So, while weights and the like are an essential part of your bodybuilding efforts, lifting weights is an anaerobic sport, an activity that does not give your heart and lungs a workout.

Consequently, you should also consider practicing aerobic sports like swimming or cycling, and if you can find something that you really enjoy doing at the same time, so much the better. Taking up something like swimming will greatly increase your endurance and stamina, and if you enjoy it as well, it inevitably makes the necessary hard work in the gym seem that much easier to bear.

The bottom line is that becoming a successful natural bodybuilder is not something that is going to happen overnight, and there will be times when your progress might seem slower than you would like it to be.

It is at times like these, when having other things in your life, things that you can turn to for enjoyment that are nevertheless good for you, will sometimes be the escape valve that you need. Without this escape valve, you come back to the fact that you will be stressed, you will be tense and you already know how this can adversely affect your efforts.

This is not to suggest that everything you do should relate to exercise. Indeed, your life should definitely not only be focused on exercise, because rest is an essential part of being a successful bodybuilder.

There is also a school of thought that maintains that too much aerobic or cardiovascular exercise can increase the production of cortisol, so it is essential that you keep your cardiovascular exercise in the ‘fat burning zone’.

This is one reason why, for a non-competitive bodybuilder, the best time to undertake aerobic exercise is immediately after a weights session.

By doing so, you ensure that the excess glycogen in your body (the first source of energy that your body turns to before it starts to burn the fat) has been exhausted by your weight training before you start exercising. Therefore, as soon as you start aerobic exercise, you are straight into the ‘fat burning zone’ the minute you start.

Remembering that there is a counterbalance between the importance of burning fat and accumulating muscle mass, this ability to start burning fat immediately after a weights session is an excellent way of keeping your body fat percentage to a minimum.

As an approximate formula by which you calculate the point at which you enter the ‘fat burning zone’, use this formula:

FBZ = 220 – (your age) x 0.75

This will give you an approximate idea of how many heartbeats a minute you need to experience in order to start burning fat. Once you are in this ‘zone’, the average male should aim for 5 or 6 aerobic exercise sessions a week for 30 minutes a time, whereas females should be looking at 20-30 minutes the same number of times every week.

Stick to these limits, and the risk of getting into a situation where you amplify cortisol production is very limited.

There must be times when you get away from all forms of training and exercise to make an effort to relax. But when you do so, try not to succumb to bad practices that might actually damage your bodybuilding efforts.

For example, while having the occasional beer is not going to damage the chances of your being a successful bodybuilder very much, smoking 20 cigarettes a day is certainly going to make it an awful lot harder to achieve the physique that you want to achieve.

Filling your lungs with tar and nicotine filled smoke every day is likely to reduce your ability to recover from serious training sessions, meaning that you will automatically be able to train less frequently and probably with less intensity as well. Your progress to bodybuilding success will naturally be slowed if you are a heavy smoker.

One of the greatest personal characteristics that you will learn or have enhanced by becoming a natural bodybuilder is that of personal discipline, which is a prerequisite for taking a life changing decision like quitting the evil weed!

Remember to apply determination and discipline to everything in your life, and set goals in everything you do as a way of achieving and then maintaining the balance that you must have to be successful.

Getting the body that you want is going to take a lot of hard work and effort, so only a naïve fool would believe that it’s going to be easy to achieve your goals. However, once you do get to where you want to be in bodybuilding terms, you can live what you might call the ‘bodybuilder lifestyle’ in the same way as thousands of other successful bodybuilders.

Nevertheless, do not ever allow yourself to lose sight of the fact that the lifestyle is not your whole life. You need balance, you need outside interests away from the gym, and above all else, you have to adapt an all-round lifestyle that is conducive to achieving bodybuilding success.

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Cortisol is a hormone that is produced by the adrenal cortex, which is part of the adrenal gland. It is a hormone that is often referred to as the ‘stress’ hormone which increases both blood sugar levels and pressure, while also reducing the effectiveness of your immune system.

