In this diet game, there are rules. Now sure, if you break these rules a referee won’t drop out of the sky and blow a whistle all up in your face, but by following them you’ll increase the likelihood of sticking to your caloric deficit, emerging on the other side looking and feeling a lot better.

1. Secure home base

There is a tasty killer lurking in your house, and he is out to desexify your body. The most disturbing part of all is that you’re the one that let him in. A lot of the damage that occurs during a diet happens right at home – late night binging, mindless tv snacking, etc – and often involves all of the comfort foods that are mighty delicious, but pack a ton of calories and are easy to devour with reckless abandon. If that’s the case, it makes sense to avoid this pitfall entirely by getting those foods out of the place where they’re most likely to be eaten.

The first rule of Rogonian Law is that if a food is in your house, it will eventually end up in your stomach. Sandra Aamodt and Sam Wang wrote a great op-ed piece for the New York Times discussing how will power is a finite resource and that while demonstrating zen-like will power on one task, you “deplete” your reserves and are therefore less likely to display that same amount of self-control when performing another seemingly unrelated task.

I don’t say this to give you a reason to obliterate the cookie jar when stressed – quite the contrary, because with practice our will power reserves can be bolstered. The best way to avoid eating something is not to have it around at all. If you’re not ready to make this plunge just yet, you can always slowly get these foods out of your house, first by reducing the portion size. Instead of buying the huge carton of ice cream, keep one or two of the single serving cups in the house – think of it as preemptive damage control. If you eat both of them, you’ve done much less harm than if you crushed an entire pint.

2. Don’t roll solo

Once you leave the comfort and safety of home base, that’s when it gets real. Not just real, but realer than real. You’re away from your usual foods and now you’re venturing out into a world where you’re rarely more than 5 minutes away from something you can eat. This is where will power is critical, but it’s best to come prepared regardless. Bag up something non perishable and keep it in your bag or car – think a piece or two of fruit (beef jerky is also an option, but you may lose friends if you eat it in close quarters) or protein powder. In those moments of dietary weakness, the simple act of getting something in your stomach helps you think more clearly and reduces the likelihood of an emotional eating episode.

By employing this strategy, you don’t have to go through the whole mental rigamarole of deciding between a piece of fruit or two ginormous slices of pizza with a piece of chocolate cake in between – you’ve already made a choice that will keep you on track towards your goals.

3. Prepare for battle

When on a diet, one fact that you’re going to have to accept is that you’re going to be hungry. Maybe not all the time, and not ravishingly so, but you and hunger are going to be homies during this process. You’re going to have to interact with other people while in a state of hunger, and this is where it becomes easy to fall off the wagon. If you create a caloric buffer or eat in line with your goals before you head out the house, you can drastically decrease the chances of overeating food at a get together only to feel like crap about it later. A social gathering with food is just that – a gathering where food just happens to be. Just because it’s there doesn’t mean you have to eat a lot.

This rule applies for grocery shopping as well. I’m sure that we’ve all gone grocery shopping while hungry at least once, and the result was madness on a grand scale. That list probably snowballed from 6 simple items into pretty much anything within arms reach that looked like it might make your stomach smile with delight. Once the beast within takes over, everything starts to look like it could taste good and you make purchases that you never would under a more sane state of mind. And lets be honest here, do you really want to get home only to find out that 5 cans of Spam managed to find their way into your cart?

What are you dietary survival tactics? What has worked (or hasn’t) for you in the past? Leave your answers in the comment section below!

You have a day to make $100,000 or you’re dead – literally – what do you do?

A) Start selling old paperback books on Ebay for $1 and have a garage sale to get rid of clothes you haven’t worn in years.

or

B) Sell your car. Sell house. Sell your kidney. Sell your neighbor’s elephant while he’s at work (gotta do what you gotta do).

Any of the above will bring you closer to your goal, but the first option ensures that you’ll never eat another piece of delicious birthday cake again while the second keeps you on this side of the dirt for at least another day because it gives you the biggest return on your time investment.

Let’s take this out to the gym. You have a year to radically change your physique for the better and can only choose two exercise:

A) Chinups and deadlifts.

or

B) Bicep cable curls and leg extensions.

When it comes time to train, look around the gym and you’ll see people using all these small rocks (aka choice “B”), day after day, with very little to show for it – these are the people who will look exactly the same a year or five from now.

Big rocks are big for a reason – they’re damn awesome, make things happen, and accomplish far more than small rocks alone. They’re all about synergy and multiple parts working together. Want big arms? Chins ups and dips will get your far better results than bicep curls and overhead tricep extensions, plus you’ll receive a better looking back and pair of shoulders as a bonus for your troubles.

Big rocks give you room for growth, for expansion, for year after year of becoming better than you were the day, week, month or year before. Are there limits? Absolutely, but the average person is so far from them that their time and energy is better served not even thinking about limits and more about what actions they can take to reach their goal.

