Hey San Antonio,

Late last week, I was invited to contribute to a soon to be released fitness and nutrition related book, and today, I received my first set of interview questions to fill out. Great timing, because they’ve definitely given me several worthy topics to discuss.

As far as the book goes, I’ll update everyone here as I learn more about future stages on the project. I have been involved in a few of these projects in the past, and this one looks to be a very high level project – I am definitely honored that they decided to include me as one of the contributing fitness experts.

How is 2012 treating you thus far? Remember, January turns to February quickly – be patient, stay focused and committed, and take one day, one step at a time!

Boyd Myers
Personal Trainer in San Antonio
Owner, San Antonio’s Top Personal Training Studio
16613 Huebner Rd (corner of Huebner and Bitters)
210.391.1454

Hey everyone,

I want to take a few seconds and congratulate Rachel S. on her decision to compete in the NPC Texas State Natural Bodybuilding/Bikini Championships on November 19, 2011 in Austin, TX. She took the first step on her journey today and I cannot wait to post her progress pictures over the next 17+ weeks as she works her way into competition shape.

Competing is NOT easy: there is a reason why so few people do it. The amount of discipline, physical and psychological effort, and sacrifice that it requires is not for the weak-minded. On top of that, just reaching stage is not enough: WE fully intend on winning her division (I say “WE” because I will be with her every step of the way!).

I know, 113 days seems like an eternity, but in the blink of the eye, it will be half that, and then inside a month, and then prep week – and during the entire cycle, I fully intend on keeping the readers of this blog informed on her progress, all the way through comp night when she is holding her trophy on stage.

Get ready for Rachel, everyone!

Boyd Myers
Personal Trainer in San Antonio
Owner, San Antonio’s Top Personal Training Studio
16613 Huebner Rd (corner of Huebner and Bitters)
210.391.1454

Doing what I do for a living leads to a lot of fitness and nutrition related discussions no matter what I’m doing or where I am at. Anytime someone asks me “What do you do for a living?” the discussion ensues.

The irony is that while people do often asks me what they should do, they rarely are interested in taking my advice, hence, which is why I don’t put forth a lot of effort in answering that question.

You see, as quickly as the question is asked, 99.9% of the time that person is going to tell me what they’re already doing and see if I will validate what they say. Almost just as often, people tell me what I should try out and tell me how well it will work.

I’ve studied the body from absolutely every aspect from a fitness standpoint – I have a pretty good grasp on the body’s response to training and nutrition, and the main piece of advice that I can offer is that there is no one size fits all training and nutrition program for every goal (no matter what the CrossFit cult wants you to believe…)

The body will do EXACTLY what it is told to do based on how you exercise, what you eat and when you eat it, but the key is that you tell your body the right thing.

There is the problem: most people aren’t telling their body the right thing. They THINK they are, but the body will respond to what it is told – you just have to learn how to tell your body exactly what to do.

Every aspect of training has a purpose: every rep scheme, amount of rest (or lack there of) between sets, every exercise, number of exercises, etc. Same with nutrition. Every bite of food plays the same role, and the body’s response depends on many factors (condition, genetics).

The great thing is? If you tell someone something they like to hear (such as “this is the best way or the easiest way”), they’ll listen to you, period. Unfortunately, they’ll listen no matter where the advice comes from. I’ve seen many cases where some pretty out of shape people have written exercise programs for individuals and the person will swear by it.

Think logically: pay attention to where the advice you get comes from. You wouldn’t let a dentist with bad teeth work on your mouth! There are a lot of so-called experts out there, but make sure they’re able to prove their track record and back up what they’re saying (remember, more than 80% of personal trainers out there have done the job for less than one year).

Don’t be anyone’s “practice” – get the truth!

Boyd Myers
Personal Trainer in San Antonio
Owner, San Antonio’s Top Personal Training Studio
16613 Huebner Rd (corner of Huebner and Bitters)
210.391.1454

Hey San Antonio and far beyond (especially those guys that write in serving in Afghanistan and Iraq – thanks!!!)

Sorry for reduced posting, but I am working on a huge project that I am putting the finishing touches on. I will share more later, just wanted to wish everyone an amazing day!

Whatever it takes!

Boyd Myers
Personal Trainer in San Antonio
Owner, San Antonio’s Top Personal Training Studio
16613 Huebner Rd (corner of Huebner and Bitters)
210.391.1454.

