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 obvious is that your ability to get your body warm will depend on the temperature the place you’re exercising in. If it’s winter time, a cool evening, or if you life in a cold place, then your body will probably require more warm up than it would on a hot summer afternoon.
Why warm up:
Why you need to warm up is a matter of safety. Just to help you visualize what’s going on, I’d like you to think about a rubber band. This will represent your muscles and other tissues. What happens if you stretch a rubber band that has been sitting in the freezer?
The rubber band probably snaps before you are able to stretch it very far. A warm rubber band, on the other hand, can probably be stretched a long ways before it breaks. This is what rubber bands were designed to do, after all. They are designed to stretch, but they can’t do that job very well cold.
The same is true for your muscles. They can’t do their job nearly as well when they are cold, and starting out with a heavy weight before your muscles are nice and warm can lead to injury and muscle tears. Trust me, you don’t want to be like that rubber band that snaps when it’s cold.
Warm ups are even more important for the bigger exercises such as the squat, deadlift, and the bench press. These will require a more extensive warm up, while other exercises will likely only need a a set or two with a light weight to get warmed up.
How to warm up
1. Clothing: Let’s start off with the right clothing. Wearing a sweater or workout pants is a good idea in cold weather until you’re able to raise you body temperature. Consider wearing several small layers instead of one heavy layer. Smaller layers can be peeled off one at a time until your body temperature is high enough.
2. Do static stretches at the end: In case you don’t know what this means, static stretches are those done without movement. The traditional stretches that you are familiar with are probably (more…)
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It doesn’t take a genius to realize that the more rest you take between sets, the more weight you’ll be able to lift when you do come back. This doesn’t mean that you should always take more rest between your sets… the right amount of rest for you will depend on your goals somewhat.
First off, let’s give little explanation on why you might choose longer or shorter rest periods between each workout. There are 3 different primary energy systems that your body uses to produce ATP, which is the primary fuel your muscles use for exercise.
These definitions come straight from this article on Wikipedia:
ATP-PC System (Phosphogen System) – This system is used only for very short durations of up to 10 seconds. The ATP-PC system neither uses oxygen nor produces lactic acid and is thus said to be alactic anaerobic. This (more…)
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Talking about the shoulder muscles can really get confusing. Chances are, if you ask someone for a shoulder rub, they’ll grab the meat that sits close to the base of your neck. This part of your “shoulders” is referred to (more…)
Continue reading about What You Need to Know About Your Deltoids
All this time you thought those thousands of sit-ups were going to build you a six pack… only to have me tell you that you might have been wasting your time.
(And chances are, you have no business doing any abs work – unless your diet is great, you are doing compound weight training, and are already fairly lean.)
The truth is that sit-ups only work your abs indirectly. All that time that you spent doing those sit-ups was really a greater benefit to your hip flexors than for your abs. Were you not trying to build up tough hip flexors with your sit-ups? If not, I’m sorry to be the one to bring you the bad news. I’ll explain what all of this means.
How your abs work:
Muscles work through contraction. To put it simply, when a muscle contracts, it becomes shorter in length as the fibers pull together. So let’s think about what this means for your abdominals. What happens when your abdominals contract?
Again, when you abdominals contract, the muscles of your stomach area pull together and essentially become shorter, thereby moving the skeletal structure they are attached to. This contraction of the abdominals shortens your abdomen and pulls your rib cage and your shoulders toward your hips (see the picture up top).
Pulling your shoulders toward your hips is exactly the type of movement we see in the various types of stomach crunch exercises. A proper crunch will keep your lower back flat to the ground, and as your shoulders are pulled toward your hips, your spine will also inevitably bend and flex. This is what we call spinal flexion.
Crunches aren’t for sissies though. The range of motion for these is quite small, so they don’t look as impressive as a full sit-up, but a well-executed crunch will place intense stress on your abs and create a burn.
Focus on really pulling with the stomach muscles and squeezing them at the top of the movement for a moment. Like any other exercise, adding weight is important, but we’ll talk about ways to do that another day.
Why sit-ups don’t work (very well):
Here’s the bad news: all of that great spinal flexion and pulling with the abs doesn’t happen very much when you do sit-ups. Think about what’s happening when you do sit-ups. Your body is bending at the hips to pull your torso upward. This is called hip flexion, and it doesn’t use your abs nearly as much.
The beginning of the sit-up movement is the most effective part for your abs. The sit-up begins by pulling with the abs for about the first 30-45 degrees of the movement. That’s the good news.
The bad news is that the rest of the movement is done by your hip flexors. The hip flexors are a little group of muscles that help connect your femur (leg bone) to your back bone/ pelvis (check out the picture on the left).
Once your abs have completed the first 30-45 degrees of movement in your sit-up, they then begin to act only as stabilizer muscles. They hold your upper body in that flexed position isometrically while your hip flexors do the dirty work to pull your body upward at the hips. So your abs are indirectly involved in the movement, and this explains why they can get a little sore when you do sit-ups, especially if you have weak abs.
Don’t believe me? Try it for yourself right now. Stand in a doorway and hold on with one hand for stability. Place your other hand on your abs to see how much they flex. Now, raise your leg straight up in front of you. You will feel tightness in the top of your thigh, but not your abs. Leg raises and sit-ups are essentially the same movement in reverse.
Bicep curls seem like such a simple exercise, but one frequent mistake exists that often leads people to transfer the stress of this movement away from the bicep muscles and to the shoulders.
In his Encyclopedia or Modern Bodybuilding, Arnold Schwarzenegger describes that bringing the elbows forward during this movement creates a lower quality stress on the biceps and can potentially hinder their growth.
