Lots of programs and approaches exist when it comes to gaining muscle. Do this, do that, count tempo, lift fast, train with high volume and no failure, train with low volume to failure, etc. But do you know what the real secret to gaining muscle is? It’s all about consistency and intensity.
Will Smith transformed his body from the skinny teenager in “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” to a muscular athlete for his powerful impersonation of the greatest boxer who has ever lived in Ali.
There has been a trend in the recent years towards the so-called functional training. It emphasizes training the body so that it performs better in sport activities and life in general. As with many trends sometimes the pendulum swings too far in one direction. What I mean is that after fitness training for decades meant working purely for size and aesthetics with a split training routine, now the completely opposite thing is in style.
I like to learn and discover stuff. One of the tricks I have stumbled upon for really getting the true nature of things is to borrow from lots of sources and track where their opinions coincide.
Almost all fitness authors talk about the importance of establishing a solid foundation of strength for folks that are new to training. One of the best explanation I’ve read was by Arthur Jones – a talented pioneer of bodybuilding. He revolutionized the way training is perceived by the general public by introducing the Nautilus machine.
This post is inspired by his writings where he advises new trainees to progress as quickly as possible in a simple but solid full body routine. With brief workouts and hard work, within a short few months significant progress is achieved.
This is probably the most important thing to do in order to build muscle over time – you have to gradually increase the difficulty of your training. You see, if you don’t change things up, if you don’t make things harder, your body won’t have a reason to adapt. Muscle growth is just an adaptation reaction to the external stress caused by the workout.
LL Cool J, on the photo above, works his ass off and consequently looks more than decent. One thing that can be learned about muscle building from the fit celebrities is their work ethic. It simply takes work to achieve anything worthwhile.
I think I became obsessed with basketball during the freshman year of high school. One thing I noticed was that all the older basketball players had great calf development. Well, they probably had good development of their whole bodies, but that was what I noticed cause we were wearing basketball shorts.
Basketball players have good calf development because of their sport. Or is it that they develop their calves for their sport? Which came first? So anyway, I became a calf training fanatic. I remember I had a classmate who was into bodybuilding and I was asking him all the time about ways to develop my calves for basketball.
The thing about most rappers’ physiques is that they have a natural advantage. They are genetically more suited for athletics. That’s why they have the muscles of the back of the body – the ones responsible for athleticism (calves, hamstrings, glutes, lower and upper back and traps) easily developed.
Ja Rule is not a big guy. He looks good because he has a decent amount of muscle and is naturally very lean. It doesn’t hurt that they have naturally lower levels of body fat. All that is left is to develop the muscles of the front of the body – biceps and chest and you’ve got yourself a beach physique.
The gradual increase of the difficulty of your training (progressive overload), is the only guaranteed method to increase your fitness. This works whether your goal is to get stronger, get bigger, get more endurance, etc. Your body changes because it adapts to the changing levels of stress.
Every change or shock in the environment is perceived as stress and the body tries to adapt to it. If the stress is too small, it won’t cause a disturbance and no adaptation will occur. If the stress is too big, you simply die.
Skipping workouts – we have all done it, whether from lack of planning or due to an unexpected circumstance.
Here are four reasons why I think we should avoid doing it or at least minimize it as much as possible.
Just imagine how much more consistent you would be if you didn’t have the habit of missing training sessions for petty reasons. The more you miss sessions, the more you reinforce that same bad habit.
It takes around 3 weeks to form a new habit. Make the decision to be consistent for 21 days and this will pay off later when you will automatically decide to stick to your plan because of the new habit.
How to military press correctly. The secret is to use your whole body. Just like in the hollow position, you have to tuck your pelvis forward and squeeze your glutes hard. The harder you can squeeze, the more force you can use from the ground, through your statically flexed quads, through the glutes and up towards the upper body and the bar itself.
When your whole body is rock solid from flexing, no force dissipates and you are instantly stronger, without gaining an ounce of muscle.
Training hard for 3 to 4 weeks and then resting or backing off on the volume has been around forever. Legendary bodybuilding trainer Vince Gironda supported it. As did the Eastern Bloc trainers. It simply allows you to attack your goals fresh.
Resting will release the accumulated fatigue throughout your whole body. Hard training is a cumulative stress on your whole body.
Not only the muscles, but also the joints, ligaments, bones and probably most importantly organs and glands get fatigued. Once they are rested your progress will be better.
Have you ever noticed how when you first join a gym it is easy to get stronger, add weight and do more reps on each subsequent workout? But a few weeks or a few months later, your progress comes to a halt. You keep pushing the same amount of weight and keep struggling at the same number of repetitions.
This is what I experienced when I first became serious about working out 8 years ago. I wouldn’t miss workouts and yet I seemed to be stuck. In fact, I keep seeing the guys at the gym struggling to change their bodies OR get stronger.
Truth is, I see this at most of the gyms I visit when I have to workout somewhere else. The cost of all this is not only that people fail to get their dream bodies, you know, the type of physiques that inspired them to start training, but also quit working out altogether.
It is a Monday morning, just got back from a walk in the cold with my Labrador Lucky. Over the weekend I had some time to catch up on my reading. I decided to motivate myself a little more for my fat loss transformation by rereading Brad Pilon’s Intermittent Fasting Book as it is an integral part of my plan.
One of the cool things I was reminded about fasting is that you can workout while you are doing it. In fact, Brad not only recommends that you workout three times during the week when fasting, but also adds that you can train on days that you fast without problem.
The barbell squat is the first exercise in the Beginner Strength Training Full body Workout. In order to progress and avoid injuries, it is imperative that you perform the exercise with correct technique. What the exercise will give you is not big legs, but overall strength throughout the body. To get big legs from squats you have to squat very heavy.
[In the video I did not take the bar from a squat rack, but you should not do it like me. Instead, start the exercise properly from a squat rack.]
I will be real here. The beginner strength training workout is not the only routine I’ve trained with. And, this is not the workout I have started training with. Having said that however, this is the workout I currently do and I would recommend to anybody that is a beginner or intermediate, because it produces the fastest progress thus the fastest results. I will write more about what physical goals you need to surpass in order to advance past intermediate status.
Weight training is a kind of stress. When your muscles, as well as tendons, bones and internal secretion glands are exposed to the stress of resistance training, they fatigue and break down a bit. The organs and tissues subsequently recover and become stronger than before.