If you’re wondering how to ask a question, sign-up for this thing. I send out weekly notes with personal, honest training reflections and tips, book reviews and suggestions, and the most recent blog posts from my personal email address. All you have to do is hit reply and type away. ===== This week’s question comes from [...]
If you’re wondering how to ask a question, sign-up for this thing. I send out weekly notes with personal, honest training reflections and tips, book reviews and suggestions, and the most recent blog posts from my personal email address. All you have to do is hit reply and type away.
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This week’s question comes from no specific email because it’s a question found in a lot of emails. If you aren’t skinny-fat, does anything I say apply to you? Maybe you’re more along the fat side. Maybe you’re more along the skinny side. Whatever. Why do I single out skinny-fat?
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Skinny-fat syndrome is about two things:
- losing fat.
- building muscle.
You’ll probably find some useful giblets tucked away in my particular fat loss and muscle building lens no matter your starting point.
What I write (aesthetics-wise) is geared towards skinny-fat people because I used to be skinny-fat. A big part of dealing with skinny-fat syndrome is managing the mental game of being both skinny and fat — the schizophrenic idea of being perceived as both lanky and bony when, underneath the clothes, a different story is told.
It probably sounds stupid to anyone not skinny-fat, but I don’t care because everyone skinny-fat understands what I mean.
On the physical side, I’ll start with fat because it’s less unique than the muscle conundrum.
Fondling body fat
Fat loss (it seems) is one of the more universal body composition problems. There’s little-to-no ability to spot reduce where you lose fat. Fat loss is about creating an environment that encourages your insides to set the fat inside your fat cells ablaze. Your body decides where the fat melts first and last.
There might be some black magic to fat distribution. Males tend to carry more in the upper body. Females tend to carry more in the lower body. There’s also stress, which might make you store fat in a specific place.
Extreme glucocorticoid secretion (when you’re a teeming ball of stress all day, this is what happens) seems to make you prone to store more fat around your waist and midsection. Mentioned that more here.
This is one of the reasons why The Skinny-Fat Solution deals with soul (life, confidence), which is apart of stimulation and supply which influence signaling. More here.
But, really, I wouldn’t change any of my fat loss philosophy. Skinny-fat? Fat-fat? Whatever.
The muscle side is a different story
Things are a bit more unique on the muscle end. Two reasons.
First, skinny-fat guys often have skinny roots. They have smaller body frames. Smaller bone structures. Less muscular. It takes a lot more convincing and coaxing to gain muscle. Especially compared to the genetically gifted.
For skinny-fat guys, it’s important to use powerful muscle building methods. To understand powerful, look at the absence of power: zero gravity.
Astronauts wither into nothingness when they go to space.
So I use a heuristic opposite of lack of bone-body loaded and withering into nothingness: exercises that load the body and skeleton in a supragravitational way are better for convincing the body to build muscle.
Bigger organism hit = bigger stressor = more convincing to the body = more justification for the investment. It’s why two of the best exercises for the upper body are chin-ups and dips. And also why I recommend going capsule corp style and building a home gym (if you don’t have access to a gym). Barbell and bodyweight and other free weight training is your best friend.
Second, there’s the issue of underlying body frame. It’s one thing to say “x” type of exercises are good for muscle building, but muscle is a callous. You don’t get callouses on your toes from using your hands.
You can pick and choose—to a certain degree—where you’re going to hunk down muscle. I try developing the body a certain way because my proportion drove me nuts.
Skinny-fat guys are built like an “A.” I’ve always been drawn to the “X” physique, so the top half of the “X” is a “V.” The “A” and “V” have opposite shapes.
Take a skinny-fat guy that has a more “A” frame, strip the fat off, and you’re still left with an “A” frame. Similarly, take the “A” frame, add muscle in equal proportions everywhere and, viola!, you’re still left with an “A” frame.
I hold no allegiances to any sport or method. I don’t slave to powerlifting. Or Olympic weightlifting. I use exercises that are (a) effective and (b) play to the goal at hand.
For instance, my fundamental four exercises for those that want to build an “X” and also perhaps dabble in the gymnastics and bodyweight world are:
- Front squat
- Snatch grip deadlift
- Weighted chin-up
- Weighted dip
I’d call these my “frenzied four” or something if I had a brain and was decent at marketing.
Not only do I think these four will take care a lot aesthetic hiccups, they’ll also do you well athletically. Start front squatting 1.5 times your bodyweight and snatch pulling 2 times your bodyweight, and strength isn’t going to be what’s stonewalling you athletically.
Although these four are my babies, a skinny-fat guy might want to be weary of dips. Dips hunk mass onto the lower chest. Some even consider the exercise the best chest exercise around. But when you have an out of proportioned chest and have lived for years under the shroud of “bitch tits” things change.
So the conclusion of sorts
So it’s not that what I recommend wouldn’t work for anyone non-skinny-fat. It would. But the information is more suited towards decisions that a skinny-fat person interested in building their body a certain way should make.
Some hate the idea of building your physique a certain way. It usually comes from those that try to overly “sculpt” themselves. I get that. I don’t do that.
You have to put down a lot of clay when you start to sculpt. But I also think that you can but down lots of clay in general areas. Front squats, snatch deadlifts, chin-ups — these aren’t fu-fu exercises.
I’m not recommending advanced body part splits with zillions of isolation exercise. I’m simply saying that it’s probably a good idea to think about the future if you have no master beyond your own imagination. And you can do that by biasing the exercises that have more play in building your body the way you want it to eventually turn out.
There are more avenues here, like whether or not to cut or bulk first. (I wrote about that before though — see here.) But I think that gives the gist of my feelings on the topic.