Articles
Lengthened Partials: What They Are & How to Use Them
Lengthened partials are the trendy new bodybuilding technique. The idea is that by challenging your muscles under a deep stretch, you can increase mechanical tension on your muscles, stimulating more muscle growth.
They aren’t as new as they seem. For several decades now, many of the best bodybuilders have built their routines around lengthened partials. So there isn’t just scientific evidence we can reference; there’s also a long bodybuilding tradition we can draw from.
I won’t bury the lead: lengthened partials work. But they don’t usually work better than a full range of motion (review paper), and there are often better ways to get the benefits of training at long muscle lengths.
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The Best Dumbbell Leg Exercises & Workout
Dumbbell leg exercises are great for beginners. They’re perfect for gaining your first 30–40 pounds of muscle. Think of exercises like goblet squats, dumbbell Romanian deadlifts, and step-ups.
Our main Bony to Beastly Program heavily emphasizes dumbbells. Some of our best transformations come from guys working out at home in simple dumbbell home gyms.
It gets a bit trickier as you get stronger. Dumbbells make it harder to lift as heavy. That isn’t as much of a problem for your arms, chest, or even back, but it can definitely make it harder to train your legs. You’ll need to progress to exercise variations that let you get more muscle growth out of less weight. We’ll show you how to do that.
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The Best Dumbbell Arm Exercises & Workout
Dumbbell exercises are fantastic for building bigger arms. They’re often better than the barbell, cable, and machine variations. You don’t need anything more.
Our main Bony to Beastly Program heavily emphasizes dumbbells. Some of our best transformations come from guys working out at home in simple dumbbell home gyms.
Arm exercises pair together well. You could quickly alternate between sets of biceps curls, triceps extensions, and lateral raises at the end of all your workouts, keeping your arms growing steadily all week long. You could also do a heartier workout focused solely on your arms. We’ll cover both approaches.
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The Best Dumbbell Chest Exercises & Workout
You can bulk up your chest perfectly well with just dumbbells. In fact, you could make a strong argument that dumbbell chest exercises are better for your chest than the barbell, cable, and machine variations.
Our main Bony to Beastly Program heavily emphasizes dumbbells. Some of our best transformations come from guys working out at home with simple dumbbell home gyms. Dumbbells can be amazing for building muscle.
The trick is to choose exercises that train all the muscle fibres that fan across your chest, ideally while challenging them under a deep stretch. You can combine those exercises into a chest workout, or you could spread them out across the week.
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The Best Dumbbell Back Exercises & Workout
You can build a big, strong, and balanced back with just dumbbells. Chin-ups and pull-ups are the foundation of most back workouts, but it’s pretty easy to replace them with dumbbell exercises.
Our main Bony to Beastly Program heavily emphasizes dumbbells. Some of our best transformations come from guys training at home with a simple dumbbell home gym. You aren’t at much of a disadvantage. Dumbbells are fantastic for building muscle.
Still, good back workouts are difficult to program. Each back muscle is responsible for slightly different movements and thus benefits from slightly different exercises. That’s why a good back workout usually has around 3 different complementary back exercises.
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The Best Upper/Lower Workout Split for Building Muscle
When I first met Marco, he had just finished studying under Eric Cressey, the head strength coach for the New York Yankees, and was working as the strength coach for professional football and rugby players. He had almost all of them on an Upper/Lower Workout Split.
The classic Upper/Lower Split has two lower-body workouts and two upper-body workouts, giving you four workouts per week. It’s a balanced routine, but it works your lower body harder than most bodybuilding routines, making it a great choice for athletes, especially if your sport is built around running.
You can also add a fifth workout, adding more emphasis to the muscles you’re most eager to grow. For most men, that means adding a third upper-body workout. For many women, that means adding a third lower-body workout.
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The Best Lower-Body Workout for Building Muscle
“Leg Day” and “Lower Body Workout” sound similar, and indeed they are. The difference is that Leg Days are usually used by bodybuilders, whereas Lower Body Workouts are more often used to gain a mix of size, strength, and athleticism. They’re part of a different training tradition.
When you split your body in two, you can train it half as much but twice as often, making your workouts shorter and easier. Or you could devote more time and energy to the muscles you’re training, increasing the overall stimulation. We’ll show you how.
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Body Recomposition: How to Build Muscle While Losing Fat
Body recomposition is when you build muscle while losing fat. It sounds like the Holy Grail, but it isn’t quite so rare as that. Recomping is realistic for most people. We’ll show you client transformations and study results.
You can recomp by lifting weights, doing cardio, eating a better diet, or improving your sleep. We’ll delve into each of those methods, including the results you can expect with every change you make. But you can do much better than that.
The shotgun approach is when you do a few different things, hoping at least one of them gives you the results you want. We’ll take a firing squad approach, firing several well-aimed bullets. Each method is strong enough to reliably produce results. Together, they’re truly fearsome.
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How to Bulk Up: The Complete Guide for Skinny Guys
I was underweight well into my twenties. I would read guides about how to build muscle, and I would try them, but they wouldn’t work. They would urge me to bulk slowly and leanly, filling me with a fear of fat gain. But I wasn’t scared of gaining fat. That wasn’t my problem.
I wanted to build muscle fast—as fast as I possibly could. I didn’t care if my gains were perfectly lean, I just didn’t want to be skinny anymore. So, I ignored the conventional wisdom. I bulked more aggressively, gaining 20 pounds in 3 months, and to my great surprise, I didn’t even gain a noticeable amount of body fat.
Shortly after that, I came into contact with Marco, a strength coach helping college, professional, and Olympic athletes bulk up during their off-seasons. He was as naturally skinny as I was. He taught me how to bulk the proper way. I gained another 25 pounds in another 3 months.
Since then, we’ve helped 15,000 other skinny guys replicate those same results. In this article, we’ll teach you how you can do it, too.
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The Best Upper-Body Workout for Building Muscle
An upper-body workout trains most of the muscles in your upper body. When you split your body in two, you could train it half as much but twice as often, making your workouts shorter and easier. Or you could devote more time and energy to the muscles you’re training, giving them a greater stimulus to grow.
These upper-body workouts go best with at least one lower-body per week. There was a primeval species who neglected to do so, and with every generation, their legs withered away. Undeterred, they propelled themselves through the air with their powerful arms and chests. That is how birds came to be. That’s why people who skip leg day are called chickens.
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