Steps of A Good Warm Up
Step One: Cardio Take 3-5 minutes to warm up your core temperature and loosen up your muscles doing some cardio. This cardio could be jogging, rowing, stair climbing, or sled drags. The most important thing is to get the blood flowing to the muscles. Step Two: Muscle Activation Muscle activation exercises can be done for…
Five Ways to Simplify Training
Whether you’re a professional bodybuilder or a beginner weight lifter, simplifying your training can help you intensify the benefits of training. Weight training can help increase strength, muscle tone, improve bone density, and help reduce fat. These five rules can help you simplify and intensify your training by cutting out all of the fads and…
The Challenge to Be Better
Are you up for the challenge? It’s simple. Be better than you are right now in one full year. It’s important for you to commit to a whole year of change and progression. What should you be better at in one year? Everything. Your health, fitness, athletic performance, nutrition, and confidence should all improve. Look…
Learn Your Gym Terms
While many gym rats can easily slip in and out of gym talk, it’s much harder for beginners to understand the slang found all over the gym. If you feel left out of the talk at the gym, it’s simple to start improving and expanding your gym slang dictionary. Starting out with this list can…
Hydration 101: Water at the Gym
Water is essential for human life. Water is necessary for bodily processes such as transporting glucose and oxygen, helping with digestion, removing waste and biproducts, regulating body temperature, and even making up part of your brain, blood, muscles, and bones. Studies show that more than 40% of fitness enthusiasts are partially dehydrated during workouts. Knowing…
Autoregulation: When to Adjust Your Workouts
Autoregulation is when you adjust your workout intensity based on how you feel about the exercises you’ve taken on. It is done independently without the help of a pre-fabricated program – hence the “auto” part. Certain things can influence how you feel about your workout load – is your strength increasing? How about your stamina?…
Five Steps to Muscle Building Success
There are five steps to successful muscle building in any training program. There are two steps for physical workout planning, one step for nutrition, and two steps for mental fitness. Without these five steps, you won’t see the results you want from your training program. Let’s look at each step in depth. Physical Workout Planning…
The Ultimate Teen Bodybuilder Guide
Why Start Bodybuilding as a Teen? Bodybuilding is a great way to keep your physical fitness in top shape through your teen years and to build the dedication to keep your fitness past your 20s. Bodybuilding can be focused on your personal goals: losing weight, building muscle, improving athletic performance and more. The term “bodybuilding”…
Winter Bodybuilding Tips
Winter isn’t just about gaining the most amount of mass you can whether its fat or muscle. Bodybuilders need to work on gaining lean muscle mass all year round, not just gaining fat. Stick with the basics in the winter. It’s good for your body to have an easy couple of weeks before ramping back…
Making Gains After Age 40
Keeping your muscles strong in your 40s, 50s, and on is still absolutely possible. There are some things to consider that will keep your physique strong and healthy, such as injury prevention and physical limitations that change as you age. Training smart means you can keep pushing long past your 40s. Cardiovascular Health A simple…
How Exercise Can Boost Mental Health
Research suggests that physical activity helps both in protecting against developing anxiety and depression but also in reducing symptoms of both mental disorders. As little as two resistance training sessions a week improved anxiety symptoms in research groups. Although more extensive research is needed, this is a good sign that physical activity can help reduce…
How to Motivate Yourself to Go to the Gym
Going to the gym has many health benefits from the physical to the mental. Knowing all of these benefits doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s easy to get yourself to actually go to the gym. If you have trouble motivating yourself to get to the gym consistently, try these tips to help! Dress the Part Research…
The Basics of Mobility
To understand the basics of mobility, you need to understand the difference between flexibility and mobility. Flexibility is the ability of a muscle to flex throughout your range of motion. Mobility is the ability of the joint to move actively through the range of motion. So, flexibility equals muscle and mobility equals joint. Now to…
Resistance Band Workouts
Resistance bands are great for travelling or at home workouts. They offer resistance and stimulate strength in your muscles. They work through your range of motion to provide differing levels of resistance throughout the movement. They can be used for everything from strength training to mobility fitness exercises. Resistance bands can vary in the amount…
Push Ups: The Classic Necessity
With a gym full of upper body equipment, it can be easy to push off classic groundwork exercises like pushups. However, push ups are a great way to work the upper body without all those fancy pieces of equipment, which makes them great for at home workouts or exercises at the gym. In upper body…
Creatine 101: What You Need to Know
What is creatine on a scientific level? Creatine monohydrate is a nitrogen-containing compound that is a “non-protein.” Organically, it can be eaten in the form of meat and fish or formed in the body from amino acids. Creatine has two forms in the body: free form creatine and phosphocreatine. Phosphocreatine is a part of how…
Types of Cardio: Which is Best?
