Articles
Should You Double Down on Strengths Or Bring Up Weaknesses?
In this article, let’s talk about the philosophy you should adopt while choosing your lift variations and accessories. Should you run lift with your strengths and focus on what you’re best at? Or should you address your weaknesses so that you can build a more balanced and versatile physique?
What’s interesting is that the answer changes depending on your goals. Doubling down on strengths will make you stronger, bringing up weaknesses will make you look better, and a mix of both approaches tends to be best for general health.
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The Deadlift Hypertrophy Guide
The deadlift strengthens us from our forearms down to our calves. In fact, it’s such a good indicator of overall strength that it’s the only lift in both powerlifting and strongman competitions.
For stimulating muscle growth, the deadlift is more controversial. Most casual gymgoers skip it. Many bodybuilders do, too. And it’s easy to see why. Deadlifts are hard to learn, challenging to do, and difficult to recover from. But if you do them, they’re worth it.
If you want a bigger, stronger, and better-looking body, there’s no better lift than the deadlift. It stimulates the most overall muscle growth, it develops full-body strength, and it thickens some of our most impressive muscles.
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The Barbell Buyer’s Guide (for Bodybuilding & Hypertrophy Training)
While writing our guide on how to build a barbell home gym, I dove way too deep into researching barbells. Which companies make the best barbells, which coatings do the best job of preventing rust, which type of knurling is best, and so on. Perhaps more importantly, there are several different types of barbell, all of which look fairly similar, but all of which are designed for different styles of lifting:
- Olympic weightlifting barbells are smooth, thin, and springy, designed to be tossed and dropped. This makes them great for Olympic weightlifting and CrossFit, but a poor choice for building muscle and gaining strength.
- Strength training “power” barbells are rough, hard, and thick, designed for heavy and methodical lifting.
- Multipurpose barbells are a mix of the two. They’re smooth and springy enough to catch on our shoulders but have enough grip and stiffness to use for strength training.
Most people assume that multipurpose barbells are designed for general strength training and bodybuilding, but that’s actually not the case. They’re designed for powerlifting and Olympic weightlifting—for programs like Starting Strength, which includes both the low-bar back squat (a powerlifting lift) and the power clean (an Olympic lift). It’s a barbell designed for two very specialized types of lifting.
If we’re lifting weights to gain muscle size and strength, or to improve our health and appearance, then we aren’t going to be doing Olympic weightlifting or powerlifting. And if we aren’t doing either of those styles of lifting, we sure don’t need a barbell designed for both.
So what type of barbell should we buy?
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