Art of Peaking

For to live is to fly
Both low and high;
So shake the dust off your wings
And the sleep out of your eyes--Townes van Zandt

The more things change, the more they stay the same. That's certainly true for bodybuilding. The same ideas guiding bodybuilding today guided it in the 1950's. And those ideas account for the poor progress most folks experience after the initial growth spurts beginners get in spite of themselves.

Bodybuilding shares common ground with modern psychology: both take it for granted that maturity is reached somewhere in the late teens. Beyond that you're all grown up and nothing much happens until aging starts in later years. Just look at any bodybuilding publication for articles on pre- and early teen training, or on training for mid-life and the senior years. There's a big reason those decades are excluded.

The Youth Image

The managing editor of one of the big bodybuilding magazines quite frankly told me publications have no interest in articles about the current training of the greats of the past, nor for children, nor for midlife or senior training. The image of bodybuilding is one of young adulthood: folks in their late teens, twenties, on into their early thirties.

Younger adults are the primary customers of the bodybuilding industry: those with just the right mix of passionate desire to get buffed, with the right amount of disposable income for monthly purchases of products, and heaps of inexperience. Inexperience is key: only the inexperienced are gullible enough to faithfully believe what the magazines publish! In other words, the bodybuilding industry disenfranchises anyone outside the Youth Image market as a potential customer. And it isn't aging in years that puts them over the hill; anyone with much life experience is bound to seriously question the nonsense published each and every month in bodybuilding magazines.

Knowledge versus Wisdom

One thing that keeps bodybuilding magazines in business is the information explosion beginning in the later half of the 20th Century that's still going on with no sign of letting up. That explosion is one of ever-increasing knowledge, huge bodies of facts and theories. But massive increases in knowledge offer no guarantee of any increase in wisdom. Bodybuilding publications get away with publishing a lot of pseudo-science, more often than not tying that pseudo-science to marketing in order to sell supplements. I submit, however, that bodybuilding publications offer precious little science in the face of astonishing amounts of specious science and grandiose claims. What's more, an art of training offered by master craftsmen is totally lacking.

Nutritional science mushroomed in growth in the last century, as did endocrinology, sports medicine, and kindred disciplines all bearing on what every bodybuilder and powerlifter wants to know for success. But no corresponding science of bodybuilding grew up along with the real sciences.

The test of my assertion is that there simply are no independent scientific research laboratories engaged in bodybuilding research and development. Nutritional companies make big claims to their 'scientific laboratories' and studies. But try finding peer reviewed publications backing up their claims. Better still, ask them for references to scientific studies.

As a case in point, over the past 18 months I've written to every identifiable producer of prohormones asking specific questions about application of prohormones in andropause and requesting reference to peer-reviewed publications reporting on prohormone efficacy. Not a one of them has ever answered those requests. Would your confidence in such organizations be affected by zero replies? In my case, I expected no replies;snake oil salesmen hawk all sorts of wares.

An Art and a Caveat

We've reached the pivotal point of this article. What follows will not key you into to 'the secrets of the stars.' Nor will it be backed up with citations and endnotes, links or references. The spirit herein is to inspire if not inflame, to stir deep waters and get you moving freely and happily down that lone highway to independence and autonomy, the keys to success in anything. We'll start with the myth of peaking.

Annual Training Cycles & Peaking

As astonishing as it might seem, nothing's really changed in the content of bodybuilding magazines since the Golden Age of the 1950's except the cover price and scantilly clad "fitness" models (women). Over the last 50 years, a lot has been written about peaking in bodybuilding training. Peaking is that last phase of getting ready for your stab at a contest title. Almost everything written about peaking is a variation on a common theme: bulking up off-season, then peaking for the big day. Absolutely nobody has talked about that journey down the lone highway obscured with a dust storm. That line is from country blues, one about the journey to death. And peaking is exactly that: a lonesome journey into dying to certain comforts in order to wake up to new dimensions of personal power and self-knowledge. But you'd never know that from the recycled refuse continually published in the mags.

Key to the decades' old peaking theory is gaining lots of 'bulk' in the off-season. Some put on upwards of 50 pounds, even without chemical assistance. As contest season approaches, that weight is laboriously shed with marathon workouts, austere diets, and an obsessive madness. Working hard to achieve that 4% level of body fat associated with being 'shredded'and 'ripped', honest trainers find the result is very little, if any, gain in lean muscle mass. What they don't calculate is the great expenses involved in overeating then dieting, all done with hosts of supplements. Add to that, if relevant, the cost of black market chemical assistance. What you can't calculate is the detrimental effects on your health, especially if unmonitored chemical assistance is part of your formula.

GAS: The Key to Everything

Our current knowledge of stress-related medicine stems from the pioneering work of Hans Seyle back in the 50's. Seyle was an exercise scientist. His notion of GAS means Generalized Adaptive Syndrome. That means you stress yourself, then rest, and then gain results.