Cardio is a necessary part of every workout routine, whether you’re trying to lose weight or define your muscles. Cardio is known to help your overall health and can even help improve your mood. There are two main forms of cardio: steady state or high-intensity. Which one is better for you? LISS: Low Intensity Steady…
Physique Training
Physique training is the idea of training for the ideal human aesthetic by conditioning your size, shape, proportions, and symmetry into an ideal balance. You want a strong, powerful body that looks good from the front, back, and all sides. When you think of the ideal, you’ll think of a strong V-taper, abs of steel…
Back to School: High School Weight Training
All high school athletes can benefit from a proper weight training program. A well-developed weight training program can help improve power, speed, coordination, flexibility, and endurance. Proper training helps to reduce the chance of injury by developing muscle, ligament, and bone strength and endurance. The Three Principles of Training The three principles of training are…
Dumbbell Workout
Build and sculpt your whole body with just a pair of ‘bells! Quarantine sucked, make no mistake. For well over a year, we as naturally social animals were locked up indoors away from other human beings. Schools and businesses of all types were closed for the duration, and things like concerts, trade shows, and expos…
Outdoor Cardio Ideas
We spend hours upon hours in the gym. Switching it up by going outside keeps things interesting and fresh. Outdoor workouts challenge you with hills and obstacles, plus you get your fix of Vitamin D from the sunshine. We’re stuck inside all winter long – you might as well enjoy the warm weather while you…
30 Days to 6-Pack Abs!
Why do abs matter so much? “Man, all chicks care about is abs!” How many times have meathead guys (usually in full bulking mode) made this complaint? They just can’t comprehend why Men’s Physique competitors, often referred to disparagingly as ‘Men’s Bikini’ by bodybuilders, get so much female attention. They don’t even have huge quads,…
How to Set Realistic Fitness Goals
Resolutions and goals are choices that we made in our own psyche. But a weight loss goal can range from broad, vague, and undetermined to detailed and concrete. A weight loss goal can be created at any time of the year. It’s important that you set a realistic goal, not a vague one. For example,…
How to Choose a Fitness Trainer
So you’ve decided to hire a personal trainer. Congratulations! While you could certainly pursue your health, fitness, and physique goals on your own and utilize the vast amount of information available on this web site and others to help guide you, you will save an enormous amount of time by finding an expert who will…
German Volume Training
An old-school routine that still delivers serious gains! Sometimes, old school still rules There are some advances over the last half-century that have been truly astonishing. Computer technology would be one, along of course with the Internet that connects us all around the world today. Automotive precision and fuel economy would be another. What about…
The Best Bodybuilding Exercises You Can Do
Bodybuilding has a ton of exercises. Expand that out into weight and powerlifting, cardio, and sport training and you have more movements than you can think of. Narrowing it down to the favorites of bodybuilders can give you a solid foundation of compound and isolation movements that you can pull from for your workouts. Below…
7 Workout Challenges that Test the Limits
Working out with the same weights and same exercises can get boring. Why not switch it up and try something that really challenges your body? These tests were created to push the limits of physical exercise. Think you’re The Man and that you can’t be tested anymore? Think again. Test One: The Mile Run When…
How to Cut WITHOUT losing muscle!
