strength

If you’ve been around the gym trenches, you have heard the term if you cannot grip it, you can’t rip it, and forearms play a big part in it. Forearm strength and endurance are critical in all grip-intensive exercises like deadlifts, chin-ups, and all row variations. The grip often fails before...

One of the best pieces of muscle-building is that you must row to grow. You may have heard this before, but it bears repeating because too many lifters still focus on the mirror muscles. Training the posterior delts, upper back, and lats must be a priority when muscle and strength are your...

5 Supersets for Brutal Strength & Explosive Power How to Get Strong and Explosive POWERFUL SUPERSETS = POWERFUL PHYSIQUE Being strong is great, but being strong AND powerful is even better. Training at high velocities using lighter loads will carry over seamlessly into lifting heavier loads...

Are the weights feeling heavy? Is your body feeling sluggish? Well, just change the way you think to overcome these feelings and crush your workout. Sounds a little woo woo, but it turns out that much of our physical performance depends on the mind, which is great news because it means we can...

I wondered if there were any exercises with the same multitasking elements. A few came to mind, but the one that stood out was the push-up. As I thought about all of the scenarios I've used some sort of push-up in, I began to appreciate its versatility. I also realized that even though the...

CHANGE, DUMB COMMENTS, AND MACHO CRAP Insanity is often defined as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. In the field of strength development, this concept applies directly to exercise selection. In order to prevent injuries we need to be able to change. We...

In your never-ending quest for size, strength, and overall athletic dominance, you'll eventually run into a plateau. And it will test you. You'll de-load, change your movements, and try different programs. In the end you'll lose countless hours of sleep thinking about it and probably try some...

You're sitting in the audience at a strength and conditioning conference, there to learn a thing or two about building bigger, stronger muscles, and the speaker calls you up to the podium. The speaker has set up a barbell onstage with a stack of plates next to it. He tells you that you're going...

Athletically speaking, there’s very few things more visually appealing than watching an NBA star dunk a basketball or an NFL wide receiver elevate to catch a football, or an Olympic-caliber sprinter run a sub-10-second 100 meters. What do these feats have in common? These displays of power are...

What training method or diet strategy did you once think was good, but now you don't anymore? Christian Thibaudeau – Strength Coach and Performance Expert I CHANGED A LOT OF MY VIEWS OVER THE YEARS, BUT THE BIGGEST CHANGE IS RELATED TO CARB INTAKE. When I first started out in the strength...

One of the longest running arguments in the history of weight training has to be between those who favour single sets (HIT) and those who advocate multiple sets per exercise. Traditionally the HIT school say that by training a set to failure you end up stimulating all the muscle fibres and once...

If you have been watching the Olympic games and marvelled at some of the athletes on show in sports such as sprint cycling and track sprinters in athletics, it certainly looks as though weight training must play a significant role in the training of these athletes based on the muscle mass that...

Adding instability to your weight training in the form of unstable surfaces or reducing points of contact was all the rage a while ago. But mixed with social media and the fight for eyeballs, some may have taken creativity a bit too far. It was (and still can) more circus trick than strength...

Nowadays you don’t have to visit a CrossFit gym to see battle rope exercises in use. What used to be reserved for specific fitness niches and professional athletes is now utilized in home gyms, outdoor workouts, and boot camps. The simplicity of battle rope exercises are what makes them a...

Most of us who’ve tried the regular hard-style single kettlebell swing is a great, low-impact, high-intensity exercise that improves grip strength and power and helps make your glutes pop. But to double the fun and the difficulty level of the movement, the double kettlebell swing provide a...

Raise Your Heart Rate, Build Your Body Cardio for Gains? Can conditioning or aerobic work support your muscle-building goals? Yes. Better aerobic fitness means you’ll be able to bring more oxygen and nutrients to muscles. Aerobic work actually helps us develop more capillaries, which is like...

The foam roller is still a fantastic tool to help release tension and soreness from muscles you never knew were tight or sore. It is a must pre and post-workout recovery tool. It comes in all shapes and sizes to improve mobility and movement and reduce muscle soreness, particularly if you are an...

Have you heard the term out of sight, out of mind? This can be applied in many gym settings where some beginner and intermediate lifters train the mirror muscles—you know, abs, pecs and biceps—and forget those all-important posterior muscles. That’s where the inverted row comes in. One muscle...

Body levers can play a pretty heavy role into what we naturally excel at. People with long arms, for instance, will likely be especially good at throwing, rowing, martial arts, and racquet sports. Taller folks will generally have a size advantage in basketball and volleyball. Large, heavy people...

The bench press. It’s one of the original rite of passage exercises that many lifters spend countless—oftentimes too many—hours toward perfecting. When you’re a beginner, you most likely performed two main exercises—biceps curl and bench press. Then, the love affair begins. The bench press is...