I'm a strength coach. I spend much of my day making people bigger, faster, and stronger – with aheavy emphasis on the latter.

I love the effect something as simple as getting stronger has on the human body. Performance improves while imbalances fade, and with time a slow, brittle physique is replaced by something stronger, faster, more athletic, and seemingly forged from titanium alloy.

Not to mention, more muscular – which is why a small piece of my soul dies every time I hear something like, "Getting strong isn't really important to me, I'd rather just look strong."

I understand the aesthetic bias we have as a society, and that having a six-pack is higher on many trainee's priority list than how much weight they can deadlift.

But one of the things I take pride in as a coach is my ability to keep things simple, so for all you lifters with iPhones filled with shirtless bathroom pictures, let me state this as simply as I can:

It's imperative to build a solid base of strength in order to build mass. And if you train for strength – and don't eat like a moron – the aesthetics you crave will undoubtedly follow.

I doubt you've seen many guys who bench 405 or squat 500 that are small. On the other hand, walk into just about any commercial gym and you'll see loads of 150-pound dudes running the rack on curls and performing drop sets of triceps pushdowns.

What good is a six-pack and veiny 14-inch arms if you can't deadlift your way out of a wet paper bag and your waif-like body resembles something that would get crushed against the wall by a surging crowd of angst-filled teenaged girls at an Avril Lavigne mall appearance?

If you're a newbie (or even someone who's been training for a few years and just not happy with the end results), this article will serve as a reminder to focus on the basics, get strong, and steal a page from Ms. Lavigne and stop making things so complicated!

As stated, you can't have fitness qualities like agility, power, endurance, and strength endurance – let alone an impressive physique –- without having a solid base of strength.

It is possible to develop a very impressive physique with just moderate strength levels, but your quest for huge arms and a set of pecs that can support a pitcher of Dos Equis will be a losing venture if a spandex-clad Richard Simmons can beat you in an arm wrestling match.

Using an analogy I shamelessly stole from strength coach Mike Boyle, it's like giving your Ford Focus a sweet paint job, spoilers, racing tires, and a roll cage in the belief that it will win the Daytona 500.

Unless you do something about increasing the horsepower of the car – you can add all the bells and whistles you want and even dress like Danica Patrick – it ain't gonna happen.

The same can be said for those that are more aesthetically minded. An emphasis on strength must be a part of the program design, yet it's one that many trainees dismiss – and as a result, they never attain the physique that they aspire to have.

The Pareto Principle was inspired by the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who back in the early 1900s demonstrated that 80% of the wealth in Italy was owned by only 20% of the population.

Interestingly, the rule has since been studied and applied to every facet of life, revealing that certain activities tend to give more return on investment than others. Put another way – 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.

The fitness industry is no different. We all know that guy who spends 45 minutes doing every variation of biceps curls imaginable yet looks like he spends more time lifting hair gel than weights.

I'm not suggesting that curls are a complete waste of time, and yes, I do them myself (on occasion). But if you're a newbie weighing all of 150 pounds soaking wet – or even if you have a few years' experience yet can't perform ten honest bodyweight chin-ups (sternum touches the bar on every rep) – your time can be better spent elsewhere.

A high premium is placed on the big compound movements like deadlifts, squats, bench presses, chins, rows, etc.

These are the movements that are going to get you strong and add serious mass to your frame. There's no science behind that statement, it's just common sense.

I have the luxury of being the co-owner of one of the premier strength and conditioning facilities in the country, Cressey Performance. While we take great pride in the meticulous nature of our approach to assessing and writing kick-ass programs for our athletes, people are often surprised by the simplicity behind the madness.

Fact is, if you look at the bulk of our programs, many are fairly "minimalist."

Sure, we may have to get more elaborate when working with a client with a unique injury history, but for the most part, we program 3-4 movements, max.

The first movement of the day is the "money" movement. Whether it's a deadlift, a squat variation, or even an overhead press, it's the exercise that's going to get the most attention, and most likely make the person want to hate life.

There's no such thing as a "chest and back day." If I program deadlifts, it's a "deadlift day." And, assuming no special circumstances – injury, limited training frequency – everything programmed after that is to complement the main movement and/or fix any imbalance or weakness that needs to be addressed.

In his phenomenal book, The Power of Less: The Fine Art of Limiting Yourself to the Essential...In Business and Life, Leo Babauta discusses how one can go about "de-cluttering" their life to make him or herself more efficient.

In short, he teaches people how to get shit done, whether it's stepping away from their email or making an effort to get up earlier in the day to get a head start on things.

We can take the same approach when it comes to training. If more trainees performed less on any given training session and just made a concerted effort to go balls to the wall on the movements that mattered, they'd see marked improvements in their strength and physique.

The programs we write have very little "fluff" involved and every exercise serves a purpose. Without giving away too many trade secrets:

We coach the hell out of our athletes and clients. Walk into our facility on any given day and I'll tell you what you'll never find: someone deadlifting with a rounded back, someone cutting their squats high, someone benching with their feet in the air, etc.Rarely will you see us use straight sets. People waste enough time in the gym as it is. I've witnessed on numerous occasions, when training at commercial gyms, someone perform a set and then spend the next ten minutes texting on their phone or playing a round of Angry Birds.To that end, every session begins with basic, tried and true compound movements. As noted, the first movement is the main focus for that particular training session, and I prefer to pair these with some low-grade activation or mobility drills (fillers), rather than another strength exercise, so as not to alter or take away from the desired training effect. Split-stance adductor mobilization* and wall hip flexor mobilization*both to be performed after each set of deadlifts * video follows
** per leg

This way I can address any postural deficits or weaknesses that may exist with the filler exercises while better controlling accumulated fatigue and keeping the trainee as fresh as possible for every set of deadlifts.

All accessory work, for the most part, will serve just to "accessorize" or complement the main movement for that day (along with bringing up weaknesses). Another thing to consider when determining accessory work is where a trainee may "fail" in any given lift.

For example, if someone is really slow off the ground when deadlifting, I may structure a session like this:

Conventional deadlifts from deficitSplit-stance adductor mobilization and wall hip flexor mobilizationboth to be performed after each set of deadlifts Squat down as deep as you can, come up half way, go back down as low as you can, then come back up to the starting position. That's one rep. Many fail to realize that the quadriceps come into play significantly on the initial pull of a deadlift. That said, some dedicated work to hammer the quads wouldn't be a bad idea. Eat copious amounts of dead animal flesh* per leg
** per side

Using the bench press as an example, let's assume that someone has a hard time at lockout.

Close-grip barbell floor pressChest-supported row (pronated grip)One-arm half kneeling cable row**One-arm strict DB military press* per side
** see following video
† per arm

Now let's use an example where someone sucks at squatting. In this case, they have a hard time getting to depth without their butt tucking.

Box squat (to a height where their spine doesn't tuck)Ass to grass squatting is cool, but not everyone can (or should) squat that deep if it's going to break their spine in half. I'd much rather someone squat to a depth that's safe, yet still grooves a nice squat pattern. As they grow more proficient, we can lower the squat depth. See video below. And, because lack of ankle dorsiflexion plays into limited squat depth, we might as well make ample use of our rest time. Glute ham raise or barbell supine bridges* per leg
** per side
† because why the hell not?

As you can see, we're only talking about 3-5 movements per session, which is a far cry from the standard 6-8 most trainees feel they need to squeeze in.

When you think about it, many have a bad habit of adding in more exercises, at the expense of mastering none – and that's a huge monkey wrench when it comes to making progress and building a physique you can be proud of.

The key, then, is to perform the basic movements well, and to focus on the things that will strengthen your weaknesses.

All progressive overload means is continually increasing the demands on the body to make consistent gains in muscular strength, size, and sometimes endurance.

Put another way, to get stronger and subsequently bigger, you must subject the body to a progressive stimulus to force it to adapt. It's surprising to me how many people fail to recognize this.

There are a million and one different variables to consider in terms of progressive overload – more reps, more sets, increased training frequency, increased intensity (as a % of 1RM), manipulating rest time, etc. – but I'm going to share only one option, which takes an admittedly Captain Obvious approach.

When I prescribe a certain rep scheme – say, five repetitions – what I really mean is 3-5 repetitions, sort of like a rep window.

This way, if someone is performing an exercise and their technique starts to falter, I'd rather see them stop the set short (within the allotted window) than run the risk of injury.

So, for example, if I have someone performing a bench press for three sets of five, it may look something like this:

Set 1: 200 x 5 (reps looked good and they were all pretty fast. Chest bump!)
Set 2: 200 x 4 (technique started to fail, bar speed too slow, no point in grinding out a fifth rep and run the risk of missing it.)
Set 3: 200 x 3 (still within the two rep window)

The objective for the following week(s), then, would be to try to hit those "missed" repetitions until all are successfully completed. When they are, increase the weight and repeat the process.

Now, if they were able to easily perform every repetition the first time through, then they know the weight was too low and they can go ahead and increase it.

Conversely, if at any point they drop out of the "two-rep window" (in this case, anything under three reps), the weight is too challenging and they should lower it.

Either way, using this approach ensures that there's a concerted effort to increase the weight on a consistent basis, and that's the name of the game.

As I mentioned, there are numerous ways to implement progressive overload, but you don't necessarily have to approach it like long division and make it more complicated than it has to be – especially the less advanced you are.

Many of you probably think that the solution to your lack of gains lies in some secret exercise, training split, or set-and-rep scheme, and that you can't fathom not hitting (insert your favorite muscle group) from every angle imaginable.

Trust me on this: you'd see better results if you stopped focusing on the fluff and started focusing on getting stronger at the big basics.

And if you're not getting stronger, if you're like most people, it's because your routine sucks and you're spinning your wheels performing every movement in Arnold's Encyclopedia of Modern Bodybuilding.

If this is the case, it's time to go back to the basics and give your body a chance to grow stronger.

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Tags: Nothing, Strong, Without

It’s of my opinion that the most efficient and single best way to develop EXPLOSIVE speed and power is by utilizing the Olympic lifts (clean & jerk, snatch) and their variations into your training for continued speed, strength, and power.

