Tip: How to Really Train Your Forearms

High-Frequency Forearms Want bigger, stronger forearms? Train them often. Forearm exercises don’t cause much, if any, muscle damage, especially for exercises with less eccentric loading like the wrist roller or Thor’s hammer (see video). But even wrist flexion and wrist extension will cause little damage. Furthermore, these exercises have a very small impact on the nervous system because they’re very simple and done with light weights. Energy expenditure is low too since it’s a short range of motion and smaller muscles are involved. None of the factors requiring more recovery time are present with forearm training. Unless you go absolutely crazy with the volume there’s no reason you can’t train forearms every day. Why Do I Want Big Forearms? Because big forearms look cool. Hey, they’re the only thing that’s 100-percent showing in a T-shirt! Having well-developed forearms will do more for you than simply attracting admiration. Bigger and stronger forearms make it easier to build bigger biceps. Coach Charles Poliquin wrote about this phenomenon 20 years ago. The body hasn’t changed since that was written. By building bigger, stronger forearms you’ll be able to handle more weight in both curling and pulling exercises, which will increase the stimulation on the biceps and back muscles. Bigger forearms and a stronger grip also help the bench press. Look at the top bench pressers in the world; they all have thick forearms. To bench heavy weight you need a strong grip. The harder you can squeeze the bar, the less the wrist will tend to cock and get the bar misaligned. (The bar should be directly above the wrist joint. If the wrist is cocked, the bar moves away from that alignment.) On top of that, big forearms create a bigger “body” on which to spread the load of the bar. This can decrease stress on the shoulder joint. One Caveat and a Program You shouldn’t overdevelop one part of the forearms. For example, the wrist flexors tend to be trained a lot more than the wrist extensors (the flexors are involved a lot when curling and pulling) and the forearms supinators are often dominant over the pronators. Just like any other muscle imbalances in the body, this can lead to problems like tendonitis. So if you want to jack up your forearms and train them every workout (or every day) then work on flexion/extension one workout, do supination/pronation on the next, and do grip work on the third. Then just rotate through that. Since forearm exercises have a short range of motion, you’ll need to do either higher reps or use a slower tempo to create enough fatigue and trigger growth. Sets lasting 30-60 seconds should be your target. I actually don’t count reps when doing forearm work. I put a timer on and keep working until I’ve achieved failure or close to it in the 30-60 second range. But I’ll prescribe a number of reps in a couple of the examples below for the sake of simplicity. Workout A – Flexion/Extension Exercise Sets Reps Rest A1 Wrist Roller 3-4 30-60 sec. 1 min. A2 Wrist Curl 3-4 10-12 90 sec. Workout B – Supination/Pronation Exercise Sets Reps Rest A1 Thor’s Hammer Pronation (4 second negative) 3-4 10-12 1 min. A2 Thor’s Hammer Supination (4 second negative) 3-4 10-12 1 min. Workout C – Grip Exercise Sets Reps Rest A1 Pinch-Grip Deadlift (Hold 30-60 sec.) 3 2 min. A2 Fat-Grip Hold (Hold 30-60 sec.) 3 2 min. You can use other exercises if you prefer, but you get the
Origin: Tip: How to Really Train Your Forearms

