Bodybuilding Sticking Points - Dennis Wolf Has The Answers
Bodybuilding Sticking Points - Dennis Wolf Has the Answers
What do you do to increase your appetite when it gets hard to eat? I’m still in my off-season. I heard that cardio would help, so I’ve been doing cardio three to four times a week— but it’s still mad tough to eat. And just out of curiosity, how many meals a day do you eat?
I always had a pretty good appetite, but I did get to a point where I knew I had to somehow get more food down if I was going to make any more gains. So I learned a couple of tricks I can share with you now. One is to have a piece of chocolate at the end of a meal. This will spike your blood sugar, and then a couple of hours later your blood sugar gets low and you are hungry again. Maybe this is why so many very overweight people are always hungry?
Another thing that works very well for me is to eat as little fat as possible. Fat makes you feel full and it also takes the longest of the three macronutrients to digest. Haven’t you ever noticed that when you eat something like a big steak or a pizza that you aren’t hungry for three or maybe four hours, at least? Fat kills your appetite, so try and eat the leanest things you can, like grilled chicken breast, egg whites, turkey breast and white fish. Don’t use butter, creams or sauces. If you eat very lean and clean (except for the bits of chocolate!), you should be hungry much more often.
How many meals I eat depends on when we are talking about. Right after a show, I give myself a break from training and I also don’t worry about how often I eat. It might be three meals a day usually, or four at the most. Once I get back into off-season training again, I start eating my usual five to six meals a day. When I start dieting, my metabolism speeds up. Even though I’m not starving like some guys on a contest diet are, I know from experience that if I don’t eat enough I will flatten out. So then it’s six to seven meals a day, with one or two of those sometimes being a protein shake from BSN.
What type of cardio do you advocate, whether it’s off-season or pre-contest: interval or steady state?
I have tried interval style cardio, such as going fast for five minutes and then slower for five minutes over and over again. I didn’t like it. Interval cardio makes me tired, and I don’t feel that your cardio should be exhausting. The goal is to lose body fat (and also to have a healthy heart), and I think if you expend too much effort during cardio, you can start to lose your muscle too. I prefer to just warm up for a few minutes, then find a good rate of speed that I can maintain for about 30 minutes and stay there. The two machines I use are the treadmill and the StepMill, both of which I have here at my house.
I know you stay pretty lean, but from what I’ve read that’s mainly due to you having a fast metabolism. For the rest of us who can get fat easily if we aren’t careful, what do you think a reasonable amount of body fat is during the off-season? Should you be able to see the abs a little, or can I get a little heavier than that?
It is true that I have a fast metabolism. But even if I didn’t, I don’t think I would ever let my body fat get very high. Think about it this way. If you compete, and I assume you do if you even use the term “off-season,” eventually you will have to diet off all the fat on your body so you can show all the deep cuts and striations. So the more fat you have put on, the more you will have to take off. That makes the diet very hard.
Another thing most people don’t seem to know about is that you don’t just gain fat under the skin, but also inside your body around your organs. This is why a lot of guys have big guts even though you can still see their abs. They have gained a lot of that deep-down fat!
Another thing to consider about letting yourself gain too much fat is that it will affect the quality of your sleep. Sleep apnea is when your airway closes up during sleep and you stop breathing. I’ve had it before, and it’s terrible! You wake up feeling like you are choking, or drowning.
So yes, I think you should always be able to see your abs throughout the year, just not perfectly clear. Watch how much dietary fat you take in, because in the big picture I think fat is worse than carbs. If you eat a low-fat diet and make sure you don’t eat far more carbs than you need, you should be able to make gains without a lot of it turning into fat.
I know a lot of bodybuilders get their meat at Whole Foods, because grass-fed beef without the extra hormones is supposed to be much healthier for you. I went there for the first time a few days ago, and wow, is everything there expensive! I read in one of your past columns that you get your meat there too. Can you please tell me honestly, do you notice any difference in the taste or how you feel eating that meat versus what you can get at the regular supermarket or Costco?
Bodybuilding isn’t always the healthiest sport, with all the supplements and the amount of meat we eat. So if I am going to eat so much meat anyway, I do want to try and make sure it doesn’t have a bunch of weird chemicals and hormones in it. The grass-fed beef and cage-free chickens and eggs do taste better to me. Are they really healthier for you? I sure hope so, considering the price! I can tell you one thing that’s weird, though. Ever since I have been living in America, when I go back to Germany I can’t eat the chicken there. It tastes funny for some reason— maybe chemicals? But even regular supermarket chicken in the USA tastes much better than what they have in German restaurants.