This past weekend, I recorded portions of a chest and back workout I did. It marked an important point in my plan to add muscle mass. During the past month, I’ve started to feel the pump during my workouts. A pump, for those who are uninitiated, is a feeling of well-being, of swollen muscles that occurs during your workout. It’s a great motivator and it helps with the pain one normally feels during the sets. You don’t get a pump unless theres a certain amount of muscle mass on your body. In other words, you could be working out for years and still not get a pump unless your muscle mass grows to a certain point where every time you work out, you start to feel your muscles grip your bones like armor plating. It’s pretty nice. Getting the pump is a mile marker, it means you’re well on your way. So it’s good.
When we wear suits, even without realizing it, our body adjusts its posture to fit the clothes better. Depending on their cut, they may pull on our shoulders or the back of our neck, even imperceptibly, distorting our posture over the course of our day. Even more so, sleeves and shoulders may also not allow full or proper movement of our arms, which means we’ll be even more restricted. Add to that the feeling that we get when we put on a suit, which tells us that we should behave and move differently, and we’ve got a recipe for potentially bad posture, which leads to ill-feelings and other health issues over time.
Instead, I propose we always think of our clothes as subservient objects that we use. We are not used by them, even if they’re an expensive suit. We dictate how we move and feel when we wear them, and if a suit won’t let us move properly when worn, perhaps the cut isn’t good enough. You know, it’s been said that a great suit made by a great tailor should feel like a pajama on your body: light, airy, enabling full movement and correct posture, breathable, molding to your very shape. If our suits don’t feel like that, we need to start looking for better suits.
We also need to actively correct our posture throughout the day, which is why I put together this video:
While it’s good to have variety in your outfits and to sometimes break the rules when it comes to choosing what you wear, it’s also important to know how things go together. As Picasso used to say, you need to know the rules before you can break them.
With that in mind, I’d like to offer you this video I put together recently, where I give advice on matching your shoes with your pants. In it, I’ll show you how to pair certain shoes with certain pants, what goes together with what and what you should avoid doing.
Enjoy! And here’s that same post on my Facebook page, which I encourage you to like in order to see much, much more content published several times a day.
I got asked this question recently and answered it with a video. Here it is:
There are two main things you can do:
Eat like a horse
Work out like a horse
There are more things involved, such as getting enough sleep and focusing on big, whole body exercises such as the deadlift, the squat, the clean and press and other similar exercises, but those two things, if put in practice with determination and with the clear goal in mind of getting big, will take you from a skinny ectomorph of 135 lbs. to a muscular, strong 195 lbs. See the diptych below. On the left is what I looked like when I started college and on the right is what I looked like when I graduated.
There is one more thing I must mention: there is a price to pay for this and it’s also big. Huge. You will inevitably get gas from all the protein-rich foods you have to eat frequently during the day. It’s not a toot here and there. Exactly when you make most of your gains in mass, you have to prepare for flat-out flatulence, all day long and all night long. It gets nasty. The odor is unbearable. Intolerable. It’s not like I was gulping down cheap buckets of mass gainers. I was eating healthy foods from the cafeteria at one of the top liberal arts colleges in the US. Between meals, I was drinking quality whey shakes and supplementing with cans of tuna. But it was very, very unpleasant. I loved working out, I loved getting big, I loved the way I looked and felt but boy, did I hate the farts… I messed up my gut for a number of years and I’m still not sure if my gut is fully recovered these days. I wonder if I did something wrong with my diet back then and if I were to do it again, I’d focus on gaining weight more moderately and more slowly and definitely eating less, even if it meant the progress would be much more gradual. Food for thought…
In this video, I talk about four layers of one’s being that make up a gentleman — or any man worth his salt for that matter. As we stand in the core, the very substance of a man, the most inner layer is his character and looking outward, we see the other layers: the body, the clothes and the behavior.
I hope you enjoy this video and find it useful! Till next time.
Raoul Pop 