Stubborn Delts: The High Tension Solution

Building big, healthy shoulders goes beyond just overhead pressing a city bus. Sure, that’ll get the job done if you’re capable of it, but there’s a better way. We’ll get into some of the exercises you probably aren’t doing, but there’s something we have to talk about first… Maximizing Tension There’s a handful of reasons you might find it difficult to develop a stubborn body part. Lack of mind-muscle connection, poor execution, poor movement selection for your structure, and poor overall programming are a few. The old bodybuilding adage, “train a muscle at different angles,” was basically a way of saying that you need to take advantage of the length-tension relationship within different movements. Different exercises will provide different resistance curves to the muscles being trained, so they’ll train those muscles at different lengths within the movement. Maximizing development is about creating as much tension as possible in those different lengths. The key is to find exercises that best suit your structure and best train the muscles in various positions: lengthened, mid, and shortened. But it’s also important to use movements that stress the targeted musculature appropriate within those lengths. Here are four exercises that’ll satisfy this approach: 1 – Banded Dumbbell Press The dumbbell overhead press is a proven delt strength and size builder. But both strength and physique-focused lifters could be doing it more effectively. The most common way people do the press is seated (which is fine), then they lock the elbows back by using external rotation, and press from the shoulders to the overhead position with the dumbbells arching together over that range of motion. There are a few problems here. To start, you can’t get away from the fact that this exercise predominantly hits the anterior delts. This means you should be making sure to get the anterior delt loaded maximally in its most lengthened state. Doing this will keep you from going into excessive external rotation and instead let the elbows come forward a bit, allowing you to work in your natural scapular plane. While pressing, you want to avoid that common arching motion because it actually takes the delts out of their active range of motion very quickly. It’s the traps that adduct the arms in that overhead arching motion. This arching motion also shortens the lever arm in the movement, making it easier as you reach lockout. And that’s cool and all if you aren’t trying to stress the actual delt muscles. But if you are, it means you’re not spending as much time in the area where the movement is actually difficult. The better way to perform these is to press directly upwards with the dumbbells staying in line with the elbows. It’s no different than if you stacked the elbows and wrists in a vertical line with one another like if you were doing a barbell press. Lastly, to make these more productive, add a band to flatten out that descending resistance curve. By adding in the band we’re eliminating that dead area in the range of motion at the top and creating a longer torque curve. Now you’re maximally loading the anterior deltoid in the bottom, you’re staying in a longer active range of motion, and you’re eliminating that dead range of motion near the top where there’s very little tension. 2 – Rear Delt Row with Supination I’ve done my fair share of bent-over lateral raises (rear delt raises), but the truth is that they fall short as a rear delt movement. With a bent-over lateral raise, the rear delts never actually get fully shortened. A key component in maximizing an exercise is to get the target muscle fully lengthened and then fully shortened within a movement. But some exercises don’t do that as well as others. A better option is the rear delt row with supination. With this exercise, you’ll be rowing (as you might expect) to bring the elbow behind the body as far as possible, which will shorten the rear delt. But you’ll add a twist, literally, by supinating as you perform the row. Why the twist? Because it’ll bring about a certain amount of external rotation in the shoulder, which is one of the components of the rear delt. Supination at the forearm is actively linked with external rotation of the shoulder, just like pronation is linked with internal rotation. This isn’t an exercise you’ll go super heavy on, but you won’t need to so long as you’re using the appropriate resistance with it for the mechanics, and making sure to get the rear delt fully shortened. 3 – Incline Lateral Raise It’s nearly impossible to cheat with these, unlike the standing lateral raise. Not that cheating is bad, and I actually do add cheaty lateral raises into my programming from time to time. But for most guys having trouble getting a strong mind-muscle connection, the incline version is a better choice. This exercise will also naturally put the resistance in line with the middle fibers of the delt. When you use a standing lateral raise it’s
Origin: Stubborn Delts: The High Tension Solution

