Extra Workouts for Improving Recovery, Enhancing Performance, and Maximizing Gains When lifters think about workouts, it’s usually either lifting or bust. It’s either hard and heavy barbell and dumbbell sessions or nothing. But it shouldn’t be this way. No matter how “hardcore” of a lifter or bodybuilder you are—perhaps you’re one of those guys that thinks anything over 5 reps is “cardio,” as I once certainly did—you need to do some stuff other than just heavy weight training. The truth is that the more serious you are about lifting, even more do you need to take advantage of non-lifting workouts. These extra sessions might very well be the difference between gaining another 10 pounds of muscle or not, or between winning your powerlifting meet or just coming in 2 nd place. When it comes to being your very best, it is the little things that matter. I first started lifting as a teenager, more...
Muscle-Building Tips and Advice for the Natural Bodybuilder In my last essay on how to gain mass fast, I mentioned that the secret just might be getting stronger on a handful of exercises. (This essay, I suppose, is just an extension of that last one.) In fact, the more I think about it, the more I think that I’m right. If you’re a natural bodybuilder, then the one thing more important than any other is to get strong on a dozen or so exercises, with your strength-focus in roughly the 5 to 10 rep range. One approach is to achieve this is to focus on movements over muscles . In other words, instead of going to the gym and “obliterating” or “destroying” (why do bodybuilders always seem to use military-sounding jargon for a lot of their training) your quad muscles with endless sets of leg extensions, leg presses, and machine whatever, how about just trying to get stronger on the squat? Same goes for the...