Obviously for an athlete, these qualities are of great importance if they wish to succeed on the athletic field. I mean, just look at the vertical jump on the athlete in the picture!! Nothing bulky or slow whatsoever about him (he is a multi-world champion and Olympic medalist).

Take a look at a few of our athletes filmed today performing different variations of the Olympic-style lifts and notice how much force and explosive power it takes to get the weights above their heads. You can even pause the video right at the most violent portion of the lift (when the bar meets the hips) and see for yourself – looks awfully familiar to a vertical jump!

If you aren’t familiar with how to do these lifts, you need to find a qualified coach to teach them to you! Trust me, you will NOT be disappointed once you find out for yourself how FUN and CHALLENGING they can be – but the end result will be worth it!

Time to get after it!

- John Cortese

PS – If you want to learn how to perform the olympic style lifts, come on down to CTS. We have qualified coaches that can help you learn how to perform these movements to maximize your athletic potential!

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Tags: Development, Explosive, Lifts, Olympic, Power, Speed, Using

I'm going to cut right to the chase and get to the point. Eat more veggies than starchy foods for your carbohydrate source.

Here's why:

The end result of all carbohydrates broken down by the body is glucose, also called blood sugar. So whether it's a spoon of sugar, a piece of bread, or some broccoli, the body breaks each down to use as its main fuel source, blood sugar. The difference between some of these carbohydrates is the rate in which the body metabolizes them, or breaks them down, to use as blood sugar. There are simple carbohydrates like fruit, syrup, and sugar and there are complex carbohydrates like bread, pasta, potatoes, and oatmeal. The difference between simple and complex carbohydrates is the speed at which the body breaks them down to utilize as glucose.

Simple carbohydrates like table sugar and fruit are converted more rapidly for a quick energy boost. Complex carbohydrates take longer to break down and offer a more sustained supply of energy for the body.

Complex carbohydrates should be your main choice for energy for that precise reason, they offer more of a sustained energy supply. Simple carbohydrates create a quick boost of energy followed by a rapid decline, almost like a "crash."

Complex carbohydrates mainly come from either starchy foods like rice, pasta, and bread, or by vegetables like broccoli, peas, and green beans. The biggest reason to switch from a diet full of starchy carbohydrates like bread, pasta, and rice to a diet with more fibrous, leafy ones like vegetables is the calories involved.

I have a friend named Shawn LeBrun who is a personal trainer in Maine and when he was getting ready for his bodybuilding show in which he lost almost 50 pounds in 10 weeks, he replaced his starchy carbohydrates with more vegetables and fibrous carbohydrates.

I have never had to lose that much weight that fast but can vouch this works.

Fat-Loss Veggies

This one simple modification accounted for a significant drop in calories that was soon followed by a significant drop in body fat. Just like it's wise to moderate fats because they are very calorie dense, starchy carbohydrates like bread and pasta are more calorie dense than fibrous, leafy ones like vegetables.

What we want to do is eat a lot of food that makes us full but without over-doing it with the calories.

For effective, permanent fat loss, I feel it's important to choose foods that offer high volume but low calories. This way you do not feel deprived because you're still eating a lot of food but you're not getting a lot of calories in return. Vegetables offer this luxury. You can eat a lot in volume, but do not get a lot of calories in return, unless they are deep fried or drowned in butter (not recommended). This high volume, low calorie luxury doesn't exist with starchy carbohydrates. A small serving of starchy carbs like pasta, bread, and rice is still high in calories.

For example, a 1/4-cup of rice has approximately 150 calories. A 1/2-cup of oatmeal has about the same amount of calories. However, you can eat an entire box package of broccoli and have fewer calories than what you consumed with the 1/4 cup of rice. Or almost an entire bag of raw baby carrots.

I know what you're thinking, "I love my bread and I'm not getting rid of it". I absolutely agree, do not get rid of your breads, pasta, rice, and oatmeal. But moderate it and reduce the amount of each serving. Instead, supplement the smaller serving with more vegetables.

Your body absolutely needs carbohydrates. Carbs are the body's main source of glucose. Your brain cannot function without glucose, in fact, you'd die without blood sugar.

To start eliminating excess calories from the diet, start to moderate and limit the amount of starchy carbs like bread, pasta, rice, oatmeal, bagels, and instead eat more vegetables like broccoli, carrots, green beans, spinach. lettuce, peas, and so on.

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Tags: Lower, Modification, Simple

Sometimes a guy wants to look as super-shredded and lean as possible. It might be for a competition, photo shoot or maybe just a hot date. Whatever the reason, besides muscle definition, there are two factors that impact just how lean and defined you look--body fat and water retention. Obviously, you can't look shredded if you've got a layer of fat covering the muscles. But even if your body fat is in the single digits, excess water can make you look less defined and sometimes, even bloated. Minimizing excess water weight is what we're going to explore here today.

Aldosterone is one of the hormones that manages the volume of fluids held in the body--water in particular. And while for most guys water retention isn't going to be an everyday issue, if you are a competitive bodybuilder or you need to look extra-ripped for a photo shoot or special event, retaining even small amounts of excess water can make all the difference in the world.

First, a little background on Aldosterone, which is released by the adrenal glands. Aldosterone is one of the hormones that helps regulate the body's sodium and potassium levels. This in turn helps control blood pressure and the balance of fluids and electrolytes in the bloodstream. The adrenal glands produce more Aldosterone when the body is trying to conserve fluid and salts. This means that high levels of Aldosterone equate to more fluids being retained in the body. When Aldosterone levels are low, the body retains less water.

The entire process is actually managed by the renin-angiotensin-aldosterone system (RAAS). If you're looking to get super shredded and hard with that contest-ready, 'paper-thin' skin, then how to manipulate the RAAS is definitely something you want to understand. By learning to manipulate the RAAS you can influence Aldosterone levels and affect how much water your body retains.

A typical strategy that many guys use to reduce the amount of water they retain is to decrease their salt intake and cut back on the amount of water they drink. Decreasing salt intake is good, but it only helps so much. And unfortunately, because the body is always striving to maintain a state of homeostasis (aka the status quo), drinking less water causes the body's metabolic systems to conserve water. This actually causes Aldosterone levels to spike, so drinking less water doesn't have the effect that you want and actually causes the body to retain more water.

So with this in mind, we know that we have to look at another strategy. Strangely enough, one of the ways you can manipulate the RAAS, lower Aldosterone levels and reduce the amount of water retained, is to actually drink more water, not less. This seems to contrary to what you want to achieve but it's not the way the body works. But it's a little more complicated than just drinking gallons of water before a competition or event.

Successful manipulation of the RAAS to reduce water retention requires timing and strategy. Finding the right 'window of opportunity' is essential to success. Before you start trying to reduce water retention, you'll need to first make sure that you've already shed any unnecessary body fat. There's no point in going through the trouble of shedding water when there's a layer of fat underneath. So step one is to get your body fat percentage into the low teens or even single digits. Once you get to that you point, you'll be in a position to be able to get shredded by reducing how much water your body retains.

The next step is to follow a specific protocol that incorporates the manipulation of protein and carbohydrate ratios combined with a period of high water intake (hyper hydration) followed by a rapid, timed period of limited water intake (dehydration). You will begin the hyper hydration and dehydration phases several days before the competition or other event for which you want to appear super shredded.

This strategy works because the hyper hydration phase will cause Adosterone levels to drop, meaning that your kidneys are flushing out most of the water you're drinking--also causing you to piss a lot. The targeted period of dehydration will allow you to rapidly shed water weight, leaving you super shredded and ultra-lean. But because you're doing it for such a short period of time, the inevitable spike in Aldosterone levels and the accompanying increase in water retention, won't happen until after the competition or big event.

Unfortunately, shedding unwanted fat is a lot more complicated than just cutting back on calories and adding in a few extra cardio sessions each week. The problem is that our genetic programming gets in the way, making getting rid of fat a lot more complicated than we'd like. When we start to cut calories and burn more energy our bodies think that we're facing a food shortage. In response, it releases a flood of hormonal responses that are designed to conserve energy and make sure we've got fat reserves to draw on for the upcoming 'famine.'

These hormonal responses are what stand in the way of our fat loss goals. There are three in particular that inhibit fat loss--estrogen, insulin and cortisol. When we do the things we do to shed unwanted fat, it triggers the release of these hormones. And when released, each of these tells the body to increase residual fat storage, especially around the waist area. The good news though is that we can 'fight hormones with hormones' and manipulate our metabolic systems to overcome these fat loss roadblocks.

The secret to this strategy is identifying the nemesis for each 'bad' hormone--or in other words, the 'good' hormone that does the opposite of what the 'bad' hormone does. For example, testosterone is the 'opposite' of estrogen. Testosterone is the male sex hormone and estrogen is the female sex hormone. To combat the fat storage effects of estrogen, we want to increase the amount of testosterone our bodies release.

There are several ways you can naturally increase the amount of testosterone the body releases. One of the best ways to accomplish this is by lifting weights. In particular, increasing training density has proven to be an excellent technique to stimulate testosterone production. Training density refers to the amount of work you perform within a given timeframe. You can increase training density by lifting more weights, performing more repetitions or by reducing the rest periods between sets.

To fight the stubborn fat around the mid-section of the body, you can really increase training density through a modified circuit training technique. A key difference between this and other types of circuit training is that here, instead of focusing on doing a certain number of reps, you perform as many reps as you can within a certain time period for the first set. Then, you increase both the weight and the number of reps you perform for the second set.

Similarly, there are training techniques you can employ to combat insulin and its impact on body fat storage. Here, training techniques focus on increasing insulin sensitivity and boosting Insulin-Like Growth Factor 1 (IGF-1), which counters the effects of insulin. Dynamic training--which is based on combination movements--is particularly effective at boosting the amount of IGF-1 in the bloodstream. Higher amounts of IGF-1 negates insulin resistance and increases the body's fat-burning capacity.

We can also combat the fat gaining effects of cortisol by increasing the amount of Growth Hormone (GH) our bodies produce. GH is the single most effective compound your body produces to affect both fat loss and muscle gain. The more GH the body produces, the more fat you burn and the more lean muscle mass you add.

