Bodybuilding Tips and Tricks

When I first start training a client I typically introduce them to what I consider to be the four components of a good fitness program: Consistency, Effort, Nutrition, and Rest. 99% of the time, if a client is not achieving the goals that they’ve set for themselves, one or more of these components needs to be altered, tweaked, or improved in some way.

1) Consistency - By this I mean that you workout on a regular basis over an extended period of time. You need to decide how often you can workout (and for how long each session) and then stick to that schedule as much as possible. The only way to stimulate your muscles to higher levels of growth and strength is to regularly challenge them. By regularly, I mean at least 3-4 times a week over a period of months (and years).

2) Effort - This component goes hand in hand with Consistency. If you’re working out on a regular basis, you’ve got the first step down. Now, you need to make sure that you’re putting in the effort and challenging yourself while you’re exercising. A workout is called a workout because it’s “work”. Your heart rate and breathing rate should increase, your muscles should fatigue, and you should sweat. The people I see at the gym strolling on the treadmill while yammering away on their cell phones or the people in the weight room just going through the motions with a bored look on their faces, are not putting in the effort they need to in order to achieve their goals. Obviously, some workouts will be harder than others (when you’re feeling better or stronger and want to push yourself) but all of your workouts should challenge you in some way. The only way to spark growth and strength gains and force your body to adapt is to challenge your muscles and do it on a regular basis.

3) Nutrition - For me, this item includes everything you put in your mouth outside of the gym. It means eating smart, keeping your protein high and your fat intake low. It also means taking all of your supplements on a regular basis and at the appropriate times (i.e. some supplements are designed to be taken before working out, before or with meals, etc.). Be sure to do some research if you’re unsure about when to take a particular supplement.

4) Rest - This is ostensibly the simplest component as it literally involves doing nothing. However, getting the proper amount of rest is a very important part of any training program and overtraining can be very detrimental to your gains. A general rule of thumb to follow is to allow at least 24 hours of rest in between working the same (or similar) bodyparts but listening to your body is probably the best thing to do in order to determine if you need more rest. Signs of overtraining can include fatigue, delayed muscle soreness, eye twiching, and more.

If you find you’re not achieving the goals you’ve set for yourself, take a look at these elements in your own training program and see if there’s anything you can improve upon.

I’m going to start off the discussion of this technique by making sure that you’re familiar with the negative and positive portion of a repetition. The positive (sometimes called the concentric) part of a rep is typically thought of as the “working” part, the portion where you are exerting more force and contracting the muscle. The negative portion is the part of the rep where you return to the original position for the exercise…in most cases, this is the easier part of the repetition. For example, when doing the bench press, pressing the bar upward is the positive portion and lowering the bar back toward your chest is the negative porton. When performing barbell curls, curling the weight upward is positive, lowering it back down is negative. And so on.

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s talk about the Negative Reps technique. Like Forced Reps, Negative Reps will require you to have a training partner or spotter to help you out. Let’s take the bench press for example. To perform negative reps, you’ll load the bar up with a heavier weight than you’d normally use. Then, you’ll have your partner help you perform the postive (pressing up) portion of the exercise while you (and only you) will perform the negative (lowering back down) portion. Repeat this process for reps. What this allows you to do is handle more weight in the negative part of the rep than you normally would if you were performing conventional reps. Negative reps are great for building up ligaments and tendons quicker than normal reps and this will then enable you to lift heavier weights in the future and stimulate new growth. Give these a try and see what ya think!

They say variety is the spice of life. And, varying your workouts is one of the best ways to ensure that you continue to achieve gains from your bodybuilding program. Building muscle is all about adaptation: forcing your muscles to adapt to increasing and varying stresses and challenges by increasing in size and strength. One problem that many people I’ve encountered have is that they’ve never changed the original workout plan they initially received, whether they obtained it from a book, a video, online, or from a personal trainer. As a result, they end up doing the same bodybuilding workout over and over (sometimes for months and years at a time) and their gains stagnate. Once they’re no longer making gains, they lose their motivation and often end up quitting their fitness routine entirely.

There are nearly an infinite number of ways to keep your workout program fresh and mix things up. One of the easiest (and simplest for beginners to understand) methods I’ve found is to take the typical training split that most people start out with and turn it on it’s head a bit. (Incidentally, a training split refers to when you work which bodyparts and which are grouped together throughout a particular training cycle–usually a week). The typical pairing of muscle groups in a workout plan is back with biceps and chest with triceps. There’s good logic behind this because each of the pairings are grouping like with like: biceps and back exercises typically involve pulling motions while chest and triceps exercises usually involve pushing motions. In addition, most back exercises utilize your biceps as an accessory muscle and most chest exercises utitlize the triceps in the same fashion.

While this is certainly a logical training split, a good way to change things up is to reverse things and work back with triceps and chest and biceps. In addition to providing a welcome variation to your muscles, it also will allow you to lift heavier and work harder when it comes time to train those accessory muscles (biceps and triceps). This is because the larger muscles (back and chest) which, incidentally, are normally trained first, have not weakened those accessory muscles yet. So, once you’re through with your chest workout and are ready to blast those bi’s, they should be nearly totally fresh and ready to be blitzed. You should notice how much stronger you are in these accessory muscles almost immediately.

One item of note: you should be sure to allow 24 hours of rest between training days when using this split to avoid overtraining your biceps and triceps. Performing a back/triceps, chest/biceps workout on consecutive days should be avoided as the biceps and triceps will be hit to some extent on both days. There are a ton of other ways to vary your workout and keep those gains coming. I’ll address some in future articles…for now, try mixing things up with the split I mentioned and keep training hard!

