September 2008 Archives

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September 2, 2008

How to Gain Weight with Just One Exercise

b846bcc0 How to Gain Weight with Just One Exercise When people ask me how to gain weight the first thing I ask them is if they do deadlifts. If you are trying to get big but aren’t including deadlifts in your program you are wasting your time. There is simply no more effective mass building exercise than the deadlift.

From your neck to your calves, nearly every muscle in your body gets activated and receives a powerful growth stimulus from deadlifts.

Not only is the deadlift the most effective mass building exercise there is but it is also the most basic ,and has the greatest carryover to the real world. There aren’t many times in life where you would lie down on your back and press a weight up over your chest like you would during a bench press. But hardly a day goes by when you don’t bend down and pick something up off the floor. And that is what you do when you deadlift. So it trains you for real life situations and helps to prevent the oh-so-common lower back problems that plague hundreds of thousands of adults due to incredible weakness.

But the bottom line for all skinny guys and aspiring mass monsters is that… …continue reading.

September 3, 2008

What is True Physical Fitness?

2540091914 c50edd6f2e o What is True Physical Fitness? I’m taking off for my birthday today and have handed the keys over to my buddy, and someone I admire and respect greatly, Jon Hinds of Monkey Bar Gym.

Enjoy…

What does it mean to be truly physically fit? Feeling physically fit is definitely different for each individual. Some people feel physical fitness is the ability to bench press 300 lbs, other people say it’s making it through a full hour aerobics class, or completing a 5k run. To me, true physical fitness is the ability to do all of these things and more, at any time. It’s the ability to instantaneously run and jump, push and pull, climb, catch, and react. You are truly physically fit when you are connected to your body in such a way that you can do anything you want to do.

My whole life I’ve heard thousands of views about what it means to be physically fit, and most people believe that the a fit body is represented by today’s bodybuilders. We are too caught up in the idea of fashion over function. Bodybuilders are big, muscular, lean, tan, and just look strong, and they have done lots of hard work

… …continue reading.

September 7, 2008

Training With the Rattlesnake

WWE Austin SP0520 01 Training With the Rattlesnake I had another great talk with Stone Cold Steve Austin at the gym last week. Even though he is no longer an active wrestler, Steve still keeps himself in good shape and is absolutely huge. And as I have mentioned before, he remains one of the nicest and most respectful human beings you could ever hope to meet. One thing I notice about Steve when he trains is that his workouts never last longer than 45 minutes. I have been a big advocate of short workouts for years for a number of reasons such as enhanced recovery ability and a more favorable testosterone/ cortisol ratio and something that I cover in full detail in Muscle Gaining Secrets. Obviously Stone Cold knows that those long workouts that so many people favor are a road to nowhere.

Stone Cold is also a huge fan of ultimate fighting and gets quite passionate when discussing it. He has his own complimentary copy of Fit to Fight and said to me that he would “last about two minutes on some of those conditioning workouts those guys do,” but respected the hell out of anyone who could train like that.

If you want to get… …continue reading.

September 9, 2008

How to Gain Muscle

arnold schwarzenegger training How to Gain Muscle When it comes to the question of how to gain muscle, there are many things you must know and do. But, often times what is more important than what you should do is what you shouldn’t do. With that in mind here are five muscle gaining mistakes you should avoid at all costs.

Training Too Often- In order to grow you must provide your body with the optimal stimulus and then back off and allow it time to rest and recover. Without ample rest time you will never grow to your maximal potential. For this reason I recommend that you don’t train with weights more than 3-4 days per week.
Training Strictly For the Pump- Far too often I see skinny guys in the gym pumping away 10-15 rep sets with weights lighter than my grandmother would use. Yes, high volume training leads to a great pump but a great pump does not always lead to muscle growth. You can get a pump by treading water for a few minutes but everyone knows that won’t turn you into a mass monster any time soon. Chasing the pump should only be a small concern in your workout; after

… …continue reading.