Like the other two fat-fighting hormones, certain training techniques stimulate the production of GH. Lactic acid training is one technique that is especially effective. Lactic acid is what causes the 'burn' you feel when you train your muscles really hard. As annoying as that feeling may be, it does trigger the release of cortisol- and fat-fighting GH. You can boost the release of lactic acid by lifting very slowly and then quickly (but carefully) returning to the starting position. Another way to increase GH production and diminish cortisol production is by sleeping. Yes, a good night's rest triggers the production of GH while simultaneously diminishing the production of cortisol.

So there you have it--three fat-fighting training techniques at your disposal. Include these in your training arsenal and you'll be able to fight hormones and with hormones and win the battle against stubborn fat, once and for all.

Get my free report entitled, The Warrior Physique - Building The Super Hybrid Muscle. Click to learn how you can rapidly build muscle and burn fat at the same time.

Mike Westerdal is the founder of Critical Bench, Inc. A free online weight training magazine.

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Tags: Aldosterone, Shedding, Water, Weight

For almost 30 years, I’ve been a member of Gold’s Gym in Venice as well as the old World Gym owned by Joe Gold. In that time, I’ve seen massively huge people come and go at both places. When I first joined those gyms in the 1980s, I saw guys and gals in their bulking up stages who were bigger than you can ever imagine. I’m not talking about the pros like Tom Platz, Lou Ferrigno, or even Arnold (people that I would see regularly). No, it was the amateurs that I was most impressed with. Some of these guys came out of nowhere and were up to a hundred pounds bigger than the pros. They would make your jaw drop if you saw these exaggerated masses of muscles.

I thought for sure that some of these no-name colossal monsters would be the next world champion bodybuilders. However, to my surprise, only a couple of them ever won anything significant. Some of the hard luck amateurs continued to beef up and train at the gym, but after losing a contest, the majority of them withered away and then disappeared. I would frequently hear stories about how some of these big monsters would shrink back to normal size when they got off the drugs, becoming fat and out of shape and then vanishing from the face of the earth.

Lou Ferrigno staring in awe at Tom Platz’s amazing quadriceps development

I’m not just picking on bodybuilders either. Living for 30 years in Los Angeles, the home of broken dreams, I’ve seen weekend warriors, models, and actors who were great looking and in shape slowly fall apart from constant disappointment and rejection. Some survived and continued to pursue their dreams, but others never recovered from the cruel pain and adversity associated with the pursuit of stardom.

Unfortunately, for those who cannot handle life’s hardships, a long and horrible road to self-destruction can be all too common. It doesn’t matter how big or beautiful you are; if you are mentally weak, you will always be vulnerable to mental collapse. Personally, I refuse to ever be that weak again. Through hard work, discipline, and dedication I have successfully changed my mindset and strengthened my mental and emotional resilience.

An Interesting Journey

I love training and building up my physique. For twenty years, I was extremely dedicated in my goal to get as massive as possible. I was never a bodybuilder…I just trained like one. However, I always felt like something was missing. I could never pinpoint what I was lacking with my lifting, but it definitely seemed as if there was a certain emptiness to it.

Then, about eight years ago, I stumbled upon a book written by Coach John Davies and experienced a deep connection to the “renegade training” philosophy that he created. His system was about more than just lifting or building muscles. The heart of renegade training was about becoming mentally tough, a whole cerebral philosophy built on seeking out challenges and overcoming adversity.

It was then that I finally found what was missing in my twenty years of training: the mental aspect. Coach Davies’ philosophy had a strong impact on me and made me question how and why I was training. I was always physically building muscle and mass, but I had never thought about the psychological aspect of my workouts. I knew my training made me physically more attractive, but other than looking good, I didn’t see how my workouts made me mentally stronger. Training was supposed to make you feel more confident, but being self-assured wasn’t always my strong point. At different stages in my life, I was mentally weak and would give into fear. In other parts of my life, however, I could be a fighter with a very strong sense of will who would stubbornly refuse to quit.

In other words, I was inconsistent in activating my will and desire. I didn’t realize at the time that mental toughness was a skill that one can learn and develop. I soon became obsessed with the work of other mental toughness teachers, such as football coach Vince Lombardi, “Miracle On Ice” coach Herb Brooks, and wrestling great Dan Gable. What I learned was that perserverance can be learned through grueling and challenging work. Mental toughness training is not for everyone, but it should be because it is woefully needed in everyday life, inside and outside of the gym. Without mental toughness you are always vulnerable to breakdown, now matter how big you are or how good you look.

New Goals

Approaching the age of 40, I was overweight and had developed hypertension, but I now had a new goal for my training: to become mentally stronger than ever. In my quest, I started reading about the effectiveness of Crossfit and reluctantly started to incorporate those classes into my workouts at least once a week.

Legendary coach and motivator Vince Lombardi

Most of the Crossfit workouts were heavily cardio-oriented, so I struggled mightily. In all my years of bulking up, I had never done any cardio. The only aerobic exercise I got was reading the sports page while pedaling very slowly on the bike machine. For me at that time, the workouts always seemed like a competitive race and, except for when that pregnant lady was in my class, I was always the last one to finish. Yet I also found that there was something new and exciting about this weekly training adventure.

Many people develop mental toughness by playing a sport, but I wasn’t a very good athlete growing up and had never played much. With Crossfit, however, I experienced real physical competition for the first time and found that I loved it. Haunted by past failures on the playground and reliving the shame in Crossfit classes, I defiantly took a stand: I was tired of getting my ass kicked.

I pushed myself harder that I ever thought my body could take. As physically fatigued as I was during the workout, my mind was not tired; instead, it was stimulated. I pushed my body, striving to be aggressive and relentless in my workouts. I had no idea what the hell I was doing or where I was getting this new level of determination and strength. In retrospect, what I was learning was how to activate my will. I was making the physical connection with my thoughts and letting my mind lead my body. I started to crush my times and finish not only first, but way ahead of everyone else. No one was more shocked than I was at my sudden burst of athleticism in my early 40s. I felt a sense of confidence after the workouts that I never had before (unfortunately, my strut didn’t transfer to the singles bars).

I give Crossfit all the credit for getting me into the best shape of my life by pushing me to a level that I never knew existed. Through all of the suffering, I began to see how vital the mental aspect of training was for me. Everybody else was stronger, faster, and more athletic than I was, but now I felt that I had an advantage…I knew I was mentally stronger than everyone else in the class.

The Greatest Strength of All

The stated goal of Crossfit is to get you in badass shape; it did that job for me and more. However, as with my bodybuilding workouts, I needed something more than just a physical challenge. In my quest for more stimuli to feed my awakened mental hunger, I started to create my own workouts with the priority of first challenging my mind. I didn’t invent a new system. In fact, I went back and did traditional full-body strength workouts and said good-bye to the isolation work that had dominated my first twenty years of training. I continued to do to Crossfit (and also Krav Maga) and kept pushing myself to do things that I hated and sucked at, like running and climbing rope.

Over the past three years, my goal in the gym has been to get physically stronger, but more important, I have also gotten stronger in my personal life. I believe that having the confidence that you can overcome any adversity is the greatest strength of all.

Problems of Teaching Mental Toughness

As a result of my personal growth, I have searched obsessively for more ways to address the mental game. I read as many articles and books as possible, and one deficiency I observed is that most of the literature out there on this topic is aimed at a professional athletes. However, my main criticism of just about all the mental toughness training I’ve seen is the emphasis on lame positive affirmations. Telling yourself that you’re a fighting machine over and over again is just a waste of time and gives you a false sense of security. You can say these positive affirmations until you are blue in the face, but once you have to throw down in an octagon, it’s more than likely you will get your teeth kicked in.

Other techniques in the strange world of mental toughness training include self-hypnosis, subliminal training tapes, and for thousands of dollars, you can also try brain wave-altering machines. I’m not making this stuff up; professional athletes will pay mega dollars to try to improve their mental game.
The harsh reality is that there is no easy way and no shortcuts: mental toughness is not for sale. The only way to get mentally tougher is to earn it through sweat equity in the gym and in the school of hard knocks (a.k.a., “life”). Everyone wants to be mentally strong, but very few are prepared to pay the price for it. The second half of this bad news is that you often have to go through some pretty awful shit to earn it too: it won’t be fun and it’s going to hurt. I wish there were an easier path to toughening up your mind, but only through suffering can one truly learn character issues that cannot be taught any other way. To put it in perspective, as scores of philosophers have observed from ancient times, the wisdom gained is well worth it the pain.

CrossFit gets you in shape!

Tips to Help You Incorporate Mental Toughness Training

The good news in all of this reality check is that you don’t have to give up your current bodybuilding workouts. Adding mental aspects to your training can be very easy, and training your mind and body should go hand in hand. The number one factor that will determine whether you will become psychologically stronger is your determination. For me, I didn’t want it — I needed it. If you understand this statement, then you have what it takes.

Tip #1: You Must Believe That Perseverance is a Skill

As with any skill, perseverance can be practiced, honed and strengthened. Think of perseverance as a muscle: the more you work it, the stronger it will get, and if you don’t use it, it will shrivel up. If this all sounds too elusive, think of perseverance as your will. Your will is the transfer of your desire into behavior and it is powerful. A strong will can lead you to accomplish extraordinary things or can get you out of a terrible situation. Through constant testing and practice, you can gain a better connection with your will.

One of the best ways to practice activating your will is by working out. The more determined your will, the less likely it is that you will give up. Get it involved in your workouts as much as possible. For example, if you’re doing bicep curls and struggling with the last reps, instead of feeling “the pump” of your muscles, focus on engaging your will. See how many more reps you can get by mentally willing yourself to do more. It’s a slight distinction from what you already do; however, you should give more credit to your will for doing the hard stuff than to your body parts.

Tip #2: There is a Direct Relationship Between Your Mental Toughness Training in the Gym and Your Personal Life

Too many people separate how they train or what they do in the gym from how they live. They categorize “strength” as only what they can physically do in the gym. They may be very strong in the bench press, but are pushovers in their relationships and professional lives. They may have huge arms, but are mentally fragile. They don’t see the connection with how physical strength training can improve mental power.

