Articles
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.
Delve into the details
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?
Delve into the details
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 more leanly.
Delve into the details
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?
Delve into the details
The Five Best 4-Day Workout Splits for Building Muscle
4-day workout splits are a popular way of training, and rightfully so. You’ll see a lot of bodybuilders doing a chest day, back day, leg day, and arm day. And that can work, depending on how you do it. You’ll see a lot of athletes doing upper/lower splits, alternating between upper-body days and lower-body days. That can be great for gaining mass, too. And one of my favourite ways of training is to combine full-body workouts with a split routine, doing 2–3 full-body workouts and then 1–2 workouts focused on something more specific, such as bringing up a target area.
So not only are 4-day workout routines great for building muscle, but there are also quite a few different ways of programming them, and all of them can be quite effective for gaining muscle mass and strength.
In this article, we’ll talk about the pros and cons of 4-day workout splits, how they compare against 3-day full-body routines, how best to program them, and then we’ll give you some sample workouts.
Delve into the details
Training Frequency: How Often Should You Work Out to Build Muscle?
How often should you work out? That might look like a single question, but there are actually two questions in there:
- How often should you train each muscle?
- How many times per week should you work out?
For example, if you do 3 full-body workouts per week, you’d be training your muscles three times per week. But if you do a 5-day split routine, dividing your body up into 5 different areas, you’d be training each muscle just once per week. So it’s possible to work out more often while training your muscle less often, or vice versa.
So first we need to see how often you should train each muscle. Then we can talk about the best way to schedule your workout routine so that you’re training each muscle hard enough, often enough.
Delve into the details
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 when trying to use a full range of motion, bringing our chests all the way up to the bar. Plus, 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?
Delve into the details
The Best Supplements for Muscle Gain & Weight Loss
What are the best supplements for people who are trying to lose weight while building muscle, aka, cutting or body recomposition. There are a few supplements that are good for this, and they all fall into one of three categories:
- Protein Supplements. Eating enough protein helps us gain or maintain muscle mass while losing weight. 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 help us shuttle nutrients towards muscle growth, allowing us to burn more fat. A good 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/or stimulate more muscle growth. A good example is caffeine.
Let’s go into each of those three categories in more detail.
Delve into the details
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?
Delve into the details
How to Grow Stubborn Muscles
How do you know if a muscle is stubborn? Much of the time, when someone thinks they have a stubborn muscle, it isn’t actually stubborn, they just aren’t training it properly. Sometimes growing stubborn muscles is as simple as following a better workout routine or choosing better lifts.
But our muscle-building genetics can vary from muscle to muscle, and most people have some muscles that are truly stubborn. So just because you’re building muscle overall, that doesn’t necessarily mean that all of your muscles will grow at the same speed. It doesn’t even mean that all of your muscles will grow at all. You may leave some in the dust. Why is that?
And how can we grow those lagging muscles? Fortunately, there are five fairly simple methods that tend to work quite well at bringing up lagging muscle groups.
Delve into the details