Body-Building

TALKING ABOUT EVOLUTION
A NEW THEORY OF MENTAL AND PHYSICAL HEALTH CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE IN YOUR LIFE

By TOM SOTER
for MUSCLE MEDIA, August 1998

Clark Bartram, ex-marine, personal trainer, and model, recalls a recent encounter he had in his local gym. He was working out with weights when a young man who had also been exercising came up to him and asked, “Can you tell me, are you happy with your body?”

The question surprised Bartram. “Why, yes, I am,” said the 5-foot, 8-inch, 195-pound bodybuilder.

The man sighed. “Yeah, I thought so. You know, I’ve never felt very good about the way I look.” He walked off, head bowed, and Bartram thought to himself, “Gee, that’s kind of sad.”

Touched, Bartram went over to the man and asked a few questions about his workout regimen, his nutrition, and the way he looked at himself and the world.“I asked him about his lifestyle and about how he was eating. In my opinion, he wasn’t eating properly or consistently enough and I saw that he wasn’t doing cardiovascular consistently enough. I told him that. So in two easy questions, I think I answered that guy’s concerns and also gave him a road he could go down to get the results that he wanted.”

But there was a more important principle that the encounter crystallized for Bartram. “This guy was depressed when he compared himself to me. But he didn’t realize that he shouldn’t try to have a body like mine. He should try to be the best that he could be personally. If you measure yourself against all the people you see in the magazines, men and women alike, you’re going to be bummed out about yourself all the time. You have imagine how you want to be, set a goal, and then create a plan to achieve it.”

Bartram knew what he was talking about – and it was “The New Theory of Evolution.” He had practiced that theory on himself only a few short months before, losing 15 pounds and gaining muscle in roughly 10 weeks. “I got out of shape,” he admits. “I got to 11 percent body fat even though I try and stay at around 5, 6 percent body fat year round.”

The model notes that it is easy for anyone – including him – to slip. “Because of my body structure, weight can be a problem for me. I’m short so I put on pounds quickly. I have to be careful.”

In fact, he had gained weight – a pound here, a pound there – until he was way off his regular regimen. Bartram then talked with Kal Yee, Muscle Media’s creative director, and Bill Phillips, its executive editor, whom he often worked for as a model, and both said he was a good subject for an idea that both men were pushing, the so-called New Theory of Evolution.

A combination of Eastern and Western concepts, the theory exemplifies many of the ideas that the Experimental and Applied Sciences (EAS) group has been developing for years. Essentially, it proposes that a sound mind combined with a sound body and a lot of discipline can get excellent results. Sounds simple? Not to everyone.

“In western culture,” Yee notes, “the body and mind are often divorced.The new theory is that two things – the mental and the physical – go hand in hand and that as you train and work on your nutrition and otherwise make choices, you’re not really just working with your body, you’re working with your body and your mind.”

Yee adds that “a lot of the difference in this idea is just focusing and admitting that there is a connection and that the mind can influence your progress. Many times, we grow in the direction that we believe we grow in and that we focus on. There are thousands of exercise techniques which are really all aimed at shifting something in your body. And just as when you emphasize, ‘I’m going to get thinner buns or flatter abs through an ab cruncher,’ [with this theory] you’re really focusing your mind and your physical energy on making a transformation.

“Now, if you’re going to focus on building a better body, which in general would be an increase of muscle tone and a decrease of fat, you’re going to be focusing on how you feel, how you’re thinking, how much energy you have, and your sense of purpose. The sense of purpose, for instance, may be to get flat abs. That ties in with the theory of evolution because you are combining the mental – your purpose – with the physical – what you’re doing to achieve it.”

The first thing to do in practicing the new theory is to set a goal, whether it be flat abs or overall body health. “The initial step is recognizing that the change is very dynamic and that how you think will affect your body and how you treat your body will affect your mind,” Yee notes.

“Everything’s a mind-body thing as far as I'm concerned,” Bartram agrees. “Here I was at 210 pounds, the worst shape of my life, with 11 percent body fat. And I walk in to meet with Cathy Sassin, the nutritionalist, and I was justifying things to her by saying, ‘I don’t normally go around like this; I’m normally 6 to 7 percent body fat.’ I’ll never forget what happened next. She looked me straight in the face and said, ‘But you’re this way now.’