With mental fitness training, you should strive to nuture the connection between what you do in the gym and how you live your life. The strength you feel at the gym should carry over to your inner strength when you have a job interview or a blind date. Your confidence should rise across the board and not only after you bench press.

The reverse is true as well – how you handle getting through an awful ordeal in your personal life should bring out the animal in you the next time you have to do a brutal workout. The goal is to have no separation between the activation of your will and whatever situation you face. Your will is blind and indifferent to the circumstances at hand. It does not discriminate between how much mental strength you must draw on to set a bench press PR and what you must do to get out of a life-threatening situation.

Your will responds by doing the same thing for either situation – it will overcome the challenge with aggression and relentless action. This aggression does not mean that you must become high-strung, violent, or frantic. On the contrary, you must be centered, methodical, and able to focus with complete determination. You are on a mission with only one goal – to get out of the mess that you are in.

You need your will to be available and ready to be called upon immediately, anywhere, at any time. You need to train your will not to care who your opponent is, but only how to whip that opponent with fierce tenacity. This is the aggressive mindset you need when you walk onto the playing field and when you walk out to face the unpredictable and cruelest of these games — life.

Tip #3: You Must Learn To Do What Is Uncomfortable For You

To develop a psychological edge, you must develop extreme discipline in order to leave the comfort zone that you train and live in. Delaying immediate satisfaction is the ultimate sacrifice that all warriors must choose. The feeble mind is all about the immature joys of the now and has no regard for the long term. To develop mental hardness, you must learn to do what the weak general population has not. You must deny the temptation of immediate gratification in favor of the rewards of the long haul. To separate yourself from the pack, you must put yourself into an uncomfortable state, and you must do this often, very often.

Going to the gym is one of the best ways to practice. Challenge your tolerance to physical and mental anguish by doing a high intensity anaerobic workout once a week. The best part about high intensity anaerobic workouts is that each set should last less than two minutes. These workouts also give your testosterone levels a boost, so you’ll also build muscle. The down side of high intensity workouts is that you literally learn what it feels like to almost die.

Twenty-rep squats, extended drops sets, and breathing squats are all classic old-school, brutal, anaerobic workouts that many of today’s lazy gym rats avoid. However, if they want something more hip to kick their asses, Crossfit is the newest trend. One of my favorite Crossfit workouts is called Fran. I like the simplicity of this workout because it combines two compound movements into one metabolic session. You load 95 pounds on a barbell and superset barbell squat to an overhead press with pull-ups, completing three sets of 21-, 15-, and 9-rep schemes in the quickest time possible, which means if you want to be an elite bad ass, you won’t have much time to rest. You can get big and ripped by doing this workout, if you survive the extreme breathlessness. If you want to test your perception of being a bad ass, Fran is good place to start.

Champion powerlifter David Hoff knows how to get intense!

Another simple but brutal anaerobic workout is the Litvonvi workout, created by Dan John based on the methods of a Russian hammer thrower. I highly suggest the Litvonvi for those who fear that cardio work will make them lose muscle. Like Fran, with the Litvonvi, you can gain muscle, increase testosterone and HGH production, and earn mental toughness points if you finish. In this workout, you do six reps of heavy front squats followed by a 400-meter run or 100-yard dash. Three sets and that’s it! It sounds easy, but this workout is extremely vicious. My reaction to the first time I did the Litvinov workout was, “God, help me.” It was by far the hardest workout I’ve ever done.
Now if this all sounds too intimidating, six sets of hill sprints is a fine substitute. As long as the anaerobic workout can wreak havoc on you mentally and physically, it has done its job. The good news is that the effect that you’ll feel isn’t all bad. Physically, you should feel spent, but finishing the gruesome workouts should be emotionally fulfilling. You should feel a great sense of accomplishment after reaching the finish, and mental toughness training is accumulative in that each victory builds upon the others.

A strong will is crucial to getting you through these challenging workouts. If you have no connection with your will, you will falter and fail. The fatigue that your body will feel will be excruciating, but remember, just because your body is fatigued does not mean that your mind is tired. Use your mind to will your body to be aggressive and relentless in the face of exhaustion. Learning to be mentally energetic even when your body is weak is a sign of an indomitable will.

Tip #4: Your Own Worst Enemy

As you begin the journey to empower your mind, you will be constantly tested. Your worst enemy will not be your competition; unfortunately, you will be most often be low-balled by your very own self. Your body will look for an escape route for what seems like the unnecessary pain it has to go through. For me, the actual physical pain wasn’t the most daunting part of the training, but the anticipation of it. Hours before the workout, I would be mentally drained from dreading what was to come.
To relieve myself of this self-imposed psychological torture, my mind would begin to procrastinate and look for excuses. I would always come up with logical reasons or rationalizations as to why I should ditch the workout. This process represents a mental chess game between you and yourself, and it is your job to distinguish between truth and lies. What IS true is that mental toughness training is not easy. You are preparing yourself for the worst-case scenario, and the pain you are feeling in the gym is nothing like the cruelties that life offers us. Feel shitty now so you can be stronger tomorrow; this is the stark logic of those in the mentally tough club.

You will need to learn how to identify and defuse many negative thought patterns during your trial of cerebral improvement. Challenge yourself to change the negative thought patterns into positive self-talk. Instead of saying, “I’ve got three more sets to go. I can’t do this,” say “I’m getting mentally stronger. I did five sets so three more will be easy for me.” Learn to reformulate the negativism to something reachable, specific, and with a possible solution. Instead of saying something cynical like “I’ll never find a job again,” change it to something positive like “If I spend two hours on monster.com, I know I should fill out at least five job applications.” Mental toughness is all about your thought process. Your thoughts can make you do what most would consider unconceivable, and this is what this training is all about.

Mental conditioning and discipline in the gym is only half of the process. Just as you need to face down discomfort in your physical tests, you also have to confront emotional stress and fear in your personal life. Make a list of things you have been avoiding or problems that you have a difficult time dealing with. We avoid confronting these issues because of the pain they cause us. However, the more we deny these negative issues, the more they have the potential to destroy us. We sit back and wish they go away, but they don’t. We become passive due to the fear that we overwhelmingly feel. Fear is an emotional response, sometimes irrational and often blown out of proportion, and life is full of disappointments and letdowns. It’s not easy to get over any shattering experience, but with guts and determination, you can get over any painful ordeal. When we don’t get what we want, the consolation is that we gain experience. This doesn’t seem like a worthwhile prize, but the adversity can enlighten you. It may not be obvious, but take a hard look at any negative experience as an opportunity for personal growth. Take in the life lesson and move on.

Facing your fear is a necessary quality to developing mental strength. By facing fear, you will learn courage. Absence of fear is a misconception; fearlessness is not realistic nor does it provide any benefit to becoming a mentally tough beast. Being threatened by fear is the catalyst for you to change, and confronting fear with brave actions is how you get tough. In summary, whether in the gym or in your personal situation, a tough mental stance will pay off in both places. Your goal is to be mentally invincible regardless of where you are.

Your Journey to Mental Toughness

In conclusion, you work hard in the gym to build a better body and become as physically strong as possible. Becoming mentally tough as well can help to sustain all of the work you put into improving your body and your strength, but more importantly, being mentally tough can improve your quality of life as a whole. It is a very challenging adventure but a worthwhile one. Good luck with your journey.

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Tags: Incorporating, Mental, Psychology, Strength, Toughness, Training

by John Meadows, CSCS – 4/30/2012

Summer is many a bodybuilder's favorite time of year. The sunny skies and warm temperatures affords an easy opportunity for us to strut our stuff and expose that superhero physique we've been building all winter.

But if you exercise your Iron Right to do the peacock walk, you best be able to back it up – and that means sporting a set of legs that matches your "showy" shoulders and pecs.

Let's start with programming. There are many ways to set up the nuts & bolts of a training program. You can operate from a percentage of one-rep max, shoot for a specific rep total, and modulate the training frequency.

However, one factor that rarely gets talked about – and one that's arguably as important as the choice of exercises – is exercise sequence. Setting up the exercises in the correct order will help you stay healthier, get stronger, and grow larger.

Here's how your programming will look over the next four leg sessions:

Frequency: How often you train legs will depend on how you feel. When your legs feel rested and ready to blast, go again, whether it's three days or six days later.

Rest periods: Keep it simple. Just take as much time as you need to feel strong again. Don't start a set out of breath or you'll compromise performance.

Exercises: Each workout will consist of four exercises. They'll be sequenced in this order:

Exercise 1 – A leg curl variation
Exercise 2 – A squat variation
Exercise 3 – An exercise that's safe to do with all-out intensity
Exercise 4 – A deadlift variation that emphasizes hamstring development

Leg curls are incredibly underrated as a hamstring developer. Starting your workout with leg curls allows you to place considerable emphasis on the hamstrings, as opposed to just tossing in a few meaningless sets at the end of your leg workout.

Most lifters are extremely quad-dominant – if you look at bodybuilders doing the classic side chest pose, it's rare (below the professional level) to see one with thick, hanging hamstrings. Sequencing leg curls first addresses this issue.

There's also a larger benefit, one not found in any Pub Med search: doing leg curls first will make your squats "feel" better. With pumped up hams, you'll feel "sturdier" in the bottom position of the squat, and your hips will seem "greased" during each squat repetition.

Furthermore, as strange as it sounds, you'll find that your knees need less warming up after starting with leg curls. Again no peer-reviewed data to back this up, just decades of experience and hundreds of client testimonials.

The other nice thing about leg curls is that you can easily employ techniques like drop sets and partial reps to further drive blood into the muscle. Provided you're using good form, this can quickly produce impressive gains in hamstring strength and thickness.

Nothing compares to squats for leg size. While other exercises certainly have merit, squats will form the core of your workouts.

However, while I was certainly born to squat – wide hips and short femurs – it isn't necessary to go completely rock bottom on every set of squats you do. My preferred approach is to vary squatting depth – some weeks squatting just to parallel, others well below.

Variation is a good thing – just ask Louie Simmons of Westside Barbell. When I trained there, we'd move the height of the box down an inch every week to help build flexibility. We would also vary our stances, as wider squats help develop hip and groin flexibility.

