Archive for the ‘Fitness Tips’ Category
Saturday, April 28th, 2012
How to Build a Ripped Midsection
Frustrated? Tired? Upset? Ready for change? If you’re answering all of these questions with a loud YES from your living room, then you are in good company. And that’s why I keep writing these pieces, honestly — there’s a lot of frustration going on.
I look down at a body in progress and I think about everyone else doing the same. Are we on track? Are we falling off the mark? It just depends on your goals. But if you’re dreaming of abs, dreaming of a nicely sculpted body from top to bottom, then you need this guide too.
I know that it’s time to think differently about the way we work out, but in order to start down that path, you have to know what you’re up against.
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Tags: abdominals, abs, fat loss, fitness, lose fat, lose weight, midsection, myths, six pack, weight loss
Posted in Bodybuilding Myths, Diet, Fitness Tips | No Comments »
Thursday, October 20th, 2011
Nowadays, it seems everyone is after a toned midsection. Some people won’t even stop until they achieve shredded washboard abs. A six pack has come to be an important quest for many persons, however, many are misled as to the method to obtain it.
One common misconception is that cardiovascular exercise is the most important aspect of dialing in a six pack. Another misconception is that doing 1000 crunches a day is most important. Wrong on both accounts! Diet possibly plays the greatest role in obtaining a six pack. Let’s see why.
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Tags: 6 pack, ab training, abdominals, abs, bodybuilding, Diet, myth, myths, nutrition, six pack, swole 101
Posted in Bodybuilding, Conditioning, Diet, Fitness Tips, HIIT Routines | 5 Comments »
Thursday, October 13th, 2011
Don’t let Your Workouts Get Stale!
Going to the gym and doing the same workout over and over again is a sure way to prevent progress when it comes on to muscle growth. Repetition is a surefire way to make progress… in moderation. Too much repetition will leave you tired, bored, sore, lazy, and overtrained. Enough emphasis cannot be placed on the necessity of having a properly designed fitness program.
Don’t let your progress plateau like this guy. |
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Tags: basics, exercise, fitness, plateau, tips, Weight Training, weightlifting
Posted in Fitness Tips, Motivation, Weight Training | 4 Comments »
Friday, October 7th, 2011
OK, so the triceps kickbacks are not the king of all triceps exercises, but in a recent study performed by the American Council of Exercise (ACE), triceps kickbacks are ranked 2nd, tied with dips. The very best triceps exercise is the diamond push up.
Don’t underestimate this study just because I grabbed your attention by starting with kickbacks. The study also used legit exercises like close grip bench, dips, and various push downs and extensions. See the table below, and then I’ll explain.
|
Table 1
Average EMG of the Entire Movement (Concentric and Eccentric)
|
Triceps Exercise
|
Combined Means |
Long Head |
Lateral Head |
| Triangle Push-up |
100 |
100 |
100 |
Kickbacks
|
87 ± 26.58 |
88 ± 33.0 |
87 ± 23.7 |
Dips
|
87 ± 19.87 |
87 ± 21.3 |
88 ± 20.0 |
| Overhead Triceps Extensions |
76 ± 16.09 * |
81 ± 21.4 * |
72 ± 16.5 * |
| Rope Pushdowns |
74 ± 22.64 * |
81 ± 32.3 * |
67 ± 15.7 *† |
| Bar Pushdowns |
67 ± 20.48 * |
75 ± 29.3 * |
59 ± 14.3 *† |
| Lying Barbell Triceps Extensions |
62 ± 16.25 * |
70 ± 20.9 * |
55 ± 14.1 *† |
| Close Grip Bench Press |
62 ± 15.88 * |
61 ± 16.9 * |
63 ± 15.5 * |
* Significantly lower than the Triangle Push-up (p < 0.05)
† Significantly lower than the Long Head (p < 0.05)
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Posted in Best Exercises, Fitness Tips, Research, Weight Training | 14 Comments »
Thursday, October 6th, 2011
For those who still don’t believe Werewolf Muscle Training works, here is more support of my theory that increased frequency combined with stopping short of fatigue, produces equal if not better results that training a muscle once a week for an hour, with a ton of volume, going to failure on most sets.
The central nervous system is extremely important for performance, and should be stimulated aggressively and frequently, but should not often be fatigued. This also helps explain why you can train muscles when they’re sore… it works just as long as the CNS has recovered.
In this video you will find Christian Thibaudeau from T-Nation. He is way stronger than you or I, and he is just about as ripped as I could ever hope to be. A true inspiration.
