Willpower is a Muscle

“I wish I had more willpower.” The sentence heard repeatedly around dessert tables at holiday parties. The same sentence muttered by the “this is the time” guy that wants to kick some bad habits. Let’s not forget the New Year’s Resolutionist, this is going to be the year, fitness chaser that can’t seem to stay on track with their diet or training. But why do we say we don’t have the willpower to overcome these obstacles? Maybe it’s time we actually looked at this mystical thing called willpower, why it fails us, and how we can overcome.

Bear with me for a minute and see if this situation seems familiar.

You enter into health and fitness for some motivational reason: you want to lose weight, the doctor says you need to or you’ll have xyz disease, you want to grow an ass that holds your pants up, you want to be able to run with your kids, etc. Whatever the reason, you entered into this crazy venture and you’re beastmode, going ham, dedicated, and committed to doing it. You got the magazines, the supplements, the training books, and you’re on your way. After a few weeks the progress slows, the enthusiasm dwindles and eventually, you’re finding that “other” things just keep popping up and stopping you from training.

Your friends and family don’t support you and encourage you, and you’re on the verge of quitting. You hear about this website called Fitocracy that supports people on their fitness journey and you join. You get re-energized and you’re back on track with all your props, badges, and duels. Somehow, you still have demons telling you to just quit because the the novelty wore off. You reach out to the community and ask for support, and they give it, some say train with friends, others to get a trainer, and inevitably, somebody will give you the same old line about “get a goal.” [Read about why having goals isn’t enough here] You’re now in a position to make a choice, with community support you lose a few, fail, or succeed, or you can just quit.
**Losing and failing aren’t always bad things. There’s an important difference between losing, failing, and quitting as David Allen points out in his article on EliteFTS**

Bear Bryant said “The first time you quit, it’s hard. The second time, it gets easier. The third time, you don’t even have to think about it. If you’re reading this in disbelief, that’s great that you are one of the lucky ones that hasn’t thought “why am I doing this?” or you’re just delusional. I’m willing to bet my Ben & Jerry’s that you’ve been down this path with something. I know I’ve been there a few times where I was chasing goals and kept falling short but because I didn’t give up, I’ve been able to make it.

Back to willpower. What is willpower? Many would agree it is the “thing” that allows us to make good choices or fails us when we make poor choices. Some believe it’s a force inside of us that allows us to hold on and defeat temptation and others refer to it simply as “self-control.” The APA defines willpower as the “ability to resist short-term temptations in order to meet long-term goals.” I define willpower as the muscle behind habit and the scapegoat behind our failures.

So how do we get better at defeating temptation and continuing the pursuit of our goals? We train our willpower, of course! When we want to conquer physical tasks, we train and use our muscles. When we face intelligence-related tasks, we study and we use our brain. It is the exact same thing when we want to change our lives, only we can’t see or feel the immediate impact of our efforts. We change our lives through building good habits and we build good habits through exercising willpower.

Some studies say 21 days builds a habit, others, 66, and I’m sure if I were to look long enough I’d find 20 other timeframes. The short of it is habits take time and every day until it becomes a habit takes willpower. We’ve all been there, to that place where we’re so tired and so stressed that we just don’t have the energy to fight anymore. While we can’t flip a switch and make ourselves strong enough to resist, we can take three small steps to help us in the battle.

The first step, and probably one of the most obvious and overlooked steps is to minimize the exposure to the trigger that brings out the bad habit and to emphasize the good habit. If the problem is eating junk food, then removing the junk food, avoiding the fast food restaurants, and rearranging the kitchen so healthy foods are easy to access and junk requires more effort is a starting point. If the goal is to work out more, start with 10 minutes and increase in small amounts each day until you reach 45 minutes, and then add a second day, and a third.

The second very important step is finding a balance in your life. Over-indulgence and over-restriction are both tremendously detrimental to willpower and good habits. We read it all the time now with IIFYM and Flexible Dieting. If I am too strict, I am exhausting my willpower at every turn and eventually will run off track and give in before I have trained a new habit. If I’m too loose, I will never change.

