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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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Marine Corps lightweight powerlifter completes a squat.

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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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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man squatting

High Bar and Low Bar Squatting 2.0

What you’re getting yourself into: ~4200 words, 10-15 minute read time There’s a graphic and video at the end with the bulk of the information if you’ve given up on reading like the youths these days (*shakes cane*) Key Points If you assume similar mechanics, bar position makes little difference in the challenge presented to the quads and hip extensors. The major mechanical differences arise because the quads are most challenged at the bottom of

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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

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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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