I don’t know bout’ all y’all, but The Lion King is one of my favourite flicks. With Bony to Beastly on the brain, I started to see a lot of similarities between lionly living and becoming a beast of an ectomorph. I started coming up with a list of bulking lessons straight from the king of all beasts—Mufasa. Besides, that movie has so many good lessons about life in general—like how when your paps tells you not to go to the elephant graveyard, well, you probably shouldn’t go to the elephant graveyard. If you do…
Anyways, I was in the middle of a normal Hagen-Daaz infused Friday night watching Lion King, when I realized that lions are really cool. I’ve got a lot of respect for the lion. So I did a quick Wikipedia and YouTube search for some legit, peer-reviewed facts.
Perusing through the world wide web, I found myself watching video after video of lions doing cool things like chomping on wildebeest butts, taking strolls through the moonlight and mating with each other—you know, normal lion stuff.
After absorbing all this amazing information, I started putting the pieces of the puzzle together. Lions are big—weighing up to 550lbs. They do explosive training (sprinting and wrestling), but only for short bursts. They rest a lot; up to 20 hours a day. They’re also pretty lean. No, they may not be winning any figure competitions, but they’re at least getting participation trophies.
So … they eat and sleep all day and are packed full of lean muscle? Goodness! The dusty prehistoric light bulb in my brain is showing signs of light!
Lions are the ultimate ectomorph bulkers. They’ve got long narrow torsos, big heads, lanky limbs—and they know exactly what it takes to stay beastly, even if they typically have more trouble benching than guys with more barrel chested body types. How?
- They spend their energy explosively. They sprint after antelopes, they wrestle with other lions, they make more lions. All of these activities are fantastic for stimulating big fast twitch muscle fibres and increasing masculine hormone secretions.
- Lions devour anywhere from 11 to 15 pounds of meat a day!!! Sometimes they gorge and eat up to 66 lb in one sitting! With the heightened insulin sensitivity built up from chasing down antelopes, do you have any idea how much protein synthesis you’d be able to induce with that much lean protein?! After doing some math, which may or may not be correct, lions can eat up to 8,580 grams of protein in one sitting and up 62,726 calories in a day. That’s like eating half of a wildebeest! Oh wait … it is.
- If that wasn’t enough music to my ears, I also learned that lions tend to be relatively inactive for 20 hours of the day. This sounds a lot like the little-known trick Hollywood actors use when putting on rapid amounts of muscle for movie roles: naps. Naps boost your growth hormone production, speeding up recovery between workouts and allowing you to train with greater frequency and intensity.
- They nap with their family. Studies have shown time and time again that those with strong social ties live longer. Even more interesting, those with stronger social ties build muscle faster. There’s a simple reason for this. The hormone that bodybuilders have nightmares about, cortisol, is produced in times of stress. If we’re in danger our body has to prioritize differently, and focus on short term benefits. Longterm health and physique benefits, like fat burning and muscle-building, are neglected. Having a strong social network and close ties keeps lions at ease, limiting cortisol production, and keeping them leaner, healthier and more muscular.
For us humans, it’s the exact same! To be as beastly as we can be and sustain a well-muscled physique, we need to train in a way that forces us to be explosive and strong (aka lifting heavy things), we need to eat a surplus of calories (eat more energy than we expend), we need to rest, and we need to love life.
To recap
If you want to be more like a lion – aka, be more athletic, muscular, lean, and cool.
- Train to be strong and athletic. This means doing stuff that forces your body to adapt in a way that makes it stronger and more athletic – lifting weights, sprinting, jumping, backflips.
- Eat lots protein-rich unprocessed foods. Become the indulgent omni-carnivore you secretly want to be.
- Rest so that you can recover. If a lioness is separated from the herd she has to hunt more, as she can’t rely on her teammates to get food. In turn these lionesses tend to drop to unhealthy weights. If she was able to rest more, she would be able to keep it beastly.
- Taking responsibility for your own life and being true to yourself will make you go places. Mufasa said it best.
You may wonder why I chose lions when there are so many other giant “bulker” animals out there, such as the tiger, grizzly bear, and Mort from Madagascar. It is simply because I felt like it. Plus The Lion King is a siiiick movie!
Before Bony to Beastly
After Bony to Beastly
How do you pull off watching Lion King with confidence and assertiveness?
I mean I’m kind of shy and improving my body to lose this flabby and weak appearenace is part of my plan to become a more confident person.
Last night the 13 year old daughter of some family friends of ours saw a bunch of cartoons DVD and said “at your age, 20 to be exact, you’re still watching this kiddy stuff?” and I just said “I like them” but I didn’t sound authoritative or convincing enough and I could sense she was still thinking “what a loser” in her mind.
- LinkI shold I reply to someone making fun of me for my interests be it cartoons, comix or cooking or what not. How do I sound like a confident person that does what he likes, doesn’t care about what other thinks but doesn’t end up sounding arrogant and unpolite either?
Hehe Marco quite likes the cartoons.
I went through a strange period where I had long hair but didn’t have the abundance of confidence that I needed to handle every single time I got called out on it. I would answer similarly. “I uh. I like it, okay?” and then think dammit why wasn’t I more confident about it. I mean I did love it, after all.
Now I just laugh. I think it’s silly when people tease others over stupid stuff, and laughing seems appropriate.
At that point they usually treat me as if they’d just made a joke, and not as if they’d just tried to make fun of me. Given the choice, after all, it makes sense that they would want to be seen as funny instead of as an asshole. I see the world as a pretty friendly place and it’s usually pretty friendly back.
My enormous monster of an uncle was gleefully listening to Justin Bieber last night, mixed in with his old 60s and 70s rock ‘n roll. Everyone commented, and he just chuckled. He thought it was hilarious that everyone wasn’t a belieber, and he started teasing them about not understanding true musical talent.
With all that said, she’s 13! It’s just that kind of age. Don’t sweat it.
- LinkWhat Shane said makes a lot of sense. It is only weird if you think it’s weird. If you love Lion King – then it shouldn’t matter what anyone else thinks. Now that Justin Bieber is in the conversation – he is a prime example of someone who gets hated on all the time for making lame music – do you think he cares? Do you think he’d be as successful as he is if he took every word of criticism to heart?
It all starts in your mind with the beliefs you have about yourself. And the better and more positive those beliefs are, the more confident person you will be.
Now to your question of what to say – I can’t give you a script for your life – but the best advice I can give – is to constantly get yourself in a positive mindset and do the things that fulfill you. Then the answers will just pop out.
In the meantime – if someone makes fun of you – just suplex them. But seriously – I read this one thing that is funny where you just agree with them and take it to a whole notha level – kind of like making fun of yourself but exaggerating it to insane proportions. Here is the thing – that may be a “technique” but confident people just do that naturally because they know that someone else’s words have no effect on them. However – it is good to take some peoples advice, just not from the majority of people – honestly I’ve gotten some great “advice” from young kids because I think they sometimes see things a bit clearer. Anyways let me kno what ya think!
- Link