Finally, for those times when we just can’t do it on our own, have a support group and an accomplice that truly does have your best interest at heart. Some will turn to family, some to friends, and some to social networks like Fitocracy. In any case, having others there to talk to and offer strength when you feel weak will help you beat those evil temptations and strengthen your willpower. And after enough help and support, that willpower will become a habit and you will be able to focus on your next healthy habit.

To sum up the three keys for stronger willpower

1. Minimize exposure to trigger objects, maximize exposure to healthy triggers
2. Find balance in your life, being too extreme only makes it harder to succeed
3. Have an accomplice to keep you on track, there are support groups for everything

A few years back I saw this posted on a weightroom door and it spoke to me.

The Habit
I am your constant companion.
I am your greatest helper or your heaviest burden.
I will push you onward or drag you down to failure.
I am completely at your command.
Half the things you do, you might just as well turn over to me,
And I will be able to do them quickly and correctly.
I am easily managed; you must merely be firm with me.
Show me exactly how you want something done, and after a few lessons, I will do it automatically.

I am the servant of all great men.
And, alas, of all failures as well.
Those who are great, I have made great.
Those who are failures, I have made failures.
I am not a machine, though I work with all the precision of a machine,
Plus, the intelligence of a man.
You may run me for profit, or run me for ruin; it makes no difference to me.
Take me, train me, be firm with me and I will put the world at your feet.
Be easy with me, and I will destroy you.
Who am I?

I am a HABIT! 

And with everything I write related to health and fitness, BE PATIENT! Nothing happens overnight, and with health and fitness it will take time, so take a deep breath, get out the calendar and celebrate the successes, no matter how small (no, I did not say to eat the cake) because the little celebrations are what keeps us going. 

And if you need some support, join Fitocracy and follow Erin and I (GottaLift and ErinEW6916) or send us an email at zstrengthfit@gmail.com

Help! I'm a Hardgainer

While there are a lot of people in the health and fitness realm that are looking to lose weight, there are some of us that are fighting the opposite battle, the battle of the “hardgainer”. For a long time, I believed I was genetically defective, unable to gain weight and grow muscle. I blamed my father (at 6’4” and under 220 lbs) for my being lanky (5’11” and under 200 lbs). I was frustrated that the scale never moved no matter how hard I trained and how much I ate. I wasn’t getting much stronger and I couldn’t figure out why. I tried supplements and lots of them, with no real results. For those of us that are hardgainers we struggle to find a way to make progress, try every “trick” and push ourselves harder and harder until we break or until we just give up. The idea that we’ll never be bigger or stronger is maddening, but it doesn’t have to be. Along my journey I’ve figured out a few things that can make a big difference if you’re a hardgainer too.

There are the obvious keys to making gains: eat more food, get your sleep, and use your recovery days wisely. There are also some glaring “mistakes” that don’t seem as obvious.

Explaining the Keys
If you’ve done any research, you know the importance of nutrition. Whether you are trying to gain weight, get stronger, lose fat, or just perform better, nutrition is the leading factor. If you want to gain muscle, you have to feed the muscle. Chances are if you are the typical skinny ectomorph, you aren’t eating nearly enough, and unless you take the time to measure your food and calculate your estimated calorie needs, you can’t be sure if you are eating enough to grow. Once you have an estimate, you have to track your weight and your food. If you don’t make any gains at the end of the week, you need to eat more food each day. I know, I know, you’re afraid to get “fat.” Let me clue you in; you’re a hardgainer so getting “fat” is extremely hard and you may have to gain some fat in order to gain some muscle too.

The second key is challenging the muscle with resistance. New trainees have the distinct advantage of their nervous system learning how to recruit muscle fibers and they can make monumental leaps in strength simply through the neural adaptation. As the nervous system learns how to recruit more muscle fibers, the weights get easier, so we increase the load and continue to get stronger. At some point, the “newbie effect” comes to an end, and a change becomes necessary to make progress. In the words of EliteFTS’s Matt Rhodes “It ain’t rocket math” when making the necessary training changes to get stronger or grow muscle.

