HIS GREATEST SUCCESSES AS A PERSONAL TRAINER

JOHN: Absolutely. Now, focusing on some of your accomplishments now for some people who might want to seek out your counsel for personal training, what would you say are some of your greatest successes as a trainer in terms of training clients for both fat loss and muscle gain?

DREW: The biggest success that I’ve had with fat loss was actually one of my former bosses. Pat Grim, who was a co-owner of Gold’s Gym, Green Bay – now they call it Title Town Fitness – he was significantly overweight; he was over 300 pounds. And I can’t remember the specific dates but between mid Spring of 1994 and around September of that year, he had lost nearly 80 pounds of bodyfat while gaining a significant amount of muscle. He went from just above 300 pounds to down in the 220s, so he still had a little bit to go but that was the most body fat I’ve every had anybody lose. Of course, a lot of the credit has to go to the client; I provided the guidance, I trained him but he’s the one who did the work.

JOHN: And all you had him do was employ the basic high intensity training principles coupled with a reduced calorie diet?

DREW: Yeah, nothing fancy with the diet, just moderately reduced calorie diet – nothing high, nothing low. Just moderate amounts of carbohydrates, proteins and fats with an emphasis on drinking a lot of cold water too. That was also something we did a lot of with our clients back then.

JOHN: And the same training frequency – i.e., once a week hard training?

DREW: He was training once a week. And as a matter of fact we did the routine so many times I can tell you exactly what he did – he did a leg press on a Hammer Strength machine, he did a pulldown also on a Hammer Strength machine – these were somewhat older Hammer Strength machines, before they had the iso-lateral feature – the Hammer Strength Chest Press, the Hammer Strength Row and a Calf Raise. So it was a real basic, real brief routine. He didn’t do a lot of exercise and he didn’t do it that often but he put everything into it. He was incredibly hard working.

JOHN: And how about muscle gain? Was he also your best example of muscle gain?

DREW: No, oddly enough my best example of muscle gain quit because he didn’t think he was “gaining enough.” He was an example of unrealistic expectations. In 1997 I had a client come to me who was in the 140s, and he wasn’t a real tall guy, maybe 5’5” or 5’6”. He wasn’t a big guy and he just wanted to be a bodybuilder. He didn’t have what appeared to be the genetics to build a large degree of muscle mass and I tried to explain to him that not everybody can look like that. And that when you go and look at these bodybuilding magazines, most of the people – if not all – are using steroids and a variety of other growth drugs. But I guess he didn’t want to accept that fact, didn’t want anybody to burst his bubble there and ruin his fantasy of someday looking like a bodybuilder. Well we got him up into the mid 150s over a period of about 3 months and to go from the low 140s up into the mid 150s in a few months and have it be just muscle – because he did get leaner – I thought was a pretty impressive transformation. I personally would have been very happy with that rate of muscle gain, but he was frustrated that he wasn’t “bigger” and actually ended up quitting after that. He had excellent, excellent muscle gain but very, very unrealistic expectations from the beginning, which I think is one of the most frustrating things as a trainer: having to let everyone know that not everybody is going to look like a fitness model or Arnold Schwarzenegger, or Mike Mentzer, or Frank Zane or whoever they should happen to want to look like. They’ll have to want to look like the best “them.”

JOHN: Even that rate of gain is tremendous. If you stack up the better part of 15 one-pound beefsteaks – and that’s quite a lot of muscle to gain within a three month period.

DREW: I think if he had just stuck around a little longer – not that he would ever look like a bodybuilder; he just didn’t have the skeletal structure for it; he was a short ectomorph; narrow shoulders and didn’t have long muscle bellies. But we managed to take somebody who was below average in his genetics and get him up to at least a respectable level of muscularity. He didn’t look like a bodybuilder by any stretch of the imagination but he did look a lot better than he did when he first came in. I guess it just wasn’t enough for him though.

JOHN: He was upset because his station wagon wouldn’t fly him to the moon.

DREW: (laughs) Exactly!

PARTING THOUGHTS

JOHN: Any parting comments Drew that you want to touch on that perhaps I might have missed?

DREW: Nothing else really comes to mind immediately except that over the next few months I’m very, very eager to see what kind of results you can produce up there with a combination of Max Contraction Training and that Eccentric-Edge equipment. That equipment will allow you to get the best possible results from that protocol. I mean it’s made for it, so I think it’s the best possible marriage of protocol and equipment.

