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Your Workout PERFECTED
320 Pages
Every workout is intended to do one thing: maximize results. Whether that result is fitness, function and performance, fat loss, or physique improvements, you want your efforts to pay off. What if you had the opportunity to have the NSCA Personal Trainer of the Year observe your workout and show you how you could make it better? Now you do have access to that expertise, with Your Workout PERFECTED.
Nick Tumminello, author of Strength Training for Fat Loss and Building Muscle and Performance, knows that a “one size fits all” approach can’t work. That program you’re following—the one you love—may be more harmful than beneficial. Or maybe, with some slight alterations, that program is exactly what you need. That’s why he developed Your Workout PERFECTED. It’s a unique and cooperative approach—one that works to improve, not replace, your routine.
Inside, there are 243 exercises and 71 programs to develop your fitness, promote fat loss, improve your function and performance, or work on your physique, including beginner workout programs for those who are just starting and even alternative home or hotel gym workouts and bodyweight workouts. Plus, you’ll learn the following:
• The mistakes you may already be making
• Minor changes to techniques that can produce big results
• Why certain exercises are preferable over others
• Whether men and women should be trained differently
• Exercises to avoid and proven principles to follow
• Combinations and sequences to maximize results
Each of the exercises is accompanied by step-by-step instructions on setup and execution. The workouts are designed for various settings (in the gym, at home, or on the go), and each ready-to-use program is also customizable to meet your specific needs and help you reach your fitness goals. Highly visual and instantly applicable, Your Workout PERFECTED will help you fine-tune your approach to your personal fitness.
Part I: Training Objectives
Chapter 1. Fitness
Chapter 2. Function and Performance
Chapter 3. Fat Loss
Chapter 4. Physique
Part II: Exercises
Chapter 5. Warm-Up and Mobility Exercises
Chapter 6. Upper-Body Exercises
Chapter 7. Lower-Body Exercises
Chapter 8. Core Exercises
Chapter 9. Conditioning Exercises
Part III: Programming
Chapter 10. General Beginner Programs
Chapter 11. Fitness Programs
Chapter 12. Function and Performance Programs
Chapter 13. Fat Loss Programs
Chapter 14. Physique Programs
Chapter 15. Strategies for Minimizing Injury
Nick Tumminello is the owner of Performance University International, which provides strength training and conditioning for athletes and educational programs for trainers and coaches all over the world.
As an educator, Tumminello has become known as the trainer of trainers. He has presented at international fitness conferences in Norway, Iceland, China, and Canada. He has been a featured presenter at conferences held by such organizations as the IDEA Health & Fitness Association, the National Strength and Conditioning Association, and DCAC Fitness Conventions, along with conducting staff trainings at fitness clubs throughout the United States. Tumminello does workshops and mentorship programs in his hometown of Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He is the author of Building Muscle and Performance (Human Kinetics, 2016) and Strength Training for Fat Loss (Human Kinetics, 2014). He has produced more than 20 instructional DVDs and is the coauthor of the National Strength and Conditioning Association’s Program Design Essentials and Foundations of Fitness Programming. Tumminello is also the editor in chief of the National Strength and Conditioning Association’s Personal Training Quarterly (PTQ) journal.
Tumminello has been a fitness professional since 1998 and co-owned a private training center in Baltimore, Maryland, from 2001 to 2011. He has worked with a variety of exercise enthusiasts of all ages and fitness levels, including physique and performance athletes from the amateur level to the professional ranks. From 2002 to 2011, Tumminello was the strength and conditioning coach for the Ground Control MMA fight team. He has been a consultant and expert for clothing and equipment companies such as Sorinex, Dynamax, Hylete, Reebok, and Power Systems.
Tumminello’s articles have appeared in more than 50 major health and fitness magazines, including Men’s Health, Men’s Fitness, Muscle and Performance, Women’s Health, Oxygen, Fitness Rx, and TRAIN. He is also a featured contributor to several popular fitness training websites. He has been on the advisory board for Yahoo! Health and has been featured in two exercise books on the New York Times–best seller list, on the home page of Yahoo! and YouTube, and in the ACE Personal Trainer Manual. In 2015 Tumminello was inducted into the Personal Trainer Hall of Fame.
Tumminello writes a popular fitness training blog at NickTumminello.com.
Nick Tumminello is an innovator in the fitness field. His combination of scientific knowledge and practical experience make him a go-to guy for getting results from a fitness program, as displayed in Your Workout PERFECTED. Highly recommended reading.
Brad Schoenfeld, PhD—Author of The M.A.X. Muscle Plan and Science and Development of Muscle Hypertrophy
It’s hard to think of anyone who consistently contributes as much valuable information as Nick Tumminello. Your Workout PERFECTED showcases his unique ability to reveal how much we don’t know about strength training—and how much we do know that’s either inaccurate or antithetical to our goals.
Lou Schuler—Award-Winning Fitness Journalist, LouSchuler.com
There are just a few trainers in the industry who are creative enough to come up with new ideas that get used around the world. Nick is one of those guys, and he constantly leaves me saying to myself, "Now why didn't I think of that?"
Bret Contreras, PhD, CSCS,*D—Owner of Glute Lab, Author of Strong Curves and Bodyweight Strength Training Anatomy
Nick Tumminello is kind of a pain in the butt. You can't just say, “Hey, Nick, what do you think of this exercise?" No, he'll analyze it, research it, conduct 101 experiments on it, and then he'll show you about a dozen ways to make it better. It's really quite annoying. He gets away with it because he's damn near always right.
TC Luoma—Editor of Testosterone Nation
If you're looking for accurate and scientifically backed information, quality workouts that are interesting and fun, and programs that are designed by someone who walks the walk and trains real people, you need not look any further than Nick Tumminello. It's been my pleasure to know him and learn from him for the past decade; he's the real deal.
Cassandra Forsythe, PhD, RD, CSCS—Professor of Exercise Science, Author, and Mom
Dumbbell front shoulder raise
Setup: Stand tall, with your feet hip-width apart. Hold a pair of dumbbells at your sides (see figure a).
Setup
Stand tall, with your feet hip-width apart. Hold a pair of dumbbells at your sides (see figure a).
Action and Coaching Tips
With your elbows slightly bent, raise your arms out in front of your body until your elbows go just above your forehead (see figure b). Do not swing the weight up. Slowly lower the dumbbells back to your sides. Use deliberate control on the lifting and lowering portion of each rep.
Why It's Better
You increase range of motion when lifting your arms up during this exercise. Stopping when your arms are parallel to the floor is like stopping a biceps curl when your forearm is parallel to the floor.
Many lifters say they don't lift their arms above shoulder level - even keeping them slightly below shoulder level - when doing shoulders raises to minimize the involvement of the upper traps. Interestingly, many of these same people do shrugs, upright rows, and other trap-oriented exercises.
Now, if for some reason you're avoiding upper trap exercises and do not want activity in your upper traps, just know that research has found that, out of 16 commonly used shoulder training and rehabilitation exercises - such as seated row, knee push-up plus, or biceps curl - all but one exercise showed moderate to low activity in the upper traps. And none of the 16 exercises investigated in this study were a shoulder shrug or upright row. The one exercise mentioned here is commonly known as the full can, which is where you're standing with your arm at your side in external rotation. Then you lift your arm in the scapular plane (at a 30-degree angle to your torso) until your arm is 90 degrees to the floor. In short, it's very much like a side shoulder raise.
The point is, don't have the delusion that your upper traps aren't being activated in upper-body exercises that you didn't think involved that muscle group.
Benefits
- Greater range of motion
- More comprehensive shoulder training
Learn more about Your Workout PERFECTED.
Nutrition for fat loss: made simple
We can’t talk about fat loss without talking about eating behaviors (a.k.a. diet). You won’t find a more common question than, How should I eat for fat loss?
We can't talk about fat loss without talking about eating behaviors (a.k.a. diet). You won't find a more common question than, How should I eat for fat loss? For an answer you'll get lots of different opinions. The fact is, this issue, along with other issues like it, isn't about what this or that so-called expert says, and it's definitely not about what some athlete, trainer, or lean person at gym says. It's about what the body of scientific evidence - not just a single study - says when taken as a whole.
The International Society of Sports Nutrition (ISSN) has provided a list of conclusions and recommendations (for eating and exercising) in their position stand paper on diets and body composition. Here are a few of major takeaways from the ISSN's scientific paper:
- There are many diet types and eating styles. The various diet archetypes are wide-ranging in total energy and macronutrient distribution. Each type carries varying degrees of supporting data and unfounded claims.
- A wide range of dietary approaches (low-fat to low-carbohydrate/ketogenic, and all points between) can be similarly effective for improving body composition, and this allows flexibility with program design. To date, no controlled, inpatient isocaloric (i.e., calories matched) diet comparison, where protein is matched between groups, has reported a clinically meaningful fat loss or thermic (i.e., metabolic) advantage to the lower-carbohydrate or ketogenic diet.
- Common threads run through the diets in terms of the mechanism of action for weight loss and weight gain (i.e., sustained hypocaloric versus hypercaloric conditions), but there are also potentially unique means by which certain diets achieve their intended objectives (e.g., factors that facilitate greater satiety, ease of compliance, support of training demands).
- Diets focused primarily on fat loss (and weight loss beyond initial reductions in body water) operate under the fundamental mechanism of a sustained caloric deficit. This net hypocaloric (i.e., reduced calorie) balance can either be imposed daily or over the course of the week.
- The collective body of research about intermittent caloric restriction (i.e., intermittent fasting) demonstrates no significant advantage over daily caloric restriction for improving body composition. Increasing dietary protein to levels significantly beyond current recommendations for athletic populations may improve body composition. The ISSN's original 2007 position on protein intake (1.4-2.0 g/kg) has gained further support from subsequent investigations arriving at similar requirements in athletic populations. Higher protein intakes (2.3-3.1 g/kg Fat Free Mass) may be required to maximize muscle retention in lean, resistance-trained subjects in hypocaloric conditions. Emerging research on very high protein intakes (>3 g/kg) has demonstrated that the known thermic, satiating, and lean mass-preserving effects of dietary protein might be amplified in resistance training subjects.
- Most existing research showing adaptive thermogenesis (i.e.,a slowing of metabolism) has involved diets that combine aggressive caloric restriction with low protein intakes and an absence of resistance training, essentially creating a perfect storm for slowing metabolism. Research that has mindfully included resistance training and adequate protein has circumvented the problem of adaptive thermogenesis and muscle loss, despite very low-calorie intakes.
- The long-term success of a diet depends on compliance.
As you can see, the relationship of how many calories you consume per day to the number you expend per day is the single most important factor when it comes to determining whether you lose fat.
Now, whenever someone says this, someone else tries to refute it by bringing up the fact that the quality or composition of the calories you eat matters. They present it as an either/or proposition. But this relationship doesn't discount that some calories are more nutrient dense than others. (After all, we've all heard the term "empty calories.") It simply demonstrates that one can be both well nourished and overfed. Food quality and food quantity are important factors that should be considered together; as important as it is to eat high-quality, nutrient-dense foods for general health, you can still gain fat from eating "healthy" if you eat too many calories relative to what you're expending.
That said, focus on the quality of the foods you eat. Emphasize fruits and vegetables and high-quality meats, eggs, and fish (or protein substitutes, for vegetarians and vegans), while limiting refined foods, simple sugars, hydrogenated oil, and alcohol. Fruits, veggies, and lean proteins are generally lower in calories than things like fast food and candy. Don't overeat. Stop before you feel bloated and stuffed. You'll likely end up taking in fewer calories without even actually counting them.
You don't just want to be well fed; you want to be well nourished. Emphasizing the quality (i.e., nutrient density) of the foods you eat over the quantity (i.e., number of calories) is an easy approach. Try it and see where that gets you. It spells success for most people.
But it's certainly possible to eat too many calories from nutrient-dense, high-quality foods. Don't think for a second that you can't gain fat from eating "healthy." While you can first emphasize the quality of the foods you eat and see where that strategy gets you, it may only take you so far. You may need another strategy as well. The next step is to focus on the caloric quantity of the food you're eating and put yourself into a caloric deficit. The ways to create a caloric deficit involve eating fewer calories, increasing your activity level to expend more calories, or a combination of both.
Learn more about Your Workout PERFECTED.
Questions to ask yourself before the lift
Evaluating your lifting program gives you the chance to see if you could be doing things more effectively.
Evaluating your lifting program gives you the chance to see if you could be doing things more effectively. The following details a variety of questions to ask yourself before you lift along with what you need to know in order to avoid the common mistakes and get the most out of your workouts.
Are You Lifting Too Much?
At any given time at any big-box gym, you'll see at least one guy doing biceps curls or shoulder raises, and he has to throw his lower back into it each time he brings the weight up. If you don't see that dude at your gym, it may be because it's you.
It's easy to make this mistake. After all, you're in the gym to lift weights, and the previous section did mention that lifting heavy loads is an effective stimulus for muscle growth, right? Well, sort of. Training to maximize muscle is not about becoming a "weightlifter." It's about using weights as a tool to increase your muscle size. Simply throwing as much weight around as you can move to boost your ego and impress the people around you is the wrong approach.
When you use weights that are too heavy, here's what happens:
- You reduce the time under (mechanical) tension because you're forced to use momentum to cheat.
- You're unable to lower the weight slowly and with control, further reducing your time under (mechanical) tension.
- You utilize more muscles, which reduces the accumulated pump (i.e., metabolic stress) in muscles you intend to target.
Training to maximize muscle isn't just about moving the weight - that's weightlifting - but about controlling the weight through the entire range of motion involved in the exercise you're doing. The point of emphasis on each repetition is to avoid swinging the weight up or "cheating" by using other areas of your bodyweight to move the load.
Do Cheat Reps Work?
There is research showing that using moderate momentum (cheating) increases the torque of the target muscles even without an increase in the load. That moderate increase in load and using momentum allows the torque to be increased even further. While an excessive use of momentum results in lower demands on the target muscles, an excessive increase of the load reduces the total hypertrophy stimulus by virtue of the decreased number of repetitions that can be performed successfully. The time under tension is shortened dramatically.