Finally, after what was in many places the coldest winter in history, the mercury is rising at last. The sun is shining, the flowers are blooming, and bodybuilders everywhere are thinking the same thing: it’s time to get cut for summer! You’ve been working hard for the past few months to pack on more muscle…
The Progressive Overload Principle: Avoiding Workout Plateaus
Progressive Overload Definition Progressive overload is the idea that in order to grow in size, strength, and endurance you have to continually adjust and increase the demand you’re putting on your body. Muscles need to work harder and longer than what’s become the “normal” to make changes. If the demand you put on your muscles…
The Beginner’s Weight Training Program
Everyone starts at the same place in the gym: the beginning. Deciding to start a weight lifting program is an exciting time when you’ve decided to take the next step into your health and fitness goals. Whether you just want to tone down and lose some weight or if your ultimate goal is to compete…
The Female Bodybuilding Handbook: Everything You Need to Know
Female bodybuilding can be intimidating. Even if you’re not looking to compete, getting into the gym at all can be hard to do. Fitness machines and routines mean that you have to learn a new activity. If you’re looking for a way to feel confident in the gym, the female bodybuilding handbook is exactly what…
Bodybuilding Posing
Do it right and show your physique off at its best! You’ve got the physique – but can you show it? So you’ve decided to compete. That’s great! I urge all bodybuilders to give themselves the gift of competing at least once. It’s the best way to see exactly what your physique looks like with…
Train for your type!
Customize your workouts and make insane gains The Declaration of Independence may have stated that all men are created equal, but that’s simply not true. Physically, human beings are extremely genetically diverse. Look at height. In Indonesia, the average male is just over 5 feet tall, whereas the average height in The Netherlands is 6-1!…
New Year, New Goals
As it is already well into the start of the new year, it is the time for setting new goals!! As women, we often put everyone else’s needs ahead of our own. As a mom of five, I understand this but I cannot stress enough, for you to be the best wife/mom/friend/employee you can be, you have…
Does Cardio Kill Gains?
Forget the ‘F word,’ bodybuilders fear the ‘C word!’ “I didn’t sign up for this.” That’s the attitude many if not most bodybuilders have about cardiovascular training. We embarked on this journey of muscle-building to pump iron, to hear the clang of heavy weights, and challenge ourselves to lift more and more weight over time…
How Cellucor Fits into Any Workout Routine
Whether you are an athlete, bodybuilder, or just a workout enthusiast, what you do before and after your workout can drastically affect the results you see. There many important aspects to a strong pre-workout routine. The pre-workout routine should start before you even think about heading to gym by getting plenty of sleep the night…
Training Tips: What Is The Rest-Pause Set?
What is a rest pause set? If you’re like me, you’re always on the lookout for new ideas and techniques that can help pack more muscle mass on my frame. The irony of it is, there are some truly spectacular methods that have been around for half a century or more that have fallen into…
The 10 Most Dangerous Pitfalls to Getting Bigger
Are You Making These Mistakes? By Lee Labrada, IFBB Pro Bodybuilding Hall of Fame inductee Copyright © Lee Labrada, Inc. All rights reserved. Competing in the IFBB Mr.Olympia is no small feat. But try doing it at 190 pounds! I did that very thing in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, holding my own against…
Berry DeMey’s Story
This story was adapted from Berry’s ebook, the DeMey88 Method. How It All Began I was just a kid, and I was hiking with my father and brother through theDutch pastures. My father often took long walks, and this time he took mybrother and me along. That day would be one of the most important…
Volume vs. Frequency Bodybuilding
Which one is right for you? The debate goes back long before most of you were born. Which is best, volume or frequency bodybuilding? Each has legions of proponents as well as success stories, just as each has its multitude of detractors and those who sneer at its ineffectiveness. Who’s right? Which one really would…
Blueprint to Mass!