Small rocks are isolation exercises, little ideas and obsession over the minutiae that doesn’t matter – they’re self-limiting and self-defeating by nature. You’ll have to work long and hard – much more than you would if you were employing big rocks – to make progress. You need a helluva lot more small rocks to equal the impact of just one big rock.

Small rocks asking nothing from you at all. It’s easy to stay within your comfort zone, do what you’ve always done and get what you’ve always gotten.

Big rocks don’t ask – they demand – that you become better.

Big rocks are also big because their potential for growth is ginormous. You may start bench pressing with just the bar, but after a few years of consistency and dedication to pushing yourself further and further, you’ll be far beyond that; you’re giving yourself a fighting chance from the start.

Tricep extensions? No matter how strong you get, you’ll always be limited by the amount of weight on the machine; your potential is capped at a low level. It”s like being the world’s smartest ant: no matter how much if a genius you are, you’re still an ant.

As much as I love training I have other interests outside of the gym, so I like to limit my time to 2-3x a week for between 45 & 60min. I also want to get the biggest bang for my time invested, which only leads me in one direction: towards the big rocks.

Very rarely does my training change. 3-5 exercises each training day, 2-3 sets with no more than 10 reps depending on the exercise. Variety isn’t a factor because boredom comes from a lack of results, and I have a small victory every session that keeps me going.

I’m not alone in this Eric Cressey, JC Deen, Martin Berkhan, Nia Shanks & Tony Gentilcore are just a few other fitness professionals walking the talk and filling the majority of their training with big rocks. I’ve yet to meet anyone who focused on what mattered in terms of training & nutrition and didn’t look good while doing it.

If you’re not on track, then you’re about to be. Here’s a quick rundown of what matters in terms of dieting and training. Focus mainly on these (throw a few small training rocks in there if it makes you happy, but they’re not necessary), be patient enough to see results and you’ll be rewarded by lifting yourself above the herd and actually achieving the Sexification goals that you set.

Training

Big Rocks: Chinups, Pullups, Squats, Deadlifts, Bench Press variations, Overhead Presses, Dips, Leg Press, Pushups, Hip Thrusts, Lat Pulldown variations (pretty much any compound movement that you can add a lot of weight to in the long run).

Small Rocks: Cable Fly, Tricep Kickbacks, Calf Raises, Wrist Curls, Lateral Raises, Hamstring Curls, “inner thigh” machines, crunches x infinity (pretty much anything you’re not able to add a significant amount of weight to in the long run).

Diet

Big Rocks: A caloric deficit/surplus. Adequate protein intake. Consistency to the deficit/surplus. Movement.

Small Rocks: “Fat burning foods”, meal frequency, fad diets requiring you to swear religious allegiance to certain foods, excuses.

Questions? I’m here to answer any that you may have, so let me know!

Sexification Note: Martin Berkhan dropped a bomb of a post recently that I know you’ll definitely get something out of. Check it out here.

Photo Credit: GorillaNut

We’ve all had one of those days. You know, the one where it takes every fiber of our being to make it to the gym and all we want to do is get in, throw around some weights, and get on with the day. On days like those, even dedicating 10 minutes to warming up can snatch the wind right out of your sails – what is a homie to do?

Have no fear, The Rog is here!

I’ve put together a quick full body warm up that will get you ready to roll out in less than 3 minutes (double the time if you’re feeling particularly sassy and want to run through it twice). Give it a try the next time you’re in the gym and feel free to send me a video of you panting and slobbering like an overworked horse once you’re done.

Photo Credit: JD Hancock

Ah yes, the weekend – the magical time between Friday (or Thursday if you’re awesome like that) and Monday that’s filled with excitement and endless possibilities.

Oh yeah, and dietary debauchery as well, and it’s absolutely killing your fat loss results.

I hear it all of the time: “I was doing so well during the week but fell off hard during the weekend.” I don’t know what it is about weekend that leads to many people looking in the mirror Monday after Monday wondering what the hell happened over just a few short days, but I do have a few Einstenian theories.

Let’s face it, dieting can be hard, so it’s helpful to know that on Wednesday you just have to last a few more days before you can ease up on the gas pedal a bit and get your mind right before jumping back onto your diet on Monday. I completely understand it. It’s nice to be able to go out with friends without having to worry about your intake as much as you do during the week.

You also have the untamed Wild West nature of the weekend. Unless you’re Beyonce or a travelling assassin for hire, odds are your weekdays have a pretty consistent level of structure. You know you’re going to be at home for a certain amount of time before going to work, and once there you know roughly how long you’ll be there before heading somewhere else and so on until you end up back in bed. With these variables in place it’s much easier to keep your diet in check as opposed to the weekend when the normal structure of life disappears and the likelihood of going buck wild with your food intake increases.

Then finally we have the scenario where you become your own worst enemy.

The way that a lot of people structure their diet is based entirely around the deprivation mindset and the belief that there is no room for treats and “non-diet” foods – a Spartan-like rigidity and adherence tends to accompany this style of dieting.

