Mark Lauren Quotes

“Aerobic training actually causes muscle wasting because the body is programmed to adapt to whatever demands we place on it. Long low-intensity aerobic training only requires the smallest and weakest, 'slow-twitch' muscle fibers to fire off again and again.

The other, stronger and larger, 'fast-twitch' muscle fibers are not necessary for the task and become a burden to carry and supply with oxygen. The body has no demand for extra muscle beyond what is needed to perform a relatively easy movement over and over. So your body adapts by actually burning muscle.

Even if you perform steady state training in conjunction with strength training, it will diminish any potential increase in lean body mass, especially in your legs. Aerobic training should only be used to develop movement proficiency when you are training for a specific sport or event, such as a 5k run, triathlon, or particular military fitness assessment.”

“Any effect you are seeking from aerobic activity can be achieved more safely and efficiently with high-intensity strength training. Remember, your cardiovascular system supports your muscular system, not the other way around.

An elevated heart rate means nothing by itself. Being nervous before a full combat equipment nighttime High Altitude Low Opening (HALO) formation jump always sent my heart rate skyrocketing, but it didn’t make my belt any looser. And even if you insisted on measuring the efficacy of an exercise by an increase in heart rate, I dare you to get it up higher than with my 'Stappers'.

So there we have it: Interval strength training is superior to aerobic activity in burning fat, as well as building strength, speed, power, and even cardiovascular endurance. All this in far less time than tedious 'cardio' sessions.”

“As I will discuss shortly, the body’s resting metabolic rate (RMR) is a key player in our ability to stay lean, and it is affected to a large degree by our body composition with muscle being our greatest calorie burning ally.

With that said, it’s important to place the emphasis on a positive change in body composition and not just weight loss. Losing muscle weight is bad and counterproductive.

Using the calories in vs. calories out theory alone, can at best give you a temporary fix. It’s unrealistic and unhealthy to go through life following a diet that causes you to feel tired and hungry while your hormones run amuck.”

“As soon as possible, following your workout you need to consume:
- 30 to 50 grams of a lean complete protein like whey, soy, egg, chicken or fish.
- 30 to 50 grams of carbohydrates with a high glycemic index.

Why lean protein? Because fat slows the absorption of protein and carbs. During a brief window of opportunity after your workout, protein synthesis occurs at the highest rate. This is due to the micro-trauma (broken-down muscle tissue) that occurred during your workout.

Complete recovery will be optimized if you provide your muscles with a large supply of amino acids — the key components of protein — within 45 minutes after your training session. A whey protein shake is the best post-workout protein choice because it is so rapidly absorbed, and it has the highest efficiency ratio, or availability to the body, of all proteins.

Why carbs with a high glycemic index? Immediately following your workout is the only time to eat carbs that rapidly absorb into the blood stream as the glucose causes an insulin spike. Insulin helps shuttle protein into the muscles, repairing and building new muscle. It is also an important hormone that regulates the storage, replacement, and use of glucose.

During a workout, the body uses stored glucose that is in the blood and muscles as fuel for the activity. If the lost glucose isn’t refilled within about 45 minutes after training, your body rapidly goes from an anabolic state (muscle growth and repair) to a catabolic state (cannibalizing of the body’s muscle for protein and energy).

Since insulin signals the body to replenish and store glycogen, and the release of insulin is best triggered by eating foods with a high glycemic index, it makes sense that eating carbohydrates with a high glycemic index, along with some lean protein, is the best post-workout choice.

An effective and convenient post workout meal is a whey or soy protein supplement, which contains maltodextrin, or simple sugars, as its carb source.”

“Craving sweets from time to time is normal, but a diet with excessive sugar can cause these cravings to get out of control. Part of the problem is the insulin spike caused by these sugars.

The insulin rids your blood of its glucose leaving you feeling tired and craving more glucose to replace the glucose that has been emptied out of your bloodstream. This creates a vicious circle.

The solution? Eat carbs with a low glycemic index. As much as possible, especially for those of you looking to shed body fat, get your carbs from whole pieces of fruit and raw or steamed vegetables, because they have the lowest glycemic index and contain valuable nutrients.

The next best source is dairy and whole grain products.”

“Ever plod along on a treadmill that tells you the number of calories burned? You might go 45 minutes before you hit 300 calories. Well, guess what? That’s 300 total calories burned in that time, and not 300 calories above what your baseline metabolism would have burned anyway, even while at rest.