I also like to vary the bar used with squats. Different bars recruit the quads and hamstrings to varying degrees. (If you're lucky enough to have a safety squat bar, get it ready for action!)

The third exercise in the sequence will be the most painful. The more advanced you are, the harder you should push yourself. Remember, the goal is huge legs, so don't train like everybody else (i.e., half-assed) and expect to look any different from them.

Expect and demand more from yourself. You'd be surprised what you're capable of. (And don't worry, I give examples below.)

Now that your legs are absolutely loaded with blood, it's time to kick in some deadlifts for hamstrings. We'll use different stances and depths for variation.

Let's get to the iron. The following workouts are tough, so put your heart into it – don't just go through the motions and expect to make gains.

Lying Leg Curls – Simply do 3 sets of 8 reps with a hard flex at the top. On the fourth set, do 8 followed by 25 partials from the stretched position. Just move the weight 4-6 inches from the bottom. Your hamstrings will feel like Jell-O when you're done. Two to three warm-up sets and then four total work sets.

Barbell Squats – Do sets of 8 to warm up. Go below parallel. As you rise up, avoid locking out – come right back down to maintain continuous tension. Once you reach a weight that's challenging for 8 reps, do 4 sets of 8. Use any stance that's comfortable, just be sure to make note of it because next week you'll go a tad wider. Wear a belt. Four total work sets.

Leg Press – Do 3 hard sets of 25 reps. Use a shoulder-width, feet in the middle of the platform stance. Turn your toes out slightly – this will blow up your VMO. Don't lock out on these either. You may need to do some light quad stretching between sets as your legs should be completely full of blood. Three total work sets.

Dumbbell Stiff Legged Deadlifts – Do 2 sets of 20. Go slow and stretch your hams. Bend your knees slightly at the bottom to avoid injury. Don't come up all the way – come up 3/4 of the way, then go right back down. This will finish you off for the day. Two total work sets.

Lying Leg Curls – Do a standard pyramid of 15, 12, 9, and 6 reps. After the last set of 6, drop the weight and do 6 more, then perform one more drop and do a final 6 reps. This 18-rep drop-set will pump your hams and get you ready for squats. Two to three warm up sets and then four total work sets.

Barbell Squats – Do sets of 8 to warm-up, but this week use a slightly wider stance. Focus on sitting back and driving your knees out so they don't buckle. This week just hit parallel, no lower, and use more weight than last week. This may be tough if changing your stance exposes some hip weakness, but try. Knock out another 4 sets of 8 once you reach your target weight. Four total work sets.

Bulgarian Split Squats –This week the leg press is swapped for split squats. Your legs will be tight and pumped, so you might have to work a little deeper each set to derive the maximum benefit. Do 12 reps on each leg, holding light dumbbells.

Take three seconds on the way down (this will hurt), and slowly get to a comfortable depth. Again, you should get a little deeper on each set. I typically do some very light hip flexor stretches for a quick 10 seconds between sets. Three total work sets.

Barbell Stiff Legged Deads – This week we switch dumbbell stiff legged deads with the barbell version. Use 25-pound plates to get the maximum stretch, but don't try to achieve max stretch on the first set. Each set you do, work a little deeper. Do 3 sets of 15. Come up all the way and flex your hams and glutes. This will finish you off for the day. Three total work sets.

Seated Leg Curls – The first two weeks we did lying leg curls, the last two we'll do the seated version to hit the hamstrings at a slightly different angle. Do 4 sets of 10 reps and on the last set, after the 10 reps, do 15 additional partial reps out from the stretched position. Two to three warm up sets and then four total work sets.

Safety Bar Squats – Like last week, work up to your starting weight doing sets of 8 reps. Go to just above parallel on these. This is a different bar, and it'll place more emphasis on the quads. Focus on a slow 3-second descent. You may lock out reps if needed. Just find that perfect weight for 8 reps and stay there for 3 sets. Then do a fourth set a little heavier and shoot for five reps. Four total work sets.

Leg Extensions – Don't laugh! You've done some hard work on the leg press and split squats, so let's work in another variation, leg extensions. Avoid letting the weight come back so far at the bottom that you stress the knees, just down until your shins aren't quite parallel. Go heavy but flex every rep at lockout for 1 second.

These will feel great with the pump you already have. Pyramid up doing sets of 12, 10, 8, and then a final set of 8. After the last set, drop the weight and do 8 more reps followed by 8 partials out of the bottom – the weight should only move 3-4 inches. Four total work sets.

Romanian Deadlifts – This week we'll stick with the bar but add a little more knee bend so it's a true Romanian deadlift. Since we aren't going for a super stretch, you can go back to using 45-pound plates. Do these powerfully – let the weight sit on the ground and then drive it up. No bouncing or cutting the reps in half. Pyramid up doing sets of 10 and 8, and then 2 sets of 6. Four total work sets.

Seated Leg Curls – Do 3 of 12 reps. On the last set, after you hit 12 reps, drop the weight and do 8 more reps, and then do another drop and do 8 more. Two to three warm up sets and then four total work sets.

Safety Bar Squats – Like last week, work up to your starting weight doing sets of 8 reps, but this week hit parallel. Continue to focus on a slow 3-second descent. This week you're going to do sets of 8 with a moderately heavy weight, then a tough set of 5 like last week, and then finally a tough set of 3 (don't forget the 3-second descent). After you do the set of 3, cut your weight in half and shoot for as many reps as you can with good form! Four total work sets.

Single-leg Lunge – My favorite way to do walking lunges is with heavy dumbbells using straps. Step forward with your left leg, go down in a controlled manner, and then bring your right leg forward so your feet are beside each other. Now stay on the same leg and do it again.

Do 10 paces with one leg, then turn around and come back on the other leg. This takes momentum and inertia out of the movement and helps keep tension focused on the working leg instead of giving it a break between reps. Three rounds equals one set. Four total work sets.

Rack Romanian Deadlifts – After you catch your breath, we'll finish with rack RDLs. Set the pins at mid-shin. Work up in sets of 3 until you can barely get 3, and then call it a day. Count the last 3 sets as working sets. Three total work sets.

Restoration – I'm a strong believer in using the Rumble Roller to enhance recovery and break down adhesions that build up from training with high intensity.

The short video shows how I use the Rumble Roller:

Walking, as boring as it may be, is also helpful. I'd do both, combined with proper nutrition to ensure you recover and improve. Remember, you're only as good as your weakest link, so if your nutrition sucks, your training progress will be limited.

Forty-five to sixty minutes before training, I eat 6 ounces of fish and 1/2 cup of oats with 1 tablespoon of nut butter.

During training, I use MAG-10® and Anaconda™, but not in the prescribed way. I take 3-4 scoops of MAG-10 and 2 scoops of Anaconda, and I drink it INTRAworkout – it's the best thing I've ever taken for recovery.

Forty-five minutes after training, I have two scoops of Metabolic Drive® Muscle Growth, 2 cups of cooked rice, and 1 tablespoon of raw organic honey.

That's the whole plan! Simple but effective.

Questions or Comments? See you in the LiveSpill!

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Tags: Growth, Simple, Workouts

Building a solid foundation is I think the most important thing for someone who is just starting to focus on. Without it you will never see the results that you want to see.

Since modern bodybuilding emerged as a sport a hundred years ago or so, the basics haven't changed: lift, eat, rest and grow. It's about understanding and sticking to the core exercises that are the "center" of our strength and keeping it simple.

The squat is a killer exercise that helps build overall mass because it involves multiple muscle groups. Not only do squats build muscles in the legs, hips and lower back, but they also cause your endocrine system to release a burst of hormones, helping to stimulate muscle growth throughout the body. Yeah, your legs are doing most of the work but the entire rest of the body is working in way or another to stabilize the weight. Basically, it's an exercise that creates a "mass building" environment that promotes growth throughout the body.

The deadlift is one more core exercise that uses more than one muscle group and should be part of good routine. Like squats, the deadlift is a core power movement that uses nearly every muscle in your body to some degree. The main areas of focus are the back and thighs but you'll see gains just about everywhere both because of the involvement of other muscle groups and the release of hormones that stimulate overall muscle growth.

The bench press is the other core area where guys need to keep their focus. It is the key exercise that is going to build a strong, powerful chest. To build mass go for heavier weights with fewer reps before using medium weights with higher reps.

Since your goal in doing these and other exercises is to gain mass then you ought to understand the concept of progressive overloads. It refers to gradually increasing the stress placed on the body during weight training. The technique is also used in strength training, high intensity training (HIT) and even physical therapy programs. Why? Because it works. The fact is that our muscles will only grow when they are challenged and called upon to exert a greater magnitude of force-it's the nature of the human body's adaptive processes.

Progressive overload forces your body to change because you are continually challenging your muscles to do more work than what they're used to doing. There are lots of different ways to use progressive overload: increasing weight, increasing the number of sets, increasing the number of reps, decreasing rest time, or just increasing intensity. If your goal is to get big though, you should focus your overloads on higher weights/fewer reps followed by medium weights, increasing the number of reps.

And while it's a great technique, progressive overload won't keep working forever. Eventually, you'll see diminishing returns on your efforts. When bodybuilders repeatedly use the same training method over and over trying to raise their strength level, they eventually stall and hit a plateau. This is completely normal-it happens to everybody now and then. The conjugate method is a technique to avoid that stall or get past the plateau. The conjugate method is a system of weight training developed in the USSR and popularized by the Westside Barbell club in Columbus, Ohio. The word "conjugate" literally means "to join together." With that bit of knowledge if you're deducing that the conjugate method is a "joining together" of multiple techniques, then you'd be correct.

Using the conjugate method, individual lifting exercises are linked together, enabling you to increase the amounts of weight you can lift thus gaining more muscle. The key though is that each of the exercises has to be close in nature to each other. In other words, you're using multiple techniques to directly and indirectly target specific areas. When you stop seeing the results from what you're doing, then you choose exercises that hit the muscle groups from slightly different angles. This keeps things fresh and enables you to continuously see gains.

