Category Archives: Advice
Exercise Upgrades for More Muscle
What You’re Doing Wrong
Lunge
Perfect Your Form
1. “When you lunge, keep your torso upright, and focus on moving it up and down, not backward and forward,” says Rasmussen. This will keep your weight balanced evenly through your front foot, allowing you to press hard into the floor with your heel—and target more muscle.
2. “Drop your back knee straight down to the floor,” says Boyle. Consider this a second strategy to help you remember that you should drop your torso down, not push it forward, as you do the exercise.
3. “To work your core harder, narrow your starting stance,” says Gray Cook, M.S.P.T., the author of Athletic Body in Balance. The smaller the gap between your feet, the more your core has to work to stabilize your body. Your goal: Lunge so that it’s almost like you’re walking on a tightrope as you perform the exercise.
Rows and Pullups
You’re ignoring the muscles that retract your shoulder blades.
Perfect Your Form
1. “When doing bent-over and seated rows, and any pullup variation, create as much space between your ears and shoulders as you can,” says Rasmussen. Pull your shoulders down and back and hold them that way as you do the exercise. This ensures you’re working the intended middle-and upper-back muscles.
2. “As you row the weight, stick your chest out,” says Mike Boyle, M.A., A.T.C., owner of Mike Boyle Strength and Conditioning, in Winchester and North Andover, Massachusetts. This allows you to better retract your shoulder blades, which will lead to better results.
3. “Imagine there’s an orange between your shoulder blades,” says Grantham. “Then try to squeeze the juice out of it with your shoulder blades as you pull the weight or your body up.”
Straight-Leg Deadlift
You’re rounding your lower back as you bend over.
Perfect Your Form
1. “To lower the weight, pretend you’re holding a tray of drinks and need to close the door behind you with your butt,” says Cosgrove. This cues you to bend over by pushing your hips back instead of rounding your lower back—a form blunder that puts you at risk for back problems.
2. “Try to ‘shave your legs’ with the bar,” says Weiss. The reason: Every degree the bar is away from your body places more strain on your back, which increases your chance of injury and limits the emphasis on your hamstrings and glutes.
3. “As you lift the bar, squeeze your glutes like two fists,” says Nick Grantham, a top strength and conditioning coach in the U.K. and the owner of Smart Fitness. You’ll ensure that you’re engaging your butt muscles. This helps you generate more power, lift more weight, and produce better results
Squat
You’re starting the movement by bending your knees.
Perfect Your Form
1. “Sit back between your legs, not on top of your knees,” says Dan John, a strength coach based in Draper, Utah. Start your squats by pushing your hips back. “Most men tend to bend their knees first, which puts more stress on their joints.”
2. “When you squat, imagine you’re standing on a paper towel,” says Charlie Weingroff, director of sports performance and physical therapy for CentraState Sports Performance, in Monroe, New Jersey. “Then try to rip the towel apart by pressing your feet hard into the floor and outward.” This activates your glutes, which helps you use heavier weights.
3. “Instead of raising your body, think about pushing the floor away from your body,” says Alwyn Cosgrove, C.S.C.S., co-owner of Results Fitness. “This helps you better engage the muscles in your legs.”
Bench Press
You’re thinking only about pushing the bar up from your chest.
Perfect Your Form
1. “Every time you lower the weight, squeeze your shoulder blades together and pull the bar to your chest,” says Craig Rasmussen, C.S.C.S., a fitness coach at Results Fitness in Santa Clarita, California. This will help you build up energy in your upper body so that you can press the bar up with more force.
2. “As you pull the weight down, lift your chest to meet the barbell,” Rasmussen says. “This will aid your efforts to create a springlike effect when you start to push the bar back up.”
3. “When you press the weight, try to bend the bar with your hands,” says Pavel Tsatsouline, a fitness expert and the author of Enter the Kettlebell! The benefit: You’ll activate more muscle fibers in your lats and move the bar in a stronger and safer path for your shoulders.
Pushup
You’re letting your hips sag as you raise and lower your body.
Perfect Your Form
1. “When you’re in a pushup position, your posture should look the same as it would if you were standing up straight and tall,” says Vern Gambetta, the owner of Gambetta Sports Training Systems, in Sarasota, Florida. “So your hips shouldn’t sag or be hiked, and your upper back shouldn’t be rounded.”
2. “Before you start, contract and stiffen your core the way you would if you had to zip up a really tight jacket,” says Kaitlyn Weiss, a NASM-certified trainer based in Southern California. Hold it that way for the duration of your set. “This helps your body remain rigid—with perfect posture—as you perform the exercise.”
3. “Don’t just push your body up; push your hands through the floor,” Gambetta says. You’ll generate more power with every repetition.
20 Ways to Stick to Your Workout
Mythbusters Vol 6 by Nate Green
Whether they’re debunking long-held myths by citing specific research, drawing from personal experience, or just making an educated guess, our rotating panel of experts likes to put the smack down on some of the most pervasive gym myths that cloud our consciousness and keep us from building lean, muscular, powerful bodies.
But as any self-respecting GI Joe fan understands, knowing is half the battle. The other half? Well, it’s putting advice into practice. That’s up to you.
This is Mythbusters Volume 6 with Dr. Clay Hyght, Alwyn Cosgrove, Chase Karnes, Mike Robertson, and Nia Shanks.
Myth: To gain muscle you must select exercises that enable you to use the maximum amount of weight.
Mythbuster: Dr. Clay Hyght
If you’ve been in the iron game for any length of time, I’m sure you’ve heard this. It’s been passed around so much and is spoken with such certainty and authority that you would assume it’s part of the Holy Gospel.
The problem is this “fact” is built upon faulty logic. First, an analogy.
Let’s say you have a choice between a job that pays $50,000 per year and one that pays $55,000 per year. I bet you’d go for the one that pays $55,000 right? But what if that job is selling Kirby vacuums and you have to use your own car and pay for your own gas to travel around the Midwest? And what if the other job is in an office within walking distance from you house, saving you precious gas money and hellish trips to Akron to sell vacuum cleaners?
It may be time to reevaluate your job situation and pick the job that pays less. As the saying goes, “It’s not how much money you make, it’s how much you keep.“
We train with weights in order to stimulate our muscles. This, obviously, can be done with a number of different methods. However, there’s one thing that everyone agrees on: in order to maximize size and strength gains you must maximize the stimulation to the target muscle.
However, maximizing the stimulation to a muscle is not accomplished by simply moving more weight. Pesky little things like gravity, rotary force, leverage, and momentum come into play.
For an easy illustration let’s look at the leg press. If getting big and strong was as simple as using more weight, then the leg press would be the single best leg exercise on the planet. But it’s not.
Let’s say you can leg press 500 pounds. But are you really doing 500 pounds?
To find the actual force (or resistance) of a leg press (a standard, angled sled), use the equation F = W x sin 45 degrees. “F” is the Force (what we call resistance), “W” is the weight, and 45 degrees is the angle of the machine. So if you leg press 500 pounds, then F = 500lbs x 0.707. Thus F = 353.5 pounds. Kind of disappointing isn’t it?
And this is assuming that your leg press is actually 45 degrees and not 30 degrees like many are these days. If the machine is angled at 30 degrees, then the resistance is a measly 250 pounds!
Now I’m certainly not bashing the leg press. It’s a great exercise for some people. The point is that selecting exercises simply based upon the amount of weight that can be used is erroneous and does not pass a logic test.
The most fundamental principle of weight training, whether for size or strength, is Gradual Progressive Overload (GPO). So go ahead and focus on using progressively heavier weight and more reps, but do not ignore physics and base your exercise selection simply upon the amount of weight you’ll be able to use.
Dr. Clay Hyght, DC, CSCS, CISSN has been a competitive bodybuilder for 17 years. He works with some of the top competitors in bodybuilding and figure. You can visit his website here.
Myth: Sweating on a treadmill is just as good as sweating outside.
Mythbuster: Alwyn Cosgrove
In the past people moved more and their exercise programs were well rounded, but recently more people have switched to doing treadmill-only workouts for their cardio. Whether they think it’s better for their joints or because they’re closet vampires who can’t…stand…the light! and never want to venture outside, I’m not sure.
What I am sure of is that steady-state cardio on the treadmill is just fucking stupid. And, no, I’m not going to rehash the old argument about how intervals burn more calories. You already know that.
Instead I’m going to do some math.
Walking a mile is about two thousand reps in the sagittal plane at about one and a half to two times your bodyweight. Jogging would be around fifteen hundred total reps at about two to three times your bodyweight.
And since the treadmill switches your hamstring and glutes off — your foot hits the belt and the belt pulls you through — it’s mainly a quad exercise.
So let’s say a client does three miles three times per week for one year (and I’m being conservative).
That’s 6000 reps x 3 days per week x 52 weeks, which equals 936,000 reps of knee extension work. Or 468,000 reps per leg.
Let’s say the load going through with the knee was a measly 100 pounds. That’s 4.6 million pounds of work for the quad with absolutely no hamstring work.
Think of it this way: if you did 400,000 reps of triceps extensions with 100 pounds you’d get four million pounds of volume. If you didn’t balance that out with biceps curls you’d expect the elbow joint to hurt, right? You’re damn straight it would!