That’s the reason the exercise machine asks your weight: To calculate your baseline metabolic rate. The average male burns 105 calories at rest in 45 minutes. Those 195 extra calories that the exercise actually burned – only 195 calories more than if you had been taking a nap – can be undone by half a bagel in half a minute. And aerobic exercise typically spurns your appetite enough to more than offset those few actual calories burned.

Here’s the skinny: One pound of fat can fuel a 130-pound female for 15 hours at target 'cardio' heart range. If we were so metabolically inefficient as to burn calories at the rate the exercise equipment advertises, we would never have survived for so long, and certainly not endured the hardship of the Ice Ages.

The calories expended hunting and gathering would have caused us to die of starvation long before we ever found a Wooly Mammoth. By today’s standards, we would hardly have enough metabolic economy to survive a trip to the super market, let alone hump it across enemy lines for a week-long reconnaissance mission with 120 pounds of gear.”

“Give your child a piggyback during leg exercises, or even your girlfriend or your wife (though not both at the same time — that could be trouble).”

“Going hungry to a restaurant or party is a common pitfall that can lead to some major overeating, especially since it’s these places where you typically consume the most unhealthy food. Unlike when you prepare your meals yourself, you can’t control your food’s content when you’re out on the town.

Even if you try to eat the healthiest thing on the menu, you’d be amazed by the amount of butter and oil they throw on just about everything in the kitchen. A great secret to not overeating at restaurants and parties is to simply eat a small meal right before you leave home. That way, when you get there, you’re focused on having fun, instead of waiting for food to fill your belly.

Focus on enjoying yourself, the company you’re with, and the party or restaurant — not on dieting or gorging yourself. You order less, save more money, and tend to really enjoy what you eat because you’re eating to satisfy your taste buds, not your empty stomach.

So don’t sweat it if you go out a couple of times a week to eat. Just try to eat as balanced of a meal as you can comfortably, and don’t stuff yourself. All it takes is a small meal beforehand.

Just remember, between traveling to the restaurant, being seated, getting menus, ordering and having your food cooked, chances are you’re not going to actually be served food for another hour at the very earliest. So think ahead. Don’t ever leave your house hungry. Eat a little beforehand, order less, and have more fun.”

“I saw it constantly training Special Operations troops. My response to trainees that were not putting out 100%: You obviously value your comfort more than your performance. Start over!”

“Intense exercise also boosts the metabolism for up to 48 hours after completion. This is one of the main reasons why high-intensity interval training is so much more effective than cardio or steady state training – neither of which is intense enough to have a lasting impact on your RMR.”

“Interval training is the repeated performance of high-intensity exercises, for set periods, followed by set periods of rest. Intervals can consist of any variety of movements with any variation of work and rest times. It burns far more calories and produces positive changes in body composition with much less time than aerobic training.

This is not only because of the muscle it builds, but also the effect it has on the metabolism following the workouts. Strength training creates enough stress on the body’s homeostasis that a large energy (calorie) expenditure is required long after the exercise has stopped.

During low-intensity aerobic exercise, fat oxidation occurs while exercising and stops upon completion. During high-intensity exercise your body oxidizes carbs for energy, not fat. Then, for a long time afterward, fat oxidation takes place to return systems to normal: to restore depleted carbohydrates, creatine phosphate, ATP (adenosine triphosphate), circulatory hormones, re-oxygenate the blood, and decrease body temperature, ventilation and heart rate.

Not to mention the longer term demands: strengthening tendons and ligaments, increasing bone density, forming new capillaries, motor skill adaptation, repairing muscle tissue and building new muscle. And the more muscle mass you have, the more calories you are able to burn during and after exercise.”

“It blows me away every time I walk into a nice home and meet its proud, overweight, out-of-shape owner. They just don’t get it. Your real home is not your apartment or your house or your city or even your country, but your body. It is the only thing you, your soul and your mind, will always live inside of so long as you walk the earth.

It is the single most important physical thing in this world you can take care of. We have a choice: To take care of ourselves, or to simply let time make us worse. And it is right now, at this moment, not later, that we must make this decision.

Most people in this world choose to lose. They drag themselves through a second-rate life, overweight and under-energetic. They just let time take its toll. Their waistline increases and their height decreases as they get older and their backs hurt and hunch. Eventually their mobility becomes limited. And they meet their maker well before they should.

Then there are the others, the minority who decide to really, truly do something about their health. They exercise, and they watch what they eat, not obsessively, only just enough. They have an understanding of nutritional basics, and workout about 20 – 30 minutes a day, 4 – 5 times a week – less than 1.2% of their time – because that is all they will ever need.

