REBUILDING MILO by Aaron Horschig, Kevin Sonthana

• To develop strength, you must strike a balance between stress and recovery.
• To progressively develop more and more strength, the demands of your training must not exceed the adaptive capabilities of your body.
• When you train hard and don’t give your body enough time to recover, the stresses of training begin to accumulate.
• There is always a reason for pain. It doesn’t develop out of thin air.
• When a radiologist sees a bulging disc on an MRI scan, they have no way to determine whether it is due to a recent event (a wound) or is 20 years old (a scar).
• Your body is resilient to injury when the power generated at your spine remains low.
• if you want to lift heavy weight (placing load on the spine), it is best not to move your spine and keep it within the neutral zone. Lock it in place and keep it stiff while you move at the hips.
• Every spine has a breaking point, and the quickest way to find it is to load your spine with a ton of compression and perform rep after rep with poor technique.
• If given time to adequately recover after being overloaded during a heavy training cycle, the body can adapt and replace a microfracture with stronger bone.
• While your hip joint is meant to move under load, your spine is not.
• Working every day to improve ankle mobility should be a priority if you wish to return to deep squatting pain-free!
• Learning to stiffen your trunk anytime you move a load (picking up a box off the ground or squatting a barbell) needs to be your first priority.
• Stiff hips affect the role of the joint complex directly above: the low back.
• Poor mobility in either the thoracic spine or the shoulders often causes the low back to move excessively as compensation when the arms are raised overhead, such as when placing a box onto a high shelf, pressing a barbell, or performing a snatch.
• Understanding how your injury presents will help you figure out what you need to do and what you need to avoid in the short term to decrease your symptoms.
• Nearly all back pain can be controlled and altered by changing the way you move.
• While exercises like Russian twists, sit-ups, and back extensions from a GHD machine may be great at increasing strength, they do little to increase core stiffness.
• To enhance the quality of stiffness, you must train the core differently. This comes through the second approach of using isometric exercises built to enhance muscular endurance and coordination.
• The definition of stability is the ability to limit excessive or unwanted motion.
• One key to fixing injured backs is to use exercises that enhance stability but place minimal stress on the spine while the exercises are being performed.
• This group of exercises has become known as “the Big Three”: • Curl-up • Side plank • Bird-dog
• Before you begin core stability training, I recommend addressing mobility restrictions at the hip and/or thoracic spine.
• After addressing mobility restrictions in those areas, Dr. McGill recommends that you perform the cat-camel before the Big Three to reduce low back stiffness and improve motion of the spine. Unlike other stretches for the low back that can place harmful stresses on the spine, this exercise emphasizes mobility in a spine-friendly manner.
• Unlike training for pure strength or power, the endurance component of stability requires the body to perform many repetitions of an exercise to see improvements.
• As this rep scheme becomes easier, increase the number of repetitions rather than the duration of the holds to build endurance without causing muscle cramping.
• The McGill Big Three has been highly effective since I started using it with my patients who come in for low back physical therapy.
• The side plank is a unique exercise because it activates the lateral oblique and QL muscles on only one side of the body, making it an excellent choice for addressing weak links in stability while placing minimal force on the spine.
• Stretching the low back stimulates the stretch receptors deep inside the muscles, giving the perception of pain relief and the feeling of less stiffness.
• Most of the muscle pain and stiffness you feel in your back is a consequence of a chemical reaction called inflammation that occurs from the real injury located deeper in the spine (disc bulge, facet irritation, etc.). 76 This underlying injury is what causes the secondary contraction or spasm of the surrounding muscles.
• Stretching the low back only treats the symptoms and does not address the true cause of the pain.
• No rehabilitation plan or corrective exercise program will truly fix your pain and restore your body in the long term if you are too stubborn to deviate from a training plan that is creating pain.
• One of the most common reasons for developing back pain is an inability to use the hips properly.
• As you work through each exercise, be cautious of how quickly you increase load. An efficient rehab program slowly applies load to the body.
• When attempting to lift heavy weight, I recommend taking a large breath in and then holding that breath throughout the entire repetition. When you combine this breath with a strong bracing of your core, your trunk will instantly become more stable and capable of handling tremendous weight.
• Many athletes who develop back pain when deadlifting do so because they fail to use their legs sufficiently and end up relying too much on their backs.
• The inverted row, performed with a suspension trainer or gymnastic rings, has been shown in research to elicit a high amount of upper and mid-back muscle activation while placing minimal stress on the spine.
• Performing a suitcase carry with the weight in one hand is significantly harder and poses a greater challenge to your core than performing the exercise with weight in both hands.
• The upside-down kettlebell carry is one of the most challenging variations.
• Proper use of a belt involves much more than just wearing it tightly! To use a belt, you must breathe “into the belt.” If you only cinch it tight, you will miss out on the benefits it has to offer. Always think about expanding your stomach into the belt and then bracing against it.
• I highly recommend keeping belt use to a minimum.
• A belt should never be used with the goal of taking away back pain or soreness.
• For those who do not have access to a specialized machine like the reverse hyper, a kettlebell swing is a great late-stage rehabilitation exercise that emphasizes and trains dynamic hip extension in a similar cyclical motion.
• Contrary to the exercise name, I recommend performing back extensions in a very hip-centric manner.
• If you want to see significant changes in flexibility of any muscle or group of muscles, you must be consistent with your stretching.
• Mobility should always be evaluated before flexibility.
• If you want to stretch before a training session or competition, I recommend short-duration stretches (less than 30 seconds), which have been shown to have no harmful effects on muscular performance.
• I’m going to share a little secret with you: most elite athletes have abnormal traits that give them the ability to do things most of us “normal” people cannot.
• The squat is a movement first and an exercise second.
• To squat to full depth with your toes straight forward, you must have adequate ankle and hip mobility and sufficient pelvic/core control. You also must have acceptable coordination and balance.
• Research shows that knee pain associated with barbell training is often due to overuse injuries. 3 These nontraumatic injuries can become nagging and often lead to further issues down the road.
• The most common reason strength athletes develop pain around the kneecap is a lack of ability to control for rotation at the knee (i.e., demonstrating poor knee stability when lifting).
• You need to stop using ice on injuries and sore muscles.
• Ice does not do what you think it does. It does not aid the process of healing from injury; in fact, an overwhelming amount of research shows that it does the opposite! Other than temporarily numbing pain, ice delays healing and recovery.
• There is no denying that ice provides temporary pain relief. Slap an ice pack on an area of your body that hurts, and you’re going to feel better instantly.
• But here’s the deal: Just because the pain is decreased does not mean that you’re fixing the injury. In fact, you’re doing more harm than good.
• inflammation and swelling are normal responses to injury.
• Plain and simple, healing requires inflammation. It isn’t a bad thing at all; it is an essential biological response to injury.
• Placing ice on an injured area essentially puts a roadblock in front of the white blood cells trying to get to the area. You think you’re helping the healing process by placing a bag of ice on your body, but you’re actually delaying its start by preventing your body from doing what it wants and needs to do.
• Swelling is merely the buildup of waste around an injured area that needs to be evacuated via the lymphatic system. It is a natural response to injury that becomes a problem only when the waste-filled fluid is allowed to accumulate.
• Scientific research does not support the use of ice.
• Despite conventional “wisdom” telling us that ice is a good idea, research shows that icing delays muscle repair after injury and gives us direct evidence that icing can lead to increased scarring!
• swelling accumulates around an injured area because you stop moving!
• Exercises performed in a relatively pain-free manner not only accelerate the removal of swelling through muscle contraction but also optimize the healing process without causing further damage.
• While voluntary exercise is undoubtedly the most effective way to preserve muscle mass, reduce swelling, and kick-start the healing process after injury, neuromuscular electrical stimulation (NMES) devices come in a close second.
• NMES devices work by stimulating muscle contraction through electricity.
• Simply put, after injury, we want to promote movement (even if it’s as little as stimulated muscle contractions through the use of an E-stim device) to optimize healing and safely return to the sports we love.
• While you may feel less soreness after icing, you’re not necessarily recovering any faster physiologically.
• Instead of reaching for that ice pack or jumping into a tub filled with ice, I recommend using an active recovery approach.
• If you’re extremely sore the day after an intense workout, I recommended performing a few minutes of soft tissue mobilization.
• Research has shown that a few minutes of rolling on a foam roller or small ball (such as a lacrosse or tennis ball) can significantly reduce delayed-onset muscle soreness (DOMS).

DINOSAUR TRAINING SECRETS: VOLUME III: HOW TO USE OLD-SCHOOL PROGRESSION METHODS FOR FAST AND STEADY GAINS IN STRENGTH, MUSCLE AND POWER by Brooks D. Kubik

• Strength training used to be called "Progressive Resistance Exercise." That's an excellent term, because it places the emphasis exactly where it belongs – on progression.
• The principle of progressive resistance training is the foundation for all gains in strength and muscle.
• There are seven basic progression methods that build strength, muscle and power: 1. Adding weight to the bar. 2. Performing more reps in each exercise. 3. Performing more work sets of each exercise. 4. Performing each rep in stricter, better, tighter and more precise form, with greater concentration and deeper focus. 5. Performing more difficult and more demanding exercises, or performing your exercises in a more difficult fashion. 6. Performing additional exercises for each body-part. 7. Any combination of 1 – 6.
• It's much better to start light and easy and allow the new trainee to experience steady progress for as long a period as possible.
• Beginners should train three times per week on a total body workout, and follow a basic training program that uses either single progression or double progression.
• Start with 5 reps on upper body exercises and 10 reps on gut work and lower body exercises. Do one set of each exercise. Use 8 to 10 different exercises.
• That's the beauty of progressive strength training. If you follow a sensible progression system, your initial progress comes fast and easily.
• Beginners do NOT need to do a variety of different exercises, and will do much better by training on the same exercises.
• As far as sets and reps go, the 5 x 5 system is perfect for intermediates. It provides the right amount of volume, and allows you to work with heavier weights than you used in your beginner programs.
• For long-term progress and lifelong training, it's a good idea to work up, drop back down, and work back up again. You don't have to stay at the hardest possible program all the time.
• Modern bodybuilding programs typically amount to specialization programs on all of the different muscle groups at the same time. That gets you nowhere, because all you do is over-train. It's much more effective to combine an all-around training program that provides adequate work – but not excessive work – for all of the major muscle groups, together with a period of specialization on one or two muscle groups. Over time, you end up specializing on all of the major muscle groups – but not at the same time.
• Remember, dropping back to the easier program (with one exercise on the days that you do heavy, awkward object training) is NOT a step backwards. It's a way to maximize your recovery and recuperation from hard training, and a way to help recover from any dings and dents that may be bothering you.
• Doug Hepburn believed that no matter what you did, what you ate, or how you trained, there was a limit on how fast you could build strength and muscle.
• The answer, Hepburn believed, was to limit yourself to gains of one rep per workout.
• As your strength increases, your progress will slow down. This happens to everyone, so don't worry about it. When it does, try using double progression rather than single progression.
• Starting light is good because it allows you to concentrate on doing your reps in good form.
• Older trainees should always use some sort of simple cycling system that lets them alternate between harder workouts and easier sessions.
• Slow and steady is ALWAYS the way to go.

