Like even guys who inject testosterone, but just not a lot of it, even they don’t really get huge muscle gains. You needs lots of extra testosterone to start gaining fast.

Brad Howard: Right, yeah. Then that’s the whole point, guys are trying to manipulate the hormones. I mean, in trying to get this 5% gain whereas whereas if it was that important to you, you could literally go out, go get a little bit of testosterone, stick it in your ass or take d-bol or whatever you want to do in just a little amount and get that same thing without doing the crap that you’re trying to do.


GLYCOGEN ECCENTRIC STEROIDS Podcast hosts: Brad Howard and John Barban http://blog.adonislifestyle.com Page 24 of 32 _____________________________________________________________________________ _ John Barban: I’m with you on that one.

Brad Howard: If it’s that damn important, just do that.

John Barban: Yeah, to me, the barrier, (and I guess this is for guys who has never used drugs, don’t get it). To me, the barrier is not realizing what you can and can’t get with a clean body, (‘clean’ being drugs versus no drugs). and then it’s how much drugs do you need to get how big you want and in what speed. So if you want to gain 30 pounds of muscle this year, well, that’s going to be pretty hard without drugs.

Brad Howard: It’s also the blurred line of what’s clean, because if you’re taking supplements, is that clean? Is that natural?

John Barban: Sure, and hey, I’m with you 100%, but all I’m saying is the rates and the results that can be achieved, we already know how to do all of this stuff. If you want to gain a hundred pounds, I know how to make you gain a hundred pounds.

Brad Howard: Right.

John Barban: It just requires a lot of drugs that I don’t have access to.

Brad Howard: Yeah.

John Barban: And if you want to look your best without drugs, I kind of know how to do that, too.

Brad Howard: Right.


GLYCOGEN ECCENTRIC STEROIDS Podcast hosts: Brad Howard and John Barban http://blog.adonislifestyle.com Page 25 of 32 _____________________________________________________________________________ _ John Barban: But you’ve got to be clear, but it may not happen quite as fast as gaining the hundred pounds with the drugs even, but it’s just two different things. So I guess that’s kind of the moral of the story and wrapping it all up. Getting into specifics of things like glycogen and rep speed and all of that stuff is a bit of the minutiae. I mean, for someone who is not using any drugs and just trying to build the best body they can have without drugs, the number one thing you can do is be consistent in the gym and work really hard…you have to push really hard. That’s the thing you have to be good at; consistency and effort. I mean, that’s the testament to Jason’s physique. He actually does push hard and he does have effort. I think that’s why he has got the shape he’s in. I mean, that’s the point, like with his pictures, he is showing you how to do it, it takes effort and if you want a shortcut, then you have to go somewhere else.

Brad Howard: Yeah, even with drugs, there is still the pain threshold.

John Barban: Well, yeah, those guys push hard, too.

Brad Howard: Yeah.

John Barban: They just end up abnormally larger, that’s all.

Brad Howard: Yeah, I mean, the pain threshold or the crap you’ve got to through, like for instance, I was talking to my buddy the other day at the gym and he’s getting ready to go and do a show, and I was asking him if he was cutting and he was like yeah. I mean, this dude is big. When he’s not cutting down, he’s probably 225, maybe 240 at 5’8.


GLYCOGEN ECCENTRIC STEROIDS Podcast hosts: Brad Howard and John Barban http://blog.adonislifestyle.com Page 26 of 32 _____________________________________________________________________________ _ John Barban: Yeah, that’s huge.

Brad Howard: Right, I mean, he’s a big dude. But the funny thing about it, I was like, “Well, how many calories are you eating now when you’re cutting down?” And he was like, “It’s 2,400 a day.”

John Barban: And does he do like cardio as well as his weights?

Brad Howard: I don’t see him do a lot of cardio.

John Barban: Yeah.

Brad Howard: I don’t see him do a lot of cardio, but that’s what I’m saying, I mean, he’s using a lot of drugs, but he’s used to eating 4,000 a day. And I walked in on him while he was eating, and I was like, “How is the food going?” He’s like, “Oh man, it sucks.”