They meet life’s obstacles with physical, mental, and spiritual strength. They care about how they look, and they look good. They thrive on the energy exercise gives them every day. How it washes away so many of the bad things in life – depression, anxiety, nervousness, tension, boredom, impatience.

It lets them think easily and clearly. They know how much worse their lives would be if they did not exercise, so they simply don’t let that happen. They are in control, not their excuses.”

“It takes about 10 calories a day just to keep one pound of muscle alive, for both men and women, even if you are completely inactive. An extra five pounds of muscle can burn up to 1500 calories in a month – that’s the equivalent of 5 pounds of fat per year, which more than reverses the negative affects of aging on your metabolism.

But with consistent aerobic exercise, over time, you’re far more likely to burn five pounds of muscle. That means your body will burn about 50 less calories a day. And as your body becomes more efficient at running, that 195 calories you burn on the treadmill will decrease to about 125.

So let’s do the math: You burn 125 calories above your resting metabolic rate each day you do aerobic exercise. Then subtract the 50 calories you do not burn due to muscle loss caused by this exercise. After all your huffing and puffing you are only burning 75 calories more than if you were sitting in front of the tube, doing nothing at all.

That’s undone by drinking half a Coke or 'rehydrating' with 12 ounces of Gatorade. This is the reason why millions of people, at gyms across the world, are unable to look and perform as they’d like after countless hours of 'cardio'.”

“It’s true that low rep workouts, consisting of powerful and explosive movements, will build more size (but not less definition) than high rep workouts, because the 'fast twitch' muscle fibers required in explosive movements are much larger than 'slow twitch' fibers required for more enduring tasks.

But really, for mass, wouldn’t you want to recruit all possible muscle fibers and not just the fast twitch? Likewise, for 'definition' – that is, losing body fat so the striations in your muscles show more – wouldn’t you want to recruit all possible muscle fibers, especially since the number one factor affecting our resting metabolic rate, and thus fat loss, is muscle mass?

The only thing you should alter depending on your goal – whether it’s to tone or bulk up – is nutrition.”

“Just look around you at the gym (if you still use a gym, that is). The people who are in the best shape are usually not in an aerobics or yoga class, or being toted from machine to machine by some trainer with a clipboard.

They’re the ones working out alone. The ones who have the drive and knowledge to customize their own strength training routines. Yet even they haven’t taken the final step of independence: Walking out of that fitness center and never returning.”

“Let’s take the Push Up, a standard exercise that works your chest, shoulders, triceps, abs, obliques, and lower back (unlike benching which only works half of these).

If you do Push Ups standing up with your hands against a wall a couple of feet in front of you, the exercise is pretty easy. Then try them with your hands on an elevated surface, like the edge of a bureau or windowsill.

The lower the surface you use – a desk, a couch, a coffee table, telephone books – the harder it gets. Putting your hands on the floor, like a standard Push Up, is harder. If we put our feet on the coffee table and our hands on the ground, the exercise becomes significantly more difficult.

This is using leverage to increase the exercise’s difficulty. To make the exercise still harder we could place our hands on one or two balls, like a basketball. Now we’re using an unstable surface. Still harder would be to do basketball Push Ups with pauses at the bottom.

Still not hard enough? Try doing them one-handed on the floor. Then one-handed with your feet on the couch. Then on an unstable surface. Then with pauses. You get the idea. And this is only a simple example that can be repeated with many of my exercises. You’ll see the possibilities are endless.

So there you have it: We’ve gone from one variation of an exercise, that probably everyone reading this book can do, to a more difficult variation that probably no one reading this book can do right off the bat. The difficulty of bodyweight exercises can be tailored to suit the needs of virtually anyone. You have total control of the resistance.”

“Losing 0.5–1.5 lbs a week is optimal. If you are very overweight, you should be closer to 1.5 pounds a week (750 calorie daily deficit), and if you only have a few pounds to shed, 0.5 lbs a week is ideal (250 calorie deficit daily).”

“More bad news for aerobic activity: Whether it’s running, cycling, or a step class, the main reason it gets easier the more you do it, is not because of improved cardiovascular conditioning, but because of improved economy of motion.

For the most part, it doesn’t get easier because of muscular endurance, but because your body is becoming more efficient at that particular movement. You require less strength and oxygen than you did before, because your body’s nervous system is adapting.