Perhaps the most important thing about cortisol is that it has been indicated that when it is produced in excess amounts (i.e. in response to increased stress or tension levels), it can reduce muscle mass while aiding the deposit of additional body fat.

From this observation, it naturally follows that if you are trying to become a more successful bodybuilder, you need to reduce cortisol levels if at all possible.

The first thing that you can do in an attempt to reduce cortisol is to reduce the stress that is present in your everyday life.

For example, try to teach yourself time management skills and how to keep every day, whether working or at leisure, completely under control.

Instead of leaving everything to the last minute so it becomes a panic filled rush, plan everything you do every day well ahead of time. In addition, give yourself plenty of time to make sure that you achieve everything you want to achieve, because there is nothing more likely to cause stress and tension than either having to leave a job uncompleted or having to finish it in a mad rush in order to get everything done.

Consider learning additional skills that will help to keep your stress levels under control such as yoga, meditation and how to breathe properly, as an aid to keeping self-control. All of these practices will greatly assist you in reducing the stress levels that you currently feel every day and as a result, the level of cortisol circulating in your body will naturally decrease.

Another thing that can help to reduce stress and therefore the levels of cortisol that your adrenal cortex is producing is to make sure that you get enough sleep. Most experts recommend that a healthy, restorative good night’s sleep is made up of 8 hours and 15 minutes of solid rest.

However, while you are trying to reduce the stress levels in your life, it is often not possible to make everything perfect, simply because there are not enough hours in the day for each of us to pack in everything that we want to do. Hence, if 8 hours and 15 minutes of sound sleep is not possible, you should aim for at least 7 hours of total rest every night, and make up the rest either with a late afternoon nap or at the weekend.

This is important, because it is scientifically proven that a lack of sleep greatly increases the production of cortisol, which will significantly hinder the effectiveness of your bodybuilding efforts and add fat to your torso at the same time.

Happiness and balance is an important factor in your bodybuilding success as well. This is because bodybuilding is a 24 hour activity, something that you cannot pick up and put down as you see fit. It requires a certain degree of dedication and a lot of determination, but living a balanced life is important too because doing things away from the gym that you enjoy doing makes it easier to put up with the training when it is hard.

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The popular perception of a hardgainer is of an individual who can work out regularly with weights for weeks on end and hardly see any improvement in muscle mass other than a slight increase in muscle tone quality.

The classic hardgainer is also most commonly the classic ectomorph, the kind of person that can eat almost anything they want and never put on an ounce of extra weight until they reach the later years of their 12

life when the hormones that control their bodily shape and development are less in control than they were in earlier years.

As previously suggested, being naturally ectomorphic does not necessarily mean that you cannot achieve success as a bodybuilder. However, it does mean that you need to approach your bodybuilding development program somewhat differently from the way the classic mesomorph might approach building up their muscle mass.

‘How will I look?’

For anyone who is considering taking up bodybuilding, this is probably one of the first questions that you are likely to ask yourself. While there can never be a definitive answer to this question because to a large extent, the final ‘you’ will be a result of the amount of work you are prepared to put in, there are many physical characteristics that could have some influence on your final success levels and physical shape.

For example, your body type as already discussed is relevant.

However, to take this analysis one stage further, it is the different components of your body that make up your complete shape, so each of these different parts needs to be considered in isolation to establish how likely it is that you can become a successful bodybuilder.

For instance, your bone structure is extremely important, with the ideal for bodybuilding being wide shoulders and a narrow waist and hips. However, despite the fact that the majority of the most famous bodybuilders do conform to these criteria, not every bodybuilder had naturally wide shoulders and narrow hips.

If you want to become a successful bodybuilder and you do not have the perfect bone structure, it simply means that you have to focus your muscle building activities on developing your body in such a way that it appears that you have ideal bone structure.