Are You Really Using Your Biceps?
Let’s take a look at a common mistake that could be holding your biceps back from having stellar growth.
For purposes of illustration, we’ll take a look at standing bicep curls using a straight bar. We begin this exercise with the bar resting just in front of the thighs.
The beginning of the motion is fairly easy. The biceps and forearms contract to bring the weight up until the arm is slightly bent.
This is the point where the exercise becomes difficult. As the elbows bend, greater stress is placed on the biceps. There is a strong temptation to move the bar upward by bringing the elbows forward in front of the body.
The problem with this method is that your shoulders are being used to push your elbows forward and raise the curl bar, while your elbows stay bent at approximately the same angle.
FYI- The more you shoulders work to move the bar upward, the less your biceps need to work through the full range of motion. Less work for your biceps means less growth for your biceps. This essentially shifts your curls from being a good bicep workout to a lame shoulder workout.
Once your shoulders have assisted you in bringing your elbows forward, your forearm is much closer to vertical and it becomes much easier for your biceps to move the weight the remaining distance to complete the contraction.
In addition, the weight (more…)
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Squatting is the best way you can build overall muscle mass. Period.
There are a lot of people out there who fear the squat. They think that doing the leg press machines or squats on a smith machine will somehow be safer. Using these machines is just like using any other machine in the gym.
The advantage of using a machine is that you really don’t have to know what you are doing. The machine forces you to do an exercise in a certain way and along the machine’s motion path.
While machines might be easier to use, you simply get less benefit out of them. Using free weights is the key to building your base of muscle, no matter what muscles you’re working. The bench press is better than a bench press machine, and doing real squats beats the squat machine or the leg press machine. That’s all there is to it.
Doing squats properly will work about 75% of the muscles on your body either directly or indirectly. And regardless of what others will tell you, squats are a safe exercise as long as you do them right.
In fact, squatting correctly will strengthen your knees and back muscles in a way that makes future injuries less likely. Let’s walk through the squatting movement in detail:
1. Start with the bar: Yes, just the bar. Practice for a while and get a feeling for how this movement should work. Pay special attention to your squat stance, keeping your knees out, keeping the back alignment, (more…)
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I hate the basics.
It doesn’t matter what it is, we simply don’t want basic things in life. Nobody wants to go out and buy a basic car if they could afford something nicer. We don’t like to have basic computers or basic cameras either… we want the fast computers or the cameras will all the hi-tech features.
There’s nothing wrong with wanting more than the basics. We don’t want to live basic lives, we don’t want to buy things that are the bare-bones basics, and we naturally want something more than a basic workout that gives basic results.
In addition, no matter how important it can be to learn the basics rules about whatever you are doing, learning the basics can be a real pain.
I remember taking a basic golf course in college. The teacher made us learn the basics of each golf swing by having us practice every day without a golf club in our hands. I became so frustrated by pretending to play golf each day that I wish I had a real club just so I could smash something with it.
Everybody in my golf class felt that way. We all wanted to learn how to play golf, and just sitting around all day looking at the most basic movements was a real frustration. It’s the same thing with anything we pursue; we naturally want to move beyond the basic level as quickly as possible.
Going to the gym isn’t much different either. You don’t want to have a basic body — you want an amazing body, right? So why would you do the basic exercises if having a basic body isn’t what you want?
That’s why I don’t like using the word “basic” to describe the most useful exercises… it’s very misleading.
The Accelerated Course
It’s just too easy to get caught up in all the details of what we’re trying to do in life. We often waste our time doing all the little things when there’s something big that needs to be done first.
It’s like trying to sweep the floor in your house when there’s a big elephant in the living room that won’t stop crapping on the floor. Take care of the big things first, and then the small details will be easy.
I get the feeling that a lot of us are doing the same thing in the gym. We’re trying to focus on the little details of our workouts like putting some little line on our biceps or a little “cut” in our shoulders. These types of exercises do have their place, but focusing on the details doesn’t get you very far in the beginning.
So why not take the accelerated course when you’re in the gym? You’ll get where you’re trying to go much faster, and you’ll even pick up a lot of the details along the way.
The strange thing is, everybody is calling the best exercises the “basics”. They are the exercises that work the most muscle groups together, and they are usually the most difficult to do. Don’t be fooled though, because these exercises also are the most rewarding.
But maybe we really need to get away from calling these the basics, since nobody wants to have a basic body. Some people will call these exercise “compound movements”, which actually sounds better to me (click here to see which exercises are “basic” or compound movements).
After all, compound interest is a really good thing when you make an investment, but then again, you can get a compound headache and compound stress in your life.
So I thought long and hard about a better name for these movements. I’m looking for a name that truly expresses how important these compound movements are in our workouts – so at length I finally decided that I will now call them Your-Workouts-Will-Always-Suck-Without-These (YWWASWT) exercises.
Darrin lists the specific exercises and calls them The Big 7.
Sure, there might be some situations where you can get a decent workout without the YWWASWT exercises, but this name helps people to understand the importance of these types of exercises.
And so going forward, I’ll refer to these exercises in this way. It helps beginners to understand how important they are instead of just calling them the “basics”. YWWASWT exercises will work many muscle groups together, and by doing these exercises that are so tough to do, you’re actually taking the accelerated path to obtaining your goals. Besides, if it isn’t difficult at first, it’s probably not that great for you anyways.
So stop trying to sweep up little bits of elephant crap — take the accelerated course and get yourself a better workout. And remember: YWWASWT!
Continue reading about Your Workouts Will Always Suck Without These
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. (more…)
Continue reading about Side Laterals That Actually Work Your Shoulders
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