5 Push-Ups for High Performance

A push-up is not just a push-up. You can do them a myriad of ways, but most people only do them one way. Sure, some variations are better than others, and some might even be more harmful than helpful depending on your experience level, injury history, and obviously, your goal. Whether you want to improve your shoulder health, improve your bench, develop core strength, or increase your explosive power, these five variations will help you reach your goal. 1 – Banded Push-Up Most athletes need upper body explosive power. In the quest for improved performance, many athletes unfortunately end up injured because they choose high-risk methods and exercises. While exercises like plyometric push-ups (clapping push-ups, box push-ups, etc.) can be great, they can also be harmful. With a background of shoulder injury, doing plyometric push-ups will cause a lot of stress in the landing and deceleration phase. Many add to this stress by dropping from way-too-high boxes, increasing the stress even more. If you’re one of those athletes who has to be smarter about your exercise selection, but you still want to increase your explosive power, go for banded push-ups. To increase explosiveness, you need to do exercises with the intent of being as powerful as possible through the WHOLE range of motion. Ballistic training methods like med-ball throws are perfect for this, but in the world of push-ups, the resistance band does the trick. There are basically two ways to do this exercise. Either with a pause in the bottom position or repeatedly, without pause. The former will train explosive starting strength, the latter will improve reactive power. 2 – Staggered Push-Up Usually, all regular bilateral strength exercises are performed symmetrically. In most sports, symmetrical actions and positions seldom happen, especially in contact sports. So you set yourself up for weakness if you only train symmetrical exercises in the gym. There’s no need to go all “sport specific” and perform all kinds of circus acts, but SOME exercises should aim to prepare your body for non-symmetrical impact. For the upper body you can do this with staggered push-ups. Just get into your regular push-up-position, but with one hand placed higher than usual (toward the head) and the other hand placed lower than usual (towards the hip). Staggered push-ups are a great exercise for improved shoulder stability, athletic preparation and performance. Give it a try! 3 – Shoulder Press Push-Up Even though most push-up variations are based on the regular up and down movement, there’s no need to be limited by this plane. You can and should use push-up variations to develop strength and stability in other planes. The shoulder press push-up is a hybrid of the vertical (think: shoulder press) and horizontal (think: bench press) movement. Beside strengthening this movement pattern, you’ll also develop good scapular control and make your shoulders healthier. This variation will especially be valuable if you have weak or “inactive” serratus anterior muscles. It’s a killer exercise for the serratus muscle! Go high rep with this and you’ll feel them in the days to come. Over time this stimuli will improve the upward rotation capacity in your shoulders, which is a win for your shoulder health and your performance. To do it, start in a wide-foot position with the hips held high. Lower yourself as far forward as possible. When the forehead almost touches the ground, press yourself back to start position while you keep the head close to the ground. 4 – Hoover Push-Up Most push-up variations equally load the right and left shoulder and arm. In real life and sports, one side is usually loaded more than the other, and your ability to handle asymmetrical load is important for optimal performance. The one-arm push-up is a good tool, but it can also be a bit too much for some athletes. You want to train the capacity to handle more load on one side at a time, but you also want to minimize the injury risk. Most people will be able to perform the one-arm push-up with training, but I prefer the hoover push-up since it’s easier for beginners. To do it, start in a regular push-up-position with a fairly wide hand placement. Lower as usual, and when in bottom position move your body to the left, over the left arm. Pause for a second, then move to the right side before you get back to center and press up to start position. The hoover push-up looks pretty easy, but it’s harder than you think. You have to keep the body tight in a plank position and stabilize the upper body more than usual. You’ll feel it! 5 – Elevated One-Legged Rack Push-Up Most push-ups are done with the hands flat on the ground. This is fine for most people, but if you have issues at the wrists, elbows and/or shoulders you might need to keep the wrists in a more neutral position. A simple way to work around such issues is to do push-ups with a barbell. The elevated rack push-up is a great
Origin: 5 Push-Ups for High Performance

