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Unleash Your Inner Superhero

What you’re getting yourself into: -3,200 words.  8-12 minute read time.  If you’re in a hurry, you can skip to the last section for the takeaways, but they may not make as much sense unless you actually read this one all the way through. Key points: Your beliefs influence your physiology directly, and the choices you make.  In these ways, they strongly influence your training success. These effects have been noted in almost every area […]

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What it Takes to Break World Records

  This is something I feel like I need to say And I don’t mean that in a “this needs to be said, so I may as well say it,” way. I mean it in a, “It does not benefit me to say this, and I benefit from not saying it, so I feel like I’m the one who is supposed to say it because then people will actually listen,” way. This is what it

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Making Sense of Strength

“The Map is not the Territory” -Alfred Korzybski For starters, I just want to be up front about the fact that the subjects covered in this post are very vast subjects. There are dozens of very long, technical books written about them, and this post is just a basic introduction. Actually, it’s more like an introduction to an introduction – I’m currently 20,000 words into a book talking about all of this stuff in much

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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

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Stress: The Silent Killer (of gains)

One of the biggest problems we have when we talk about training is that we tend to only talk about physical stressors. We like complicated periodization models, manipulating training volume, intensity, and frequency. In short, we like having a sense of control. We like thinking, “If I plan out and control these training factors, I’ll get this outcome.” Sure, nutrition and sleep play a role too, but as long as those factors (often given the

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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

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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

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Two Easy Ways to Make Your Novice Strength Training Program More Effective

There are a lot of popular novice strength training programs.  Though people like to obsess about the differences between them, they’re all basically set up the same way (example one, two, three, four). All of them accomplish their intended purpose relatively well:  getting you somewhat proficient with the core barbell lifts.  However, they all have two major pitfalls that can be easily remedied to a) make them more effective and b) set you up for greater success

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Daily Undulating Periodization

Daily Undulating Periodization: The Bogeyman of Training Programs

It’s always interesting to see how long it takes for scientific practices to gain traction on the internet, and then in gyms everywhere. Sometimes there’s an exciting paper, it gets discussed on reddit and forums across the internet, and then people become guinea pigs within weeks or months. Other times, it’s a slow burn – creatine has been researched for well over 2 decades, but only recently (in no small part because of the great

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Sleep, Pt 1: Wrecking Your Diet, One Night At a Time

“Insufficient sleep undermines dietary efforts to reduce adiposity“ The title of the study says it all. If there’s one subject I tend to get preachy about, it’s sleep.  It’s not exciting like a new exercise protocol or as sexy as some new diet trend, so it doesn’t get the coverage it deserves.  But it is absolutely crucial that you get a full night of sleep.  This is probably going to turn into a 3-4 post

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Practical Considerations for Combining Cardio and Lifting

Hey guys, after the huge response to my recent article about combining aerobic and resistance training, I got my friend Alex Viada to go into a little more depth on the subject.  Combining the two is what he does for a living, so he’s the guy to really talk about application.  I’m just a guy going through the research – he’s the expert that REALLY knows this subject inside and out.  I hope you enjoy! 

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