DINOSAUR TRAINING SECRETS: VOLUME II: HOW STRONG ARE YOU? by Brooks D. Kubik

• The ability to put 200 pounds over your head was the mark of strength back in the day.
• In the modern world of drug-free training, we have Stuart McRobert's 300/400/500 standards. The goal for an advanced trainee weighing about 190 pounds at a height of 5'9" would be a 300 pound bench press, 400 pound squat and 500 pound deadlift. These lifts are drug-free and without any lifting gear other than a belt. In other words, they're "raw" lifts.
• Most lifters of the era used a power clean when they did a press.
• The crucifix is a tremendous test of shoulder, arm and upper body strength.
• strength training is one of the most important keys to lifelong strength and health – and as you grow older, it becomes more and more important.
• Many regard the standard deadlift as the best measure of over-all body strength. It's a very effective movement, and one of the best exercises to include in your training program.
• The back hand or reverse curl was one of the exercises in the York Barbell training courses, and it was widely practiced back in the day. It's not used nearly as often today, and that's a shame. It's a very good exercise, and a terrific test of arm, forearm, and wrist strength.
• Pressing exercises build real-world "stand on your feet" strength. They are a very important part of a strongman's training, and should be a regular part of your workouts. And they're a great way to match your strength against the legendary strongmen of the past.
• The alternate dumbbell press is a terrific exercise for the pressing muscles, as well as the abdominals and obliques, and even the lower back muscles. You perform the exercise by cleaning the dumbbells to the shoulders. From there, you press the left arm to the extended position. Now press the right arm up – and as you do so, lower the left arm. Continue until you perform a total of 10 reps – five reps with each hand. Finish with both arms overhead, and hold for a count of two.
• The military press is a tremendous exercise, and one that every trainee should do. It builds the kind of rugged, total body strength that is very rare nowadays.
• The repetition press begins by cleaning the bar to the shoulders. After a two-second pause, the lifter presses the weight for five consecutive reps.
• Of course, if you prefer to do so, you can make the exercise harder and more demanding by performing one clean and one press on every rep.
• The repetition clean and press is a real man-maker.
• However you do it, the snatch is a wonderful exercise.

DINOSAUR TRAINING SECRETS: VOLUME I: EXERCISES, WORKOUTS AND TRAINING PROGRAMS by Brooks D. Kubik

•  devote all or substantially all of your training time to the very best and most effective exercises. The best and most effective exercises are the basic, compound exercises such as squats, presses, bench presses, deadlifts, etc.
• There are no "secret exercises," so don't waste time looking for them. Stick to the basics.
• Of course, the sad reality is that most trainees spend almost all of their training time on isolation exercises, and some "gyms" even prohibit their members from performing some of the most important and most effective compound movements, such as squats, deadlifts, military presses and push presses.
• The basic, compound exercises are best because they allow you to work several muscle groups at the same time, and thus, to work up to substantial amounts of weight in your different exercises.
• Over time, hard work on the basic, compound exercises leads to enormous increases in strength and muscle mass.
• Your best compound exercises are squats, front squats, deadlifts, Trap Bar deadlifts, standing presses with barbells or dumbbells (or a single dumbbell), barbell and dumbbell bent-over rowing, pull-ups, chin-ups, pull-downs, weighted push-ups, bench presses (performed with barbells, dumbbells, or a single dumbbell), incline presses (performed with barbells, dumbbells, or a single dumbbell), shoulder shrugs (performed with a barbell, two dumbbells, one dumbbell or a Trap Bar), deadlifts from the knees (performed with the bar or Trap Bar elevated by resting the plates on sturdy wooden blocks), hand and thigh lifts, and Hise shrugs.
• Grip work, gut work, and neck work are all important.
• Altogether, there are about 20 basic, compound exercises.
• So do this: pick one squatting exercise, one deadlifting movement, one or two upper body pushing movements and one or two upper body pulling movements. That gives you four to six "big" exercises to focus on. Train these exercises hard for six to twelve weeks, and then, if you want some variety, switch to other movements.
• Contrary to what many mistakenly believe, there's no need to change exercises as long as they're working for you and as long as you are motivated to train hard and heavy on them.
• Many very strong and powerful men have performed the same exercises for pretty much their entire training careers.
• Your job is to train hard and heavy on the basics, and that's where the lion's share of your time and effort needs to go.
• The simplest way to train with heavy, awkward objects is to carry them as far as you can, put them down, rest, and then carry them back to where you started.
• The farmer's walk is the simplest and best of the lot, and doubles as a very effective grip builder.
• By building your back muscles and avoiding over-development of the chest muscles, you develop a tall, erect posture.
• Heavy dumbbell training is a lost secret of strength, power and muscular development.
• The two-dumbbell clean and press is an excellent dumbbell exercise.
• Over time, thick bar training will make your entire upper body much more massive and more heavily developed than would ever happen otherwise.
• The only caveat is to be careful when lifting thick-handled dumbbells. Don't hold them over your head or feet, and make sure you get out of the way fast if you drop them.
• Understand that with the right kind of training, you can make incredible gains with nothing other than a barbell.
• Unless you are an advanced trainee who plans to enter a bodybuilding contest, training for "cuts" is a waste of time.
• Instead of training for "cuts," train for strength. Strength is a positive quality. It's something you build.
• A healthy diet is one that promotes recovery from your workouts, builds muscle and keeps you from adding unwanted body-fat.
• Don't get hung up about training for "cuts" or extreme definition. Train for strength instead.
• As your strength increases, so will your muscle mass.
• There are many excellent exercises for the midsection. I've always preferred leg raises to anything else.
• Hanging knees to chest, leg scissors, leg raises, and windshield wipers are all excellent exercises.
• Planks are excellent for mid-section training.
• The gains from workout to workout are extremely small, but over time, they add up to enormous increases in strength and muscular development.
• If you train too much, too hard or too often, you outrun your body's recovery system. It's that simple.
• The biggest challenge for most older trainees is finding the right balance between training hard enough, heavy enough and often enough to build strength and muscle without training too hard, to heavy or too often.
• Abbreviated programs work far better than longer, more complicated, more demanding workouts.
• There's no magic about 5 x 5.
• Always use what works best for you in terms of sets and reps.
• The key to building great strength and muscle mass is to add weight to the bar whenever you can.
• Do gut work to finish the first workout, grip work to finish the next workout, and neck work to finish the first workout of week two.
• I've suggested that you use the 5 x 5 system. Try four progressively heavier warm-up sets and one set with your working weight for the day.
• The squat and deadlift are especially good for building all-around strength and muscle mass.
• Diet and nutrition helps you recover from hard workouts, but there quickly comes a point where diet and nutrition can’t do anything more.
• If you've been paying careful attention, you will have noticed that the primary message of this book is to train hard and heavy on sensible, low-volume training programs that focus on the basic, compound exercises.
• Devote yourself to hard, heavy training on a small number of the very best exercises.

