I’ve gotta say, it’s nice when your insurance policy works, but it got me thinking again… I’m still putting everything in that one logical RAID volume. Even though the configuration gives me single drive survivability, I’m still at the mercy of a failing RAID controller or a dual-drive crap-out. Maybe time to drop in that second NAS and double the armor?

Like anything on the web that is open-source and completely free, learning WordPress from the ground up is an adventure in repeated and escalating frustrations. Whereas most of the guts are by now well-established and reliable, getting WordPress to do your bidding often always requires getting under the hood and tinkering. Endless hours of Googling PHP tags and syntax, trying to keep up with all the developments in CSS, policing all your plugins for broken updates and malicious code, and keeping your site patched and humming happily are pastimes better suited to web admins and the cubicle-bound.

Yes, the are plenty of free and premium off-the-shelf themes out there. The majority of themes that go beyond mere blogging seem to be tailored to corporate portfolio or e-commerce sites, with a growing number geared toward photographers and artists. The only problem is, every single one of them has some kind of glitch or another –and I’ve tried hundreds of them. A theme may do images perfectly, but skimps on shortcodes. It may do full screen but fall apart on a mobile device. It seems everyone designing themes wants to put their own proprietary spin on things, instead of leveraging the standard features common to the platform. Buy the wrong theme, and you may just find yourself locked into it because the author believed every image should be a separate post, or they have their own thumbnail script that ignores your media settings.

At this writing, I’ve come back to Photocrati. So far, the only non-standard tweak on this site is the custom gallery scripts –a pretty big custom tweak, actually, when you consider the whole point of this site is photography. If I ever outgrow this theme’s functionality, I can look forward to hours of rebuilding my galleries and portfolios in whatever format I try migrating to in the future. Oh well… This theme is 90% of what I need, so I’m just going to leave it alone for a while.

Today, however, all I want to know is how well this mobile WordPress for iPad app works. From the look of things, I’d say it’s pretty decent. I can save the post as a draft, and there are rudimentary format options, but still not WISIWYG. I can moderate comments and edit posts and their meta, but the whole utility is still a little rough around the edges. What do you want for free? Rubber biscuits??

When the universe decides to play a practical joke, it doesn’t think on our scale, and things that seemed hilarious and maybe even cute at the subatomic level have a way of becoming significantly less so in very short order.   And, while I’ve done a fairly passable job (I think) keeping this under wraps for the past ten days, let’s face it –when your house becomes the epicenter of a miniature hurricane, and wind is howling in through your open windows non-stop for more than 48 hours, people will take notice.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

This all started the Saturday before last, while I was assembling a media center I bought from Ikea.  I’m pretty sure that has nothing to do with a gravitational singularity spontaneously manifesting in the center of my living room, but you never know, right?  I mean, that flat-pack business model is way too efficient.  Who’s to say the Swedes aren’t actually interstellar spacefarers, and this is just their version of a “1 Billion Served” promotional celebration?  Lucky me.

Anyway, at first, it was just a tiny hissing sound, barely audible.  It’s the kind of sound you hear in the car and it takes you ten minutes to discover that a can of soda has rolled under the passenger seat and has been emptying itself through a pinhole-sized puncture.  In any case, it’s not the kind of thing you want to hear in a house with gas heat.  I spent probably a good twenty minutes walking from room to room, sniffing, pressing my ear to the walls, but to no avail.  The hissing persisted, and gradually grew more obvious over the next three days.  By Tuesady, it was unmistakable and constant –yet I still could not pinpoint the source.

By Tuesday night, the windows had started to whistle and howl.  Opening the patio door quelled the noise immediately, but it quickly became unbearably drafty.  If I closed the door, the howling would resume instantly, and when I opened it, I would get a gust of wind in the face.  Something was clearly evacuating the air from inside my house –but what??  The bathroom fans were both off; and, in any case, they were too weak to produce this much pressure.  The fan over my stove was off.  And besides, it doesn’t even vent to the outdoors; it simply passes air through a flimsy metal screen (never understood the point of that).  Then it hit me!  I had seen an episode of HomeTime where they pressurized the house, and some dude with smoke generator went from room to room checking the window seals (by the way, Dean, I’m sorry the world will be ending like this –for what it’s worth, I was always a big fan of your and Joanne’s work.  Bob Vila, not so much).

So I grabbed the Cohiba I was saving for poker night and lit it up.  I opened the patio door again, and started heading toward the kitchen, thinking I would start with the adjoining laundry room, but I was frozen in my tracks.  The smoke trailing off the end of the cigar all seemed to be wafting toward the middle of the living room.  Well, that makes sense, I thought; the air return for the HVAC is in the living room.  I took a few long drags on the stogie and blew them in the direction of the return vent.  Imagine my amazement –my absolute befuddled shock and horror- as the cloud of smoke lazily drifted into the middle of the room, stretched into a long, straight, needle-like funnel and vanished into the thin air four feet above my coffee table!

That’s probably the closest I’ve come to a heart attack.  Call me a pussy if you like, but this was some straight up John Carpenter shit happening here.  One simply doesn’t see matter sucked into an infinitely small point half way between the TV and the sofa without their sphincter clamping shut involuntarily –or worse, the opposite.  All things being equal, you’ll know what I mean in a few days, if not sooner.  I stood there for a few minutes, trying to force myself to un-see what I had just witnessed, trying to conjure a way for this not just to have transpired.  But curiosity is an irresistible force, and mine compelled me forward.

Another long drag on the cigar.  Exhale.  Same result.  I got closer… another draw… more smoke vanishing into the same undefinable, infinitesimally small point.  I leaned in as close as I could, trying to focus on the end of the smoke-needle… And then I saw it.  A tiny black dot, no bigger than the period at the end of this sentence, perfectly, uncannily dark –just poised there in space.  I could see the dust particles in the sunlight, all streaming toward it, accelerating, buzzing and fizzling like static, never quite touching it, but never breaking free and whizzing past.  What the hell is this?  I marveled, eyes wide, my mouth agape.  Is this even possible?  What are you telling me, there’s a fucking worm hole in my living room?!

That explains it!  It’s gobbling up all the oxygen and hydrogen in the immediate vicinity.  It’s starting with the light stuff.  Maybe it’ll burn out –or… dissipate –or… whatever worm holes do.  Then again, maybe it won’t.  Maybe, I thought, it will just keep gobbling up dust and air molecules until it gets big enough to start pulling in heavier objects like insects.  How fast do these things accrete, I wondered, and –no, that  can’t be right… What was that Neil DeGrasse Tyson said last week on the Science channel?  When a large enough body of hydrogen gas compresses into a small space, it becomes super hot and dense, and the atoms begin fusing –a star, not a black hole.  A black hole is what happens when a star uses up all its fuel and collapses under its own gravity.  So, either a star is about to ignite in my living room and incinerate the entire neighborhood (isn’t that supposed to take billions of years, anyway?) or somehow nature just skipped all that burning and fusing bullshit and jumped right to the gravity well part.

