Category Archives: Motivation

Blog, Motivation

Simple is Best

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While I’ve been sitting here trying to come up with content, thinking about how I have trained and the things I have done, it has dawned on me that nothing I ever did was all that special.

While thinking about how I built my shoulders, I only had 4 exercises to write about. Three sets of four different exercises and that’s it. The entire plan could be written on a post-it note. The same goes for my workout split in those early days. four days a week, about 1 hour every day and that was it.

My rep schemes didn’t change all that often, my exercise selection didn’t either, neither did the days I worked out or the time I spent in the gym. The only major change was the change from using lighter weights to using heavier weights as I progressed. It was all part of a very simple, but very repeatable formula. Almost too simple it seems……

This is the fitness secret that everyone keeps asking for but no one wants to see. Everyone is hoping for that magic exercise, or magic diet or secret supplement that can allow them to reach their goals, but ultimately they hope that they can reach their goals by doing less work as well. Ultimately this seems to be the goal, to achieve their goals but without working for them. The problem is that if they spent just a little less time working for the secret and a little more time  working out in the gym they would already have those goals or be well on their way to them.

To get bigger and stronger you need only two things: A simple routine made up of big movements that you can add weight to easily, and a plan that you can easily stick to every week. If that is a three day plan then so be it. Four day plan, fine. If it is easy for you to do then go 5 days a week. The point is that going to the gym and deciding what movements to do should be the easiest part of all this.

Stop making it hard!

Simple and consistent is the key.

Blog, Motivation

Save Money By Making Smarter Training Choices

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Penny smart, Dollar Stupid

Today I’m going to give you guys a little investment advice. I’m no Warren Buffet but I really do believe that if you listen carefully to the following advice I think you will get a good return on your investment.

I’m talking money wise and training wise here and I’m also going to be calling out certain people and places. If you find yourself being offended then yes i am talking to you and this advice is for you.

A few times a week the topic of fitness and weight training pops up in conversation and one of the most common occurrences is when after listening to someone’s problems, I ask them where they work out and they get a little quiet, they shake their head and they reluctantly admit that they work out at Planet Fitness. You can see the shame in their face almost as if they admitted to spying on their country or cheating on their wife. The second most common occurrence, and one I find much more annoying is the pompous and arrogant statement of “I have better things to spend my time and money on then going to the gym.” This statement usually comes from older people who generally make quite a bit more money then average people, or young people who think they make way more money then most people. It’s quite common for the same people who go to planet fitness to also say they think spending time and money on fitness is stupid. I ultimately find this ironic because the business model of Planet Fitness is to make sure people stay unfit, but for 10 dollars a month. Why not just save the 10 bucks and stay unfit at home for free? But what the hell do I know about anything?

First off let’s get the qualifying statement out of the way, not because I’m worried about offending anyone who may be going to Planet Fitness, but because I actually want you to keep reading long enough to benefit yourself. Planet Fitness is better then nothing, for sure and it may be possible that for some people that is the only gym they have access to at this point in their life. That’s fine because sometimes you have to just make do with what you have. But almost everyone with some serious muscle building or strength goals realizes that Planet Fitness and others like it are marginal gyms at best and ill equipped to handle the goals of someone moderately serious.

Health and fitness is one of the most important investments that most people can make in their life and it is also one of the easiest. The cost of a gym membership is a pretty small price to pay compared to all the benefits and a few hours a week surely isn’t too hard to do.

First lets talk training and lame gyms. A cheap chain gym may seem like a good monetary investment at only 10 dollars a month but what are you really getting for that 10 dollars? A pizza party on Fridays? Access to a ton of inferior, feminine colored machines? Bagels in the morning? Which one of these things is going to get you to your fitness goals faster? Since all the junk food isn’t going to help you, lets tackle the issue of the machines. Machines are just not the most efficient way to get stronger and build muscle. Fundamentally, when was the last time you had to exert your leg or arm maximally while in a seated position? Honestly tell me. Have the basics of human movement evolved so much since the invention of the smart phone that we have to create all these fancy new machines to train these new movement patterns? How did Eugene Sandow, Paul Anderson, Reg Park and John Grimek build their strength and physiques before such advanced machines were created?

The big basic barbell exercises are the simplest, most efficient way to create strength and muscle especially in beginners. Barbells can accommodate small incremental loads and they can continue being used and scaled up indefinitely. The very same barbell that can build a 225 pound bench press can build a 500 pound bench press. The four basic barbell movements also hit the most muscle mass, thru the largest range of motion, resulting in more strength and muscle gains per any given amount of time. Since so many people are at crappy gyms like this to save money maybe they should also look at saving time as well. After-all time is money and time spent in the gym can eat into your time making money, so why not pick the movements that can build the most muscle in the shortest amount of time? Adding ten pounds of muscle will happen much faster under a heavy squat bar then on a purple seated leg extension machine.