“Never Chase Fatigue, Chase Performance”
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Tags: build muscle, build strength, fatigue, gain muscle, gain strength, muscle, performance, strength, Weight Training, weightlifting
Posted in Bodybuilding, Fitness Tips, Quote of the Day, Videos, Weight Training | 3 Comments »
Thursday, September 29th, 2011
Editor’s Note: I nearly didn’t publish this guest post, due to the fact that I don’t believe any Project Swole readers want ‘skinny legs’. I am a firm believer in diet and heavy resistance training to lose fat and create hard, dense lower body muscle. But hey, if any of you female Swole readers want toothpick legs, here is some good advice.
As you go about your workout program, one goal that you might have set for yourself is to get skinny legs. For many people, especially women, losing weight in the thigh region does tend to be placed on high priority as this is that one place where females naturally tend to store higher amounts of body fat.
If you want to get skinny legs, there are a number of important things that you should be focused on doing with your workout routine. Implementing the correct strategies will ensure that you’re doing everything possible to reach your end goal.
Let’s look at the main points to consider to help you learn how to get skinny legs.
Avoid Resistance Based Cardio Exercise
The very first thing that you’ll want to make sure you’re doing in order to get skinny legs is avoiding any cardio exercise variations that are going to place a high level of resistance on the muscles. This would include activities such as biking at a high level or uphill walking.
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Tags: legs, skinny, women
Posted in Fitness Tips | 2 Comments »
Friday, August 26th, 2011
Today’s society is keener on converting young athletes into peak performers overnight by just winning competitions. The people behind these young athletes i.e. parents and coaches, fail to understand that there is much more than just winning.
Peak performance is not only about winning a competition or two. The athletes should be able to perform well for a long while in their field of interest.
The training program thus, should comprise of a comprehensive plan that combines various elements pertaining to the body, mind and spirit, so as to improve the performance of the athletes both on and off the court. What are the factors to consider while devising such a training program?
Here are some tips for young athletes to achieve peak performance:
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Tags: athletes, fitness, Kids, performance, Sports, teenagers, young
Posted in Fitness Tips, Kids, Sports, Weight Training | 1 Comment »
Monday, August 15th, 2011
Eat Right, Train Right and You Can Have it All
A couple days ago I posted the first 5 reasons you are not gaining weight. Here are 5 more reasons you are not gaining weight. Check out the first article if you missed it: 10 Reasons You Are Not Gaining Weight Part 1
Peep these second 5 five items in my list of 10 possible ways you could be sabotaging your muscle building plan.
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Too Much Cardio
To lose fat while maintaining muscle, you’ll want to stick to 2, thirty minute HIIT sessions; and 1, forty five minute endurance session in a week. Adding HIIT like that will help you to elevate your metabolism, which increases fat loss, and will keep cortisol levels in check to preserve existing muscle mass. The HIIT should be a max sprint for an interval of 30-60 seconds, followed by a light jog interval for twice the length of your sprint interval (60-120 seconds).
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Tags: bodybuilding, exercise, fitness, gain mass, gain muscle, mistakes, muscle, muscle building, muscles, strength, tips
Posted in Bodybuilding, Fitness Tips, Weight Training | 6 Comments »
Friday, August 12th, 2011
Attention Hard Gainers and Dudes Who Want to Gain 10 lbs of Solid Muscle!
You use protein shakes. You eat lots of food. You workout like a maniac. Yet you still weigh 50 pounds less than your goal weight. Sick of skinny wrists and stick figure calves? Stop making the mistakes that compromise your weight gain strategies.
There are several components that go into a proper weight gain cycle. Nutrition is most important, exercise is next, and lifestyle can make or break you. Today we will cover some nutrition mistakes you might be making. Fix them today so you can gain muscle tomorrow!
Here are the first 5 points in my list of 10 mistakes you could be making to sabotage your weight gain.
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Tags: bodybuilding, exercise, fitness, gain mass, gain muscle, mistakes, muscle, muscle building, muscles, strength, tips
Posted in Bodybuilding, Diet, Fitness Tips, Nutrition Tip | 6 Comments »
Monday, August 1st, 2011
How to Effectively Combine HIIT Sessions with Endurance Cardio
Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention please: walking or jogging for hours on the treadmill, peddling for hours on the stationary bike, climbing a mountain on the StairMaster, and plodding away on the elliptical trainer is NOT the best way to burn calories!
We’ve seen a hundred studies telling us that high intensity interval training (HIIT) burns more calories and fat, speeds up your metabolism, and is less catabolic than hours of endurance cardio. HIIT can also be far less boring, will actually help you build more muscle tissue, and increases your resting metabolic rate.