It can appear as if the results of this study validate cheating by incorporating momentum into the sets, but it doesn't. The results of this study shouldn't surprise you, because mechanical tension on the muscles is still present during cheat reps. However, this doesn't mean that cheating with momentum is just as effective as not cheating by avoiding momentum. Cheating is basically only applying mechanical tension in part of the range of motion and using momentum to get through the rest of the range. Although cheating may still have you moving through the full range of motion involved in the exercise, from a mechanical tension perspective, it's essentially a partial rep performed by target muscles. We have good evidence demonstrating that a partial range of motion rep creates less muscle growth than a full range of motion rep.
How Are You Lowering the Lift?
Controlling the weight while minimizing momentum in exercises to maximize muscle gains also applies to the eccentric portion of each rep. People who cheat the weight up (on the concentric portion of the rep) normally also let the weight come crashing back down (on the eccentric portion of the rep) instead of maintaining deliberate control by slowing the weight down when they lower it. Not controlling the weight on the way down could be less effective. We have evidence demonstrating that a slower (4 second) eccentric lowering action during biceps curls produced superior increases in arm growth than did a one-second eccentric action. This makes perfect sense. A slower eccentric action causes more time under tension, which creates more mechanical tension on the working muscles than a shorter eccentric portion does.
Additionally, from a training safety perspective, since cheating creates an overload of mechanical tension in a small piece of the range of motion involved in an exercise, it is more likely that you'll use a weight that's too heavy for you, making the muscles deal with forces that exceed the structural integrity of your tendons and ligaments and increasing your risk of injury.
If you want to maximize your gains in muscle size, maximize your time under (mechanical) tension on every rep by using strict form as well as controlled eccentric (lowering) movements of around three to five seconds.
Are You Avoiding Machines?
The whole idea of pitting free weights against machines is like pitting fruits against vegetables. Both training modalities offer a unique benefit the other misses, so it makes sense to do them both to make your muscle-building workouts more comprehensive, just like eating both fruits and vegetables will make your diet more nourishing.
Free weights excel by requiring you stabilize and control not just the load being moved but also the path of the movement. However, free weights fall short when it comes to keeping consistent mechanical tension on the working muscles throughout the range of motion involved in most exercises. That's where machines excel and therefore offer distinct benefits for building muscle.
All free-weight exercises have one disadvantage that a machine doesn't - gravity! Free weights use a single load vector, gravity, to create resistance. If you use a pulley cable machine, you're also working against a single load vector, which is the line of the cable itself. When you work against a single load vector, you're going to have points within the range of motion involved in the exercise where the lever arm is long, creating high levels of mechanical tension on the involved muscles, and ranges where the lever arm is short, resulting in little to no mechanical tension on those same muscles.
Example: During any style of biceps curl, the point at which your biceps is being maximally loaded (stimulated) is range of motion when your forearm is at a 90-degree angle with the load vector. If you're using free weights, gravity is your load vector. The point of maximal mechanical tension on the biceps would be when your elbow reaches 90 degrees of flexion or when your forearm is parallel to the floor. If you're doing biceps curls using a cable machine, however, the cable itself is the load vector. The point of maximal mechanical tension to your biceps is when your forearm makes a 90-degree angle with the cable.
Here's the kicker: The farther away you move from a 90-degree angle in either direction of the load vector, the shorter the lever arm and the less work your biceps have to do; therefore, your biceps experience less mechanical tension. That's why, in a free-weight biceps curl, the closer you move toward the bottom or top of the range of motion, the less work your biceps do because the lever arm is shortening. People tend to rest between reps at the top and bottom positions when doing barbell or dumbbell curls.
This applies to any free-weight exercise in that they're all being loaded by a single load vector (gravity or a pulley cable). On the other hand, selectorized machines have a cam system, which isn't dependent on a single load vector like free weights or cables. Instead, the cam is set up to offer you a much more consistent resistance throughout a larger portion of the range of motion. This gives you much more time under tension because your working muscles don't get the same chance to rest at the bottom or top position of the range like they do when you are using free weights.
While you can absolutely build plenty of muscle size exclusively using free weights, there's no reason to avoid machines if you have access to them. Both types of exercises have advantages, so don't let popular misconceptions blind you to machines' unique muscle-building benefits. For muscle gains (and strength gains, which are discussed in the Function and Performance chapter), machines can be very beneficial when used with free weights.
Should Men and Women Train Differently?
It's common to see men stampede toward the free weights, while women pack into the Pilates and yoga studios and line up on cardio and weight machines. Should men and women train as differently as they do? There's a lot of confusion, and here's the truth.
I've written workout programs that were featured in major men's exercise magazines, only to see those exact programs later printed in the same publisher's women's exercise magazines. The only thing that changed was the terminology. In the men's version, it said something like, "Use this workout program to build a stronger and more ripped body,"whereas in the women's version, it said something like, "Use this workout program to shape the tight and toned body of a goddess."
Despite what it might seem, this common practice is not dishonest or misleading. After all, even the best workout won't do anyone any good if it's not put into practice.
The publishers of these exercise magazines are merely trying to reach their readers using the goals they commonly hear them expressing. Put another way: If exercise is medicine, then we're much more likely to take our daily dose when it tastes good to us. If you do a quick Internet search for body-part specific exercises for the glutes, arms, chest, and shoulders, you'll see many of those terms are commonly followed with "for women" or "for men." This isn't by accident. People are including those words in their Internet searches.
The truth is, there are no exercises for men or exercises for women. There are just exercises. We're different sexes, but our bones, connective tissues, nerves, and muscles fibers are all made of the same raw material and function in the same way. There's nothing inherently male about a barbell exercise or nothing inherently female about machine exercises. They're both effective resistance training methods, and each can be used safely and effectively depending on your ability and goals - not your sex.
Don't be afraid of a machine or resistance exercise. The entire gym is open to you, so learn how to use it to your advantage. This book is designed to help you do that.
Learn more about Your Workout PERFECTED.
Dumbbell front shoulder raise
Setup: Stand tall, with your feet hip-width apart. Hold a pair of dumbbells at your sides (see figure a).
Setup
Stand tall, with your feet hip-width apart. Hold a pair of dumbbells at your sides (see figure a).
Action and Coaching Tips
With your elbows slightly bent, raise your arms out in front of your body until your elbows go just above your forehead (see figure b). Do not swing the weight up. Slowly lower the dumbbells back to your sides. Use deliberate control on the lifting and lowering portion of each rep.
Why It's Better
You increase range of motion when lifting your arms up during this exercise. Stopping when your arms are parallel to the floor is like stopping a biceps curl when your forearm is parallel to the floor.
Many lifters say they don't lift their arms above shoulder level - even keeping them slightly below shoulder level - when doing shoulders raises to minimize the involvement of the upper traps. Interestingly, many of these same people do shrugs, upright rows, and other trap-oriented exercises.
Now, if for some reason you're avoiding upper trap exercises and do not want activity in your upper traps, just know that research has found that, out of 16 commonly used shoulder training and rehabilitation exercises - such as seated row, knee push-up plus, or biceps curl - all but one exercise showed moderate to low activity in the upper traps. And none of the 16 exercises investigated in this study were a shoulder shrug or upright row. The one exercise mentioned here is commonly known as the full can, which is where you're standing with your arm at your side in external rotation. Then you lift your arm in the scapular plane (at a 30-degree angle to your torso) until your arm is 90 degrees to the floor. In short, it's very much like a side shoulder raise.
The point is, don't have the delusion that your upper traps aren't being activated in upper-body exercises that you didn't think involved that muscle group.
Benefits
- Greater range of motion
- More comprehensive shoulder training
Learn more about Your Workout PERFECTED.
Nutrition for fat loss: made simple
We can’t talk about fat loss without talking about eating behaviors (a.k.a. diet). You won’t find a more common question than, How should I eat for fat loss?
We can't talk about fat loss without talking about eating behaviors (a.k.a. diet). You won't find a more common question than, How should I eat for fat loss? For an answer you'll get lots of different opinions. The fact is, this issue, along with other issues like it, isn't about what this or that so-called expert says, and it's definitely not about what some athlete, trainer, or lean person at gym says. It's about what the body of scientific evidence - not just a single study - says when taken as a whole.
The International Society of Sports Nutrition (ISSN) has provided a list of conclusions and recommendations (for eating and exercising) in their position stand paper on diets and body composition. Here are a few of major takeaways from the ISSN's scientific paper:
- There are many diet types and eating styles. The various diet archetypes are wide-ranging in total energy and macronutrient distribution. Each type carries varying degrees of supporting data and unfounded claims.
- A wide range of dietary approaches (low-fat to low-carbohydrate/ketogenic, and all points between) can be similarly effective for improving body composition, and this allows flexibility with program design. To date, no controlled, inpatient isocaloric (i.e., calories matched) diet comparison, where protein is matched between groups, has reported a clinically meaningful fat loss or thermic (i.e., metabolic) advantage to the lower-carbohydrate or ketogenic diet.
- Common threads run through the diets in terms of the mechanism of action for weight loss and weight gain (i.e., sustained hypocaloric versus hypercaloric conditions), but there are also potentially unique means by which certain diets achieve their intended objectives (e.g., factors that facilitate greater satiety, ease of compliance, support of training demands).
- Diets focused primarily on fat loss (and weight loss beyond initial reductions in body water) operate under the fundamental mechanism of a sustained caloric deficit. This net hypocaloric (i.e., reduced calorie) balance can either be imposed daily or over the course of the week.
- The collective body of research about intermittent caloric restriction (i.e., intermittent fasting) demonstrates no significant advantage over daily caloric restriction for improving body composition. Increasing dietary protein to levels significantly beyond current recommendations for athletic populations may improve body composition. The ISSN's original 2007 position on protein intake (1.4-2.0 g/kg) has gained further support from subsequent investigations arriving at similar requirements in athletic populations. Higher protein intakes (2.3-3.1 g/kg Fat Free Mass) may be required to maximize muscle retention in lean, resistance-trained subjects in hypocaloric conditions. Emerging research on very high protein intakes (>3 g/kg) has demonstrated that the known thermic, satiating, and lean mass-preserving effects of dietary protein might be amplified in resistance training subjects.
- Most existing research showing adaptive thermogenesis (i.e.,a slowing of metabolism) has involved diets that combine aggressive caloric restriction with low protein intakes and an absence of resistance training, essentially creating a perfect storm for slowing metabolism. Research that has mindfully included resistance training and adequate protein has circumvented the problem of adaptive thermogenesis and muscle loss, despite very low-calorie intakes.
- The long-term success of a diet depends on compliance.
As you can see, the relationship of how many calories you consume per day to the number you expend per day is the single most important factor when it comes to determining whether you lose fat.
Now, whenever someone says this, someone else tries to refute it by bringing up the fact that the quality or composition of the calories you eat matters. They present it as an either/or proposition. But this relationship doesn't discount that some calories are more nutrient dense than others. (After all, we've all heard the term "empty calories.") It simply demonstrates that one can be both well nourished and overfed. Food quality and food quantity are important factors that should be considered together; as important as it is to eat high-quality, nutrient-dense foods for general health, you can still gain fat from eating "healthy" if you eat too many calories relative to what you're expending.
That said, focus on the quality of the foods you eat. Emphasize fruits and vegetables and high-quality meats, eggs, and fish (or protein substitutes, for vegetarians and vegans), while limiting refined foods, simple sugars, hydrogenated oil, and alcohol. Fruits, veggies, and lean proteins are generally lower in calories than things like fast food and candy. Don't overeat. Stop before you feel bloated and stuffed. You'll likely end up taking in fewer calories without even actually counting them.
You don't just want to be well fed; you want to be well nourished. Emphasizing the quality (i.e., nutrient density) of the foods you eat over the quantity (i.e., number of calories) is an easy approach. Try it and see where that gets you. It spells success for most people.
But it's certainly possible to eat too many calories from nutrient-dense, high-quality foods. Don't think for a second that you can't gain fat from eating "healthy." While you can first emphasize the quality of the foods you eat and see where that strategy gets you, it may only take you so far. You may need another strategy as well. The next step is to focus on the caloric quantity of the food you're eating and put yourself into a caloric deficit. The ways to create a caloric deficit involve eating fewer calories, increasing your activity level to expend more calories, or a combination of both.
Learn more about Your Workout PERFECTED.
Questions to ask yourself before the lift
Evaluating your lifting program gives you the chance to see if you could be doing things more effectively.
Evaluating your lifting program gives you the chance to see if you could be doing things more effectively. The following details a variety of questions to ask yourself before you lift along with what you need to know in order to avoid the common mistakes and get the most out of your workouts.
Are You Lifting Too Much?
At any given time at any big-box gym, you'll see at least one guy doing biceps curls or shoulder raises, and he has to throw his lower back into it each time he brings the weight up. If you don't see that dude at your gym, it may be because it's you.
It's easy to make this mistake. After all, you're in the gym to lift weights, and the previous section did mention that lifting heavy loads is an effective stimulus for muscle growth, right? Well, sort of. Training to maximize muscle is not about becoming a "weightlifter." It's about using weights as a tool to increase your muscle size. Simply throwing as much weight around as you can move to boost your ego and impress the people around you is the wrong approach.
When you use weights that are too heavy, here's what happens:
- You reduce the time under (mechanical) tension because you're forced to use momentum to cheat.
- You're unable to lower the weight slowly and with control, further reducing your time under (mechanical) tension.
- You utilize more muscles, which reduces the accumulated pump (i.e., metabolic stress) in muscles you intend to target.
Training to maximize muscle isn't just about moving the weight - that's weightlifting - but about controlling the weight through the entire range of motion involved in the exercise you're doing. The point of emphasis on each repetition is to avoid swinging the weight up or "cheating" by using other areas of your bodyweight to move the load.
Do Cheat Reps Work?