That doesn’t make any sense…  This is something else.  Something else entirely.  Someone get Steven Hawking on the phone… no –wait a second… THINK, damnit!

You get the point.

Folks, I don’t mean to alarm anyone, but it’s not like I opened my front door and found a baby in a bassinette with a note.  What the hell was I supposed to do?  What could I do, besides wait and hope it went away?  That is, what could I do that wouldn’t instigate spontaneous mass hysteria and the complete breakdown of civilization?

Well, that’s all water under the bridge now.  As you are by now no doubt aware, my hungry little houseguest did not grow bored and leave on his own.  I opened every window in the house and spent Friday, Saturday, and Sunday moving all my furniture out so it doesn’t devour anything too molecularly dense –I have a sneaking suspicion that would exponentially accelerate its appetite.  I honestly don’t know how much atmospheric gas it can consume before it’s big enough to pull in the walls and the floor, but that can’t be far off.  It’s already the size of a pea, and the wind ripping into the building has to be clocking 90MPH right now.  Structural collapse can’t be far off.

It occurs to me that all they need to do is fashion some kind of containment device that seals it in a perfect vacuum, and whose walls remain perfectly equidistant and never come into contact with it for… well, for as long as human beings want to exist.  But I’m not getting my hopes up.

A calorie (note the lowercase “c”) is the amount of energy required to raise 1 gram of water 1 degree Celsius.  In all practical terms, this is a very tiny amount of energy –about the same as the amount of heat you might generate through friction by rubbing your hands together vigorously for two or three seconds.

The Calories (capital “C”) that everyday diet-conscious people bandy about are actually multiples of 1,000 calories, or kCal.  Just as in kg, kB, km, and dozens of other metric annotations, the “k” stands for kilo, or 1,000.  So your morning bagel with cream cheese was not really 500 calories –it was actually 500,000.  And the USDA standard 2,000 Calories-per-day diet is actually 2,000,000 calories-per-day.

Not since the invention of bits and Bytes has upper vs. lowercase caused so much consternation.

It may be splitting hairs over semantics, but most people who eventually stumble upon a (properly used) reference to kCal on a food label find themselves scratching their heads.  No, you’re not going insane –that’s the way things should be labeled.

Here’s some food for thought:

If you have to burn 3,500 food Calories (capital “C” –actually 3,500 kCal, or three and a half MILLION literal calories) to lose a pound of body fat, and you run a 500 food Calorie-per-day deficit, it should take you one week to lose 1 pound of body fat.  Assuming you created half of your daily deficit through stationary biking, you would be looking at roughly 3.5 hours of brisk pedaling during that week to accomplish your 1-pound weight loss.  Now, if a food Calorie (capital “C”) were actually the same as a literal, lab coat, physics nerd calorie (lowercase “c”), you would only need 12.5 seconds on the stationary bike to lose that pound of body fat.  If only it were that easy.

So, to summarize:

1 Calorie (food label type) = 1 kCal or 1,000 calories (labcoat type).

In all likelihood, the first dieticians and physicians to start talking about the energy content of food omitted the “kilo” from their literature so as not to scare off the non-scientific public.  Just remember that when you are reading a food label, the values stated are actually kilocalories, not “calories”.

Michelle Obama got a taste of that this week when she singlehandedly dynamited all her childhood obesity advocacy efforts and scuttled her credibility by eating a hamburger.  Within seconds, the Twittersphere and FAUX News was aflame with cries of “HYPOCRITE!”

For the record, Michelle Obama never put herself forward as Mother Theresa.  In bringing attention to the growing national epidemic that is childhood obesity, she hasn’t placed herself on some lofty judgmental perch.  In telling people to eat more vegetables, she hasn’t taken a vow of chastity with her own diet.  Yet, in an amusing display of self-delusion, Michelle Obama’s critics have bestowed all of these assumptions upon her, and are lining up to claim their Pulitzer Prizes for having the journalistic fortitude and perseverance to find the proverbial mote in her eye.

These people need to get lives.

For the record, occasional indulgence is a healthy thing.  Michelle Obama gets that; and even with the occasional indulgence, she still makes healthier choices than 99.9999% of the knuckle-dragging mouth-breathers who think this discredits her in the slightest.  So, while they celebrate surviving their heroic leap from the basement window, let’s remind the First Lady’s critics that they cannot simultaneously put her on a pedestal, and then whine about the undeserved sainthood “The Media” bestows upon her and her husband.

Personally, I hope she has a cheeseburger and French fries on her husband’s second inauguration and a big vat of Ben & Jerry’s on her first.  That’ll really set them off.

However, my objection to this and other “diet” food ads is much less specific than the eating disorder subtext they all seem to espouse.  Namely: the idea that all healthy food options are bland, unpleasant, and just plain gross.  I don’t know about you, but I’m sick and tired of American food companies beating that drum.  By repeating this asinine mantra ad nauseam, they’ve convinced themselves (and a huge swath of American consumers) that if something isn’t indulgent, people won’t want it.  People love junk food, so the best way to get them to make healthier choices is to mask them as junk food.  And the punch line: they’re no healthier than the crap they purport to imitate.

All I could think, watching this stupendously boneheaded ad was, “If you’re the kind of person who would eat a processed yogurt-like substance made from antibiotic-laced dairy, pumped full of artificial flavors, colors, preservatives and synthetic sweetener, calories are the least of your problems.”

The bottom line is this: if you can’t learn to crave fresh fruit, whole grains, and clean, unprocessed foods the way you crave garbage, then you are not serious about eating healthy.  If you can’t appreciate the crunch of fresh vegetables and the quenching refreshment of clean water for their own sake, then you’re acting like an infant.  And if you need a crutch, like cheesecake-flavored yogurt to stay on the “straight and narrow”, then you have unaddressed self-control issues.

Is there something wrong with mixing fresh raspberries and granola into plain, organic yogurt?  There’s just as much fiber in an apple and a banana as there is in a single Fiber One breakfast candy bar.  Do we really need chocolate chips and shellac to make it palatable?

To those who think it takes an extraordinary feat of willpower to resist junk food, I call B.S.  They could make antifreeze and drain cleaner taste like raspberry cheesecake or Boston Cream Pie, but I promise you, I won’t need a lick of willpower to abstain from drinking it.  Some things should should just be obvious.