SQUAT EVERY DAY by Matt Perryman

• Any practitioner, whether we’re talking the line technician who keeps the phone lines working or the MD who keeps you healthy, has more knowledge than is immediately evident from their educational background and formal training. There is an unspoken ― and unspeakable ― element in the Doing. The term for this is tacit knowledge.
• Some things are going to remain fuzzy, and you’ll have to make judgment calls based on necessarily incomplete information.
• If doing everything wrong works better than doing it by the book, is it really wrong?
• Take the lifts you want to improve and, perhaps, a bare minimum of assistance work, and hammer it as often as you can.
• This is a trend among top weightlifters ― lots of pulling and squatting, then more pulling and squatting, leads to a strong squat.
• Strength sports aren’t bodybuilding. Strength means lifting things.
• A central theme of this book is that there’s more than one way to get strong.
• The “bulk and power” method, effective as it can be, is not for everyone, and probably has little place outside brief and occasional growth spurts.
• Paraphrasing Vladimir Zatsiorsky, the idea is to train as heavy as possible and as often as possible while staying as fresh as possible.
• Whatever you want to call it, the idea is to get as much exposure to heavy weights as you can stand.
• If you want more than modest results ― if doing it all “right” hasn’t worked out for you ― then you should be open to new kinds of training instead of resigning yourself to being a genetic reject.
• Circumstances matter. The people around you, the people in your gym, the atmosphere of your gym, what you read about training, who you talk to about training, what you believe about training ― this all matters, and I believe it is key to making any type of training effective.
• What you’re going to find in this book is affirmation of the basics: squatting, picking up, and pressing heavy weights on the regular.
• Strength training is Not That Complicated. The hardest part is showing up and putting in the effort. If you can do that, just about anything will work.
• Seek to lift gradually heavier weights and over weeks and months and years those tiny increments eventually add up to a respectable number. This is the fundamental principle of exercise: to stimulate physical fitness, we must present our bodies with ever-increasing challenges.
• For most of us, progress doesn’t happen in a straight line.
• Progress fluctuates. Progress is nonlinear.
• Muscle mass will always determine the upper limits of strength, but only in terms of potential strength. The more muscle available to contract, the more potential for generating force and torque around joints.
• You become what you do.
• Hebb’s rule, as this came to be, says that “cells which fire together wire together”. Nerves learn through repetition.
• The more you practice a skill, the better you become at that skill. Practice enough and the skill hardwires itself into your brain.
• A skill is just a movement. Once you learn it, you’ve learned it.
• In principle, the more practice you get with an exercise ― not just the gross movement, but the weight and technical conditions of that weight ― the better you get at it.
• To get good at lifting heavy things, you must practice lifting heavy things.
• It’s hard to draw a line between too much training and just being out of shape for what you’re doing.
• A high work capacity allows you to handle the volume you need to improve.
• The more quality work you do in training, the more your whole body ― muscles, nerves, organs, everything ― experiences a demand to adapt.
• More workouts mean more opportunities to practice under weights without the boredom and exhaustion of three-hour workouts. You get in shape through sheer repetition and consistency.
• Strength is about skill, teaching your brain how to handle both a movement and a maximum weight, but it’s also about building your body’s capacities.
• Progressive overload and neurological adaptation tell us that, at least in principle, the more you do, the stronger you can become.
• In principle, more frequent training should add up to more progress.
• Getting strong is not what the cliques would have you think, but neither is it complicated.
• If it disagrees with experiment it is wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science.
• Exercise science defines intensity as a physical measure: your output relative to your maximum capability. In strength training, intensity is given as a percentage of your one-rep maximum (1RM).
• Stress has a specific meaning: the biological response to a threat encountered by a living being. Stress is your body’s reaction to a threat.
• Train hard, then rest and recover.
• Supercompensation is all about timing.
• The supercompensation model dominates the way we think about exercise. Train hard, then take time off to recuperate. You grow outside the gym, not in it.
• Think patterns, not pieces.
• Muscles heal, and they heal fast ― especially if you’ve got a background of training.
• No single measurement can describe you as “recovered” or “not-recovered”.
• “Reject your sense of injury and the injury itself disappears.” ―Marcus Aurelius
• Fatigue is just a fancy way of saying that you’re tired and not operating at peak capacity.
• We’re often physically capable of doing much more work, at a higher effort, than we typically do, but from a survival standpoint, voluntarily working to a point of catastrophic failure isn’t the best idea.
• the brain is receptive to physical signs of fatigue as well as being the site of mental fatigue.
• CNS fatigue is nothing more ― or less ― than “getting tired” during training.
• The more you exert your will and train your attentional focus, the better you get at staying focused and in control.
• The survival systems in your body are dumb. They can’t distinguish between a deliberate exercise program and physical labor that might kill you. Your body treats conditions as they come without concern for the intent behind them.
• Reactivity can be thought of as how sensitive or numb you are to this environmental noise.
• Top lifters are natural intensity responders.
• Practice builds proficiency with lots of repetition at the edge of our limits.
• The lesson is that if you don’t find that “less” works for you, then you might be better served by upping the amount of work you do.
• High volumes of tissue-damaging exercise can, like infections and trauma, trigger a feeling almost like a mild form of depression.
• A prepared body can handle more than an unprepared body, differences in reactivity and constitution aside.
• Scaling back the stress of heavy lifts by way of periodization is certainly one way to address recovery.
• Exercise is supposed to be uncomfortable.
• Nothing says you have to train to deliberately maximize the discomfort.
• With repeated exposure to the stresses of heavy weights, lifters become better able to handle those stresses.
• The link between mental well-being and physical health is becoming clearer by the year.
• Your mind follows your thoughts.
• Every single thing you do, everything you encounter, every event or activity that elicits a response from you can influence the way your genes express themselves.
• Practice, however, is not just a matter of logging hundreds of uninspired hours. According to “expert on experts” K. Anders Ericsson of Florida State University, what defines the high performers is how they practice.
• You become an expert by pushing outside your comfort zone and working on those things just outside your grasp.
• Consistent practice working through not-so-great genes yields athletes who are still well above average.
• So that’s our target: to think of training as deliberate practice instead of another round of beating ourselves to paste.
• The brain, as we know, is particularly sensitive to the intensity of physical sensations, and when you exercise, fatigue in heart and lungs and muscles begins competing for our attention.
• Forcing yourself to pay attention, to reflect on and honestly evaluate each set, adds information that percentages and sets can’t quite capture, and this helps you keep your work sets dialed in to that zone of quality.
• To get good at lifting a really heavy weight one time, you need to practice lifting really heavy weights one time. Singles let you do that.
• Fatigue, not weight, causes injuries.
• That’s all autoregulation is: adjusting the next set based on the set you just did. You plan on the day, not in advance.
• A black swan is an event that appears unlikely in the extreme, at least according to our forecasting methods, but actually has a substantial probability of occurrence.
• Your body is the outcome of a few million years (at least) of mammalian musculo-skeletal evolution.
• Your training (and eating) gains no benefit from over-analysis and detail-fixation. Good enough isn’t just good enough – it’s all there is.
• Your body needs the kick provided by environmental stresses; it just needs them at the right levels.
• Lots of small doses and occasional extremes can create better long-term results than a gradual, incremental process.
• As we know by now, your mental and emotional condition is a crucial part of stress, and it’s also key to workout performance.
• Learning to relax in the rest of your life is as critical to this process as what you do during training.
• When you go hard, go hard. Push your weights, add more volume, and lift all the time. When you rest, don’t half-ass it by saying you’re “deloading” while hitting the gym for a couple of PR attempts. Rest. Stay away from the gym. In fact, donft think about the gym. Eat bad foods and drink beer.
• “If it’s worth doing, do it every day.” ―Dan John
• Experimenting costs you very little, but it has a potential for large payoffs.
• Don’t be afraid to tinker around and see what suits you – and if you feel like hitting a different lift, hit that lift. Be volatile.
• The “dead” in deadlift refers to the starting position: the bar sits on the floor, and you have to lift the weight from a dead stop.
• To summarize the two approaches: Squat a lot and limit deadlifts to fast pulls or one hard deadlift day. Or pull a lot, limit squatting, and cycle the daily training intensity and the range of motion (by pulling out of the rack or off blocks).
• When you squat every day, it will hurt no matter what weights you lift. Frequency has it’s own break-in curve.
• In my experience, losing your motivation for training and falling out of the habit is the hardest thing to recover from, and preventing that is always better than trying to fix it later.
• The people who focus on the doing, rather than the achieving, tend to get better results.
• Success happens when you do for the sake of doing. Success happens when you see outcomes as a result of effort, practice, and consistency, rather than the exclusive province of natural talent.
• Going through life as an unfocused zombie with an unsharpened mind. That’s dangerous.
• Act with intent. Focus your attention on the task at hand and cultivate self-discipline. Make the effort without making it effortful.

