Elite Physique The New Science of Building a Better Body

CHAPTER 4
Building Muscle Versus
Burning Fat
Everyone knows you need to train one way to get bigger and another way to
get leaner.
When the goal is to increase muscle mass, you need to do a high volume of
training, using moderately heavy weights and sets of 8 to 12 repetitions, with
some periods of heavier lifting with the goal of increasing strength. And when
the goal is to lose fat, you need to use lighter weights with much higher reps.
Indeed, those are the recommendations you’ll typically hear and read. And it
makes sense, especially if you look at the people who have the kind of physiques
we aspire to. The most muscular non-steroid-using bodybuilders almost always
do high-volume workouts with reps in the traditional hypertrophy range. The
leanest people often promote body weight movements and cardiorespiratory
exercise while eschewing heavy weights.
But with some thought, you’d see the flaw in using anecdotes as evidence.
Generations of young lifters have followed the training routines of elite athletes
and contest-winning bodybuilders, but very few have ended up with physiques
like theirs. You and I could do the exact same program and get very different
results. I might get bigger while you get leaner, even though we’re both doing
the same exercises with the same system of sets and reps.
That doesn’t mean the program is optimal for either goal. It just means the
results of a program are determined by factors beyond sets, reps, and exercise
selection. Chief among them is your caloric balance, as you’ll see in this chapter.
You’ll also learn the physiological causes of muscle growth. I’ll finish with
a comparison of my muscle-building and fat-burning programs—why they’re
similar in some ways but very different in others.
57