The last bit of advice I would have for guys just starting out or getting back into training is that it is absolutely essential to get the form and technique right. Not only is it crucial to getting results but it is equally important to avoiding injury. By cheating, anyone can lift more weight but that doesn't help increase your strength or build muscle. All it does is waste your time and lead to injuries. You've got to make sure that your form and technique are correct before increasing the weight. So get the form right, stick to the basics, focus on the core areas and don't give up and you'll get the results you want.

To celebrate the ten year anniversary of CriticalBench.com I'm giving away $297 worth of killer muscle building downloads. Learn the secrets most people will never know about getting stronger and building lean muscle extremely fast.

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Tags: Advice, Building, Foundational, Muscle

When most people think of kettlebells, they usually think of exercises such as swings, snatches, cleans, and jerks, but the kettlebell can be used for a variety of other moves as well. Kettlebells are a great tool for building work capacity, power, strength, and even endurance using a set of classic exercises. Although all of the previously mentioned exercise are examples of quick power movements, it is important to note that most people can simply begin by focusing on building size and strength before working on speed and power (among other goals). Building muscle is a good first step because, as a wise person once told me, “You can’t flex bone.”

To build size and strength, there is probably no better tool than the barbell. The problem is that many people jump right into heavy barbell training without first adequately mastering proper form and movement patterns. For certain movements, the design of the kettlebell actually forces the body into positions that are better suited to learning basic technique using many of the same exercises that are traditionally done with barbells. The right technique will ensure that the targeted muscles are working optimally from both a muscle-building and strength-building standpoint. By mastering good form, lifters will also be able to train longer and harder and avoid injury. As a result, they will make better gains and improve performance more steadily.

There are many different roads to getting big and strong, but I’ve found that using heavy compound movements are the best way to develop size and strength. Variations of the squat, deadlift, bench press, and overhead press are the keys to developing a strong and powerful physique as well as improving performance in both athletic endeavors and strength competitions. The powerlifting moves essentially challenge every muscle in your body because compound movements use multiple joints and work muscle mass throughout the body, thus making them very effective for building size and strength. Novices and advanced athletes alike can benefit from strength work with kettlebells for the squat, deadlift, bench press, and overhead press in order to build strength as well as reinforce good foundational movement patterns.

KB Goblet Squat

The kettlebell goblet squat, popularized by strength Coach Dan John, is a great way to learn how to squat properly. Two of the biggest problem lifters face when squatting is rounding the lower back and allowing the weight to go too far forward. Being able to hold the kettlebell in front of the body in the goblet position helps combat this problem. The goblet squat drill reinforces proper position in both the upper back and the hips. Holding the weight in front makes this movement feel very similar to a front squat or Zercher squat in that the weight pulls the lifter forward and actually produces a more upright posture. If the lifter bends the spine and rounds the back, there is a very good chance s/he will drop the weight or stumble forward. Strength Coach Zach Even Esh refers to this movement as “the kettlebell Zercher squat”and has used it with his high school and college wrestlers for many years as both an introductory exercise before barbell squats as well as in kettlebell conditioning circuits. Using goblet squats, lifters learn to brace their cores and keep their upper backs tight, techniques that are integral in all variations of squatting.

Another common problem during the squat motion is knees that cave in excessively, and the goblet position can help correct this as well. When performing the goblet squat with a narrower stance, the lifter can use his or her elbows to guide the knees out in order stretch the hips and develop proper position of the knees. I have my younger athletes hold the bottom position for a few seconds and use their elbows to actively “pry” open their hips while to learning the proper depth position. Once they understand how to force the knees out, I eliminate the pause in the bottom position, and we then increase the loads to work on strength.

KB Goblet Box Squat

Another squat problem many lifters have is difficulty in “sitting back”, and this is where I like to use a box to help lifters learn to do this properly. It teaches people to really sit back, which engages more of the glutes and hamstrings and makes the squat not just a pure quad movement. This method also ensures proper position of the knees and can help to prevent injuries. If the lifter is having trouble getting down to a proper depth, I have them squat to a higher box at first and continue to work on form in addition to mobility drills to help open up the hips. As the lifter gets stronger and more mobile, the squat depth should improve dramatically.

KB Double Front Squat

Once the lifter can handle some heavier weight in the goblet position, he or she can start to utilize the double kettlebell front squat to build even more strength. In this movement, the lifter can effectively double the working load by using two bells instead of one. For the double front squat, the lifter assumes the rack position with the elbows pulled down and in toward the body. This is a really tough exercise for core as well because there is a lot of weight working to pull the lifter forward and out of position. Resisting that forward pull really teaches the lifter to brace the core and maintain good positioning while performing deep squats, and this is a great exercise for overall leg development and pure strength.

KB Deadlift

Like the squat, the deadlift is one of the most valuable exercises for gains in both strength and size. On the surface, the deadlift is one of the simplest lifts in the sense that the lifter is just picking up a weight from the floor and putting it back down, but it is much more complex than most people give it credit for. It takes a lot of mobility in the hips as well as stability in the spine to execute a proper deadlift. Working with a kettlebell is a great way to introduce beginners to pulling from the floor as the handle is much higher off the ground than a dumbbell, and thus it is much easier to get into proper position.

As with the goblet squat, the handle of the kettlebell makes the weight very easy to grasp and helps to put the lifter in proper position right from the start. The most common form mistake I see with deadlifts is excessive rounding of the back. By using the handle of the kettlebell, lifters can really “pull” themselves down to the ground using their lats, upper back, and hip flexors while keeping the back flat. The guys at Westside barbell refer to this concept as “pulling the slack out of the bar”.
The second biggest mistake I see with beginning deadlifters is that they want to mimic a squatting motion and use too upright a posture–they try to squat the weight up rather than sit back and pull it up. One easy way to help the lifter sit back is to make sure that the body is in a good position at the start. I encourage my athletes to start off with the kettlebell positioned slightly behind them, or at the very least, with the handle of the kettlebell in line with their ankles at the start of the pull. This positioning makes it much more difficult for the lifter to start in a bad position. With the kettlebell slightly behind the lifter, the arms must be held tight to the body, which helps to engage the lats. Also, if the lifter “squats” down, then the arms actually won’t be able to touch the handle until the lifter reaches back.

Having an athlete work with the back to a wall is a great way to correct a “hip hinge” problem. The athlete should face away from the wall (about a foot away or so) and try to get his or her butt to touch the wall by sitting back. Squatting down will cause the lifter to miss the wall, but the lifter will successfully find the wall if he or she pushes the hips back. If form does not improve, then the lifter can try using the elevated KB deadlift as shown below.

Elevated KB Deadlift

If the lifter cannot reach the kettlebell due to a lack of hip mobility (rather than a lack of technique), then the kettlebell can be placed up on boxes until mobility and range of motion improves. This exercise is similar to a block pull or rack pull because it effectively shortens the range of motion, allowing the lifter to stay in good position within the realistic range. Strength Coach Eric Cressey often starts his athletes out on rack pulls at first if he feels they cannot achieve good position while pulling from the floor.

KB Double Deadlift

As with squats, the deadlift load can be increased simply by using two bells instead of one. The lifter will now have to assume a slightly wider stance in order to accommodate the size of the bell. Therefore, this particular lift will be more similar to a sumo deadlift than a conventional deadlift and thus will work the hips a bit more. Using two bells also helps teach a better lockout position as the lifter can get his or her chest up more effectively at lockout than when holding one bell.

KB One Arm Floor Press

For this exercise, the lifter should start in a side-lying position and grasp the handle firmly with the working hand. The free hand should help to guide the working hand into position at the start of the lift. The one-arm kettlebell floor press is a good way to introduce pressing exercises to young lifters and athletes. For more experienced lifters, this movement can also be a great assistance lift that challenges the core and is a little easier on the shoulders than traditional bench pressing. I suggest using one arm for all of the pressing exercises in this article, mainly because the lifter can then use the free hand to help get into better position to lift. As an added benefit, the unbalanced load also works the core muscles and stabilizers a bit more since the lifter is only working on one side of the body and will need to adjust on the free side.

Many new lifters bench press with the elbows out too far, and they often shrug their shoulders up when pressing as well, which puts the shoulder in a vulnerable position. Older lifters who have beat up shoulders may find this kettlebell exercise more comfortable than a dumbbell floor press because it keeps the elbows closer to the body and forces a much harder “elbow tuck”, which is much easier on the shoulders than pressing with the elbows out to the sides. Working with the kettlebell is a lot different than working with a barbell or dumbbell in pressing exercises because the weight sits behind the athlete’s wrist. This weight actually pulls the lifter out of position, so if the elbows flare out too much, he or she will miss the weight or simply have to dump the weight. The kettlebell actually forces a much more “elbows tucked” position than a traditional floor press. The elbow doesn’t necessarily need to be this close to the side in a traditional barbell bench press or floor press, but this exercise helps to teach the concept of “tucking the elbows” in the bottom of a bench press, as seen frequently in modern day powerlifting meets.

The floor press is also a safer option for beginners; if they do miss a weight or get into trouble during the lift, the weight will simply drop to the floor. Once lifters are comfortable with the correct form and set-up for a floor press, they can progress to the one-arm bench press.

One-arm KB Bench Press

As stated previously, using the kettlebell really teaches the lifter to tuck the elbows in an exaggerated fashion, which will help when learning the powerlifting style of bench press in the future. When setting up for both the floor press and the bench press, it is important to keep the shoulder blades pulled down and back to ensure proper stability as well as safety of the shoulder. The other adjustment to look for is to make sure that the lifter maintains proper alignment in the wrist when pressing. The wrist, elbow, and shoulder joints should be in alignment at lockout for both the floor press and the bench press. The weight of the kettlebell on the outside of the wrist helps to achieve this optional lockout position.
The one-arm bench press will feel slightly less stable than the floor press. This movement really forces the lifter to engage the lats, core, and glutes in order to create a stable platform to press from. If the lifter doesn’t create full body tension, he or she will have a very difficult time pressing the unbalanced weight successfully. This is a great variation of the bench press that can be used to get some extra core work in without directly doing any core exercises.