Tip: Train Like This or Die Sooner

After 40, Just Give Up After a man turns 40, his muscles atrophy, his strength wanes, and his belly grows. And women over 40? Well, they just wilt like old banana peels. They even have to start buying “mommy swimsuits” at JCPenny, complete with butt-hiding ruffles. At least that’s what a lot of people seem to think. As a T Nation fan, you already know those people are full of shit. Heck, with all we know now about training, nutrition, and supplementation, your 40s and 50s might just be your best years. But there is something that takes a Kamikaze dive in your middle years. After the age of 40 or so, even physically fit men and women start to lose their ability to produce power. And power, not strength, may be the key to longevity. What is Power Exactly? Power is your ability to produce force and velocity. Moving weight fast – be that a barbell or your own bodyweight – recruits a lot of motor units. While strength and power overlap in many ways, power is the rebar in the concrete foundation of athleticism. In the gym, you can get more powerful by doing Olympic-lifting variations, torpedo’ing medicine balls, performing jump squats, and swinging a kettlebell like you’re mad at it. Generally, you use lower loads, but try to move those loads with speed and ferocity. Acceleration is key. Outside the gym, sprinting up a set of stairs relies more on power than strength. “Functional strength” is all the rage, but functional power may be even more important. So what does power have to do with living longer? Let’s ask Mr. Science. The Study Researchers gathered up 3,878 men and women between 41 and 85. This age range was chosen because power starts to diminish after 40. All the participants took a power test, this one involving the upright row. (Maybe not the best exercise choice, but easy enough for non-meatheads to learn.) Then the scientists just sat around for several years. They caught up on Grey’s Anatomy and did some fly fishing. After seven years, they tracked down the study participants to see who died, which must’ve been awkward. The Results In a nutshell, those folks who displayed above-average muscle power in the original test outlived those with below-average muscle power. But those study participants who scored a little below average on the power test were up to five times more likely to suffer an early death. Those who scored WAY BELOW average on the power test were 10-13 times more likely to be chilling out in a coffin or a lovely urn. Researchers concluded that power is strongly related to all-cause mortality. How to Use This Info No, you don’t have to give up your strength or hypertrophy training and become an Olympic weightlifter, a full-time CrossFitter, or a plyo-obsessed skinny guy. The researchers noted that becoming super-duper powerful doesn’t seem to extend your life any further than simply becoming more powerful than the average Joe or Jane. Just be above-average powerful. In the gym, add some power training to what you’re already doing. Try power cleans or some O-lift variations. (I like the easy-to-learn muscle snatch.) Throw some medballs, try to accelerate a lighter bar quickly using the core lifts, and toss in some plyo push-ups, sprints, and jumps. Then tell those people that think life is over after 40 to suck
Origin: Tip: Train Like This or Die Sooner

5 Things You Can Train Everyday

I’m a firm believer in frequency when it comes to strength and size gains. It’s not surprising when you look at my personal training background. I started out training for football and our strength coach was a big believer in hitting the big basics three days a week. Our program was essentially the power clean, squat, bench, and pull-up three days a week. After football I transitioned to Olympic lifting where I’d squat, clean, and snatch pretty much every day. The higher frequency regimen worked for those exercises too. The truth is, you can train pretty much everything with a high frequency once technical mastery is accomplished. Of course, you need to plan volume and intensity properly, but it’s possible. Not sold on the idea of squatting every day or snatching every workout? No worries. There are a few things that are less complicated than others to train every day. And they’ll make it pretty easy to fix some of your weak links too. Here are five of them. 1 – Forearms Forearm exercises don’t cause much, if any, muscle damage, especially for exercises with less eccentric loading like the wrist roller or Thor’s hammer (see video). But even wrist flexion and wrist extension will cause little damage. Furthermore, these exercises have a very small impact on the nervous system because they’re very simple and done with light weights. Energy expenditure is low too since it’s a short range of motion and smaller muscles are involved. None of the factors requiring more recovery time are present with forearm training. Unless you go absolutely crazy with the volume there’s no reason you can’t train forearms every day. Why would you want to do that? Because big forearms look cool. Hey, they’re the only thing that’s 100-percent showing in a T-shirt! But having well-developed forearms will do more for you than simply attracting admiration. Bigger and stronger forearms make it easier to build bigger biceps. Coach Charles Poliquin wrote about this phenomenon 20 years ago. The body hasn’t changed since that was written. By building bigger, stronger forearms you’ll be able to handle more weight in both curling and pulling exercises, which will increase the stimulation on the biceps and back muscles. Bigger forearms and a stronger grip also help the bench press. Look at the top bench pressers in the world; they all have thick forearms. To bench heavy weight you need a strong grip. The harder you can squeeze the bar, the less the wrist will tend to cock and get the bar misaligned. (The bar should be directly above the wrist joint. If the wrist is cocked, the bar moves away from that alignment.) On top of that, big forearms create a bigger “body” on which to spread the load of the bar. This can decrease stress on the shoulder joint. There is one caveat: You shouldn’t overdevelop one part of the forearms. For example, the wrist flexors tend to be trained a lot more than the wrist extensors (the flexors are involved a lot when curling and pulling) and the forearms supinators are often dominant over the pronators. Just like any other muscle imbalances in the body, this can lead to problems like tendonitis. So if you want to jack up your forearms and train them every workout (or every day) then work on flexion/extension one workout, do supination/pronation on the next, and do grip work on the third. Then just rotate through that. Since forearm exercises have a short range of motion, you’ll need to do either higher reps or use a slower tempo to create enough fatigue and trigger growth. Sets lasting 30-60 seconds should be your target. I actually don’t count reps when doing forearm work. I put a timer on and keep working until I’ve achieved failure or close to it in the 30-60 second range. But I’ll prescribe a number of reps in a couple of the examples below for the sake of simplicity. Workout A – Flexion/Extension Exercise Sets Reps Rest A1 Wrist Roller 3-4 30-60 sec. 1 min. A2 Wrist Curl 3-4 10-12 90 sec. Workout B – Supination/Pronation Exercise Sets Reps Rest A1 Thor’s Hammer Pronation (4 second negative) 3-4 10-12 1 min. A2 Thor’s Hammer Supination (4 second negative) 3-4 10-12 1 min. Workout C – Grip Exercise Sets Reps Rest A Pinch-Grip Deadlift (Hold 30-60 sec.) 3 90-120 sec. B Fat-Grip Hold (Hold 30-60 sec.) 3 90-120 sec. You can use other exercises if you prefer, but you get the idea. 2 – Abs My strategy for ab training? Using blocks of intense abdominal training where I hit them every day for 4-6 weeks. You can recover rapidly from pretty much any abdominal exercises except those full range GHD sit-ups you see in CrossFit. (This movement creates a powerful stretch of the rectus abdominis – especially when done with the speed they use – which will cause a lot of muscle damage, and require more recovery time.) Daily ab training at an adequate level of intensity is one of the fastest ways of improving abdominal aesthetics, provided you’re lean enough to show them. The “abs
Origin: 5 Things You Can Train Everyday

