Do You Have To Be Fat To Be Strong?

By Mike Westerdal

Many of you know that I compete as an amatuer powerlifter. One thing I’ve noticed over the past few years is that there are a lot of guys that believe the bigger you get and the more bodyweight you carry the stronger you will get. This was pretty much undisputed in the past.

All you had to do was look up all the world records in the squat, bench and deadlift and you’d find that the super heavyweights weighing 300 lbs and more dominated all the record boards regardless of age.

I’m not sure exactly when it started happening, but the tides are turning. When you look up the powerlifting rankings you’ll see that today the top numbers at many of the biggest powerlifting events each year are not always held by the heaviest guys.

In fact on forums across the Internet people are arguing that the strongest guys in the world today are representing the 198, 220, 242 and 275 lbs classes.

And I’m not talking about short fat guys that weigh less than their taller counterparts. These are lean powerlifters that look like they compete in bodybuilding.

Matt Kroczaleski pictured above competes in the 220 lb class giving the
heavyweights a run for their money and I don’t see no stinkin body fat!

The world famous strength coach and owner of Westside Barbell Louie Simmons is an advocate of having his powerlifters push a weighted wheelbarrow and do sled drags. You can read about it in many of his articles.

What does this have to do with Lean Hybrid Muscle, Mike? Well, there’s a new breed of powerlifters that are taking over and they do cardio! Can you believe that, powerlifters doing cardio? Well they’re doing hybrid cardio or resistance cardio.

Not only are they improving their fitness level, but they are increasing their overall or “absolute strength” which seems to be carrying over to their max strength powerlifting results.

It’s true, times are a changing in the powerlifting world. Pretty soon the word powerlifter may just bring to mind a lean hybrid muscle machine instead of the stereotypical big fat bald guy with a goatee. Hybrid cardio or type III muscle training has a lot to do with it in my opinion.

Sometimes I train with an elite powerlifter named Mike Schwanke over at Tampa Barbell. Here’s another example of a lighter guy giving the heavyweights a run for their money. He squats over 1K and has deadlifted 800 lbs. Check out this video of his training footage prior to a meet earlier this year.

Even though he’s a powerlifter he implements cardio and hybrid conditioning so that he can reduce his bodyfat while building strength.

Yes – You Can Be Strong, Lean & In Shape At The Same Time

This is important so listen up. Hybrid cardio is not a “style” of training but rather, it is a component of training-and it doesn’t require and special training or fancy equipment.

If you are interested in developing balance among fitness, strength and size, then you should be taking a good look at this blog and the developments. For example, a guy can lift and lift and lift until he’s as big as an ox with bulging muscles of steel but be short of breath from a climb up a flight of stairs.

Or, if you are into competitive sports, adding the Hybrid Muscle Training component to your training mix can really give you a competitive edge. Guys also use hybrid conditioning to improve weak spots, to be more adaptable, improve their overall fitness levels and to boost and speed up their bodies’ capacity to recover.

The sled pull, tire flip, farmer’s walk, wheelbarrow push and plate lifting are some of the more common hybrid exercises around. In doing any of these exercises you start out with a goal of doing it for maybe ten minutes or so, with a long-term goal of working up to about 30 minutes.

It’s important to remember this part: Once you reach 30 minutes, don’t keep striving to be able to do longer stretches of time. Rather, enhance your capacity by increasing the weight, not the amount of time you’re doing the exercises. This is where you’ll really see improvements in your performance.

One of the great things about Hybrid cardio as it relates to muscle building is that it involves compound exercises that require you to use multiple muscle groups and multiple skills (balance, coordination, etc.) at the same time. By doing compound exercises you’re not only improving your all around fitness level but you’re also significantly lowering your risk of injuring yourself.

Lots of bodybuilders get totally caught up in building size, focusing on doing the same exercises over and over again. By keeping the focus just on the muscles that you see in the mirror (the “beach muscles”) and not training the core, they are setting themselves up for injury.

Powerlifters are equally guilty on totally concentrating on their maximum strength without paying much attention to their hearts or work capacity as we discussed earlier. If you can squat 700 pounds you should be able to squat 225 for 15 reps without getting totally winded.

Many powerlifters myself included could use the fat burning benefits of incorporating some hybrid cardio training which as a bonus will develop the type III muscle fiber. Maybe there’d be a little more gas in the tank by the time the deadlift rolls around on meet day.

I’ve heard the excuses, doing this will make you weaker. Well I’m calling Bullshit on that one! How many of you have seen the DVD “242 Raw” featuring Jeremy Hoornstra? For those of you who don’t know him he’s one of the top raw bench pressers in the world having hit a 675 bench in competition right before my eyes!

It was amazing. Well in Jeremy’s DVD him and his buddies push his SUV up a hill for their early morning workout. So don’t tell me this kind of conditioning will make you lose max strength, because if anything it will make you overall stronger.

That’s another great thing about hybrid cardio/muscle building exercises, you can do them with whatever you have handy. If you don’t happen to have a sled hanging around the house, no worries just push a vehicle around.

And if you aren’t able to do that, then maybe you can flip a tire or attach some rope to a piece of plywood, put a bunch of bricks on it and start dragging it around. With lean hybrid muscle building workouts, you’re not tied to a specific routine or exercise.

It’s not a requirement that you do specific exercises or follow a particular routine-it’s more important that you do “strongman” type exercises in addition to your current routine that are really going to challenge you.

Even if you live in the heart of the city you can incorporate hybrid muscle exercises into your training routine. The farmer’s walk can be done anywhere. Just grab a couple of heavy dumbbells and start walking. As you improve, use heavier dumbbells.

