What is Strong? (How to Get Strong, Part 2)
If you’re aiming to get strong, what sorts of numbers should you be shooting for? What is strong?
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powerlifting
Strong Starts in the Mind: The Benefits of Active Imagery for Lifters
Active imagery (or visualization) DOES have a role in building strong lifts. Here’s what it is and how to implement it.
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How a Masters World Champion Improved His Total by 40 kg in 3 Months
An IPF Masters World Champion and world record-holder comes back to set a PR in every lift and improve his total. What’s his secret?
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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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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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Hamstrings: The Most Overrated Muscle for the Squat 2.0
What you’re getting yourself into 2,100 words 7-14 minute read time. If you’d rather watch than read, there are both a video and a graphic covering the same information at the end of the article. Key Points 1. In general, the body utilizes single-joint muscles before two-joint muscles really kick in. This makes movement more efficient. 2. At the bottom of the squat, overactive hamstrings make the movement unnecessarily difficult, so squatting in a manner
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Avoiding Cardio Could Be Holding You Back
What you’re getting yourself into ~3100 words 8-12 minute read time Key Points Lifting heavy things is more metabolically taxing than most people realize. Most people think of weight training as a purely anaerobic enterprise, but the majority of the energy you use to train is produced by your aerobic energy system. Cardiovascular training can improve your recovery between sets and workouts, and won’t interfere with strength or muscle gains if you do it correctly.
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Tucking the Elbows for Bench – You’re Probably Doing it Wrong
Proper elbow position: A quick fix and the secret to a bigger bench press.
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Level Up Your Mindset: Goal-Attainment as a Badass Quest
Remember Super Mario? How he would risk life and limb, through the treacherous realms of Mario world, battling an array of baddies to rescue Princess Peach, only to find a mushroom-headed bro tell him: “Sorry mate, but the princess is in another castle.’’ (I always imagined Toad with a British accent. Go figure.) Off he would go, once again, in search of his damsel in distress. You had to admire his persistence. Dude did not
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The Bulgarian Method
The Bulgarian Method. Just the mention of it is apt to get a rise out of people. Some people argue that it’s the best training system ever devised (how else could a country as small as Bulgaria become a world powerhouse in weightlifting, they argue). Others say it’s a surefire way to bring about overtraining, injury, and death — unless you’re using a copious amount of drugs. In the summer of 2012, I wanted to
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Squat Mechanics – The Red Pill
What you’re getting yourself into ~2,400 words. 6-10 minute read time. Key points: 1) When you miss a squat, it’s not because one muscle or muscle group failed – they all failed sequentially; what you perceive as your limiting factor is just the last thing that failed. 2) The quads are “maxed out” earlier in the movement than the hip extensors. 3) When you don’t purposefully rely on your quad strength and don’t try to
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