The 3rd Adonis Index transformation contest started yesterday and it’s not too late to enter today.

You can go to this link to find out how to enter: Transformation Contest

Here is a look at some of our previous contestants:

Pierre was one of the first winners

Ron won the overall at the first contest

Rich finished second overall in the second contest

Nate also won cash in our second contest

The result of two contests...amazing

(sorry ladies this one is for guys only…venus index is coming in October, there will be a contest for the women then)

So why bother entering a contest anyway?

1) It gives you a clear time frame to set your sights on

2) Gives you motivation to make a serious change in your body in a short period of time

3) Teaches you to challenge yourself and support others who are competing to challenge themselves too

4) Introduces you to a community of rare people who have entered and completed a contest (most people will never try this sort of thing and will never know how much their body can really change)

5) Teaches you what is truly possible when it comes to changing your body when you put your mind to it

6) You can win MONEY!

I’m sure there are dozen’s of other personal benefits you can get from competing in a transformation contest and they’re all good.

This is why we hold frequent transformation contests and they’re getting bigger every time.

Look, I can build you a workout, I can show you how to do it, I can write as many motivational blog posts as possible, and I can give you the best nutrition and fat loss program and information around…BUT I can’t make you follow any of it.

That part is up to you.

The best I can do is give you money of you follow what we say…and that is what the contest is for. I’m simply asking you to follow our recommendations take a couple pics and collect your winnings!

If you’re serious about changing your body don’t wait another day, make today the day it all changes. (and for the girls make mid october the day when the Venus Index workout comes out!)

John

An example of what steroids can do. Jose Canseco, the only honest man in baseball.

So I guess the general theme this week is “hormones”. So the next topic that we’re going to cover was sent in by Jason and this is about steroid muscle vs natural muscle.

This is a tricky topic because most celebrities, athletes and bodybuilders don’t admit or disclose the drugs they use so it’s hard to match a look with the drugs it took to get that look.

In other words, even though certain athletes have openly admitted to steroid use we still don’t know how much they used, for how long and most of all, we can never know for certain how big, strong and lean they would have been if they didn’t use.

So we’re left guessing and putting together the puzzle with only some of the pieces and no idea what the puzzle picture really looks like.

If you’ve been around the steroid sub culture or used them for any length of time they you have a good idea of what they can do and how your body will change…and how fast it will change.

You also gain some appreciation and insight into spotting other steroid users. There are a few characteristics that just become obvious if you’ve been on the inside.

1) Rapid strength gain. It’s pretty obvious when a guy is using drugs because is overall strength and the rate of is strength gain are massively accelerated.

2) Rounding bloated look. the muscle bellies of a guy on steroids seem to have a rounder, fuller more bloated look that natural guys can never really achieve. This is a subtle difference that many non users wont notice. But guys in the know can pick it out pretty easily as they can remember when they had the same effect and also know that it’s impossible to get that effect without drugs.

3) Overall size. There is a limit to natural muscle growth and when you see a guy who is simply far too big for his frame it becomes obvious that he’s using some extra help to get there.

4) Facial bloating. Many steroids will change the look of the face giving it a slightly fuller/bloated look. This is a dead giveaway for many guys.

These are just some of the visual cues that a guy is using steroids.

Natural guys who want to build muscle should try not to use a steroid induced look as their ideal that they’re shooting for. With that said it will be difficult to know if the person who you are role modeling uses drugs or not. The 4 guidelines above are at least a start to know if you’re chasing an ideal that you simply cannot catch without drugs.

If you don’t want to use drugs then you need to find a body image ideal that is drug free so you can set your expectations accordingly.

If you you do use drugs then the sky is the limit and the more you use the bigger you’ll get. But the quality of your look will still come down to conditioning and how and what you use and how much you use.

The bottom line with drug use is that the person with the best genetics to begin with will still look the best given the same amount of drugs (I’m talking competition level here).

It doesn’t really matter to me which path you’re on, it’s your body and its your rules so knock yourself out. I don’t believe anyone else has the right to tell you what you can or can’t put into your body. It’s really the only piece of property you have in the world that is mostly yours (and even with that the gov still tries to tell you what you can and can’t do with it)

Anyway, the point is to try and set a body image ideal that is consistent with what you’re doing to achieve it.

For guys and muscle building it typically boils down to:

a) Whether you are using drugs or not

b) Finding a body image ideal that was built using drugs or not

That latter is the tricky part as most steroid user’s don’t broadcast their use. The only way to know for sure is if you know them personally.

John

“I’m starting my weight loss program today”

“I’m back on track…starting today”

Eventuall you have to leave the starting box...

Being in a perpetual starting position is just another way of saying that you’re standing still. You may recognize what I’m saying about those people around you who are always ‘just starting’ something.

But those same people never come back 3-4 months later when they’re ‘finished’ the program.

