If you’re new to the fitness industry, you’re in for a world of hurt.
Plain and simple. There are thousands of sharks lurking who can smell the blood on you. If you’re a newbie to fitness – tread with caution or get eaten alive.
Don’t start with google.
You’ll leave more confused than ever, and it’s not your fault.
There is so much information available at your fingertips that attempting to trim the fat, and separate the useful from the useless, is an impossible task. Case in point, a simple search for “weight training” yields over 71 million hits. Good luck navigating through that mess.
Instead of sifting for nuggets of gold in a sea of dirt, close your browser and start simple. Enlist a professional or friend you trust. If you’re clueless in the gym, or when it comes to dieting in general, find someone who knows what they’re doing and piggyback off their knowledge. You can hire a personal trainer to hold your hand for those first couple months of workouts, or find a friend who knows their stuff and pick their brain, or ask to train with them for a while. Don’t question every exercise (unless it hurts) or meal suggestion early on. Keep an open mind and find out what works for you along the way.
If you’re looking for fitness advice, don’t start with Google.
Once you’ve got a halfway decent diet and training plan on lock, the third – and final – piece of the fitness world pie is the supplement industry.
Good luck with this one.
They’re fooling people who have been established in the industry for years, and the marketing dollars being thrown about are effective at preying on folks looking for any edge they can find. The sharks can smell blood on you from a virtual mile away.
Don’t get me wrong, if you’re dieting and training to some degree, then supplements can be a worthy ‘supplement’ to your program. But, unfortunately, too often young trainees skip (or underemphasize) the first two steps thinking magic is found in a pill or bottle. That’s simply not the case, despite what the marketers want you to believe.
With profit margins large and regulations minimal – supplements are exempt from the FDA’s strict approval process for prescription drugs – some companies take advantage of this loose environment. A number of major retailers recently came under fire for selling products that did not contain what they claimed.
DNA testing on hundreds of bottles of store-brand herbal supplements sold at Wal-Mart, Target, GNC and Walgreens found that four out of five contained none of the herbs on the label. Instead, they were packed with cheap fillers such as wheat, rice, beans or houseplants. Testing was performance by an expert in DNA technology, James Schulte II of Clarkson University. The DNA tests were done on three to four samples of each supplement and tested five times a piece.
The industry has fired back, criticized the testing methods, but nonetheless it puts a spotlight on an industry that has had its share of questionable antics in recent years.
If these supplements contain what they claim to, are there health benefits to be had?
That may even be up for debate.
A Queen’s University study, cited in a Globe & Mail article, tested 16 men before and after a four week sprint-interval training program. The group who took a resveratrol supplement saw smaller improvements in anaerobic power and impaired fat-burning during exercise compared to the group that did the exercise alone with no supplemental “advantage.”
As a second example, the article cites a 2008 Spanish study that found combining exercise with 1,000 mg per day of vitamin C through pill form led to smaller gains in aerobic fitness-boosting mitochondria than exercise alone. Similarly, a German study in 2009 found a combination of 1,000 mg of vitamin C and 400 IU of vitamin E blocked the improvements in insulin sensitivity you’d normally get from exercise.
A 2008 Spanish study that found combining exercise with 1,000 mg per day of vitamin C through pill form led to smaller gains in aerobic fitness-boosting mitochondria than exercise alone. Similarly, a German study in 2009 found a combination of 1,000 mg of vitamin C and 400 IU of vitamin E blocked the improvements in insulin sensitivity you’d normally get from exercise.
What should you take from all this?
If you aren’t on a severely calorie restricted diet, a well-rounded diet that incorporates plenty of micronutrients the natural, absorbed-through-food way will often get the job done.
I see young 20-somethings touting around a pill box full of tablets only their grandparents could rival, and that worries me. Your body is programmed to digest food and extract macronutrients (protein, carbs etc. for fuel) and micronutrients (vitamins and minerals).
Instead of spending wads of cash at the supplement store, take that to your local farmer’s market. I am a staunch believer in natural sources of fat soluble vitamins, and you will get way more Vitamin D from a free range egg, as the hens get more sunlight, than your run-of-the-mill $2/dozen bare bones variety that lives its life confined to a cage. In addition, free range eggs give you twice the Omega 3’s (although I have seen as much as 20 times more Omega 3), and 7 times more beta carotene. That’s just one example. Grass-fed beef has a host of benefits over its grain-fed cohorts.
Vitamin C can be had from a variety of fruits and veggies, and Vitamin E is found in abundance in wheat germ, green leafy veggies and grass fed beef. Make the effort to consume high quality foods and you won’t need a medicine cabinet full of herbal supplements.
Direct from the Globe & Mail article: “But it should be clear by now that just because something is “good for you,” extracting its essence and ingesting 100 times more of it won’t be 100 times better for you – and in some cases, may actually be worse.”
Note: I’m not 100% anti-supplement. I believe in adding in a daily dose of Vitamin D during the long winter months when you come to and leave work in darkness, and if your diet is lacking in seafood, fish oil supplements in moderation can close the gap, but the take home point here is to focus on a diet rich in quality foods first and foremost. Thinking you can make up for poor diet by popping pills is not a winning formula. I believe a lot of health problems could be nipped in the bud early if diet and exercise is preached before medicine, but don’t tell Big Pharma or the billion dollar health supplement industry that.