There is research showing that using moderate momentum (cheating) increases the torque of the target muscles even without an increase in the load. That moderate increase in load and using momentum allows the torque to be increased even further. While an excessive use of momentum results in lower demands on the target muscles, an excessive increase of the load reduces the total hypertrophy stimulus by virtue of the decreased number of repetitions that can be performed successfully. The time under tension is shortened dramatically.
It can appear as if the results of this study validate cheating by incorporating momentum into the sets, but it doesn't. The results of this study shouldn't surprise you, because mechanical tension on the muscles is still present during cheat reps. However, this doesn't mean that cheating with momentum is just as effective as not cheating by avoiding momentum. Cheating is basically only applying mechanical tension in part of the range of motion and using momentum to get through the rest of the range. Although cheating may still have you moving through the full range of motion involved in the exercise, from a mechanical tension perspective, it's essentially a partial rep performed by target muscles. We have good evidence demonstrating that a partial range of motion rep creates less muscle growth than a full range of motion rep.
How Are You Lowering the Lift?
Controlling the weight while minimizing momentum in exercises to maximize muscle gains also applies to the eccentric portion of each rep. People who cheat the weight up (on the concentric portion of the rep) normally also let the weight come crashing back down (on the eccentric portion of the rep) instead of maintaining deliberate control by slowing the weight down when they lower it. Not controlling the weight on the way down could be less effective. We have evidence demonstrating that a slower (4 second) eccentric lowering action during biceps curls produced superior increases in arm growth than did a one-second eccentric action. This makes perfect sense. A slower eccentric action causes more time under tension, which creates more mechanical tension on the working muscles than a shorter eccentric portion does.
Additionally, from a training safety perspective, since cheating creates an overload of mechanical tension in a small piece of the range of motion involved in an exercise, it is more likely that you'll use a weight that's too heavy for you, making the muscles deal with forces that exceed the structural integrity of your tendons and ligaments and increasing your risk of injury.
If you want to maximize your gains in muscle size, maximize your time under (mechanical) tension on every rep by using strict form as well as controlled eccentric (lowering) movements of around three to five seconds.
Are You Avoiding Machines?
The whole idea of pitting free weights against machines is like pitting fruits against vegetables. Both training modalities offer a unique benefit the other misses, so it makes sense to do them both to make your muscle-building workouts more comprehensive, just like eating both fruits and vegetables will make your diet more nourishing.
Free weights excel by requiring you stabilize and control not just the load being moved but also the path of the movement. However, free weights fall short when it comes to keeping consistent mechanical tension on the working muscles throughout the range of motion involved in most exercises. That's where machines excel and therefore offer distinct benefits for building muscle.
All free-weight exercises have one disadvantage that a machine doesn't - gravity! Free weights use a single load vector, gravity, to create resistance. If you use a pulley cable machine, you're also working against a single load vector, which is the line of the cable itself. When you work against a single load vector, you're going to have points within the range of motion involved in the exercise where the lever arm is long, creating high levels of mechanical tension on the involved muscles, and ranges where the lever arm is short, resulting in little to no mechanical tension on those same muscles.
Example: During any style of biceps curl, the point at which your biceps is being maximally loaded (stimulated) is range of motion when your forearm is at a 90-degree angle with the load vector. If you're using free weights, gravity is your load vector. The point of maximal mechanical tension on the biceps would be when your elbow reaches 90 degrees of flexion or when your forearm is parallel to the floor. If you're doing biceps curls using a cable machine, however, the cable itself is the load vector. The point of maximal mechanical tension to your biceps is when your forearm makes a 90-degree angle with the cable.
Here's the kicker: The farther away you move from a 90-degree angle in either direction of the load vector, the shorter the lever arm and the less work your biceps have to do; therefore, your biceps experience less mechanical tension. That's why, in a free-weight biceps curl, the closer you move toward the bottom or top of the range of motion, the less work your biceps do because the lever arm is shortening. People tend to rest between reps at the top and bottom positions when doing barbell or dumbbell curls.
This applies to any free-weight exercise in that they're all being loaded by a single load vector (gravity or a pulley cable). On the other hand, selectorized machines have a cam system, which isn't dependent on a single load vector like free weights or cables. Instead, the cam is set up to offer you a much more consistent resistance throughout a larger portion of the range of motion. This gives you much more time under tension because your working muscles don't get the same chance to rest at the bottom or top position of the range like they do when you are using free weights.
While you can absolutely build plenty of muscle size exclusively using free weights, there's no reason to avoid machines if you have access to them. Both types of exercises have advantages, so don't let popular misconceptions blind you to machines' unique muscle-building benefits. For muscle gains (and strength gains, which are discussed in the Function and Performance chapter), machines can be very beneficial when used with free weights.
Should Men and Women Train Differently?
It's common to see men stampede toward the free weights, while women pack into the Pilates and yoga studios and line up on cardio and weight machines. Should men and women train as differently as they do? There's a lot of confusion, and here's the truth.
I've written workout programs that were featured in major men's exercise magazines, only to see those exact programs later printed in the same publisher's women's exercise magazines. The only thing that changed was the terminology. In the men's version, it said something like, "Use this workout program to build a stronger and more ripped body,"whereas in the women's version, it said something like, "Use this workout program to shape the tight and toned body of a goddess."
Despite what it might seem, this common practice is not dishonest or misleading. After all, even the best workout won't do anyone any good if it's not put into practice.
The publishers of these exercise magazines are merely trying to reach their readers using the goals they commonly hear them expressing. Put another way: If exercise is medicine, then we're much more likely to take our daily dose when it tastes good to us. If you do a quick Internet search for body-part specific exercises for the glutes, arms, chest, and shoulders, you'll see many of those terms are commonly followed with "for women" or "for men." This isn't by accident. People are including those words in their Internet searches.
The truth is, there are no exercises for men or exercises for women. There are just exercises. We're different sexes, but our bones, connective tissues, nerves, and muscles fibers are all made of the same raw material and function in the same way. There's nothing inherently male about a barbell exercise or nothing inherently female about machine exercises. They're both effective resistance training methods, and each can be used safely and effectively depending on your ability and goals - not your sex.
Don't be afraid of a machine or resistance exercise. The entire gym is open to you, so learn how to use it to your advantage. This book is designed to help you do that.
Learn more about Your Workout PERFECTED.
Dumbbell front shoulder raise
Setup: Stand tall, with your feet hip-width apart. Hold a pair of dumbbells at your sides (see figure a).
Setup
Stand tall, with your feet hip-width apart. Hold a pair of dumbbells at your sides (see figure a).
Action and Coaching Tips
With your elbows slightly bent, raise your arms out in front of your body until your elbows go just above your forehead (see figure b). Do not swing the weight up. Slowly lower the dumbbells back to your sides. Use deliberate control on the lifting and lowering portion of each rep.
Why It's Better
You increase range of motion when lifting your arms up during this exercise. Stopping when your arms are parallel to the floor is like stopping a biceps curl when your forearm is parallel to the floor.
Many lifters say they don't lift their arms above shoulder level - even keeping them slightly below shoulder level - when doing shoulders raises to minimize the involvement of the upper traps. Interestingly, many of these same people do shrugs, upright rows, and other trap-oriented exercises.
Now, if for some reason you're avoiding upper trap exercises and do not want activity in your upper traps, just know that research has found that, out of 16 commonly used shoulder training and rehabilitation exercises - such as seated row, knee push-up plus, or biceps curl - all but one exercise showed moderate to low activity in the upper traps. And none of the 16 exercises investigated in this study were a shoulder shrug or upright row. The one exercise mentioned here is commonly known as the full can, which is where you're standing with your arm at your side in external rotation. Then you lift your arm in the scapular plane (at a 30-degree angle to your torso) until your arm is 90 degrees to the floor. In short, it's very much like a side shoulder raise.
The point is, don't have the delusion that your upper traps aren't being activated in upper-body exercises that you didn't think involved that muscle group.
Benefits
- Greater range of motion
- More comprehensive shoulder training
Learn more about Your Workout PERFECTED.
Nutrition for fat loss: made simple
We can’t talk about fat loss without talking about eating behaviors (a.k.a. diet). You won’t find a more common question than, How should I eat for fat loss?
We can't talk about fat loss without talking about eating behaviors (a.k.a. diet). You won't find a more common question than, How should I eat for fat loss? For an answer you'll get lots of different opinions. The fact is, this issue, along with other issues like it, isn't about what this or that so-called expert says, and it's definitely not about what some athlete, trainer, or lean person at gym says. It's about what the body of scientific evidence - not just a single study - says when taken as a whole.
The International Society of Sports Nutrition (ISSN) has provided a list of conclusions and recommendations (for eating and exercising) in their position stand paper on diets and body composition. Here are a few of major takeaways from the ISSN's scientific paper:
- There are many diet types and eating styles. The various diet archetypes are wide-ranging in total energy and macronutrient distribution. Each type carries varying degrees of supporting data and unfounded claims.
- A wide range of dietary approaches (low-fat to low-carbohydrate/ketogenic, and all points between) can be similarly effective for improving body composition, and this allows flexibility with program design. To date, no controlled, inpatient isocaloric (i.e., calories matched) diet comparison, where protein is matched between groups, has reported a clinically meaningful fat loss or thermic (i.e., metabolic) advantage to the lower-carbohydrate or ketogenic diet.
- Common threads run through the diets in terms of the mechanism of action for weight loss and weight gain (i.e., sustained hypocaloric versus hypercaloric conditions), but there are also potentially unique means by which certain diets achieve their intended objectives (e.g., factors that facilitate greater satiety, ease of compliance, support of training demands).
- Diets focused primarily on fat loss (and weight loss beyond initial reductions in body water) operate under the fundamental mechanism of a sustained caloric deficit. This net hypocaloric (i.e., reduced calorie) balance can either be imposed daily or over the course of the week.
- The collective body of research about intermittent caloric restriction (i.e., intermittent fasting) demonstrates no significant advantage over daily caloric restriction for improving body composition. Increasing dietary protein to levels significantly beyond current recommendations for athletic populations may improve body composition. The ISSN's original 2007 position on protein intake (1.4-2.0 g/kg) has gained further support from subsequent investigations arriving at similar requirements in athletic populations. Higher protein intakes (2.3-3.1 g/kg Fat Free Mass) may be required to maximize muscle retention in lean, resistance-trained subjects in hypocaloric conditions. Emerging research on very high protein intakes (>3 g/kg) has demonstrated that the known thermic, satiating, and lean mass-preserving effects of dietary protein might be amplified in resistance training subjects.
- Most existing research showing adaptive thermogenesis (i.e.,a slowing of metabolism) has involved diets that combine aggressive caloric restriction with low protein intakes and an absence of resistance training, essentially creating a perfect storm for slowing metabolism. Research that has mindfully included resistance training and adequate protein has circumvented the problem of adaptive thermogenesis and muscle loss, despite very low-calorie intakes.
- The long-term success of a diet depends on compliance.
As you can see, the relationship of how many calories you consume per day to the number you expend per day is the single most important factor when it comes to determining whether you lose fat.
Now, whenever someone says this, someone else tries to refute it by bringing up the fact that the quality or composition of the calories you eat matters. They present it as an either/or proposition. But this relationship doesn't discount that some calories are more nutrient dense than others. (After all, we've all heard the term "empty calories.") It simply demonstrates that one can be both well nourished and overfed. Food quality and food quantity are important factors that should be considered together; as important as it is to eat high-quality, nutrient-dense foods for general health, you can still gain fat from eating "healthy" if you eat too many calories relative to what you're expending.
That said, focus on the quality of the foods you eat. Emphasize fruits and vegetables and high-quality meats, eggs, and fish (or protein substitutes, for vegetarians and vegans), while limiting refined foods, simple sugars, hydrogenated oil, and alcohol. Fruits, veggies, and lean proteins are generally lower in calories than things like fast food and candy. Don't overeat. Stop before you feel bloated and stuffed. You'll likely end up taking in fewer calories without even actually counting them.
You don't just want to be well fed; you want to be well nourished. Emphasizing the quality (i.e., nutrient density) of the foods you eat over the quantity (i.e., number of calories) is an easy approach. Try it and see where that gets you. It spells success for most people.
But it's certainly possible to eat too many calories from nutrient-dense, high-quality foods. Don't think for a second that you can't gain fat from eating "healthy." While you can first emphasize the quality of the foods you eat and see where that strategy gets you, it may only take you so far. You may need another strategy as well. The next step is to focus on the caloric quantity of the food you're eating and put yourself into a caloric deficit. The ways to create a caloric deficit involve eating fewer calories, increasing your activity level to expend more calories, or a combination of both.
Learn more about Your Workout PERFECTED.
Questions to ask yourself before the lift
Evaluating your lifting program gives you the chance to see if you could be doing things more effectively.
Evaluating your lifting program gives you the chance to see if you could be doing things more effectively. The following details a variety of questions to ask yourself before you lift along with what you need to know in order to avoid the common mistakes and get the most out of your workouts.
Are You Lifting Too Much?
At any given time at any big-box gym, you'll see at least one guy doing biceps curls or shoulder raises, and he has to throw his lower back into it each time he brings the weight up. If you don't see that dude at your gym, it may be because it's you.
It's easy to make this mistake. After all, you're in the gym to lift weights, and the previous section did mention that lifting heavy loads is an effective stimulus for muscle growth, right? Well, sort of. Training to maximize muscle is not about becoming a "weightlifter." It's about using weights as a tool to increase your muscle size. Simply throwing as much weight around as you can move to boost your ego and impress the people around you is the wrong approach.
When you use weights that are too heavy, here's what happens:
- You reduce the time under (mechanical) tension because you're forced to use momentum to cheat.
- You're unable to lower the weight slowly and with control, further reducing your time under (mechanical) tension.
- You utilize more muscles, which reduces the accumulated pump (i.e., metabolic stress) in muscles you intend to target.
