Bodyweight Training and More for Upper Body Size and Strength You don’t need much equipment to build a good physique. A lot of trainees spend all their time at the gym doing endless bench press exercises with barbells and dumbbells along with an assorted array of machine movements for their chest, shoulders, and triceps. Most gym-goers could get equally good results, and perhaps even better gains, with little other than dips and push-ups, however. Push-ups seem so “basic” that many think there isn’t much use for them once one gets past the beginner stage or has access to “better” exercises. But they still work as well as about anything. And old-school bodybuilders and lifters from yesteryear often called dips the “upper body squat” for a reason. Dips can produce big-time upper body gains. Dips and push-ups have been around for a long time. Well over a thousand years ago, Roman and Gre...
Musings on Lifting, Life, and the Reasons for Training (with a few workouts thrown in for good measure) Why do you train? It’s a question you must ask yourself and it’s a question that only you can answer. To help you with the question, I can only tell you why I train. But to do that, we have to go back to the past a little bit. Why did I train? What got me started in the first place? What kept me going? Why do I train now and why will I continue to train long into the future? I started training when I was pretty young, around 13 years old. It might have been 14. I’m not really sure, though 13 sounds about right. It would have been in ‘86 or ‘87, when my father bought me one of those cement-filled DP weight sets for either my birthday or Christmas. I think it was my birthday, because I remember first training in the summer, and I was born in May. My siste...