I believe in adding in a daily dose of Vitamin D during the long winter months when you come to and leave work in darkness, and if your diet is lacking in seafood, fish oil supplements in moderation can close the gap, but the take home point here is to focus on a diet rich in quality foods first and foremost.
Some of the worst scams out there? Watch out for these three supplement industry buzz words:
Cleanses
Cleanses are marketed to cleanse your wallet of hard-earned cash, and they do a good job at that.
Scare tactics like ridding your body of the “toxins” building up in your system is often the sales pitch, but a 2009 investigation reported by Examine.com found that not a single company behind 15 commercial cleanses could name the toxins targeted by their treatment. Nor could they agree on the definition of the word ‘detox’, or even supply evidence that their products work.
Nevertheless, a cleanse generally involves a fast of some sort with an emphasis on nutrient-dense foods (think vegetables and fruits). For those reasons alone they can have marginal benefits.
Supplement-free alternative: Exercise. Seriously. You’re “cleansing” every time you get your sweat on. For example, Bisphenol A (an estrogenic, endocrine-disrupting compound found in plastics) is released in sweat. Not enough people are sweating on a regular basis these days – your body can do all the detoxing you need if you let it.
Cleanses are marketed to cleanse your wallet of hard-earned cash, and they do a good job at that.
Fat Burners
Few (if any) legal options exist that will help you burn significant amounts of body fat without diet or exercise along for the ride.
Many of the products on the market use caffeine as their base, with a “proprietary blend” of other ingredients included, based on flimsy science backing their effectiveness.
99% of the stuff out there is not worth spending your hard-earned cash on. There is one, known affectionately as yohimbine, which has been shown to help with fat loss (and libido) while notably leading to a small but measurable increase in penile girth, so there’s that. Honestly though, just like we have individual responses to coffee consumption, so too can individual responses vary to stimulants.
Some people can feel like absolute crap on yohimbine, and I have no anecdotal experience to impart on you, so I won’t comment further. As far as supplements go, I’ll leave you with this: If my fitness and health pursuits impact my day-to-day life in a negative way, I drop them. It seems like common sense, but amateurs turning to poison (cough*DNP*cough) to lose a few pounds seems incredibly unnecessary. Again, if the side effects (sleep disruption, adrenal burnout, anxiety, increased blood pressure etc.) out-weigh the benefits it’s not for you, got it? Good.
Supplement-free alternative: A strong, dark coffee pre-cardio or weight training.
Few (if any) legal options exist that will help you burn significant amounts of body fat without diet or exercise along for the ride.
Testosterone Boosters
There’s nothing that compares to the effects of real pharmaceutical-grade anabolic steroids.
We’re talking about supplements, not drugs. Anabolic steroids create an environment where supraphysiological levels of testosterone are present, leading to measurable increases in muscle gain and fat loss over time. If you’re expecting something comparable from herbal alternatives, you’re barking up the wrong tree (even if it’s an African evergreen tree). Note: There are prohormones (recently banned) that I won’t discuss here, though side effects generally out-weigh the benefits in that realm too.
You’ve probably heard of a few of the more common natural testosterone boosters. I’ll reference horny goat weed and tribulus to name a couple. Legend has it that Chinese goats would eat horny goat weed and get a little more sexual in nature. Sign me up! I, too, bought into the Tribulus hype once. I’m still waiting for nothing to happen.
Many of the studies done on these compounds have been conducted on rats, while those investigating benefits on athletes for sports performance (the things you’re after by trying to boost your testosterone) failed to show any measurable difference.
If you’re looking for a libido boost – and that’s your only expectation – then these products will work for you, whether it’s placebo effect or not. But, frankly, most of you are probably horny bastards as it is. If your wife/girlfriend/mistress/boyfriend/dog has a bedside shovel to thwart your nightly attempts at Round 3, then a libido enhancer is probably not going to be good for your relationship.
Supplement-free alternative: The best T booster around is a combination of quality sleep, a balanced diet including a decent amount of healthy fats and protein, and better dietary choices, i.e. free run eggs, grass-fed meats, and wild-caught fish as often as you can.
There’s nothing that compares to the effects of real pharmaceutical-grade anabolic steroids.
Buyer Beware
If you want to look awesome, make sure you’re doing everything right before getting caught up in the various supplement scams mentioned here. If you hear the words, “fat burners”, “testosterone boosters”, or “cleanses”, you should think twice before buying them (or at least research or cross reference them with Examine.com’s Supplement Goals Reference Guide). Remember, nothing legal beats a good diet, sleep, and exercise.
About the Author
Mitch Calvert shares a condo with his wife and a cat named Chelsea, and bears a striking resemblance to Matt Stafford, according to reliable sources (Dean Somerset, cheque is in the mail). You can find him online at www.mitchcalvert.com, or you can check out his diet and training program made specifically for guys and gals who share his endomorphic genes, Endomorph Evolution.
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