Training to maximize muscle isn't just about moving the weight - that's weightlifting - but about controlling the weight through the entire range of motion involved in the exercise you're doing. The point of emphasis on each repetition is to avoid swinging the weight up or "cheating" by using other areas of your bodyweight to move the load.
Do Cheat Reps Work?
There is research showing that using moderate momentum (cheating) increases the torque of the target muscles even without an increase in the load. That moderate increase in load and using momentum allows the torque to be increased even further. While an excessive use of momentum results in lower demands on the target muscles, an excessive increase of the load reduces the total hypertrophy stimulus by virtue of the decreased number of repetitions that can be performed successfully. The time under tension is shortened dramatically.
It can appear as if the results of this study validate cheating by incorporating momentum into the sets, but it doesn't. The results of this study shouldn't surprise you, because mechanical tension on the muscles is still present during cheat reps. However, this doesn't mean that cheating with momentum is just as effective as not cheating by avoiding momentum. Cheating is basically only applying mechanical tension in part of the range of motion and using momentum to get through the rest of the range. Although cheating may still have you moving through the full range of motion involved in the exercise, from a mechanical tension perspective, it's essentially a partial rep performed by target muscles. We have good evidence demonstrating that a partial range of motion rep creates less muscle growth than a full range of motion rep.
How Are You Lowering the Lift?
Controlling the weight while minimizing momentum in exercises to maximize muscle gains also applies to the eccentric portion of each rep. People who cheat the weight up (on the concentric portion of the rep) normally also let the weight come crashing back down (on the eccentric portion of the rep) instead of maintaining deliberate control by slowing the weight down when they lower it. Not controlling the weight on the way down could be less effective. We have evidence demonstrating that a slower (4 second) eccentric lowering action during biceps curls produced superior increases in arm growth than did a one-second eccentric action. This makes perfect sense. A slower eccentric action causes more time under tension, which creates more mechanical tension on the working muscles than a shorter eccentric portion does.
Additionally, from a training safety perspective, since cheating creates an overload of mechanical tension in a small piece of the range of motion involved in an exercise, it is more likely that you'll use a weight that's too heavy for you, making the muscles deal with forces that exceed the structural integrity of your tendons and ligaments and increasing your risk of injury.
If you want to maximize your gains in muscle size, maximize your time under (mechanical) tension on every rep by using strict form as well as controlled eccentric (lowering) movements of around three to five seconds.
Are You Avoiding Machines?
The whole idea of pitting free weights against machines is like pitting fruits against vegetables. Both training modalities offer a unique benefit the other misses, so it makes sense to do them both to make your muscle-building workouts more comprehensive, just like eating both fruits and vegetables will make your diet more nourishing.
Free weights excel by requiring you stabilize and control not just the load being moved but also the path of the movement. However, free weights fall short when it comes to keeping consistent mechanical tension on the working muscles throughout the range of motion involved in most exercises. That's where machines excel and therefore offer distinct benefits for building muscle.
All free-weight exercises have one disadvantage that a machine doesn't - gravity! Free weights use a single load vector, gravity, to create resistance. If you use a pulley cable machine, you're also working against a single load vector, which is the line of the cable itself. When you work against a single load vector, you're going to have points within the range of motion involved in the exercise where the lever arm is long, creating high levels of mechanical tension on the involved muscles, and ranges where the lever arm is short, resulting in little to no mechanical tension on those same muscles.
Example: During any style of biceps curl, the point at which your biceps is being maximally loaded (stimulated) is range of motion when your forearm is at a 90-degree angle with the load vector. If you're using free weights, gravity is your load vector. The point of maximal mechanical tension on the biceps would be when your elbow reaches 90 degrees of flexion or when your forearm is parallel to the floor. If you're doing biceps curls using a cable machine, however, the cable itself is the load vector. The point of maximal mechanical tension to your biceps is when your forearm makes a 90-degree angle with the cable.
Here's the kicker: The farther away you move from a 90-degree angle in either direction of the load vector, the shorter the lever arm and the less work your biceps have to do; therefore, your biceps experience less mechanical tension. That's why, in a free-weight biceps curl, the closer you move toward the bottom or top of the range of motion, the less work your biceps do because the lever arm is shortening. People tend to rest between reps at the top and bottom positions when doing barbell or dumbbell curls.
This applies to any free-weight exercise in that they're all being loaded by a single load vector (gravity or a pulley cable). On the other hand, selectorized machines have a cam system, which isn't dependent on a single load vector like free weights or cables. Instead, the cam is set up to offer you a much more consistent resistance throughout a larger portion of the range of motion. This gives you much more time under tension because your working muscles don't get the same chance to rest at the bottom or top position of the range like they do when you are using free weights.
While you can absolutely build plenty of muscle size exclusively using free weights, there's no reason to avoid machines if you have access to them. Both types of exercises have advantages, so don't let popular misconceptions blind you to machines' unique muscle-building benefits. For muscle gains (and strength gains, which are discussed in the Function and Performance chapter), machines can be very beneficial when used with free weights.
Should Men and Women Train Differently?
It's common to see men stampede toward the free weights, while women pack into the Pilates and yoga studios and line up on cardio and weight machines. Should men and women train as differently as they do? There's a lot of confusion, and here's the truth.
I've written workout programs that were featured in major men's exercise magazines, only to see those exact programs later printed in the same publisher's women's exercise magazines. The only thing that changed was the terminology. In the men's version, it said something like, "Use this workout program to build a stronger and more ripped body,"whereas in the women's version, it said something like, "Use this workout program to shape the tight and toned body of a goddess."
Despite what it might seem, this common practice is not dishonest or misleading. After all, even the best workout won't do anyone any good if it's not put into practice.
The publishers of these exercise magazines are merely trying to reach their readers using the goals they commonly hear them expressing. Put another way: If exercise is medicine, then we're much more likely to take our daily dose when it tastes good to us. If you do a quick Internet search for body-part specific exercises for the glutes, arms, chest, and shoulders, you'll see many of those terms are commonly followed with "for women" or "for men." This isn't by accident. People are including those words in their Internet searches.
The truth is, there are no exercises for men or exercises for women. There are just exercises. We're different sexes, but our bones, connective tissues, nerves, and muscles fibers are all made of the same raw material and function in the same way. There's nothing inherently male about a barbell exercise or nothing inherently female about machine exercises. They're both effective resistance training methods, and each can be used safely and effectively depending on your ability and goals - not your sex.
Don't be afraid of a machine or resistance exercise. The entire gym is open to you, so learn how to use it to your advantage. This book is designed to help you do that.
Learn more about Your Workout PERFECTED.
Dumbbell front shoulder raise
Setup: Stand tall, with your feet hip-width apart. Hold a pair of dumbbells at your sides (see figure a).
Setup
Stand tall, with your feet hip-width apart. Hold a pair of dumbbells at your sides (see figure a).
Action and Coaching Tips
With your elbows slightly bent, raise your arms out in front of your body until your elbows go just above your forehead (see figure b). Do not swing the weight up. Slowly lower the dumbbells back to your sides. Use deliberate control on the lifting and lowering portion of each rep.
Why It's Better
You increase range of motion when lifting your arms up during this exercise. Stopping when your arms are parallel to the floor is like stopping a biceps curl when your forearm is parallel to the floor.
Many lifters say they don't lift their arms above shoulder level - even keeping them slightly below shoulder level - when doing shoulders raises to minimize the involvement of the upper traps. Interestingly, many of these same people do shrugs, upright rows, and other trap-oriented exercises.
Now, if for some reason you're avoiding upper trap exercises and do not want activity in your upper traps, just know that research has found that, out of 16 commonly used shoulder training and rehabilitation exercises - such as seated row, knee push-up plus, or biceps curl - all but one exercise showed moderate to low activity in the upper traps. And none of the 16 exercises investigated in this study were a shoulder shrug or upright row. The one exercise mentioned here is commonly known as the full can, which is where you're standing with your arm at your side in external rotation. Then you lift your arm in the scapular plane (at a 30-degree angle to your torso) until your arm is 90 degrees to the floor. In short, it's very much like a side shoulder raise.
The point is, don't have the delusion that your upper traps aren't being activated in upper-body exercises that you didn't think involved that muscle group.
Benefits
- Greater range of motion
- More comprehensive shoulder training
Learn more about Your Workout PERFECTED.
Nutrition for fat loss: made simple
We can’t talk about fat loss without talking about eating behaviors (a.k.a. diet). You won’t find a more common question than, How should I eat for fat loss?
We can't talk about fat loss without talking about eating behaviors (a.k.a. diet). You won't find a more common question than, How should I eat for fat loss? For an answer you'll get lots of different opinions. The fact is, this issue, along with other issues like it, isn't about what this or that so-called expert says, and it's definitely not about what some athlete, trainer, or lean person at gym says. It's about what the body of scientific evidence - not just a single study - says when taken as a whole.
The International Society of Sports Nutrition (ISSN) has provided a list of conclusions and recommendations (for eating and exercising) in their position stand paper on diets and body composition. Here are a few of major takeaways from the ISSN's scientific paper:
- There are many diet types and eating styles. The various diet archetypes are wide-ranging in total energy and macronutrient distribution. Each type carries varying degrees of supporting data and unfounded claims.
- A wide range of dietary approaches (low-fat to low-carbohydrate/ketogenic, and all points between) can be similarly effective for improving body composition, and this allows flexibility with program design. To date, no controlled, inpatient isocaloric (i.e., calories matched) diet comparison, where protein is matched between groups, has reported a clinically meaningful fat loss or thermic (i.e., metabolic) advantage to the lower-carbohydrate or ketogenic diet.
- Common threads run through the diets in terms of the mechanism of action for weight loss and weight gain (i.e., sustained hypocaloric versus hypercaloric conditions), but there are also potentially unique means by which certain diets achieve their intended objectives (e.g., factors that facilitate greater satiety, ease of compliance, support of training demands).
- Diets focused primarily on fat loss (and weight loss beyond initial reductions in body water) operate under the fundamental mechanism of a sustained caloric deficit. This net hypocaloric (i.e., reduced calorie) balance can either be imposed daily or over the course of the week.
- The collective body of research about intermittent caloric restriction (i.e., intermittent fasting) demonstrates no significant advantage over daily caloric restriction for improving body composition. Increasing dietary protein to levels significantly beyond current recommendations for athletic populations may improve body composition. The ISSN's original 2007 position on protein intake (1.4-2.0 g/kg) has gained further support from subsequent investigations arriving at similar requirements in athletic populations. Higher protein intakes (2.3-3.1 g/kg Fat Free Mass) may be required to maximize muscle retention in lean, resistance-trained subjects in hypocaloric conditions. Emerging research on very high protein intakes (>3 g/kg) has demonstrated that the known thermic, satiating, and lean mass-preserving effects of dietary protein might be amplified in resistance training subjects.
- Most existing research showing adaptive thermogenesis (i.e.,a slowing of metabolism) has involved diets that combine aggressive caloric restriction with low protein intakes and an absence of resistance training, essentially creating a perfect storm for slowing metabolism. Research that has mindfully included resistance training and adequate protein has circumvented the problem of adaptive thermogenesis and muscle loss, despite very low-calorie intakes.
- The long-term success of a diet depends on compliance.
As you can see, the relationship of how many calories you consume per day to the number you expend per day is the single most important factor when it comes to determining whether you lose fat.
Now, whenever someone says this, someone else tries to refute it by bringing up the fact that the quality or composition of the calories you eat matters. They present it as an either/or proposition. But this relationship doesn't discount that some calories are more nutrient dense than others. (After all, we've all heard the term "empty calories.") It simply demonstrates that one can be both well nourished and overfed. Food quality and food quantity are important factors that should be considered together; as important as it is to eat high-quality, nutrient-dense foods for general health, you can still gain fat from eating "healthy" if you eat too many calories relative to what you're expending.
That said, focus on the quality of the foods you eat. Emphasize fruits and vegetables and high-quality meats, eggs, and fish (or protein substitutes, for vegetarians and vegans), while limiting refined foods, simple sugars, hydrogenated oil, and alcohol. Fruits, veggies, and lean proteins are generally lower in calories than things like fast food and candy. Don't overeat. Stop before you feel bloated and stuffed. You'll likely end up taking in fewer calories without even actually counting them.
You don't just want to be well fed; you want to be well nourished. Emphasizing the quality (i.e., nutrient density) of the foods you eat over the quantity (i.e., number of calories) is an easy approach. Try it and see where that gets you. It spells success for most people.
But it's certainly possible to eat too many calories from nutrient-dense, high-quality foods. Don't think for a second that you can't gain fat from eating "healthy." While you can first emphasize the quality of the foods you eat and see where that strategy gets you, it may only take you so far. You may need another strategy as well. The next step is to focus on the caloric quantity of the food you're eating and put yourself into a caloric deficit. The ways to create a caloric deficit involve eating fewer calories, increasing your activity level to expend more calories, or a combination of both.
Learn more about Your Workout PERFECTED.
Questions to ask yourself before the lift
Evaluating your lifting program gives you the chance to see if you could be doing things more effectively.
Evaluating your lifting program gives you the chance to see if you could be doing things more effectively. The following details a variety of questions to ask yourself before you lift along with what you need to know in order to avoid the common mistakes and get the most out of your workouts.
Are You Lifting Too Much?
At any given time at any big-box gym, you'll see at least one guy doing biceps curls or shoulder raises, and he has to throw his lower back into it each time he brings the weight up. If you don't see that dude at your gym, it may be because it's you.
It's easy to make this mistake. After all, you're in the gym to lift weights, and the previous section did mention that lifting heavy loads is an effective stimulus for muscle growth, right? Well, sort of. Training to maximize muscle is not about becoming a "weightlifter." It's about using weights as a tool to increase your muscle size. Simply throwing as much weight around as you can move to boost your ego and impress the people around you is the wrong approach.
When you use weights that are too heavy, here's what happens:
- You reduce the time under (mechanical) tension because you're forced to use momentum to cheat.
- You're unable to lower the weight slowly and with control, further reducing your time under (mechanical) tension.