Wasted movements are eliminated, necessary movements are refined, and muscles that don’t need to be tensed are relaxed and eventually atrophied. This is why marathon runners will huff and puff if they cycle for the first time in years.”

“Most people would agree that it’s the physiques with the most development across a spectrum of physical qualities that are most attractive, as opposed to those that have very limited usefulness. It is diversity in physical ability that is most useful and functional, not to mention beautiful.

In contrast, those who are extremely developed in a certain area almost always have a weakness equivalent to their strength. The super fast, skinny runners lack strength, and the bulky bodybuilder types have little endurance.”

“My program develops the entire spectrum of physical skills: Muscular Strength, Muscular Endurance, Cardiovascular Endurance, Power, Speed, Coordination, Balance, and Flexibility. The degree to which you possess these eight physical qualities defines your level of fitness.

It is only by focusing on these eight skills, rather than appearance, that you will make your best gains, in ability, well-being, and in appearance.

The washboard stomachs, big chests, round shoulders, and shirt-sleeve-stretching biceps of my men are testament to that, as are the toned legs, tight triceps and abs of the women I’ve trained.”

“Our RMR decreases by about 5% every decade after thirty, mainly because of the loss of muscle mass associated with aging. Fortunately, our lean body mass can be controlled through proper nutrition and strength training. It only takes a few months of training to recover one or two decades of decrease in our RMR.

Metabolically, muscle is very expensive tissue, even when it is at rest. Another way to positively influence our RMR is to provide our body with a steady flow of nutrients. The body is extremely resourceful, and during times of starvation it adapts by slowing down its RMR. It tries to save every calorie consumed by storing some as fat.

Any of the common diets that severely restrict your caloric intake neglect this principal, and that is why people on those diets almost always gain at least their original weight back.

When the body receives a regular flow of calories, in the form of frequent meals, it allows the RMR to remain high, and burn those very same calories off. Frequent meals also utilize the thermal effect of food. Eating temporarily cranks up your metabolism.

The more meals you eat in a day, the more consistently your metabolism is boosted. You experience an increase in your RMR for about 5 hours every time you eat. This accounts for 5–10% of your total calorie expenditure. Over the long haul this can make quite a difference.”

“People often starve themselves in order to lose weight. That’s a no-go! The body is very resourceful, and it will slow down its metabolic rate in order to compensate for the lack of calories.

It tries to hold onto every calorie you consume, since it is unsure when it will be fed again. Then, once you resume your normal caloric intake, your metabolic rate remains slowed down. This is why people who try restrictive diets usually gain their original weight back and often some more too.

The good news is that if you want to lose weight, you should never be hungry. A well balanced diet consisting of small frequent meals (every 2.5–3.5 hours) is the key to long term success.”

“Quality 1: Muscular strength

Your ability to exert a force through a given distance. Muscular strength can be determined by the difficulty of an exercise that you are able to perform for a single repetition.

For example, if Jane, with maximal effort, can perform one Classic Push Up and Tarzan can perform a Handstand Push Up, then Tarzan has greater muscular strength.”

“Quality 2: Muscular endurance

How long you can exert a specific force.

Jane and Tarzan could compare their muscular endurance by seeing who can hold the peak position of the Pull Up the longest.”

“Quality 3: Cardiovascular endurance

Your body’s ability to supply working muscles with oxygen during prolonged activity.

Jane and Tarzan challenge and improve their cardiovascular endurance by performing 200 non-stop Squats together.”

“Quality 4: Power

The amount of force you can exert in a specific amount of time. Power = Work/Time.

If Tarzan and Jane are both able to perform only one Pull Up with their maximal efforts, but Jane is able to perform that one Pull Up faster, then she has more power even though they have the same strength.”

“Quality 5: Speed

Your ability to rapidly and repeatedly execute a movement or series of movements.

If Jane can do 45 lunges in 30 seconds and Tarzan can do only 25, then Jane has greater speed.”

“Quality 6: Coordination

Your ability to combine more than one movement to create a single, distinct movement.

For example, performing a simple jump requires that you coordinate several movements. The bend at the waist, knees, and ankles and then the correct extension of those joints must all be combined into a single movement.

Your ability to combine these movements, with the proper timing, into one movement determines your coordination, and in turn, how well you can do the exercise.”

“Quality 7: Balance

Your ability to maintain control of your body’s center of gravity.”

“Quality 8: Flexibility

Your range of motion.

If Jane, while doing a squat and using good form, can go down until her butt touches her heels, and Tarzan can only go until his thighs are parallel to the ground, then Jane has greater flexibility.”