Will your muscles shrivel up and your strength plummet if you take a week of light or easy lifting, or even take a week of total rest, or could an intentional training break actually improve your long-term gains and reduce risk of injury and burnout? If the latter is true, then how often should you back off, what should you back off of (weight, reps, volume, intensity) and how long should you do it?
When you’re feeling burned out from a long stretch of hard training and you suspect you have over-training syndrome, there are many strategies and tactics you can apply to stimulate recovery and start making progress again, and to prevent over-training in the future.
You've probably heard that you have to lift weights with intensity to make muscle gains. You may have also heard in recent years that you have to do a fairly high volume (more exercises [...]
Time-efficient training is a vitally important topic because lack of time is one of the most commonly reported barriers to exercising consistently. For many people, "no time to train" is their number one problem, or at least it's their biggest perceived problem. I say "perceived" because if they knew about the time-saving training strategies you're about to learn in this blog post, they wouldn't see "no time" as a problem anymore.
I'd like to introduce a new type of "hybrid" split routine designed for building both muscle and strength at the same time. You'll get a lot stronger on this schedule, but because you don't train heavy every day of the week, it's fairly easy on your joints. It also rotates some of the exercises through the week so you don't get bored, and it uses triple progression so you can keep making gains on the same routine for 12 weeks straight.
Weight training systems that save you time without compromising your gains are the most valuable kind for busy people. When the same training method helps you easily achieve progressive overload as well, that takes it to a whole other level. The rest pause training method is one of the few that achieves both. It's not a new technique - it's been used by pro bodybuilders for at least 60 years, but outside of physique sports, most people don't even know what rest pause is. Now, decades later, scientists have confirmed how effective and efficient it is so if you're not using it, you're missing out... |image1|
A lot of people do cardio first thing in the morning on an empty stomach before eating breakfast, hoping that this will increase fat loss. For sure, fasted cardio can help with fat loss, [...]
Even before modern scientific research on supersets was ever published, world-class bodybuilders had already figured it out. Antagonist superset training was a favorite technique of the bodybuilding champions in the 60s and 70s Golden Era, including Mr. America Dave Draper and the one and only Arnold Schwarzenegger. This is the definitive guide to supersets…
There are standard guidelines for choosing all your weight training variables. Traditional trainers and textbooks advise us to follow these rules if we want the best results in strength and [...]
Most people believe that if they don’t lift heavy, they’ll never gain muscle. High rep, light weight training has always been thought of as for endurance or toning. Some people would even say, "Lifting light is for wimps." Science now shows that you can build muscle with light weights if you do 1 thing
