What I didnt know about abs...By: Cort Arthur

Contact Info:
Cort Arthurarthur.cort@gmail.com
Facebook: Cort Arthur  

Twitter: @CortArthur

If you want to have the lean body, the big muscles, and the awesome booty, you have to WORK AT IT! There is no excuses allowed, only excuses made!!!

 

I asked my friend Cort Arthur to write a blog over belly fat... I actually had no clue that some of the exercises mentioned would get you abs...  Def. try to read the whole thing... when I first started reading it I was expecting to read all these cool tricks but honestly... I'm glad to read that its stuff I'm already doing that is helping build my core which is AWESOME bc that's a few less things I would have had to add to my work out. THANKS AGAIN CORT :))OH AND I LOVE HOW he bluntly tells you towards the END of the blog that if your not going to work for it then dont complain!! :)) A healthy body doesnt come for free and easy. (thank you Cort)
If you read this blog you will truly understand weight loss more. Its a little hard to read if your not familiar with some of it but if you can wrap your head around it, I honestly think it will help, and its important to understand this stuff anyway!!

Performance Goals and Weight Loss
Hello everyone! My name is Cort Arthur. I am a friend of Belle’s who all but begged her to let me write a guest blog post on her magnificent forum. She has done an amazing job with 1) Her Journey in weight loss and body transformation, and 2) in telling people the truth about how truly hard it is and how much it sucks. She often gets praise from people both on the blog, and also on her Facebook page…I’m telling you now, she deserves more praise than she gets. Her results are fantastic, and her honesty is amazing. There is little doubt in my mind as to why she has been so successful, the previous sentence states the exact reason.
 
