The Question of Why
To get the most out of your training and eating, I suggest you have an objective for both. So many people go through the motions not knowing why they are doing things. At Pat’s Gym we train and eat for a purpose. We train to lose weight, maintain weight, lose fat, gain power, gain strength, improve psychological abilities, excel in a sport and–in some rare cases–bulk up. Just like in training, we eat to lose fat, to maintain size, to add weight, to excel at a sport and because we are injured and can’t train.
When talking about training there are general guidelines we have used over the years:
| Goal | Reps |
| Increase muscular endurance and cardio endurance | 50-100 |
| Maintain muscle and increase muscular endurance | 30-50 |
| Train muscular endurance and gain a tiny bit of muscle mass | 15-30 |
| Add strength, endurance and mass | 10-15 |
| Add strength and maintain mass | 4-10 |
| Add strength without mass | 1-4 |
If your goal is to get massive, eat a ton and train to failure. Most of the athletes we work with at the gym focus on power-to-weight ratio without gaining size, which would hurt their oxygen efficiency. Power-to-weight ratio is the amount of power you’re able to generate per pound of body weight. Having a high power-to-weight ratio is what allows a small-looking cyclist to power up a steep mountain grade. A higher power-to-weight ratio is important to cyclists and triathletes that need to propel their bodies and bikes up and over hills and steep mountain grades. These athletes strive for the most muscle mass on the leanest frames. Again this pertains to most of the athletes we work with at the gym.
Now onto eating: We eat based on our activity and performance days as well as our training and rest days. You want to figure out how many calories you need per day to reach your goals. If you are very active, you want to take your body weight and multiply it by 30. So for instance if you weighed 165 pounds, you would want to take in 4905 calories a day.
Meanwhile, if you’re somewhat active and do modest exercise, you would take your body weight and multiply it by 20. For those who do very little exercise, multiply your body weight by 15. Remember you calories should be spread out evenly between fat, protein and carbohydrates.
The main thing you need to take away from this article is that you only have a certain amount of time in a day so do things with a purpose. If you are going to work hard and put in the time make sure you are doing things that will help you reach your goals and have a specific plan laid out.
