Back in high school, an unlucky friend of mine had man boobs. He was a great kid, and an active one at that. He played high school football while I sat on the bench. We played basketball together. We even worked out.
Despite all the exercise, however, he still had that shapely chest, at the ripe old age of 16.
It was a running joke between our group of friends. Not really jokes, more like entertaining jabs of love. I mean really entertaining.
“Hey, happy birthday man, here’s a training bra.”
Or “You’re so lucky, buddy, Cameron Diaz would kill for a rack like yours.”
Oh, to be a heartless, teenage boy.
If this rings a bell, it’s probably because you’re in the same predicament. You can put an end to it, though. Here’s the plan you need to help you look a little less like Cam Diaz and a little more like Cam Newton.
Man boobs (also known as Gynecomastia) occurs in 50% of men at one point or another. That’s one breast for every man on Earth.
A number of factors can trigger the common condition. Most of these are not genetic. In many cases, it’s consumption that puts you at risk for this condition.
Possible Causes of Gynecomastia
- Excess weight: The added growth comes from fat being stored in the chest area.
- Hormonal imbalance: Caused by higher levels of estrogen and lower levels of testosterone.
- Medication: Some antibiotics, diuretics and prostate cancer therapies can cause an upswing in estrogen.
- Anabolic Steroids: Are you a bodybuilder?
- Massed-produced meats: An overproduction of estrogen can occur from consuming too many lambs, cows and chickens which were injected with growth hormones.
- Soya products: The verdict is still out on this. Some studies claim ingredients in soy products can drop testosterone while others say the exact opposite. But you can’t say I didn’t tell you.
This is the part where we don’t talk about paying a couple thousand dollars to have surgery done. It doesn’t always work, it hurts and it’s expensive. You can do plenty of better things with that money, like build that sweet potato garden you’ve always dreamed about (but never told anyone).
If you do your research (or just keep reading) you’ll find there are a host of other options.
The best of all those has to be The Superset. Working on the age-old mantra of “No pain, no gain,” there’s no arguing how effective this strategy can be.
The Superset is a two-pronged approach based around two equally productive principles.
- Boost testosterone levels
- Burn fat
Reel in your diet to boost testosterone
Besides not watching the Lifetime Channel, tweaking your daily intake in some important ways can really help in getting your testosterone levels where you need them to be.
Just make sure you only eat carbs and proteins one day a week, but always at different meals and never in the same two-day span unless it’s a harvest month. And eat plenty of wheatgrass. And remember to take naps.
Ok, that’s not true at all. Well, I stand by the naps.
You just have to watch yourself and be disciplined. If it takes a food log where you record your daily intake, do it. If you need to use shock therapy because you don’t have any discipline, do it. Your dog would enjoy it, I’m sure.
Your diet can get exactly where it needs to be if you follow these four steps.
- Lose weight slowly: If you aren’t in the right mindset, it could ruin everything. There are a million ways to lose weight fast. You could drastically drop the amount of calories. Or you could cut out the carbs or do Herculean amounts of cardio exercise. But here’s the gist: Starvation is not good for your testosterone level. Shoot to lose two pounds of fat each week.
- Eat a balanced diet: Approach your diet like a politician approaches a question. Be moderate with everything. Whether it’s low carbs or high proteins, nothing is as good as eating balanced. For example, here is a list of the problems you could face simply from eating too much protein.
- Weight gain
- Intestinal irritation
- Dehydration
- Seizures (if not enough water is consumed)
- Increase in liver enzymes
- Nutritional deficiencies
- Risk of heart disease
- Stick with healthy fats: Most men need to eat more healthy fats. That’s right; there are some fats which are beneficial for you (besides Albert). Basically, avoid trans fats and saturated fats like the plague. MonoUNsaturated and polyUNsaturated fats are the ones you want to find. Warning: Product label checking ahead, bring your trifocals. These are a handful ways to incorporate healthy fats.