One-Arm Tall Kneeling KB Overhead Press

The overhead press is not as common as the bench press in most gyms, but it is a highly effective movement for developing both size and strength. I personally like to start athletes out in the tall kneeling position when learning this movement because it ensures proper core activation when using larger loads later on. The lifter should get set with both knees on the floor and try to feel “as tall as possible” by bracing the core and squeezing the glutes. These cues teach the lifter how to stabilize the entire body and create the full body tension required to perform a strict overhead press. If the lifter tries to lean back excessively and press the weight forward (rather than press it directly overhead) or begins to bend to the side, he or she will lose balance and miss the lift. Once lifters understand how to brace the core effectively, then they can move to the standing position as shown below.

One-arm KB Overhead Press

A common problem with lifters is that they have trouble mastering the true overhead position. Most people will initially try to press the weight forward (almost like an incline press) rather than directly overhead. Again, having the weight positioned behind the wrist helps to keep the kettlebell in the proper position. Because the weight is behind the lifter’s hand, the kettlebell works to pull the lifter back into proper position. As the lifter presses the weight up, the wrist, hips, knees, and ankles should all line up in a straight line. It is not possible to achieve this position if the lifter doesn’t get the bell overhead.

Just as with the horizontal pressing variation mentioned earlier, the lifter should use the free hand to help “cheat curl” the bell into proper position at the start. (This is the same rack position that the lifter learned earlier in the double front squat except done with one bell). The rack position helps to reinforce the “elbows in” position when performing pressing exercises and is much easier on the shoulders. The elbows should naturally “tuck and flare” just as in a bench press. This means the elbows will be positioned “in” on the way down and will slowly come “out” as the lifter approaches lockout. This should occur with a very fluid pressing motion and will most likely happen naturally without much coaching due to the bell forcing the lifter into good position.

The squat, bench press, deadlift, and overhead press done with kettlebells are useful exercises that assist the lifter in learning proper movement patterns for the traditional barbell lifts. Because they target nearly every muscle in the body, they are also great exercises to do as warmups before the main movements or as assistance work for both strength and muscle building. I hope you enjoyed this information on kettlebell lifting and that it speeds you on your journey to becoming a bigger and stronger lifter or an athlete who moves and performs better!

Note: All of the movements outlined in this article can be used as assistance exercises for more advanced lifters or as a main movement for beginner and intermediate lifters. This rule isn’t set in stone obviously, but is just a general guideline for readers to follow. In this way, anyone can start incorporating these movements in their own set routines. For the squats and bench press, I would recommend sticking to the 6-12 rep range, and for the deadlift and overhead press I would suggest the 3-8 rep range for strength and muscle building. I have included two sample training templates below so you can see how these exercises could fit into a training routine.

A sample Novice two-day full body program might look like this:

A2) One-arm tall kneeling overhead press A3) Tall kneeling anti-rotation press B2) Assisted chin-ups with band

A sample Intermediate two-day full body program might look like this:

B3) Supine hip flexion with band

Coach John Gaglione is a Sport Performance Specialist out of Long Island New York. An avid strength sport athlete, John also competes in powerliftering and kettlebell strong sport competitions. If you would like to learn more about John you can reach him at www.gaglionestrength.com or e-mail him at gaglionestrength@gmail.com.

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Tags: Enhance, Kettlebells, Strength, Training

Everybody loves to take a vacation. For many people although, going on vacation typically means taking a break from regular fitness routines and healthy dietary regimens. In reality, one of the greatest difficulties most people have with getaways is getting back to their normal exercise and healthy eating routines once the vacation is over. As soon as they get home, most vacationers are faced with two significant difficulties:

1) Getting back to the standard coaching timetable.

2) Getting rid of the few extra pounds that were place on in the course of the holiday.

With an increasing number of individuals concerned about their well-being and staying fit year-round, there's a growing business that caters to people who wish to take a holiday but in the very same time, do not want to deal with any 'setbacks.' To put it differently, folks who want to combine their want to loosen up with their desire to be sexy. As being a relatively new business it goes by several names, but it is most generally known as fitness vacations or adventure holidays.

Fitness Adventures USA is this kind of firm that has emerged catering towards the desires from the active vacationer. They supply a variety of possibilities for the adventure-minded traveller. Let's consider a search and see what they have to give. The business was founded by a guy named Scott Colby, who previously ran a fitness boot camp in Dallas for several many years. Scott says that he has always had an enthusiasm for outdoor sports and that his new business-Fitness Adventures USA-is a means for him to share that enthusiasm with other like-minded people.

Each Fitness Adventure is exclusive, but all are week-long active holidays that offer participants possibilities to enjoy activities for example fitness bootcamps, yoga, biking, whitewater rafting, hiking, wholesome cooking courses, horseback riding, motivational coaching, wine tasting, canoeing and much more. Particular actions for each trip are matched for the destination. And after a difficult day of fitness and adventure, all journeys include relaxation time along with an alternative to take pleasure in a pampering massage.

Scott's very first Fitness Journey outing took place in summer 2010 in Estes Park Colorado, within the heart with the Rocky Mountains. Other locations incorporate California Wine Nation along with a Vermont Drop Foliage trip in the autumn months. To ensure that each and every participant gets individual, one-on-one focus, Scott limits the variety of travelers on each trip to 10-12.

Fitness Journey isn't just about becoming active although, it is also a lesson in wholesome eating. The price of each and every journey holiday consists of 3 meals each day. The dishes are not only nutritious, but tasty also. Each meal delivers a number of choices which will fit the choices of even the most picky of eaters.

Comfortable lodging are incorporated within the price of every Fitness Journey encounter. For example, throughout the California Wine Country trip, guests remain at a Marin Holiday retreat home just twenty minutes away from your Napa Valley wine makers. Guests in the other journeys also stay in luxurious houses. Scott says that all the lodging he offers incorporate panoramic views, gourmand kitchens and soothing outdoor decks.

With Fitness Adventures USA, Scott Colby is not just trying to help individuals 'get fit.' What he actually wants is for each of his visitors to possess a true, life-changing experience. He is happy to report that with less than a year's operation below his belt, the feedback he is getting from FA participants signifies that he is reaching his objective.

Scott is particularly pleased with a gal named Lesa, who went on his Rocky Mountain Fitness Adventure last yr. In her personal words, Lesa says that her FA expertise was essentially the most "phenomenal, life transforming, beneficial experience" she has actually had. Her story is genuinely remarkable. Lesa says that from June, 2010 to January, 2011, she lost an extraordinary 61 lbs! She lost 12 of these pounds throughout the first 5 days of her FA expertise and has gone from a size twenty to a size eight.

Since then, Lesa says that she's grown to be a fitness buff, enjoying outdoor activities such as hiking like never before and regularly taking boot camp courses. But that's not all-since getting fit with FA, she says that her self-esteem has increased and she has already been promoted two times at her job! That, my friends will be the type of testimony that each and every personal trainer dreams to get.

So in the event you discover yourself in a rut or are just seeking to try some thing new and thrilling that can not merely pump up your heart rate but possibly alter your life, you may think about taking a Fitness Journey USA holiday.

Get my free report entitled, The Warrior Physique - Building The Super Hybrid Muscle. Click to learn how you can rapidly build muscle and burn fat at the same time.

Mike Westerdal is the founder of Critical Bench, Inc. A free online weight training magazine.

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There are many people out there who call themselves bodybuilders, but in my opinion, unless you have attempted to take the stage at least once in your life, you are just a weightlifter. There is a big difference between having a physique with some visible abs that looks good on the beach and the body that you see in competition, with striated glutes, paper-thin skin, and veins like you’d see in an anatomy chart. Many have attempted to step on stage, and many have failed. In my mind, that’s what separates a wannabe bodybuilder from the real deal.

Bodybuilding isn’t for everyone, and for some it just isn’t in the cards due to body structure and genetics. You don’t necessarily need to have superior genetics like Jay Cutler to compete, but contest prep does require discipline, hard work, consistency, and the drive to do what it takes to get results. At the end of the day, genetics (and the judges) may determine the on-stage winner; however, the fact that you may not receive a trophy doesn’t mean you are not a personal winner as long as you did everything possible to be your best on that day. As I tell my clients, if you enjoy the process and the challenge, then you have already won.

IFBB Pro Evan Centopani Weeks Out From the 2012 Arnold Classic

Where do you start? One general recommendation I make is to hire qualified help. Even with the information in this article, which is written in a general format, there are too many individual differences among potential competitors that must be addressed. An expert will be able to hone in on your particular body and how it works, and then will be able to apply tried-and-true principles to achieve specific results while avoiding the traps and pitfalls that can occur during contest prep. Also, a professional will provide an objective viewpoint and will be able to help you keep your mind on the right path; as the diet progresses, it becomes as much a mental challenge for some as a physical one.

The Diet:
A lot of bodybuilders believe there is only one single process to follow to get ready for a show. Most pick a certain number of weeks before the show to start dieting, usually 12-16 at minimum, and then just gradually drop their calories as the show gets closer. How early you should start your diet depends on your current condition and how much fat you are carrying. A good rule of thumb is to give yourself one week for every percentage point of body fat. Therefore, if you have roughly 12% body fat, start at 12 weeks out; if you are over 16% body fat, start at 20 weeks out.

There are also many bodybuilders who still follow outdated and useless practices during prep such as carb depleting and then reloading the week before the show; all that does is risk damage to the physique. I like to use methods that are based more on science and in-the-trenches experience and not merely on tradition. Always plan extra time for contest prep to ensure optimum fat loss and retention of muscle mass. Specifically, you want to maintain a relative calorie deficit rather than an absolute calorie deficit (an important point I learned from Scott Abel). The reason for this is that in an absolute calorie deficit, an athlete can and almost always will lose muscle mass, which we would prefer to avoid at all costs. In an absolute caloric deficit, the body will be more stubborn about giving up fat because it is in starvation mode, which is roughly 750-1000 calories below an individuals BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate). In this state, the metabolism will protect fat storage at the expense of muscle in order to maintain energy expenditure.