For example, by concentrating on adding inches of extra muscle mass to his deltoid and pectoral muscles while keeping his waist as lean as possible:

Larry Scott was able to create an illusion of the classic V shape torso that is characteristic of successful bodybuilders.

The size and density of your bones is also extremely important for anyone who wants to become a successful bodybuilder, because while strong, heavy bones are a major advantage in full body contact sports like rugby and football, they are not going to be advantageous when your success or failure as a bodybuilder is judged on the way you look.

The opposite is also true. If your skeletal frame is too light and perhaps a little weak, it could limit on the amount of muscle mass you can carry on your frame as well as the amount of weight you can lift in the gym.

Other individual characteristics of bone structure are also important if you want to achieve the perfect bodybuilder pose and look. As an example, a big rib cage as exemplified by Arnold Schwarzenegger is a huge advantage for a bodybuilder, because it naturally creates potential for a bigger chest and greater upper back muscle development.

In a similar manner, the length of your bones makes a difference to the final shape you can achieve, and there is absolutely nothing you can do to change the shape of your bones, so it is a question of working with what you have.

For instance, long legs suggest an ectomorphic body area, so they may be more difficult to develop, but long legged bodybuilders naturally look taller.

Then you have the muscles which are the ‘building bricks’ around which all of your bodybuilding development work will be centered. Many people do not understand that natural muscle shape is a characteristic unique to every individual with the shape itself been dictated by how far the muscle is naturally stretched.

If you have muscles that are attached to the bone at each end quite closely together, you are likely to have fairly compressed muscles which form a noticeable peak when the muscle is tensed. Such big muscles are a big advantage in competitive bodybuilding, which is one of the reasons that Schwarzenegger was so successful (take a look at his biceps to see what I mean).

Others have muscles that are attached much further down the bone, with the attached ends being further apart. In this case, the muscle will demonstrate a considerably smoother, more flowing image, rather than appearing to reach a peak. Again, compare biceps between Schwarzenegger and Larry Scott to see a couple of very good examples of the differences.

What does all this mean to you?

After reading through this chapter, the main thing that you have to take away is that while every individual who decides to become a bodybuilder enters the fray with different ‘raw materials’, it does not automatically follow that your body shape or bone structure limits what you can do.

However, it is going to be helpful if you can analyze the kind of person you are before starting your bodybuilding training, because knowing what your raw materials are should enable you to approach bodybuilding far more practically. While it is probably not realistic to expect you to understand all of the fine-detail niceties of whether your bone structure is perfect for bodybuilding or not, or whether your muscle attachment points are suitable, you should be able to come up with a general idea of the kind of person you are before embarking on bodybuilding training.

The importance of this is that bodybuilding success ultimately depends on three factors – your general lifestyle, the training program you adopt and proper nutrition.

As we progress through this book, we will look at all of these different aspects of how to become a successful bodybuilder, but only you can know what raw materials you are starting with before you begin doing whatever is necessary to become a bodybuilding success.

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In order to achieve their objectives, it is therefore necessary for a bodybuilder to work on developing their musculature. In short, all bodybuilders bulk up their muscle mass until they either start winning the competitions that they enter or until they ‘look the way they have always wanted to look’.

However, there is one cloud on this theoretical horizon, which is the fact that no bodybuilder starts with an empty canvas on which they can paint. On the contrary, every bodybuilder starts with the body they have already got, and there is some evidence that the body type and shape that you start with will to an extent dictate how successful you are as a bodybuilder in the future.

To some degree, your success as a bodybuilder is partially genetic, because like any artist or artisan, you can only work with the raw materials you have been given.

There are various genetic factors at work which will to a degree dictate how good a bodybuilder you might become. Let’s start to consider some of these factors.

Three body types…

Back in the 1940’s, an American numismatist and psychologist Dr William H. Sheldon propounded the theory that there are essentially three different types of body shape that could cover all men.

As a result of his studies, Sheldon classified all human physiques into one of three categories, which he deemed to be mesomorphs, endomorphs and ectomorphs.

