Man 2.0 Engineering the Alpha

Recommendations (www.engineeringthealpha.com/omega3)

    • Athletic Greens Omega3
    • Nordic Naturals

    Vitamin D
    Why You Need It
    Men don’t get enough sunlight. And this has nothing to do with having a great tan. The sun provides your body with vitamin D, and recent research indicates that more than 40 percent of men are deficient in vitamin D, according to the journal Nutrition . This wouldn’t be an issue if vitamin D wasn’t so essential to your health. Low levels have been linked to cancer, cardiovascular disease, heart attacks, and depression.
    And research from Canada now shows that people with higher levels of vitamin D also have lower levels of body fat. The connection isn’t coincidence. Vitamin D helps you feel fuller because, according to Australian researchers, it helps you release more leptin—an important hormone you’ll learn about in chapter 5. And it also helps you store less fat by decreasing parathyroid hormone, which makes you hold on to lard. Best of all, vitamin D literally burns more fat by reducing production of the stress hormone cortisol, which you’ll also learn more about in chapter 5.
    Our Recommendations (www.engineeringthealpha.com/vitaminD)
    • Athletic Greens D3
    • Nature Made D3

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    REJECT THIS THOUGHT:
    You can’t target specific areas of your muscles.
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    Judging the past by the standard of the present, Arnold Schwarzenegger and his crew were certified broscientists, in the sense that nothing they did was scientifically validated and they just used observation. You see this all the time; the big guy at the gym has some “proven” thoughts on what will work best for muscle growth. There isn’t any science behind it, just years of experience, testing, and experimentation.
    While this can be helpful, the best approach is one that combines real-life experience with science that can explain the results. And while bodybuilding pseudoscience has persevered for years, without science, it makes it harder to prove the cause of results. We finally have some answers to explain why some of the methods actually work.
    In a somewhat ironic scenario, science is now telling us that the broscientists (bodybuilders) were right—more interestingly, that even when they were wrong, they weren’t necessarily far off the mark.
    Let’s look at one of the hallmarks of traditional bodybuilding workouts: selective hypertrophy. As early as the 1950s, bodybuilders have been staunch in the notion that varying exercises and body positions on exercises can target distinct areas of individual muscles, preferentially recruiting specific fibers during the movements. For close to twenty years, though, you’ve been told not to do that. And the only reason was that there wasn’t scientific research to back up the results.
    One of the most difficult aspects of the fitness industry is that the experts are divided. One group focuses on what works, and the other on what can scientifically prove what’s effective. Ideally, you are able to marry the two. But oftentimes that takes time. All scientific research needs to be funded. And earning that funding is a long, difficult process. Not to mention, a lot of the cool stuff that you would do in the gym would never get funded because most research companies just don’t care about muscle building and fat loss the way the average guy does.
    This led to a divide in that being pro-research meant accepting an anti-bodybuilding slant on fitness techniques. For example, because it hadn’t been exhaustively concluded that incline pressing worked the clavicular head of your pecs, the very idea was considered foolish; study-dependent coaches maintained that muscle fibers run the entire length from origin to insertion and are activated by single nerves, and as a result they said it is not possible to preferentially recruit specific areas. Of course, that is possible, as every bodybuilder in history has known.
    Now, research is clearly showing that some coaches and scientists owe those bodybuilders an apology. In a review paper written in 2000, Dr. Jose Antonio began to dispel the misconceptions and demonstrated clearly that you could target areas of specific muscles.
    In the time since that paper was published, much more research has emerged to substantiate Antonio’s position, and this is finally working its way into the public eye of the fitness industry, thanks in no small part to a group of fantastic coaches who are doing their best to get the