So long term walking or running on the treadmill is almost guaranteeing knee pain. And that’s not even the worst part. Since the hamstring is switched off you’re actually burning even less calories than you would if you were to walk on the ground!
This study showed that hip flexion angle increases on the treadmill as opposed to the ground and that stance time was reduced. Basically, the whole hip extensor mechanism is affected; hip and knee flexion angles have to increase to bring the hip through on the stride. So hip flexor fatigue plus substitution patterns equals severe knee pain.
Ten or twenty years ago we’d get away with this because our clients ran outside and did other activities. The contribution of treadmill time to total exercise time was much lower. It’s hardly the case today.
One of the problems with low intensity steady-state aerobics for fat loss in the deconditioned population is the sheer amount of reps needed. I can do a bodyweight circuit and spread the “reps” over the whole body and get a similar metabolic effect.
At my gym we’ve always done interval training as we felt the results were superior, but over time we’ve moved to a “metabolic resistance training” model.
For example, one mile on the treadmill would be 1500 reps and burn around 100 calories. If you did a circuit of kettlebell swings, undulating ropes, inverted rows, sled pushes, and burpees for four rounds with 10 to 15 reps each, you’d burn 100 calories in less time with less load, and the reps would be spread over the entire body instead of on the ankles, knees, and hips. It’s just a superior model.
Alwyn Cosgrove is owner of Results Fitness in California, and coauthor of “The New Rules of Lifting and The New Rules of Lifting for Women.”
Myth: You’re not putting on muscle because you’re too active outside the gym.
Mythbuster: Chase Karnes
The big guys at my local gym used to tell me I couldn’t gain weight because I was too active. I played football, worked a manual labor job, raced motocross, and lifted three days per week. They’d always tell me if I wanted to gain weight I’d have to cut back on all the activity and sit on my ass all day. Luckily for me they had it all wrong.
I’ve heard many recreational athletes or guys who work manual labor jobs blame their failure in gaining weight on their high activity levels. On the surface it may seem like they have a valid point. I mean, if too much cardio causes catabolism then recreational sports and manual labor would do the same, wouldn’t they? Not exactly.
You won’t burn so many calories that they can’t be replaced with proper nutrition and eating big. Take some freakin’ protein bars to work with you. Try packing a lunch. If gaining muscle is important to you, you’ll sure as hell find a way to sneak in some hard-boiled eggs and tuna packets.
And anyone who’s familiar with the “G-Flux” concept may argue that this increased physical activity should cause you to have an even better chance at gaining muscle and losing fat.
And what about the training thing? Most guys think they’ll have no energy to train after they work at the construction site. The simple fact is the human body has a very remarkable ability to adapt. So while the first few weeks of adding in a training program may seem difficult, the body will eventually adapt to the increased activity and it won’t seem as hard.
Try planning your workouts when you feel most rested. If you work construction Monday through Friday, hit the gym hard with an upper-body workout on Saturday, a lower-body workout on Sunday, and a full-body workout on Wednesday. If you don’t go to work until 9 A.M., try training at 7:30. Careful periodization of your program with planned back-off weeks is a must, but just because you work or play hard doesn’t mean you still can’t train hard.
You’re just not that special. Look at college, pro, and Olympic level athletes. Some of these guys practice and train hours everyday, yet they’re still jacked. You don’t see their physical activity affecting their abilities to gain or maintain muscle do you?
I know you’ve heard this a million times, but it’s calories in versus calories out. If you work or play hard, then you’re going to have to eat that much more. Another thing I recommend is using BCAAs before and during any prolonged physical activity.
Chase Karnes is a NSCA certified personal trainer and strength coach and an accomplished bodybuilder (Two NPC 1st place finishes) and powerlifter (SLP National Raw Powerlifting record-holder) who trains strength and physique athletes from around the country. You can check out his blog here.
Myth: You should never wear a weight belt.
Mythbuster: Mike Robertson
This is a classic case of people swinging too far to one side. The answer is always going to be “it depends.”
Are you a competitive powerlifter? Then, yes, I think using a belt on sets above 90 percent of your one rep max is a good idea. But you’ve also got to understand that the stronger you are raw, the stronger you’ll be once you get in your gear.
Are you a guy who trains hard in the gym and is concerned mostly about building huge muscles? Then, no, I don’t think you need a belt. Well, at least not all the time.
First, let’s talk about what a weight belt does. It gives you a psychological advantage when you start to move out of your comfort zone and also provides some extra stability to your lumbar area.
The problem is you should already have an “inner weight belt” which consists of your abdominals, lower back, and diaphragm before you even consider using an external weight belt to compensate for your lack of muscular balance. Most guys with weak cores are the same guys who think squats and deadlifts are enough to work their torso. Sure, they help, but if you’re truly interested in building muscle and strength, you need to target your core directly and get it as strong as possible.
The whole point to building the core is to effectively transfer energy from your legs, through your “inner weight belt,” and into the bar. As Dave Tate says, “Would you rather have a pillow or a rock for a stomach?”
If you’ve got a doughboy core, you won’t be moving heavy weight.
So let me go ahead and throw out a general rule about belts. If you’re a powerlifter or just someone who wants to work on max strength, then I think a belt is a good thing to have in your gym bag.
But if you’re not pulling max singles or heavy triples, I think you can safely get by without one if you really work on your core strength and stability.
Mike Robertson, M.S., C.S.C.S., U.S.A.W and received his Masters Degree in Sports Biomechanics from the world-renowned Human Performance Lab at Ball State University. He is the president of Robertson Training Systems.
Myth: Intervals are the best training method for fat loss for everybody.
Mythbuster: Nia Shanks
I’ve done my fair share of running full speed up a hill and nearly losing my breakfast doing barbell complexes. There’s no argument that interval training is effective for fat loss.
But if you’re serious about building muscle and increasing your strength, sitting on the bike and pedaling furiously till your legs look like the Roadrunner’s will negatively impact your progress. So interval training is not always the best method.
From personal experience, and from the results of my clients, I’ve noticed that interval training can be so overwhelming that performance in weight training sessions start to decline. Weights that once felt easy barely move and you start to lose motivation. This sub-par performance in the weight room will lead to a decrease in fat loss.
The way I’ve always trained has been ovaries-to-the-wall. (I’m a woman, so deal with the analogy). It doesn’t matter if I’m deadlifting 250 pounds for reps or jumping rope, I go all out every time, and so do my clients.
If you train with that intensity multiple times a week it’ll catch up with you quickly, causing you to lose focus, burn out, or not recover properly. That’s why if your main goals include building muscle and strength, you should lay off intervals for a while and make sure you kick your ass every time you’re in the gym.
But if you still want to lose a little fat and need to huff and puff like an overweight Wal-Mart whale to feel productive, I suggest going on brisk walks outside after your weight training session. Find a hill or put on a weight vest to make it harder. But keep these walks limited to twenty to thirty minutes and don’t do it more than four times per week. This will help you retain your muscle mass and burn fat at the same time without sacrificing any of your precious energy. And if you really need to shed a lot of fat and want to do intervals, at least be smart enough to tune down the frequency and intensity of your weight training sessions.
Nia graduated from the University of Louisville with a degree in Exercise Science with high honors. Nia is also the SPF push/pull national record holder for her division with a bench press of 145 pounds and a deadlift of 300 pounds at the bodyweight of 122. You can check out her website here.
Your Turn
Playing the angles may not be such a good idea after all.
Treadmill work is horse-puckey.
© 1998 — 2009 Testosterone, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Mythbusters Vol 6 by Nate Green
Whether they’re debunking long-held myths by citing specific research, drawing from personal experience, or just making an educated guess, our rotating panel of experts likes to put the smack down on some of the most pervasive gym myths that cloud our consciousness and keep us from building lean, muscular, powerful bodies.
But as any self-respecting GI Joe fan understands, knowing is half the battle. The other half? Well, it’s putting advice into practice. That’s up to you.
This is Mythbusters Volume 6 with Dr. Clay Hyght, Alwyn Cosgrove, Chase Karnes, Mike Robertson, and Nia Shanks.
Myth: To gain muscle you must select exercises that enable you to use the maximum amount of weight.
Mythbuster: Dr. Clay Hyght
If you’ve been in the iron game for any length of time, I’m sure you’ve heard this. It’s been passed around so much and is spoken with such certainty and authority that you would assume it’s part of the Holy Gospel.
The problem is this “fact” is built upon faulty logic. First, an analogy.
Let’s say you have a choice between a job that pays $50,000 per year and one that pays $55,000 per year. I bet you’d go for the one that pays $55,000 right? But what if that job is selling Kirby vacuums and you have to use your own car and pay for your own gas to travel around the Midwest? And what if the other job is in an office within walking distance from you house, saving you precious gas money and hellish trips to Akron to sell vacuum cleaners?
It may be time to reevaluate your job situation and pick the job that pays less. As the saying goes, “It’s not how much money you make, it’s how much you keep.“
We train with weights in order to stimulate our muscles. This, obviously, can be done with a number of different methods. However, there’s one thing that everyone agrees on: in order to maximize size and strength gains you must maximize the stimulation to the target muscle.