For several years, I have relied on direct-attached external hard drives (of increasingly larger capacities) for offline archiving of RAW files.  At first, for direct-attached storage (DAS), I preferred Firewire drives, because they could be daisy-chained; but more recent entries in portable USB drives are offering a smaller footprint, single cable connectivity, and no external power supply clutter.  I was burned early on by USB drives, and thought there might be something endemic to the format that made them inherently unreliable, but I’ve since outgrown that fear.  Besides, massive external storage options are now so cheap that I no longer have any good excuses for not keeping two copies of everything on two separate physical volumes.

DAS is by far the cheapest and most scalable option -you just buy capacity as you need it.  And if you stick to a simple calendar-based archive workflow, keeping the volumes straight is as simple as buying a labeler and slapping date stickers on them.  The downside to using individual external drives is that backing them up is often a manual affair.  Most of the backup solutions on the market today do an excellent job of mirroring your Operating System and anything on your built-in storage to an external volume (or volumes), but most don’t handle backing up externals to other externals very well.  So you bite the bullet and make a point to synchronize your redundant copies every time you do anything that might change your images’ XMP sidecar files.  This sort of thing will turn even the most meticulous and thoughtful photog into an obsessive compulsive basket case in short order.

What is needed instead is a massive, fault-tolerant, self-healing, fully-redundant storage solution that is accessible by all the hardware in your digital workflow.  It should be scalable, so you can add storage as your business grows, and it would be nice if you could access it over the Internet.  Enter Network-Attached Storage, or NAS.

I recently installed a Synology DS1511+ NAS in my local area network, and I’m just as pleased as punch with it.  Besides dual gigabit ethernet ports (which can be run multiplexed), it sports four USBs (for more external storage or printer sharing), and two eSATA ports for connecting up to two extra 5-bay expansion units.  populated with 3TB hard drives in RAID 5 configuration, that’s almost forty terabytes of storage!  Holy cow!  Now, I’m not going to push it quite that far… more likely, I’ll populate a full 5-bay chassis, and back the whole thing up to one of those 5-bay expansion units.  For bullet-proof security, you can even back it up to another unit in another physical location over the ‘net -talk about belt, suspenders, and Kevlar underwear!

Anyway, besides just the massive amount of storage potential, the Synology also features a full suite of applications for serving up media files and granting clients passworded access to their photos (if that’s in your business model).  The best part is, all of Synology’s products use the same OS and web-based interactivity, so they’re truly platform agnostic one-stop solutions.

Not too long ago, I would have considered this sort of thing to be best left to the IT pros and sysadmins of the world, but the user-friendliness is improving by leaps and bounds with each generation of NAS.  So far, Synology seems to bridge the gap between consumer and professional SOHO storage needs the most elegantly.  If you really want to take advantage of the remote accessibility features, and you don’t have a static IP address (cable/DSL anyone?) you may want to bone up on Dynamic DNS, and spend a few quality hours with your firewall’s instruction manual.  It may be a little daunting at first, but once you get the hang of it, administering your very own personal cloud storage empire will give you goose bumps.  Then you can stop fretting about your files and get back to SHOOTING!

First, let me preface my remarks by stating that I am not a huge Bose fan.  While they do make a couple of really impressive products, I have been convinced by several years of exposure to professional studio reference equipment that much of Bose’s reputation and perceived superiority is pure HYPE –the result of very effective (and relentless) marketing.  In nearly every case, the high premium Bose charges for its products is unjustified, especially when similar (and often superior) sound, durability, and design quality can be found elsewhere for considerably less expense.  I am convinced that in a truly blind comparison, stripped of their name recognition and left to the mercy of listeners’ ears, a LOT of Bose products would not fare as well as the company wants you to think.

Having said that, why would I then proceed to endorse and recommend Bose’s OE Headphones?  Quite simply, it comes down to a confluence of quality AND features I haven’t found anywhere else.  At $180, are they priced appropriately?  My gut instinct is to say “no”, but until someone else delivers a similar product with the same set of features, we don’t really have a say in the matter.  And besides, I believe companies that deliver a unique experience should be rewarded for their innovation… within reason.

So, about this “perfect storm” of features:

I usually can’t abide on-ear cans for long listening sessions.  My ears get hot and itchy, the cushions seldom isolate enough ambient noise, and the pressure causes the temples of my eyeglasses to dig into my head.  Bose OE’s, on the other hand, defy all of these preconceptions.  They are RIDICULOUSLY comfortable.  As others have noted, they have a tendency to disappear once you put them on, and when people exclaim, “I forgot I was wearing them”, they are not exaggerating.  My first endurance test was to watch all of Toy Story 3 on an iPad, and I never once had to adjust them or take a break.

The replaceable soft “pleather” memory foam cushions ($35 from Bose) conform to the shape of your ears without creating pressure points, while providing enough sound isolation to block out noisy coworkers.  They will not silence the drone of an airline cabin, air conditioner, or lawn mower however –these are not active noise cancelling headphones, after all.  But the passive noise isolation they achieve is at least on par with the best circumaural monitors I’ve used.

The OEs are powered by a single detachable straight cable leading to the left can.  Bose provides two cables in the box: a standard 43″ length, and a much shorter 16″ lead.  The latter seems best suited to use with an MP3 player strapped to your arm, though I doubt many people would find these headphones unobtrusive enough to wear during a workout.  However, even if you don’t plan to hit the jogging trail with them, the detachable cable also affords you the flexibility of connecting an optional inline microphone and playback control module, converting these headphones into the perfect smartphone companion.

They collapse and fold flat into a positively minimal 4.5” square footprint for easy storage in a purse, laptop bag, or the supplied felt-lined molded hard case.  Kudos to Bose on that one: too many headphone manufacturers just give you a drawstring fabric case (when they give you anything at all) that offers no crush protection.  And thanks to their tiny size and fold-flat configuration, when you hang them around your neck, they don’t strangle you or crowd your head movement.

Finally, there is the sound quality.  Bose OE headphones reproduce a sound stage that is truly remarkable, given their diminutive size.  I’m not used to hearing such impressive lows from drivers this small, yet Bose have really exceeded expectations in this area.  Their literature credits the punch to their “tri-port acoustic headphone structure”, familiar proprietary Bose marketing gobbledygook that most likely boils down to “you get all the low frequencies from both sides of the driver.”  Anyone who has heard a properly designed ported subwoofer knows that the object is to channel the sound waves coming off the back of a driver in such a way that they arrive at your ears in phase with the sound waves coming off the front, effectively squeezing every last drop of juicy bass from the loudspeaker with minimal power consumption.  This was always Bose’s strong point, and –at least when it comes to subwoofers- they have consistently delivered admirable solutions in ported loudspeaker designs.  But there’s more to these babies than surprising bass reproduction.  They also deliver refreshingly crisp highs and a clean, balanced mid-range.  I’ve tried everything from Jay-Z to J.S. Bach, and these cans do not disappoint.

