PinNaCle Performance

If you’re reading this long after I wrote it, the title won’t make much sense. But as I type, Angelina Jolie has a movie in theatres called “Salt”.

Here’s a mother of six in her late 30′s who is a UN Goodwill Ambassador and a busy actor (the highest paid female actor in the world, currently) who had to bulk up to play a CIA agent whose shining service record is matched only by the gloss on her puffy lips.

Oh, and she may also be a Russian agent. The character Salt, that is, not Angelina Jolie. Although anyone who has ever heard Angelina attempt a Russian accent knows she couldn’t possibly be KGB.

In order for us to believe she’s actually a badass female agent, as familiar with semtex as kotex, Angelina had to get lean and mean. Because I’m still looking to shave a couple of kgs of body fat from my frame while replacing the muscle that withered away, I took a peek at her training methods of getting toned.

Back in the first throes of the industrial revolution, three square meals a day made sense – from the standpoint of the factory owners. You ate once before you came to work, they gave you a single break mid-day for lunch, and you’d work until quitting time where you’d go home, eat one more meal a few hours before bed, and the process would repeat itself.

Nowadays people are tempted to skip breakfast. This means from the time you have supper to the time you have lunch the next day, it could be 18 hours since you last ate. This causes your metabolism to slow.

Worse, you could turn into a ‘night eater’ -from supper on you snack ’till bedtime, then get up, skip breakfast, have a light lunch, then pig out from supper to bedtime again. This boom-and-bust eating confuses your system and it keeps preparing for famine, packing on the lbs.

What Angelina did is the same eating schedule I’m doing, and what I recommend for people trying to lose weight or build muscle while keeping fat off. Eat 5 or 6 small meals a day, each one only 1/2 the size of your normal breakfast, lunch. and dinner meals. Each meal should be the size of one of your fists.

If you were the type to skip breakfast, knock that off and have something like a banana and a piece of whole wheat toast when you get up in the morning. Or a cup of cottage cheese and a sliced apple. A mix of natural sugars, carbs, and protein to kickstart your metabolism back into awake mode.

Speaking of protein, Angelina made sure it made up 30% of her diet. Whether you want visible sculpted muscles or you just want to tone up underneath and stay kinda soft at skin level, eating protein helps build up muscles constantly being torn apart by workouts.

That’s right, torn apart. It’s not during a workout that your muscles tone up – its your muscles preparing themselves for the next workout that makes them build more tissue. o making sure you’re eating at least 30% protein keeps the nutrients available for your body to build those muscle strands. As you add muscle mass it’ll raise your BMR (basal metabolic rate) meaning you’ll be burning more calories even sitting still or sleeping than you did before you started working out.

As far as the rest of the nutrition plan goes it’s pretty basic: No junk food, alcohol only on weekends (if at all – and of course don’t guzzle the stuff), and if you’ve read a few articles on here you’ve seen me declare how fat isn’t the evil thing it’s made out to be; well, neither are carbs. If you’re doing intensive weight training, you need the energy.

Finally, Angelina followed a path similar to the one Ed Norton took when building up his body for American History X. it seems a bit counterintuitive, but if you’re already happy with your body fat amount and just want to tone or build muscle, skip the treadmill. Angelina did zip for cardio, sticking entirely to weights.

Of course actors do this sort of thing on a compressed time frame, and Angie baby was hitting the weights 2 hours a day, 5 days a week. once filming started they switched to lunch hour workouts 4 days a week and bumped her diet to 40% protein to help her keep the muscle on.

We can do it too. Maybe not as fast, maybe not as intense – but just like losing weight too quickly isn’t good for you, building up properly also takes time. But the results are helthier, more stable, and longer lasting so it all works out in the end.

I hope you’ll keep following along with me as I go through this process. Let’s do it together!