26 Jan Who Cares How You Look Like Naked?!
Hey guys, how you doing? It’s Joe from Joe’s Basecamp, the bucket list coach here. I’ve got a bit of a gnarly subject for you today.
So let me pre-frame it. Okay, so for a start, I really don’t give a $hit what you look like with your shirt off. I don’t care what you look like naked. I don’t care what you look like in your swimmers or at the beach.
But what I do care about is this. Is your body composition important to your goal?
How you look in your swimmers or naked is a totally subjective thing.
What we’re concerned with is are you the optimal body composition for what you’re trying to achieve? An uphill mountain athlete such as a mountaineer needs to have a a strong, but lean wirey frame a good solid muscle structure for carrying load and for getting up mountains. But any excessive size is going to need oxygen to fuel it. And you don’t need, you know, the larger you are, the more oxygen you require, which isn’t a great thing at altitude.
A mountain runner tends to have a slightly more muscled frame than their road running marathon counterpart. Note I did say slightly. They do need to have extra muscle for coping with the hills. They’ve got to have really, really strong legs for those mountain environments that they’re in. A stronger frame also copes with environmental issues, such as tumbles and knocks and scrapes a bit better, as well, which are more likely to happen in environments like the trails etc. You know, rather than, say on a road, on a road running marathon. The other extreme you have to think about is people like our polar explorers. You know, pulling a 200 kilo Pulk a pulks, a sled, you need to have mass it’s basic physics, you know, the more mass you have, the easier it is to pull heavier loads. But you’ve got to balance that with the endurance because they might be having to cover the equivalent of a marathon every day as they’re crossing the snow in the Arctic wastes. And you know, so endurance and strength and the more mass the easier is to pull the pulk. So your polar explorer is going to benefit from having solid lean muscle mass, and a few extra percentage of fat wouldn’t go astray either because of the the massive amount of calories that they burn every day. So there’s two numbers you need to look at. Your muscle quality. We call it your muscle number. And your body fat percentage. The quality of your muscle is how dense it is. Is it good, strong working muscle, or is it weak? And the body fat speaks for itself. You know, are you overly fat for the goals that you’re trying to achieve? And there’s a big difference, you know, if you’re a recreational trail runner, you know, does it really matter if it’s going to make an impact on your lifestyle if you carrying an extra couple of kegs? Who cares? You know, whereas if you are trying to do some podium finishes, etc, then yeah, we’ve got to try and chop that back. We don’t want to have anything spare. Okay. So, this isn’t how you look in your swimsuit. Like I said at the start, you know, I don’t care. You know, what I do care about is having the correct body composition for you to travel from A to B with ease. And just remember the more mass that you have both muscular and adipose tissue, the more oxygen required for you to function.
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