However, maximizing the stimulation to a muscle is not accomplished by simply moving more weight. Pesky little things like gravity, rotary force, leverage, and momentum come into play.
For an easy illustration let’s look at the leg press. If getting big and strong was as simple as using more weight, then the leg press would be the single best leg exercise on the planet. But it’s not.
Let’s say you can leg press 500 pounds. But are you really doing 500 pounds?
To find the actual force (or resistance) of a leg press (a standard, angled sled), use the equation F = W x sin 45 degrees. “F” is the Force (what we call resistance), “W” is the weight, and 45 degrees is the angle of the machine. So if you leg press 500 pounds, then F = 500lbs x 0.707. Thus F = 353.5 pounds. Kind of disappointing isn’t it?
And this is assuming that your leg press is actually 45 degrees and not 30 degrees like many are these days. If the machine is angled at 30 degrees, then the resistance is a measly 250 pounds!
Now I’m certainly not bashing the leg press. It’s a great exercise for some people. The point is that selecting exercises simply based upon the amount of weight that can be used is erroneous and does not pass a logic test.
The most fundamental principle of weight training, whether for size or strength, is Gradual Progressive Overload (GPO). So go ahead and focus on using progressively heavier weight and more reps, but do not ignore physics and base your exercise selection simply upon the amount of weight you’ll be able to use.
Dr. Clay Hyght, DC, CSCS, CISSN has been a competitive bodybuilder for 17 years. He works with some of the top competitors in bodybuilding and figure. You can visit his website here.
Myth: Sweating on a treadmill is just as good as sweating outside.
Mythbuster: Alwyn Cosgrove
In the past people moved more and their exercise programs were well rounded, but recently more people have switched to doing treadmill-only workouts for their cardio. Whether they think it’s better for their joints or because they’re closet vampires who can’t…stand…the light! and never want to venture outside, I’m not sure.
What I am sure of is that steady-state cardio on the treadmill is just fucking stupid. And, no, I’m not going to rehash the old argument about how intervals burn more calories. You already know that.
Instead I’m going to do some math.
Walking a mile is about two thousand reps in the sagittal plane at about one and a half to two times your bodyweight. Jogging would be around fifteen hundred total reps at about two to three times your bodyweight.
And since the treadmill switches your hamstring and glutes off — your foot hits the belt and the belt pulls you through — it’s mainly a quad exercise.
So let’s say a client does three miles three times per week for one year (and I’m being conservative).
That’s 6000 reps x 3 days per week x 52 weeks, which equals 936,000 reps of knee extension work. Or 468,000 reps per leg.
Let’s say the load going through with the knee was a measly 100 pounds. That’s 4.6 million pounds of work for the quad with absolutely no hamstring work.
Think of it this way: if you did 400,000 reps of triceps extensions with 100 pounds you’d get four million pounds of volume. If you didn’t balance that out with biceps curls you’d expect the elbow joint to hurt, right? You’re damn straight it would!
So long term walking or running on the treadmill is almost guaranteeing knee pain. And that’s not even the worst part. Since the hamstring is switched off you’re actually burning even less calories than you would if you were to walk on the ground!
This study showed that hip flexion angle increases on the treadmill as opposed to the ground and that stance time was reduced. Basically, the whole hip extensor mechanism is affected; hip and knee flexion angles have to increase to bring the hip through on the stride. So hip flexor fatigue plus substitution patterns equals severe knee pain.
Ten or twenty years ago we’d get away with this because our clients ran outside and did other activities. The contribution of treadmill time to total exercise time was much lower. It’s hardly the case today.
One of the problems with low intensity steady-state aerobics for fat loss in the deconditioned population is the sheer amount of reps needed. I can do a bodyweight circuit and spread the “reps” over the whole body and get a similar metabolic effect.
At my gym we’ve always done interval training as we felt the results were superior, but over time we’ve moved to a “metabolic resistance training” model.
For example, one mile on the treadmill would be 1500 reps and burn around 100 calories. If you did a circuit of kettlebell swings, undulating ropes, inverted rows, sled pushes, and burpees for four rounds with 10 to 15 reps each, you’d burn 100 calories in less time with less load, and the reps would be spread over the entire body instead of on the ankles, knees, and hips. It’s just a superior model.
Alwyn Cosgrove is owner of Results Fitness in California, and coauthor of “The New Rules of Lifting and The New Rules of Lifting for Women.”
Myth: You’re not putting on muscle because you’re too active outside the gym.
Mythbuster: Chase Karnes
The big guys at my local gym used to tell me I couldn’t gain weight because I was too active. I played football, worked a manual labor job, raced motocross, and lifted three days per week. They’d always tell me if I wanted to gain weight I’d have to cut back on all the activity and sit on my ass all day. Luckily for me they had it all wrong.
I’ve heard many recreational athletes or guys who work manual labor jobs blame their failure in gaining weight on their high activity levels. On the surface it may seem like they have a valid point. I mean, if too much cardio causes catabolism then recreational sports and manual labor would do the same, wouldn’t they? Not exactly.
You won’t burn so many calories that they can’t be replaced with proper nutrition and eating big. Take some freakin’ protein bars to work with you. Try packing a lunch. If gaining muscle is important to you, you’ll sure as hell find a way to sneak in some hard-boiled eggs and tuna packets.
And anyone who’s familiar with the “G-Flux” concept may argue that this increased physical activity should cause you to have an even better chance at gaining muscle and losing fat.
And what about the training thing? Most guys think they’ll have no energy to train after they work at the construction site. The simple fact is the human body has a very remarkable ability to adapt. So while the first few weeks of adding in a training program may seem difficult, the body will eventually adapt to the increased activity and it won’t seem as hard.
Try planning your workouts when you feel most rested. If you work construction Monday through Friday, hit the gym hard with an upper-body workout on Saturday, a lower-body workout on Sunday, and a full-body workout on Wednesday. If you don’t go to work until 9 A.M., try training at 7:30. Careful periodization of your program with planned back-off weeks is a must, but just because you work or play hard doesn’t mean you still can’t train hard.
You’re just not that special. Look at college, pro, and Olympic level athletes. Some of these guys practice and train hours everyday, yet they’re still jacked. You don’t see their physical activity affecting their abilities to gain or maintain muscle do you?
I know you’ve heard this a million times, but it’s calories in versus calories out. If you work or play hard, then you’re going to have to eat that much more. Another thing I recommend is using BCAAs before and during any prolonged physical activity.
Chase Karnes is a NSCA certified personal trainer and strength coach and an accomplished bodybuilder (Two NPC 1st place finishes) and powerlifter (SLP National Raw Powerlifting record-holder) who trains strength and physique athletes from around the country. You can check out his blog here.
Myth: You should never wear a weight belt.
Mythbuster: Mike Robertson
This is a classic case of people swinging too far to one side. The answer is always going to be “it depends.”
Are you a competitive powerlifter? Then, yes, I think using a belt on sets above 90 percent of your one rep max is a good idea. But you’ve also got to understand that the stronger you are raw, the stronger you’ll be once you get in your gear.
Are you a guy who trains hard in the gym and is concerned mostly about building huge muscles? Then, no, I don’t think you need a belt. Well, at least not all the time.
First, let’s talk about what a weight belt does. It gives you a psychological advantage when you start to move out of your comfort zone and also provides some extra stability to your lumbar area.
The problem is you should already have an “inner weight belt” which consists of your abdominals, lower back, and diaphragm before you even consider using an external weight belt to compensate for your lack of muscular balance. Most guys with weak cores are the same guys who think squats and deadlifts are enough to work their torso. Sure, they help, but if you’re truly interested in building muscle and strength, you need to target your core directly and get it as strong as possible.
The whole point to building the core is to effectively transfer energy from your legs, through your “inner weight belt,” and into the bar. As Dave Tate says, “Would you rather have a pillow or a rock for a stomach?”
If you’ve got a doughboy core, you won’t be moving heavy weight.
So let me go ahead and throw out a general rule about belts. If you’re a powerlifter or just someone who wants to work on max strength, then I think a belt is a good thing to have in your gym bag.
But if you’re not pulling max singles or heavy triples, I think you can safely get by without one if you really work on your core strength and stability.
Mike Robertson, M.S., C.S.C.S., U.S.A.W and received his Masters Degree in Sports Biomechanics from the world-renowned Human Performance Lab at Ball State University. He is the president of Robertson Training Systems.
Myth: Intervals are the best training method for fat loss for everybody.
Mythbuster: Nia Shanks
I’ve done my fair share of running full speed up a hill and nearly losing my breakfast doing barbell complexes. There’s no argument that interval training is effective for fat loss.
But if you’re serious about building muscle and increasing your strength, sitting on the bike and pedaling furiously till your legs look like the Roadrunner’s will negatively impact your progress. So interval training is not always the best method.
From personal experience, and from the results of my clients, I’ve noticed that interval training can be so overwhelming that performance in weight training sessions start to decline. Weights that once felt easy barely move and you start to lose motivation. This sub-par performance in the weight room will lead to a decrease in fat loss.
The way I’ve always trained has been ovaries-to-the-wall. (I’m a woman, so deal with the analogy). It doesn’t matter if I’m deadlifting 250 pounds for reps or jumping rope, I go all out every time, and so do my clients.