Vocals and acoustic guitars sound rich, organic, and lifelike and electronic instrumentation really shines with all its digital precision reproduced faithfully.  Recordings of live performances retain a staggering amount of depth and subtlety, and movies –especially surround soundtracks downmixed to Pro Logic II- seem to jump off the screen, delivering the closest thing to a full surround sound experience you can expect to find in a pair of stereo headphones.

So, to recap: are there better sounding headphones out there for less than $180?  Absolutely; but not with this combination of small size, comfort, and versatility.  They don’t singlehandedly excuse Bose’s habitual over-inflated claims regarding the rest of their portfolio, but they do stand on their own, and they do it admirably.

When I was an architecture student, the widespread adoption and relative novelty of computer-assisted drafting inspired a lot of businesspeople to question the necessity of hiring professional drafters and architects.  ”Why should I pay for all that training when all I need is a really fast computer?” was a question I heard far too many times.  That perception and the prospect of spending the rest of my life pushing a digitizer puck around when I had already fallen in love with the feel of vellum and the smell of pencils put me off of architecture.  Now, a similar mentality seems to be taking over photography, and I find myself having to explain why people should still pay for professional photographic services, when they could easily buy the latest whiz-bang digital camera and shoot the pictures themselves –sometimes for less money.

Like architecture, where a fast computer and decent CAD skills don’t automatically grant one an eye for design, no digital camera –however technologically advanced and automated- can turn a novice into Arney Freytag or Annie Leibovitz overnight.  And that goes for me too.  I still (and always will) consider myself a student of this art form.  But there are plenty of situations in life that don’t afford the casual snapshooter the luxury of trial and error –like when your subject is standing at the altar, about to seal their vows in front of a congregation of witnesses.  You have to know your equipment like the back of your hand, and know what angle and composition and lighting will capture the story in a memorable way, because there are no mulligans.  When you ask your friends and family to handle the photography at your wedding, you’re basically asking them to be working guests, and that’s just not right.  Unless they happen to be photographers and insist on helping, shouldn’t they be free to relax and celebrate the occasion with you?

But weddings aren’t the only venue where the trained eye of a professional photographer comes in handy.  It’s true that not every family portrait needs to be a formal affair worthy of an over-the-mantle canvas enlargement, but there’s a very good reason those kinds of portraits look so good and are so rare: they require more than a tripod and a self-timer.  You’ve got enough to worry about, corralling the kids, making sure wardrobe and hair are perfect and the dog has had a bathroom break –you shouldn’t have to be the key grip and the clapper loader too.

Aspiring models too are often tempted to build their book on the cheap, and this is especially ill-advised.  Think about it: you’re trying to impress people whose stock-in-trade is the cultivation of professional imagery.  They can tell the difference.  When you are trying to break into the modeling business, your book is essentially a visual resume, and while professional headshots won’t guarantee that you get the gig, amateurish looking ones will nearly always guarantee that you won’t.  Remember, your book is a tool that can potentially generate income for you -you should invest in the tools of your trade.

We get it.  When times are hard and money is tight, people look for ways to cut back on discretionary spending.  But do you really want the economic hardships of the moment reflected in the quality of your keepsakes -or your brand?  When you pay for professional photographic services, you are essentially paying someone else to sweat the details and make you look your best; you’re investing in their expertise and their confidence in the tools of their trade.  Your patronage is an expression of trust, and no photographer worth their weight in empty film canisters takes that trust lightly.

As I explained before, the single most effective way to send a message to your body asking it to release anabolic hormones is to overload and inflict controlled damage on the muscles. It is not by accident that our bodies have evolved such complex hormonal responses to physical trauma; if muscle mass wasn’t so metabolically wasteful, our bodies would flit in and out of an anabolic state with little or no provocation, and even the laziest couch potato would be a Mr. Olympia contender. In truth, the body even has (what it considers) defense mechanisms against building more muscle -proteins like myostatin (hard-coded into our genes) that inhibit muscle growth at best, and hormones like cortisol, adrenaline, and glucagon that straight up reverse it at worst.

NOTE: It is a noble goal to want to increase the “good” anabolic hormones, while minimizing the “bad” catabolic ones at all costs; but before we get too wrapped around that dichotomy, it bears mentioning that these two sides of the metabolic coin are, to a large degree, inextricably linked. It may seem counterproductive, but the very same stimuli (stress and trauma) that signal your body to fire up its anabolic drive also aggravate it’s catabolic mechanisms. There’s just no escaping our bodies’ ruthless quest for equilibrium. The explosiveness with which the human body is capable of building muscle is matched measure for measure by the explosiveness with which it can break muscle down, and the latter comes MUCH more easily -all you have to do is sit on your ass. But don’t despair. If you have the tenacity to adopt the principles of bodybuilding and fitness as a permanent lifestyle, and apply them in a sensible manner, you can keep the demons of catabolism from crashing your party for a good, long while.

This should come as no surprise to anyone older than eight years of age. If you want bigger muscles, you have to exercise them. And yet, for something so painfully obvious and elementary, there sure seem to be a lot of questions and theories about the best way to do this. Unless you live under a rock, chances are you’ve seen more than one television infomercial or print advertisement trying to convince you that you don’t really have to exert yourself to stimulate muscle growth (or more commonly, shed fat). And, while some of their claims are valid to a degree, you can rest assured that “fifteen minutes a day” of comfortable, painless abdominal flexing is NOT going to beef you up. Explosive growth only comes from a cascade of anabolic hormones, and that calls for something decidedly less timid; it calls for a neuromuscular jolt.

Let’s Compound the Message, Shall We?

Few things will elicit the kind of neuromuscular jolt that triggers a massive flood of anabolic hormones like compound, holistic resistance training exercises. And by “compound” and “holistic”, we mean exercises that recruit the most muscle fibers possible from the greatest number of individual muscles simultaneously. The classic body-weight calisthenic movements are excellent examples: Pushups, Pullups, and Squats may seem like child’s play when compared to that circuit of new, super-ergonomic, scientifically targeted Hammer Strength isolation machines, but they accomplish –in their elegant simplicity- what all those fancy isolation machines are specifically designed to avoid. Those simple calisthenic movements hit several muscles at once, and consequently, they (and free-weight exercises that mimic them) have a much greater anabolic payoff.

Isolation exercises do have their place in a balanced bodybuilding regimen. And yes, any exercise that recruits a lot of muscle fibers is going to elicit some kind of growth response, even if those fibers are all in one muscle, or a very small collection of closely-related muscles. But this is hardly the most efficient way to elicit a system-wide neuromuscular jolt. Trying to build lots of muscle with a gym full of specialized isolation equipment is like trying to mow a football field with a toenail clipper, tweezers, and a pair of scissors. Isolation exercises will be an important asset to someone who wants to add extra emphasis to trouble areas, but they don’t belong anywhere near the foundation of a serious bodybuilding regimen.