The Best Damn High Volume Workout Plan for Natties

In Olympic weightlifting, the word “tonnage” is used to indicate how much total weight was lifted during the session. We also call it the “volume of work.” Tonnage is important, but when it comes to hypertrophy and the natural lifter, there’s an optimal dose. If a natural lifter goes overboard on volume, he or she will burn out their nervous system or skyrocket their cortisol – both of which will make gains stall. But I developed a system for natural lifters using high volume. Before we get to it, let’s take a look at who we’re talking about here and what their bodies do. 4 Kinds of Lifters Different people are stimulated by different types of training: 1 – Volume People Lifters who naturally prefer to perform a greater number of sets to achieve muscular stimulation. They normally don’t push each set as hard to be capable of doing the planned volume without crashing. If you follow the various experts, Dr. Mike Israetel, Pat Davidson, and John Meadows fall in that category. For them, gradually increasing volume over time is the main driver of hypertrophy. 2 – Intensity People These are people who prefer to do fewer work sets, but push these extra hard – to failure (or very close to it) or even beyond. Dr. Scott Stevenson, Dorian Yates, Mike Mentzer are good examples. Paul Carter’s preferred style is also more slanted toward intensity than volume. 3 – Load People These people are mostly about adding weight to the bar. We’ll find them more often among the powerlifting crowd, or they see themselves more as powerbuilders. In that category we can have a wide variety of approaches, from linear progression/progressive overload to the conjugate model. But they have one thing in common: strength is the number one goal. Think: Jim Wendler. 4 – Process People They’re all about precision. Perfecting their technique, writing down everything, analyzing data, and seeing a well-planned program deliver results is what they train for. They’re all about minutia and often suffer from paralysis by analysis. We don’t have that many of them among bodybuilders or strength athletes. Sure, many lifters love geeking out over technique and data, but it’s not their number one priority. Note: This type tends to be common among keyboard warriors who love to argue about everything and then need studies to allow themselves to try something new. When Hypertrophy Is The Main Goal Among those who are mostly interested by muscle gain, we have mainly the volume and intensity people. The intensity people tend to kill themselves and get worse results when they go higher volume because they can’t scale down their effort. They are all-out or nothing. And if they force themselves to “stop short” they don’t feel satisfied and it kills their motivation. The volume crowd often burn out on high intensity programs because of the high adrenaline/cortisol it produces. They’re often unable to reach the required level of intensity to make low volume work and, even if they do, the low volume is unsatisfactory and kills motivation. Cortisol – Enemy Number One Cortisol is the enemy of the natural lifter trying to get jacked. It can limit muscle growth, if chronically or excessively elevated, by: Making protein breakdown higher than protein synthesis Increasing myostatin levels (which inhibits muscle growth) Inhibiting the immune system (muscle damage repair is driven by the immune system) Reducing nutrient transport to muscles There’s a strong connection between training volume and cortisol production. One of the functions of cortisol when training is the mobilization of stored energy so that you have enough fuel for your workout. The more volume you do, the more fuel you require and this means more cortisol release. Understandably that’s one of the reasons why, if you reach a certain amount of volume in a workout, results will start to diminish. However, intensity (and load) can also increase cortisol. See, we often call cortisol the stress hormone, but “readiness hormone” would be more accurate. Basically, cortisol’s purpose is to put you in a physical and mental state to be able to fight or run away. It mobilizes energy so that you don’t run out of fuel in the middle of the fight, but it also increases mental alertness and focus, blood flow (to deliver oxygen to the muscles), and muscle contraction strength. The latter three are done indirectly via an increase in adrenaline levels. So let’s get into that. How Cortisol Increases Adrenaline It does so by increasing the amount of the enzyme responsible for converting noradrenaline into adrenaline (Phenylethanolamine N-methyltransferase). The more a situation requires alertness and drive, the more adrenaline you’ll produce which means that cortisol goes up too. In lifting, the more threatening a set is, or the closer to your limit you go, the more adrenaline/cortisol will be released. A “death set” will spike adrenaline a lot more than a set with 3-4 reps in the tank. A max effort lift will also
Origin: The Best Damn High Volume Workout Plan for Natties