“Right then, I realized, ‘Hey I’m out of shape and it doesn’t matter what I used to be like. I’m in bad shape now.’ So I had to make up my mind at that point that I was going to get back to where I was. I thought, ‘I’m 35 years old and it doesn’t get easier, as the years go by.’ I knew that I had to get busy.”

The next move in the evolution was to design a plan to achieve the goal. Working with Sassin, Bartram mapped out how he should proceed. The bodybuilder already knew how to work out and eat right, but a crucial part of the new theory was to set markers on the road to good health. Sassin helped him do that

“There’s a lot to be said for accountability. I became accountable to her on my nutritional programs,” Bartram recalls. “I checked in with her on a weekly basis for her to go over what I was eating and how it affected me. Every week, she opened up my book and would question me on things. She’d say, ‘Do you really think two California rolls of sushi has enough protein in it for your body?’ I had to say no. And she’d say, ‘Well, why did you eat it then?’ And I was embarrassed, I felt my face turning red.

“But that helped me,” he adds. “With the California roll, my body was not getting the type of nutrients it needed to get into the type of condition I wanted. That’s what happens. People slowly justify more and more things in their life. You get off track one inch, and at the beginning it’s one inch but when you go two or three weeks down the road, you’ve gotten so far off the track that your body is no longer responding. You’re not getting the results that you want.”

From then on, Bartram stuck to his plan. For breakfast every morning, he consumed six egg whites and two whole eggs and two-and-a-half ounces of oatmeal with a cup of non-fat milk and a little bit of jelly.Three hours later, he would have six ounces of tuna, two pieces of seven-grain bread, a half-tablespoon of mayonnaise, an apple, and a banana. In another three hours, he would drink a Myoplex shake with bananas mixed in it. Three hours after that, he would eat eight ounces of chicken breast, eight ounces of broccoli, seven ounces of yam, and add a tablespoon of natural peanut butter on the yam. In three more hours, he would repeat one of the earlier menus, for a total of six meals a day. For supplements, he was taking Phosphagen HP, Cytovol, and CLA

“In each meal I had, I was getting a perfect balance of all the macro-nutrients I needed for my make-up,” Bartram explains. “So I had enough calories and enough proteins, and enough carbs and fat for my body to become lean and muscular.”

He also was drinking at least two gallons of water daily. “Water is the best thing you can drink as far as keeping you hydrated, keeping your body and water balanced, and helping you flush out toxins,” he notes. “It actually will help your body burn fat better by getting the toxins out.”

Thinking about the effects and the taste of food was another important element in practicing the new theory of evolution. “Everything that you put in your mouth is going to cause some kind of effect in your body,” the bodybuilder notes. “Taste is temporary, but there is always a long-lasting effect. For me, I have come to realize that for the two seconds of pleasure of chewing a tasty piece of food, it’s not worth the long-lasting effect of being out of shape.”

Bartram also worked out religiously. His training routine consisted of exercising one body part a day: the chest on Monday, the back on Tuesday, his legs on Wednesday, his shoulders on Thursday, and his arms on Friday. On alternating days, he would do calves and abs. He also worked cardio on a treadmill, starting at about 40 minutes a session.

“And then I bumped it all up in the final two weeks. In the last few weeks, I was increasing the cardio. I also stepped my calories up; I even added another meal in there. Towards the end, I increased the frequency of my meals so I added more calories to my caloric intake as I upped my cardio.”

The entire evolution process was tied in to yet another schedule: shooting photos for an ad display for Muscle Media. Phillips and Yee both saw an opportunity to promote the new theory by documenting Bartram’s progress. If this super-model could gain weight – and lose it – then anyone could. Bartram would dramatically demonstrate the ideas that were a cornerstone of the new theory.

“We could offer dramatic proof of these ideas,” Yee explains. “We thought it would catch people’s attention, especially in a Western society where people always want something quick; they want the magic bullet. The new theory is not a quick fix, but visually, [the ad campaign for it] grabs you [because it seems quick].”

Bartram was the guinea pig. He stuck to his time table. Every picture took place almost three weeks apart. “I knew each week I had to be in that much better condition,” admits Bartram. “I had my plan, then I had my goal, which was to be ready for each shot, to be in that much better condition so you could see a big difference in each photograph. It’s important to set deadlines. Without a deadline, you don’t know what you’re shooting for and you can easily get off track.”

