Increase Bodybuilding Performance

Pace Yourself, It's Not a Sprint

In my years prior to bodybuilding, I was a gymnast and professional dancer. I was always interested in sports nutrition and supplementation growing up. I was inspired to go into medicine by articles that I read in Muscular Development, much like this column. After becoming an All-American in gymnastics in college, I kept up with it in medical school, chasing the dream to be a world champion.

As I entered my orthopaedics residency, I kept up my gymnastics and dance while also trying my hand at bodybuilding. Burning the candle at both ends resulted in a dramatic crash in 2005. Having just competed in my first NPC Junior Nationals, I was excited when I signed my first supplement contract. I flew to Los Angeles to do a photo shoot. That weekend, I would perform on the rings for the last time in my life on Santa Monica Beach.

In the middle of the shoot, I was playing around on the rings doing variations of the “iron cross.” After a brief warm-up, I pulled up into a maltese cross and felt a pop. My biceps tendon had pulled off the bone. After all those years of training and all my experience reading MD, and becoming an MD and learning to operate, I still sustained an injury that I never should have. My tendon ruptured because I had many misconceptions about exercise, attitude, sports medicine and nutrition. 

- Misconception #1: I thought that I had to give 110 percent every time I went to the gym.

- Misconception #2: I thought that my mind had all of the control over my body.

- Misconception #3: I thought that pain was “weakness leaving the body.”

- Misconception #4: I believed that three meals per day was the way to eat.

All of these misconceptions and many others lead me to develop The G.A.I.N. Plan. 

G = Graded Exercise

Giving 110 percent in every workout isn’t necessary. It is more important to train smart than to go at your workouts with blind ambition. You need to learn when is the right time to “shock the system” in to growth. You need to know how to “grade” your exercise. Grade means gradually inclining your performance while also giving yourself a grade. Your workout program should be goal-oriented so that you can follow your progress with objective measures. Take two steps forward and anticipate one step back. Recover and keep moving forward.

A = Attitude

The mind has very powerful control over the body. How you interpret your surroundings affects your body. The fight-or-flight response and the stress it evokes affects your physiology to the point where it can make or break a champion bodybuilder in their last week of prep. However, I never really realized how much your body can control your mind. When you physically stress the body without giving it time to recover, metabolites build up and change the way you think. A negative attitude toward training can simply mean you have trained too much. Understanding how to control your attitude and thus stress is a huge component of your G.A.I.N. Plan.

I = Integrated Medicine

Pain isn’t always weakness leaving the body. Sure, you have to work through the burn in the gym, but often times it is difficult to know when you have an injury brewing. Furthermore, overtraining syndrome with its metabolic and hormonal disturbances can crush anyone’s desire to build muscle. Muscle is metabolic currency and The G.A.I.N. Plan is designed to help you build muscle and maintain it even when strictly dieting. 

N = Nutrition

We are all told at an early age that we should eat a healthy breakfast, lunch and dinner. However, many studies show that this eating pattern just doesn’t cut it when you’re trying to put on muscle. Especially when we eat the way most Americans do, with our protein skewed more toward the evening meal.

Early on, many myths stifle our progress much how kryptonite stifles Superman. Sugar is our kryptonite in that it produces resistance to our most anabolic hormone, insulin. Sugar “caramelizes” our tissues (glycation), leading to inflammation and tissue damage. We are told early on that orange juice is part of a complete breakfast of sugar flakes, and manufacturers hide sugar as “evaporated can juice.” However, we have an “anti-kryptonite” that most bodybuilders are becoming more aware of over time.

When we eat protein more evenly throughout the day we can build more muscle, as a threshold is met with higher and more frequent protein intake. That threshold is the leucine content of your food. Leucine is a branched-chain amino acid that turns on muscle growth as well as contributes to muscle protein structure. Leucine is one of two amino acids that can’t be converted to kryptonite (sugar) in your blood. Finally, leucine has the ability to boost insulin secretion and improve insulin sensitivity. Leucine is essentially the “anti-kryptonite” that will save your muscle.

My book series The G.A.I.N. Plan and its iPhone app and nutrition bars will help you to maximize your training, boost your attitude, keep you healthy and optimize your leucine intake. Get your copy today at YourGAINPlan.com. Feel free to follow me on Twitter and Instagram @victorprisk for updates to my blog and further insight into G.A.I.N.

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