While the best exercise for building shoulder mass is the overhead press, you might want to incorporate side laterals into your workout to add thickness to your outer shoulders. There are, however, a couple ways to lose some of the benefit from this exercise.
Your shoulder muscles are actually composed of three separate heads that are in the front (anterior deltoids), middle (medial deltoids), and rear (posterior deltoids). Developing full looking deltoids is a good idea because your shoulders are visible from every angle, whether you’re being viewed from the front, side, or rear.
Working on your medial deltoid adds width to your shoulders which helps make your waistline look smaller in comparison. This is great for women also as it helps to shape an “hourglass figure”.
A common mistake when doing deltoid side laterals, however, is to use too much momentum to raise the weights up to shoulder level instead of letting your muscles do the work. There are a few ways this can happen. We’ll take a look at each of these problems and how to fix them. Read the rest of this entry »
Getting a good warm up before you attempt any heavy lifting is an absolute necessity. The purpose of a warm up should be pretty obvious from its name. You need to get your body warm and the blood pumping before you start lifting heavy.
Another fact that should be pretty Read the rest of this entry »
Written by Jason
Alright, let’s be honest, we all have those days where it’s tough to get up and go to the gym. You can think of a thousand reasons not to do it, and of course it’s so easy to rationalize that skipping just one day won’t hurt anything. Read the rest of this entry »
Doing squats is one of the best ways to increase your overall lean body mass and power. Squats involve more muscle groups than almost any other exercise, and if you’re not already doing squats, adding them to your routine can help you to add strength quickly.
Learning the correct squatting stance will go a long ways in helping you to avoid injury. Lower back and knee injuries can happen if you’re not careful to use correct technique, and having the correct stance is necessary to help prevent these injuries. If it’s done correctly, the squat can be a very safe exercise.
Taking the correct stance
One mistake that you should avoid is Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: back, exercises, form, lower back, squat, squats, tips, training
Your body is 100% unable to do anything that your brain does not tell it to do. Period.
For every movement you make, and for every action you take, the initiation and completion begins and ends with the signals that come from your brain. Since your brain is the central Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: mental, motivation, visualization
Think you’re too wimpy or too small to be seen in a gym? Better think again.
His name is Aditya, but his friends call him Romeo. He is 2’9” tall, weighs in at less than 20 pounds, and feels no shame whatsoever as throngs of people come to see him as the smallest bodybuilder ever.
And why should he feel any shame whatsoever?
What is wrong with being born with a frame that’s smaller or larger than usual?
Yeah, I know that it’s easy for a beginner to feel out of place in a gym. You’re struggling to press an empty bar while some beast of a man is pressing 500 pounds next to you. You might feel Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: confidence, motivation
If you’ve been going to a commercial gym regularly, you might have noticed that some guys will crank out a set of 15 reps for an exercise while another guy just does 3 reps on a different exercise. What’s up with that?
The reason you’ll see people using totally different Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: muscle, repititions, reps, strength
This is Part 2 of a two-part series that explains how your muscles grow. If you haven’t already read Part 1, please go back and read it first. In this post, we’ll explain the message presented in Part 1 and what it represents.
In Part 1, a short story was told in which I had you imagine that you were the Greek god, Zeus, up in the clouds. Your goal was to push a small tribe of people into building a stronger building. You couldn’t force them to do it. You could only put them in the right situation that would cause them to grow.
Think about your muscles. They react in a similar way. We can’t just tell them to grow, but instead we can create the proper environment that stimulates their growth. As you may have guessed, the people in this story represent the systems within you that cause you to grow; the building represents your body and your muscles.
Strength Progression
Our muscles do not grow spontaneously. Instead, they grow in response to the stresses we put upon them. That means that if we want to see results, we need to lift weights, and this momentarily weakens our muscles.
Remember the people inside their thatched home? They never tried to make a stronger home until there was a need. Once the wind blew and weakened their home, they immediately went to work rebuilding it.
Your muscles work in a similar way. Lifting weights weakens your muscles and creates a response in them to grow stronger. Notice that the people never came out to rebuild the home while the wind was blowing or while the earthquake was raging. They waited for a calm moment when they could go out and do the repair work. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: 101, god, muscle growth, principles, Weight lifting