Now let’s address the money issue. The people I’m going to hit hard are the people I meet out at the bars and social events who think 30, 40, or 50 dollars a month is too much to spend on a gym membership. What are all of these people doing when they say this to me? Drinking a beer or mixed drink and getting drunk. These must be free beers because because the average beer in my town is about 4.25 or 4.75 and the cheapest real mixed drink is about 6 bucks, and that can add up to more then a monthly gym membership real quick. I bet most of these people aren’t walking out with less then a 20 dollar bar tab any given night, and most are going out a few nights a week, sometimes even eating food too. Just being conservative and saying they go out once a week and have a 20 dollar tab; that’s 80 dollars a month….enough for two memberships at my gym. Are we all starting to see where I’m going with this?

Let’s break it down and look at how long they spend drinking, I’d guess on average about 4 hours each night they go out, conservatively. Simple math shows us that is  16 hours spent each month. The real numbers are likely much higher then this. Please don’t now tell me that it’s hard to find time to go to the gym….. Honestly if you’re serious about getting to the gym then you can cut back on this somewhat and you’re just lying to yourself if you say otherwise.

And now the nail in the coffin, health or lack of it is one of the great equalizers in this world. All the money in the world won’t stave off a heart attack if you insist on eating like shit and not exercising. Sure you can buy a new heart,  but that’s assuming you live thru the heart attack in the first place. What kind of hospital bill will it be after spending a week in the hospital after a heart attack? Or after breaking a bone, or tearing a weak muscle? Taking some kind of interest in fitness and proper diet of any kind is your first, best and most controllable step you can take as far as keeping your health in check.  I have one friend who refused to take weight training seriously and suffered a torn acl, the surgery to fix that costed more then I’ve spent on gym memberships in the last 12 years.  Another friend of mine neglected weight training for years and suffered a shoulder injury that never healed properly that will most likely require surgery one day. This won’t be a free procedure either….

This comes full circle back to the idea of the best results for your time and money spent. 4 hours a week in the gym kept me strong enough to avoid injuries doing the very same activities that hurt my friends and I got a whole host of other benefits as well. A relatively short amount of time spent on the big basic barbell exercises will have a much greater return then the same amount of time spent on inferior machines and the results will be fairly permanent with a fairly low amount of maintenance required just to maintain it.

A gym membership alone won’t be enough but the lasting discipline, knowledge and muscle that come from reaching and exceeding strength and physique goals will make a huge difference later in life. Look at famous lifters who are older men now and compare them to the average penny pinching man, or woman, the same age that you see in the real world and tell me who would you rather be? I look around and at 31 most of my peers from high school look and act as if they were 50 years old. A good friend of mine a few years ago died of a heart attack at age 45. Let’s compare that to one of my bmx heros Dennis Mccoy who at 47 years old won third at the X Games this year and pulled a 900 on the vert ramp like 8 feet high. Which one of those two do you think was eating doughnuts and drinking cases of soda all the time?

Would you rather save 40 dollars a month now and pay for it the rest of your life or would you like to treat your body and health as an investment and spend that 40 dollars now and stave off a $100,000 dollar hospital bill later? The best way to save money is a little bit at a time and to make a habit of it, the same goes for fitness, a little bit now will pay off a lot late

Blog, Motivation

Put The Books Down!

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Just 5 years ago the internet was a very different place. Today you can find any information you want, on any subject that you desire, especially fitness. Whatever your fitness goals, you can find methods of achieving them on the online.

Want safe steroid advice? The internet has it. Stuck at a 300 pound bench and not sure how to get it higher? The internet has the answer. Want advice about a new, trendy, yet inefficient new strength activity/sport? The internet has that too. The internet and especially youtube has enabled us to find a wealth of knowledge about any topic we wish.

Unfortunately there is no filter on the internet. There is also no “stop” button. It seems as though new studies are giving us new information every single day. Every day it seems as though the accepted knowledge is being challenged and new answers are being put forth. This seems to be happening in the fitness industry more then most.

Is brown rice better then white rice today? Should I do a linear progression plan or a periodized progression plan? What about squats? Are they good for the knees today or bad? High carb or low carb diet? Gluten free? What the hell is a paleo diet? With so much information available how does anyone know where to begin? Unfortunately this is exactly the problem.

Many people never begin.