For any diet, and especially for contest diets, a better approach is to use a relative caloric deficit in which an individual begins the diet at or near his normal BMR, which is the rate at which the body burns calories while at rest. Once the BMR has been established, the diet begins. There are various methods that can be used to prepare for a contest…the particular approach all depends on a person’s current needs state, how they have been eating up to that point, and their current condition. Some of these methods are: 1) staggering calories (one of my favorite methods), 2) carb cycling, or just a 3) a steady-state approach at or near the BMR, while introducing fat burning activities (such as a structured training program and cardio) to create a fat-burning machine rather than a fat-storing machine.

Dennis Wolf Also Weeks Out From the 2012 Arnold Classic - Looking HUGE!

So how do we figure out a person’s BMR? There are some good equations out there, but to keep things simple, just take your bodyweight times 12 or 14 if you are in decent shape (below 14% body fat) or your body weight times 10 if you are on the fatter side (above 15%). Next, subtract 300-500 calories from that number, depending on how much fat you have to lose. There are several factors that influence the BMR, including gender, hormonal levels, age, height, and background. Therefore, it would be useful to have a record of a few days worth of eating in order to poinpoint an individual’s current caloric intake and how closely it matches their calculated BMR. Once calorie consumption is assessed, then we proceed to choosing an appropriate diet strategy. I recommend breaking the calories up into five, six, or even seven evenly spaced meals throughout the day. In this way, the body is more easily able to process smaller amounts of food efficiently and to keep insulin levels steady.

Once the general eating strategy is set, it is then necessary to structure the diet in terms of fat, carb, and protein percentages. One point I want to get across immediately is that in a calorie deficit (as in a pre-contest diet), there will be no predisposition for your body to store fat from ANY energy source (carbs, fat, or protein). Therefore, when dieting, don’t be concerned that a certain energy source may make you fat (the usual targeted source is carbs); instead, focus your sights on determining the best strategy to optimize fat loss while insuring retention of your hard earned muscle. Carbs and fats are the protein-sparing energy sources– enough of these must be present in a diet so that protein can be used to build and rebuild tissue. If not, the body will use protein for the production of energy at the expense of rebuilding tissue.

A word on carbs: Carbs are not the enemy, but too much insulin may be a problem when trying to get ripped on a diet. The problem is that too much insulin and too little insulin can both result in feelings of hunger. Therefore, to control insulin levels, we should monitor physiological feedback after meals. If there is too much insulin, the body feels tired and the mind sluggish. If insulin is low, the body feels hungry, but focus and concentration remain clear. Finding a balance between these two situations then becomes a matter of tweaking the meals during a diet. Someone who feels tired and lethargic after a meal may be consuming too many calories at that particular meal. If he feels hungry, but is still focused and alert, then his body is in a fat burning mode. As time goes on most bodybuilders get used to the hunger…it’s just part of a typical contest prep!

Getting back to macronutrients, how do we decide the ratios of proteins, carbs, and fats? As an example, let’s take a 200-lb client. Protein needs would be roughly 275 grams, as I like to keep protein around 45-50% of total calorie intake during contest diets. Because his BMR would be around 2400 calories, according to our calculations, I would recommend that 50% of that should consist of 300 grams of protein (just take 2400, multiply by .50, then divide by 4). Now there are 1200 calories left to divide between carbs and fat. Using a carb-based diet as an example, I would keep carbs at 35-40% and fat at 10-15%. I have gotten many competitors into ripped contest condition using this model. In terms of fat loss, you should monitor bodyweight and the image in the mirror each week (the mirror will always overrule the scale weight) as well as your body’s feedback on hunger, focus, energy levels, etc.. Remember, this is one of many possible ways to diet for a contest, and it always comes down to an individual’s physiology. This is one of the best parts of what I do–manipulate and coax the body to come in shredded and watch it all unfold in front of me.

Also keep in mind that if the body is in a fat burning mode, water intake needs to be increased as well. During diet periods, more body fluids will be lost and replenishment becomes crucial. Proper fluid replenishment and electrolyte balance is important at this stage to maintain cell integrity and intracellular water levels. Therefore, sodium ingestion should also be kept quite high through the whole prep by using sea salt and certain condiments.

After you have taken all of these variables into consideration and have set a plan into action, you can then and only then look for other factors that may influence performance. Finding the right training protocol and minimizing stress levels are factors outside of the diet that can contribute positively or negatively to performance. The others, of course, are supplements and drugs. Too many readers already rely too heavily on pharmacological influences so I will not go into that subject. However, supplements can be put to use in pre-contest dieting. Products are called “supplements” for a reason–they supplement diet and training, but they do not take the place of them. Supplements exist to aid the process of fat loss and muscle retention but they will not replace bad training, coaching, or dieting, and will not fix what is wrong with your overall protocol.

Cardio:
When it comes to cardio, the more fat you have to lose, the more cardio you may need to do. Keep your cardio sessions at 25-45 minutes; longer sessions will cost you hard earned muscle. If you have a lot of fat to lose, the key is to start cardio at the same time as you start dieting. The problem most competitors have is that they tend to throw the kitchen sink at themselves from the start, whether it be cardio or diet. If you start out at six 1-hour sessions per day and plateau at eight weeks left, where do you go from there? Yes, you would initially lose a lot of weight, but once you hit that plateau, you have no option but to go to extremes. Two sessions per day on top of workouts? You want bodybuilding to add something positive to your life, not consume your life. Furthermore, if you go to these extremes, the after-effects once the contest is over could be dangerous, and this is something you want to avoid as much as possible. So you want to get the most out of the least when it comes to cardio—add it only when needed. I would not recommend you start with more than three sessions a week at 30 min each unless you are completely out of shape.

OG IFBB Pro Renel Janvier Knew How to Get Into SHAPE!

Keep your cardio at an easy-to-maintain pace. The rule of thumb is that you should be able to maintain a conversation but still build up a sweat. You are a bodybuilder, not a runner; save the high intensity stuff for your workouts and keep cardio at a comfortable level. Now I know some individuals like HITT, but for the most part, once you are a month or so into contest prep, you will more than likely end up burning off muscle with this approach. If you want to do it for the first few weeks, that’s good, just be cautious. The time of day at which you do your cardio depends on your lifestyle and other factors. Forget this idea that “first thing in the morning on empty stomach” is absolutely necessary. That may be the absolute best-case scenario, but if you don’t have a good bike or treadmill at home, and you need to drive to the gym or you do your cardio after training, it’ll be fine. Don’t sweat the small details, just maintain consistency with your diet and training program.

First of all, I want to point out that if you didn’t put in the hard work and a good plan to get ripped ahead of time, then no amount of water manipulation, fat loading, or carb loading is going to work in the end. I often hear competitors say that they were just holding water—no, you were just not lean enough, period! If you are shredded, then proper loading can help you to look fuller and dryer in order to present the best package possible on stage.

What you do with your water intake depends on how you will be peaking. If you carb load, water manipulation will have to be different than if you fat load. For carb loading, you need to know that carbs require roughly three grams of water for one gram of carbs in order to load into the muscle cell. For simplicity, let’s say you are loading 400 grams of carbs, which would require 1200 grams of water to load into the muscle. To help with drying out, instead of taking in 1200 g of water, you take in 700 g of water. The body will take the rest of the water needed from its subcutaneous stores. Unless a client needs to make weight, we would typically start loading on Wednesday (Saturday being the contest day) and taper on Thursday; that way, we have some wiggle room for adjustments come Friday and Saturday, depending on how the client is looking. Therefore, you should decrease water as you decrease carb intake, but you should never completely cut water if you are just carb loading. Also, when you carb load you should use carb sources such as potatoes, rice, oatmeal, and rice cakes and not simple sugars. All those will do is cause bloating and water retention.

Another method, and one I use more often, is fat loading. Carb loading can work and work well for an individual with a higher metabolism, but for those more sensitive to carbs, it may be much harder to peak and keep water under control. Instead, fat loading can be done by increasing calories on Wednesday and Thursday (using good fats such as natural peanut butter, whole eggs, olive oil, and red meat) with minimal carbs at a couple of meals as well as keeping water intake low on the day of the show.

Alternatively, this can also be accomplished by taking in simple sugars along with very high fat foods using the correct timing. I learned this method when working with Scott Abel. You must cut out water completely for this approach to work, usually around 12 hours or so before the contest, in order to get rid of the little interstitial water you may have and to make room for fat loading. But first, before you cut your water, you need to take in as much water as you can starting on Tuesday and leading up to Friday. This will send the message to your body to turn off ADH (anti-diuretic hormone), which will ensure that you will continue to lose water even after you stop taking in fluids. Tapering off your fluid intake with this method is a huge mistake because that is what turns on ADH; as less water comes into your body, it responds by trying to hold and store its own water. The result is unwanted water retention. A good rule is that if you are on point conditioning-wise, you shouldn’t need to dehydrate for more than about 20 hours max. You should use foods such as prime rib, fries, cheesecake, nuts, pancakes, and even candy bars along with regular diet foods. If you are plenty dehydrated, after prejudging is over, then a diet soda or two will help fill out the muscles. Just make sure you have them between meals and not WITH your meals, and only have them if you look like you are getting flat. Remember, timing is everything.

Now if you are a novice and you are ripped and ready to go but are unsure about the peaking methods, don’t change a thing…if it ain’t broke, don’t try to fix it!. Don’t take a chance (as so many bodybuilders do at the last minute) if you truly don’t know what you are doing. To take months to prepare for a contest and then risk it all by trying methods you have no experience with is just not worth it. Fat loading and carb loading both work and work well, but they are not foolproof. This is where expert advice comes into play.

So, to sum it all up, here are the take-home points:

• Determine your timeline (err on the side of longer).
• Select your diet approach.
• Listen to your body and be objective (which is harder than you may think).
• Add in cardio only when needed.
• Be ready at least 1- 2 weeks prior to the contest.
• Don’t use ANY peaking method if you don’t know what you are doing.
• Don’t go to extremes. No contest is worth screwing up your body.
• Work hard and be consistent!

The best advice I can give is to hire a coach to guide you on this journey. It takes all the stress out of the process, and you will also learn things along the way. No two contest preps are ever the same, and prep even shifts from contest to contest as your body changes. A good coach will assess how your body works and will know when to make changes based on your feedback. Good luck and get yourself up on that stage!

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