Articles
How Many Calories Does Walking Burn? (Calorie Calculator)
How many calories does walking burn per kilometre, mile, hour, or step? There’s a simple calculator we can use to figure that out. All we need to know is how much you weigh and how much you’re walking.
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What Muscles Do Dips Work?
Dips are an underrated exercise, and there’s some fascinating research to cover. They’re one of the best exercises for building muscle in your chest and shoulders—arguably even better than push-ups and bench presses.
I’ve been doing dips for over a decade, and I credit them for helping me build a big chest. They also helped me bench 315 pounds, even though I rarely do the bench press.
So, what muscles do dips work? Why are they so powerful?
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The Beginner’s Guide to Blood Flow Restriction (BFR) Training
Blood Flow Restriction (BFR) Training is a niche bodybuilding technique that occasionally muscles its way into the mainstream. When you restrict blood flow, blood can still reach your muscles, but it has trouble escaping, resulting in terrifying muscle pumps. This is thought to stimulate the production of growth factors and other anabolic hormones, improving muscle growth.
BFR sounds strange and dangerous, and many people are scared of it. Surprisingly, it’s actually one of the safest ways to stimulate muscle growth. In fact, outside of bodybuilding, it’s most commonly used in rehab and with older lifters.
So, does BFR work? should you add it to your workout routine? And if so, how should you do it?
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The Anabolic Window: Both Fact & Fiction
The “anabolic window” is an old bodybuilding term. A few years ago, it was pilloried by the evidence-based fitness community, and perhaps rightfully so—the requirements were woefully strict.
As so often happens, the backlash was overly harsh. There’s some merit to the idea of the anabolic window. The truth is that most people can benefit from taking advantage of it. That’s even more true for naturally thinner people.
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How to Ruck—The Complete Beginner Guide
Rucking is walking with a loaded backpack, also known as a “rucksack,” hence the term “rucking.” The term comes from military training, but its origins go back far further. We’ve been carrying heavy loads over long distances throughout all of human history.
Hunter-gatherers carried spears and shields and baskets full of forage. Men would lug large game home after successful hunts. Women would carry their young children strapped to their backs. We’ve always been rucking, just without the rucksacks.
Rucking is still popular. It remains one of the best ways to improve cardiovascular fitness and muscular endurance. Here’s our beginner guide explaining how to do it.
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Hypertrophy Training Volume: How Many Sets to Build Muscle?
How many sets should you be doing per muscle group per week to build muscle? If you train efficiently, optimizing every factor for muscle growth, you may be able to maximize your rate of muscle growth away with as few as 9 sets per week.
On the other hand, if you’re training for other goals—strength, power, fitness, or endurance—you might gain less muscle per set. In that case, you may benefit from higher training volumes.
So, we’ll start by reviewing the best type of training volume for building muscle. Then we can discuss how much volume we should do to maximize our rate of muscle growth.
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Can Bulking Cause Insulin Resistance & Diabetes?
Whenever we talk about how carbohydrates can be good for building muscle, we get comments from people worried that if they eat too many carbs, they’ll produce too much insulin, and their bodies will become desensitized to it, causing insulin resistance and potentially even leading to diabetes. Can that happen?
The other concern is that bulking means eating in a calorie surplus to intentionally gain weight. Can that calorie surplus cause insulin resistance?
The first thing I did was reach out to Dr. Karl Nadolsky, an endocrinologist who specializes in diseases like diabetes. Then, I reached out to Danny Lennon, a nutritionist on the Advisory Board of the Sports Nutrition Association. I asked them both the same question: Should skinny and skinny-fat people be worried about eating too many carbs while bulking? Could that lead to insulin resistance and diabetes?
Their answers surprised me.
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A Review of the MacroFactor Macro-Tracking App
We’ve spent nearly two years reviewing MacroFactor, tested it against all its major competitors, and had over 100 clients use it to build muscle, lose fat, or recomp.
MacroFactor is a calorie-counting, macro-tracking app created by two of the most respected research reviewers in the fitness industry. It’s built on good muscle-building and fat-loss principles, it boasts a clever algorithm, and it’s impressively precise.
However, there’s more to a good calorie-counting app than good science. How easy is it to use? How much of your time will devour every day? And perhaps most importantly, how does it compare against industry giants like MyFitnessPal?
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The 5 Best Compound Lifts for Building Muscle
All the best muscle-building programs are built on the idea of progressively overloading the big compound lifts. If you aren’t able to progressively overload those exercises, then you won’t build muscle. And if you can’t build muscle, then you won’t be able to progressively overload your exercises.
Most bodybuilding programs prioritize effort. They emphasize doing more sets and reps, pushing harder, and focusing on the pump, the pain, the burn, and the strain. After all, pain is the feeling of weakness leaving the body, right? It can be, but it can also be an illusion. Your effort is only productive if it adds up to actual progress. That’s where strength training shines.
Strength training is rooted in powerlifting, where your strength is determined by how much you can squat, bench press, and deadlift for a single repetition—your total. If you’re getting stronger at the big compound exercises, you’re improving. If you aren’t, the problem is immediately evident, allowing you to fix it right away.
However, strength training has its own problems. Low-bar back squats aren’t the best compound exercise for building muscle. Neither are wide-grip bench presses or wide-stance sumo deadlifts. The emphasis on progression is fantastic, but the exercises aren’t ideal.
We need to combine both approaches, choosing the best compound exercises for our goals, then attacking them with the vigour of a bodybuilder and the focus of a powerlifter. If you can grow gradually stronger at the best muscle-building exercises, you can consistently build muscle.
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The Best Shoulder Exercises for Your Front, Side & Rear Delts
Your shoulders house the biggest muscles in your upper body (study). They’re 50% bigger than your chest, lats, and triceps and 300% bigger than your biceps. As a result, building bigger shoulders is one of the best ways to build muscle, gain strength, and improve your appearance (study).
Your shoulder muscles are made up of three different heads—the front delts, side delts, and rear delts. Each of those heads performs a different function, requiring a different shoulder exercise. You need a mix of pressing exercises, lateral raises, and pulling exercises.
In this guide, we’ll go over the best shoulder exercises for each head, then combine them together into a balanced shoulder workout.
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