John Barban: Oh yeah, dieting sucks. Every single fitness competitor and bodybuilder I’ve ever met knows that it’s not exactly fun. They just force their way through it.

Brad Howard: Yeah.

John Barban: Like when I was working at the last supplement company I worked at, there was a guy, (and I didn’t know he was dieting at the time) but he had a show coming up, and I would purposely go leave little doughnuts on his desk just to tease him.


GLYCOGEN ECCENTRIC STEROIDS Podcast hosts: Brad Howard and John Barban http://blog.adonislifestyle.com Page 27 of 32 _____________________________________________________________________________ _ Brad Howard: Right.

John Barban: And then some of the other girls (everyone on that freaking company was either a bodybuilder or a fitness competitor). Some of the girls would come over and take the donuts and bring them back to me, and then they’d give me a lecture. They’re like, “Would you stop it. You need to support him. He’s competing.” I was like, “Oh, I didn’t didn’t know he was competing. I wouldn’t have done that.” And so the next day I just left even more on his desk, but it was killing him, like it was really hard for him to have those sitting in front of him. And then another girl there, she was dieting down and she was a national level fitness competitor, and she had like five or six almonds sitting on her desk next to her keyboard, and I walked walked up. I don’t know what I needed to talk to her for, and I had grabbed one to eat it and then she slapped it out of my hand and she’s like, “Don’t do that. I only get to have those five.” She has her calories calculated for the day and so all five of those almonds were accounted for, so if I ate one, I just took one-fifth of her almond snack, right? And she’s said, “Come on, that’s all I get right now.” I’m like, “Oh, sorry.”

Brad Howard: Right.

John Barban: But that was how strict they were, and they know there is no other way around it. I mean, there is still a lot of effort to be put into lose weight.

Brad Howard: Yeah, well, there is one secret that I don’t think we really ever talked about, and I think we can end with this. The secret is this: once you discover how hard this really is, then it gets easy.


GLYCOGEN ECCENTRIC STEROIDS Podcast hosts: Brad Howard and John Barban http://blog.adonislifestyle.com Page 28 of 32 _____________________________________________________________________________ _ The road gets really easy once you realize and come to grips with how hard all of this is because everything crystallizes in front of you. It all makes sense.

John Barban: Yeah, it’s basically the recognition of what you’re actually up against.

Brad Howard: Right.

John Barban: And at that moment, you discard all of the minutiae that are pointless and then you can focus all your attention on what actually needs to be done.

Brad Howard: Right, yeah. I forget who, but som somebody ebody was telling me that, and and this is years and years ago, and yeah, I blew it off, like I said, yeah, whatever. But yeah, I’m seeing it now, just in this regard, especially when you’re trying to cut down. On muscle building, I’m not as much concerned with because I don’t think I want to gain too much more and not that they would be even possible, but you realize that you’re like, “All right, well, this shit sucks. It’s hard.” Right? I mean, you just know mentally. You know it. It’s like going to war every single day. You know it’s going to suck. You know something is going to get sacrificed. You know you’re going to have to do this. Something is going to have to happen. Yeah, you’re still going to be able to live your life, but I mean, once you decide that you have this ultimate big hairy goal that you want to go and hit, man, I mean, you can have anything you want in life, you just can’t have everything. That’s really the key. I had a guy tell me that one time. I was like, “What do you mean?” He goes, “Well, you can’t have everything. I mean, if you want, you’ve got got to decide what you want and then there are going to be other things that you kind of want to do that you’re just not going to be able to do it if you want that.”

John Barban: Oh, yeah, if you want the red car, you can’t have the blue car.


GLYCOGEN ECCENTRIC STEROIDS Podcast hosts: Brad Howard and John Barban http://blog.adonislifestyle.com Page 29 of 32 _____________________________________________________________________________ _ Brad Howard: Yeah, sure.

John Barban: So you’ve got to pick.

Brad Howard: Yeah, I mean, it’s kind of the way it is. So that’s kind of what we’re saying about the hormone thing. I mean, let’s wrap up real quick. Let’s go ahead and wrap up and then let them go, but go ahead and wrap up glycogen and all that stuff and then we’ll take it home. Go.