- You utilize more muscles, which reduces the accumulated pump (i.e., metabolic stress) in muscles you intend to target.
Training to maximize muscle isn't just about moving the weight - that's weightlifting - but about controlling the weight through the entire range of motion involved in the exercise you're doing. The point of emphasis on each repetition is to avoid swinging the weight up or "cheating" by using other areas of your bodyweight to move the load.
Do Cheat Reps Work?
There is research showing that using moderate momentum (cheating) increases the torque of the target muscles even without an increase in the load. That moderate increase in load and using momentum allows the torque to be increased even further. While an excessive use of momentum results in lower demands on the target muscles, an excessive increase of the load reduces the total hypertrophy stimulus by virtue of the decreased number of repetitions that can be performed successfully. The time under tension is shortened dramatically.
It can appear as if the results of this study validate cheating by incorporating momentum into the sets, but it doesn't. The results of this study shouldn't surprise you, because mechanical tension on the muscles is still present during cheat reps. However, this doesn't mean that cheating with momentum is just as effective as not cheating by avoiding momentum. Cheating is basically only applying mechanical tension in part of the range of motion and using momentum to get through the rest of the range. Although cheating may still have you moving through the full range of motion involved in the exercise, from a mechanical tension perspective, it's essentially a partial rep performed by target muscles. We have good evidence demonstrating that a partial range of motion rep creates less muscle growth than a full range of motion rep.
How Are You Lowering the Lift?
Controlling the weight while minimizing momentum in exercises to maximize muscle gains also applies to the eccentric portion of each rep. People who cheat the weight up (on the concentric portion of the rep) normally also let the weight come crashing back down (on the eccentric portion of the rep) instead of maintaining deliberate control by slowing the weight down when they lower it. Not controlling the weight on the way down could be less effective. We have evidence demonstrating that a slower (4 second) eccentric lowering action during biceps curls produced superior increases in arm growth than did a one-second eccentric action. This makes perfect sense. A slower eccentric action causes more time under tension, which creates more mechanical tension on the working muscles than a shorter eccentric portion does.
Additionally, from a training safety perspective, since cheating creates an overload of mechanical tension in a small piece of the range of motion involved in an exercise, it is more likely that you'll use a weight that's too heavy for you, making the muscles deal with forces that exceed the structural integrity of your tendons and ligaments and increasing your risk of injury.
If you want to maximize your gains in muscle size, maximize your time under (mechanical) tension on every rep by using strict form as well as controlled eccentric (lowering) movements of around three to five seconds.
Are You Avoiding Machines?
The whole idea of pitting free weights against machines is like pitting fruits against vegetables. Both training modalities offer a unique benefit the other misses, so it makes sense to do them both to make your muscle-building workouts more comprehensive, just like eating both fruits and vegetables will make your diet more nourishing.
Free weights excel by requiring you stabilize and control not just the load being moved but also the path of the movement. However, free weights fall short when it comes to keeping consistent mechanical tension on the working muscles throughout the range of motion involved in most exercises. That's where machines excel and therefore offer distinct benefits for building muscle.
All free-weight exercises have one disadvantage that a machine doesn't - gravity! Free weights use a single load vector, gravity, to create resistance. If you use a pulley cable machine, you're also working against a single load vector, which is the line of the cable itself. When you work against a single load vector, you're going to have points within the range of motion involved in the exercise where the lever arm is long, creating high levels of mechanical tension on the involved muscles, and ranges where the lever arm is short, resulting in little to no mechanical tension on those same muscles.
Example: During any style of biceps curl, the point at which your biceps is being maximally loaded (stimulated) is range of motion when your forearm is at a 90-degree angle with the load vector. If you're using free weights, gravity is your load vector. The point of maximal mechanical tension on the biceps would be when your elbow reaches 90 degrees of flexion or when your forearm is parallel to the floor. If you're doing biceps curls using a cable machine, however, the cable itself is the load vector. The point of maximal mechanical tension to your biceps is when your forearm makes a 90-degree angle with the cable.
Here's the kicker: The farther away you move from a 90-degree angle in either direction of the load vector, the shorter the lever arm and the less work your biceps have to do; therefore, your biceps experience less mechanical tension. That's why, in a free-weight biceps curl, the closer you move toward the bottom or top of the range of motion, the less work your biceps do because the lever arm is shortening. People tend to rest between reps at the top and bottom positions when doing barbell or dumbbell curls.
This applies to any free-weight exercise in that they're all being loaded by a single load vector (gravity or a pulley cable). On the other hand, selectorized machines have a cam system, which isn't dependent on a single load vector like free weights or cables. Instead, the cam is set up to offer you a much more consistent resistance throughout a larger portion of the range of motion. This gives you much more time under tension because your working muscles don't get the same chance to rest at the bottom or top position of the range like they do when you are using free weights.
While you can absolutely build plenty of muscle size exclusively using free weights, there's no reason to avoid machines if you have access to them. Both types of exercises have advantages, so don't let popular misconceptions blind you to machines' unique muscle-building benefits. For muscle gains (and strength gains, which are discussed in the Function and Performance chapter), machines can be very beneficial when used with free weights.
Should Men and Women Train Differently?
It's common to see men stampede toward the free weights, while women pack into the Pilates and yoga studios and line up on cardio and weight machines. Should men and women train as differently as they do? There's a lot of confusion, and here's the truth.
I've written workout programs that were featured in major men's exercise magazines, only to see those exact programs later printed in the same publisher's women's exercise magazines. The only thing that changed was the terminology. In the men's version, it said something like, "Use this workout program to build a stronger and more ripped body,"whereas in the women's version, it said something like, "Use this workout program to shape the tight and toned body of a goddess."
Despite what it might seem, this common practice is not dishonest or misleading. After all, even the best workout won't do anyone any good if it's not put into practice.
The publishers of these exercise magazines are merely trying to reach their readers using the goals they commonly hear them expressing. Put another way: If exercise is medicine, then we're much more likely to take our daily dose when it tastes good to us. If you do a quick Internet search for body-part specific exercises for the glutes, arms, chest, and shoulders, you'll see many of those terms are commonly followed with "for women" or "for men." This isn't by accident. People are including those words in their Internet searches.
The truth is, there are no exercises for men or exercises for women. There are just exercises. We're different sexes, but our bones, connective tissues, nerves, and muscles fibers are all made of the same raw material and function in the same way. There's nothing inherently male about a barbell exercise or nothing inherently female about machine exercises. They're both effective resistance training methods, and each can be used safely and effectively depending on your ability and goals - not your sex.
Don't be afraid of a machine or resistance exercise. The entire gym is open to you, so learn how to use it to your advantage. This book is designed to help you do that.
Learn more about Your Workout PERFECTED.
Dumbbell front shoulder raise
Setup: Stand tall, with your feet hip-width apart. Hold a pair of dumbbells at your sides (see figure a).
Setup
Stand tall, with your feet hip-width apart. Hold a pair of dumbbells at your sides (see figure a).
Action and Coaching Tips
With your elbows slightly bent, raise your arms out in front of your body until your elbows go just above your forehead (see figure b). Do not swing the weight up. Slowly lower the dumbbells back to your sides. Use deliberate control on the lifting and lowering portion of each rep.
Why It's Better
You increase range of motion when lifting your arms up during this exercise. Stopping when your arms are parallel to the floor is like stopping a biceps curl when your forearm is parallel to the floor.
Many lifters say they don't lift their arms above shoulder level - even keeping them slightly below shoulder level - when doing shoulders raises to minimize the involvement of the upper traps. Interestingly, many of these same people do shrugs, upright rows, and other trap-oriented exercises.
Now, if for some reason you're avoiding upper trap exercises and do not want activity in your upper traps, just know that research has found that, out of 16 commonly used shoulder training and rehabilitation exercises - such as seated row, knee push-up plus, or biceps curl - all but one exercise showed moderate to low activity in the upper traps. And none of the 16 exercises investigated in this study were a shoulder shrug or upright row. The one exercise mentioned here is commonly known as the full can, which is where you're standing with your arm at your side in external rotation. Then you lift your arm in the scapular plane (at a 30-degree angle to your torso) until your arm is 90 degrees to the floor. In short, it's very much like a side shoulder raise.
The point is, don't have the delusion that your upper traps aren't being activated in upper-body exercises that you didn't think involved that muscle group.
Benefits
- Greater range of motion
- More comprehensive shoulder training
Learn more about Your Workout PERFECTED.
Nutrition for fat loss: made simple
We can’t talk about fat loss without talking about eating behaviors (a.k.a. diet). You won’t find a more common question than, How should I eat for fat loss?
We can't talk about fat loss without talking about eating behaviors (a.k.a. diet). You won't find a more common question than, How should I eat for fat loss? For an answer you'll get lots of different opinions. The fact is, this issue, along with other issues like it, isn't about what this or that so-called expert says, and it's definitely not about what some athlete, trainer, or lean person at gym says. It's about what the body of scientific evidence - not just a single study - says when taken as a whole.
The International Society of Sports Nutrition (ISSN) has provided a list of conclusions and recommendations (for eating and exercising) in their position stand paper on diets and body composition. Here are a few of major takeaways from the ISSN's scientific paper:
- There are many diet types and eating styles. The various diet archetypes are wide-ranging in total energy and macronutrient distribution. Each type carries varying degrees of supporting data and unfounded claims.
- A wide range of dietary approaches (low-fat to low-carbohydrate/ketogenic, and all points between) can be similarly effective for improving body composition, and this allows flexibility with program design. To date, no controlled, inpatient isocaloric (i.e., calories matched) diet comparison, where protein is matched between groups, has reported a clinically meaningful fat loss or thermic (i.e., metabolic) advantage to the lower-carbohydrate or ketogenic diet.
- Common threads run through the diets in terms of the mechanism of action for weight loss and weight gain (i.e., sustained hypocaloric versus hypercaloric conditions), but there are also potentially unique means by which certain diets achieve their intended objectives (e.g., factors that facilitate greater satiety, ease of compliance, support of training demands).
- Diets focused primarily on fat loss (and weight loss beyond initial reductions in body water) operate under the fundamental mechanism of a sustained caloric deficit. This net hypocaloric (i.e., reduced calorie) balance can either be imposed daily or over the course of the week.
- The collective body of research about intermittent caloric restriction (i.e., intermittent fasting) demonstrates no significant advantage over daily caloric restriction for improving body composition. Increasing dietary protein to levels significantly beyond current recommendations for athletic populations may improve body composition. The ISSN's original 2007 position on protein intake (1.4-2.0 g/kg) has gained further support from subsequent investigations arriving at similar requirements in athletic populations. Higher protein intakes (2.3-3.1 g/kg Fat Free Mass) may be required to maximize muscle retention in lean, resistance-trained subjects in hypocaloric conditions. Emerging research on very high protein intakes (>3 g/kg) has demonstrated that the known thermic, satiating, and lean mass-preserving effects of dietary protein might be amplified in resistance training subjects.
- Most existing research showing adaptive thermogenesis (i.e.,a slowing of metabolism) has involved diets that combine aggressive caloric restriction with low protein intakes and an absence of resistance training, essentially creating a perfect storm for slowing metabolism. Research that has mindfully included resistance training and adequate protein has circumvented the problem of adaptive thermogenesis and muscle loss, despite very low-calorie intakes.
- The long-term success of a diet depends on compliance.
As you can see, the relationship of how many calories you consume per day to the number you expend per day is the single most important factor when it comes to determining whether you lose fat.
Now, whenever someone says this, someone else tries to refute it by bringing up the fact that the quality or composition of the calories you eat matters. They present it as an either/or proposition. But this relationship doesn't discount that some calories are more nutrient dense than others. (After all, we've all heard the term "empty calories.") It simply demonstrates that one can be both well nourished and overfed. Food quality and food quantity are important factors that should be considered together; as important as it is to eat high-quality, nutrient-dense foods for general health, you can still gain fat from eating "healthy" if you eat too many calories relative to what you're expending.
That said, focus on the quality of the foods you eat. Emphasize fruits and vegetables and high-quality meats, eggs, and fish (or protein substitutes, for vegetarians and vegans), while limiting refined foods, simple sugars, hydrogenated oil, and alcohol. Fruits, veggies, and lean proteins are generally lower in calories than things like fast food and candy. Don't overeat. Stop before you feel bloated and stuffed. You'll likely end up taking in fewer calories without even actually counting them.
You don't just want to be well fed; you want to be well nourished. Emphasizing the quality (i.e., nutrient density) of the foods you eat over the quantity (i.e., number of calories) is an easy approach. Try it and see where that gets you. It spells success for most people.
But it's certainly possible to eat too many calories from nutrient-dense, high-quality foods. Don't think for a second that you can't gain fat from eating "healthy." While you can first emphasize the quality of the foods you eat and see where that strategy gets you, it may only take you so far. You may need another strategy as well. The next step is to focus on the caloric quantity of the food you're eating and put yourself into a caloric deficit. The ways to create a caloric deficit involve eating fewer calories, increasing your activity level to expend more calories, or a combination of both.
Learn more about Your Workout PERFECTED.
Questions to ask yourself before the lift
Evaluating your lifting program gives you the chance to see if you could be doing things more effectively.
Evaluating your lifting program gives you the chance to see if you could be doing things more effectively. The following details a variety of questions to ask yourself before you lift along with what you need to know in order to avoid the common mistakes and get the most out of your workouts.
Are You Lifting Too Much?
At any given time at any big-box gym, you'll see at least one guy doing biceps curls or shoulder raises, and he has to throw his lower back into it each time he brings the weight up. If you don't see that dude at your gym, it may be because it's you.
It's easy to make this mistake. After all, you're in the gym to lift weights, and the previous section did mention that lifting heavy loads is an effective stimulus for muscle growth, right? Well, sort of. Training to maximize muscle is not about becoming a "weightlifter." It's about using weights as a tool to increase your muscle size. Simply throwing as much weight around as you can move to boost your ego and impress the people around you is the wrong approach.