Beyond Brawn by Stuart McRobert

• An average or even less-than-average potential for bodybuilding, if achieved, is stunning to an untrained person, and respected by almost any trained individual.
• Achieving your potential for muscle and might demands extraordinary discipline and dedication. There’s no place for half measures, corner cutting, laziness or lukewarm enthusiasm. If you don’t train well, rest well, sleep well, and eat well, you’ll get nowhere or make only minimal progress.
• You have tremendous control over your physique development, if only you would start to employ it.
• Negative thoughts and negative people will harm all your endeavours. If you imagine failure, dwell on it, and prepare for it, you’ll fail.
• With a good plan, and no time for negativity, you’re set for the confidence and persistence that lead to success. But the journey there will be neither trouble free nor easy.
• Lifting weights is a solo activity over which you alone have the power of control. Once you know what to do, you need rely on no one.
• Never lock yourself into using an exercise if it doesn’t suit you. The number one priority for any exercise is that it does you no harm.
• Don’t focus on what you’ll never be able to do well. Instead, focus on what you can do better.
• Use a rep count for a given exercise that best suits you, get as strong as you can in exercises that suit you and which you can perform safely, keep your body fat levels to below 15% (or below 10% if you want an appearance that’s stunning--assuming that you have some muscle), eat healthfully, perform cardio work, stretch regularly, and then you’ll have the full bodybuilding package.
• Experience has taught me that the conservative approach isn’t just the safest way, it’s the most productive and satisfying over the long term.
• Most people train too much. Not only is this counterproductive for short-term results, it produces the overtraining that wears the body down and causes long-term structural problems.
• The biggest exercises are uncomfortable when done with effort. If they were easy to work hard on, they would do little or nothing for you. But don’t use an exercise that’s harmful for you.
• In this book, “light” weight generally means that the set’s rep target can be met easily, with little or no strain. A “heavy” weight is one that demands much effort to complete the set’s rep target regardless of how many reps that is.
• One of the biggest and most disastrous errors in the training world today is the belief that basics-first abbreviated programs are only for beginners.
• Bodybuilding and strength training are almost laughably simple; but simple doesn’t mean easy. All that really matters is focus, and progressive poundages in correct form.
• Pick a handful of the biggest and best exercises for you and then devote years to getting stronger, and then stronger still in them.
• There’s even danger in using variety because you can lose focus and get caught up in an excessive assortment of exercises.
• Focus on the big basic lifts and their variations. Do this for most of your training time. Don’t try to build yourself up using tools of detail.
• You can’t get very powerful in the key basic exercises without becoming impressive throughout your physique.
• Never train if you don’t feel systemically rested from your previous workout. While some local soreness may remain, you should be systemically rested, and mentally raring to go for every workout. If in doubt, train less often.
• Once-a-week training for the biggest exercises is a good rule of thumb. Fine-tune your training frequency according to your individual recovery ability.
• Unless you walk every morning feeling fully rested, and without having to be awoken, you’re not getting enough sleep. And even if you are making gains in the gym, more rest and sleep could substantially increase your gains.
• Add small poundage increments when you’re training full-bore. Don’t go short-circuiting a cycle by adding a minimum of 5 pounds to eh bar at a shot. Get some pairs of little discs.
• Dependable training for typical people with regular lives is about doing things slowly, safely, steadily and surely. It’s not about trying to do in two months something that needs half a year.
• What matters is what works. If you can gain only from a routine that’s absurd in its brevity and simplicity by conventional standards, fine. But if you can gain well using a routine that most hardgainers wouldn’t gain an ounce on, that’s fine too.
• High reps, especially in thigh and back work, have been proven to pack on loads of muscle.
• Don’t neglect your calves, abdominals, grip, or the external rotators of your shoulders. This accessory work matters.
• Some neck work is mandatory if you’re involved in contact sport, and still a good idea if you’re not. And back extensions will help keep your lower back in good order.
• Once you have a good grasp of training, all you need is persistence and time. Then the realization of your potential for muscles and might is almost guaranteed.
• There’s not much if anything that’s really new in the training world. What’s “new” is usually just a twist on an old idea.
• With a dose of creative lingo and modern-day advertising hoopla, even something that has been around for decades can appear new.
• The dip, done in correct form, is a terrific exercise that’s much underused. It’s at least as productive as the bench press.
• Never, ever let your attention waver from progressive poundages in correct form. Never, that is, until you no longer want to build stronger and bigger muscles.
• Only you can find how far you can go by actually going as far as you can go.
• Urging realistic expectations doesn’t mean accepting mediocrity.
• Age isn’t the limiting factor untrained people usually make it out to be. The limiting factor is in the mind. Expect little from your body and that’s what it will deliver. Expect a lot from it and that’s what it will deliver.
• Never pile on bodyweight by adopting a long-term very-heavy eating program. You want a muscular physique, not a soft or flabby one.
• Once you can strictly press overhead a barbell weighing the equivalent of your bodyweight, you’ll be a better presser than nearly all weight trainees.
• What matters the most to you is your progress, and comparing yourself with yourself. Everything you study and apply related to training should be geared to this.
• You must have a great passion for what you’re doing if you’re to be successful at it. If you try to achieve at something that your heart isn’t really into, and that your body doesn’t respond to, you won’t get far.
• Your immediate short-term target should be to take the next small step towards your next set of medium-term goals.
• Never lose sight of the pivotal importance of progression. Organize your training program, nutrition, sleep, and rest habits so that you make progression a reality.
• To realize your potential, you need to become an achievement-oriented, goal-driven and success-obtaining individual.
• Achievement comes in small steps, but lots of them. Lots of little bits add up to huge achievement.
• Success is rarely an accident in any endeavour. Success in the gym is never a hit or miss activity. It’s planned.
• Deadlines are often imperative for making people take action, in all areas of life.
• Giving something a deadline and urgency, and it usually gets done.
• There’s nothing like the urgency of concentrating on a specific goal by a specific deadline to focus attention, application, and resolve. Without something specific to rally attention and resources, people tend to drift along and never get even close to realizing their potential.
• Avoid getting locked into tunnel vision that keeps you looking at the same sort of targets throughout your training life.
• If you want to be successful in achieving your potential you need to program that success. Step leaving life to chance.
• Achievement in any sphere of life depends on getting the individual moments freight, at least most of the time.
• An essential part of the organization needed to get each workout day right is a training diary. At its most basic this is a written record of reps and poundage for every work set you do, and an evaluation of each workout so that you can stay alert to warning signs of overtraining.
• It’s not enough just to train hard. You need to train hard with a target to beat in every work set you do. The targets to beat in any given workout are your achievements the previous time you performed that same routine/workout.
• Unless you have accurate records of the achievements to be bettered, you can’t be sure that you really are giving your all.
• Most trainees have neither the organization needed for success, nor the will and desire to push themselves very hard when the need to.
• Never become dependent on another person to get in a good workout.
• Effective training has to be intensive, and intensive training is very difficult to deliver on a consistent basis without a demanding taskmaster to urge you to deliver.
• Treat workouts as very serious working time. Get down to business and keep your training partner or supervisor at a distance. Keep your mind focused rigidly on your training.
• Always be able to train well by yourself. Have spells where you intentionally train by yourself, to be sure you can still deliver the goods alone.
• Take as much control over your life as you can. Learn from your mistakes. Capitalize on the good things you’ve done. Do more of the positive things you’re already doing, and fewere of the negative things.
• Any equipment other than the basics nearly always serves to divert attention from where most application should be given.
• Spoil trainees for choice, and you’ll spoil their progress too.
• Supplements will never be the answer to training problems.
• Until you get the basic package of training, food, sleep, and rest in general, to deliver good steady gains in muscle and might, forget about any fine-tuning with supplements.
• Ignore anything and anyone that will hinder your progress. You are in charge of your training. Never surrender that authority to others.
• The advantages you get from a home gym are so profuse and profound that, if you’re serious about training, you should do your utmost to get one.
• Parallel-grip bent-legged deadlifts, plus chins and dips, cover most of the body’s musculature. Just those three exercise, if worked progressively and for long enough, can produce a lot of muscles.
• If you have to load or unload a heavy barbell that rests on the floor, lift the end up and slip a disc underneath the inside plate. The raised end will make plate changing much easier.
• If it’s training day today, and so long as you feel well recovered from your previous workout, train today.
• Use a belt very selectively--for low-rep squats and deadlifts, and overhead presses--or not at all. Otherwise, you’ll become dependent on it to generate the necessary intra-abdominal pressure you need to protect your spinal column during heavy lifting; and without that armor you’ll be a shadow of your usual self.
• Successful weight training in its various forms is about progressive resistance. Despite this being so obviously central to training, it’s implications so often go ignored or only barely noticed. Successful training is about making lots of small bits of progress, with all the bits adding up to huge improvement. To achieve this you must have persistence galore, patience in abundance, and revel in knocking off each little bit of accumulation. Concentrate on knocking off one little bit at a time, and long-term success almost takes care of itself.
• As always, your barometer of progress is poundage progression. If the poundage gains aren’t coming, cut back your training volume by reducing total sets and/or exercises, and perhaps by training less frequently. Less work but harder work, and less total demand upon your recuperative abilities, will usually get the poundage progression back on track.
• If you’re gaining in your core exercises for a given cycle, you’ll be gaining in size and strength generally. The core movements are what you need to focus on as the cycle gets ever heavier and more demanding, and closes in on its end.
• The secondary exercises should not restrict progress in the core movements when you’re focusing on building mass. [...] In practice, to maximize gains on your core exercises, you may need to phase out some of the secondary movements as you approach the end of a cycle, or reduce their training frequency.
• Continue with the slow poundage increments, and progress will continue to feel smooth, good, and strong.
• While it’s essential to add poundage to the bar as often as possible, it’s imperative not to be enslaved by it.
• The greatest number of consecutive full-bore workouts is no good if you’re not recovering fully from each of them.
• Don’t be fullhardy, or else you may regret it later. Back off and come back next week for a hard workout when you’re ready. This aspect of conservatism especially applies once you’re in your thirties, and older.
• Remember, safety first, at all times. Patience, conservatism, and training longevity will serve you best over the long term. Haste and shortcuts invariable backfire. Haste makes waste.
• When adding poundage to the bar, use smaller rather than larger increments.
• Don’t ruin the potential magic of abbreviated routines by adding poundage too quickly, in too large jumps, or by training too frequently.
• Find the time to develop a flexible body and then maintain it.
• Eventually you will reach the point where no progress is being made, or is forthcoming. This represents the end of the cycle for that exercise.
• Conservatism, with few exceptions, is the way to go for most people who lift weights.
• Make haste slowly.
• The harder you train, the less training (volume and frequency) you need to stimulate strength and increase muscular growth.
• As you gain experience of training hard, you’ll learn to tolerate more discomfort.
• A steady diet of extremely heavy weights imposes enormous stress on the body. To pre-exhaust will reduce the size of the poundage needed in the compound movement to deliver a good training effect.
• Training intensity is a means to an end, not the end in itself.
• Training intensity is a fundamental and irreplaceable component of making muscle growth and progressive poundages a reality, but that’s all.
• Whatever you try, never persist with something that doesn’t help to keep your training poundages moving up, no matter how much it may be promoted by others.
• Don’t assume that anyone who claims to be a qualified personal trainer really knows what he’s doing. Strings of letters that indicate certifications of various organizations, or degrees obtained, don’t necessarily signify competence as a coach.
• Potentially, the square may be the most productive single exercise you can do provided you can perform it safely and progressively. The more efficiently you squat, the greater the potential benefits you can extract from it.
• Mastering the squat, and then intensively and progressively squatting on a consistent basis is a linchpin of successful bodybuilding and strength training. Don’t miss out on your chance to exploit this wonderful exercise.
• If you can’t squat safely and productively using a barbell, you should try both the hip-belt squat, and the parallel-grip deadlift.
• The parallel-grip deadlift isn’t just an alternative to the barbell squat. It’s an excellent exercise in its own right.
• Some form of deadlifting should be part of every program.
• If you don’t barbell squat you must find an alternative that at least approaches the quality of the squat. If you don’t barbell squat, you should parallel-grip deadlift, hip-belt squat, or leg press, along with some form of deadlifting for the latter two exercises.
• If you don’t find a good alternative to the barbell squat you’ll greatly reduce the potential value of your training for building muscle, if not almost extinguish it.
• Shrugs done face-down on a bench set at about 45-degrees work the musculature of the upper back differently to the regular standing shrug. In the incline shrug the whole upper back is involved, especially the lower and middle areas of the traps, and the muscles around and between the shoulder blades.
• The incline shrug in particular will help improve posture for people who have rounded shoulders.
• The parallel bar dip works more muscle than does the bench press.
• The developmental effects of the bench press in your particular case should also be a consideration in exercise selection. If you find that you get overly heavy lower pecs from the bench press (or dip), the incline press should be a preferred choice.
• There are seven small areas that shouldn’t be neglected during the focus on the core movements. This support seven can have a big impact for keeping you free of injuries. It’s made up of specific work for your calves, grip, shoulders external rotators, neck, midsection, lower back (work from back extensions additional to that from deadlift variations), and finger extensors (to balance the strength of opposing muscles in your forearms). The leg curl should be included too, to provide hamstring work additional to that given by deadlift variations. And the lateral raise is a valuable isolation exercise, to help produce healthy shoulders.
• Deadlifting using a thick barbell provides tremendous grip work. Add the thick-bar deadlift to your deadlift day’s work, either on top of your regular work if you recuperate well, or instead of a little of your regular work, in order to keep the total volume of work constant.
• Most bodybuilders and strength trainers perform their reps too quickly.
• Perform each rep as an individual unit that ends with a brief pause prior to performing the next rep. Take the time you need to set yourself to perform the next rep perfectly.
• Abbreviated training is the most productive type of training for typical drug-free trainees. The potential effectiveness of abbreviated training rests on the brevity of its routines and its infrequent workout frequency relative to conventional training methods.
• Particularly in the pre-steroids era, working out three times a week with a full-body program was the standard.
• The incline shrug is the best all-purpose upper-back shrug.
• If your training poundages are moving up steadily, and your form is consistently good, you’re bang on course. To be able to gain like this you may not need to train any exercise more often than once every five to seven days. And there are some people who may be better off training some of their exercises and body parts less often than once a week.
• Most people weight train too frequently, and don’t provide enough time for their bodies to grow stronger and bigger. Thus they fail to progress; and in addition they accumulate wear-and-tear injuries because their bodies are being worn down.
• The more progressive workouts you put in, the faster your overall progress will be. But if you train too frequently you’ll not be able to produce many if any progressive workouts.
• It’s a dedication to results that counts most, not a dedication to mere gym attendance.
• Don’t weight train if you’re still dragging your feet from the previous workout.
• Results from your weight training come from using incrementally ever-greater poundages. To achieve progressive training poundages you must rest between workouts long enough to recover from the impact of each workout, and then rest a bit longer so that your body can build a smidgen of extra strength and muscle.
• Successful weight training is about stringing together as many progressive workouts as possible. Twenty progressive workouts over ten weeks will produce far better results than thirty workouts over the same period but with only a handful of them being progressive.
• Weight-training success is about results, not just about how many hours you clock up at a gym.
• Experiment with training frequency to see what delivers steady exercise poundage gains for you. This will be relative to your individual recovery ability and the type of training program you use.
• A good training program that doesn’t yield good results can often be made productive by supplying more rest, sleep, and nutrition.
• “Best” is defined as what consistently produces poundage gain on all your exercises.
• Twenty-rep rest-pause squatting and deadlifting are extremely demanding, which is why they can be extremely productive, but only when combined with a very abbreviated training program, lots of recovery time, and plenty of quality nourishment.
• Single-rep work is exaggerate rest-pause training where the pause between reps is extended to several minutes, making the individual reps into sets of one rep each.
• Remember, many if not most people don’t have the robustness of joints and connective tissue needed to prosper on singles.
• Choose exercises you can safely perform over the long term.
• Once you’ve found your preferred major core exercises, stick with them over the long term. It’s a fallacy that you must regularly change your exercises in order to keep progressing. Changing your exercises around excessively is even counterproductive because it stops you from applying yourself to a given group of exercises for long enough to really milk them dry and make sufficient progress in strength to yield a difference.
• Rather than look for a better way to train, look for ways to recover better between workouts, and to focus better during your workouts so that you can train harder and with better form.
• Training each exercises just once a week doesn't necessarily mean training each body part only once a week.
• Sleeping well on a regular basis is of critical importance. You need to take action to correct any sleeping inadequacies you may have. Otherwise your inability to sleep adequate will continue, your recovery will be compromised, and your rate of gain in muscle and might impaired.
• Unless you wake every morning feeling fully rested, and without having to be awoken, you’re not getting enough sleep. And even if you’re making gains in the gym, more sleep and rest in general could substantially increase your gains.
• Getting adequate sleep is pivotal for enabling your body to recover optimally from training. Most trainees shortchange themselves of sleep, and as a result restrict their rate of progress in the gym.
• Use chalk everywhere you need the help, especially in back exercises and upper-body pressing movements.
• A flexible body helps protect you from injury so long as you don’t perform your stretches in a way that exposes you to injury in the first place.
• Have the courage to swim against the training tide.
• Life is too short to waste any of it on useless training methods.
• The first requirements for realizing a very demanding goal are lots of resolve, heaps of persistence, and tons of effort. [...] There’s no easy way to reach a demanding goal.
• Gravity in general, and the stress of heavy exercise in particular, compress the joints of the spine, and the muscles and soft tissue of the back as a whole, but especially of the lower back. This is at the root of many back problems. But with the appropriate therapy this compression can be relieved, leading to a healthier and more injury-resistant lower back.
• One of the simplest measures for taking care of the lower back is to take pressure off the lumbar spine. Not only is this inversion therapy a preventative measure, it can help during rehabilitation following injury.
• More isn’t better with inversion therapy (as with much of physical training and therapy). Just one minute or so is all you need to achieve maximum decompression of your spine. A longer duration isn’t necessary, and a shorter time may work very well for you.
• Better to have several very short inversions per day rather than one long one. Invert for up to 60 seconds one or more times per day, and you may experience immediate benefits.
• Even if your body can tolerate singles and very low-rep work, avoid using such high-force training for long periods.
• If your body isn’t suited to singles and very low reps, stick to medium and high reps. Use a rep count for a given exercise that suits your body.
• Avoid medium- and high-impact aerobic and cardio work.
• The harder and more seriously you train, the greater the need to satisfy nutritional requirements. Better to oversupply on the nutritional front than undersupply. Don’t give your all in the gym and then sabotage your progress by cutting corners with your diet!

