Since the start of the New Year, I’ve been searching tirelessly for the top fitness and nutrition professionals to help contribute articles to BuiltLean.com.

If you believe you are a top fitness/nutrition pro and have excellent writing skills, I would love for you to seriously consider becoming a contributor to this website. If you are not a fitness pro but have any friends, or family who may be interested, then please shoot them this post!

For more information, I have below an advertisement I’ve posted on several websites:

Continue Reading Want To Write For BuiltLean? Learn How…

Looking back at 2011, it has been a very fun, exciting, and busy year for BuiltLean.com. From the start of the year, traffic to BuiltLean.com has grown 10x from 300-400 visitors/day to 3-4K visitors/day (See: BuiltLean.com Surpasses 100K Unique Visitors Per Month). Some more notable items: I did my first live TV appearance for the NBC Philadelphia 10! Show, the BuiltLean Program launched in March to rave reviews, 29 new videos were uploaded to the BuiltLean Youtube Channel, which now has over 150K views from around the world, and 3 amazing contributors came on board to write articles for BuiltLean.com (Christy, Max, and John).

Continue Reading Best of BuiltLean 2011

In December, I came across news items and articles ranging from the FDA warning companies to stop marketing HCG products to exercise labels showing promise as an effective deterrent of sugary drink consumption. For more, check out the articles below:

1) HCG Diet Products Illegal, FDA Warns Seven Companies

The HCG Diet, which requires eating only 500 calories per day and injections of HCG hormone to help speed up metabolism and improve hormonal balance has spread like wildfire in the last couple of years. The success of HCG may come to a screeching halt as the Food and Drug Administration and the Federal Trade Commission issued warning letters to seven companies that market HCG, calling for these companies to stop selling and marketing these unapproved drugs. First, HCG is unapproved as a drug and second, only trace amounts are typically found in these products.

Continue Reading HCG Diet is a SCAM? Fitness Around The Web Dec-2011

I’m thrilled to announce that BuiltLean.com has surpassed over 100K unique visitors in a one month period (11/5-12/5) since launching in March 2010. Visitors came from over 180 countries and over 8,300 cities around the world. I was checking my website stats every day the last week approaching this milestone, which was one of my original short term goals when I started BuiltLean.com.

Check out the chart below from my Google Analytics account:

Continue Reading BuiltLean.com Surpasses 100K Unique Visitors/Month!

As Thanksgiving approaches, the media starts kicking into high gear with fitness and nutrition tips like:

“5 Tips to Eat Healthy on Thanksgiving”

“How to Lose Fat On Thanksgiving Day”

…and the list goes on.

Instead of offering you some tips on how to eat less on Thanksgiving, I’m hoping to share with you something deeper, more fundamental to your life.

I have a lot to be thankful for on Thanksgiving day and one person in particular is my Dad. My dad taught me one of my most valuable fitness lessons years ago, but I only started to fully understand this lesson in the last few months. I want to share this valuable lesson with you today.

Continue Reading Fitness is a Journey, Not a Destination

Gary Taubes is an award winning science writer who is best known for his 640-page tome Good Calories, Bad Calories, which challenges conventional wisdom about nutrition, weight loss, and disease. His more recently published Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It is billed as shorter, but more reader friendly version of Good Calories, Bad Calories. I reasoned it would be a good idea to first read Why We Get Fat so I could share it with you.

Why We Get Fat is split into 2 sections:

Continue Reading Gary Taubes’ “Why We Get Fat” Book Review

New Column! Fitness Around the Web

As a professional web surfer, I come across tons of fitness related articles and videos each month. So I thought to myself, why not share some of these articles in a monthly column? Well, that’s exactly what I plan to do moving forward!

Each month I will include links to articles and videos that I find during the month that are informative, useful, entertaining, or a combination of all three. If you ever come across an article or video that is worthy of being added to this column, let me know!

1) Can A Multivitmain Be Deadly?

A study published this month concluded the daily use of a multivitamin (and other nutrient supplements) was associated with a higher rate of death. Alarmist headlines spread around the media, but should you be concerned? Are multi-vitamins really deadly? Do you even need a multi-vitamin? Dr. Katz who is the Founding Director at the Yale University Prevention Research Center takes on these questions and offers insights into analyzing research studies.

Continue Reading Can Multivitamins Be Deadly? Fitness Around The Web Oct-2011

We all have seen bogus fitness claims and many of us have considered buying products that make these types of claims.

I compiled a list and analyzed the Top 10 Bogus Fitness Claims that are used to appeal to our emotions and woo us into a state of fixation on a product that can solve our deepest, most personal, most challenging problems.

The following claims are (1) factually incorrect, (2) blatantly misleading, (3) involve the notion that fitness goals can be reached without diet, or exercise modifications and/or (4) claim body change in a way that does not make physiological sense.

Continue Reading Top 10 Bogus Fitness Claims: Have You Heard Them Before?

I’ve discussed in depth How Much Muscle You Can Gain Naturally, or your maximum muscle potential, but how fast can you build muscle?  Is it possible to gain 10 pounds of muscle in a month for example?

I’ve personally seen dramatically different rates of muscle gain for several people following the same exact exercise plan and a nearly identical nutrition plan.

How can this be?

Here are 5 factors that affect how fast you build muscle:

1. Training Age
   Your training age is how long you’ve been lifting weights.  If you’re a newbie, you will be able to gain more muscle faster than if you’ve been lifting for many years.

Continue Reading How Fast Can You Build Muscle? 5 Factors That Affect Muscle Growth

Tim Ferris is best known as the author of the The 4-Hour Workweek, which is a minimalist approach to “escaping the 9-5, live anywhere, and enjoy the new rich”. It’s a fantastic book that I would rank in my Top 10 most influential books I’ve read, maybe even Top 5.

So with that said, how does the The 4-Hour Body hold up? Did Tim translate his impressive research, analytical, and outside the box thinking to crack the code of transforming the human body?

Continue Reading The 4 Hour Body Book Review (Pros & Cons)