When you use weights that are too heavy, here's what happens:
- You reduce the time under (mechanical) tension because you're forced to use momentum to cheat.
- You're unable to lower the weight slowly and with control, further reducing your time under (mechanical) tension.
- You utilize more muscles, which reduces the accumulated pump (i.e., metabolic stress) in muscles you intend to target.
Training to maximize muscle isn't just about moving the weight - that's weightlifting - but about controlling the weight through the entire range of motion involved in the exercise you're doing. The point of emphasis on each repetition is to avoid swinging the weight up or "cheating" by using other areas of your bodyweight to move the load.
Do Cheat Reps Work?
There is research showing that using moderate momentum (cheating) increases the torque of the target muscles even without an increase in the load. That moderate increase in load and using momentum allows the torque to be increased even further. While an excessive use of momentum results in lower demands on the target muscles, an excessive increase of the load reduces the total hypertrophy stimulus by virtue of the decreased number of repetitions that can be performed successfully. The time under tension is shortened dramatically.
It can appear as if the results of this study validate cheating by incorporating momentum into the sets, but it doesn't. The results of this study shouldn't surprise you, because mechanical tension on the muscles is still present during cheat reps. However, this doesn't mean that cheating with momentum is just as effective as not cheating by avoiding momentum. Cheating is basically only applying mechanical tension in part of the range of motion and using momentum to get through the rest of the range. Although cheating may still have you moving through the full range of motion involved in the exercise, from a mechanical tension perspective, it's essentially a partial rep performed by target muscles. We have good evidence demonstrating that a partial range of motion rep creates less muscle growth than a full range of motion rep.
How Are You Lowering the Lift?
Controlling the weight while minimizing momentum in exercises to maximize muscle gains also applies to the eccentric portion of each rep. People who cheat the weight up (on the concentric portion of the rep) normally also let the weight come crashing back down (on the eccentric portion of the rep) instead of maintaining deliberate control by slowing the weight down when they lower it. Not controlling the weight on the way down could be less effective. We have evidence demonstrating that a slower (4 second) eccentric lowering action during biceps curls produced superior increases in arm growth than did a one-second eccentric action. This makes perfect sense. A slower eccentric action causes more time under tension, which creates more mechanical tension on the working muscles than a shorter eccentric portion does.
Additionally, from a training safety perspective, since cheating creates an overload of mechanical tension in a small piece of the range of motion involved in an exercise, it is more likely that you'll use a weight that's too heavy for you, making the muscles deal with forces that exceed the structural integrity of your tendons and ligaments and increasing your risk of injury.
If you want to maximize your gains in muscle size, maximize your time under (mechanical) tension on every rep by using strict form as well as controlled eccentric (lowering) movements of around three to five seconds.
Are You Avoiding Machines?
The whole idea of pitting free weights against machines is like pitting fruits against vegetables. Both training modalities offer a unique benefit the other misses, so it makes sense to do them both to make your muscle-building workouts more comprehensive, just like eating both fruits and vegetables will make your diet more nourishing.
Free weights excel by requiring you stabilize and control not just the load being moved but also the path of the movement. However, free weights fall short when it comes to keeping consistent mechanical tension on the working muscles throughout the range of motion involved in most exercises. That's where machines excel and therefore offer distinct benefits for building muscle.
All free-weight exercises have one disadvantage that a machine doesn't - gravity! Free weights use a single load vector, gravity, to create resistance. If you use a pulley cable machine, you're also working against a single load vector, which is the line of the cable itself. When you work against a single load vector, you're going to have points within the range of motion involved in the exercise where the lever arm is long, creating high levels of mechanical tension on the involved muscles, and ranges where the lever arm is short, resulting in little to no mechanical tension on those same muscles.
Example: During any style of biceps curl, the point at which your biceps is being maximally loaded (stimulated) is range of motion when your forearm is at a 90-degree angle with the load vector. If you're using free weights, gravity is your load vector. The point of maximal mechanical tension on the biceps would be when your elbow reaches 90 degrees of flexion or when your forearm is parallel to the floor. If you're doing biceps curls using a cable machine, however, the cable itself is the load vector. The point of maximal mechanical tension to your biceps is when your forearm makes a 90-degree angle with the cable.
Here's the kicker: The farther away you move from a 90-degree angle in either direction of the load vector, the shorter the lever arm and the less work your biceps have to do; therefore, your biceps experience less mechanical tension. That's why, in a free-weight biceps curl, the closer you move toward the bottom or top of the range of motion, the less work your biceps do because the lever arm is shortening. People tend to rest between reps at the top and bottom positions when doing barbell or dumbbell curls.
This applies to any free-weight exercise in that they're all being loaded by a single load vector (gravity or a pulley cable). On the other hand, selectorized machines have a cam system, which isn't dependent on a single load vector like free weights or cables. Instead, the cam is set up to offer you a much more consistent resistance throughout a larger portion of the range of motion. This gives you much more time under tension because your working muscles don't get the same chance to rest at the bottom or top position of the range like they do when you are using free weights.
While you can absolutely build plenty of muscle size exclusively using free weights, there's no reason to avoid machines if you have access to them. Both types of exercises have advantages, so don't let popular misconceptions blind you to machines' unique muscle-building benefits. For muscle gains (and strength gains, which are discussed in the Function and Performance chapter), machines can be very beneficial when used with free weights.
Should Men and Women Train Differently?
It's common to see men stampede toward the free weights, while women pack into the Pilates and yoga studios and line up on cardio and weight machines. Should men and women train as differently as they do? There's a lot of confusion, and here's the truth.
I've written workout programs that were featured in major men's exercise magazines, only to see those exact programs later printed in the same publisher's women's exercise magazines. The only thing that changed was the terminology. In the men's version, it said something like, "Use this workout program to build a stronger and more ripped body,"whereas in the women's version, it said something like, "Use this workout program to shape the tight and toned body of a goddess."
Despite what it might seem, this common practice is not dishonest or misleading. After all, even the best workout won't do anyone any good if it's not put into practice.
The publishers of these exercise magazines are merely trying to reach their readers using the goals they commonly hear them expressing. Put another way: If exercise is medicine, then we're much more likely to take our daily dose when it tastes good to us. If you do a quick Internet search for body-part specific exercises for the glutes, arms, chest, and shoulders, you'll see many of those terms are commonly followed with "for women" or "for men." This isn't by accident. People are including those words in their Internet searches.
The truth is, there are no exercises for men or exercises for women. There are just exercises. We're different sexes, but our bones, connective tissues, nerves, and muscles fibers are all made of the same raw material and function in the same way. There's nothing inherently male about a barbell exercise or nothing inherently female about machine exercises. They're both effective resistance training methods, and each can be used safely and effectively depending on your ability and goals - not your sex.
Don't be afraid of a machine or resistance exercise. The entire gym is open to you, so learn how to use it to your advantage. This book is designed to help you do that.
Learn more about Your Workout PERFECTED.
Dumbbell front shoulder raise
Setup: Stand tall, with your feet hip-width apart. Hold a pair of dumbbells at your sides (see figure a).
Setup
Stand tall, with your feet hip-width apart. Hold a pair of dumbbells at your sides (see figure a).
Action and Coaching Tips
With your elbows slightly bent, raise your arms out in front of your body until your elbows go just above your forehead (see figure b). Do not swing the weight up. Slowly lower the dumbbells back to your sides. Use deliberate control on the lifting and lowering portion of each rep.
Why It's Better
You increase range of motion when lifting your arms up during this exercise. Stopping when your arms are parallel to the floor is like stopping a biceps curl when your forearm is parallel to the floor.
Many lifters say they don't lift their arms above shoulder level - even keeping them slightly below shoulder level - when doing shoulders raises to minimize the involvement of the upper traps. Interestingly, many of these same people do shrugs, upright rows, and other trap-oriented exercises.
Now, if for some reason you're avoiding upper trap exercises and do not want activity in your upper traps, just know that research has found that, out of 16 commonly used shoulder training and rehabilitation exercises - such as seated row, knee push-up plus, or biceps curl - all but one exercise showed moderate to low activity in the upper traps. And none of the 16 exercises investigated in this study were a shoulder shrug or upright row. The one exercise mentioned here is commonly known as the full can, which is where you're standing with your arm at your side in external rotation. Then you lift your arm in the scapular plane (at a 30-degree angle to your torso) until your arm is 90 degrees to the floor. In short, it's very much like a side shoulder raise.
The point is, don't have the delusion that your upper traps aren't being activated in upper-body exercises that you didn't think involved that muscle group.
Benefits
- Greater range of motion
- More comprehensive shoulder training
Learn more about Your Workout PERFECTED.
Nutrition for fat loss: made simple
We can’t talk about fat loss without talking about eating behaviors (a.k.a. diet). You won’t find a more common question than, How should I eat for fat loss?
We can't talk about fat loss without talking about eating behaviors (a.k.a. diet). You won't find a more common question than, How should I eat for fat loss? For an answer you'll get lots of different opinions. The fact is, this issue, along with other issues like it, isn't about what this or that so-called expert says, and it's definitely not about what some athlete, trainer, or lean person at gym says. It's about what the body of scientific evidence - not just a single study - says when taken as a whole.
The International Society of Sports Nutrition (ISSN) has provided a list of conclusions and recommendations (for eating and exercising) in their position stand paper on diets and body composition. Here are a few of major takeaways from the ISSN's scientific paper:
- There are many diet types and eating styles. The various diet archetypes are wide-ranging in total energy and macronutrient distribution. Each type carries varying degrees of supporting data and unfounded claims.
- A wide range of dietary approaches (low-fat to low-carbohydrate/ketogenic, and all points between) can be similarly effective for improving body composition, and this allows flexibility with program design. To date, no controlled, inpatient isocaloric (i.e., calories matched) diet comparison, where protein is matched between groups, has reported a clinically meaningful fat loss or thermic (i.e., metabolic) advantage to the lower-carbohydrate or ketogenic diet.
- Common threads run through the diets in terms of the mechanism of action for weight loss and weight gain (i.e., sustained hypocaloric versus hypercaloric conditions), but there are also potentially unique means by which certain diets achieve their intended objectives (e.g., factors that facilitate greater satiety, ease of compliance, support of training demands).
- Diets focused primarily on fat loss (and weight loss beyond initial reductions in body water) operate under the fundamental mechanism of a sustained caloric deficit. This net hypocaloric (i.e., reduced calorie) balance can either be imposed daily or over the course of the week.
- The collective body of research about intermittent caloric restriction (i.e., intermittent fasting) demonstrates no significant advantage over daily caloric restriction for improving body composition. Increasing dietary protein to levels significantly beyond current recommendations for athletic populations may improve body composition. The ISSN's original 2007 position on protein intake (1.4-2.0 g/kg) has gained further support from subsequent investigations arriving at similar requirements in athletic populations. Higher protein intakes (2.3-3.1 g/kg Fat Free Mass) may be required to maximize muscle retention in lean, resistance-trained subjects in hypocaloric conditions. Emerging research on very high protein intakes (>3 g/kg) has demonstrated that the known thermic, satiating, and lean mass-preserving effects of dietary protein might be amplified in resistance training subjects.
- Most existing research showing adaptive thermogenesis (i.e.,a slowing of metabolism) has involved diets that combine aggressive caloric restriction with low protein intakes and an absence of resistance training, essentially creating a perfect storm for slowing metabolism. Research that has mindfully included resistance training and adequate protein has circumvented the problem of adaptive thermogenesis and muscle loss, despite very low-calorie intakes.
- The long-term success of a diet depends on compliance.
As you can see, the relationship of how many calories you consume per day to the number you expend per day is the single most important factor when it comes to determining whether you lose fat.
Now, whenever someone says this, someone else tries to refute it by bringing up the fact that the quality or composition of the calories you eat matters. They present it as an either/or proposition. But this relationship doesn't discount that some calories are more nutrient dense than others. (After all, we've all heard the term "empty calories.") It simply demonstrates that one can be both well nourished and overfed. Food quality and food quantity are important factors that should be considered together; as important as it is to eat high-quality, nutrient-dense foods for general health, you can still gain fat from eating "healthy" if you eat too many calories relative to what you're expending.
That said, focus on the quality of the foods you eat. Emphasize fruits and vegetables and high-quality meats, eggs, and fish (or protein substitutes, for vegetarians and vegans), while limiting refined foods, simple sugars, hydrogenated oil, and alcohol. Fruits, veggies, and lean proteins are generally lower in calories than things like fast food and candy. Don't overeat. Stop before you feel bloated and stuffed. You'll likely end up taking in fewer calories without even actually counting them.
You don't just want to be well fed; you want to be well nourished. Emphasizing the quality (i.e., nutrient density) of the foods you eat over the quantity (i.e., number of calories) is an easy approach. Try it and see where that gets you. It spells success for most people.
But it's certainly possible to eat too many calories from nutrient-dense, high-quality foods. Don't think for a second that you can't gain fat from eating "healthy." While you can first emphasize the quality of the foods you eat and see where that strategy gets you, it may only take you so far. You may need another strategy as well. The next step is to focus on the caloric quantity of the food you're eating and put yourself into a caloric deficit. The ways to create a caloric deficit involve eating fewer calories, increasing your activity level to expend more calories, or a combination of both.
Learn more about Your Workout PERFECTED.
Questions to ask yourself before the lift
Evaluating your lifting program gives you the chance to see if you could be doing things more effectively.
Evaluating your lifting program gives you the chance to see if you could be doing things more effectively. The following details a variety of questions to ask yourself before you lift along with what you need to know in order to avoid the common mistakes and get the most out of your workouts.
Are You Lifting Too Much?
At any given time at any big-box gym, you'll see at least one guy doing biceps curls or shoulder raises, and he has to throw his lower back into it each time he brings the weight up. If you don't see that dude at your gym, it may be because it's you.