- Cook with liquid plant oils (e.g. olive and canola)
- Switch from butter to soft-tub margarine (check labels for “zero trans fat”)
- Get your omega-3 fats each day (from salmon, tuna or walnuts)
- Replace red meat with fish or chicken
- Cut back on dairy products (cheese in particular has a lot of saturated fats)
- Lose the fake meats: As mentioned before, it’s yet to be determined if soy does damage to testosterone levels, but is that soy burger really good enough that you can’t stop eating it?
Once the diet is firmly in place, it is time to move on to phase two.
Sculpt your workouts, sculpt your body
Enter the supersets. When you have the reins on your diet, it is just a matter of putting in the sweat and tears to take it to where you want to be.
The goal of your workout is to gain lean muscle. The math is simple. Your body needs more calories to maintain muscle than it does fat. Once the lean-muscle ball is rolling, everything else will be easier.
Just think of it like this: Fat is only stored energy. Flappy, flubbery energy. So use it to your advantage, MacGyver (in case you were wondering, spell check does in fact recognize “MacGyver” as a word).
This workout plan is designed specifically to turn you into an efficient, fat-burning locomotive. The plan is divided over a three-day workout schedule. Workouts shouldn’t be done on back-to-back days.
Day 1
Dedicate the first day to doing small sets with more weight while targeting your chest and back. For future reference, a battalion’s worth of exercises and detailed instruction on how to do them can be found at Exrx.net. On day one, seventy five percent of your (non-abdominal) exercises should be made up of:
- Chest: Bench press, dips, free weights.
- Back: Rows (cable or dumbbells).
Day 2
On the second day, switch your focus to legs and shoulders, again in smaller sets with more weight. Try to max out your muscles. Make sure to include:
- Shoulders: Military press, behind neck press, front raises
- Legs: Lunges, squats, leg extensions, calf presses
Day 3
The last day targets the biceps and triceps.
- Triceps: Lying triceps extensions, close grip bench press, push downs
- Biceps: Curls, drag curls, underhand chin-ups
Looks simple, right? Actually, it looks downright normal. What breaks this regimen apart from the rest?
The Cardio
Personally, I used to begin and end every workout with a leisurely treadmill stroll along an imaginary beach or by hiking up a mountain slowly while watching ESPN. The truth is that’s less effective than buttering a bagel with a toothpick. You should do the exact opposite.
It’s called high intensity exercise. The best reasons to do cardio are to burn calories and get your metabolism in gear. Raise your heart rate. And the faster you work, the more you can do just that. High intensity exercises like the Leg Matrix and Squat Series will not only spark your heart rate and metabolism, but they will exercise your heart.
After re-inventing the (stationary bike) wheel, there is only one thing left to do. The finishing, and possibly most important, touch is the addition of supersets.
With supersets, you will turn your workout plan up a notch. One day a week (Day 1) you’ll substitute a superset in the place of your normal splits. The man boobs will disappear quicker than toilet paper rolls in a Mexican restaurant.
For best results, alternate between any two, or all, of these chest supersets. One set per week. TIP: Try to rest as little as possible between exercises.
- Workout A: Do push-ups and dips in five descending sets. Start at 50 and cry your way back down to 10.
- Workout B: For a period of twenty minutes, alternate between 10 reps of incline push-ups and dumbbell pullovers. Do as many sets as gravity will allow.
- Workout C: In sets of 15 reps, alternate between Hindu push-ups and dumbbell bench press. Do five rounds of each.
When trying to burn fat, the most important thing to keep in mind is calories. Are you burning more calories each day than you are taking in? If so, you are picking up speed on the fat-burning train.
You’ll finally get rid of those pesky man boobs.
[Editors Note – Many guys consider surgery as an option here. DON’T! Really…simply don’t. And although man-boobs are not pretty and at times really not sexy it IS possible to get rid of them naturally within less than 1 month. Cliff Manchaster, a.k.a “The Chest Coach”, has developed a unique in-house method based on you got to take a look at. One of the KEY secrets Cliff reveals is linked to putting your testosterone levels through the roof while minimizing the extra estrogen that’s usually produced so you’ll actually be losing your man boobs while you sleep! You can read more by going here now.