When guys just getting started in bodybuilding ask me how to workout, by far my most frequent advice is “big, ugly, simple, compound lifts.” I usually follow that with some very specific advice about how much weight to use, and how many reps (we’ll get to that in a moment), but step one is to understand the importance of holistic exercises. It really can’t be stressed enough. By choosing exercises that directly tax the biggest muscles, you reap a spillover benefit in all of the smaller muscles that come along for the ride, and the cumulative effect is profound. Why spend hours blasting your biceps directly with curls when pullups hit your biceps, biceps bracchii, wrist flexors, rear delts, traps, rhomboids, infraspinatus, terres major and minor, latissimus, and… oh yeah, your entire abdominal core AND your glutes and hamstrings (by virtue of keeping your knees bent throughout the movement)? Hit a few small muscles with a moderately heavy resistance, or beat the crap out of them while blasting more than half of all the muscle mass in your body all at once. The choice seems pretty clear to me.

If you’re just getting started in resistance training, your ass doesn’t belong anywhere NEAR the lat pulldown machine. Get off your butt and start lifting your entire body weight! “But pullups are hard!” I hear you saying. Or, “But I suck at pullups!” Well, here’s a news flash, chum: that’s precisely why you need to make them your numero uno priority! If you’re like me, you may spend a lot of your best years avoiding these heavy, basic lifts because you’re afraid you’ll look foolish doing them, or they don’t give you the vein-popping satisfaction that pumping out fifteen reps of alternating dumbbell curls in the mirror does. But if you take that approach to building mass, you’re setting yourself up for a loooooong, tedious, disappointing journey. If you can’t do one full pullup, then start by getting in position at the top of the rep (by climbing on a chair, say) and holding yourself there until your grip fails or your arms give out. That’s one set. Rest for 90 seconds and do it again. And keep doing that, workout after workout, three times a week, until you CAN put up one full rep. Then work on getting to two. Then three. It doesn’t take as long as you think, but one thing’s for certain: you will never improve by avoiding them, or looking for an easy way out, like the lat pulldown machine.

That’s one example of a compound movement. Here are some others, and the more common isolation exercises that make for lousy substitutes:

To Split, or Not to Split?

With a solid foundation of basic, compound exercises, it’s time to turn our attention to designing workouts. Anytime I meet someone just getting started in resistance training, and even when I myself am starting back up from a few weeks off, my advice is always the same: start with total-body workouts, and take your time building up to a split routine. Trust me, you’ll inflict plenty of controlled damage, and stimulate a massive anabolic response without trying to jump right into some hideously complex five-day split right out of the gate. What does a total-body workout look like? The table above is a good place to start. Spend ten minutes doing some light cardio to get your body warmed up and your joints loose -jump rope, jog on a treadmill, hit a stair climber or an eliptical. I’m not talking about a huge calorie burn here -the idea is to get your blood flowing and your core temperature up a tad. Never jump right into a resistance training workout cold. And never stretch before a free-weight workout either. I know that sounds controversial. We all grew up being taught that you have to stretch before exercise; but new research shows that stretching a muscle before it is warmed up and before heavy exertion can actually weaken it, and set you up for injury. You should absolutely stretch after a workout, but never before.

Once you’re warmed up, do three sets each of the exercises in that table: pullups to failure, bent T-Bar rows, squats, deadlifts, and bench presses. Use light weights, or none at all, and keep every set to twelve reps or fewer. Rest no more than two minutes between sets, and repeat the whole thing once every four days for three weeks, gradually adding weight to each of those movements (where appropriate). I guarantee you, if you haven’t worked out in a long time, or are just getting started, you are going to feel like you got hit by a dump truck for several days. One of the most common reasons people give up early on a workout regimen is that they do too much, too soon, and spend days flat on their back, wracked with joint soreness. As soon as most of that soreness subsides, hit your body again. Suck it up and deal with the soreness for three weeks, and I promise you, not only will you notice less and less soreness between workouts, but you’ll actually start to crave it.

I advocate this kind of break-in for everybody because it accomplishes three things at once: it gives your body time to get acclimated to the sensations of resistance training, it gives you plenty of time to concentrate on perfecting your form, and it kick-starts the anabolic drive with a vengeance. When you are unable to complete four sets of each exercise in a 45 to 60 minute workout, then it’s time to consider switching to a two way split. I’ve always progressed from total-body workouts straight to an upper/lower routine, where upper body consists of back, chest, and arms, and lower consists of legs and abdominals. Two days in a row, two days off, repeat. When I need to add more variety to each workout, and start including two or three exercises per body part, only then do I switch to a three-way split. My personal favorite is the “push/pull/legs & abs” variation, where day one focuses on pushing movements (everything that hits the chest, front delts, and triceps), day two focuses on pulling movements (hitting the back, rear delts, and biceps), and day three is dedicated to legs and abdominal work. Three days in a row, one day off, repeat.

By the end of two months, you should be clicking along, working your entire body roughly three times every ten days. Every single workout you perform should start with the big, holistic, compound lifts, and branch out into isolation movements for variety and to add some fun. There’s nothing wrong with tossing in an occasional set of concentration curls if you want to blast your biceps and trip on the pump, but if you’re getting your pullups and barbell rows in, I’m betting you won’t feel the need to blast them directly. Unless (like me) you’re really impatient and you think it will speed up the growing process (it won’t).

Light Weights, High Reps? Sorry, You’re Just Not My Type

That brings us to the matter of how much weight, and how many reps. The short answer is “six to eight reps, with the heaviest weight you can lift while maintaining excellent form”. But in order to understand why, we need to geek on a little physiology for a moment. Not all muscle fibers are created equal. Some can contract slowly and repeatedly for long periods of time, others contract much more rapidly, and with greater force, but they can only sustain that contraction for very brief periods. The slower, smaller fibers are known as Type I, or “slow twitch” fibers, and the faster, stronger, bigger fibers are known as Type II, or -wait for it- “fast twitch” fibers. There are actually several other sub-types (Type IIa and IIb to name just two, and some fibers that can serve both roles), but I’m only going to focus on slow twitch and fast twitch here for sake of simplicity.