The Journey: A complete Strength Training Guide by Greg Nuckols

• What does it take to be as strong as you can be? Big muscles (duh). Master of the lifts you’ll be using to demonstrate strength.
• There is a very large skill component to mastering a lift: You have to get your muscles to work in a very powerful yet precise manner to lift heavy stuff as effectively and efficiently as possible. This comes with practice--the more specific, the better.
• The less wear and tear you have on your body, the more you’ll be able to lift.
• Simple observation is enough to tell you that there are many roads leading to Rome.
• Remember, the four things we need to accomplish to get super strong:
• Big muscles
• Mastery of the lifts
• Healthy joints
• Age/minimizing the time it takes to get there
• Each phase of your training will be governed by a simple question: What obstacles standing between me and my end goal are hindering me the most right now? This question helps give your training clarity.
• The first and most important factors are buy-in and habit formation.
• Most people who start an exercise program end up quitting within the first year.
• You need to enjoy your training. This is a key piece most people miss.
• Sticking with something is all about the things that make you want to continue outweighing the things that make you want to quit.
• When training new lifters, enjoyment matters just as much as progress.
• If new lifters don’t enjoy a program, they won’t stick with it, and if they don’t start seeing the results they’re looking for, they’ll get demotivated and quit.
• The second most important factor is developing proficiency with the movements you’re using to express your strength.
• The more times you do something, and do it the way you’re supposed to, the faster your nervous system will master and store the pattern.
• Simply doing the movements helps, but to gain proficiency with the lifts as quickly as possible, practice needs to be deep and purposeful to cement the skills and keep bad habits from developing.
• To get in enough work while avoiding failure and technical breakdown, multiple sets of low reps are your best bet.
• Generally, training each lift 2-4 times per week will give you the best bang for your buck.
• Practice is key for learning anything new.
• A high body fat percentage generally goes hand in hand with poor insulin sensitivity, and for every pound of tissue gained, a smaller percentage of it will be muscle, and a greater percentage of it will be fat.
• If you’re a male over 20% body fat, or a female over 30% body fat, getting down to the 12-15%/20-25% range will make it easier to train hard, recover well, and build more muscle and strength.
• If your conditioning is good, but your sleep habits are atrocious, then you’d benefit the most from getting more high quality sleep.
• If you set your calories to lose about 1% of your bodyweight per week, consume enough protein, and train hard, then you should have no issues gaining muscle and strength as you lose weight.
• A major mistake new lifters make is sticking with beginner programs for too long.
• Most of the strength gains you make on a beginner's program come from neurological improvements--your nervous system learning the lifts you’re performing.
• When you hit a wall and your lifts stop going up as quickly, it’s because you’re finally bumping up against the limits of how much you can lift with your current muscle mass. To continue getting stronger, you have to gain more muscle.
• Hypertrophy training generally involves training with accumulated fatigue because the main driver of muscle growth is training volume.
• When you hit a wall for the first time on a beginner's program, it’s time to shift training styles.
• Increasing your work capacity is of the utmost importance because, as previously mentioned, training volume is the #1 driver of hypertrophy. You’ve got to handle high training volume to grow, so you need to be able to recover from that training volume.
• A bigger muscle, all other things being equal, is a stronger muscle. There’s no way around it; past a point, you simply have to grow.
• Our bodies aren’t actually built very well for lifting heavy things. When you compare humans to comparably sized animals, we tend to be far weaker.
• Because muscles attach so close to joints, small variations can make a big difference.
• Proficiency/mastery comes with practice.
• I’d just like to point out that training with a focus on gaining mass to dominate at powerlifting is directly supported in the literature.
• If you stay the same size, you have a cap on how strong you can possibly get.
• The primary goal of intermediate training is to get into the highest weight class possible, as fast as possible, while still being fairly lean and protecting the joints as much as possible.
• Get the bulk of your training volume from accessory lifts for all major muscle groups, with sets of 6-15 reps, training each muscle/movement 2-3 times per week for 4-6 sets (or 40-70 total reps) per session.
• Periodization isn’t overly important for hypertrophy, but varying your training a bit simply helps keep workouts feeling fresh.
• Split your training into bulking and cutting phases. This generally allows you to gain muscle at a faster overall rate than attempting to gain it with minimal body fat fluctuations.
• A major reason to make your training more “bodybuilding-centric” during this [intermediate] phase is that bodybuilding-style training has an astonishingly low injury rate.
• Remember the importance of maintaining joint health over the long haul.
• You can absolutely build a ton of muscle doing more heavy powerlifting-specific training as long as you’re doing enough sets.
• Training volume is the #1 driver of hypertrophy.
• There’s actually a surprising amount of neural coordination that goes into lifting really heavy stuff.
• Periodization plays a larger role in advanced, purely strength-focused training, as it contributes more to strength development than muscle hypertrophy.
• Proper nutrition, sufficient sleep, and stress management all play just as big of a role as proper training, if not bigger. You don’t get stronger in the gym.
• Most people don’t stop to consider this basic fact. At the end of a workout, you’ve accumulated some fatigue and you’re weaker than when you walked into the gym. You get stronger outside the gym.
• It’s not the training itself that makes you bigger and stronger. It’s how your body RESPONDS to the training that makes you bigger and stronger.
• Your body adapts by responding to what it perceives to be a threat.
• Two of the most important threats that keep your body from responding well to training are lack of sleep and chronic life stress, such as a stressful job, a bad relationship, financial worries, etc.
• Chronic stress literally doubles how long it takes you to recover from lifting.