John Barban: Yeah, I guess, the take home message is there is not a whole lot to worry about with glycogen. If you’re interested you can load, but in the research, it’s a lot. Like they’re taking in 800-1000 extra calories and basically just pure sugar, so I’m sure that that’s not really on your radar for something you’d want to do. So I wouldn’t worry too much about it. If you do feel weak in the gym, just a bit of caffeine might help, and if it’s because you’re cutting down, just remember that it’s okay if you’re going to feel a little weak or look a little flat while you’re cutting down because your goal is fat loss, not having the greatest muscle building workouts of your life while your cutting down because the cutting down eventually will end. end. Muscle building goes on forever.

Brad Howard: Sure.

John Barban: Rep speed, the weight you’re using, the amount of weight and the rep range you’re using more or less dictates the rep speed. So the heavier the weight, the slower things get on their own. own. If you want to manipulate rep speed, you can but just realize that the longer the eccentrics take, the lighter the weight will get, and at some point, you’ve got diminishing diminishing returns. I would say eccentrics longer than two seconds


GLYCOGEN ECCENTRIC STEROIDS Podcast hosts: Brad Howard and John Barban http://blog.adonislifestyle.com Page 30 of 32 _____________________________________________________________________________ _ down is kind of getting a little ridiculous, so two seconds down is probably more than enough, if you want to experiment with it and I would only add that every once and while. If you browse the ATS workouts, they’re in there for a full four weeks and you’re sore the whole time during that one.

Brad Howard: Yeah.

John Barban: And we don’t keep it up for the whole 12 weeks.

Brad Howard: It’s terrible.

John Barban: Yeah, and then as far as the hormone manipulation in training, don’t pretend like you’re going to get steroid like gains just by doing squats and deadlifts. I mean, they’re good. They’re definitely good foundation exercise for building mass. I mean, that’s because they work basically almost every muscle in your body. That’s the point of those exercises, so it’s not necessarily because they’re mimicking steroid-like blood levels of testosterone.

Brad Howard: Yeah, that’s the other thing, too, you’re thinking that one thing would trigger it all, but there could be ten other things in your life that you’re not doing like not getting enough sleep or not doing this or not doing that, that it will totally negate any of those effects, so it’s like why?

John Barban: It’s an aggregate, the whole thing, it’s everything.

Brad Howard: Sure, so like I say, we’re not telling you to use roids or not use roids. Your body is up to you, but I think both John and I agree that’s it. I mean, if this is


GLYCOGEN ECCENTRIC STEROIDS Podcast hosts: Brad Howard and John Barban http://blog.adonislifestyle.com Page 31 of 32 _____________________________________________________________________________ _ important to you, well, just go and do it and and just see for yourself. yourself. I mean, hell, maybe one of us should go on roids for a month or something just to show them what happens. Because I remember a guy that was one of our friends, and this guy was skinny as a rail. He literally could not bench the bar. He could not bench the bar and he got on Finajet, I think it was, and within three months he was benching over 225 and he was big.

John Barban: Oh, yeah.

Brad Howard: I mean it was incredible.

John Barban: Yeah, drugs are powerful. You’ve just got to make a decision and then if you’re not going to use drugs, you have to accept the fact that things just take a bit longer.

Brad Howard: But the other thing is don’t fool yourself if you’re going to use drugs to think that nobody is going to know that you don’t use because people will know.

John Barban: Yeah.


GLYCOGEN ECCENTRIC STEROIDS Podcast hosts: Brad Howard and John Barban http://blog.adonislifestyle.com Page 32 of 32 _____________________________________________________________________________ _ Brad Howard: All right, man. All right guys, well, I don’t think we got anything else to cover with that. But for John Barban, I am Brad Howard and this is your Adonis Lifestyle podcast.

Here are a few links for you to check out: 1. Adonis Lifestyle Podcast (iTunes subscription link) 2. Listen to the audio version of “Glycogen, Eccentrics, and ‘Roids” 3. Get the body you deserve and invest in the Adonis Index Systems today!


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