Sadly for most people they’re forever stuck in the starting blocks. They desperately want to do something, but somehow are frozen in place and can’t get going.

This inability to follow through is not because of a lack of discipline, or a physical inability to get things done…it’s rooted in a belief system.

All of our actions are preceded by a belief. In the case of weight loss or getting in shape many people are stuck with a belief that they simply do not deserve to lose weight or get in shape. As bizarre and contradictory as that sounds this is something people learn and it becomes ingrained into their subconscious over time.

Changing this belief system is the key to getting out of the starting blocks and actually getting into and finishing the weight loss and exercise race.

Changing beliefs like this is what you might call a paradigm shift, and it’s at base of both the Adonis Effect and Eat Stop Eat.

If you haven’t read them I suggest you do, if you already have them, re-read them to remind yourself why you workout and why you at least think twice about how you eat and look.

For those of you who don’t know, I’m going to be offering a coaching program to help get you out of the starting blocks and into the race for both weight loss and muscle building. I’ll be posting more details in the next few weeks, but if you’re interested in getting a gentle nudge (or maybe a good old fashioned kick in the ass) to make your weight loss and fitness dreams a reality I might just have the foot your looking for!

Email me at john(at)adoniseffect.com and we can discuss further.

John

Unlike this road, our muscle growth does have a finite limit.

The largest muscle size you can ever achieve is determined in combination by your genetic predisposition and your workout pattern, consistency, effort, and to a lesser degree nutrition. Beyond that you can push closer to your limit by using anabolic drugs like testosterone and it’s derivatives, Growth Hormone, IGF-1, Insulin and others.

However, even those individuals who use any or all of these drugs will eventually reach a limit as well.

The human system (any biological system for that matter) can only adapt to a finite and specific amount of stress until it eventually breaks down.

This is a well known phenomenon and is an example of hormesis (not to be confused with homeostasis)

Hormesis is the concept that a given stressor (such as exercise) can force the system to adapt in a positive manner but the amount of stress that compared to the benefit/reaction is not a linear relationship but rather a curved relationship.

In other words, there is an amount of exercise that is too little and an amount that is too much and an amount that is just right.

The ‘just right’ zone is where you want to be to stimulate muscle growth, and as you get stronger this zone changes.

You need to do more work and more often to continue to grow over time. This however reaches a limit at which point the entire system breaks down (over training).

Most people don’t do enough work to ever reach a true state of over training so this really isn’t an issue.

The key to stimulating maximum muscle growth is pushing the upper edge of the ‘just right zone’ without ever going over it.

John

How Do You Make The Descision to Use Steroids or Not?

Alek sent in a very interesting question. He simply asked what are the real objective reasons for not using steroids.

This is a good question because there is much misinformation about steroids in the general media, and the side effects and potential negative effects are usually associated with massive doses.

What then are the objective reasons to avoid steroid use?

First of all any drug taken on a chronic basis will have some side effects to deal with. In the case of testosterone and it’s derivatives the side effects (no matter how mild the drug or dose) are as follows:

Aromatization of some testosterone to estrogen and then estrogen based side effects (development of breast tissue is the most obvious)

Hair Loss (not too many guys would trade a head of hair for slightly bigger muscles)

Raised blood lipids and cholesterol. This is one of the side effects that can directly increase risk of heart disease.

Potential increased risk of prostate cancer.

Acne (it’s person to person, not everyone gets this reaction)

And finally, there is likely a set of completely unknown side effects that the scientific community has yet to uncover or have a chance to study.

This list (while not complete) is a good starting point of ‘con’s’ to using steroids. If a guy wanted to use them he would have to weigh out these vs the ‘pro’s’.

Depending on the dose testosterone can be a benefit to many guys, it’s even prescribed as an anti-depressant and to elevate mood and well being.

It may also be of use for men who are beyond 50 years of age and want to replace some testosterone to restore their circulating levels back to those of a 30 year old. This may actually be beneficial for longevity and quality of life. This is analogous in some respects to hormone replacement therapy for post menopausal women.

In the end it should be up to each individual to decide what they want to do with their body. Collecting unbiased and objective information is the key to making an informed descision.

John

Have you ever wondered why some people react differently to the same workout. Some people gain more muscle than others, some seems to have greater gains in strength than others. The typical answer is simply ‘genetics’. But this is too simplistic of an answer and I think there is much more to it than this.

If you’ve been following the last two phi-life podcasts you’ve heard Brad Pilon and I talk about the anabolic continuum and the concepts of anabolic resistance and anabolic slow down.

The anabolic continuum is a range of sensitivities to weight training and anabolic signals for any given person, it ranges from highly sensitive, to resistant to complete anabolic exhaustion (where no amount of exercise seems to stimulate any growth or strength increase)

If you’re curious to find out where you are on the Anabolic Continuum we’ve got an assessment quiz you can download for free to determine where you land.