I don’t have any issue with this way of doing things if this is just how that person rolls, but what often happens as a result is that when the weekend rolls around they feel like they deserve to eat those foods that they’ve blacklisted (and eat more food in general) because they stuck to their diet so well during the week.  So they eat, and because they’ve deprived themselves for so long and they know that they won’t be eating like this again for at least another week they eat a bit (read:a lot) more of it than they otherwise would have.

So how does the weekend slow down fat loss in the real world?

First we’ll start with the optimal scenario. Let’s assume that during the week you’re crushing it like the boss you are and by Friday night you’ve been in a deficit of 3,500 calories (roughly a 700 calorie deficit per day), earning yourself 1lb of fat loss. Awesome!

Now Saturday and Sunday roll around. You plan to stay the course, but you end up eating 500 calories over your maintenance each day. Because of this, you can go ahead and subtract 1,000 calories from that 3,500 calorie deficit you created during the week, putting you at 2,500 calories burned in total which will net you a little more than half a pound of fat loss for the week.

Not bad at all.

Now let’s talk about what usually goes down.

Let’s assume that during the week you think you’re crushing it diet wise, but due to not moving as much as you think you are and not tracking your intake as well as you should, sneaking extra bites of food here and there, by the time Friday night rolls around you’ve only accumulated a 1,750 calorie deficit, which is half a pound of fat. That’s cool though, because you still have two more days to put in work, right?

Mmmmmmhmm.

It’s weekend time, and once again you end up going over your maintenance by 500 calories on both Saturday and Sunday – go ahead and knock 1,000 calories off that 1,750 calorie deficit you already created, putting you at 750 calories for the week which ends being a face-palm worthy .2lbs worth of fat loss. This becomes even more painful once you do the math and realize that at this rate it would take another 4 weeks before you even saw 1lb of fat loss.

This is the very definition of 3 steps forward/2 steps back, and there is only one thing to say about that situation:

How To Not Become Another Weekend Statistic

1. Be extremely diligent during the week in preparation for the weekend.

If you’re one of those people that no matter how much sense it makes to change your weekend eating habits but isn’t going to actually do it, then this option makes the most sense for you. If you know you’re going to be in food heaven during the weekend, then the only other variable that you can control is to hit your deficit hardcore during the week and make sure that you’re on top of tracking your intake.

Think of it as preemptive damage control.

This way, even if you end up going over your calories a bit on the weekend, you’re still in a pretty decent deficit for the entire week. Strength training on the weekend helps a bit as well in the sense that you have nutrient partitioning on your side (some of the additional calories going towards muscle repair).

Just know that this strategy alone can only take you so far and at some point, depending on your results and if you want to speed them up, you’re going to have to bring change to the weekend.

2. Rock out for 5 days, maintain for 2.

If you cant handle an aggressive deficit during the week, then this is a good option that gives you the best of both worlds: you can choose a less harsh deficit Monday-Friday and then on Saturday & Sunday you can simply eat at maintenance. This way you can still accumulate a pretty decent weekly deficit which is great because you’re eating to maintain on the weekend and therefore you aren’t backsliding and erasing any of the gains that you’ve already made.

I would also make sure that you include some delicious, traditionally “non-diet food” into your meal plan during the week so that you don’t feed into that sense of deprivation, decreasing the chances of you going wild with such foods on the weekend. This is something that I suggest implementing during any diet.

3. Use Intermittent Fasting

I’m a huge fan of intermittent fasting as both a diet strategy and a long term lifestyle choice, but it  can also do wonders in the short term. For example, you would eat a sizable meal on Friday night before bed and on Saturday go about your day, holding off eating your first meal for as long as you can. If you have to eat sooner rather than later, turn it into a game and see how little food you can get away with until you go out to dinner; make your first meal a small portion of your overall calories (I.E. if your caloric budget for the day is 1800 calories, eat a 200-400 calorie meal with lots of protein and fiber for satiety which will help hold you over).

By doing this, at the end of the end of the night you’ll still have room for another 1400-1600 calories which is an amazingly satisfying amount of food, unless you go out of your way fill that quota with crap, but that’s another issue entirely. Rinse and repeat on Sunday.

Does it suck to have to watch what you eat on the weekend while everyone else around you eats whatever they want? It all depends on your mindset. It sucks more to have an entire weeks worth of results crippled by two days worth of dietary weakness. It also sucks to have it take 5 months to lose only 5lbs because you kept repeating the same weekend errors over and over again.

At the end of the day an uncontrolled weekend can absolutely ruin a good week, and if you think otherwise then you need to get your head checked. This is America, baby, home of the Luther Burger! Life is full of compromises, and if you want to lose fat at any appreciable rate of speed you’re going to make some one way or another.

Get in there, make it happen, and get on with the rest of your life.

“Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion.”
– Muhammad Ali

 Photo Credit: Naomi Ibuki