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Technique archive

Stronger By Science publishes articles on topics like lifting technique (squatbench, and deadlift), body composition and hypertrophyprogrammingnutritionprehab and rehab, and cardio.

Don’t know where to start? Check out our Complete Strength Training Guide or the How to SquatHow to Bench, and How to Deadlift guides.

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The Belt Bible

What you’re getting yourself into: ~4700 words, 15-18 minute read time This is almost certainly the most thorough article on the web about the effects, benefits, and drawbacks of training with a belt. Key Points 1) Wearing a belt improves your performance in the gym 2) These performance increases likely mean increased size and strength in the long run 3) There are still instances that it’s better to train beltless, but you should probably use

Everything You Think Is Wrong With Your Deadlift Is Probably Right

What you’re getting yourself into: -1750 words.  5-8 minute read time.  If you’re in a hurry, don’t fret.  There are a lot of pictures that will help you get the concepts, even if you need to skim the text. Key Points: If you’re afraid you deadlift with your hips too high or too low, it’s probably just a matter of how you’re built. Rounding your back when you deadlift “works,” primarily, by decreasing how hard

Squats are not Hip Dominant or Knee Dominant. Some Biomechanical Black Magic.

What you’re getting yourself into: -2,200 words.  8-10 minute read time.  If you’re in a hurry, you can skip on down to the “Practical Takeaways” and save the dense stuff for later. Key Points: The origins and insertions of the hamstrings and rectus femoris allow them to extend the hip and knee simultaneously, even though their actions oppose each other. Two joint muscles allow force from single joint muscles to be transmitted to joints they

Greg hits parallel in a squat.

High Bar vs. Low Bar Squatting

Before we get into this post, I want to let you know about our giant How to Squat guide. It covers everything you need to know about every aspect of the squat – from biomechanics to correcting weaknesses to technique. Click here to open it in a new tab so you can check it out after you’ve finished reading this article.  Sayre’s law:  “In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the

Band-Resisted Pushups = Bench Press for strength gains? Plus, how useful is EMG?

First things first, please give this post a little time to get rolling. There are bits of it that are primarily for nerds like myself, but there are also directly actionable parts, so be patient while we get there. You may have heard of EMG before. EMG stands for Electromyography – essentially measuring the electrical activity in your muscles. Muscle contraction starts with a nerve impulse. If the nerve impulse is strong enough, it creates

Speed kills: 2x the intended bar speed yields ~2x the bench press gains

If you want to get stronger, training volume and intensity are the two most important variables, right?  Well, a recent (May 2014) study published in the European Journal of Sports Science sheds some light on another crucial factor – bar speed. Now, if you’re like me, you’ve always heard that you’re supposed to lift the bar (concentric) as fast as possible, and that doing so would recruit more fast twitch fibers since you’re producing more

Hamstrings – The Most Overrated Muscle Group for the Squat

Before we get into this post, I want to let you know about our giant How to Squat guide. It covers everything you need to know about every aspect of the squat – from biomechanics to correcting weaknesses to technique. Click here to open it in a new tab so you can check it out after you’ve finished reading this article.  After the huge response I got to my article on the infamous Good Morning Squat, I realized

Fixing the Good-Morning Squat

The good-morning squat is a common problem, and one I get asked about frequently enough that it was worth explaining what’s happening and how to fix it in a blog post. For those of you who don’t know, a good-morning squat is ostensibly a squat, but when the lifter starts coming out of the hole, their butt shoots straight up, so instead of squatting the weight up, they end up using their hamstrings, glutes, and

Should you wear a belt or not? Study write-up

A MUCH more thorough treatment of this subject can be found here:  The Belt Bible The belt vs. beltless discussion is a common one in the strength world, and is, in fact, one that I actually wrote about several weeks ago.  What I have for you guys today is a study write-up to cut through the speculation and actually provide some data for the discussion.  The study is titled “The Effectiveness of Weight-Belts During Multiple

What I learned on the way to benching 350 pounds

Continuing the series that, at this rate, is set to finish up in about 15 years, here is the third installment, and currently the first of three installments about the bench press. Just to recap what this whole thing is about – since a lot of you weren’t following my blog the last time I did an installment (in January) – I’m giving an overview of the things I had to learn to hit milestones

A few thoughts about squat depth

Before we get into this post, I want to let you know about our giant How to Squat guide. It covers everything you need to know about every aspect of the squat – from biomechanics to correcting weaknesses to technique. Click here to open it in a new tab so you can check it out after you’ve finished reading this article.  This will probably sound heretical to some, but I don’t always squat to parallel, and I think that’s

Greg deadlifts 500 in early February,

What I Learned to Deadlift 500 Pounds

This is installment 2 in a (currently) 8-part series.  The first was “What I learned to squat 500 pounds.”  I’m planning on doing one installment for each 100-pound increment for squat and deadlift starting at 500, and each 50-pound increment on bench starting at 350.  Just as a refresher from the first installment: “There are three types of strong people. 1. Lucky ones 2. Injured ones 3. Smart ones Unless you’re simply a freak, getting

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