Everyone has a combination of these two basic muscle fiber types distributed throughout all the skeletal muscles in their body. Some people have more Type I slow twitch fibers than others, while some people have more Type II fast twitch. Which one predominates in your muscle composition is determined by your genes. This is why some people make great endurance athletes, like cyclists and marathon runners (dominant slow twitch), but can’t perform explosive feats of strength and speed, like powerlifting or sprinting. As you may have guessed, Type II fast twitch muscle fibers (because they contract more forcefully and with greater speed) are larger, and capable of greater size increases. They’re also the last to get involved during muscle contraction. Like a bunch of divas and prima donnas- those fast twitch fibers won’t even budge until you’ve exhausted darn near your entire collection of slow twitch fibers first. This only happens when you are straining your absolute hardest against an immovable resistance.

Think of these fast twitch fibers like high-paid executives in a multinational corporation. On any given day, that company may receive a thousand complaints from irate shareholders -every one handled by some lackey (if they’re handled at all). But the CEO doesn’t personally get involved until someone with a ton of money and influence complains. That’s exactly how your muscles operate, too. When you present your muscles with a challenge –say, curling a 50-pound barbell- your nervous system is rigged to innervate the slow twitch fibers first, and keep triggering them until every single one is activated. If that isn’t enough to get the weight moving, your nervous system starts to recruit the MVP reserves. All of this hierarchical recruitment happens very rapidly -every single time you contract a muscle. There are no “coupon days” in the world of muscle fiber recruitment; there are no “freebies.” If you aren’t putting 100% of your strength into every single rep, those Type II fast twitch fibers will happily sit around blogging on Facebook, while the Type I’s do all the work.

In any given bout of resistance training, it doesn’t take very long at all to exhaust your supply of Type I fibers and get those recalcitrant Type II’s to pull their weight. With perfect form and a heavy enough weight, it need only take six to eight reps. With the strictest possible form, you should start strong on reps 1 through 3, struggle on 4 through six, and be barely able (if at all) to complete rep seven or eight. If you have enough strength to put up a ninth repetition, you’re not going heavy enough, and it’s time to increase the weight. Every single muscle mutt who ever picked up a barbell knows this: maximum growth, and maximum strength increases only come when you put in 100% of everything you’ve got. Now you know why.

Good Form, Old Chap!

Finally, let’s talk about form for a moment. This should be a no-brainer, but the sad fact is there are a lot of people in gyms today who are just asking for an injury with the way they lift. I’m not going to call people out by name, but you know who you are. Swinging the weights, crappy posture, bouncing, throwing equipment at the end of a set… cool it, okay? If you know what good form is, and you insist that you can’t hit your target intensity without getting sloppy, then you’re either showing off or just plain going too heavy. No one will think any less of you in the gym if you ask someone for tips on proper form; in fact, they’ll probably be impressed that you are serious about doing things right.

Swinging the weights up, cheating with inertia, and bouncing them at the bottom of the movement does three things:

1. it takes the resistance off the target muscle (even if only momentarily, this is bad),
2. it makes you look like a noob, and
3. it sets you up for an injury.

For maximum muscle fatigue and anabolic stimulus, I always advocate a 1-1-3 count strategy. Explode up for a one count (concentric), squeeze the muscle as hard as you can at the top of the contraction for a one count, and lower the weight slowly through a three count (eccentric), resisting the weight all the way down.

Many experts agree, lowering the weight slowly and deliberately, resisting against gravity steadily the whole way down actually provides a greater neurological shock than simply contracting the muscle through the concentric portion of the lift. If you ever want proof of just how underapreciated this simple nugget is, just spend ten minutes in the gym watching how people lift. All their focus and concentration is on the concentric movement -they squeeze the weight up, pause for a split second, then let it fall with just enough control to prevent it from flying out of their hand. Remember: muscles get the message during contraction AND relaxation. Don’t neglect that most important second half of every rep!

There’s a lot more to cover, including periodicity and variation, but that is better reserved for another article entirely.

Let’s recap:

1. Rapid muscle growth requires a cascade of anabolic homones. By far, the most effective way to trigger that cascade is by progressively overloading the muscles through heavy, holistic resistance training.
2. Maximum anabolic stimulus is achieved when you select exercises that hit many muscles simultaneously, called “compound” or “holistic” movements.
3. Stick with total-body workouts for as long as you can, and take your time ramping up to a split routine.
4. Limit your workouts to 45 minutes on average, and not more 60 minutes as a rule.
5. Not all muscle fibers are the same. The ones with the greatest potential for growth don’t even activate until you’re going all-out in a lift, therefore…
6. You need to lift weights that you can barely complete eight reps with, max, and…
7. Concentrate on a 1-1-3 count during each rep, and at all times
8. Practice impeccable form

Let’s start with the fact that there are no secrets when it comes to building muscle.  If that’s not what you were expecting to hear from me, then perhaps it’s best we just get it over with and rip that bandage off right up front.  I’m going to do my best not to blow sunshine up your ass about having some elusive “secret” that has only been privy to Navy Seals and MMA elites.  Frankly, that kind of marketing hype annoys me off, and just makes the people touting it sound like con artists.

Pretty much everything we know today, and everything the glossy magazine ads call a “breakthrough” in bodybuilding science, derives from the same two fundamental principles –two inescapable truths about the human body that you must come to terms with if you are to have any success at all in forcing yours to grow more muscle.  To anyone with a high school understanding of human anatomy, they are not secrets, and they are as follows:

1. All muscle growth is controlled by anabolic hormones.
2. The human body doesn’t increase anabolic hormone production without a very good reason.

You can wrack your brain for months trying to dissect all the staples of bodybuilding –how much weight to lift, how often to lift it, how to inflict the right amount of micro-trauma, how to maximize recuperation, how much protein to consume, what kind, what supplements to take, how much water to drink, etc- but every single one of those questions (in fact, every single thing you do in bodybuilding) is rooted in, and serves to satisfy these two inescapable truths.  At the end of the day, it’s all about the hormones.  The hormones are in charge.

Now this may sound extraordinarily patronizing, but I point it out because when people ask “what’s your secret,” what they’re really asking is “How do I get the most effective hormonal response from the smallest possible stimulus?”  They may not even know these are the two controls they are trying to affect, and they may not articulate it that way when asked, but in the long run, every quest for the ideal combination of diet, strength training, and rest is an attempt to get the most #1 for the least #2.

So, while I want you to be skeptical of anyone who claims to have discovered the “secret” of packing on the pounds, I also don’t want you to instantly assume they’re full of it.  What they mean (and have every right to be proud of) is that they figured out how to take advantage of these basic physiological truths.  And yes, they work better for some people than others.  Like it or not, there are hard, quantifiable reasons why some people can eat two crappy meals a day and explode with lean mass, while others have to cram food down their throats ’round the clock just to gain two pounds a month.  And while all the multitudinous variations between individuals certainly make finding common ground difficult, it is not a complete waste of time.  There are certain fundamentals that apply equally to everyone; they just don’t sound very sexy, and (at the risk of sounding like a broken record) they are far from “secrets”.