I’ve been terribly busy over the last few days and haven’t really had the time to sit down and get online and type a blog (or for that matter, even assemble a thought), but today deserves to be recognized.

Last night, a group of 24 Navy SEALs hunted and killed the man that was responsible for more than 3000 deaths on September 11, 2001. While it has been almost 10 years since that terrible day, it still rings fresh in the minds and hearts of so many people.

In the subsequent years, numerous military lives have been given in the aftermath of September 11.

Of course, I know that most of us realize that there is still a lot of danger to our country and to others in the world, but at least the man that was primarily responsible has been disposed of.

I know, this is a personal training and a fitness blog, and I try to keep it that way as much as possible, but I feel this is a big day in the world.

My life should be returning back to a state of normalcy quickly, but I wanted to make sure to acknowledge this occasion.

God Bless – Enjoy your lives, one day at a time!

Boyd Myers
Personal Trainer in San Antonio
Owner, San Antonio’s Top Personal Training Studio
16613 Huebner Rd (corner of Huebner and Bitters)
210.391.1454

Hey San Antonio,

Just noticed that the email form on my website has been corrupted but I’m working to replace that RIGHT NOW!

Sorry for the inconvenience – I’ll be back to writing fitness, nutrition, training and related articles ASAP!

Boyd Myers
Personal Trainer in San Antonio
Owner, San Antonio’s Top Personal Training Studio
16613 Huebner Rd (corner of Huebner and Bitters)
210.391.1454

I’m asked about supplementation nearly every day. Most aren’t worth the bottle their in. However, if you’re going to take anything at all, no matter what your goal is (fat loss, muscle gain, body transformation, performance, etc, it should be Branched Chain Amino Acids (BCAA). I’ve written about BCAA’s more over the last 10 years than anything else, so I’m simply going to take a little bit from my other writings, add some other information and combine it together here. I’m writing this quickly and these are all my own thoughts, so once I read over it a time or two, I may make some simple adjustments (spelling/grammar errors, etc). Enjoy!

This isn’t information just for people to gain muscle – for fat loss, it is essential to maintain lean body mass to keep an increased metabolic rate. This is one of the more technical writings I will write here on the blog, because I like to keep it simple for the fitness beginner and people just looking to make a change, but this information is too important not to thoroughly understand.

Quick rundown: Essential amino acids are the ones your body cannot make on it’s own and must be obtained from diet. These are the important ones and these are the absolute key to body transformation. Three of the most important are leucine, iso-leucine and valine (the branched chained amino acids, or BCAAs). Why are they so important? Simple – the key to body transformation (even before fat loss) is preserving the muscle we already have. Muscle = Higher Metabolic Rate. Higher metabolic rate = leaner you, because you’re burning more calories in everything you do. Ok, so how do the BCAAs have to do with this? When you exercise, your body will try to use these three aminos for energy, thus, breaking down muscle to obtain these. More importantly, the body CANNOT SYNTHESIZE PROTEIN WITHOUT EVERY AMINO ACID PRESENT!!! This is why it is important to consume whole proteins (and why protein from sources such as peanuts and bread aren’t very good sources because they are deficient in many essential aminos).

Many quality protein powders are enriched with extra BCAAs, but I prefer to take it a step further: muscle (for women and men, and this is for everyone that is serious about looking lean, toned, trim, or whatever you may call it) is extremely precious. So, I choose to supplement with additional amino acids. To add, the BCAAs are binded to other aminos in powders. In formulas like Xtend, they are free formed and are more readily absorbed into the bloodstream.

Amount depends on your size (of course), but timing is crucial. Consumption should be at times when muscle is vulnerable to metabolization: I drink them before and during cardio and also during and after weight training.

For optimum muscle growth, cellular growth, metabolism, and recovery to occur, the proper proportions of amino acids need to be eaten. However, eating amino acid sources, such as meat and eggs, does not ensure that the amino acids they supply will be available for muscle growth and formation of other proteins. For example, suppose you have a gross intake of 100 grams of protein with all the essential amino acids present in equal amounts. Now consider how these amino acids are used in the body. To start, a considerable amount of leucine will be used for energy in exercising muscle. This means that there may be only a small amount of leucine available for growth and repair. When leucine finally runs out, this will affect protein formation because leucine is an essential amino acid. That means your body cannot make it. In actuality, perhaps only 15 grams of the original 100 grams of protein will be available for growth and repair. This is one reason why athletes need more protein, not just to compensate for growth and recovery demands from exercise, but to compensate for the loss of essential amino acids like leucine when they are used for energy.

