Skip to main content

Posts

Non-Lifting Workouts

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...
Recent posts

Movements Over Muscles

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...

Gain Mass Fast

       I received a question the other day via email.   It was succinct and to the point—and, when first received, I thought a bit generic.   “What’s the easiest way to gain mass fast?”   I get quite a bit of questions, and they are usually more in depth.   Most of them, truth be told, are the opposite of this question.   I find that a good many lifters have too many questions, usually because they overthink things too much or they are somehow searching for the “perfect” workout program (which doesn’t exist, by the way).   In the case of this questioner, I responded with a small litany of “the usual” advice for someone in need of quick mass gains: full-body workouts, compound movements, high-frequency training, the “big 4,” plenty of calories, lots of protein… yada, yada, yada.      Then last night, while I was watching one of those cozy little British murder mysteries on PBS and trying my absolute best to not...

Choose Your Own Mass-Building, Strength-Gaining Adventure (i.e. Workout Program)

Some Ready Made (yet Do-it-Yourself) Size and Strength Programs      In the 5 th grade, way back in 1983, I was obsessed with “Choose Your Own Adventure” books.   If you were a kid in the ‘80s, you may very well have experienced this obsession yourself.   According to Wikipedia, between the years ‘79 and ‘98, the books sold 250 million+ copies, so apparently it was, in the words of Ron Burgundy, sort of a big deal.   In fact, until I started reading muscle magazines voraciously starting around ’86, I’m pretty sure that the extent of my reading was comprised of Choose Your Own Adventure books, Conan the Barbarian novels, and various-assorted comic books.   (My favorite comic book series at one point was “Adolescent Radioactive Black Belt Hamsters,” so take that TMNT.)      Choose Your Own Adventure books, if you’re not familiar, were exactly what they sound like: books where you, the reader, decided what happened to the m...