September 16, 2008

5 Muscle Building Tips

history 72mro4 5 Muscle Building Tips
Here are 5 random muscle building tips that may make a big difference in your training.

– Don’t exceed 5-6 reps on most of your warm up sets. Your first set could consist of a very light weight for 10-20 reps just to get loosened up and get the blood flowing but beyond that you want to keep the reps low. The reason for this is that you don’t want to build up too much lactic acid or accumulate too much fatigue with your warm ups.

– Don’t stretch before your workout in the hopes of preventing injury. This doesn’t work. The only benefit of stretching before a workout is to help you get into positions you might not be able to reach (such as a full squat) because you are tight in specific areas (such as the glutes and hip flexors). But stretching for the sake of injury prevention is an outdated idea and doesn’t really work.

– Don’t over-analyze and over-think everything you do in the gym. This never gets you anywhere. Don’t worry if the incline of the bench is supposed to be 30 degrees or 35 degrees. Don’t worry that if you don’t supinate… …continue reading.

September 22, 2008

“I feel like I’m losing an old friend”

No post about training today. Instead I, like many Tri State area sports fans, would rather reflect on the end of an era and the loss of an old friend.

As everyone knows, they turned the lights out for the final time at Yankee Stadium last night and like Yogi Berra said, I too, “am sorry to see it over, I’ll tell you that.”

I can still remember the first time my dad took me to Yankee Stadium over 25 years ago, and the overwhelming excitement I felt when I first saw The House That Ruth Built, up close and personal, and heard Reggie Jackson’s name announced for the first time. I can vividly recall the 80′s, sitting in the blue seats, cheering on Donny Baseball and Big Dave even though they hadn’t won a world championship in years. And I was there for countless regular and post season games throughout the historic run of the 90′s, watching the heroics of Bernie Williams, Paul O’Neil and Mariano Rivera; memories I will never forget.

I had always hoped to bring my kids and my grandkids to Yankee Stadium but unfortunately will never get the chance. Like most Yankee fans I don’t… …continue reading.

September 26, 2008

The Importance of Record Keeping

jones minicamp The Importance of Record Keeping Keeping a detailed training journal is one of the most important things you can do to ensure optimal and consistent progress in the gym. Without a journal, your training will be completely haphazard and you will never know if you are making progress or not; it’s just guesswork. It is imperative that you keep detailed records of every workout. This gives you a goal to beat in each succeeding week or month, and allows you to look back and make adjustments when things are not going as well as you had planned. As I have mentioned before you should constantly be striving to hit new PR’s (personal records) in your training. Without a training journal you will be hard pressed to remember all of your PR’s so will never even know what you are chasing. If you don’t keep a training journal, everything you do is just like driving without a map and your progress will be much slower than it could be.

That is why, in the Muscle Gaining Secrets system I have included pre-made workout log sheets to record everything and an online progress tracker to chart your phenomenal results.… …continue reading.

September 30, 2008

What’s the ONLY Way to Get Faster?

23pic1 Whats the ONLY Way to Get Faster? By Patrick Beith & Latif Thomas

On a daily basis I receive emails from newsletter subscribers asking variations of the very same question:

What is ‘step over drive down?’
How do you ‘step over drive down?’
What does ‘step over drive down’ actually do?

I think you understand what I mean.

And this is a great question that clearly needs some further explanation.

The only way to get faster is to learn to apply more force to the ground. Simple Physics state that every action has an equalAnd opposite reaction. So it stands to reason that the more force you apply to the ground with every step, the more it is going to give back to you.

So how to run faster ?

Now this is an overall concept of course. Athletes must use a variety of training methods to develop this ability. But it is this ability to apply greater force to the ground that determines how quickly an athlete can accelerate, change directions or maintain top speeds.

So I don’t want you to get the idea that if you practice one specific drill or do one specific lift in… …continue reading.

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