How to Squat by Greg Nuckols

• Most people should squat.
• You’d be hard-pressed to find a better exercise than the squat.
• Squats should probably be at the core of your training program.
• There are few exercises that can build or test head-to-toe strength as well as the squat.
• To produce movement, your muscles contract. By doing so, they produce a linear force, pulling on bones that act as levers, producing flexor or extensor moments at the joints they cross, with joints acting as the axes of rotation.
• The two factors that determine whether your muscles can produce large enough internal extensor moments to lift a load are the attachment points of the muscles, and the force with which they can contract.
• Attachment points play a huge role because muscles generally attach very close to the joint they move, so small variations can make a big difference.
• Unfortunately, you can’t change muscle attachment points, so the only factor within your control is increasing contractile force.
• In a properly performed squat, there shouldn’t be a meaningful amount of flexion or hyperextension taking place. Your spine should remain rigid and extended to transfer force from your legs and hips into the bar.
• The length of the shaft of your femur largely determines the moment arms you’re working with at the knee and hip.
• Each intervertebral joint is cushioned by a spinal disc, and each allows for only a little bit of flexion, extension, rotation, and lateral flexion, which add up to large ranges of motion in essentially all planes when addressing the spine as a whole.
• The gluteus maximus is your strongest hip extensor.
• “Origin” refers to the attachment point of a muscle closest to the middle of the body, and “insertion” refers to the attachment furthest from the middle of the body. When a muscle contracts, it pulls the origin and insertion toward each other.
• There are four basic challenges you need to overcome in the squat: a spinal flexor moment, a hip flexor moment, a knee flexor moment, and an ankle dorsiflexor moment.
• There are three key components of the squat: the setup, the descent, and the ascent.
• The first consideration for your setup is bar position. There are three basic bar positions for the squat: high bar, low bar, and front. In the high bar squat, the bar is resting on your traps; in the low bar squat, the bar is resting across your rear deltoids; and in the front squat, the bar is resting across your anterior deltoids or in the cleft between your anterior deltoids and your traps.
• The biggest thing you want to avoid when situating the bar for the high bar squat is letting it grind into your C7 spinous process--the little bony bump at the base of your neck.
• For both the high bar and low bar squat, you should actively pull your shoulder blades together.
• In general, for the high and low bar squat, a narrower hand position will help you keep your upper back a little tighter and more stable.
• Wrist position isn’t an overly important consideration for the back squat if you’re creating a stable enough shelf for the bar with your traps or rear delts.
• Remember, your grip should be as close as it can get without pain in your wrists, elbows, or shoulders.
• The first thing you need to square away is the height of the hooks you’re squatting out of. You should be able to get the bar over the hooks comfortably without having to half squat the weight just to unrack it, or rise up on your toes to get the bar over the hooks.
• The second order of business is getting your feet set under the bar. This is primarily a matter of comfort.
• Unrack the bar by driving your shoulders up into the bar aggressively.
• You should walk the bar out of the rack as efficiently as possible so that you waste minimal energy before you actually get down to the business of squatting. This means taking as few steps as possible.
• The next issue is finding your stance width. There are two main considerations here: comfort and carryover.
• No need to complicate this. Simply play around with your stance width and see what feels best for you.
• In general, you’ll get the best carryover if your squat width is similar to your stance width in whatever movement you’re hoping it will carry over to.
• In general, your best bet is to let your hips and knees determine your foot angle.
• You want your knees to track over roughly your first or second toe. Rather than squatting with your feet turned out to a predetermined degree or arbitrarily pointed straight ahead and forcing your knees and hips to follow along, you’re better of seeing what hip and knee position feels the strongest and most comfortable, and letting that determine how far out you point your feet.
• There are two key factors for developing torso rigidity: spinal extension strength, and intra-abdominal pressure.
• You want to create as much tension throughout your entire body as possible so that you’ll be in utmost control of the bar.
• In general, your best bet is to descend as fast as possible while remaining in complete control of the bar.
• A faster descent can help you get a little more “bounce” out of the bottom of the squat via the stretch reflex, but a little extra pop isn’t very helpful if you’re loose and out of control when you hit the hole.
• Some people are concerned that deep squats will injure their knees or their back, so they squat high and cut their squat off as soon as their torso starts inclining forward ever so slightly. However, the most thorough review of scientific literature found that deep squats posed no serious risks to the knees or spine.
• Deep squats help you gain more strength and muscle than shallow squats, and they transfer better to most athletic endeavours.
• If you’re going to squat deep, then you may as well go until you bottom out. Not only do you get the benefits of increased range of motion, but most people find they can actually lift more weight.
• The advantage you gain from decreasing your range of motion is generally outweighed by the additional effort it takes to reverse the load without the aid of the bounce.
• The ascent revolves around the single most crucial point in the lift: the sticking point.
• The #1 thing you want to avoid is getting caved forward and reaching the sticking point in a good-morning position.
• One final point: EXPLODE. Lift every rep as fast as you can while still maintaining proper technique.
• You’ll gain strength much faster if you make a point of lifting each rep as explosively as you can, from the first rep of each set to the last.
• To correct a good-morning squat, most people need dedicated quad work.
• The biggest tell-tale sign that your core is limiting you is a big discrepancy between your squat and deadlift. If your deadlift is more than 15-20% higher than your squat, it’s likely a core issue.
• The biggest factor that explains why most people can deadlift more than they squat is that people naturally brace more effectively for the deadlift.
• In other words, your squat and deadlift numbers should be pretty similar. If they aren’t, the most likely explanation for the difference is suboptimal core bracing patterns.
• There is the potential for injury with every exercise. However, on a risk scale from 1 to “snap city”, properly performed squats are a 1. The reason I say “properly performed” is that things like spinal flexion or excessive knee caving can make squats more dangerous.
• With very heavy loads (2x your body weight or more) your bar path should be very close to vertical, but you shouldn’t expect it to be with lighter loads.
• I’ll spare you the math, but essentially bar path depends on the weight of the bar compared to the weight of your body.
• In general, longer ranges of motion mean more hypertrophy.
• Any type of squat will build your quads, but high bar squats and front squats taken as deep as possible, sitting down into the lift instead of sitting back into the lift, will probably build your quads the best.
• While squats should probably be at the center of your lower body training, squatting probably won’t maximize leg development by itself.
• If you’re doing front squats...just suck it up or don’t front squat. They’re never comfortable until you eventually deaden the nerves surrounding your clavicles and AC joints.
• If you have healthy knees, letting your knees track past your toes isn’t a concern.
• Unless you’re already a very strong squatter, improving your squat will probably make you better at other sports.
• There’s almost certainly a point of diminishing returns, but aiming for a ~2x bodyweight full squat would be a good goal for most athletes who play sports that require a lot of running and jumping.
• The overall difference in whole-body training effects between all three varieties of squats is probably pretty small.
• Front squats are, hands down, the best squat variation for building upper back strength.
• In a general sense, the best bar position for you is the one that lets you train the hardest and the most consistently.
• Squat as deep as you can for general training purposes and for weightlifting.
• Squat low bar to build more hip strength.
• Squat high bar to build more quad strength.
• Front squat to build more upper back strength.
• Lift every rep as explosively as possible.
• Improve quad strength if your squats end up looking like good mornings.
• Improve core bracing if there’s more than a 15-20% gap between your squat and your deadlift.
• Improve hip extensor strength if you don’t meet the first two criteria.
• Any shoe with good traction and a solid sole is fine; with or without a raised heel is just a matter of preference, but cushion-y soles should be avoided.