Of the three classifications, the ‘kindest’ by far, the one that everyone would probably like to be is the mesomorph, which is representative of an individual who has a classic, naturally athletic build. Such an individual would generally be characterized by broad shoulders, a strong back and a large chest. They would be muscular and lean, with above average natural strength.

In other words, a person who could be characterized as a mesomorph is an ideal candidate to be a successful bodybuilder.

An endomorph is a person who is naturally heavy, often someone who has a natural tendency to be fat. An endomorph will often be characterized by a soft, more rounded body shape, a round face and wider hips. It is also quite common for people who are endomorphs to have a naturally heavy bone structure, so it is easy for them to gain weight while difficult to maintain physical fitness.

The ectomorph character is someone who is naturally skinny, with long, thin arms, a slight bone structure, narrow chest and a limited amount of natural body fat.

From the description of the three different types of human physiques that Sheldon recognized, it is going to be easiest for someone who is a mesomorph to become a successful bodybuilder.

However, one thing that has become increasingly clear since Sheldon’s original classifications were established is that not everyone fits neatly into one body category or the other. Indeed, some extremely well-known and highly successful amateur and professional competition bodybuilders have exhibited characteristics of more than one classification.

For example, the very first Mr. Olympia Larry Scott was not a particularly metamorphic individual, being noticeably skinny (ectomorphic) before he started training to be a bodybuilder. However, by the time he won Mr. Olympia, there is no way that you could suggest that he was skinny, so his body had the ability to ‘bulk up’. Larry Scott was an ecto-mesomorph from the beginning, someone who did not fit nicely into one of the Sheldon classifications.

At the other end of the scale, other well-known professional bodybuilders like Danny Padilla were fairly heavily built to start with, and had no problems whatsoever putting on the bulk that they needed to be successful bodybuilders. However, he is believed to have had problems getting lean enough to win competitions, so is forced to follow an extremely rigid diet in order to achieve what he eventually went on to achieve in professional bodybuilding.

In this situation, you could say these individuals were endo-mesomorphs rather than being classic mesomorphs of the type who generally make the best or most natural bodybuilders.

To a certain extent therefore, the type of body you have will have some influence on your body building success. However, even if you are not the perfect mesomorph of the Sheldon classification, it does not follow that bodybuilding is not for you. Whether you could achieve professional status is another question, but I am assuming that you don’t want to anyway. At a recreational or personal enjoyment level, bodybuilding is something that almost anyone can do.

There is also another consideration to take into account, which is that other people’s perception of us as individuals often affects our attitude to our own body.

For example, if coming to the end of your teens, getting ready to leave home for the first-time, you are the kind of person who has always carried a little weight because Mom’s home cooking was just so good, you will probably consider yourself to be just an average guy or girl.

If however everyone starts telling you that you are endomorphic, it is likely that you are eventually going to start pay more attention to other people’s opinion of your body type than you do to your own opinions. It then becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, because if you enjoy your food and you know that you are a naturally fat person (because you’ve been told this so often), why would you make an effort to change things?

While there is probably nothing intrinsically physiological that prevents you from becoming a successful bodybuilder, psychologically you have already accepted that bodybuilding (and probably every other kind of sport as well) is not for you.

So, while your natural body shape or physique will have some bearing on how successful you are likely to be as a bodybuilder, it is not the be-all-and-end-all. As indicated previously, many highly successful professional bodybuilders were not ‘the right shape’ by nature, but by dint of hard work and dedication, they became amongst the best in the business.

Perhaps it is fairer to suggest that while their body shape might not have been ideal for becoming bodybuilders, they had metamorphic characteristics somewhere in their makeup that enabled them to become successful in their chosen field. Whether these characteristics were strictly physical or partially physical and partially psychological, it is impossible to say, but if they had these characteristics, there is no reason whatsoever why you may not have them as well.

Click here to read Part 2 of this article

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