If you train with that intensity multiple times a week it’ll catch up with you quickly, causing you to lose focus, burn out, or not recover properly. That’s why if your main goals include building muscle and strength, you should lay off intervals for a while and make sure you kick your ass every time you’re in the gym.
But if you still want to lose a little fat and need to huff and puff like an overweight Wal-Mart whale to feel productive, I suggest going on brisk walks outside after your weight training session. Find a hill or put on a weight vest to make it harder. But keep these walks limited to twenty to thirty minutes and don’t do it more than four times per week. This will help you retain your muscle mass and burn fat at the same time without sacrificing any of your precious energy. And if you really need to shed a lot of fat and want to do intervals, at least be smart enough to tune down the frequency and intensity of your weight training sessions.
Nia graduated from the University of Louisville with a degree in Exercise Science with high honors. Nia is also the SPF push/pull national record holder for her division with a bench press of 145 pounds and a deadlift of 300 pounds at the bodyweight of 122. You can check out her website here.
Your Turn
Playing the angles may not be such a good idea after all.
Treadmill work is horse-puckey.
© 1998 — 2009 Testosterone, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
>Mythbusters Vol 6 by Nate Green
>
Whether they’re debunking long-held myths by citing specific research, drawing from personal experience, or just making an educated guess, our rotating panel of experts likes to put the smack down on some of the most pervasive gym myths that cloud our consciousness and keep us from building lean, muscular, powerful bodies.
But as any self-respecting GI Joe fan understands, knowing is half the battle. The other half? Well, it’s putting advice into practice. That’s up to you.
This is Mythbusters Volume 6 with Dr. Clay Hyght, Alwyn Cosgrove, Chase Karnes, Mike Robertson, and Nia Shanks.
Myth: To gain muscle you must select exercises that enable you to use the maximum amount of weight.
Mythbuster: Dr. Clay Hyght
If you’ve been in the iron game for any length of time, I’m sure you’ve heard this. It’s been passed around so much and is spoken with such certainty and authority that you would assume it’s part of the Holy Gospel.
The problem is this “fact” is built upon faulty logic. First, an analogy.
Let’s say you have a choice between a job that pays $50,000 per year and one that pays $55,000 per year. I bet you’d go for the one that pays $55,000 right? But what if that job is selling Kirby vacuums and you have to use your own car and pay for your own gas to travel around the Midwest? And what if the other job is in an office within walking distance from you house, saving you precious gas money and hellish trips to Akron to sell vacuum cleaners?
It may be time to reevaluate your job situation and pick the job that pays less. As the saying goes, “It’s not how much money you make, it’s how much you keep.“
We train with weights in order to stimulate our muscles. This, obviously, can be done with a number of different methods. However, there’s one thing that everyone agrees on: in order to maximize size and strength gains you must maximize the stimulation to the target muscle.
However, maximizing the stimulation to a muscle is not accomplished by simply moving more weight. Pesky little things like gravity, rotary force, leverage, and momentum come into play.
For an easy illustration let’s look at the leg press. If getting big and strong was as simple as using more weight, then the leg press would be the single best leg exercise on the planet. But it’s not.
Let’s say you can leg press 500 pounds. But are you really doing 500 pounds?
To find the actual force (or resistance) of a leg press (a standard, angled sled), use the equation F = W x sin 45 degrees. “F” is the Force (what we call resistance), “W” is the weight, and 45 degrees is the angle of the machine. So if you leg press 500 pounds, then F = 500lbs x 0.707. Thus F = 353.5 pounds. Kind of disappointing isn’t it?
And this is assuming that your leg press is actually 45 degrees and not 30 degrees like many are these days. If the machine is angled at 30 degrees, then the resistance is a measly 250 pounds!
Now I’m certainly not bashing the leg press. It’s a great exercise for some people. The point is that selecting exercises simply based upon the amount of weight that can be used is erroneous and does not pass a logic test.
The most fundamental principle of weight training, whether for size or strength, is Gradual Progressive Overload (GPO). So go ahead and focus on using progressively heavier weight and more reps, but do not ignore physics and base your exercise selection simply upon the amount of weight you’ll be able to use.
Dr. Clay Hyght, DC, CSCS, CISSN has been a competitive bodybuilder for 17 years. He works with some of the top competitors in bodybuilding and figure. You can visit his website here.
Myth: Sweating on a treadmill is just as good as sweating outside.
Mythbuster: Alwyn Cosgrove
In the past people moved more and their exercise programs were well rounded, but recently more people have switched to doing treadmill-only workouts for their cardio. Whether they think it’s better for their joints or because they’re closet vampires who can’t…stand…the light! and never want to venture outside, I’m not sure.
What I am sure of is that steady-state cardio on the treadmill is just fucking stupid. And, no, I’m not going to rehash the old argument about how intervals burn more calories. You already know that.
Instead I’m going to do some math.
Walking a mile is about two thousand reps in the sagittal plane at about one and a half to two times your bodyweight. Jogging would be around fifteen hundred total reps at about two to three times your bodyweight.
And since the treadmill switches your hamstring and glutes off — your foot hits the belt and the belt pulls you through — it’s mainly a quad exercise.
So let’s say a client does three miles three times per week for one year (and I’m being conservative).
That’s 6000 reps x 3 days per week x 52 weeks, which equals 936,000 reps of knee extension work. Or 468,000 reps per leg.
Let’s say the load going through with the knee was a measly 100 pounds. That’s 4.6 million pounds of work for the quad with absolutely no hamstring work.
Think of it this way: if you did 400,000 reps of triceps extensions with 100 pounds you’d get four million pounds of volume. If you didn’t balance that out with biceps curls you’d expect the elbow joint to hurt, right? You’re damn straight it would!
So long term walking or running on the treadmill is almost guaranteeing knee pain. And that’s not even the worst part. Since the hamstring is switched off you’re actually burning even less calories than you would if you were to walk on the ground!
This study showed that hip flexion angle increases on the treadmill as opposed to the ground and that stance time was reduced. Basically, the whole hip extensor mechanism is affected; hip and knee flexion angles have to increase to bring the hip through on the stride. So hip flexor fatigue plus substitution patterns equals severe knee pain.
Ten or twenty years ago we’d get away with this because our clients ran outside and did other activities. The contribution of treadmill time to total exercise time was much lower. It’s hardly the case today.
One of the problems with low intensity steady-state aerobics for fat loss in the deconditioned population is the sheer amount of reps needed. I can do a bodyweight circuit and spread the “reps” over the whole body and get a similar metabolic effect.
At my gym we’ve always done interval training as we felt the results were superior, but over time we’ve moved to a “metabolic resistance training” model.
For example, one mile on the treadmill would be 1500 reps and burn around 100 calories. If you did a circuit of kettlebell swings, undulating ropes, inverted rows, sled pushes, and burpees for four rounds with 10 to 15 reps each, you’d burn 100 calories in less time with less load, and the reps would be spread over the entire body instead of on the ankles, knees, and hips. It’s just a superior model.
Alwyn Cosgrove is owner of Results Fitness in California, and coauthor of “The New Rules of Lifting and The New Rules of Lifting for Women.”
Myth: You’re not putting on muscle because you’re too active outside the gym.
Mythbuster: Chase Karnes
The big guys at my local gym used to tell me I couldn’t gain weight because I was too active. I played football, worked a manual labor job, raced motocross, and lifted three days per week. They’d always tell me if I wanted to gain weight I’d have to cut back on all the activity and sit on my ass all day. Luckily for me they had it all wrong.
I’ve heard many recreational athletes or guys who work manual labor jobs blame their failure in gaining weight on their high activity levels. On the surface it may seem like they have a valid point. I mean, if too much cardio causes catabolism then recreational sports and manual labor would do the same, wouldn’t they? Not exactly.
You won’t burn so many calories that they can’t be replaced with proper nutrition and eating big. Take some freakin’ protein bars to work with you. Try packing a lunch. If gaining muscle is important to you, you’ll sure as hell find a way to sneak in some hard-boiled eggs and tuna packets.
And anyone who’s familiar with the “G-Flux” concept may argue that this increased physical activity should cause you to have an even better chance at gaining muscle and losing fat.
And what about the training thing? Most guys think they’ll have no energy to train after they work at the construction site. The simple fact is the human body has a very remarkable ability to adapt. So while the first few weeks of adding in a training program may seem difficult, the body will eventually adapt to the increased activity and it won’t seem as hard.
Try planning your workouts when you feel most rested. If you work construction Monday through Friday, hit the gym hard with an upper-body workout on Saturday, a lower-body workout on Sunday, and a full-body workout on Wednesday. If you don’t go to work until 9 A.M., try training at 7:30. Careful periodization of your program with planned back-off weeks is a must, but just because you work or play hard doesn’t mean you still can’t train hard.
You’re just not that special. Look at college, pro, and Olympic level athletes. Some of these guys practice and train hours everyday, yet they’re still jacked. You don’t see their physical activity affecting their abilities to gain or maintain muscle do you?
I know you’ve heard this a million times, but it’s calories in versus calories out. If you work or play hard, then you’re going to have to eat that much more. Another thing I recommend is using BCAAs before and during any prolonged physical activity.