Yee says that when many saw the “New Theory” photos, there were doubters. “I actually shot the photos as they appear in the magazine over a period of nine to ten weeks,” Yee notes. “But the difference is so large that I knew many people weren’t going to believe it. There is no body make-up to contour Clark and there is no computer retouching. And it’s really important to know that. I mean, I could take someone’s face and put it on Tarzan’s body and blend the two, but what good is that? This is really his body.”

Yee, a licensed physician who currently does not practice, feels that such suspicions about the physique transformation are not surprising, considering the traditional approaches to fitness and body-building which the new theory challenges.

“Only to a society with a very physical mentality would this new theory seem strange. It wouldn’t be considered mystical to someone with an Eastern mentality. For them, to see someone getting liposuction – sticking a tube in and trying to remove fat cells – they would think you were stupid. To divorce your mind and your body to that extent would be something that they would think is ridiculous.”

Yee notes that when he was training as a physician it was very clear to him that his patients and most of his colleagues regarded the body as “an almost mechanical object that could be rearranged through surgery or pumped up through chemicals and that your only choice [in making a major health change] is to go through the physician. That’s where the mind part stops. It’s a completely unholistic model. The Western model is, ‘I’m the doctor. I i fix you, you really have nothing to do about it. You’re broken, you’re like a car. I will change the parts and then you will run fine.’ But man is not a machine.”

The new theory of evolution, according to both Bartram and Yee, is to visualize what you want to be and then, through discipline, hard work, and a well-concieved plan, achieve it. “If you don’t have a concept of what your best body is, if you don’t have a goal of it, you can’t possibly get to it,” Yee notes. “The fact that you think you’re moving towards it can have has a huge impact on your achieving results.”

Bartram agrees, adding: “The thing I’ll hear from people all the time when I’m setting up a training program for them is, ‘When do I get my ‘cheat day’?’ And I say, ‘That’s the wrong mentality, If you’ve eaten junk food all these years that’s how you’ve gotten this way. Why do you want to concentrate on that? Let’s concentrate on getting you into condition first and then we’ll slowly introduce that food back into your program. People have their priorities out of line when it comes to that kind of stuff. To succeed, to evolve, you really have to concentrate your efforts. If the first thing you’re concerned about is when your cheat day is, the mental thing is not there yet.”

For Bartram, cheat days are the furthest thing from his mind. Being back in shape, at a fighting trim of 195 pounds, is too wonderful to squander. (And he lost the weight just in time for a new cable TV workout show, American Health and Fitness, set for the winter of ‘98.) “I worked hard to lose what I had gained,” he observes, “and anyone who thinks it was easy because I’m a bodybuilder is wrong. I busted my butt to do it. Once I made up my mind, and then set my goal, it was just a question of following my plan of action and not deviating from it.

“I’m not going to let myself get out of shape again,” he adds. “That’s what I see a lot of people doing. They get on fad diets that cut off the carbohydrates completely, or else they do other fancy things that work but cannot maintain them forever. They don’t think it through. I think that’s partly what the theory is about. People need to understand that fitness is more than a one-time thing. It’s a lifestyle. You’re going to be doing it for the rest of your life. You have to have things you can eat forever in the right combination and the right amount. And you have to continue to practice proper eating habits once you get into shape. When I reached my goal, I didn’t say, ‘It’s done. Now I can party.’ You have to stick with the program.”

Yee feels that the new theory of evolution is also about rethinking why you are working out and eating right in the first place.“I would emphasize that the whole idea of evolution is the evolution of the mind and the body. Some people just do the body to become a sexier person. Sure, they tell you it’s for their heart rate and general health, but most Americans don’t exercise because of their heart rate; if they did, they’d eat differently, or they’d reduce their stress, or they’d make a thousand other conscious choices. They lose weight so they can look better. They feel physically more attractive and they feel sexier.

“But the new theory says there’s more to it than that. You should think about the mind-body connection. You can gain in life from fitness. Your physicality is linked to your energy states and your mental states and your performance.” Being fit, both physically and mentally, “gives you a sense of accomplishment. Fitness is not just about getting a flat tummy because you have been feeling miserable. If you do, you could find out that you are just as miserable with a flat tummy as you were with a fat tummy.

“Some people can discount the new theory and say, ‘Mind and body? That’s no big deal. I know that anyway,’” adds Yee. “But they do they really know it? If they did, they’d live their lives that way. I think the new theory coincides with the entire evolutionary idea of what America is going through, the east-west mind merge and the incorporation of alternative medicine. The concept is a consolidation of all that. To my mind, it’s really fairly radical.”