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CONVENTIONAL VS. SUMO

Should you Deadlift Conventional or Sumo?

What You’re Getting Yourself Into: 1,900 words, 6-13 minute read time Key Points: Your hip structure will impact your strength and comfort in the conventional and sumo deadlift much more than factors like height and limb lengths. There are no factors that make either the conventional or the sumo deadlift inherently easier or harder.  It’s more a matter of individual strengths and weaknesses. Hip extension demands are nearly identical between the conventional and sumo deadlifts.

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YOUR Drug-Free Muscle and Strength Potential: Part 2

If you haven’t read the first part of this series, go ahead and check it out before diving into this article.  Just a quick recap of the background information from Part 1: Of the available models for predicting your drug-free muscular potential, muscle:bone ratio is probably the best option, but Dr. Casey Butt’s calculations are based on similar principles, and are much more user-friendly, so that’s what we’re going with for predicting muscular potential. Strength is

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YOUR Drug-Free Muscle and Strength Potential: Part 1

What you’re getting yourself into: 3,300 words, 11-22 minute read time Key Points: 1) Drug-free muscular potential is influenced by the size of your frame. 2) Strength is a function of neural factors and muscular factors.  Once you’ve hit a point of diminishing returns for the neural factors, your strength potential will be determined by how much muscle you can build. 3) Based on a few simple calculations, you can get a pretty good idea of your muscular

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Who’s The Most Impressive Powerlifter?

What you’re getting yourself into 5300 words, 17-35 minute read time Key Points 1) The most common method people use to compare relative strength is strength/bodyweight ratios.  However, this standard is horribly flawed. 2) The formulas used to compare relative strength in powerlifting (most notably the Wilks formula) have their own issues.  The two biggest problems with the Wilks formula are that it’s not regularly updated, and it’s notably biased against middleweight lifters. 3) Allometric scaling is an

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How to Prevent Muscle Strains

Key points A muscle strain occurs when the strain energy the muscle is forced to absorb exceeds the strength of the tissue. Two-joint muscles are more susceptible to muscle strains, and nothing increases your likelihood of a strain more than a previous strain in the same muscle. Proper warm-ups, developing adequate mobility, and avoiding excessive fatigue decrease your risk of a muscle strain. Background Few things are more annoying than injuries.  Your training is going well,

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steroids

Steroids for Strength Sports: The Disappointing Truth

What you’re getting yourself into: ~5,600 words, 18-37 minute read time Key Points: Many people think steroids make a massive (several-fold) difference in terms of competitiveness in strength sports.  They are wrong. Other people (somehow) think that steroids don’t make much of a difference.  They are also wrong. Steroids DO help people gain muscle mass and absolute strength at a much faster rate, but the increase in muscle mass generally means you’re forced to move

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Training to failure

Training to Failure, or Just Training to Fail?

What you’re getting yourself into ~3300 words, 11-22 minute read time Key Points 1. When comparing a WIDE array of training variables (number of reps, rest periods, rep speed, and loading), muscle growth is the same if sets are taken to failure. 2. Training to failure is likely safe.  Or, at the very least, there’s no direct evidence that it’s particularly dangerous. 3. Training to complete failure likely isn’t necessary to maximize growth – you can

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Mr. Universe bodybuilding

The New Approach to Training Volume

What you’re getting yourself into: ~3500 words 12-24 minute read time Key Points 1. Studies across a variety of populations have demonstrated that muscles grow in a very broad variety of rep ranges. 2. When training protocols are matched for number of sets, even with very different training volumes, they generally result in similar levels of muscle growth. 3. Gains in strength and muscular endurance are still very much tied to the rep range used. 4.

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Bench press

Why Cookie-Cutter Solutions Often Fail: Context

It can be hard to sieve through all the fitness information on the Internet. Picking out the wheat from the chaff is tough, and to make it worse, even a lot of the good information out there is misunderstood and misused by those who access it. The issue is that we are obsessed with content, what the information is saying, but rarely give any thought to the context in which the information is being given.

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