They are constantly searching for the perfect information, the best plan, the best diet, and they put off achieving their goals until they find this elusive “perfect plan.” Another name for this is Analysis Paralysis. There is simply so much information available that you don’t know where to begin.

This can happen to anyone; it even happened to me.

About a year ago I got the competition bug. I decided to enter a few small powerlifting competitions being held at my local gym. I entered two push/pull competitions and one full competition that had bench, squat and deadlift.  Due to my advanced training age, I thought i was in need of a lot of advanced lifting techniques. I spent a year doing all kinds of crazy things, chains, partial reps, paused reps, heavy singles, deadlift every day, bench press every day, extended range of motion exercises, partial range of motion exercises, explosive variations of exercises, and all sorts of other “advanced techniques” that I had read about online. Every day I was learning about some new method to “strengthen my weak point”, and implementing it into my training.

My results were less then stellar.  In general after a year of such techniques and intense reading my results were not impressive.

At one point I realized that I myself had turned into one of those “program hoppers” and I had over estimated my response to training, and as a result I made much less progress then I would have made on a much simpler  intermediate program, or honestly, any actual program.

Beginning in 2016 I decided I was going to pick a proven plan and just stick to it. I tried out the Madcow Advanced 5×5 and I’ve never looked back. After running that for it’s entire 9 weeks I chose an even simpler intermediate program because I felt like my recovery abilities could support it and I’ve been extremely pleased. My progress has been astounding but almost as important as that was another unexpected side effect….

I had freed my mind!

Suddenly now that I was on a proven, effective program based around a simple linear progression of adding 5 pounds per week, I no longer felt the need or desire to constantly read the bodybuilding and powerlifting blogs every single day. I simply did not feel required to know every single trick in the book, I was already making effective progress with the tricks i was currently using. This allowed me to concentrate more on my work, and my side business and it really made training more fun and easier to do. All the trouble shooting and constant “improvement” was over. It almost felt like my training was on autopilot. And without having to read all the weightlifting blogs every morning I was able to use that time for more productive things.

I had realized that I had found that elusive perfect plan. The unicorn of the fitness world.

The only problem is that there is no such plan. There is no unicorn. No plan works forever. But the best part is, so what? So what if every plan will stop working someday? Why not just run the plan until that happens? There’s the answer. There is no need to fix something that isn’t broken. Wait till it breaks, then fix it. Once your program stops, assess what has happened and find a new program that will take you forward again. Every lifter goes thru these various phases throughout their training career. These are natural cycles.

The problem with the internet is that it provides new information at a pace that far exceeds our ability to fully assess and vet that very information. There is no need to suddenly change an effective program that is working simply because some new article got posted today, or some guy on Youtube has a new bench press variation “guaranteed to bust your plateau.” Hell, most of us, myself included, are not even strong enough yet to be at a real plateau.

The basic proven principles of building strength haven’t changed much in 50 years, I doubt tomorrow’s new blog post will revolutionize the weight training world with some amazing new techniques or methods. One thing that was true 100 years ago and is still true today, internet or no internet, is that no one ever got strong just by reading a book, or watching a youtube video, or reading a blog post. Action is the single most important thing, without action nothing will ever happen.  The only way books alone are going to make you stronger is if you hang them off the ends of the barbell and start squatting them.

Strength is built in the gym. Take Action; find a good plan, then turn off the internet and start lifting!

Blog, Motivation

Don’t be Afraid of Strength

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Are you afraid to be strong?

Everyone wants to be a bodybuilder but no one wants to lift no heavy ass weights-Ronnie Coleman, 8 time Mr Olympia

It seems nowadays that no truer words have ever been spoken.

Literally every single friend  I have who is into lifting who doesn’t do powerlifting says the exact same thing. None of them care about getting stronger. Every guy, and every girl I talk about training with, only wants to “get toned” or “build their physique”

Why is everyone so afraid to be strong?

When did strength and performance become completely detached from “building a physique”? Do these people ever wonder why they seem to have the same physique year after year? Do they ever wonder why they spend so much time in the gym isolating every little muscle,or spending hours prepping strange trendy foods only to never  appear significantly leaner or more muscular?

How is it that these same people seem so obsessed with watching sports, and envying the physiques of their heroes but none of them seem to look like these people?  How can these people be spinning their wheels and not going anywhere? Bad genetics? No drugs? Not enough money to eat right?

The simple answer is this-THEY ARE NOT STRONG ENOUGH!

It really is that simple. Want bigger legs, then squat more weight. Want bigger shoulders, overhead press more weight. Want a bigger back, then deadlift and row more weight.  I can almost just end this article right there and be finished; the answer is really that simple.