In terms of working out, stress means overloading your muscles, working them past previous levels of adaptation. Bodybuilding publications are full of homegrown universal solutions for making gains. Working out up to the peaking phase is a matter of cycles of training promoting ever-increasing gains from workout to workout. For some of you, low reps with heavy weights will do that; for others, more sets with moderate weights will work; for others, high reps and lots of sets will fill you in. As long as you eat right, supplement right, and rest right, the adaptive cycle of GAS will kick in.

The final cycle of GAS is the gains. You know them by clothing size, workouts, and what you see in the mirror; all of them speak with a lion's roar. The key here is that regardless of your training, the same GAS rules apply any time of year. Without staying in harmony with those rules, overtraining can result; instead of peaking you fail.

Peaking versus Pigging & Peaking versus Wasting

Bodybuilding competition as we think of it began around 1940. Within the first ten years of bodybuilding competition, articles started appearing about peaking, even though it wasn't called peaking in those days. For about sixty years now, one viewpoint has dominated bodybuilding: bulking up off-season, then cutting down and peaking for competition. From the early days down to our latest publications, you'll see photos of the big names off-season weighing 30, 40, even 50 pounds over competition condition. With those kinds of weight gains, a lot of the big guys look more like superheavy weight powerlifters than bodybuilders. In fact, they get up to at least the weight of superheavy weights.

Something's fatally flawed in the bulking-up-cutting-down model of thinking. Gaining 30-50 pounds of additional weight is simply not a matter of gaining lots more muscle, then cutting down for contest shape. Back in the 1940's and 50's, there was precious little sports science, thus a lot of strange ideas took root which remain alive and well to this very day.

One simple fact is inescapable: lean muscle tissue cannot be confused with fat cells. Bulking up comes about by means of overeating, and overeating creates a condition of storing energy in the form of fat cells. Those fat cells are interspersed within and around muscles, adding girth but not muscle. Cutting down means depleting the energy saved in those cells as fat.

What can we learn from the bulking model? The best lesson is not to do it. Why go to all the extra expense of overeating just to have to starve yourself later? Overeating means spending extra hard-earned dollars on food to build up fat stores in your body. Building fat stores burdens your cardiovascular system with extra work and is thought to be the precursor to Syndrome X conditions that will haunt you later in life. Overall, bulking up is a pretty stupid idea all around.

Pigging out is not peaking out.

Equally stupid is starving yourself to get rid of that weight. This kind of regimen actually compromises any muscle gains made anyway.

Some medical practitioners have crossed the line. I'm thinking of the works of Karlis Ullis, M.D. of the University of California at Los Angeles. For decades a sports medicine scientist and practitioner, his work in overtraining versus peak performance bears important news. Important news with life long benefit.

Somewhere in his work Dr Ullis realized that the condition of being overtrained was similar to the wasting diseases he saw in aging patients. He viewed that condition as catabolic, or tissue destroying. His practice took a new turn, applying notions of peaking both in sports competition and in anti-aging strategies.

Ullis sees over-tonus or overtraining as being a condition of far too much stimulation combined with inadequate rest and recuperation. The result is that working out turns on you like a poisonous snake putting venom in your system. Bodybuilders are particularly vulnerable to bad advice leading to over- training since the majority of champions are hormonally assisted in their training. Use of multiple hormones by athletes aims at offsetting the catabolic reaction to overtraining.

Athletes use anabolic hormones to facilitate building more lean muscle mass. By injecting large quantities of steroids, they're compensating not only for being overtrained, but actually stretching the boundaries by being able to train past natural barriers yet stay anabolic. Since those guys' training routines are what we all read about, you better keep it in mind that you're going to hurt yourself trying to follow those routines. Overtraining has a serious consequence: you can actually stimulate acceleration of aging by overtraining. Ullis' insights offer a lot of dimensions about how training the wrong way leads to wasting your time and energy.

Trouble in Mind

The pundits of Western science hold to the bizarre idea that all psychological states can be reduced to activities of the brain, or more precisely, to parts of the brain, to neural networks, and to underlying biochemical processes occurring within the brain. To maintain that lopsided ideology, they abandon the first principles of science, picking and choosing information and data that suits their cases, while privileging themselves to demean, diminish, and outright deny bodies of fact that don't fit or endanger the dogmatic theology of their body of theories. As a result, such institutional near-sightedness treats aging as a phenomenon of physical structures breaking down with resulting loss of mental and emotional functioning. That is no doubt true of certain disorders.

Cultures the world over shape and condition how their members experience the world. For example, the Japanese language has over 300 words for smells; our English language has no words specifying smells. That means we can't translate Japanese expression for smell. It also means speakers of Japanese have a richer repertoire of smell experiences available to them, while for us English speakers smell remains an immense blind spot, something we may sense, but not label or identify with words.

Cultures shape how we understand, experience, value and know our world; so much so that unless you've lived in another culture, or become bilingual, you cannot even know the difference. With only one culture at your disposal, you cannot begin to appreciate or understand anything outside your acculturated world.

So we take science's reducing of everything to material explanation as a given. It's really only a culturally-conditioned attitude. So much so that comparative studies these days recognizes it for what it really is: Western Science.