It's easy to make this mistake. After all, you're in the gym to lift weights, and the previous section did mention that lifting heavy loads is an effective stimulus for muscle growth, right? Well, sort of. Training to maximize muscle is not about becoming a "weightlifter." It's about using weights as a tool to increase your muscle size. Simply throwing as much weight around as you can move to boost your ego and impress the people around you is the wrong approach.
When you use weights that are too heavy, here's what happens:
- You reduce the time under (mechanical) tension because you're forced to use momentum to cheat.
- You're unable to lower the weight slowly and with control, further reducing your time under (mechanical) tension.
- You utilize more muscles, which reduces the accumulated pump (i.e., metabolic stress) in muscles you intend to target.
Training to maximize muscle isn't just about moving the weight - that's weightlifting - but about controlling the weight through the entire range of motion involved in the exercise you're doing. The point of emphasis on each repetition is to avoid swinging the weight up or "cheating" by using other areas of your bodyweight to move the load.
Do Cheat Reps Work?
There is research showing that using moderate momentum (cheating) increases the torque of the target muscles even without an increase in the load. That moderate increase in load and using momentum allows the torque to be increased even further. While an excessive use of momentum results in lower demands on the target muscles, an excessive increase of the load reduces the total hypertrophy stimulus by virtue of the decreased number of repetitions that can be performed successfully. The time under tension is shortened dramatically.
It can appear as if the results of this study validate cheating by incorporating momentum into the sets, but it doesn't. The results of this study shouldn't surprise you, because mechanical tension on the muscles is still present during cheat reps. However, this doesn't mean that cheating with momentum is just as effective as not cheating by avoiding momentum. Cheating is basically only applying mechanical tension in part of the range of motion and using momentum to get through the rest of the range. Although cheating may still have you moving through the full range of motion involved in the exercise, from a mechanical tension perspective, it's essentially a partial rep performed by target muscles. We have good evidence demonstrating that a partial range of motion rep creates less muscle growth than a full range of motion rep.
How Are You Lowering the Lift?
Controlling the weight while minimizing momentum in exercises to maximize muscle gains also applies to the eccentric portion of each rep. People who cheat the weight up (on the concentric portion of the rep) normally also let the weight come crashing back down (on the eccentric portion of the rep) instead of maintaining deliberate control by slowing the weight down when they lower it. Not controlling the weight on the way down could be less effective. We have evidence demonstrating that a slower (4 second) eccentric lowering action during biceps curls produced superior increases in arm growth than did a one-second eccentric action. This makes perfect sense. A slower eccentric action causes more time under tension, which creates more mechanical tension on the working muscles than a shorter eccentric portion does.
Additionally, from a training safety perspective, since cheating creates an overload of mechanical tension in a small piece of the range of motion involved in an exercise, it is more likely that you'll use a weight that's too heavy for you, making the muscles deal with forces that exceed the structural integrity of your tendons and ligaments and increasing your risk of injury.
If you want to maximize your gains in muscle size, maximize your time under (mechanical) tension on every rep by using strict form as well as controlled eccentric (lowering) movements of around three to five seconds.
Are You Avoiding Machines?
The whole idea of pitting free weights against machines is like pitting fruits against vegetables. Both training modalities offer a unique benefit the other misses, so it makes sense to do them both to make your muscle-building workouts more comprehensive, just like eating both fruits and vegetables will make your diet more nourishing.
Free weights excel by requiring you stabilize and control not just the load being moved but also the path of the movement. However, free weights fall short when it comes to keeping consistent mechanical tension on the working muscles throughout the range of motion involved in most exercises. That's where machines excel and therefore offer distinct benefits for building muscle.
All free-weight exercises have one disadvantage that a machine doesn't - gravity! Free weights use a single load vector, gravity, to create resistance. If you use a pulley cable machine, you're also working against a single load vector, which is the line of the cable itself. When you work against a single load vector, you're going to have points within the range of motion involved in the exercise where the lever arm is long, creating high levels of mechanical tension on the involved muscles, and ranges where the lever arm is short, resulting in little to no mechanical tension on those same muscles.
Example: During any style of biceps curl, the point at which your biceps is being maximally loaded (stimulated) is range of motion when your forearm is at a 90-degree angle with the load vector. If you're using free weights, gravity is your load vector. The point of maximal mechanical tension on the biceps would be when your elbow reaches 90 degrees of flexion or when your forearm is parallel to the floor. If you're doing biceps curls using a cable machine, however, the cable itself is the load vector. The point of maximal mechanical tension to your biceps is when your forearm makes a 90-degree angle with the cable.
Here's the kicker: The farther away you move from a 90-degree angle in either direction of the load vector, the shorter the lever arm and the less work your biceps have to do; therefore, your biceps experience less mechanical tension. That's why, in a free-weight biceps curl, the closer you move toward the bottom or top of the range of motion, the less work your biceps do because the lever arm is shortening. People tend to rest between reps at the top and bottom positions when doing barbell or dumbbell curls.
This applies to any free-weight exercise in that they're all being loaded by a single load vector (gravity or a pulley cable). On the other hand, selectorized machines have a cam system, which isn't dependent on a single load vector like free weights or cables. Instead, the cam is set up to offer you a much more consistent resistance throughout a larger portion of the range of motion. This gives you much more time under tension because your working muscles don't get the same chance to rest at the bottom or top position of the range like they do when you are using free weights.
While you can absolutely build plenty of muscle size exclusively using free weights, there's no reason to avoid machines if you have access to them. Both types of exercises have advantages, so don't let popular misconceptions blind you to machines' unique muscle-building benefits. For muscle gains (and strength gains, which are discussed in the Function and Performance chapter), machines can be very beneficial when used with free weights.
Should Men and Women Train Differently?
It's common to see men stampede toward the free weights, while women pack into the Pilates and yoga studios and line up on cardio and weight machines. Should men and women train as differently as they do? There's a lot of confusion, and here's the truth.
I've written workout programs that were featured in major men's exercise magazines, only to see those exact programs later printed in the same publisher's women's exercise magazines. The only thing that changed was the terminology. In the men's version, it said something like, "Use this workout program to build a stronger and more ripped body,"whereas in the women's version, it said something like, "Use this workout program to shape the tight and toned body of a goddess."
Despite what it might seem, this common practice is not dishonest or misleading. After all, even the best workout won't do anyone any good if it's not put into practice.
The publishers of these exercise magazines are merely trying to reach their readers using the goals they commonly hear them expressing. Put another way: If exercise is medicine, then we're much more likely to take our daily dose when it tastes good to us. If you do a quick Internet search for body-part specific exercises for the glutes, arms, chest, and shoulders, you'll see many of those terms are commonly followed with "for women" or "for men." This isn't by accident. People are including those words in their Internet searches.
The truth is, there are no exercises for men or exercises for women. There are just exercises. We're different sexes, but our bones, connective tissues, nerves, and muscles fibers are all made of the same raw material and function in the same way. There's nothing inherently male about a barbell exercise or nothing inherently female about machine exercises. They're both effective resistance training methods, and each can be used safely and effectively depending on your ability and goals - not your sex.
Don't be afraid of a machine or resistance exercise. The entire gym is open to you, so learn how to use it to your advantage. This book is designed to help you do that.
Learn more about Your Workout PERFECTED.
Dumbbell front shoulder raise
Setup: Stand tall, with your feet hip-width apart. Hold a pair of dumbbells at your sides (see figure a).
Setup
Stand tall, with your feet hip-width apart. Hold a pair of dumbbells at your sides (see figure a).
Action and Coaching Tips
With your elbows slightly bent, raise your arms out in front of your body until your elbows go just above your forehead (see figure b). Do not swing the weight up. Slowly lower the dumbbells back to your sides. Use deliberate control on the lifting and lowering portion of each rep.
Why It's Better
You increase range of motion when lifting your arms up during this exercise. Stopping when your arms are parallel to the floor is like stopping a biceps curl when your forearm is parallel to the floor.
Many lifters say they don't lift their arms above shoulder level - even keeping them slightly below shoulder level - when doing shoulders raises to minimize the involvement of the upper traps. Interestingly, many of these same people do shrugs, upright rows, and other trap-oriented exercises.
Now, if for some reason you're avoiding upper trap exercises and do not want activity in your upper traps, just know that research has found that, out of 16 commonly used shoulder training and rehabilitation exercises - such as seated row, knee push-up plus, or biceps curl - all but one exercise showed moderate to low activity in the upper traps. And none of the 16 exercises investigated in this study were a shoulder shrug or upright row. The one exercise mentioned here is commonly known as the full can, which is where you're standing with your arm at your side in external rotation. Then you lift your arm in the scapular plane (at a 30-degree angle to your torso) until your arm is 90 degrees to the floor. In short, it's very much like a side shoulder raise.
The point is, don't have the delusion that your upper traps aren't being activated in upper-body exercises that you didn't think involved that muscle group.
Benefits
- Greater range of motion
- More comprehensive shoulder training
Learn more about Your Workout PERFECTED.
Nutrition for fat loss: made simple
We can’t talk about fat loss without talking about eating behaviors (a.k.a. diet). You won’t find a more common question than, How should I eat for fat loss?
We can't talk about fat loss without talking about eating behaviors (a.k.a. diet). You won't find a more common question than, How should I eat for fat loss? For an answer you'll get lots of different opinions. The fact is, this issue, along with other issues like it, isn't about what this or that so-called expert says, and it's definitely not about what some athlete, trainer, or lean person at gym says. It's about what the body of scientific evidence - not just a single study - says when taken as a whole.
The International Society of Sports Nutrition (ISSN) has provided a list of conclusions and recommendations (for eating and exercising) in their position stand paper on diets and body composition. Here are a few of major takeaways from the ISSN's scientific paper:
- There are many diet types and eating styles. The various diet archetypes are wide-ranging in total energy and macronutrient distribution. Each type carries varying degrees of supporting data and unfounded claims.
- A wide range of dietary approaches (low-fat to low-carbohydrate/ketogenic, and all points between) can be similarly effective for improving body composition, and this allows flexibility with program design. To date, no controlled, inpatient isocaloric (i.e., calories matched) diet comparison, where protein is matched between groups, has reported a clinically meaningful fat loss or thermic (i.e., metabolic) advantage to the lower-carbohydrate or ketogenic diet.
- Common threads run through the diets in terms of the mechanism of action for weight loss and weight gain (i.e., sustained hypocaloric versus hypercaloric conditions), but there are also potentially unique means by which certain diets achieve their intended objectives (e.g., factors that facilitate greater satiety, ease of compliance, support of training demands).
- Diets focused primarily on fat loss (and weight loss beyond initial reductions in body water) operate under the fundamental mechanism of a sustained caloric deficit. This net hypocaloric (i.e., reduced calorie) balance can either be imposed daily or over the course of the week.
- The collective body of research about intermittent caloric restriction (i.e., intermittent fasting) demonstrates no significant advantage over daily caloric restriction for improving body composition. Increasing dietary protein to levels significantly beyond current recommendations for athletic populations may improve body composition. The ISSN's original 2007 position on protein intake (1.4-2.0 g/kg) has gained further support from subsequent investigations arriving at similar requirements in athletic populations. Higher protein intakes (2.3-3.1 g/kg Fat Free Mass) may be required to maximize muscle retention in lean, resistance-trained subjects in hypocaloric conditions. Emerging research on very high protein intakes (>3 g/kg) has demonstrated that the known thermic, satiating, and lean mass-preserving effects of dietary protein might be amplified in resistance training subjects.
- Most existing research showing adaptive thermogenesis (i.e.,a slowing of metabolism) has involved diets that combine aggressive caloric restriction with low protein intakes and an absence of resistance training, essentially creating a perfect storm for slowing metabolism. Research that has mindfully included resistance training and adequate protein has circumvented the problem of adaptive thermogenesis and muscle loss, despite very low-calorie intakes.
- The long-term success of a diet depends on compliance.
As you can see, the relationship of how many calories you consume per day to the number you expend per day is the single most important factor when it comes to determining whether you lose fat.
Now, whenever someone says this, someone else tries to refute it by bringing up the fact that the quality or composition of the calories you eat matters. They present it as an either/or proposition. But this relationship doesn't discount that some calories are more nutrient dense than others. (After all, we've all heard the term "empty calories.") It simply demonstrates that one can be both well nourished and overfed. Food quality and food quantity are important factors that should be considered together; as important as it is to eat high-quality, nutrient-dense foods for general health, you can still gain fat from eating "healthy" if you eat too many calories relative to what you're expending.
That said, focus on the quality of the foods you eat. Emphasize fruits and vegetables and high-quality meats, eggs, and fish (or protein substitutes, for vegetarians and vegans), while limiting refined foods, simple sugars, hydrogenated oil, and alcohol. Fruits, veggies, and lean proteins are generally lower in calories than things like fast food and candy. Don't overeat. Stop before you feel bloated and stuffed. You'll likely end up taking in fewer calories without even actually counting them.
You don't just want to be well fed; you want to be well nourished. Emphasizing the quality (i.e., nutrient density) of the foods you eat over the quantity (i.e., number of calories) is an easy approach. Try it and see where that gets you. It spells success for most people.
But it's certainly possible to eat too many calories from nutrient-dense, high-quality foods. Don't think for a second that you can't gain fat from eating "healthy." While you can first emphasize the quality of the foods you eat and see where that strategy gets you, it may only take you so far. You may need another strategy as well. The next step is to focus on the caloric quantity of the food you're eating and put yourself into a caloric deficit. The ways to create a caloric deficit involve eating fewer calories, increasing your activity level to expend more calories, or a combination of both.
Learn more about Your Workout PERFECTED.
Questions to ask yourself before the lift
Evaluating your lifting program gives you the chance to see if you could be doing things more effectively.
Evaluating your lifting program gives you the chance to see if you could be doing things more effectively. The following details a variety of questions to ask yourself before you lift along with what you need to know in order to avoid the common mistakes and get the most out of your workouts.
Are You Lifting Too Much?
At any given time at any big-box gym, you'll see at least one guy doing biceps curls or shoulder raises, and he has to throw his lower back into it each time he brings the weight up. If you don't see that dude at your gym, it may be because it's you.
