How can you improve your body and health?
What would you ask a man who has successfully transformed his body into an amazing specimen of health?
You should know that a healthy and fit body is an essential factor to looking sharp and feeling great about yourself.
In this interview, I speak with Ryan Masters, certified training and conditioning coach at The Workout Corner.
What motivated Ryan to train and workout
I've been training and working out forever. I was eating healthy. I was never seeing results. I went through the books, went through the training, and was able to get the transformation that I finally wanted, the results in terms of working out.
I believe my personal philosophy. Working out for me is not about looks. It's about the disciplines and the training and improving yourself. What you're talking about, just the image and the self-confidence that you get from working hard and just putting your nose to the grind.
-Ryan Masters
Focus on the Three Aspects
The Workout Trinity – food intake, exercise, and rest. What do I got to do? I've got to go to the gym and hit the weights.” I go to the gym, toss some weights around, and then I'll be in shape.
Food intake is more important in some cases than the actual exercise. What can really kill guys is they don't see the results.
Water is an essential to your overall fitness
Start drinking a gallon of water just, but if you are seriously hitting the gym a lot and you are serious about putting on mass or losing fat, you want to get up to about a gallon of water.
That can include juices and fruits and vegetables. You're not necessarily just drinking a straight jug because you get water from almost all the food that we eat. That's a common benchmark that you hear. You also hear about the eight glasses a day. I think that was created forever ago, but we want a little bit more than that.
Stick to Healthy Food, Don't go for the Processed Ones
Apple is a great food. I eat an apple every day or banana. You also want to look at some type of vegetables, leafy vegetable like spinach is good or something dark green like broccoli. Eggs are the best source of protein. It is easily digested by our body. It's all the protein blocks that we need for the body to take and then go start building muscle with.
Not all proteins are created equal. Proteins from soybeans are missing certain elements that the body can't just take that protein and start building muscle. It needs to find protein from somewhere else, put them together, and then it's ready to go build the muscle.
Lean meat and Fish are good for your Balanced Diet
Chicken is great. Lean meats are good, salmon, fish. Salmon is a great fish. It's healthy fat. You just want to watch for the fat, and even with the red meat.
Red meat is good, but you want to make sure you're getting lean, not like prime rib. That can be a lot of fat, so you want to steer clear of that or use that in moderation Tilapia is good and then any other fish.
Rest helps you to build muscles
You want to shoot for six to eight hours a night because your body doesn't build muscle when we're in the gym. We're not actually building muscle; we're tearing our muscles down, and our body builds muscle when we're sleeping.
When it's literally taking the stuff from the eggs and whatever else you eat and putting it on the muscles. So if you're cutting your sleeping time short, well, then you're not going to be getting any bigger.
Massage helps your body
When you're working out a lot, you're tearing down and you're causing a lot of stress to your body and it's good to get a massage at least once a quarter.
Importance of Sleep
We bend our environment to build our body, and a lot of people, the environment breaks their body and they let the environment bend and change them, and that's the wrong way to do it.
If you're trying to just put on muscle, you have to start taking command and control of your life and changing it to help build your body. You want at least 24 hours to 48 hours between workouts.
Five Core Exercises
- Cardio
You want to keep your cardio sessions to under 40 minutes. You don't want to be doing those in the same workout. If you're going to the gym, you do your lifting and then another day, you do your cardio, or you can do them on the same day, but spaced several hours apart.
- Lifting weights
I would do three gym sessions of lifting and one cardio session because when you're lifting and you're putting on muscle, you're going to raise your metabolism and you're going to naturally be burning fat throughout the day, which is why I can eat seven waffles. I couldn't do that every day, but that's not going to hurt me at all.
- Squats
One of the best exercise, and it's one of those things that's counterintuitive because you're like, “I don't want big legs. I don't want to train my legs.” No. There's a lot of stuff unfortunately that's just counterintuitive when it comes to working out, but our body operates as a system.
When you're doing squats and you train with the right rest time and the right number of sets and all this stuff I teach in my Muscle Growth Formula class, that's when your body starts releasing more testosterone, growth hormone, and you start building more muscle.
- Shoulders
The main reason we stick to the five core exercises is you start getting better at the form because you're doing those same exercises. If you're trying something like this crazy muscle confusion and you're doing new exercises every day, well, how good are you really getting at the technique? The form is very, very important.
Never sacrifice form for weight when it comes to working out.
- Body weight exercises.
A couple of caveats there like if you're a bigger guy and you can't quite do pull-ups yet, hopefully your gym has an assisted machine which is where you stand on a bar and it lets you put weight on, and that actually reduces the amount of weight you're lifting, so you can do kind of assisted pull-ups or assisted dips. That's one way to start.
We just need to take action and focus on that 20% and get to the 80% level. When you're at that 80% level, then I think you're in a better position to start asking the questions about muscle confusion and variations in each of the exercises.
If you're doing those exercises consistently and you're eating right, all of a sudden, you're just going to be in a much better position and I think most of us are right now.
Certain cardio may work better for me than it does for you. Particular foods may affect you more than they affect me, and no one in the world could tell you that.
When we're taking action and we have the right systems in place, then we start to learn what affects our body and how it affects it, and we can use that to our advantage so we're training a little bit smarter.
Try the Spartan Workout Program. Designed for busy lifestyles and people who don't want their whole life to revolve around fitness and bodybuilding. Includes gym-alternative exercises for men who don't belong to a gym and want to do their entire workout program at home.
