The following is an excerpt of an interview I did for The Elite Body, with Vince Delmonte, author of No Nonsense Muscle Building.

Jim:    So going with the hormone thing and not doing steroids, what are the alternatives to that?  What are the natural ways to stimulate those hormones?

Vince:    That’s a great question.  Let’s look at the three things – training, lifestyle and nutrition.  Let’s start off with things people might miss on lifestyle.  The reality is that when training, you’re only in the gym a couple of hours a week.  The majority of the time you’re outside of the gym.  So sleeping eight hours a night is very important.  These are the things that can’t really get dressed up as sexy and they can’t market on the cover of a magazine, “Sleep Eight Hours a Night.”

People underestimate this stuff.  Going to bed earlier I found was one of the big things for me in recovery and being able to train harder the next day.  I would let that kick in.  So I recommend that everybody – I’m just painting a perfect situation.  Whether you can do this or you can’t, that’s up to the person listening to the call to make that commitment and lifestyle change.

If you can get to bed closer to 10:30/11:00 each night, that’s going to help a lot.  They say for every hour of sleep you can get before midnight, it’s almost like the equivalent of two hours sleep.  I tested this out.  I know it’s amazing.  You wake up earlier and you’re able to start your first meal earlier.  You’re able to finish your last meal earlier.  Everything just seems to work a lot better.  Your body is able to start building muscle quicker.

That’s going to produce growth hormone.  That’s one of the hormones that are going to allow you to build muscle.

Also minimizing stress in your life.  Looking at the relationships you’re in; the career you’re in; the social settings you’re in; how late are you staying up – all those little things – the one isolated incident might not make a big difference.  It’s what happens when going to bed at 2:00/3:00 in the morning occurs two or three nights a week over a course of six to nine months.

That’s where the damage is.  So that’s lifestyle.  Alcohol too – that’s another thing.  A lot of people ask me, “Vince, can I drink on the weekends?”  Of course you can drink, but is it going to get you closer to your goal or further from your goal?  It all comes down to how serious you are.

If I’m getting ready for a show, the booze has got to go.  If I’m just wishy washy; I’m happy with how I look and I’m just trying to relieve some stress and that, well then sure.  A drink here and there isn’t going to be a big deal.  So you have to ask yourself how serious you are and then you’ll be able to start answering these questions better for yourself.  That’s lifestyle.

If you want to learn more about Vince’s amazing muscle building program, visit No Nonsense Muscle Building.

Jim Katsoulis: Talk a little bit about  the Tabata protocol, if I’m pronouncing that right. Talk a little bit about – explain what the Tabata protocol is and how it influenced 7 Minute Muscle and your ideas of training.

Jon Benson: Okay, yeah. Tabata is a Japanese researcher that a lot of fitness guys were quoting in the ‘90s especially when this study first came out in the early 2000, that Tabata, he just – he came up with this ridiculously intense protocol which later just became high intensity interval cardio, interval training that basically pushed people well beyond their lactate threshold for only periods of time, like brief periods of time, 30 seconds sometimes, the protocol for that are that short, followed by duration periods where you’re at – where you’re exercising at a normal pace.

So, it’s just basically – it’s a glorified version of interval cardio. And what the studies where he was most impressive, and that these studies had been duplicated, is the actual – the O2 increase, in other words, your oxygen, how much oxygen can your system use efficiently. And he was seeing just rapid, massive increases in the body’s ability to process oxygen, which means your cardio – it means that your cardio health is increasing basically. And since then a lot of guys had tried to apply that fat burning and it does work for fat burning if you do it right, and if you’re willing to do a little bit of low-intensity walking, things like that, along with it.

But I’ve always believed that fat burning was 80 percent nutrition and so the cardio is just on top of this. So, I have a version of – it’s just totally different than Tabata, to be honest with you. But it’s based – Richard’s study – Dr. Richard Winett came up with a protocol called GXP or Graded Exercise Protocol actually before Tabata if I’m not mistaken and he’s had four different university tests done, and that’s the protocol I suggest that people use.

So, the 7 Minute Muscle protocol, obviously, I developed but I quoted everyone that I actually said this is the guy who influenced me here, this is the guy who influenced me here, but the 7 Minute Muscle is totally different in the way that protocol is put together but it’s influenced by guys like Vince Geronda, it’s influenced by EDP training, by – there’s just a myriad of different influences that come into it. But the cardios are like Dr. Richard Winett’s and – so, Ageless Athletes. It’s a very, very good website. And it’s nine minutes long and I used it for years. I had used it for years. And it’s by far and away more effective than trying to do something ridiculous like the 45 minutes of cardio a day. It is, you know, unless I’m four weeks away from a photo shoot, there’s no point in it.

