Q: HI,Mike, i just started ur 6 week chest routine today. In my previous question you said not to do any shoulders or triceps? why is that? couldnt i work them after my chest workout, just to get a final burn for them, i dont want to lose the muscle im gaining in my shoulders and triceps. Plus, with shoulder muscles, i heard somewhere else it can hide man boobs a little bit. I would just work them on M and F. Oh, and also u dissed honey bunches of oats, what is wrong with that? plenty of oats and grains. Same with peanut butter, one gains 9g of protein per tablespoon!

A: The reason to not work shoulders and triceps is to be as fresh as possible for the bench press which is your primary focus while on this program. Bench press on its own will provide some good work for the triceps and also a decent workout for shoulders too. Many low-volume programs do not have any isolation tricep work and instead rely on the bench press to do all the tricep training -- and they work perfectly well! I guarantee you that you won't lose any tricep/shoulder muscle while on this program for 6 weeks. You might lose a bit of shoulder/tricep exercise strength when you come back from the program and you will gain it back in 1-2 weeks (this kind of strength loss happens due to neurological changes, not muscle changes and you regain the old strength back quickly. If you absolutely feel the need to work shoulders/triceps, do it for weeks 1-3 only, not for the last 3 weeks.

The problem with honey bunches of oats, along with pretty much any other processed cereal is that all that processing makes them very easy for your body to digest. This basically has the same effect on your body as eating sugar. Body digests them quickly, lots of glucose enters your bloodstream at once, your pancreas responds by releasing insulin which stimulates glucose uptake both into your muscle and into fat reserves. However your muscles don't have any particular need for extra glucose at that time, so it all ends up as fat.

Actually the process is much much more complicated than I described, but the basic lesson is the same: avoid eating processed foods, especially if you're concerned about fat gain! To defend honey bunches of oats, you do eat them in the morning when your body is less likely to store fat and they're not the worst choice you could've made. But you can still do a lot better by eating real old-fashioned oatmeal without any extra sugar or processing (see sample diets). Slice an apple, sprinkle cinnamon, or throw some strawberries into the oatmeal to make it taste better.

Peanut butter is OK (as long as you control portion sizes), but PB sandwiches are not OK. Bread is, again, a heavily processed carbohydrate (whole grain is better than white bread, but still not a great choice). Combine that with the calorie-heavy PB and you have a combination of heavy insulin release with lots of extra calories in the form of glucose and fatty acids floating in your bloodstream. All those calories will go to your fat reserves. (Again, I'm oversimplifying the actual physiological processes to illustrate my point). PB would be OK to mix with say, low-fat cottage cheese -- that would give you a high protein/low carb/high fat meal. But PB sandwiches are a big no-no, especially when trying to lose fat.

Hope that helps.