Chase Karnes is a NSCA certified personal trainer and strength coach and an accomplished bodybuilder (Two NPC 1st place finishes) and powerlifter (SLP National Raw Powerlifting record-holder) who trains strength and physique athletes from around the country. You can check out his blog here.
Myth: You should never wear a weight belt.
Mythbuster: Mike Robertson
This is a classic case of people swinging too far to one side. The answer is always going to be “it depends.”
Are you a competitive powerlifter? Then, yes, I think using a belt on sets above 90 percent of your one rep max is a good idea. But you’ve also got to understand that the stronger you are raw, the stronger you’ll be once you get in your gear.
Are you a guy who trains hard in the gym and is concerned mostly about building huge muscles? Then, no, I don’t think you need a belt. Well, at least not all the time.
First, let’s talk about what a weight belt does. It gives you a psychological advantage when you start to move out of your comfort zone and also provides some extra stability to your lumbar area.
The problem is you should already have an “inner weight belt” which consists of your abdominals, lower back, and diaphragm before you even consider using an external weight belt to compensate for your lack of muscular balance. Most guys with weak cores are the same guys who think squats and deadlifts are enough to work their torso. Sure, they help, but if you’re truly interested in building muscle and strength, you need to target your core directly and get it as strong as possible.
The whole point to building the core is to effectively transfer energy from your legs, through your “inner weight belt,” and into the bar. As Dave Tate says, “Would you rather have a pillow or a rock for a stomach?”
If you’ve got a doughboy core, you won’t be moving heavy weight.
So let me go ahead and throw out a general rule about belts. If you’re a powerlifter or just someone who wants to work on max strength, then I think a belt is a good thing to have in your gym bag.
But if you’re not pulling max singles or heavy triples, I think you can safely get by without one if you really work on your core strength and stability.
Mike Robertson, M.S., C.S.C.S., U.S.A.W and received his Masters Degree in Sports Biomechanics from the world-renowned Human Performance Lab at Ball State University. He is the president of Robertson Training Systems.
Myth: Intervals are the best training method for fat loss for everybody.
Mythbuster: Nia Shanks
I’ve done my fair share of running full speed up a hill and nearly losing my breakfast doing barbell complexes. There’s no argument that interval training is effective for fat loss.
But if you’re serious about building muscle and increasing your strength, sitting on the bike and pedaling furiously till your legs look like the Roadrunner’s will negatively impact your progress. So interval training is not always the best method.
From personal experience, and from the results of my clients, I’ve noticed that interval training can be so overwhelming that performance in weight training sessions start to decline. Weights that once felt easy barely move and you start to lose motivation. This sub-par performance in the weight room will lead to a decrease in fat loss.
The way I’ve always trained has been ovaries-to-the-wall. (I’m a woman, so deal with the analogy). It doesn’t matter if I’m deadlifting 250 pounds for reps or jumping rope, I go all out every time, and so do my clients.
If you train with that intensity multiple times a week it’ll catch up with you quickly, causing you to lose focus, burn out, or not recover properly. That’s why if your main goals include building muscle and strength, you should lay off intervals for a while and make sure you kick your ass every time you’re in the gym.
But if you still want to lose a little fat and need to huff and puff like an overweight Wal-Mart whale to feel productive, I suggest going on brisk walks outside after your weight training session. Find a hill or put on a weight vest to make it harder. But keep these walks limited to twenty to thirty minutes and don’t do it more than four times per week. This will help you retain your muscle mass and burn fat at the same time without sacrificing any of your precious energy. And if you really need to shed a lot of fat and want to do intervals, at least be smart enough to tune down the frequency and intensity of your weight training sessions.
Nia graduated from the University of Louisville with a degree in Exercise Science with high honors. Nia is also the SPF push/pull national record holder for her division with a bench press of 145 pounds and a deadlift of 300 pounds at the bodyweight of 122. You can check out her website here.
Your Turn
Playing the angles may not be such a good idea after all.
Treadmill work is horse-puckey.
© 1998 — 2009 Testosterone, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Advice You Don’t Want to Hear Vol 2 by the editors
Stop making lame excuses about “muscle loss” and do your cardio, fatty.
Stop obsessing about overtraining, ya wimp.
Lose the ego and do more unilateral training.
That’s just some of the advice you didn’t want to hear from Part I. Now, seven more muscle-building experts lay down the tough love.
Dan John: You Already Know Where You’re Weak, So Fix It!
The biggest problem with most trainers is that they know exactly what their biggest problem is!
That’s right, it never comes as a shock when I tell a 300 pound woman the results of her full physical assessment: “You are too fat.”
Don’t laugh. You probably have some glaring issues too… and you know it!
Like I told Mark Twight (the guy who trained the actors for the 300 movie), why do we even assess males? They all have the following issues:
1. They need to add 100 pounds to their front squat and get the flexibility to go deep.
2. They have tight hip flexors from typing and driving and watching TV. They need to address that before they ask one more “six-pack abs” question.
3. They have to build their rhomboid strength because their shoulders are rolled so far forward it looks like their chest is a spinnaker.
4. They need to double the number of pull-ups they can do. Real pull-ups, by the way.
Yet two weeks after I spend several hours with someone reviewing all these issues, their workouts revert back to bench press, lat pulldown, and thirty-two variations of the curl. And sadly, when this guy puts on his clothes he looks like he has never spent five minutes working out in his life.
If you have glaring issue, do the Arnold trick and work that weakness first. If you honestly don’t know what to do about your weakness, ask. Then, follow the advice!
Alwyn Cosgrove: Weight Training is NOT a Program!
Yeah, you heard me. Weight training is not a fitness program. It’s part of a program.
A TMUSCLE reader, in my opinion, is an athlete. An athlete in today’s world can’t get it done just by adding resistance to a movement. You need more than that. You may be training for looks, but based on your lifestyle you need more than just resistance training to get the body to look right and fly right.
Even if you’re training two hours per day, seven days per week, that’s probably all the activity there is. Fourteen hours out of 168. About 8%. And let’s face it, it’s more like five hours a week really — closer to 3%.
The rest of the time? Well, you’re probably sitting on your ass — in the car, at a desk, in a chair watching TV. We spend hours inactive, with slouched posture and shortened muscles. We need to fix that, and just adding weight and loading the structure isn’t the key. We need a complete program.
You need to address seven areas:
1. Movement Preparation: More than just mobility, this is a process of undoing the damage that you do the other 23 hours of the day — freeing the hips, activating the glutes, developing range of motion, and working each joint as it was designed.
2. Prehabilitation: Quick, hands up if you’ve ever known anyone that has had a shoulder injury. That means that there are areas of “concern” or weakness in the body that we need to address up front. Throw in some YTWLs and some external rotator work as a resiliency tool.
3. Core Stability: Despite what some coaches are saying, the evidence is clear: You need to train the core for stability, and direct training activates the core more than indirect work. Spend a couple of minutes per workout on core stability.
4. Power: Every TMUSCLE reader should be power training. It’s the quality we lose the fastest as we age, yet it’s easy to keep. Make sure you have some explosive movements in your program — not necessarily with bars and dumbbells — maybe just some bodyweight stuff.
5. Resistance Training: ‘Nuff said.
6. Energy System Development: Do your cardio, but remember to mix it up. Cardio doesn’t mean “aerobics on the treadmill.” Use kettlebells, sprints, and complexes as well as longer-duration cardio.
7. Regeneration and Recovery: You need to stretch and foam roll at the very least. If you can recover better and faster, then each training session can be harder… and your results better.
Tony Gentilcore: Suck It Up and Static Stretch!
Every few years, it becomes common practice to vilify a certain idea in the fitness industry:
1. “Saturated fat is evil!” As a result, we’re now in the middle of an obesity epidemic. Huh, that’s weird.
2. “Steady-state cardio will turn you into an emaciated, pencil-neck dweeb.” Now we have trainees who are 50 pounds overweight doing sprints. Brilliant!
The latest trend is the common — albeit wrong — premise that static stretching is a waste of time. A couple of studies showed how static stretching of the hamstrings prior to testing the vertical jump reduced power output by upwards of 10%.
Predictably, coaches and trainers everywhere took this new bit of info and deemed static stretching evil — replacing it with more dynamic warm-ups. Not necessarily a bad thing, just a bit overzealous.
People, we’re talking ten percentage points here. Big deal! Mike Boyle has a great analogy for this using Kevin Garnett of the Boston Celtics. If you could have a healthy Garnett with a 27 inch vertical on the basketball court, as opposed to an injured Garnett with a 30 inch vertical sitting on the bench, isn’t it worth losing three inches if static stretching will keep him healthy and playing?
Listen, we sit on our asses all day for upwards of 40 to 60 hours per week. It stands to reason that our muscles (particularly in our hips) are going to adaptively shorten in the process, resulting in a multitude of postural deficiencies and kinetic dysfunctions. Dynamic flexibility drills and foam rolling are an important component to fixing these issues, but we also need to static stretch to re-establish those length-tension relationships between our joints and muscles.
In the end, suck it up and do your static stretching. For the vast majority of us, the advantages — better movement efficiency, improved mobility, less chronic pain — far outweigh the disadvantages.