There’s so much more than just protein grams – you MUST be getting the right aminos!

Branched Chained Amino Acids - the first used for energy, and typically the most limited supply in the body (these are the ones that your body WILL breakdown muscle to get if it runs out of glucose for energy):

Leucine
Iso-Leucine
Valine

Essential Amino Acids – these are the ones that your body cannot create on it’s own (the BCAAs are included)
Isoleucine
Arginine
Lysine
Methionine
Phenylalanine
Threonine
Trytophan
Valine
Histidine
Tyrosine
Pyrrolysine

Nonessential Amino Acids – the aminos that your body can synthesize and don’t necessarily need to be obtained in the diet.
Alanine
Aspartate
Cysteine
Glutamate
Glutamine
Glycine
Proline
Serine
Asparagine

Conditionally Essential Amino Acids – in some cases, the body cannot produce enough of some amino acids, to they are considered essential (meaning they must be obtained from the diet).
Arginine
Histidine
Tyrosine
Cysteine
Glutamine
Glycine
Proline
Serine
Asparagine

If every amino acid is present, the body is in a state in which it can synthesize protein, also called a “positive nitrogen balance”. If every amino is not present, then the body is in “negative nitrogen balance”.

Nitrogen balance is binary – there’s no “almost” or “partly” synthesizing. Before new muscle tissue can be built, the body must be in positive nitrogen balance!

Exercise basically “eats up” the BCAAs, so it is obvious that there is a need for increased BCAA intake for the physically active to not only gain muscle, but to also preserve it. Specifically replacing (or overcompensating loss of BCAAs) is best accomplished by supplementing with a product such as Scivation’s Xtend (the blue raspberry and lemonade are AMAZING).

One can also conclude that it makes sense to focus not only on total protein intake, but also obtaining a complete amino acid profile, specifically focusing on the essential and conditionally essential amino acids. This is most easily done by supplementation with a quality protein blend (note that I did not say WHEY protein – search for a blend) and eating a variety of different protein sources (chicken breast, fish, lean cuts of red meat, turkey, etc).

Boyd Myers
Personal Trainer in San Antonio
Owner, San Antonio’s Top Personal Training Studio
16613 Huebner Rd (corner of Huebner and Bitters)
210.391.1454

Hey San Antonio,

For whatever reason, most personal trainers offer very little, if any, guidance as far as nutrition. Most have no formal education in performance nutrition and don’t have the experience to help set up feasible nutritional lifestyle that will compliment a quality training program, and that can be implemented in your current lifestyle. My programs aren’t conventional, but are highly successful. I cannot overstate that when you eat and what you eat are imperative when it comes to transforming the body, and simply following a “diet” that only focuses on “how much” and that doesn’t take these things into consideration is a huge waste of time and effort. Believe it or not, my nutritional programs are not about drastic restriction. Yes, it takes quite a bit of discipline, but it’s very doable and the results are simply mind boggling (feel free to check out some of the testimonials and progress pics).

In this video, I discuss some of these things and explain the steps I take to get my clients started on the custom nutritional program that I create for them to help them reach their goals. Don’t settle for a cookie cutter diet that is created for the masses. So many people focus on things that are going to have a marginal impact (supplements, etc) but timing proper intake plays a drastic role in the type of progress you can make.

Boyd Myers
Personal Trainer in San Antonio
Owner, San Antonio’s Top Personal Training Studio
16613 Huebner Rd (corner of Huebner and Bitters)
210.391.1454

Hey San Antonio,

For some odd reason, most personal trainers are stuck in the stone age when it comes to fat loss and body transformation: they continue to perpetuate the myths that it’s important to do tons of cardio, eat just enough to survive, waste your workout time with isolation exercises and excessive core work, and do absolutely nothing to educate their clients on how to make progress long after their personal training sessions have ended.

Everyday, I put everything out there for people to see.

I talk about the importance of nutrient timing and controlling natural hormone production through exercise and nutrient timing. My clients are surprised at how much I let them eat, how I reduce their dependence on excessive cardio and how their bodies continue to change. Not just change, but change the way they want them to – they become leaner and more defined, not just a smaller version of their current shape.