Tip: Eat More, Train More – The Anabolic Toggle

How Do You Eat for Muscle Gains Without Getting Fat? First, you have understand that the metabolism is not a great multitasker. It likes to be building up fat and muscle (anabolism) or tearing them both down (catabolism). Trying to do both at once is the metabolic equivalent of patting your head and rubbing your belly. You can do it, it’s just not that easy… unless you’re a beginner or using anabolics. The trick here is to understand you have four different metabolic toggles to pull: 1 – Eat less, exercise more. This will burn fat and muscle because it creates a pretty intense and wide calorie gap through both exercise and food. Think marathon runner or skinny fat. 2 – Eat more, exercise less. This will put on both muscle and fat through creating a calorie gap in the other direction. Think powerlifter or muscle-fat. That latter scenario is what most people try to do when they want to gain muscle. It works, but it often makes you look like you just put a jacket on top of two sweaters. It’s not the best approach or the best look. This is usually creating a 500-calorie surplus or more, and that may be too much if the training isn’t right. 3 – Eat less, exercise less. Think the little old lady in Paris who climbs four flights of stairs six times a day, but eats only half a baguette, a cup each of coffee and wine, a radish, and some cheese. She stays lean because she drives the calorie deficit through diet and moves enough to not become a skeleton. 4 – Eat more, exercise more. That’s the toggle you want. It’s the athlete toggle. Ramp up your food intake to a slight surplus so you can gain some muscle. I suggest somewhere between 15 and 20 times body weight in pounds depending on whether or not you’re a hard gainer. If you tend to get “muscle-fat” easily (like me), stay near 15 to start. Now set your macronutrients to 40-30-30 (carbs, protein, and fat). You’ll need the extra carbs. Insulin is, after all, the most powerful anabolic hormone in the body. If you can’t get that fuel in the cell, you’re not going to grow no matter how much testosterone you have. Now turn on the training intensity like you’re a banshee in a bench, squat, and deadlift competition to the death. Doing things this way will amplify energy flux, reduce fat (or at least minimize its accumulation) and put mechanical pressure on the muscle to grow. If it’s not working, SLOWLY ramp up the calories until it does. My guess is you’ll end up in a slight surplus of 200-400 calories. This is the best way to
Origin: Tip: Eat More, Train More – The Anabolic Toggle