Every single person i know who wants to tone or just look buff has this one problem in common without fail. They are not strong enough. How do  know they aren’t strong enough?

Its easy, they are not even anywhere near their genetic potential. How do I know what someone’s genetic potential is? The real answer is-I don’t need to.

No one knows the answer to that but it certainly isn’t less then a double body weight squat, a 2.5 times body weight deadlift or a 1.5 times body weight bench press (for men.) With the exception of some medical problem every single able bodied person can get to these numbers and exceed them with fairly little effort. Yet everyone I know with a less then impressive physique who still spends hours in the gym, can not hit any of these strength bench marks.

The basic barbell exercises are the fundamental corner stones of the most basic human movement patterns. Even the barbell itself is the most basic yet most efficient tool for building strength in these fundamental movement patterns. Oddly enough, strength is also one of the easiest athletic traits to grow and improve. The vertical jump cannot be dramatically improved and sport skill can take many many years to perfect. Yet building some decent strength can be done in a relatively short amount of time with efficient training, and without drugs, and it is a fairly permanent physical change to the body. So why the hell isn’t anyone doing any of this?

Two main reasons:

1: Mental laziness

2: Lack of education

To varying degrees and combinations these two things are the main reasons that most gym goers refuse to believe that getting strong on the basics barbell exercises is the answer to their physique goals.

Mental laziness: A lot of the people I’m talking about are not actually lazy, they really do “work hard in the gym” the problem is that it’s physically hard to  do tons of drops sets to get a burn or pump but it is way easier mentally to do drop sets or high reps with 135 pounds on the squat then to climb under the bar with double body weight and pound out 5 or 6 grueling reps. Real heavy weight can be scary, it can be stressful, and that can make it very appealing to use other techniques to make lighter weight seem harder. But at the end of the day its still just lighter weight, and while in the very short term you may see a change, this will lead to stagnation very quickly. This is a time when you need to work smarter, and harder.

This brings me to a lack of education. The very principles of volume, frequency, intensity, and hypertrophy are simply not taught to people by the magazines or whatever bullshit websites these people read. The actual hormone response from lifting heavy weights simply cannot be faked by using light weights until they feel heavy. If it could we could all just squat 10 pounds a thousand times and build huge legs.

The best strength results come from training with 85-95 percent of your one rep max, the best muscle building or hypertrophy results come from using 65-75 percent of your max. The middle ground of 80-85% works well for building strength and mass. Roughly speaking, 75% of your max is a weight that you can lift ten times and not an 11th.

What does this mean? It basically means that the prevailing common knowledge of higher reps building more muscle then lower reps, to a point, is true. The key here however is that weight used still has to increase over time. If you can bench 225 for 10 reps and you increase to where you can do 245 for ten reps then you will be much larger. if you don’t add weight to the bar, that weight simply becomes too light to stimulate an adaptation in the muscle, because it falls out of the hypertrophy range and into the endurance range 50-60% and your physique will begin to stagnate. It’s perfectly fine to stay in the lighter range of the spectrum (75%) for a while, maybe a very long while, but improving within that range has to be your main priority. You simply have to add more weight. You have to get stronger.

This brings me to another point-Efficiency

You’re already spending hours in the gym each week, why not spend it on the most efficient exercises you can. Tons of arm curls may build big biceps but they won’t build anything else, but being able to row a large amount of weight will build a big back and big biceps. You can flail around with tricep extensions all day, but that won’t build a bigger chest or bigger shoulders, but building a bigger over head press or bench press will build all three of those muscle groups. These days everyone seems super busy and we can only spend so much time in the gym, why not spend that time as efficiently as possible?

This brings me back to the basic barbell exercises. These exercises work the largest amount of muscle groups thru the fullest range of natural motion. More muscles moving more weight equals more muscle mass being built.

They are also scaleable. You can always add more weight to the squat, or deadlift, but 900 pound deadlifters aren’t doing bicep curls with 200 pound dumbells.

They aren’t doing lateral raises with 150 pound dumbells. The isolation exercises simply can not be scaled up that far. However, you can always add a little bit to your bench press, squat and deadlift.

I’m not saying that isolation lifts don’t have a role to play but they should never make up the bulk of your training time. 

There isn’t a 500 pound squatter on earth who doesn’t have impressive quads. There isn’t a 600 pound deadlifter who doesn’t have an impressive back. If you want to get bigger, you have to get stronger. it is that simple. Every major muscle growth spurt I’ve had coincided with large strength increases, and also, every period of stagnation I’ve encountered happened when I focused too much on making lighter weights feel heavy, and not actually increasing the weight on the bar. So after reading all this, ARE YOU STILL SCARED OF GETTING STRONGER?