When I speak of our bodies needing a “very good reason” to increase anabolic hormone production, that’s not hyperbole.  Muscle is very expensive stuff, metabolically speaking.  It requires complex blood supply and nervous system support, and it burns energy our bodies would rather store for times of famine.  Thanks to our overly frugal evolutionary hard-wiring, our bodies are content to provide and sustain exactly as much muscle as is needed to carry our sustenance from the grocery store to our mouths and not one ounce more.  So if you want to get all swole and jacked up with all kinds of aesthetically cool muscle mass and definition, you’re going to have to convince your tightwad hormonal axis to cough up the goods.

Sweet!  So how do I do it?

Since the very first homo sapiens stood upright, the most compelling reason our bodies have ever accepted for increasing muscle size and strength is neurological and muscular overload.  Put another way: asking more from your muscles and nervous system than they are presently capable of.  Pretty simple really.  If you repeatedly ask your body to perform what it cannot, over time, it will adapt itself to the task, and all that adaptation is driven by hormones.  Fortunately, it takes a lot less neurological and muscular overload than you might think to get those hormones dancing.

And the good news is that while our hormonal accountants are relative tightwads when it comes to coughing up the stimulus, they also have a tendency to overreact and overcompensate when they finally get the message.  It is not uncommon for guys to reap huge immediate growth results when they first start working out seriously –a phenomenon known amongst the ranks as “beginner’s gains”.  But the real trick is to keep those hormonal accountants overcompensating once they start.

Patience, Grasshopper.

rogressively overloading a muscle through strength training is the most effective way to stimulate a compensatory response.  You break down the muscle so that the body is forced to build it back bigger and stronger.  Most inexperienced lifters seize upon this basic physiological principle, and set about beating their muscles to oblivion with hundreds of reps of isolation exercises, thinking that if a little damage provokes a noticable compensatory response, a lot of damage must trigger the inner Hulk.  But not so fast.  Like any group of workers driven too hard, your body does have limits.  Demand too much of your hormonal and neurological workforce, and it will happily go on strike –a condition we call “overtraining.”

PSSST! There’s more to it than “working out”

While the most effective stimulus to kick-starting the hormonal signal to build muscle is progressive overload through strength training, you won’t reap the maximum benefits of that stimulus (or the resulting hormonal activity) if you don’t support it outside the gym, too.  This is where most strength training noobs totally miss the boat.  When I tell someone they aren’t paying enough attention to their diet when training for mass, they immediately jump to nitpicking about their protein intake, or the supplements they take, or some other minutia, when the real oversight is much, much more fundamental and insidious.  Eating –itself- has its very own effect on anabolic hormones.  I’m talking about the basics here:  How much you eat at each sitting, how often you eat, the time of day you eat specific macronutrients -all of these have powerful anabolic repercussions.  It is no exaggeration to say that you can bust your butt in the gym and take all the latest and greatest supplements, but you if you aren’t eating like a polar bear in a daycare center, you are basically running a marathon with a piano tied to your waist.

Finally, the most overlooked anabolic trigger is also the easiest to supply, and therefor the easiest to take for granted: sleep.  Among the myriad physiological benefits that sleep provides, perhaps none is more profound or welcome than the regular (and completely automatic) regeneration of muscle proteins.  This is one of those things we can safely call universal; the vast majority of all the muscle ever built was assembled while we were counting sheep.  No one ever grew an ounce of muscle in the gym (unless they were sleeping there); they grew it at home, under the covers, when all their other metabolic functions (digestion, respiration, cardiac activity, etc.) were relaxed, and all those hormones could go to work.

With all these things considered, I’ll leave you with another fundamental truth about bodybuilding:

while the reasons you provide today are good enough to get your body releasing anabolic hormones, those reasons won’t suffice for long.

With a specific increase in strength comes a specific (and finite) increase in lean mass.  So if you’re not constantly increasing the intensity of your workouts (lifting heavier weight, taking shorter breaks between sets, varying your speed, or combinations of all these and more), if you’re not increasing your calories to keep up with the gains, and if you’re short-changing yourself on sleep, sooner rather than later, your hormonal accountants will grow complacent, and your growth will “plateau” or “hit the wall.”  It takes constant variation, and more persistence and tenacity than most people are capable of to keep the engines of growth humming.

So, to recap:

1. All muscle growth is regulated by hormones.
2. The human body has a severe grudge against muscle, and won’t build more of it on a whim, so it won’t release those hormones without a lot of coercion.
3. The most effective way to coerce the body into releasing those hormones is to a) break it down through just the right amount of progressive overload, b) feed the hell out of it, and c) give it plenty of sleep.
4. Never let your body get used to anything you do in #3.
5. None of this is a secret, and
6. There is no escaping any of it.

Short answer: Yes! More nuanced, thoughtfully considered answer: HELL yes, please oh please, for the love of god, PLEASE bodybuild!

As long as there are women who are want to be strong, fit, and well-defined, and as long as people deem pronounced musculature to be the province of men exclusively, there will be opinions about whether or not female bodybuilding is attractive.  And as long as there are rigid, arbitrary expectations placed on what is and is not feminine, there will be women who shy away from even modest strength training, citing as an excuse their fear of looking too “bulky”.

I could write a whole article addressing the latter misconception (and I may yet); but first, I should probably address the idea that there is only one standard for female attractiveness, an archaic mindset based almost entirely upon contemporary preconceptions about how women ought to look.

What is frankly so ingratiating about these preconceptions is that they are driven mostly by the mainstream media –the same media which bends over backwards to sell us a vision of ideal human youth and beauty.  What is popular culture, after all, but that which we see on television, in movies, and in print everyday, and subsequently talk about with friends, parrot on FaceBook and Twitter, and emmulate in a trillion blogs the ‘Net over?  You could argue that the media are just giving the audience what they want, but to do so naively discounts the media’s power to influence opinion.  Entertainers and public figures are not passive entities who merely reflect our aesthetic tastes –far from it.

Judging by the vast and unambiguous volume of material produced by the advertising industry, one could be forgiven for thinking all women should aspire to waiflike, emaciated proportions characterized by stick figure arms, shapely (but never defined) legs, small waists with no abdominal definition whatsoever, and paradoxically large breasts.  And why not?  Such an ideal sells a lot of beer, cars, magazines, disposable razors, prepared diet foods, and gee… EVERYTHING.