The New High Frequency Training

Here’s what you need to know… Training more often is better for building muscle than cramming more and more into a long workout. Ideal High Frequency Training (HFT) exercises include pull-ups, push-ups, dips, lunges, single-leg squats, and single-leg deadlifts. Do one of these exercises every day outside of your normal workout, adding a rep each day. Use HFT for the long haul. The best gains come in the last two months. You may find yourself being the most muscular you’ve ever been. Long Workouts vs. More Frequent, Short Workouts There’s a mind-numbing array of training programs out there. But most modern programs fail to provide faster muscle growth than lifters achieved in 1969. True, today’s bodybuilders are much bigger than they were then, but that difference is largely due to drugs. Why so little progress? There are two possible conclusions. Maybe we’ve already tapped out our ability to grow muscle as fast as our physiology allows. Maybe we can’t achieve hypertrophy at a faster clip because our genes have a limit set. There’s still a better way that no one has figured out yet. From a training perspective, there are only two possible angles for cracking the hypertrophy conundrum: Stimulate more growth in a single workout. Train more often. If we consider option #1 and put our energy into figuring out a way to get more growth out of a single workout, we quickly run into a wall. How can I say this? Because if 100 sets of curls over the course of two hours could add an inch to our biceps, we’d all find time to do it. Furthermore, this hypothesis is easiest to test. Every guy who’s tried a four-hour training session ultimately realized how futile and impractical that approach was for muscle growth. I’m not saying that option #1 is unequivocally a dead-end. But if the answer is that we need significantly more volume in a single workout, I have no idea how to approach it without inducing severe stress to your immune system and joints. So that leaves us with option #2: train more often. If there’s one irrefutable truth about training for hypertrophy, it’s that twenty workouts can build more muscle than four workouts. The question then becomes one of fatigue and recovery. How can you manage them? Most lifters train a muscle group three times per week or less, so I categorize training four or more times a week as High Frequency Training (HFT). I’ve been experimenting with all sorts of HFT programs since 2001. If your primary goal is muscle growth, this new version was built for you. HFT Overview Choose one exercise that you’ll train every day, like pull-ups or push-ups. Follow your usual training plan at the gym, but hit this extra exercise every single day following the rules and progression plan below. 1 – Start with Less Than You Think You Need If you forget everything else about HFT, remember rule #1 because it’s the key element – you’re much better off feeling like the first few weeks of a targeted HFT plan are too easy. On January 5, 2011, I embarked upon a six-month long daily pull-up journey. The day I started, I did five pull-ups from the bar I had hanging in my doorway. The next day I did six reps. I could have easily done 20 reps at a time, but I didn’t. I was in it for the long haul and I had already learned my lesson by doing too much too soon. On July 1 of that year I did 182 pull-ups spread throughout the day. The day before I did 181 reps. The day before that it was 180 reps. Yet I had absolutely no soreness or joint pain during those final days. The reason was because I spent six months slowly building up to that volume. When you look at my new rules of a targeted HFT plan, I know you’ll think you can start with more reps, but as my Russian gymnastics coach likes to say in his thick accent, “Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.” Here’s what to do: Start with an exercise that you can do for 12-22 reps while fresh. Let’s say you can do 13 straight pull-ups. Split that total into two sets, as evenly as possible: in this case, 1×7 and 1×6. That’s how many reps you should do on day 1. The next day add an extra rep. So you’ll do two sets of 7 reps. Spread those sets out as far as possible. It’s best to do one set in the morning and one in the evening. This won’t seem necessary in the early days when the volume is low, but once you keep adding reps day after day and reach 60 reps or more it becomes invaluable and necessary to spread the sets throughout the day. 2 – Choose the Right Exercises and Use Perfect Technique Perform every rep with perfect form. There’s no excuse for sloppy technique when you’re doing half as many reps per set as you actually could be doing. Here’s a list of some of the top exercises to use for the HFT methodology explained in Rule #1. Whatever exercise you choose should be removed from your current training program (the one you do in the gym). Pull-up: Ideally, perform them from rings. If rings aren’t an option, use a hammer grip (palms facing
Origin: The New High Frequency Training