Jim: What are some rules people should follow for an effective workout?

Tom:    One of course would be form.  You have to learn the proper technique for the exercise.  That’s important because bad form can cause an injury.  If you’re injured, you can’t work out.  Second would be that poor form robs you of results.  For example, if you’re heaving a weight up and using momentum to lift the weight, the muscle’s not working.  Momentum is working.  If you’re dropping the weight, it is gravity working; not your muscle resisting.  Form is number one.

Number two, proper resistance – for weight training that means choosing the right amount of weight to give you the exact stimulus you need to get the response you want – strength and muscle growth.  If you don’t use enough weight, you don’t get the stimulus you wanted.  Outside of some calories you burn, your workout was ineffective.

What I’ve noticed is the advanced trainee gets a real instinct for this.  If you watch a pro in a gym, they might put the pin in the machine, do a couple of reps.  Immediately they stop and they pull the pin out and they adjust it.  They know instantly or they’ve been keeping a training journal and they’re tracking the exact poundages they used for the previous workout.  They’ve walked into the gym knowing exactly how much weight to use.

If you are a beginner, you need to work on this.  You need to develop a sense of the right load to use as early as possible in your training career.  One what that I like to help people do that is by instead of giving a fixed number of sets and reps, I use two things – a rep range and a rep max.  Now I’m sure you’ve heard a training program with a prescription “I want you to do three sets of ten; four sets of eight; five sets of five” and there’s nothing wrong with that provided you have load selection down to a “T”.  If you do that, you need to know how to pick the right weight.

I would prefer to figure out what your goal is, choose the right repetition range for that goal – for example muscle growth is typically a range of 8-12 reps – and instead of saying three sets of ten, I’m going to say “I want you to do three sets of 8-12.”  I’m going to give you a repetition max number of 12.  Your cue is that if you can do 12 reps in good form, that’s your signal to increase the weight.

If you’re training with the right weight, the last rep or two is very difficult.  You are working to get the last rep or two.  You may even hit failure on that last rep on some of your sets.  It happens between 8-12 – no brainer way to figure out how much weight to use and it’s really important because I see a lot of people using light weights and they’re doing three sets of 12, but it was a 25 rep max.  They’ve selected absolutely the wrong weights.  You’ve got to nail down the poundages.

Number three would be progressive overload or some kind of overload or some kind of progression.  That’s the fundamental principle of making progress.  Here’s a rule to remember – do what you’ve always done; get what you’ve always got.  I have that on a little poster.  I’m looking at it right now up on my bulletin board.  That’s one that you should always remember.  To get something that you never got before like more muscle or a leaner body than you’ve ever had before or more strength than you’ve ever had before, you are going to have to do some work that’s above and beyond what you’ve ever done before.  Makes sense, right?

You have to work out of your comfort zone.  Safely but steadily you push a little bit past your previous workout.  A little more weight, another rep or two, the same workout completed in less time which is called density; a new exercise you have never done before; a new combination of exercises; a new workout program – something – anything you’ve never done before.

I could go on and on, but one more I think is really important is recovery because the growth takes place outside of the gym, not while you’re in the gym.  This one is so important.  It influences all the others.  Your volume, your frequency, your resistance, everything – if you’re not recovering between workouts you may have to change your frequency.  If you were training four or five days a week, you may have to come back to three days a week or you may need to put more rest days in between.  If you were doing 12 sets per body part and you’re feeling overtrained and you’re not recovering, you may have to cut back to 8 or 6 or 3.

The idea is that you have to overload your body and make it do work that it hasn’t done before, but you have to be able to recover from that.  The idea here is that training is a stress.  People have this idea that stress is bad.  Stress is not bad.  Stress is your stimulus for growth.  No stress, no growth.  You rot away and die.  What you need is stress, recovery, stress, recovery, stress, recovery and that would be a good thing to remember in terms of life stress as well with people’s work and with people’s career.
I mention this because your lifestyle is going to influence the results that you get out of the gym too.  If you have a high stress psychological level and you’re not sleeping well and your boss is driving you crazy and you’re overworked, it’s going to affect physical recovery.  You have to take the time to balance all kinds of work with stress and that’s what’s going to keep the progress coming.

I interviewed Shawn Phillips this week and he explained this idea in such clear and profound ways that it could change the way that you think about strength for the rest of your life. He became famous for having world class abs, and since then he has continued to go deeper into teaching how you can create the body of your dreams, from the inside out. You can listen to a replay of this powerful seminar for a limited time by clicking here.