If the weather is lousy then you can do it at the gym. At the gym you can also carry around plates instead of dumbbells, if you’d like. Kettle bells are great for doing these exercises too. You can use them to do snatches, the farmer’s walk or any number of other compound exercises.

You can even do these hybrid training exercises if you don’t have anything more than your own bodyweight. Jump squats are just one example of a bodyweight exercise that you can do. The point is this kind of training allows for a great deal of creativity, flexibility and adaptability. Watch the Strong Man competitions on the television if you want some great ideas for coming up with your own routines.

To wrap up, by including Hybrid muscle training exercises into the training routine, dangerous imbalances-and the injuries that often accompany them-can be avoided. Adding some of these exercises into the mix can also help keep boredom at bay and can also keep you from getting burned out on training.

You’ll also be giving yourself a serious competitive edge and as an added bonus, because the body is in all-around better physical condition, you’ll also find that you recover more rapidly and will probably have more energy too.

Thanks for letting me get this off my chest. I’m learning so much just from reading everyone’s comments. So if you learned anything or enjoyed this post, than please leave a comment below. It’s only fair that I get to pick your brain too!

Give me 35 comments below and I’ll be back with a follow up post!

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Primal Workouts

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An Excerpt from the Lean Hybrid Muscle Building Program

Nature is amazing. Plants, animals, humans, insects and ecosystems, left on their own, over time adapt to their environment to not just exist, but to thrive. Each species is designed to do whatever it does best. For example, carnivores like wolves, lions and tigers are built to hunt and kill. They’re strong and fast with sharp teeth and powerful jaws. And all this happens naturally. When they are born, their parents don’t sit them down and explain to them what they have to do to become skilled hunters—they just go about living their lives and they develop that way naturally.

Animals in nature don’t go to the gym. They don’t lift weights, they don’t do cardio, they don’t read about the latest hot training routine and they don’t go on diets. Yet despite the fact that they don’t do any of these things, wolf cubs, lion cubs and others grow up to be skilled hunters with lean but incredibly strong bodies. Why? Because they live their lives the way nature intended, doing the activities that nature intended them to be doing without giving it any thought. It’s like this throughout nature, with all species. What does this have to do with building a better body and why should you care? A lot—and I am going to tell you why.

Over the last thousand years or so man has gotten soft. By nature, we’re hunter-gatherers, meaning that our bodies are built both to hunt and to forage for food—we kind of get the best of both worlds. But as our society has become more civilized we’ve moved away from doing the things that nature intended our bodies to be doing. And as a result, for the most part we’ve become flabby, soft and out-of-shape. We don’t have to hunt down animals and kill them with our bare hands or with simple tools and we don’t have to traverse long distances, searching for fruits, vegetables and nuts. When we did have to do those things every day in order to survive, we developed naturally lean and strong bodies—without even thinking about it.

Today though, we go to the gym, use machines, moon over the latest fad diet or hot new supplement. And what’s the result? More people than ever before are overweight or obese. Our intellect and knowledge have grown exponentially but yet overall, we’re in progressively worse shape than at any time in our history. What’s the problem? I’ll tell you what the problem is—it’s us. When man intervenes things start to get all mucked up.

We’ve moved away from living the way nature intended us to live. We train at the gym doing exercises that are unnatural and wonder why we don’t get results. Our ancestors didn’t do this but yet they thrived. Look at the warrior cultures like the Spartans, the Vikings, the Roman Gladiators and others. They didn’t have gyms but they developed lean, powerful, muscular bodies. They got that way because they did what they had to do to survive. They trained every day not doing isolated, contrived movements, but using compound movements that incorporated a variety of training styles and developed real-world skills.

Our ancestors didn’t order carry-out food. If they were hungry they had to go out and forage or hunt. And while doing this, sometimes they got chased by wolves, bears or other humans. Food had to be carried across distances. If they killed a bear, they probably had to drag it a long ways back to camp. And the warrior cultures did the same thing—trekking across the land wearing their heavy battle gear and lugging cumbersome weapons, supplies and even wounded soldiers. These are the kinds of activities that are bodies were built to do. When we did those things on a daily basis, we just naturally got the best results without even thinking about it. Our ancestors—the hunter/gatherers and the warrior cultures developed into what they were and thrived because if they didn’t, they would have perished.

And if we today want to see the same kind of results and be lean, muscular, strong and healthy, we need to stop looking for the magic bullet and look to our past. We need to get primal and train the way nature intended our bodies to train. To get really healthy and get the bodies we want we need to exercise the way our ancestors lived by getting primal in our workouts. So how’s a modern guy supposed to “get primal” in his workout? One of the best ways to train like our ancestors is by following training strategies like Lean Hybrid Muscle Training and others.

As you may already know hybrid muscle training is a training philosophy. It incorporates the best of bodybuilding, powerlifting, strongman and cardio and combining them into a cohesive training philosophy that essentially mimics the sorts of intense physical activities our ancestors would have done on a daily basis. The approach runs totally contrary to most of what you may have read in magazines but most “revolutionary” ideas have done the same. It’s a way to burn fat and build muscle at the same time, without the hit or miss—mostly miss—hassles of bulking and cutting. Lean Hybrid Muscle Training will really supercharge workouts and completely maximize your results.

Visit the Official LHM blog @ http://www.leanhybridmusclereview.net/primalworkouts

lean hybrid muscle workouts

Do You Have To Be Fat To Be Strong?

Read the Official Lean Hybrid Muscle Review by Clicking Here!

Primal Workouts