2020 has been the most topsy-turvy year the world has seen in many decades, yet one thing remains constant for we bodybuilders. It’s the fall, and that means it’s time to put the tank tops and shorts away, stop worrying about your tan and being cut up, and shift your focus toward building some fresh…
5 Pec-popping chest workouts!
Pre-exhaust Pec fly machine Warm-up: 1 x 20, 1 x 12 Sets: 4 x 15, 12, 12, 10 + 10* *10 full reps, then 10 from mid-point to full contraction Superset with Flat Smith machine press Warm-up: 1 x 20, 1 x 12 Sets: 4 x 15, 12, 12, 10 + 10* Incline cable crossover…
6 Routines for the best back you can build!
If you don’t want to have a great back, you should. Though you can’t see it looking in a mirror, trust me that it a wide, thick back sets you apart from the crowd like little else. You should want to be just as muscular and impressive from the back as you are the front.…
The Future of More “Personal” Personal Training
Personal training has been around for centuries. Back when the Romans were around, you better believe that the best, strongest soldiers were trained by the best of the best – the personal trainers of the Roman era. Now, personal trainers are highly regarded as people who are not only extremely knowledgeable about workouts but as…
How To Build Glutes At Home
A glute building workout plan you can do in the gym or at home. Very often I’m asked for a glute building workout plan. For better or worse, one of the things I’m most known for is my ass. I was the first pro bodybuilder to bring striated glutes to the Olympia stage. Since then,…
Stop Sabotaging Your Workouts
Each and every time we head for a workout (gym or otherwise), we go with intention to make improvements. I don’t know too many people that are performing regular exercise out who aren’t trying on some level to get better, whether it be a better physique, better health or better performance in a sport. Better…
The best hypertrophy program!
Because bodybuilding is about building bigger muscles Decide right now, do you want to get big or get strong? This is not a trick question, and you can’t answer ‘both.’ If you train in a manner to produce maximum results in muscle growth, you will of course become stronger over time. Conversely, if your training…
Old School Bodybuilding
Does it still hold up in 2020? You hear the arguments all the time. Cranky old bodybuilders insist everything was better back in their day, while the younger crowd is certain things are superior today in every way. Who’s right? The only way to settle this is to break it down. Training then If you…
Your Ultimate Lower Chest Workout!
The lowdown on lower chest We all love chest training, don’t we? There’s a reason International Chest Day is universally performed on Mondays. After the weekend break, it’s the one body part we can’t wait to blast and pump up to mythic proportions. Oftentimes when we talk about specializing on a specific region of the…
Compound Lifts: The Key to Getting Huge!
Why compound movements are superior Which exercises build the most mass? In their quest for that answer, many aspiring bodybuilders look to how pro bodybuilders train and mimic their routines. This seems like a good idea, but more often it sets you up to fail. The way a pro bodybuilder trains today is often drastically…
How to Get Shredded
Step 1: Clean up your diet When people ask me how to get shredded, they seem disappointed when I tell them to start eating clean. They were hoping they could get sliced and diced by taking a drug or an OTC supplement. Those do work, but only to an extent. If your diet isn’t on…
Creatine for Women
Creatine is a highly controversial supplement for many people – but it shouldn’t be! Creatine is a perfectly safe supplement with a long list of tests and evidence behind it. It is not a steroid and it is not actually banned from competition – so you don’t have to worry about using it in them…
The Best Supplements for Muscle Gain and Strength
To start with, there a few questions we need to ask. Are you physically active? Have you started to train and manage your diet? Are you cleared by a medical professional to take supplements? Talk to your doctor if you have a pre-existing medical condition. If you answered yes to all of these questions, you’re…
Using Wrist Straps for Lifting
What is a wrist strap? A wrist strap is a piece of nylon or leather that loops around the bar and your wrist, making it easier to keep your grip at a heavy wright. They’re common for bodybuilders and useful for powerlifters, amateurs, and other strength athletes. Wrist straps allow you to continue working on…
How Yoga Improves Powerlifting
Powerlifting asks competitors (or hobbyists) to max out their weights on three lifts: deadlift, squat, and the bench press. Pushing yourself to your max weight can be taxing and requires your body as a whole to work in harmony. Your muscles need to work together to power through the lift. Yoga can help powerlifters with…
