Photoshoot part 2: Fitness Magazine Inside Scoop

As I mentioned last Friday, I recently spent 2 days monitoring a photo shoot for one of my upcoming workouts for Maximum Fitness. Its' a mass training program, and it's really good, if I do say so myself.

Here's something interesting about some of the models you see in the mags.

Some claim to barely workout at all. Now at first that sounds ridiculous, but after talking with them further, here's how it breaks down:

Most of the fitness models are not that big, usually about 5'8"-5'10", and weigh about 175. Not huge by most standards. In the past, most of these guys were actually much bigger and more muscular, so they actually lost weight to get into modeling (unfortunately for them, they remain far too big for fashion modeling).

So that leaves them with plenty of muscle. All they need to do is keep off the fat, and maintain their abs. And for someone that knows what they are doing with nutrition and fitness, that doesn't require a lot of working out.

So what good does this do you?

I think there is a very important lesson for guys that want a beach body to take from this...

To get a good body that you can have for decades:

1) Gain muscle first - even a little more than you think you'll want
2) Lose the fat
3) Easily maintain your body for months, years, and decades.

This is almost the exact opposite approach taken by most fitness magazine readers.

Most readers are impatient and want abs now. So while they only weigh 150 pounds, all they focus on is losing the last 5 pounds of fat. So after 4 weeks they find themselves at 145 pounds, but still need to lose another 3 pounds of fat - because the abs just won't show up.

And so on and so on goes the cycle until all of their family members are asking, "are you sick", "whats wrong with you", "why don't you eat something"?

The better approach is outlined above, and has some pretty good anecdotal support based on the fitness models I've spoken with this year.

CB