We’re also holding a live teleseminar this thurs June 10th at 9pm to explain the anabolic continuum, your score on the quiz, what it means and our new workout system that deals with Anabolic Slow Dow and restarting muscle growth for those of you who seem to have hit a big plateau in both muscle size and strength.

Go to this link to get your assessment guide and recieve the link for the teleseminar: Anabolic Assessment Guide

The Ripping Friends are at Peak Anabolic Sensitivity for Sure!

I was having a conversation with a friend of mine who is currently using steroids and he said something very interesting. I was mentioning the difference between gaining muscle with and without steroids and how difficult it is to gain without steroids and he said “I’m giving up on trying to get any bigger as well”! And this guy uses steroids!

The point is that we all have an upper limit even with drugs. We simply cannot grow forever and part of it is due to our Anabolic Sensitivity.

When you first start working out your anabolic sensitivity has not been built up yet, workouts are difficult and gains seem to be non existent. After a few months of training your muscles and nervous system go through major adaptations and your anabolic sensitivity is high. This is when you will experience big time gains and consistent gains.

But at some point anabolic sensitivity eventually diminishes and a long plateau or stagnant period sets in, and this even happens to guys on steroids. In short there is another way of looking at your current muscle growth potential, it’s called the Anabolic Continuum.

On one end there is low or zero growth potential, and on the other end there is high growth potential, each one of us is somewhere on this continuum. (it’s not so black and white as marketers would have you believe)

Shifting yourself to the high growth potential side of the continuum should be the goal of any muscle building workout.

Brad and I discuss the concept of anabolic sensitivity and the Anabolic Continuum in todays PhiLife podcast.

Check out the podcast here: The Anabolic Continuum

John

Can you really turn this into Muscle?

If you walk into any health food store you’ll see a wall of supposed muscle building supplements. Each one with fantastic claims about protein synthesis, strength, power, weight gain, boosting hormons and enzymatic pathways and on and on.

There are muscle building supplements for pre workout, post workout, morning, night, morning AND night, testosterone boosters, nitric oxide stimulators, amino acid products of all kinds, plain creatine, mixed creatine, protein, meal replacements, weight gainers, GH boosters, prohormones etc.

With an unlimited supply of money it would appear that each one of these is worth taking (based on their claims). But most people have a limited supply of money.

If these things worked, even a bit, how much money would you realistically spend for a few extra pounds of muscle?

Leave you answer in the comments section.

note: I’m assuming no amount of supplements can produce steroid like gains

John

Muscle improves your proportions, but fat ruins them.

The shape of your body is largely determined by your muscle mass, however that is assuming that you don’t have an excess of body fat distorting you true shape. The point of working out with weights is to manipulate your muscle mass to augment your look. Having fat covering all of those muscles makes your effort in the gym seem pointless.

Part of the reason fat distorts your shape is because it is not evenly distributed over you body. For example men typically build up significantly more fat around their abdomen and women typically store more fat around their hips and thighs.

If we gained fat evenly over our whole body then fat gain would look exactly like gaining muscle (the only difference would be less definition, but proportions would always be good)…this however isn’t the case. As we gain more and more fat both men and women start to look more like blobs with most of the fat stored closer to the middle of our bodies (abdomen and hips thighs) and thus proportions look worse and worse the more fat we gain.

The point of both gaining muscle and losing fat (besides any health benefit) is to improve our proportions for the aesthetic appeal. This of course is also measurable with the Adoins Index for men and Venus Index for women. (waist to shoulder ratios and waist to shoulder to hip ratios respectively)

John

In the past 7-10 years there has been an explosion of live action comic book super hero movies, and I’m loving it!

Which one looks more impressive?

But the celebrities that are chosen to play the super heroes never quite measure up to the expectations I have in my mind.

Many guys who grew up reading comic books (or even glanced through them from time to time) have an idea of what they think a super hero should look like…and they’re always larger than life.

Believe it or not some guys actually set these cartoon images of their favorite super hero as their mental image of the ideal body. This of course is a completely unrealistic ideal but it’s part of what drives some guys to use steroids…the need to be something special/bigger/different/to stand out in a crowd.

This is partly why many of us are left unimpressed when we see a celebrity depicting the image of our favorite hero.

Hugh Jackman is in great shape and was a great pic for wolverine, but have a look at the picture above comparing the cartoon image of wolverine to Jackman…

A real person with a realistic body is never as impressive as what a cartoonist can do.

Superheroes are just supposed to be different, larger than life…so unless every superhero is computer generated we’ll have to go with what hollywood has to offer.

I suppose we have to look at these movies with the following mindset: “This is what wolverine (or any superhero) might have looked like if he were a real person”

John