How to Deadlift by Greg Nuckols

• Most people should deadlift.
• Do you want to add muscle to your posterior chain, gaining quality mass from your traps all the way down to your hamstrings? You’d be hard pressed to find a better exercise than the deadlift.
• Deadlifts should probably be at the core of your training program.
• There are few exercises that can build or test head-to-toe strength as well as the deadlift (I’d put squats on the same level, with push-press close behind).
• When our muscles contract, they exert a pulling force on one end of the muscle straight toward the other end.
• While force is linear, moment is rotational.
• Moments imposed by a load on your musculoskeletal system are called external moments, and moments produced by your muscles pulling against your bones are called internal moments.
• To produce movement, your muscles contract. By doing so, they produce a linear force, pulling on bones that act as levers, producing flexor or extensor moments at the joints they cross, with joints acting as the axes of rotation.
• The two factors that determine whether your muscles can produce large enough internal extensor moments to life a load are the attachment points of the muscles and the force with which they can contract.
• Attachment points play a huge role because muscles generally attach very close to the joint they move, so small variations can make a big difference.
• Unfortunately, you can’t change muscle attachment points, so the only factor within your control is increasing contractile force. There are only two ways to do that: 1) increase your skill as a deadlifter so your current muscle mass can produce more force during the movement and 2) add more muscle!
• The deadlift is a full-body movement, so a multitude of muscles and bones are involved.
• As long as your spine doesn’t flex too much, it should be able to tolerate the loads placed on it in the deadlift without issue if you don’t have pre-existing back issues.
• Your spine should always remain rigid and extended to transfer force from your legs and hips into the bar.
• Intervertebral joints are those between two vertebrae. To briefly recap: Each intervertebral joint is cushioned by a spinal disc, and each allows for only a little bit of flexion, extension, rotation, and lateral flexion, which add up to large ranges of motion in essentially all planes when addressing the spine as a whole.
• “Origin” refers to the attachment point of a muscle closest to the middle of the body (proximal attachment), and “insertion” refers to the attachment furthest from the middle of the body (distal attachment). When a muscle contracts, it pulls the origin and insertion toward each other.
• There are three basic planes: sagittal, frontal, and transverse.
• There are four basic challenges you need to overcome in the deadlift: a spinal flexor moment, a hip flexor moment, a knee flexor moment, and, obviously, you need to be able to hold onto the bar.
• Knee extension demands are pretty low; odds are very low that quad strength will limit how much someone can deadlift with a conventional stance.
• The farther your hips are behind the bar, the harder the lift is for your hip extensors.
• In general, hip extension demands are highest at the start of the lift, and progressively decrease throughout the pull.
• In the Sumo deadlift, especially with a very wide stance, your don’t just drive your feet straight down through the floor. You also drive your feet out against the floor.
• Pulling a lot of weight depends, of course, on being jacked enough and having enough muscle to produce the required force against the bar.
• As a general heuristic, the best place to start [your stance width] is simply by performing a vertical jump, and noting what stance you naturally gravitate toward.
• Generally, larger people who have a little more of a gut to fit between their thighs pull with a slightly wider stance than smaller conventional deadlifters.
• Once you find your strongest stance width, the next factor to address it toe angle.
• The biggest difference between the sumo and conventional deadlift is stance width, with all the other smaller differences arising from the difference in stance.
• Grip width is pretty straightforward: take the narrowest grip you can without forcing your knees to cave in, or without causing undue friction between your arms and thighs at the start of the lift.
• There are four main grips you can take on the bar: double overhand, mixed grip, hook grip, and double overhand with straps.
• Double overhand grip is generally a no-go. Of the four grips you can take on the bar, double overhand is the one that allows you to grip the least amount of weight.
• If you grip the bar deep into your palms, it’s going to pull itself down into your fingers anyways, tearing your hands up without actually letting you grip heavier weights. Instead, set the bar either just above or just below the calluses at the base of your fingers.
• Grip the shit out of the bar, but leave your upper arms relaxed. Don’t try to row the bar when you’re deadlifting it.
• Always grip the bar harder than you need to.
• The biggest difference between gripping the sumo and conventional deadlifts is that your knees won’t be in the way of your arms when pulling sumo. As such, you can take a narrower grip on the bar. Grip the bar with your hands directly below your shoulders.
• Before you really bear down and rip the bar off the floor, you need to make sure your body is tight enough that your form won’t disintegrate as soon as you start lifting the bar. This is often called “pulling the slack out of the bar”.
• You should create as much tension throughout your body as humanly possible before adding the extra force required to start pulling the rep. You should already be pulling so hard on the bar when it’s still on the floor that adding just a tiny bit of extra force will get the lift moving.
• If your center of pressure shifts too far forward or too far back, it may make lockout excessively difficult.
• As a general rule of thumb, the bar should start about an inch or two from your shins, or roughly over your shoelaces.
• As mentioned earlier, a general heuristic for finding your sumo stance is to start with a stance width where your shins are vertical when viewed from both the side and the front.
• The biggest key to picking a heavy bar up off the ground is...to pay as little attention to the bar as possible. Beyond gripping the bar and pulling the bar into your body to keep your lats engaged, your focus should not be on the bar itself.
• To complete the lift, you need to extend your knees and hips while keeping your spine stiff.
• Generally, thinking “chest up” will help keep the spine stiff through the pull. That requires you to, at the very least, attempt to extend your thoracic spine.
• To initiate the pull, think “drive the floor away”. For whatever reason, focusing on pushing the floor away instead of picking the bar up helps people keep their hips from rising too quickly at the start of the pull. This is the cue for just the first 3-4 inches of the pull; after that, it’s all about hip extension.
• Perform each rep as aggressively as possible, applying maximal force through the lift. Research has shown that lifting at maximal velocity causes roughly twice the strength gains of lifting at purposefully slower velocities.
• Many people have a tendency to hyperextend their hips and spines at lockout. This is unnecessary for competitive purposes, and it’s necessary to gain the training effect you’re aiming for with the lift. It makes the lift harder without any real payoff.
• Many people who have issues locking out heavy pulls can fix their problem simply by engaging the glutes properly.
• The deadlift lockout is basically just a loaded pelvic thrust.
• You should set the bar back down the same way you picked it up: under control and with your spine extended.
• Remember, there are four basic demands in the deadlift:
• Keep the spine extended (or re-extend the spine if you pull with some thoracic flexion).
• Extend the hips.
• Extend the knees.
• Hold onto the bar.
• Speaking in generalities, the smaller you are, the more likely it it that sumo will be your best stance, and the larger you are, the more likely it is that conventional will be your best stance.
• Chalk increases the friction between your hands and the bar, independently and by soaking up any moisture on your hands to make them a bit less slippery. This can let you grip considerably heavier loads more comfortably.
• Liquid chalk is normal lifting chalk dissolved in an alcohol-based medium that rapidly dries after application, leaving the chalk behind on your hands. This keeps chalk dust from spreading.
• If you can’t hold onto the bar when attempting max deadlifts, or if there’s a big gap between what you can pull with straps versus without straps, then your first order of business should obviously be to improve your grip strength.
• Just because fat bar grip work is hard, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s maximally effective for improving your deadlift-specific grip.
• The easiest and (in my opinion) most effective way to implement grip training for the deadlift is simply with timed deadlift holds.
• The deadlift generally responds best to a fairly high frequency of hinge-pattern work, but a relatively low frequency of actual deadlifting.
• People who are built better for the deadlift (long arms relative to their body height) and people who pull sumo can generally train the deadlift more frequently and with higher volumes.
• The better and more consistent your technique gets, the higher deadlift volumes you can generally handle.
• In short, be a bit more conservative with your deadlift training than you would be with your squat or bench training, and prioritize building back strength. The stronger and more resilient your back is, the easier each deadlift session will feel, and the more often you’ll be able to train the deadlift.
• Hip position at the start of the pull is determined and constrained, under normal circumstances, by basic geometry.
• In general, longer ranges of motion mean you’ll build more muscle and “general” strength.
• If you can pull more with a belt and feel more comfortable with a belt, wear one.
• Deadlift straps work by allowing you to grip heavier weights or grip a given weight for longer.
• Straps over two big advantages: They help protect your hands, and they make sure grip won’t limit how hard you can train your back and hips.
• If you’re a powerlifter, you should practice like you play for the majority of your training, and deadlift with a straight bar.
• If you’re not a powerlifter, it’s perfectly fine to deadlift with a trap bar. In fact, it may even be preferable.
• Trap bar deadlifts are probably slightly better than straight bar deadlifts for most non-powerlifters.

How to Bench by Greg Nuckols

• Force is linear: It describes how things are pushed or pulled in a straight line.
• To produce movement, your muscles contract. By doing so, they produce a linear force, pulling on bones that act as levers, producing flexor or extensor moments at the joints they cross, with joints acting as the axes of rotation.
• Attachment points play a huge role because muscles  generally attach very close to the joint they move, so small variations can make a big difference.
• Unfortunately, you can’t change muscle attachment points, so the only factor within your control is increasing contractile force. There are only two ways to do that: a) increase your skill as a bencher so your current muscle mass can produce more force during the movement and b) add more muscle!
• Narrowly defined, the shoulder joint is simply the ball-and-socket joint made up of the humerus and the glenoid cavity of the scapula.
• Your shoulder is a very shallow ball-and-socket joint--much shallower than the hip. That can cause a bit more instability (which is why dislocated shoulders are way more common than dislocated hips), but it also allows for a huge range of motion in all planes.
• The elbow is a simple joint. It flexes (like a biceps curl) and extends (like a triceps extension).
• Your pecs are your biggest, strongest prime mover in the bench. Their main role is in horizontal flexion, but they can also aid in shoulder flexion, extension, and internal rotation.
• There are only three major movements you need to accomplish to complete the bench press: flexion at the shoulder, horizontal flexion at the shoulder, and extension at the elbow.
• The most important thing is simply that your shoulder blades are pulled together.
• A key aspect of a tight set up is finding proper foot position. Your legs and hips help stabilize you on the bench and help you get leg drive.
• A common feature of studies that compare elite-level benchers to average joes is that elite lifters lower the bar slower and do a better job controlling the weight on the way down.
• If you’re a powerlifter, you need to get experience pausing the bar on your chest for each rep, since that’s required for competition. Otherwise, lightly touching the bar to your chest without a pause before pressing it back up is fine.
• Drive the bar off your chest aggressively, initiating the press with leg drive and pushing the bar up and back toward your face.
• Hold your breath throughout the duration of the rep. Take a deep, diaphragmatic breath before you start the descent, and release it once the bar is locked out, or at least nearing lockout. This will help you maintain tension and stability.
• Press every rep as hard as you can.
• In one study, pressing each rep as fast as possible resulted in literally twice the bench press gains as pressing the bar intentionally slower with the exact same training program. When you press harder, force output is higher (so training conditions are more similar to conditions when attempting 1RM loads), and you recruit more motor units, amplifying the training effect.
• Remember, there are three primary movements you need to produce in order to bench the bar: You need to flex your shoulders, horizontally flex your shoulders, and extend your elbows.
• As you start the press, squeeze your glutes hard and try to drive your heels through the floor.
• When you DB press, the only appreciable force you’re dealing with is the force of gravity acting upon the dumbell. Gravity pulls the DB straight to the floor, and you press against that force. Because of that, the weight needs to stay more-or-less over your elbow the whole time.
• The reason your elbows have to stay more-or-less directly under the weight when you’re DB pressing is that you can’t impose a meaningful amount of outward lateral forces on the dumbell.
• Once the bar starts moving back off your chest, you’ll want to start to flare your elbows to get them back under the bar by the midrange of the press.
• One of the only findings that seems consistent across the majority of the studies is the activation of the triceps tends to increase a bit more than pec activation as you add weight to the bar.
• Muscles don’t produce the same amount of force ever their entire range of motion. Muscle fibers themselves produce the most force when they’re around resting length, and their capacity to produce force increases or decreases as they lengthen or shorten.
• Lockout should be the strongest part of the lift.
• Bench press cues:
• Squeeze the shit out of the bar.
• Bend the bar/rip the bar in half (while lowering it).
• Chest up/inflate your stomach.
• Heels through the floor/squeeze glutes (for leg drive).
• Flare (to get the bar back over your shoulders).
• Screw your shoulders out (to make sure elbows are facing out for lockout).
• The reverse grip bench is a forgotten art form. [...] It’s probably a better upper pec developer than bench with a pronated grip.
• If you have shoulder or elbow issues when benching, it’s worth giving the reverse grip bench a shot.
• Incline press will train your front delts slightly harder than flat bench will, and maybe your upper pecs as well. However, based on available research, it seems like incline still doesn’t challenge your upper pecs quite as much as reverse grip benching with a wide grip does.
• If at all possible, incline press with a low incline (15-30 degrees) if you’re primarily incline pressing to train your pecs.
• In my personal opinion, decline press is primarily an ego lift. [...] Dips are a much better movement to train your pecs and triceps at that pressing angle since your scapulae can still move freely, and since you can achieve greater range of motion.
• For starters, research has shown that different regions of a muscle are activated and grow to different degrees based on the exercise performed. So, to fully develop the entirety of a muscle, you’ll need some exercise variety. You don’t need to take the full-on muscle confusion route, but you should probably have at least 2-3 movements in your training routine targeting each muscle if overall hypertrophy is your goal.
• Incline curls are my go-to exercise for happy elbows with heavy bench training.
• Ultimately, technical improvements can help your bench press dramatically (for both strength and longevity). However, technical improvements aren’t going to give you a huge bench press--they simply allow you to get all the strength possible out of your current muscle mass.
• Improving your skill as a bencher can make a big difference for a novice or intermediate lifter, but ultimately if you want to reach your full potential in the bench press, you need to put on as much upper body muscle mass as possible.
• If you already have good technique but your bench press is stalled, the prescription is simple: increase your training volume, make sure you’re eating enough protein, and increase your calorie intake.

