If you have the luxury of working out, you’re squandering the opportunity by walking into the gym without a plan. To avoid wasting your time with marginally effective training, you need to get organized. ... Continue Reading
How to Build a Brand in the Fitness Industry
Our guest is Andrew Coates. Andrew is a coach, writer, and podcast host. He works with athletes and gen-pop clients with a focus on education and enjoyment. Our guest is Andrew ... Continue Reading
The 4-Hour Fat Loss Elixir For Busy Lifters
Years ago, you were young with little responsibility. You wanted to pack on muscle, shed fat, and gain superhuman strength. You trained six days a week for two hours at a time. You felt ... Continue Reading
Is Lifting Heavy Weight Important For Building Muscle Size?
There’s an ongoing debate on how important heavy weights are in order to get jacked. As with most trends, public opinion likes to cluster around the extremes. One day heavy weights are critical and the ... Continue Reading
How to Use Ascending Reps to Build Size and Strength
Assuming that building strength and muscle ranks highly among your training priorities, then you may be interested to learn about ascending reps (also known as ladders). What are ascending ... Continue Reading
You Shouldn’t Train Like the Pros to Build Muscle
Most men come to the gym with the goal of improving their aesthetics. Often they look for guidance through various channels of information, the most common being Google, YouTube, or a fitness ... Continue Reading
Eliminate Poor Reps to Build More Muscle
If you’re not making weekly progress with your training plan right now, then listen up. Chances are it has nothing to do with the exercises you’re using, or to do with how much time you’re spending in the ... Continue Reading
Thick Thighs to Save Lives
Biologically, men maintain most of their mass in their upper half while women maintain most of their weight in the lower half. Body types come in endomorph, mesomorph, and ectomorph flavors with ... Continue Reading
Effort Determines Outcome
Have you been working out with the goal to get bigger? You have read the latest articles on what the best training program is to meet your goal and after six weeks have little to show for it. Does this ... Continue Reading
Bridge the Gap Between Strength and Hypertrophy
There still seems to be a lot of confusion these days between the worlds of strength training and hypertrophy training, and how the two are interconnected—similar yet completely different at the same ... Continue Reading
Big Man Training
Big Man Training (BMT) was the name of the program the strength and conditioning coach at my first professional rugby club put me on when they needed to add some size on my frame as fast as possible. It ... Continue Reading
Powerlifters Need Bodybuilding
When it comes to those of us who strength train, we often choose a camp to stick our flag in—it is never just strength training. We often label ourselves as either: a powerlifter, a bodybuilder, a ... Continue Reading
Fix Your Broken Metabolism
Chances are if you’ve been struggling with your weight for an extended period of time, more than likely you’ve screwed up your metabolism. Yo-yo dieting—the process of losing weight and regaining it ... Continue Reading
It’s Okay to Want to Look Good
Longtime fitness pros remember a time when the term “functional training” didn’t exist. The phrase came into common usage in the early 2000s as a corrective to the bodybuilding approach to training ... Continue Reading
Fitness Machines Aren’t All Bad
Machines get a bad rap. Your local “globo” or “commercial” gym is riddled with them. The internet trolls and Instagram trainers are fast to the punch and love to discredit these gyms. But, I’m here to let ... Continue Reading
Effective Training: Make Every Rep Count
A long time ago a bloke with a funny accent said, “The last three or four reps is what makes the muscle grow. This area of pain divides the champion from someone else who is not a champion. ... Continue Reading
Muscle Progress: Reverse Linear Daily Undulating Periodization
In all walks of life, any plan is better than no plan. We’ve all heard the quotes and clichés about failing to plan equating to planning to fail. Well, there is a reason that these types of sayings are ... Continue Reading
Use High Frequency Bodybuilding to Avoid Junk Volume
Recent research has identified a dose-response relationship between training volume and hypertrophy. The more volume you do, without exceeding your capacity to recover, the more you grow. Most people ... Continue Reading
Muscle in a Hurry: Full Contractile Range Tri-Sets
To fully stimulate a muscle, you must challenge it across its entire contractile range. Just doing a full range of motion (ROM) in the big lifts won’t achieve this. Moving through a full ROM is very ... Continue Reading
Unravelling the Mysteries of Training Frequency for Hypertrophy
As discussed in my article on manipulating intensity, volume and frequency for muscle gain, training frequency is one of the most important variables to consider for hypertrophy. In this instance, training ... Continue Reading
What Science Has to Say About Building Muscle
Science is a way of developing knowledge; a mechanism to establish what you accept as sufficiently "real" to allow you to act upon, and thereby live your life. So, science can help guide how you live your ... Continue Reading
Success Leaves Clues; So Does Science
Throughout the history of the iron game bodybuilders have used trial and error and the wisdom passed down from one generation of meathead to the next to determine what works. The evolution of this process ... Continue Reading
The Art of Using Angles for Increased Strength
Strength training isn’t as complicated as people think. In fact, a relentless focus on the basics—squat, deadlift, press, pull—can produce eye-popping results. But understanding the basics of how the game ... Continue Reading
A Reality Check for Impatient Natural Bodybuilders
The plight of the natural lifter is real. We are constantly inundated with images and videos of chemically-enhanced lifters. Common sense seems to have taken a back seat, replaced by circus tricks and ... Continue Reading