JOHN: Well, I have you to thank for that because Randy got in touch with me after you spoke to him about Max Contraction.

DREW: I told him and Charlie Haire that they had to talk to you about this because that’s what their equipment is for – to make it easy for a trainer to help the user get the heaviest possible weight into position to do a Max Contraction or a Negative-Only or a Hyper – any of the TRULY High Intensity Training -- protocol. If you’ve met Randy, you’ll see that he’s got a lot of genetic potential. I think he should focus on Max Contraction for a while; I think he would get even bigger.

JOHN: I also wanted to get your opinion on the concept that is bandied about recently that a Max Contraction is good but it should be done when the muscle is fully stretched, rather than contracted. This seems to be ludicrous.

DREW: I don’t think it needs to be fully stretched. There needs to be some negative movement because the majority of the research seems to show that load is the primary factor but during the negative is when most of the micro-trauma occurs. I think the Omega Set is probably the best use of the negative because it’s starting in the fully contracted position, you’re holding an incredibly heavy weight, it causes as much of the muscle – as many motor units as possible within the muscle – to be recruited, and you’ve got all of those cross bridges being formed so that you’re setting the muscle up so that you can get the most micro-trauma out of the negative portion. Obviously you have to recruit as many motor units as possible so that you’ve got the muscle involved in the set so that it can be stimulated, which is going to happen if you’re in that position of full muscular contraction and if you’re using a heavy enough weight, which of course is benefited by using that equipment that allows you to do that. And it probably doesn’t even need to be anywhere near a full range negative – maybe not even half range – there just has to be some negative movement. You know, you are measuring cross-bridges in thousandths of an inch, so you probably don’t have to move them too far to damage them. You might almost be able to stay in or stay close to, or within maybe an inch of the fully contracted position and do real, real short movements – which is what the Omega Set recommends.

JOHN: I was impressed with your research into cross bridge attachments and their role in the process of stimulating size and strength increases.

DREW: Well that research is what led me to concur with you about your point about the position of full muscular contraction being the most significant for stimulating strength and size increases. The next couple of years will be interesting. Dr. Stan Linstead at the University of Arizona is doing a lot of research on the effects of eccentric action, and Dr. Mike Reedy at Duke University is doing a lot of research on exactly what’s going on the cross bridge mechanics and what the difference is between the positive and negative portion of a repetition and what is really involved in stimulating increases in muscular size. Of course they’re doing all this for AIDS patients, and people with Multiple Sclerosis and Muscular Dystrophy – people who’s lives, literally, depend on them being able to maintain body tissues. But of course as bodybuilders we can benefit from all the related sciences. But keeping an eye on what those guys are doing will continue to shed more light on information we can use in trying to get bigger and stronger muscles.

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NOTES: 1.) Journal of Applied Physiology; Association of interleukin-15 protein and interleukin-15 receptor genetic variation with resistance exercise training responses; Steven E. Riechman,1 G. Balasekaran,1 Stephen M. Roth,2 and Robert E. Ferrell;1Department of Human Genetics, Graduate School of Public Health, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15260; and 2Department of Kinesiology, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742; Submitted 6 May 2004 ; accepted in final form 16 July 2004.

Abstract: Interleukin-15 (IL-15) is an anabolic cytokine that is produced in skeletal muscle and directly affects muscle anabolism in animal and in vitro models. The contribution of IL-15 variability in muscle responses to 10 wk of resistance exercise training in young men and women was examined by measuring acute and chronic changes in IL-15 protein in plasma and characterizing genetic variation in the IL-15 receptor- gene (IL15RA). Participants trained 3 days a week at 75% of one repetition maximum, performing three sets (6–10 repetitions) of 13 resistance exercises. Plasma IL-15 protein was significantly increased (P < 0.05) immediately after acute resistance exercise but did not change with training and was not associated with variability in muscle responses with training. A single nucleotide polymorphism in exon 7 of IL15RA was strongly associated with muscle hypertrophy and accounted for 7.1% of the variation in regression modeling. A polymorphism in exon 4 was also independently associated with muscle hypertrophy and accounted for an additional 3.5% of the variation in hypertrophy. These results suggest that IL-15 is an important mediator of muscle mass response to resistance exercise training in humans and that genetic variation in IL15RA accounts for a significant proportion of the variability in this response.