Talking Shop: Mike Roussell

Supplements won’t make or break your success. This is a key point. But many people will interpret this as supplements don’t work. That’s not the case; certain supplements do work and can boost your progress. At the simplest level if you are taking a fat loss supplement then you need to be in caloric deficient for it to work. The same goes for a supplement that is going to help boost muscle growth; you need to be in a caloric excess. This sounds basic but it is often overlooked by people.

Here’s another idea that I’ve been thinking about lately. Before you take a supplement you owe it to your body to understand the general mechanism in which that supplement will elicit the desired response. If you are taking a fat burner then you should take the time to educate yourself to the ingredients and how they work. Once you do that you will be able to better compare products, cater your supplementation to your own body, and make some killer stacks.

I was just talking with Bill Hartman about this the other day. Take Biotest’s Hot-Rox Extreme for example. HRX rocks my world (pun intended). It makes me so wired. I am very sensitive to the combination of caffeine and yohimbe. If I take it past 2pm then I have trouble sleeping. But one of the ingredients that I really like in HRX is Biotest’s forskolin derivative, Carbolin-19. So what I’m going to do now is just take the HRX in the morning and then take a full dose of Carbolin-19 in the afternoon. Carbolin-19 isn’t a stimulant so I won’t have any trouble taking it in the afternoon. By using it I will still be able to upregulate cAMP – if the supplement does what it is supposed to and from looking at the literature I think it does. cAMP is important for facilitating fat loss.

Mike Roussell