Mike Robertson: Your Upper Back Strength Sucks
If most people trained their upper back as hard as they should, we’d have a lot fewer geek physiques and jacked-up shoulders roaming around the local fitness facility.
If you’re looking for an analogy, upper back is like the leg workout for your upper body. If you’re serious and pushing yourself, it’s a damn hard workout.
Think about it like this: Are you always willing to do that extra chin-up? Or to add another five pounds to your chest-supported row? If you’re like most guys and gals out there, the answer is probably “no.”
The cool thing is, when you get serious about your upper back strength, everything seems to get bigger and stronger. Without even trying, you’re adding mass to your arms. Your squat and your deadlift are suddenly much more stable.
And your bench press? Well, I’d bet that your bench would really shoot through the roof if you trained your back — the stabilizers of your bench press — as hard as you trained the bench press itself.
If you want to take your back strength and development to the next level, try prioritizing it in your training for several months. Increase the volume. Place a big exercise like chins or chest-supported rows first in your workout. Better yet, place them at the beginning of your workout and at the beginning of your training week.
Get serious about your upper back. You’ll be amazed at the results.
Mike Boyle: You Need To Train Lower Body First and Do “PRE”
My friend Alwyn Cosgrove says that Monday is International Bench Press Day. All over the world men flock to the gym to perform the most sacred of rituals — the heavy bench day. As Sunday is to church, Monday is to benching.
As a strength and conditioning coach I realized long ago that my primary job was to battle human nature. In fact, I realized I could actually leave the bench press out of workouts and athletes would simply stay longer in order to perform it. My conclusion was simple: The first day in the gym has to be a lower body day.
That means Monday is squat day, not bench day. What heresy! Miss Monday? Then Tuesday is squat day. Sick both Monday and Tuesday? Wednesday is squat day. You get my point. The first day in the gym should be a lower body day. No excuses.
Here’s my simple advice for lower body day. Do front squats or trap bar deadlifts for 3 sets of 8 reps. Two sets are warm-ups. Set three is your best set of eight done to technical failure. (This means with perfect form.)
From this point forward use a form of advanced periodization called Progressive Resistance Exercise or PRE. This novel concept was discovered by Delorme and Watkins in the fifties and calls for the use of something called a 2.5 pound plate.
In the Progressive Resistance Exercise you simply slip 2.5 pounds on each side of the bar every week. Here’s the frightening part: If you simply did this every week starting with 135 x 8 you would do 395 x 8 in the front squat at the end of one year.
People are just in too big a hurry. Don’t get fancy, just use the small plates and PRE.
Mike Roussell: You Can’t Estimate Calories!
You can’t accurately estimate calories. This is a hard truth that many people who struggle with their weight fail to realize. The bottom line is that if you want to get really, really lean, then you’re going to need to get a hold of your calorie intake more than just “yeah, that looks like a tablespoon of peanut butter.”
Studies have shown that people do a very poor job at estimating calories, and it gets worse the more unhealthy the food is (so look out next time you justify eating an entire pizza on your next cheat meal). For example, in one study participants underestimated the caloric value of chicken fajitas by 136%. Even the caloric value of basic foods like chicken breasts were underestimated by 34%.
Another study had people that were dieting keep a food log and found that 53% of the time they estimate the caloric value of the food they were eating incorrectly and 64% of the time they recorded the amount of food they were eating incorrectly. The researchers estimated that this level of calorie inaccuracy could result in a person thinking they were eating 2000 calories per day but in reality they are eating 3000+ calories per day.
Are you still wondering why you can’t lose those last 10 pounds?
It’s time to switch to a more accurate plan. Volumetric measurements (cups, TBSP, etc.) are easier and faster for many foods compared to using grams and weighing everything. Keep in mind that with speed comes a little added error. So if volumetric measures start to fail then move to weighing all your food.
If you don’t mind the hassle and just want to get the body fat off, go straight to weighing all your food — chicken, peanut butter, protein powder, etc. That will allow you to get the most accurate measurement of how many calories you’re eating so you can get lean quick.
Eric Cressey: You Know Too Much for Your Own Good
Imagine Joe Average needs an organ transplant, so he tirelessly scours the Internet to learn everything there is to know about the procedure. Finally, the day of his operation comes. He shows up at the hospital and tells his doctor that he’s “really well read” and wants to do the surgery himself. Crazy, huh?
At least once a month, I meet a TMUSCLE reader who has covered all the material on this site to the point that it’s practically been memorized. He has dressed up like Chad Waterbury for Halloween. He read one of TC’s Atomic Dog columns as the best man’s toast as his buddy’s wedding. And he has slept on the sidewalk outside of Christian Thibaudeau’s house in hopes of catching a glimpse of Christian as he walks outside in his tighty-whities to grab the morning paper.
The only problem is that he’s fat, weak, inflexible, uncoordinated, and deconditioned. He’s the guy showing up at the hospital to do his own organ transplant. He doesn’t understand that there’s a lot more to this. None of this knowledge translated to physique or performance gains.
Why does this happen to some folks? Well, some people just spend way too much time in Internet fantasy land to actually go out and train. They see what they read as everything they need to be successful, but in reality, it’s just one piece of the puzzle.
Information can help you tremendously, but only if you’re willing to work your ass off, too. So, take the experts’ advice to heart, but also go beyond the Internet to find the environment that’ll motivate you to bust your hump.
Find a good training program instead of spending countless hours trying to plan your own. Get a good training partner. Find a new gym. Get a little angry.
You probably need to add 100 pounds to your front squat.
You need to double the number of pull-ups you can do.
Her shortened hip flexors probably overshadow any other physical attributes she might have.
Your upper back strength sucks.
Monday is International Bench Press Day.
© 1998 — 2009 Testosterone, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Advice You Don’t Want to Hear Vol 2 by the editors
Stop making lame excuses about “muscle loss” and do your cardio, fatty.
Stop obsessing about overtraining, ya wimp.
Lose the ego and do more unilateral training.
That’s just some of the advice you didn’t want to hear from Part I. Now, seven more muscle-building experts lay down the tough love.
Dan John: You Already Know Where You’re Weak, So Fix It!
The biggest problem with most trainers is that they know exactly what their biggest problem is!
That’s right, it never comes as a shock when I tell a 300 pound woman the results of her full physical assessment: “You are too fat.”
Don’t laugh. You probably have some glaring issues too… and you know it!
Like I told Mark Twight (the guy who trained the actors for the 300 movie), why do we even assess males? They all have the following issues:
1. They need to add 100 pounds to their front squat and get the flexibility to go deep.
2. They have tight hip flexors from typing and driving and watching TV. They need to address that before they ask one more “six-pack abs” question.
3. They have to build their rhomboid strength because their shoulders are rolled so far forward it looks like their chest is a spinnaker.
4. They need to double the number of pull-ups they can do. Real pull-ups, by the way.
Yet two weeks after I spend several hours with someone reviewing all these issues, their workouts revert back to bench press, lat pulldown, and thirty-two variations of the curl. And sadly, when this guy puts on his clothes he looks like he has never spent five minutes working out in his life.
If you have glaring issue, do the Arnold trick and work that weakness first. If you honestly don’t know what to do about your weakness, ask. Then, follow the advice!
Alwyn Cosgrove: Weight Training is NOT a Program!
Yeah, you heard me. Weight training is not a fitness program. It’s part of a program.
A TMUSCLE reader, in my opinion, is an athlete. An athlete in today’s world can’t get it done just by adding resistance to a movement. You need more than that. You may be training for looks, but based on your lifestyle you need more than just resistance training to get the body to look right and fly right.
Even if you’re training two hours per day, seven days per week, that’s probably all the activity there is. Fourteen hours out of 168. About 8%. And let’s face it, it’s more like five hours a week really — closer to 3%.
The rest of the time? Well, you’re probably sitting on your ass — in the car, at a desk, in a chair watching TV. We spend hours inactive, with slouched posture and shortened muscles. We need to fix that, and just adding weight and loading the structure isn’t the key. We need a complete program.
You need to address seven areas:
1. Movement Preparation: More than just mobility, this is a process of undoing the damage that you do the other 23 hours of the day — freeing the hips, activating the glutes, developing range of motion, and working each joint as it was designed.
2. Prehabilitation: Quick, hands up if you’ve ever known anyone that has had a shoulder injury. That means that there are areas of “concern” or weakness in the body that we need to address up front. Throw in some YTWLs and some external rotator work as a resiliency tool.
3. Core Stability: Despite what some coaches are saying, the evidence is clear: You need to train the core for stability, and direct training activates the core more than indirect work. Spend a couple of minutes per workout on core stability.
4. Power: Every TMUSCLE reader should be power training. It’s the quality we lose the fastest as we age, yet it’s easy to keep. Make sure you have some explosive movements in your program — not necessarily with bars and dumbbells — maybe just some bodyweight stuff.
5. Resistance Training: ‘Nuff said.
6. Energy System Development: Do your cardio, but remember to mix it up. Cardio doesn’t mean “aerobics on the treadmill.” Use kettlebells, sprints, and complexes as well as longer-duration cardio.
7. Regeneration and Recovery: You need to stretch and foam roll at the very least. If you can recover better and faster, then each training session can be harder… and your results better.
