Articles
The Bench Press Hypertrophy Guide
The bench press is the best lift for building a powerful chest. It’s also great for bulking up your triceps and the fronts of your shoulders, making it a great overall lift for improving your aesthetics.
The bench press is one of our Big 5 bulking lifts, and in this article, we’re going to go over the best strategies for integrating it into your bulking routine. This article has nothing to do with powerlifting or even powerbuilding, just with using the bench press to becoming bigger, stronger, and better looking.
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The Chin-Up Hypertrophy Guide
Chin-ups are a great lift for your upper back, abs, and grip strength. They’re even a great lift great for improving your cardiovascular fitness. What they’re most famous for, though, is building absolutely killer biceps.
In fact, the only other lift that’s as good for bulking up our biceps is the biceps curl. But given that curls are a smaller single-joint movement, they’re better thought of as an assistance lift to the chin-up anyway.
The chin-up is one of our Big 5 bulking lifts, and in this article we’re going to go over the best strategies for integrating it into your bulking routine, getting the most muscle mass and strength out of it as possible.
In this article, we’ll cover:
- How to bulk up your arms, back, and abs with the chin-up.
- Whether you should use a neutral grip, overhand grip, or underhand grip as your main chin-up variation.
- How to assess your weaknesses and then fix them.
- The best assistance lifts for improving your chin-up strength.
- How to use accessory lifts, such as biceps curls and rows.
The Overhead Press Hypertrophy Guide
The overhead press (often referred to as the military press) is the best lift for bulking up our shoulders. It’s also fantastic for our upper traps, upper chest, triceps, posture, and even our abs, making it one of the best lifts for building a bigger shoulder girdle, developing general strength, and improving our aesthetics. And, of course, as you may have already guessed, pressing is the opposite of depressing. As a result, we consider it one of the five main muscle-building lifts.
In this article, we’ll go over how to program the overhead press into your workout routine, how to min-max your technique for even more muscle growth, and how to choose the best assistance and accessory lifts.
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High-Frequency Training: Should You Train Your Muscles Every Day?
A common question we get is whether we can train our muscles every day. And yes, that’s okay. There’s even a name for it: high-frequency training. The idea is that by training our muscles more often, we can keep them growing steadily all week long, speeding up our muscle growth.
The next question, though, is whether we should train our muscles every day. Does it offer any advantages? Are there any disadvantages we should consider? And that’s where things get more tricky.
There’s a reason why most workout programs that have stood the test of time recommend training our muscles just 2–3 times per week. But it’s also true that high-frequency training has some genuine advantages.
So, should you train your muscles every day?
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How to Gain Less Fat While Bulking
One of the most common problems people have is that they bulk up, gain a bunch of fat, and finish looking out of shape instead of looking more muscular. They might have gained a fair amount of muscle mass and strength, but their progress is hidden by their rising body-fat percentage.
Most of us work out to build muscle, get stronger, improve our health, and improve our appearance. Bulking will certainly make us bigger and stronger, but if it comes at the cost of our health and appearance, is it really worth it?
Despite the protestations of your inner nihilist, yes, gaining both muscle and fat is probably still worth it. You can burn the fat while keeping the muscle and strength, becoming both leaner and more muscular by the end of it. It just means having to go through a period of fat loss. That’s a pain, but it’s still progress.
But wouldn’t it be nice to gain less fat while bulking? You’d finish your bulk looking great. You could spend longer building muscle before needing to trim off the fat. And you wouldn’t need to spend months cutting afterwards.
So in this article, we’ll talk about why some people gain a disproportionate amount of fat while bulking, and then go over a few strategies to increase your muscle growth and reduce your fat gain, allowing you to build more muscle leanly.
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Lifting Tempo: How Fast Should You Lift & Lower Weights to Build Muscle?
Lifting tempo is one of the more minor muscle-growth factors, not because it doesn’t matter, but because most people have a good intuition for it. Most people lift in the way that makes them stronger, and that’s also a pretty good way to lift for muscle growth. Still, there are ways that we can improve our lifting tempo, eking out a little bit more muscle growth with every repetition.
But there are also some trends that might hurt more than they help. For example, should we pause with the barbell on our chest when bench pressing? Should we drop the barbell down to the floor when deadlifting? Should we slow down our lifts to get a better mind-muscle connection?
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How Often Should You Work Out Per Week to Build Muscle?
If you want to build muscle quickly, you need to work out often enough to keep your muscles growing all week long. There are two key questions we need to answer:
- How often should you train your muscles?
- How many days per week should you work out?
If you do a full-body workout 3 times per week, you train each muscle 3 times per week. However, if you use a 6-day workout split, dividing your body up into 6 different areas, you may only be training each muscle once per week. That means it’s possible to work out more often while training your muscles less often, or vice versa.
First, we need to determine how often you should train each muscle. Then we can talk about the best way to schedule your workout routine so that you’re working each muscle hard enough, often enough.
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Lat Pulldown Alternatives: How to Train Your Lats With Free Weights
One of the most common questions we get is how to do lat pulldowns without a lat pulldown machine. People are training at home with either a barbell or dumbbells, and they aren’t sure how to replace the lat pulldown exercise with free weights. And, the truth is, there’s no perfect replacement for it. We need to replace it with a similar exercise, not an identical one.
The movement that best mimics the overhand lat pulldown is the pull-up, and that’s great for people who have a pull-up bar and are strong enough to do them, but even then, it can still create problems.
Lat pulldowns are often programmed in moderate rep ranges of 8–15 reps, but it takes quite a lot of upper-body strength to bust out that many pull-ups, especially if you’re already fatigued from other exercises. That’s a problem because lat pulldowns are often programmed after heavy sets of chin-ups and pull-ups.
So, what’s the best free-weight alternative to the lat pulldown?
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The Best Supplements for Burning Fat & Building Muscle
There are a few supplements that are good for both building muscle and losing fat, making them perfect for body recomposition. They all fall into one of three categories:
- Protein Supplements. Eating enough protein helps us gain or maintain muscle mass while burning fat. A good example is whey protein.
- Muscle-Building Supplements. Supplements that increase our rate of muscle growth, improve our hormones, or help us manage our stress can shuttle nutrients toward muscle growth instead of fat storage, making us stronger and leaner. The best example is creatine.
- Ergogenic supplements. If a supplement gives us the energy to move more, be more consistent with our workouts, or push ourselves harder while working out, then it can help us burn more calories and stimulate more muscle growth. The best example is caffeine.
Let’s go into each of those three categories in more detail.
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GreySkull LP: Is It Good for Gaining Muscle Mass?
GreySkull LP (GSLP) is a powerbuilding program designed to help beginners get bigger and stronger. It’s one of the more popular programs in the strength training community, and it’s often recommended to people who are interested in building muscle.
What’s interesting about GreySkull LP is that it’s a modern evolution of programs like Starting Strength, StrongLifts 5×5, and 5/3/1. It has that same foundation of heavy strength training, but it goes beyond that, adding in a couple simple changes that make it more robust.
So, is GreySkull LP any good at helping beginners gain muscle mass?
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