I’m not saying the media shouldn’t be in the business of setting trends or defining beauty.  I just find it frankly a little disconcerting that Americans in particular are so loathe to give women license to be more than just Barbie Doll analogues until (and unless) a prominent and likable media figure takes the first step.  Would the recent popularity of sporting a little upper arm definition have taken off so virulently among women if Michelle Obama, then a darling of the media, hadn’t confidently held a gun show in her inaugural gown first?  Literally within the span of a week, a new term sprouted up in gyms all across America: “Michelle Obama Arms.”  Okay ladies, the secret is out.  Girls are also born with biceps.  We tried to keep it under wraps, but you were bound to find out sooner or later.  So yeah, it’s okay to train them now.

How about Corey Everson, or Lenda Murray?  Arguably two of the most beautiful and influential women in the history of oh-dear-god-don’t-let-her-get-that-big female bodybuilding, these ladies spent decades trying to convince girls it was empowering, liberating, and yes, very sexy to have sixpack abs and shoulders that don’t need to be accentuated with fake pads.  Still, it took another dozen or so years and Jennifer Lopez’s washboard to crack the taboo –but probably only because she never took it to an extreme.

Unfortunately, I don’t think this trend is going to abate anytime soon.  The whims of popular opinion are tilting toward acceptance of extreme female fitness as a mainstream pursuit, but it’s taking way too damned long in my opinion.  It seems to be the fate of women in Western cultures that developing what Mother Nature gave them will be deemed unacceptable until someone extraordinarily popular and famous does it first, and then only if they promise not to get too carried away with it.

I have no illusions about ever convincing everyone that muscular women are incredibly sexy.  Not when so many people have already made up their minds that muscles on a woman are “gross” or “manish.”  Clearly it is a matter of taste.  I mean, if we allowed that sort of thing, we’d have to let women into all the other manliness clubhouses too, like firefighting and military combat.

Sarcasm aside, I could sit here and speculate for hours about the unacknowledged homophobia and other insecurities that lead some men to assert that all women who bodybuild are lesbians or look too masculine, but I doubt it would make any difference.  About all I can do is point out the extreme sexism inherent in telling a woman she is less of a woman, or making assumptions about her sexual preferences simply because she chooses to develop her anatomy to its maximum potential.  All I can do is keep professing my own appreciation for the power, sensuality, and beauty embodied in a well-developed female physique, and hope that sooner rather than later, popular culture will catch up.

Like most people who work for a living, I don’t like parting with my hard-earned money, only to find out later I’ve been played.  And believe me, I’ve had to learn the hard way.  I could easily turn this article into a scathing critique of the supplement industry, because there is no shortage of greedy, cynical asswipes out there eager to prey on people’s naivite and impulsiveness, but I’m not going to.  The fact is, while there are a lot of scams dressed in really impressive and scientific-sounding ad copy, there are also some very important babies that should not be thrown out with the bath water.  So listen up.

First and foremost, I advocate getting as much of your nutrients from whole foods as possible.  Keep your wallet in your pocket, and your ass out of GNC until you’re maximizing your efforts in the kitchen.  At the end of the day, no supplement –no matter how “technologically advanced”- is going to make up for crappy eating habits.  That said, there are some products that I have found have made a significant difference in my own personal fitness journey.  I’m more than happy to talk about what I take, but don’t rush out and buy something just because it seems to work for me.  You’ve still got to do your own research.

Right at the top of my list is a good multivitamin. Even with our newly fashionable interest in organic, sustainable agriculture, produce today is a cruel nutritional joke.  Here in the United States, we too often rely on chemical fertilizers and we don’t always (okay, never) replenish what we take out of the ground.  We’ve had to invent –complete with patents- whole new species of fruits and vegetables that resist rot longer and can withstand the insane amount of transportation and processing we put them through before they reach our mouths.  Again, I’m not going to beat this dead horse; there are far more qualified and meticulously researched writers on the subject than I (take Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma for a spin -you’ll never look at your grocery store shelves the same again).  Suffice it to say, this is one area where it’s better to be safe than sorry.

Just one word of caution with regard to multivitamins: if there’s something on the label that you don’t understand, do the research before you start popping tablets down your throat.  For example, a lot of “Men’s Health” formulations on the shelves contain Saw Palmetto, an herbal supplement sold under the premise that it promotes prostate health in men over 40.  It accomplishes this by suppressing testosterone, and if you have a healthy prostate to begin with, the last thing you want to do is take the pom-poms away from your body’s primary anabolic cheerleader.  I hate to sound like a big pharma ad, but this should be a no-brainer: if you’re worried about your prostate health, discuss it with your doctor.

Second on my list is a good whey protein shake, taken immediately after a workout.  Granted, I always eat a full meal within a half-hour of finishing my workout, but right after hitting the iron, I want a big hit of free-form amino acids cruising around in my bloodstream, so that means a fast-digesting protein like whey isolates.  For my money, nothing beats Optimum Nutrition 100% Whey Gold Standard, blended with 10 oz of Soymilk.  Could I take a fistful of BCAA tablets and accomplish the same thing? Sure, but I believe the human body has evolved to digest food, not pills.  And hey, Whey isolates are digested and absorbed fast enough as it is; save a little work for your stomach.  Besides, a comparable dose of amino acids taken in tablet form costs twice as much as a shake.

Third, I’m a big believer in Creatine Monohydrate.  Considering how much solid science there is supporting Creatine use, it blows my mind that this simple product is so misunderstood.  Hang around long enough on those same online discussion boards I mentioned before, and sooner or later, you’ll hear someone assert that Creatine is a steroid, or Creatine gives you “water muscles”, or Creatine will erase your hard drive.  Stop it, okay?  If you’re one of those people spreading this kind of misinformation, you need to do some reading before you open your flap.

Stripped of all the hype and recent attempts to reinvent the wheel, plain, flavorless Creatine Monohydrate is by far the cheapest supplement per serving, with the greatest payback.  I only take it on workout days, and only at the maintenance dose of 3 grams/day (I never do a “loading” phase) for a two months on, two weeks off cycle.

And finally, I take L-Glutamine right before bed.  Glutamine is the most abundant amino acid in skeletal muscle protein, and the most readily catabolized during times of stress.  It’s also the primary “food source” of the immune system.  Wanna know what can put the brakes on your muscle-building activities faster than low testosterone production?  Try being laid up with a cold or the flu for two weeks.  Especially during flu season, I don’t take chances with boosting my immunity.  As for taking it right before bed, there’s a good reason for that too: studies show that elevated plasma glutamine levels can amplify growth hormone release by as much as 400%, and your greatest GH release of the day occurs within 45 minutes of falling asleep.

That’s it, kids.  That’s really all there is.  Multivitamin, Whey Protein, Creatine Monohydrate, and Glutamine.  No gainer shakes for me –they’re nothing but a huge serving of maltodextrin with too much protein mixed in.  I know its not what most guys want to hear; but then, most guys aren’t satisfied until there are more supplement containers on top of their fridge than there are food products in it.

Eat food. Use supplements sparingly.