ARNOLD: THE EDUCATION OF A BODYBUILDER by Arnold Schwarzenegger

• On some days your goals are just clearer. On the bad days you need someone to help get you going.
• From the beginning, I was a believer in the basic movements, because that was Reg Park’s preference.
• The basic exercises were creating for me a rugged foundation, a core of muscle I could later build upon for a winning body.
• Nobody seemed to understand what was involved in bodybuilding. You do look at your body in a mirror, not because you are narcissistic, but because you are trying to check your progress. It has nothing to do with being in love with yourself.
• I know that if you can change your diet and exercise program to give yourself a different body, you can apply the same principles to anything else.
• The secret is contained in a three-part formula I learned in the gym: self-confidence, a positive mental attitude, and honest hard work. Many people are aware of these principles, but very few can put them into practice.
• I was always honest about my weak points. This helped me grow. I think it’s the key to success in everything: be honest; know where you’re weak; admit it.
• Discipline was not a new thing to me—you can’t do bodybuilding successfully without it.
• I remember turning around slowly, looking at it all and saying to myself, “There’s no way back now, Arnold.”
• That’s my style. As soon as I grasp something, I take control.
• Good early training shows up in the muscles around the spine.
• Back at the gym, I trained almost totally according to Reg Park’s principles and system: keep the exercises simple.
• There are certain things you can win and still not be sure you are the best. So if it’s important for you to be the best and not just the winner, and it was for me, then you go on.
• Motions mean nothing. You have to realize what is happening to you. You have to want results.
• Concentrate while you’re training. Do not allow other thoughts to enter your mind.
• Mentally it’s possible to break records. Once you understand that, you can do it.
• Positive thinking can be contagious. Being surrounded by winners helps you develop into a winner.
• I think the most important things I developed through bodybuilding were my personality, confidence and character.
• I believe you overcome a lot of frustrations in the gymnasium, things you’re not even aware of.
• One thing is that people listen much more to bigger guys; the bigger you are and the more impressive you look physically, the more people listen and the better you can sell yourself or anything else.
• For me, life is continuously being hungry. The meaning of life is not simply to exist, to survive, but to move ahead, to go up, to achieve, to conquer.
• The only activity that can build the entire body evenly and uniformly is progressive weight resistance training.
• Weight resistance training develops every muscle in your body.
• One very good reason to train is that the body doesn’t get enough physical activity to keep it tuned and responsive.
• Most people are aware only of muscles that they use in everyday work. But when you do unusual movements or use your body in unusual ways, you feel muscles you never knew existed.
• Most people prefer to let their muscles remain anonymous. They take it for granted that the body just moves. Then they are baffled when something goes wrong.
• The mind is incredible. Once you’ve gained mastery over it, channeling its powers positively for your purposes, you can do anything. I mean anything. The secret is to make your mind work for you—not against you. This means constantly being positive, constantly setting up challenges you can meet—either today, next week, or next month. “I can’t. . .” should be permanently stricken from your vocabulary, especially the vocabulary of your thoughts. You must see yourself always growing and improving.
• Honesty is the key to how much you can improve.
• You must know why you are training in order to give it your best and be productive.
• The Ectomorph: A thin person with a light bone structure and long tenuous muscles. The ectomorph has a tough time gaining weight and building strength.
• The Endomorph: A stocky person with thick bones and a general tendency to be round and stout. The endomorph will gain fast and be able to handle heavy training. His body is more likely to remain blocky and muscular without showing great cuts or definition.
• The Mesomorph: Anatomically, the ideal body for weight resistance training. The mesomorph has a large frame and the capacity for becoming muscular fast.
• You can improve your body. All that you should look for in training with weights is that you should achieve 100% of your potential.
• The power of the mind is astonishing.
• If you exercise faithfully, with a strict adherence to form, you should notice an increase in strength and coordination within a very short time.
• There is no age limit on improving your body and no body that cannot be improved by regular exercise.
• Every person who takes up bodybuilding should have a basic understanding of nutrition.
• The very words body building imply that we are undertaking something constructive. An exercise program is not enough. Exercise merely tones and develops existing muscles. In order to build muscles we must have the nutrients that promote growth.
• There are three primary nutritional elements—proteins, carbohydrates and fats. They are all necessary to the well-balanced diet.
• Protein is the most important element to the bodybuilder. Protein is for growth, maintenance and repair of muscle tissue. The amount of protein needed by the average person is 1 gram for each 2 pounds of body weight. The bodybuilder needs more—approximately 1 gram of protein to each pound of body weight.
• One thing every bodybuilder (or individual concerned with the ultimate welfare of his body) ought to do is to cut super-refined foods and food products from his diet.
• The secret of rapid weight gain is a high-protein, high-calorie diet.
• You will use three general types of exercises in developing your body: 1. Upper-body exercises—to build up the arms, chest, shoulders and back muscles. 2. Lower-body exercises—to build up the thighs and calves and strengthen the legs and hips. 3. Abdominal exercises—to tighten, tone and muscularize the waist and improve the posture.
• It’s very important that you expose your weaknesses, that you constantly point them up to yourself.
• Breathing properly is essential to your health.
• Remember that one rule: as soon as there is any strain on your body you should breathe out.
• Do not let your ego get in the way of your progress.
• The important thing is to do the exercise correctly; that counts for everything.
• The reason some bodybuilders develop short pectorals, short biceps, short triceps is that they don’t do full movements.
• I’m going to repeat that idea over and over throughout this book: Doing exercises correctly, perfectly, doing full movements, is the most important thing in bodybuilding.
• Unfortunately, the calves are difficult to develop. They are made of dense muscle fibers that must really be bombed to be altered.
• Add more resistance as you get stronger, but never at the expense of good exercise form.
• Maintain a positive mental attitude at all times.
• Anything worth doing at all is worth doing well.
• I have found that the best way to get great workouts is to have an enthusiastic training partner.
• There are no “secret” exercises in bodybuilding. The secret is not what exercises to do but how to do them.
• This [bench press] is the number-one exercise for increasing the mass of the upper body, especially the pectoral muscles.
• I believe in basic moves, and the standing barbell curl couldn’t be more basic for building the biceps.
• As with all exercises, start with a weight that becomes progressively more difficult to lift after about the fifth rep.
• I do leg curls on the leg curl machine. No exercise works more directly on the backs of the thighs, the leg biceps.
• Because the calf is a difficult muscle, you should do five sets of 15 reps.
• When you exercise you should be totally aware of the muscle you are working on.
• The worst mistake the average aspiring bodybuilder makes is attempting to do too much.
• The name of the game is to do as much for each muscle as possible, and to develop the entire body uniformly.
• Stretching is important while you’re exercising.
• Stretching the muscles, making them long and limber, is one of the things that sets off the champion from the guy who is as big as the champion but who doesn’t look as good.
• So remember this: It isn’t how much weight you handle but rather how much weight you handle in the correct form that will give you the best body.
• The more attention I paid to strict form, the closer I brought myself to the perfect body I wanted.
• The problem with training alone is that you sometimes don’t feel strong.
• The squat can be done in different ways, depending upon your need and purpose.
• Weight is not as important as form.
• The calf is different from any other muscle. It is stubborn and slow to respond. You should be just as stubborn. Don’t do only 8 or 10 repetitions—do at least five sets of 15 repetitions.
• Sharply defined abdominals are a must for maximum impressiveness.
• Lateral raises work specifically on the side and rear deltoid.
• The single most dramatic feature of a great physique is a well-developed back. The back balances out the body by tying together the major muscle groups and giving the whole thing a symmetrical look.
• The back is a big important area of muscles and it should be trained really hard.
• To some people the biceps are the symbol of strength. Everybody can relate to arms. Arms are one of the most impressive parts of the body, the part everybody wants to see.
• A lot of attention should be put into arms so they look good.
• For your abdominals workout you should alternate one set of leg raises with bent legs with one set of twists with the broomstick in a bent-over position. You combine them in order to save time.
• After you have trained long enough to discover your weak points, write them down and analyze them.
• People have a tendency to overdo things at first and then sluff off.
• No area in bodybuilding is more neglected than the legs.
• The squat is the best thigh-building exercise I know.
• It should be automatic by now for you to go to the bench for wrist curls at the end of each day. Remember this exercise not only develops the forearm, it also increases gripping power and wrist strength.
• After your back work is completed you need to do a lot of stretching, a lot of flexing to avoid stiffness.
• The way to the top in competitive bodybuilding is not merely to have muscles but to be able to control your muscles and to show them. Remember that most of the points in a physique competition are achieved through posing.
• The inclined press with a barbell builds the upper pectoral, concentrating on the area where that muscle ties into the front deltoid. Although the bench press reaches a little into the upper pectoral muscle, the inclined press attacks it directly. It gives that “armor-plated” look to the upper chest and helps fill in hollow spaces around the clavicle (collarbone).
• The bent-over lateral raises are strictly for the rear deltoids.
• The rear deltoid is usually neglected, but it can be reached when you are in a bent-over position.
• The entire workout in the accelerated program should not take longer than an hour and a half. If you spend more time than that on any of the routines I’ve outlined, you’re doing something wrong.
• There is no reason not to superset if you’re in good shape. You can do more exercises in a shorter period of time, and you can get into opposite movements—pushing and pulling. You will train faster and become more accomplished. You will train muscles that are logically connected with each other or muscles on opposite sides of your body—such as the front thigh and the back thigh.
• Supersetting is a tough program, but in a month or so you will adjust to it.
• You must approach all of your training with a positive mental attitude and the firm conviction that you will succeed. This is especially true of the superset program. Visualize the body you want and then train relentlessly until you get it. Be explicit. See yourself with that body, cut up and toned to an ideal state. Tell yourself it’s possible. Then work to make it happen.
• Mentally, supersetting puts an additional strain on you.
• Seeing tremendous growth and change in yourself can open new worlds for you.