Finally, growth requires rest and recovery. We don’t gain weight or get stronger with the one or two hours we train each day, but in the remaining hours we have for our body to grow and heal. There are a plethora of great articles and research showing the importance of sleep, and here is one by Greg Nuckols that explains the importance of sleep and recovery on gains.
http://gregnuckols.com/2014/04/28/poor-recovery-and-increased-muscle-breakdown-insufficient-sleep-part-2/

Now, let’s explore some of the pitfalls and stumbling blocks that keep us from making optimal progress and have us still saying we’re a hardgainer.

Making Overly Healthy Choices
I made the mistake of trying “intermittent fasting” and trying to make lean gains. I found it nearly impossible to get enough calories in to gain any weight. I can hear you asking, “How is eating healthy a mistake?” If our focus is on eating a “healthy diet” we will struggle to reach our daily caloric goal. As an ectomorph, we tend to have a fast metabolism, which burns more calories than most. It can be a curse because it makes getting enough calories hard when we eat super-clean but it’s a godsend when we need to cut weight. I’m not endorsing JM Blakely’s “Big Boy’s Menu Plan”, but eating super-clean isn’t going to get it done either.

The simple solution for most hardgainers is eating simple carbs such as white rice and bread. I’ve been known to eat bagels and pop tarts as a snack because they are high calorie foods that can help us reach the caloric surplus necessary to make weight and muscle gains. I recommend simple carbohydrates make up 30-40% of the total carbohydrates you eat on a daily basis and that carbohydrates make up 40% of your total diet. Having more calories available when your body needs them is always better than not having enough. Also, fat is not the enemy in our food. Healthy fats are a fast way to increase our calories, and can be added to most of our meals by simply using heavy cream, olive oil, coconut oil and the like.

Too Much Training
Training every day won’t get it done. In fact, training that much is too much! I get it, we have been taught that if we want to get better at something we need to practice it as much as possible. And when we aren’t getting results, we push harder, we find new programs, we switch to two-a-days, etc. It makes sense, right? Unfortunately, we don’t grow by being overly active and training every day; we grow by stressing the muscle and then giving it adequate time to heal.
Remember above where I said “We don’t gain weight or get stronger with the one or two hours we train each day, but in the remaining hours we have for our body to grow and heal.” So instead of training longer and harder, limit your training sessions to less than an hour and a half and train three to four days per week. This give your body more time to repair and rebuild new muscle, and you will be better rested for the next training session, allowing you to maximize each workout.

Training Small Muscles
Every hardgainer has looked at a bodybuilding magazine with envy and read about the latest, greatest split routine and how to grow a massive {insert body part here} fast. Isolation workouts work well for targeting specific muscle groups, but they aren’t good choices for hardgainers. Being an ectomorph necessitates a focus on maximal muscle recruitment through compound lifts like the squat and deadlift. These lifts recruit the most muscle and also stimulate the release of anabolic hormones, which are one of the most important components of muscle building. Remember, muscle grows AFTER it’s broken down and repaired, and these lifts will cause the most recruitment and best opportunity for growth.

Great Movements for Hardgainers

Squats Deadlifts Bent Over Rows Bench Press Push Press Weighted Carries

Military Press Pull Ups Tire Flips Dips Farmer’s Walks Heavy Sled Push

Using the Wrong Rep Scheme
While there is no such thing as the perfect rep scheme and it is possible to build muscle using just about any rep scheme, muscle growth is more likely to happen in the moderate to high rep ranges. Working with the appropriate amount of weight and performing the proper reps can greatly enhance muscle growth.

In my experience, the best results for hardgainers happens with loads between 70 and 80% of their 1RM for three to four sets of 8-12 reps per set.  My best growth came right in the middle of both lines at 75% for three sets of 10. Does that mean it will be best for you? No, but I’m willing to be it will work better than doing high intensity / low rep workouts or low intensity / high rep workouts.

The Takeaway
While our genetics are seemingly against us, we don’t have to live the life of the skinny weakling! As hardgaining ectomorphs, we make mistakes by simply not eating enough, training too much or the wrong way, and not getting enough recovery. Our body type dictates that we do certain things to beat our genetics and that we get over our fears. If you finally want to break the mold, the steps aren’t much different than losing weight; focus on your nutrition, train hard with the right sets, reps, and weights, and get proper rest and recovery for growth.