The 3 Smartest Ways to Train Shoulders

Stop Pissing Off Your Shoulders Years in the iron game can leave the shoulders beat to crap. The last thing you want to do is to piss off some of the most important joints in the body more than they already are. Your shoulder work should enhance the way this region of the body looks AND functions while improving your performance. Here are three pain-free strategies to decrease joint stress while maximizing the pump effect for growth and strength. 1 – Use Bands With Dumbbells Using bands and chains for accommodating resistance is usually reserved for the big lifts, but they should also be a staple in smart shoulder training. The only problem is the equipment restrictions. Bands are often too thick and chains are too heavy to complete enough full range of motion reps to get a good training effect. The secret is to use the ultra-light, handled bands that have become popular in commercial gyms. These bands have much smaller diameters and thickness, allowing you to apply accommodating resistance when used in combination with dumbbells. Holding the handles of the bands together with the handles of dumbbells works with the lateral raise and its variations. Staying consistent with the light band and increasing the dumbbell poundage allows you to train in strength, hypertrophy, endurance, and metabolic-stress based rep schemes without sputtering out on range of motion or losing control of shoulder stability. Another advantage bands provide during lateral raises is the ability to train explosively without losing shoulder stability at the top of the movement. Because the load is lighter at the bottom of the range when your hands are down by your sides, you’re able to engage the delts more explosively and have the speed of contraction slowed down by the increased resistance through the bands at the top. This is great for targeting the fast twitch motor units in the shoulders while also providing a novel, pain-free stimulus for shoulder training. Remember, train the shoulders explosively with this method. Focus on increasing the contraction speed in the concentric (lifting) part of the movement while slowing down the eccentric (lowering) part of the exercise. Don’t let the bands pull you down fast. 2 – Train Between the Usual Planes of Motion Open up an anatomy textbook and you’ll see that the deltoid is broken down into three distinct fiber orientations: the anterior, lateral and posterior. Though traditional training protocols have called for training shoulder flexion, abduction, and extension, it’s not the most effective way. Sure, isolating different parts of the deltoid is better than just barbell overhead-pressing yourself into an AC joint injury, but let’s try to be better than the industry standard, shall we? Training not only the three cardinal planes of motion, but BETWEEN these planes of motion is pivotal to finding what variation of shoulder raises fits your specific body type, while also taking into account things like functional instability, weakness, or even past injury. This strategy gives you endless angles to emphasize, adding novelty to traditional movement patterns while also minimizing chronic joint stresses commonly associated with sloppy lateral raises and overhead pressing. Check out the dumbbell scaption raise that works between the sagittal and frontal planes, emphasizing fibers between the anterior and lateral heads of the deltoid. Dumbbell Scaption Raise There’s a huge need for posterior and posterior-lateral direct deltoid training as many lifters place too much emphasis on vertical and horizontal pressing. To protect your shoulders and build some muscle in the posterior shoulder area, do 2-3 times more volume on the posterior shoulder than the anterior. 3 – Trigger the Metabolic Pump Effect The shoulders don’t traditionally respond well to heavy-ass loads. The deltoid is comprised of a majority of slow twitch muscle fibers, meaning that the average lifter will be more likely to get results from higher rep ranges of around 12-20 reps. While this is based on individual presentation of fiber and body typing, higher reps can be advantageous to almost every lifter by decreasing external loads placed on the shoulder joint, thus decreasing cumulative joint stress over time. Less weight moved equals less stress on the joints. But this doesn’t give you the excuse to get fluffy with your shoulder training and go light without challenging yourself. Building strength and size in the shoulders requires placing an emphasis not only on progressively overloading staple movements, but also on eliciting a huge metabolic pump effect in the tissues. The pump has been crapped on for decades by elitist powerlifters and strength athletes who are usually chronically injured, but tapping into metabolic stress is one of the most intelligent training variables to exploit for performance, aesthetic, and orthopedic success. There are a few key methods that will increase the metabolic stress of the
Origin: The 3 Smartest Ways to Train Shoulders