Tony Gentilcore: Suck It Up and Static Stretch!
Every few years, it becomes common practice to vilify a certain idea in the fitness industry:
1. “Saturated fat is evil!” As a result, we’re now in the middle of an obesity epidemic. Huh, that’s weird.
2. “Steady-state cardio will turn you into an emaciated, pencil-neck dweeb.” Now we have trainees who are 50 pounds overweight doing sprints. Brilliant!
The latest trend is the common — albeit wrong — premise that static stretching is a waste of time. A couple of studies showed how static stretching of the hamstrings prior to testing the vertical jump reduced power output by upwards of 10%.
Predictably, coaches and trainers everywhere took this new bit of info and deemed static stretching evil — replacing it with more dynamic warm-ups. Not necessarily a bad thing, just a bit overzealous.
People, we’re talking ten percentage points here. Big deal! Mike Boyle has a great analogy for this using Kevin Garnett of the Boston Celtics. If you could have a healthy Garnett with a 27 inch vertical on the basketball court, as opposed to an injured Garnett with a 30 inch vertical sitting on the bench, isn’t it worth losing three inches if static stretching will keep him healthy and playing?
Listen, we sit on our asses all day for upwards of 40 to 60 hours per week. It stands to reason that our muscles (particularly in our hips) are going to adaptively shorten in the process, resulting in a multitude of postural deficiencies and kinetic dysfunctions. Dynamic flexibility drills and foam rolling are an important component to fixing these issues, but we also need to static stretch to re-establish those length-tension relationships between our joints and muscles.
In the end, suck it up and do your static stretching. For the vast majority of us, the advantages — better movement efficiency, improved mobility, less chronic pain — far outweigh the disadvantages.
Mike Robertson: Your Upper Back Strength Sucks
If most people trained their upper back as hard as they should, we’d have a lot fewer geek physiques and jacked-up shoulders roaming around the local fitness facility.
If you’re looking for an analogy, upper back is like the leg workout for your upper body. If you’re serious and pushing yourself, it’s a damn hard workout.
Think about it like this: Are you always willing to do that extra chin-up? Or to add another five pounds to your chest-supported row? If you’re like most guys and gals out there, the answer is probably “no.”
The cool thing is, when you get serious about your upper back strength, everything seems to get bigger and stronger. Without even trying, you’re adding mass to your arms. Your squat and your deadlift are suddenly much more stable.
And your bench press? Well, I’d bet that your bench would really shoot through the roof if you trained your back — the stabilizers of your bench press — as hard as you trained the bench press itself.
If you want to take your back strength and development to the next level, try prioritizing it in your training for several months. Increase the volume. Place a big exercise like chins or chest-supported rows first in your workout. Better yet, place them at the beginning of your workout and at the beginning of your training week.
Get serious about your upper back. You’ll be amazed at the results.
Mike Boyle: You Need To Train Lower Body First and Do “PRE”
My friend Alwyn Cosgrove says that Monday is International Bench Press Day. All over the world men flock to the gym to perform the most sacred of rituals — the heavy bench day. As Sunday is to church, Monday is to benching.
As a strength and conditioning coach I realized long ago that my primary job was to battle human nature. In fact, I realized I could actually leave the bench press out of workouts and athletes would simply stay longer in order to perform it. My conclusion was simple: The first day in the gym has to be a lower body day.
That means Monday is squat day, not bench day. What heresy! Miss Monday? Then Tuesday is squat day. Sick both Monday and Tuesday? Wednesday is squat day. You get my point. The first day in the gym should be a lower body day. No excuses.
Here’s my simple advice for lower body day. Do front squats or trap bar deadlifts for 3 sets of 8 reps. Two sets are warm-ups. Set three is your best set of eight done to technical failure. (This means with perfect form.)
From this point forward use a form of advanced periodization called Progressive Resistance Exercise or PRE. This novel concept was discovered by Delorme and Watkins in the fifties and calls for the use of something called a 2.5 pound plate.
In the Progressive Resistance Exercise you simply slip 2.5 pounds on each side of the bar every week. Here’s the frightening part: If you simply did this every week starting with 135 x 8 you would do 395 x 8 in the front squat at the end of one year.
People are just in too big a hurry. Don’t get fancy, just use the small plates and PRE.
Mike Roussell: You Can’t Estimate Calories!
You can’t accurately estimate calories. This is a hard truth that many people who struggle with their weight fail to realize. The bottom line is that if you want to get really, really lean, then you’re going to need to get a hold of your calorie intake more than just “yeah, that looks like a tablespoon of peanut butter.”
Studies have shown that people do a very poor job at estimating calories, and it gets worse the more unhealthy the food is (so look out next time you justify eating an entire pizza on your next cheat meal). For example, in one study participants underestimated the caloric value of chicken fajitas by 136%. Even the caloric value of basic foods like chicken breasts were underestimated by 34%.
Another study had people that were dieting keep a food log and found that 53% of the time they estimate the caloric value of the food they were eating incorrectly and 64% of the time they recorded the amount of food they were eating incorrectly. The researchers estimated that this level of calorie inaccuracy could result in a person thinking they were eating 2000 calories per day but in reality they are eating 3000+ calories per day.
Are you still wondering why you can’t lose those last 10 pounds?
It’s time to switch to a more accurate plan. Volumetric measurements (cups, TBSP, etc.) are easier and faster for many foods compared to using grams and weighing everything. Keep in mind that with speed comes a little added error. So if volumetric measures start to fail then move to weighing all your food.
If you don’t mind the hassle and just want to get the body fat off, go straight to weighing all your food — chicken, peanut butter, protein powder, etc. That will allow you to get the most accurate measurement of how many calories you’re eating so you can get lean quick.
Eric Cressey: You Know Too Much for Your Own Good
Imagine Joe Average needs an organ transplant, so he tirelessly scours the Internet to learn everything there is to know about the procedure. Finally, the day of his operation comes. He shows up at the hospital and tells his doctor that he’s “really well read” and wants to do the surgery himself. Crazy, huh?
At least once a month, I meet a TMUSCLE reader who has covered all the material on this site to the point that it’s practically been memorized. He has dressed up like Chad Waterbury for Halloween. He read one of TC’s Atomic Dog columns as the best man’s toast as his buddy’s wedding. And he has slept on the sidewalk outside of Christian Thibaudeau’s house in hopes of catching a glimpse of Christian as he walks outside in his tighty-whities to grab the morning paper.
The only problem is that he’s fat, weak, inflexible, uncoordinated, and deconditioned. He’s the guy showing up at the hospital to do his own organ transplant. He doesn’t understand that there’s a lot more to this. None of this knowledge translated to physique or performance gains.
Why does this happen to some folks? Well, some people just spend way too much time in Internet fantasy land to actually go out and train. They see what they read as everything they need to be successful, but in reality, it’s just one piece of the puzzle.
Information can help you tremendously, but only if you’re willing to work your ass off, too. So, take the experts’ advice to heart, but also go beyond the Internet to find the environment that’ll motivate you to bust your hump.
Find a good training program instead of spending countless hours trying to plan your own. Get a good training partner. Find a new gym. Get a little angry.
You probably need to add 100 pounds to your front squat.
You need to double the number of pull-ups you can do.
Her shortened hip flexors probably overshadow any other physical attributes she might have.
Your upper back strength sucks.
Monday is International Bench Press Day.
© 1998 — 2009 Testosterone, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
>Advice You Don’t Want to Hear Vol 2 by the editors
>
Stop making lame excuses about “muscle loss” and do your cardio, fatty.
Stop obsessing about overtraining, ya wimp.
Lose the ego and do more unilateral training.
That’s just some of the advice you didn’t want to hear from Part I. Now, seven more muscle-building experts lay down the tough love.
Dan John: You Already Know Where You’re Weak, So Fix It!
The biggest problem with most trainers is that they know exactly what their biggest problem is!
That’s right, it never comes as a shock when I tell a 300 pound woman the results of her full physical assessment: “You are too fat.”
Don’t laugh. You probably have some glaring issues too… and you know it!
Like I told Mark Twight (the guy who trained the actors for the 300 movie), why do we even assess males? They all have the following issues:
1. They need to add 100 pounds to their front squat and get the flexibility to go deep.
2. They have tight hip flexors from typing and driving and watching TV. They need to address that before they ask one more “six-pack abs” question.
3. They have to build their rhomboid strength because their shoulders are rolled so far forward it looks like their chest is a spinnaker.
4. They need to double the number of pull-ups they can do. Real pull-ups, by the way.
Yet two weeks after I spend several hours with someone reviewing all these issues, their workouts revert back to bench press, lat pulldown, and thirty-two variations of the curl. And sadly, when this guy puts on his clothes he looks like he has never spent five minutes working out in his life.
If you have glaring issue, do the Arnold trick and work that weakness first. If you honestly don’t know what to do about your weakness, ask. Then, follow the advice!
Alwyn Cosgrove: Weight Training is NOT a Program!
Yeah, you heard me. Weight training is not a fitness program. It’s part of a program.