HIIT: Twenty minutes of HIIT cardio improves your VO2 max, burns a ton of calories, increases your metabolism, and maintains or builds muscle tissue all at once.
vs.
Endurance Cardio: Sixty minutes of endurance cardio is not only boring as hell, it also increases cortisol, burns muscle tissue (protein) for energy, and halts protein synthesis.
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Tags: cardio, cardiovascular, endurance, exercise, fat loss, hiit, lifting, lose fat, training, Weight Training, weightlifting, workout
Posted in Conditioning, Fitness Tips, HIIT Routines | 11 Comments »
Friday, July 29th, 2011
It’s not this easy, but these 10 basic tips will get you started in your quest to accomplish your strength and bodybuilding goals.
- The basics have always and will always work best. You can build a core workout routine with just squats, deads, bench, overhead press, pull ups / chin ups, dips, and situps. Rows and curls can be added as needed.
- Find what works best for you and keep doing it until it no longer works. Start with the basics, optimize for your personal needs, repeat until you plateau.
- As long as you are making progress, stick with your routine. No need to change workout routines every month just because you don’t want to plateau. If your routine is working, stick with it UNTIL you plateau.
- Strength is greater than bulk. If you are strong you have nothing to prove and it is easy to get bigger. If you are big it’s tough to get stronger and strong guys will tell you “well, at least you LOOK strong.”
- Three months is the minimum trial length before you can pass judgement. Six months is even better. What I’m saying is, you need to stick with a plan for 3-6 months before you can say it does or doesn’t work.
- Free weights rule.
- Excuses will hold you back for your entire life if you let them. Stop making excuses, stop reading and researching, stop thinking. Just do it!
- You will become your environment. If you want to be weak and small, surround yourself with weak and small. If you want to be big and strong, hang with those guys, ask questions, and take advice from those who have accomplished what you want to accomplish.
- You have to really want what you think you want. If you REALLY wanted to be strong, you’d be strong by now. So change your mindset today. If you really want to be something, you have to want it more than anything else.
- Eat to grow. You have to eat if you want to get stronger. You have to eat if you want to get bigger. If you’re not getting bigger or stronger, eat more food. Especially protein.
Tags: basics, bodybuilding, Fitness Tips, Motivation, muscle, strength, strong, strongman, tips
Posted in Fitness Tips, Motivation | 3 Comments »
Friday, June 10th, 2011
10 Things to Avoid If You Want to Build Rock Solid Muscles Fast
Here is a guest post that a personal trainer once wrote for me. The writing style sounds suspiciously international in origin, but the points he makes are true.
Many fitness and bodybuilding magazines come up with different tips to help you with bodybuilding. You can find abundant of tips to help you in bodybuilding. However, you also need to know some things that you need to avoid for building those rock solid muscles quickly.
Here is a list of 10 tips that you must avoid while engaging in muscle building and bodybuilding:
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Tags: bodybuilding, gain mass, gain muscle, gain weight, mass gain, muscle gain, weight gain
Posted in Bodybuilding, Fitness Tips | 7 Comments »
Sunday, January 23rd, 2011
I get plenty of questions in various comments throughout the website, but I also get comments and questions via the Project Swole Contact Form.
Generally I address those questions through e-mail, but often I do not have the time to reply to each and every question personally.
From now on I want to take a more proactive approach to answering Your Health Questions by posting them separately in the blog. This way we can be sure that everyone benefits from the Q & A.
Kalee wrote:
I have shin splints right now so I can’t run or bike or anything but lift weights while sitting and do core exercises… unless you can think of anything that I could do for cardio that wouldn’t require me to use my legs. What exercises [should I use] until my shin splints heal? Thanks!
Response:
If you haven’t managed to avoid shin splints, then it is obvious that you haven’t read and understood my article about How to Avoid Shins Splints, but first, if you haven’t already, you should take a couple minutes to understand What Are Shin Splints. Once you’ve become well versed on shin splints, you can now read about how heal or treat shin splints. Let’s get this problem under control so you can get back to training.
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Tags: injuries, injury, leg training, legs, Medical, prevention, running, shin splitns, shins, Sports
Posted in Fitness Tips, Medical, Sports, Your Questions | 2 Comments »
Thursday, January 20th, 2011
Isn’t it obvious that we wouldn’t have to know how to recover from shin splints if we could avoid them in the first place? In order to understand how to avoid shin splints, we must first understand What Are Shin Splints. Then we can better understand how to proactively avoid them. We need to learn more about who gets shin splints, how to properly warm up and stretch the lower leg, and finally we need a method of strengthening those muscles. Assuming we can’t avoid shin splints, we will need to understand How to Treat Shin Splints.