I post videos of regular clients doing things they never thought they would ever be able to do: including women lifting heavy weights and becoming leaner and leaner week after week. Not becoming big and bulky.

I explain the importance of training for functionality, and educate individuals about the body’s response to exercise, how the body actually changes and debunk the common exercise myths. Core work is for functionality and has nothing to do with appearance. Re-read that. Doing all of the crunches and sit-ups in the world will do nothing to stimulate the loss of body fat.

How many times have I said “a calorie is not a calorie” and YOU have control over what you get rid of and what you keep (lean body mass or disgusting, excess body fat)?

Of course, I regularly post up progress pics and testimonials from clients who continue to rapidly change, who looked better in their day to day clothing and in swimming suits. What good is it to lose a ton of weight if you still can’t show your progress?

Unfortunately, too many personal trainers still obsess over your caloric intake vs how much cardio you do, etc. They have you on the ground doing hours of abs every month. They insist that it’s important that you do several hours of cardio per week.

My approach is NOT easy. It’s tough as hell. It’s extreme. It goes against everything that everyone else is doing. But it’s completely science based and exponentially more effective than what most people are doing. There’s a reason that so few people obtain results, and why my track record of helping people completely transform the way they look is second to none. I design everything I do from scratch to ensure that you are going to reach your goals as quickly as possible and that your body will be forced to progress because I’ll never let it adapt.

The journey is great, but results breed motivation. Education allows results to persist. There are way too many personal trainers that have next to no grasp of the science behind body transformation, and have very little idea if what they’re doing with you is going to help you reach your goals. Hell, watch them train multiple clients – if every client is completely different, how are their approaches different? Most rarely change anything from session to session.

The choice is yours and is simple: do what everyone else is doing and continue to get the nonexistent results, or follow a program designed specifically for you, your current condition and your short and long term goals and have everyone asking you “How did you do that?”

Break the mold!
Boyd Myers
Personal Trainer in San Antonio
Owner, San Antonio’s Top Personal Training Studio
16613 Huebner Rd (corner of Huebner and Bitters)
210.391.1454

Hey San Antonio

The amount of misinformation that is perpetuated in the fitness industry never ceases to amaze me, and many companies are willing to capitalize on any fear or myth in order to make a buck.

In the last few weeks, I have regularly written about how lifting weights will not make women big and bulky (check out this post). Of course, fat loss is completely evasive for most people, and usually, misconceptions about what needs to be done and fear of the unknown routinely leave people searching for answers or an easier way to change their bodies.

Now, there have been some ridiculous gadgets that have come and gone over the last decade or so. Since so many people believe that they can reduce abdominal fat by doing crunches (you cannot spot reduce fat whatsoever, and doing crunches will do absolutely nothing toward reducing body fat), garbage exercise machines/gadgets such as the Ab Lounge, the Bender Ball and the Abdominator have all made attempts at capitalizing on a common misconception. Everyday, a new fat loss pill comes out, and often, they simply contain a few commonly known products that have a slight fat burning effect, recommend a starvation diet and initially, people lose a little bit of weight, buy more and more of the product (even though they hit an abrupt wall and typically rebound) and the creators laugh all the way to the bank.

Of course, many people really don’t know what’s useful and what is not. But no matter your fitness experience or knowledge about fat loss or changing the body, I think you can see that this is absolute bullshit:

Now, I’ve seen some nonsense in my life, but this takes the cake and is a first class case of false advertising. Muscle fibers do not “tone” or define, they either grow or dissolve. This thing has as much capability to activate fiber recruitment as riding in a wagon down a gravel road. Definition is obtained by reducing body fat, not by repetitive motion.

While I realize I’m giving this nonsensical product a bit of free advertising, I couldn’t resist pointing out how ridiculous it is. And, of course, the product itself is so ridiculous that it is kind of funny.

While I can pray, I guess it’s safe to assume that people will waste their money on this thing. Of course, they’ll be sorely disappointed.

Body transformation can only be achieved by a disciplined approach to following a well-designed program that is dedicated to progression. To achieve health, condition and a physical appearance like you’ve never had requires going further than you’ve ever been. Over 80% of people fail to reach fitness goals that they set for themselves. Do not allow yourself to be a number…

Boyd Myers
Personal Trainer in San Antonio
Owner, San Antonio’s Top Personal Training Studio
16613 Huebner Rd (corner of Huebner and Bitters)
210.391.1454