Have you ever been walking through the magazine aisle at your local grocery store and caught a glimpse of a male or female on the cover of a fitness magazine? If so, did you take a look at how perfect there physiques are? How is this even possible? Are there people who actually look like this on a daily basis?

You can sleep soundly…these physiques you’re seeing on the magazine covers aren’t realistic. No one is capable of walking around with this physique on a daily basis. I won’t even get into the details of the photo-shopping involved for these models to appear the way they do on the covers. The main reason they look the way they do for these photo shoots is due to a little strategy called sodium and water manipulation.

Sodium and water manipulation is a great way to look a lot leaner than you usually are in just a few days. Your body naturally holds a certain percentage of water, and this water retention makes your muscles appear less toned. Sodium and water manipulation allows you to trick your body into flushing away this excess amount of water and give you a drier and leaner appearance. So, how do you achieve this?

You achieve this by taking in larger amounts of sodium a week prior to your photo shoot and also drastically increasing your water intake. Drastically increasing your water intake will trick your body into flushing the additional water out. As the week progresses, you keep your sodium high and start cutting back your water until you are barely drinking any the day before your photo-shoot. The additional sodium will soak up the remaining water and you will look leaner than you ever have.

This is just a trick used by fitness models to achieve that cover model physique. Just remember, increasing your sodium intake can be very dangerous to your heart, so I wouldn’t recommend that anyone try this technique. The main point of this blog was just to prove that models on a magazine cover don’t walk around looking like this at all times.

-Tom