Now, let’s examine the best ways to avoid shin splints by first understanding who is in danger of developing them.
Who Gets Shin Splints?
Athletes, weekend warriors, and even military recruits often experience shin splints, especially at the beginning of the season. Sometimes treatment can be as simple as changing to softer running surface or adding extra arch support to shoes to redistribute the stress. Active rest is often recommended by doctors as a primary treatment. This means that a runner should take up non-impact exercises such as swimming or biking, which gives the injured areas time to heal, but also maintains the cardiovascular benefits of exercise.
It is also believed that people with misalignment often develop problems such as shin splints. Misalignment to the knee, pelvis, ankle, neck, and spine, can result in abnormal posture and abnormal ROM at different joints, which causes excessive wear and tear on bones, joints, and muscles.
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Tags: biomechanics, calf, calves, exercise, fitness, footwear, injuries, injury, injury prevention, leg training, legs, Medical, shin splint, shins, Sports
Posted in Fitness Tips, Medical, Sports, Weight Training | 4 Comments »
Friday, September 10th, 2010
Today’s guest post is by Clint Nielsen. He has 10 years of experience with fitness and nutrition. Clint runs a no-nonsense health and fitness blog over at Crude Fitness which is all about helping others achieve their fitness goals without the gimmicks currently being promoted in the fitness industry. Check it out.
Every time I set foot in the gym, I see people that haven’t the slightest clue as to why they are there, nor what they should be doing.
I often see them struggling with weights that are way too heavy or i find gym-goers that are training with the intensity of a sloth on Valium.
I’m not trying to be sexist here by any means, as these traits often apply to both genders.
Without further hesitation, here are the Top 5 things women do that hinder their progress in the gym:
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Tags: crude fitness, fitness, Guest Post, myths, training, women
Posted in Fitness Tips | 12 Comments »
Thursday, September 2nd, 2010
Recently at Project Swole there has been some discussion of post-workout nutrition. I typically recommend Biotest Surge but several people in the last 6 months or so have suggested chocolate milk. The reality is that chocolate milk really might be the best and cheapest drink you can use post-workout.
The Study
In a recent study, novice weightlifters who trained to failure with 3 sets of 6 exercises each day and drank a post-workout supplement immediately after training, gained 5 pounds of muscle in only 8 weeks.
The proof is out there, experts have been touting it for years, and now you just have to accept it: post-workout nutrition is a necessity to maximize muscle growth.
Make sure you drink your post-workout shakes within 20 minutes of finishing your training, in order to take advantage of the most optimal anabolic window for growth. By doing this you will immediately reverse catabolism and kick-start protein synthesis, which puts you in the fast lane, on the highway to muscle recovery.
So, what are your options for a post-workout shake?
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Tags: Biotest, Diet, nutrition, post-workout, protein powder, protein shake, recovery, Surge, whey protein
Posted in Fitness Tips, Nutrition Tip | 1 Comment »
Monday, May 24th, 2010
Here’s a tip I read last week when I was reading about pull-ups and chin-ups. Apparently by using this tip, chin-ups will “feel” easier. Give it a try and let me know if it works for you. Check it out:
Rather than thinking about pulling yourself up when you do chin-ups, imagine pulling your elbows down instead. In theory, this will make the exercise seem “easier”.
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Tags: back, chin-ups, chinups, fitness tip, pull-ups, pullups, Weight Training, weightlifting
Posted in Fitness Tips | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, April 13th, 2010
Do you see these people walking around all day long, who appear not to be that fat, but whose bellies stick out like they are preggo? This happens because their internal abdominal muscles are weak and loose. Don’t let this happen to you.
The best way to flatten your belly is to work your invisible abdominal muscles. The transverse abdominis lies beneath your rectus abdominus; the rectus abdominus of course being the muscle that most people refer to as “the six-pack”.
When you suck in your stomach and your waist appears to be flatter, the muscle responsible for this is indeed the transverse abdominis. The good news is that the transverse abdominis can be trained with exercise.
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Tags: abdominals, abs, belly, Fitness Tips, gut, six pack, stomach, transversus, vacuum
Posted in Fitness Tips | 12 Comments »
Friday, March 26th, 2010
I haven’t verified this tip yet, but Charles Staley once said that you can lift more weight if you look at your dominant hand when benching. Although you are not supposed to turn your head at all.
Really, I have no idea if this works, but if you give it a try please let us know what happens. It doesn’t sound like anything I would ever tell anyone to do, but maybe it has a place in max effort training?
I remain skeptical.
Tags: bench press, benching, chest, powerlifting
Posted in Fitness Tips | 3 Comments »