A TMUSCLE reader, in my opinion, is an athlete. An athlete in today’s world can’t get it done just by adding resistance to a movement. You need more than that. You may be training for looks, but based on your lifestyle you need more than just resistance training to get the body to look right and fly right.
Even if you’re training two hours per day, seven days per week, that’s probably all the activity there is. Fourteen hours out of 168. About 8%. And let’s face it, it’s more like five hours a week really — closer to 3%.
The rest of the time? Well, you’re probably sitting on your ass — in the car, at a desk, in a chair watching TV. We spend hours inactive, with slouched posture and shortened muscles. We need to fix that, and just adding weight and loading the structure isn’t the key. We need a complete program.
You need to address seven areas:
1. Movement Preparation: More than just mobility, this is a process of undoing the damage that you do the other 23 hours of the day — freeing the hips, activating the glutes, developing range of motion, and working each joint as it was designed.
2. Prehabilitation: Quick, hands up if you’ve ever known anyone that has had a shoulder injury. That means that there are areas of “concern” or weakness in the body that we need to address up front. Throw in some YTWLs and some external rotator work as a resiliency tool.
3. Core Stability: Despite what some coaches are saying, the evidence is clear: You need to train the core for stability, and direct training activates the core more than indirect work. Spend a couple of minutes per workout on core stability.
4. Power: Every TMUSCLE reader should be power training. It’s the quality we lose the fastest as we age, yet it’s easy to keep. Make sure you have some explosive movements in your program — not necessarily with bars and dumbbells — maybe just some bodyweight stuff.
5. Resistance Training: ‘Nuff said.
6. Energy System Development: Do your cardio, but remember to mix it up. Cardio doesn’t mean “aerobics on the treadmill.” Use kettlebells, sprints, and complexes as well as longer-duration cardio.
7. Regeneration and Recovery: You need to stretch and foam roll at the very least. If you can recover better and faster, then each training session can be harder… and your results better.
Tony Gentilcore: Suck It Up and Static Stretch!
Every few years, it becomes common practice to vilify a certain idea in the fitness industry:
1. “Saturated fat is evil!” As a result, we’re now in the middle of an obesity epidemic. Huh, that’s weird.
2. “Steady-state cardio will turn you into an emaciated, pencil-neck dweeb.” Now we have trainees who are 50 pounds overweight doing sprints. Brilliant!
The latest trend is the common — albeit wrong — premise that static stretching is a waste of time. A couple of studies showed how static stretching of the hamstrings prior to testing the vertical jump reduced power output by upwards of 10%.
Predictably, coaches and trainers everywhere took this new bit of info and deemed static stretching evil — replacing it with more dynamic warm-ups. Not necessarily a bad thing, just a bit overzealous.
People, we’re talking ten percentage points here. Big deal! Mike Boyle has a great analogy for this using Kevin Garnett of the Boston Celtics. If you could have a healthy Garnett with a 27 inch vertical on the basketball court, as opposed to an injured Garnett with a 30 inch vertical sitting on the bench, isn’t it worth losing three inches if static stretching will keep him healthy and playing?
Listen, we sit on our asses all day for upwards of 40 to 60 hours per week. It stands to reason that our muscles (particularly in our hips) are going to adaptively shorten in the process, resulting in a multitude of postural deficiencies and kinetic dysfunctions. Dynamic flexibility drills and foam rolling are an important component to fixing these issues, but we also need to static stretch to re-establish those length-tension relationships between our joints and muscles.
In the end, suck it up and do your static stretching. For the vast majority of us, the advantages — better movement efficiency, improved mobility, less chronic pain — far outweigh the disadvantages.
Mike Robertson: Your Upper Back Strength Sucks
If most people trained their upper back as hard as they should, we’d have a lot fewer geek physiques and jacked-up shoulders roaming around the local fitness facility.
If you’re looking for an analogy, upper back is like the leg workout for your upper body. If you’re serious and pushing yourself, it’s a damn hard workout.
Think about it like this: Are you always willing to do that extra chin-up? Or to add another five pounds to your chest-supported row? If you’re like most guys and gals out there, the answer is probably “no.”
The cool thing is, when you get serious about your upper back strength, everything seems to get bigger and stronger. Without even trying, you’re adding mass to your arms. Your squat and your deadlift are suddenly much more stable.
And your bench press? Well, I’d bet that your bench would really shoot through the roof if you trained your back — the stabilizers of your bench press — as hard as you trained the bench press itself.
If you want to take your back strength and development to the next level, try prioritizing it in your training for several months. Increase the volume. Place a big exercise like chins or chest-supported rows first in your workout. Better yet, place them at the beginning of your workout and at the beginning of your training week.
Get serious about your upper back. You’ll be amazed at the results.
Mike Boyle: You Need To Train Lower Body First and Do “PRE”
My friend Alwyn Cosgrove says that Monday is International Bench Press Day. All over the world men flock to the gym to perform the most sacred of rituals — the heavy bench day. As Sunday is to church, Monday is to benching.
As a strength and conditioning coach I realized long ago that my primary job was to battle human nature. In fact, I realized I could actually leave the bench press out of workouts and athletes would simply stay longer in order to perform it. My conclusion was simple: The first day in the gym has to be a lower body day.
That means Monday is squat day, not bench day. What heresy! Miss Monday? Then Tuesday is squat day. Sick both Monday and Tuesday? Wednesday is squat day. You get my point. The first day in the gym should be a lower body day. No excuses.
Here’s my simple advice for lower body day. Do front squats or trap bar deadlifts for 3 sets of 8 reps. Two sets are warm-ups. Set three is your best set of eight done to technical failure. (This means with perfect form.)
From this point forward use a form of advanced periodization called Progressive Resistance Exercise or PRE. This novel concept was discovered by Delorme and Watkins in the fifties and calls for the use of something called a 2.5 pound plate.
In the Progressive Resistance Exercise you simply slip 2.5 pounds on each side of the bar every week. Here’s the frightening part: If you simply did this every week starting with 135 x 8 you would do 395 x 8 in the front squat at the end of one year.
People are just in too big a hurry. Don’t get fancy, just use the small plates and PRE.
Mike Roussell: You Can’t Estimate Calories!
You can’t accurately estimate calories. This is a hard truth that many people who struggle with their weight fail to realize. The bottom line is that if you want to get really, really lean, then you’re going to need to get a hold of your calorie intake more than just “yeah, that looks like a tablespoon of peanut butter.”
Studies have shown that people do a very poor job at estimating calories, and it gets worse the more unhealthy the food is (so look out next time you justify eating an entire pizza on your next cheat meal). For example, in one study participants underestimated the caloric value of chicken fajitas by 136%. Even the caloric value of basic foods like chicken breasts were underestimated by 34%.
Another study had people that were dieting keep a food log and found that 53% of the time they estimate the caloric value of the food they were eating incorrectly and 64% of the time they recorded the amount of food they were eating incorrectly. The researchers estimated that this level of calorie inaccuracy could result in a person thinking they were eating 2000 calories per day but in reality they are eating 3000+ calories per day.
Are you still wondering why you can’t lose those last 10 pounds?
It’s time to switch to a more accurate plan. Volumetric measurements (cups, TBSP, etc.) are easier and faster for many foods compared to using grams and weighing everything. Keep in mind that with speed comes a little added error. So if volumetric measures start to fail then move to weighing all your food.
If you don’t mind the hassle and just want to get the body fat off, go straight to weighing all your food — chicken, peanut butter, protein powder, etc. That will allow you to get the most accurate measurement of how many calories you’re eating so you can get lean quick.
Eric Cressey: You Know Too Much for Your Own Good
Imagine Joe Average needs an organ transplant, so he tirelessly scours the Internet to learn everything there is to know about the procedure. Finally, the day of his operation comes. He shows up at the hospital and tells his doctor that he’s “really well read” and wants to do the surgery himself. Crazy, huh?
At least once a month, I meet a TMUSCLE reader who has covered all the material on this site to the point that it’s practically been memorized. He has dressed up like Chad Waterbury for Halloween. He read one of TC’s Atomic Dog columns as the best man’s toast as his buddy’s wedding. And he has slept on the sidewalk outside of Christian Thibaudeau’s house in hopes of catching a glimpse of Christian as he walks outside in his tighty-whities to grab the morning paper.
The only problem is that he’s fat, weak, inflexible, uncoordinated, and deconditioned. He’s the guy showing up at the hospital to do his own organ transplant. He doesn’t understand that there’s a lot more to this. None of this knowledge translated to physique or performance gains.
Why does this happen to some folks? Well, some people just spend way too much time in Internet fantasy land to actually go out and train. They see what they read as everything they need to be successful, but in reality, it’s just one piece of the puzzle.
Information can help you tremendously, but only if you’re willing to work your ass off, too. So, take the experts’ advice to heart, but also go beyond the Internet to find the environment that’ll motivate you to bust your hump.
Find a good training program instead of spending countless hours trying to plan your own. Get a good training partner. Find a new gym. Get a little angry.
You probably need to add 100 pounds to your front squat.
You need to double the number of pull-ups you can do.
Her shortened hip flexors probably overshadow any other physical attributes she might have.
Your upper back strength sucks.
Monday is International Bench Press Day.
© 1998 — 2009 Testosterone, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
FROM FAT TO FIT 