Cultures do other things just as insidiously. One is how they shape our expectations and beliefs about aging, illness, dying, and even death. And it is precisely those life-long bodybuilders the popular magazines chose to ignore whose wisdom we ought to seek. In the ongoing success of their training, they seem to have defied aging: in fact, they've learned to anabolically peak in body, mind and spirit while the rest of the population has gone the way of popular culture which emphasizes wasting away slowly, eroding without mindfulness, and never questioning the notions of their culture.

Disciplines such as psychoneuroimmunology, biofeedback, and stress medicine all reveal that human beings innately incorporate huge, although dormant vital reserves, for self-control in the form of an independence that can change your life, even reverse terminal illnesses in some cases. Stress medicine such as the work of Jon Kabat-Zinn highlights the pervasive catabolic effect of stress in our life; fortunately he outlines a program for becoming free, independent and autonomous in the face of the wasting disorders brought about by the addition of being stressed by the flow of life.

Until we examine our culture's beliefs about the aging occurring with the passage of years, we remain unconscious, unwitting victims. To the extent we subscribe to the view that our body and mind are fixed things rather than continually changing dynamic processes, we ignore the truth of our life condition.

Taken personally, you are a process that's changing all the time. Working out induces catabolic stress while recovery and growth depend on learning how to rest and maintain a relaxed inner attitude wherever you might be.

Wasting disorders seem to sneak up on folks. In fact, what sneaks up on folks is the awakening of having become pretty wasted after years or decades of ongoing wasting. As we grow rich in years and experience, our various physiological systems begin slowing down.

Regular working out enhances and maintains levels of physiology, keeping us young in body and spirit. They cannot, however, entirely work against wasting of our psychological bearing; instead, working out in your psyche has to be as steadily and regularly pursued with diligence as training your body. A flabby, wasted mind in a perfect body is like having a well-tuned Mercedes but driving asleep at the wheel.

Since we have no real models for the maturing bodybuilder, one way of maintaining a fresh, bright and vibrant bodymind is through doing your own research into the processes going on inside yourself. Little attention is called to andropause, the male equivalent of menopause. Since men have a 24 hour daily testosterone cycle rather than the 28 day menstrual cycle women experience, diminishing capacity is much sneakier.

Add to that data showing that upwards of 35% of men who had vasectomies are subject to early andropause. Testosterone replacement therapies using natural, bio-identical testosterone are readily available through any competent doctor using therapies involving legal prescriptions of transdermal creams through compounding pharmacies. The numbskulls with a black and white outlook on 'steroids' and 'natural' seem incapable of understanding the value and importance of hormonal replacement therapy to offset wasting due to the biological clock slowing down. The same applies to other hormonal systems.

Peak Performance Lifestyle

So what do we do? How to we workout, gain, even peak occasionally? How do we accomplish that end without overtraining? How do we stay out of catabolic, tissue wasting states? How can we make gains without peaking?

From a strictly scientific perspective, all those questions have the same answer: an anabolic, healthy lifestyle incorporating regular training, appropriate rest and recuperation, appropriate supplementation (which may include hormonal replacement therapy as one grows rich in years), and techniques to facilitate a considerable change in habit and thinking to successfully meet the challenge.

Down the Innerstate

Of the things that I've mentioned, there are plenty of resources for all but the journey down your own innerstate. Now I'm going to offer some broad strokes about inner peaking. That's the hardest part of it because you're about to enter the forest where it's thickest; there's no path and you have neither a compass nor a clue.

The new model of peak performance is one of living in balance, being within a few weeks of enhanced training to hit full peak performance. That means no bulking up. And it means getting to know yourself instead of relying on muscle mags, gym rats, and other questionable sources of information.

Peaking cannot be taught; it can only be learned within yourself.

Two sides of the peaking coin are: individuality and autonomy.

Individuality points to the simple fact that you are unique. In practical terms, you're going to have to experiment with everything involved in working out to determine what works best for yourself through the course of a year. Leave no stone unturned. It's really best to keep a diary of workouts. Former Mr. Olympia Dorian Yates left nothing to chance with diet: he kept a record of everything that went into his mouth, and measured everything on a scale to know exactly what he was intaking. Sound like a pain? Such a pain is the only way you can really make the shift in mind that's needed for staying pretty close to peaked year round. And not just peaked but fit for a long healthy life.

Autonomy means more than just being independent: it stands for a rare kind of freedom. Freedom from relying on self-declared experts, freedom to know and be you, to have and maintain a near-peaked condition.

A big change has occurred in bodybuilding. One you're not going to read about elsewhere than here. The focus on peaking requires an inner peaking, a change of heart that will open up new vistas of success for you. That change involves a lot more work than the all-too-common mindless approach to training. The mindless approach doesn't produce winners. Mindfulness of peaking will change your life, offering a way that's year-round and healthier._______________

Ken O'Neill resides in Wimberley, Texas, and. is available for personal consultation and workshops. kayoneill@earthlink.net.