Ketones, Glucose, and Belly Fat
Today, I want to talk a little bit about Performance Goals. Belle asked me to talk about belly fat, and I promise that I am, but it’s going to be a bit indirectly related to the post as a whole.
The great thing about the human body is that it is, in fact, not that different from person to person. I often hear, “Oh, eating that way won’t work for me,” or “I can’t lose weight because my parents were always heavy, and it’s in my genetics.” While I don’t have a hard time listening to people who tell me these lines, I do have a very hard time taking them seriously. Here’s the scoop: the human body is designed to smash certain foods into an energy efficient, body fueling oblivion, other types of food is creates into somewhat unusable, definitely unsustainable bits of badness and deposits them in places that no one wants to talk about, much less see. (Love handles, saddle bags, Yeah I dont like seeing those either Cort LOL)
In its ultimate state, the human body does what it is supposed to do, it helps the soul it carries until the ever present expiration date move from Point A to Point B without getting itself smashed by a dinosaur, mountain lion, or the ever present alligator/crocodile (perhaps the scariest animals to ever live!). How do you reach that ultimate state? Well, I tell you that it has to do more with food than anything else.
Ok, quickly to the bottom line: If you want to lose BELLY FAT, look no further than the word ketosis. Ketosis, not to be confused with Ketoacidosis (that’s bad), is the state of being in which the body in which  the human machine uses STORED FATS as energy! How sweet that sounds, right?!? What happens in Ketosis, or a ketogenic state is the body makes ketones to use as a primary energy source instead of using glucose. Ketones are simply a bi-product of fat metabolism, a water soluble bit of energy that most of the tissue in our body can use for energy. Now, what’s crazy about Ketones is the simple fact that the heart, kidneys, and intestines work BETTER on ketones than they do glucose (sugar). (NO MORE DONUTS, CANDY, COKES, ALCOHOL ETC...)
Now, with out getting too sciency, I will just say that the difference between the two forms of energy is how the body uses them. Glucose/glycogen stores are consumed very rapidly throughout the body, to the point that you have to constantly replenish them as you use them (eating a crap load of carbohydrates). Now, ketones, even in a Belle Parham-esque lean body are there for the taking, because no matter how lean you get you still have stored fat to use as energy.
So, with all of this said, what am I really trying to say? Basically, a low carb diet (preferably a diet with zero grains, and carbohydrates only coming from fruits and veggies) is how your body wants to function. I won’t lie, it takes a bit of time to get used to... but think of it this way, you get to eat more bacon and steak!
Now, I want to talk about Performance Goals. As someone who works with teenagers on a daily basis, I completely understand why people want to be lean, and why they HAVE TO HAVE abs! I hope I don’t offend anyone with this, but I think that abs are the stupidest muscle ever invented (mostly because I don’t have them, I think...). I will say that, with every athlete I have worked with, abs have shown up pretty quickly when they stopped thinking about abs.
I have a phenomenal athlete named Levi. He is 17 years old, he has a 550ish backsquat, a 350ish bench press, and a 500ish deadlift. He runs a sub 4.7 40 yard dash, can do 25-30 strict pull ups on a single serving, and can jump vertically close to 38 inches. He is amongst the top powerlifters in the state of Texas, and I think will have a fantastic football season this year as a junior.
Levi has completely sold out to what I have told him. He comes and works out with me every single day, he eats pretty well (doesn’t avoid soy as much as I would like him to) and looks like he was chiseled out of marble by Michelangelo. He used to work and work and work for abs. Crunches daily, contraptions galore (ab wheels, funny looking hangy things from chin-up bars, etc). When I finally got him to quit worrying about his “core” (another stupid word in my opinion) his abs showed up!
What we did with Levi is we started to work on performance goals. We know that if he puts the time and the effort into the gym, he will get what he wants. He doesn’t need to do HOURS and HOURS of cardio, to the point of complete muscle break down. Nah, instead he squats houses, bench presses cars, and deadlifts trains off of damsels in distress (as chivalrous as that may sound, it’s still messy).
How we program for our athletes
Levi isnt the only one who looks like he came from a museum. I have several boys and girls both that look very lean, very strong, and super fit. I can say that my girls summer program is completely fascinating. This summer I’ve had 12-or-so girls come in and completely busted their asses on (they are squatting heavy, so that is the opposite of making them go away). They have lines in their quads, in their arms and shoulders, it’s amazing! The best part for me, as their coach/trainer, today I heard one of them say “I love to squat now, I used to hate it because it hurt my knees so badly, but now it doesn’t hurt at all, and I love to move heavy weight.” She’s a sophomore, she will squat 200lbs plus for a set of five before the summer is out, maybe even 225.
Anyways, we program our athletes to do several things: be able to move under heavy loads in various positions, be explosive, and have a motor that can last. That’s broad, I know. Often times I see that people have different solutions, or starting places for new lifters/fitness goers. I tend to fall in line with the Mark Rippetoe (excellent strength coach, maybe the best ever?) line of thinking. It all starts with strength. As a human, when your strength goes, you start to see many other things go. Flexability, mobility (the scariest one), creativity, etc. So, how do you get strong?
Well, the easiest thing I can tell you to do is to learn how to squat properly (deep). The back squat is, without a doubt, the single most important exercise in any weight room. I absolutely HATE going to a gym and seeing no squat rack, or hack squats/smith machines instead. It’s a disservice to humanity. The awesome part of squatting is that it creates more change throughout your entire body than any other lift, reason being is it uses more muscles to complete the movement than any other lift. Your calves have to stabilize your ankles, your hammies, quads, and glutes have to lower, then raise you up; your abs (both front and back) are supreme stabilizers so you don’t crash through the floor, your chest, shoulders, biceps, triceps, traps, and delts are used to control the weight. I challenge another exercise that uses every part of your human system to move an object. My email address will be in this somewhere, you can contact me to debate if you want. Bring sources.
Why should you train like an athlete?
I know that most, if not all of you are not necessarily athletes. When I say that I’m not coming down on you, I am merely saying that your competitive days may well be behind you. Nothing wrong with that at all. You should still train like one.
Guys tell me all the time, “I want to look like I did in high school.” Well, no shit, dude! (for the record, I don’t want to look that way, I weighed about 130lbs as a graduating senior, a full 100lbs less than I do presently). My response to these men is typically, “dude, then train like you did when you were in high school.”  SO TRUE!!!!
“Cort, that’s too hard.”
“I understand, then be satisfied with how you look.” (love that Cort said this!!)
Bottom-bottom line is this, and I think that Belle states this clearly (both indirectly and directly) in her posts: If you want to have the lean body, the big muscles, and the awesome booty, you have to WORK AT IT! There is no excuses allowed, only excuses made. OH CORT!! LOVE THIS WHOLE PART OF YOUR BLOG!!
In closing, I hope you enjoyed this post. I know that it was long winded and possibly confusing. So, if you have questions, feel free to email me at arthur.cort@gmail.com. I will answer as quickly as I can. I may not know every answer to every question, but I have spent the better part of the last 10 years trying to be smarter at this. In the last 5 years I have made some good strides. This summer I will complete my CSCS training and be an official Certified Strength and Conditioning Coach through the NSCA (www.nsca-lift.org). I am a certified CrossfitFootball Trainer (and more-so, a junky), and a Robb Wolf enthusiast (www.robbwolf.com). If you want to see old workouts of mine, feel free to look at my blog (I don’t keep up with it much any more, because I see my students on a more regular basis than I used to). It’s address is www.bearcatgymwise.blogspot.com. We have changed several things about our programming since I last posted there, but the concepts are the same. Again, ask me questions if you have any, and keep up the good fight, I have zero doubt that you can do it for yourself... Now you need to think the same way.
Contact Info:
Cort Arthur
arthur.cort@gmail.com
Facebook: Cort Arthur
Twitter: @CortArthur