I’ll admit it: I’m an average sized guy, well at least as far as height is concerned. I’ve bulked myself up considerably through weight training using many of the tips I’ve shared with you in this blog but I’ve always wished I was a bit taller. Unfortunately, there isn’t any magic pill that can help us add a few inches to our height. Luckily though, at least as far as sports and athletics is concerned, there *is* something we can do to overcome much of the burden of being an average sized or short guy: improve our vertical jump. Actually, even if you’re already a tall dude, improving your vertical leaping ability is something that will increase your performance in sports such as basketball, football, volleyball, and a whole host of others.

For years, I’d tried to improve my vertical jump but, despite diligent adherence to what I thought was a great training regimen, I was making very little overall progress. Then I noticed this guy at the gym. This dude was stacking aerobic STEP blocks at higher and higher levels and vaulting onto them seemingly effortlessly. He’d do some reps, then add another block, and do some more, and so on and so on. Finally I approached him and asked how he’d managed to achieve such a high vertical jump. He’s the guy I have to thank for introducing me to The Jump Manual, the system he had used to achieve the incredibly vertical leaping ability I had seen him demonstrating in the gym.

Normally, I’m very skeptical of things like this and this time was no exception: my first reaction was “Yeah, right”. But I took a shot, upon my new gym buddy’s recommendation, and damn am I glad I did. It turns out The Jump Manual is put out by a guy named Jacob Hiller who has trained athletes in improving their vertical jump at everything from the high school level all the way up to the NBA pros and Olympic athletes. Jacob’s system covers everything you need to know to improve your vertical jump including complete workout charts to keep track of your training, videos of exercises and stretches, a nutrition plan, and much more. He even offers up techniques you can use if you don’t have access to a gym. In addition, Jacob offers up his own personal consulting services which could include emails, online chats, and even phone calls. Once I started the system, it didn’t take me long at all to start seeing an improvement…now my buddy and I train our vertical jumps together at the gym and I’m keeping pace with him. Plus, when I’m playing some b-ball, I can actually do some dunking for a change. It’s awesome. Take a look at Jacob’s site, watch the intro video, and check out all the info he has to give you. If you want to improve your vertical jumping power (with no bullshit), grab yourself a copy of The Jump Manual today.

Even a rookie to bodybuilding or any type of fitness training knows that protein is one of the most important nutritional supplements one can consume in order to ensure maximum success. The problem is, there are so many types and brands out there it can be difficult to determine which is best for you. To this end, I’m sharing this aticle with you from bodybuilding.com. It discusses protein supplements in depth and dissects them based on protein type, taste, brand name, price, and content. Take a look =)

Check out the article here!

Discipline. It’s what drives any good training program. The discipline to go to the gym rain or shine, tired or energetic. The discipline to push yourself during your workout and not just “go through the motions”. The discipline to watch your diet every day and supplement properly. Here’s a fantastic article from David Robson over at bodybuilding.com addressing just that: discipline. I think it will inspire you both in the gym and perhaps even outside the gym as well. Check it out here.

Here’s a great article from Michael Kurilla over at bodybuilding.com. It discusses the science behind interval training (something I’ve touched on in my fat burning section) and really gives some great information about the exercise physiology of burning fats opposed to carb and protein, how to determine you maximum fat burning zone, and howto adjust your diet to burn more fat. A great read!

Check out the article here. This is part 1, be sure to check out parts 2 and 3 linked up at the top of the page.

The pre-exhaust technique involves working a muscle group using an isolation move before moving on to a heavier compound joint exercise. This goes against a basic rule of beginning bodybuilding which tells us that a good rule of thumb is to perform heavy multi-joint exercises first, then move on to the lighter isolation moves. There is a method to the madness though. The pre-exhaust technique allows us to fatigue the targeted muscle group so that when we perform the heavier compound joint movement, the targeted muscle will be the first to fail as opposed to the secondary accessory that are used in the exercise.

Let’s look, for example, at using the pre-exhaust principle for chest. To isolate the chest muscle, we’ll start off with a move that eliminates the accessory muscles often used in chest moves like the triceps and shoulders. Pectoral flyes are a good choice (I like to do these on the pec-deck machine for pre-exhaust work, but dumbbells work fine too). Once you’ve finished your flye sets, move on to a heavy compound lift like incline or flat bench barbell presses. Because you’ve already pre-fatigued your chest with the flyes, your chest should give out before your triceps and shoulders, thus ensuring a complete workout of the pectoral region. Often, in chest and back work, you may find some of the accessory muscles involved in the movement (triceps and biceps respectively) giving out before the larger muscle you’re trying to target does. The pre-exhaust technique is a way around this problem and a great way of busting through plateaus to boot. Give it a try!

Here are some other examples of pre-exhaust movements for various other bodyparts:

Back: Pre-exhaust with Straight-arm Pulldowns or Machine Pullovers, then move to Lat Pulldowns or Barbell Rows

Legs: Pre-exhaust with Leg Extensions or Leg Curls, then move to Squats or Leg Presses

Biceps: Pre-exhaust with Concentratrion Curls, then move to Barbell Curls

Triceps: Pre-exhaust with Dumbbell Kickbacks, then move to Skull Crushers

Shoulders: Pre-exhaust with Lateral Raises or Front Raises, then move to Shoulder Presses

Note: I recommend beginners avoid using pre-exhaust in their routines as it could possibly lead to overtraining. Intermediate lifters can use the technique, but should be careful of how frequently they employ it in their routines. Using it every workout can lead to overtraining.