It's easy to make this mistake. After all, you're in the gym to lift weights, and the previous section did mention that lifting heavy loads is an effective stimulus for muscle growth, right? Well, sort of. Training to maximize muscle is not about becoming a "weightlifter." It's about using weights as a tool to increase your muscle size. Simply throwing as much weight around as you can move to boost your ego and impress the people around you is the wrong approach.
When you use weights that are too heavy, here's what happens:
- You reduce the time under (mechanical) tension because you're forced to use momentum to cheat.
- You're unable to lower the weight slowly and with control, further reducing your time under (mechanical) tension.
- You utilize more muscles, which reduces the accumulated pump (i.e., metabolic stress) in muscles you intend to target.
Training to maximize muscle isn't just about moving the weight - that's weightlifting - but about controlling the weight through the entire range of motion involved in the exercise you're doing. The point of emphasis on each repetition is to avoid swinging the weight up or "cheating" by using other areas of your bodyweight to move the load.
Do Cheat Reps Work?
There is research showing that using moderate momentum (cheating) increases the torque of the target muscles even without an increase in the load. That moderate increase in load and using momentum allows the torque to be increased even further. While an excessive use of momentum results in lower demands on the target muscles, an excessive increase of the load reduces the total hypertrophy stimulus by virtue of the decreased number of repetitions that can be performed successfully. The time under tension is shortened dramatically.
It can appear as if the results of this study validate cheating by incorporating momentum into the sets, but it doesn't. The results of this study shouldn't surprise you, because mechanical tension on the muscles is still present during cheat reps. However, this doesn't mean that cheating with momentum is just as effective as not cheating by avoiding momentum. Cheating is basically only applying mechanical tension in part of the range of motion and using momentum to get through the rest of the range. Although cheating may still have you moving through the full range of motion involved in the exercise, from a mechanical tension perspective, it's essentially a partial rep performed by target muscles. We have good evidence demonstrating that a partial range of motion rep creates less muscle growth than a full range of motion rep.
How Are You Lowering the Lift?
Controlling the weight while minimizing momentum in exercises to maximize muscle gains also applies to the eccentric portion of each rep. People who cheat the weight up (on the concentric portion of the rep) normally also let the weight come crashing back down (on the eccentric portion of the rep) instead of maintaining deliberate control by slowing the weight down when they lower it. Not controlling the weight on the way down could be less effective. We have evidence demonstrating that a slower (4 second) eccentric lowering action during biceps curls produced superior increases in arm growth than did a one-second eccentric action. This makes perfect sense. A slower eccentric action causes more time under tension, which creates more mechanical tension on the working muscles than a shorter eccentric portion does.
Additionally, from a training safety perspective, since cheating creates an overload of mechanical tension in a small piece of the range of motion involved in an exercise, it is more likely that you'll use a weight that's too heavy for you, making the muscles deal with forces that exceed the structural integrity of your tendons and ligaments and increasing your risk of injury.
If you want to maximize your gains in muscle size, maximize your time under (mechanical) tension on every rep by using strict form as well as controlled eccentric (lowering) movements of around three to five seconds.
Are You Avoiding Machines?
The whole idea of pitting free weights against machines is like pitting fruits against vegetables. Both training modalities offer a unique benefit the other misses, so it makes sense to do them both to make your muscle-building workouts more comprehensive, just like eating both fruits and vegetables will make your diet more nourishing.
Free weights excel by requiring you stabilize and control not just the load being moved but also the path of the movement. However, free weights fall short when it comes to keeping consistent mechanical tension on the working muscles throughout the range of motion involved in most exercises. That's where machines excel and therefore offer distinct benefits for building muscle.
All free-weight exercises have one disadvantage that a machine doesn't - gravity! Free weights use a single load vector, gravity, to create resistance. If you use a pulley cable machine, you're also working against a single load vector, which is the line of the cable itself. When you work against a single load vector, you're going to have points within the range of motion involved in the exercise where the lever arm is long, creating high levels of mechanical tension on the involved muscles, and ranges where the lever arm is short, resulting in little to no mechanical tension on those same muscles.
Example: During any style of biceps curl, the point at which your biceps is being maximally loaded (stimulated) is range of motion when your forearm is at a 90-degree angle with the load vector. If you're using free weights, gravity is your load vector. The point of maximal mechanical tension on the biceps would be when your elbow reaches 90 degrees of flexion or when your forearm is parallel to the floor. If you're doing biceps curls using a cable machine, however, the cable itself is the load vector. The point of maximal mechanical tension to your biceps is when your forearm makes a 90-degree angle with the cable.
Here's the kicker: The farther away you move from a 90-degree angle in either direction of the load vector, the shorter the lever arm and the less work your biceps have to do; therefore, your biceps experience less mechanical tension. That's why, in a free-weight biceps curl, the closer you move toward the bottom or top of the range of motion, the less work your biceps do because the lever arm is shortening. People tend to rest between reps at the top and bottom positions when doing barbell or dumbbell curls.
This applies to any free-weight exercise in that they're all being loaded by a single load vector (gravity or a pulley cable). On the other hand, selectorized machines have a cam system, which isn't dependent on a single load vector like free weights or cables. Instead, the cam is set up to offer you a much more consistent resistance throughout a larger portion of the range of motion. This gives you much more time under tension because your working muscles don't get the same chance to rest at the bottom or top position of the range like they do when you are using free weights.
While you can absolutely build plenty of muscle size exclusively using free weights, there's no reason to avoid machines if you have access to them. Both types of exercises have advantages, so don't let popular misconceptions blind you to machines' unique muscle-building benefits. For muscle gains (and strength gains, which are discussed in the Function and Performance chapter), machines can be very beneficial when used with free weights.
Should Men and Women Train Differently?
It's common to see men stampede toward the free weights, while women pack into the Pilates and yoga studios and line up on cardio and weight machines. Should men and women train as differently as they do? There's a lot of confusion, and here's the truth.
I've written workout programs that were featured in major men's exercise magazines, only to see those exact programs later printed in the same publisher's women's exercise magazines. The only thing that changed was the terminology. In the men's version, it said something like, "Use this workout program to build a stronger and more ripped body,"whereas in the women's version, it said something like, "Use this workout program to shape the tight and toned body of a goddess."
Despite what it might seem, this common practice is not dishonest or misleading. After all, even the best workout won't do anyone any good if it's not put into practice.
The publishers of these exercise magazines are merely trying to reach their readers using the goals they commonly hear them expressing. Put another way: If exercise is medicine, then we're much more likely to take our daily dose when it tastes good to us. If you do a quick Internet search for body-part specific exercises for the glutes, arms, chest, and shoulders, you'll see many of those terms are commonly followed with "for women" or "for men." This isn't by accident. People are including those words in their Internet searches.
The truth is, there are no exercises for men or exercises for women. There are just exercises. We're different sexes, but our bones, connective tissues, nerves, and muscles fibers are all made of the same raw material and function in the same way. There's nothing inherently male about a barbell exercise or nothing inherently female about machine exercises. They're both effective resistance training methods, and each can be used safely and effectively depending on your ability and goals - not your sex.
Don't be afraid of a machine or resistance exercise. The entire gym is open to you, so learn how to use it to your advantage. This book is designed to help you do that.
Learn more about Your Workout PERFECTED.
Dumbbell front shoulder raise
Setup: Stand tall, with your feet hip-width apart. Hold a pair of dumbbells at your sides (see figure a).
Setup
Stand tall, with your feet hip-width apart. Hold a pair of dumbbells at your sides (see figure a).
Action and Coaching Tips
With your elbows slightly bent, raise your arms out in front of your body until your elbows go just above your forehead (see figure b). Do not swing the weight up. Slowly lower the dumbbells back to your sides. Use deliberate control on the lifting and lowering portion of each rep.
Why It's Better
You increase range of motion when lifting your arms up during this exercise. Stopping when your arms are parallel to the floor is like stopping a biceps curl when your forearm is parallel to the floor.
Many lifters say they don't lift their arms above shoulder level - even keeping them slightly below shoulder level - when doing shoulders raises to minimize the involvement of the upper traps. Interestingly, many of these same people do shrugs, upright rows, and other trap-oriented exercises.
Now, if for some reason you're avoiding upper trap exercises and do not want activity in your upper traps, just know that research has found that, out of 16 commonly used shoulder training and rehabilitation exercises - such as seated row, knee push-up plus, or biceps curl - all but one exercise showed moderate to low activity in the upper traps. And none of the 16 exercises investigated in this study were a shoulder shrug or upright row. The one exercise mentioned here is commonly known as the full can, which is where you're standing with your arm at your side in external rotation. Then you lift your arm in the scapular plane (at a 30-degree angle to your torso) until your arm is 90 degrees to the floor. In short, it's very much like a side shoulder raise.
The point is, don't have the delusion that your upper traps aren't being activated in upper-body exercises that you didn't think involved that muscle group.
Benefits
- Greater range of motion
- More comprehensive shoulder training
Learn more about Your Workout PERFECTED.
Nutrition for fat loss: made simple
We can’t talk about fat loss without talking about eating behaviors (a.k.a. diet). You won’t find a more common question than, How should I eat for fat loss?
We can't talk about fat loss without talking about eating behaviors (a.k.a. diet). You won't find a more common question than, How should I eat for fat loss? For an answer you'll get lots of different opinions. The fact is, this issue, along with other issues like it, isn't about what this or that so-called expert says, and it's definitely not about what some athlete, trainer, or lean person at gym says. It's about what the body of scientific evidence - not just a single study - says when taken as a whole.
The International Society of Sports Nutrition (ISSN) has provided a list of conclusions and recommendations (for eating and exercising) in their position stand paper on diets and body composition. Here are a few of major takeaways from the ISSN's scientific paper:
- There are many diet types and eating styles. The various diet archetypes are wide-ranging in total energy and macronutrient distribution. Each type carries varying degrees of supporting data and unfounded claims.
- A wide range of dietary approaches (low-fat to low-carbohydrate/ketogenic, and all points between) can be similarly effective for improving body composition, and this allows flexibility with program design. To date, no controlled, inpatient isocaloric (i.e., calories matched) diet comparison, where protein is matched between groups, has reported a clinically meaningful fat loss or thermic (i.e., metabolic) advantage to the lower-carbohydrate or ketogenic diet.
- Common threads run through the diets in terms of the mechanism of action for weight loss and weight gain (i.e., sustained hypocaloric versus hypercaloric conditions), but there are also potentially unique means by which certain diets achieve their intended objectives (e.g., factors that facilitate greater satiety, ease of compliance, support of training demands).
- Diets focused primarily on fat loss (and weight loss beyond initial reductions in body water) operate under the fundamental mechanism of a sustained caloric deficit. This net hypocaloric (i.e., reduced calorie) balance can either be imposed daily or over the course of the week.
- The collective body of research about intermittent caloric restriction (i.e., intermittent fasting) demonstrates no significant advantage over daily caloric restriction for improving body composition. Increasing dietary protein to levels significantly beyond current recommendations for athletic populations may improve body composition. The ISSN's original 2007 position on protein intake (1.4-2.0 g/kg) has gained further support from subsequent investigations arriving at similar requirements in athletic populations. Higher protein intakes (2.3-3.1 g/kg Fat Free Mass) may be required to maximize muscle retention in lean, resistance-trained subjects in hypocaloric conditions. Emerging research on very high protein intakes (>3 g/kg) has demonstrated that the known thermic, satiating, and lean mass-preserving effects of dietary protein might be amplified in resistance training subjects.
- Most existing research showing adaptive thermogenesis (i.e.,a slowing of metabolism) has involved diets that combine aggressive caloric restriction with low protein intakes and an absence of resistance training, essentially creating a perfect storm for slowing metabolism. Research that has mindfully included resistance training and adequate protein has circumvented the problem of adaptive thermogenesis and muscle loss, despite very low-calorie intakes.
- The long-term success of a diet depends on compliance.
As you can see, the relationship of how many calories you consume per day to the number you expend per day is the single most important factor when it comes to determining whether you lose fat.
Now, whenever someone says this, someone else tries to refute it by bringing up the fact that the quality or composition of the calories you eat matters. They present it as an either/or proposition. But this relationship doesn't discount that some calories are more nutrient dense than others. (After all, we've all heard the term "empty calories.") It simply demonstrates that one can be both well nourished and overfed. Food quality and food quantity are important factors that should be considered together; as important as it is to eat high-quality, nutrient-dense foods for general health, you can still gain fat from eating "healthy" if you eat too many calories relative to what you're expending.
That said, focus on the quality of the foods you eat. Emphasize fruits and vegetables and high-quality meats, eggs, and fish (or protein substitutes, for vegetarians and vegans), while limiting refined foods, simple sugars, hydrogenated oil, and alcohol. Fruits, veggies, and lean proteins are generally lower in calories than things like fast food and candy. Don't overeat. Stop before you feel bloated and stuffed. You'll likely end up taking in fewer calories without even actually counting them.
You don't just want to be well fed; you want to be well nourished. Emphasizing the quality (i.e., nutrient density) of the foods you eat over the quantity (i.e., number of calories) is an easy approach. Try it and see where that gets you. It spells success for most people.
But it's certainly possible to eat too many calories from nutrient-dense, high-quality foods. Don't think for a second that you can't gain fat from eating "healthy." While you can first emphasize the quality of the foods you eat and see where that strategy gets you, it may only take you so far. You may need another strategy as well. The next step is to focus on the caloric quantity of the food you're eating and put yourself into a caloric deficit. The ways to create a caloric deficit involve eating fewer calories, increasing your activity level to expend more calories, or a combination of both.
Learn more about Your Workout PERFECTED.
Questions to ask yourself before the lift
Evaluating your lifting program gives you the chance to see if you could be doing things more effectively.
Evaluating your lifting program gives you the chance to see if you could be doing things more effectively. The following details a variety of questions to ask yourself before you lift along with what you need to know in order to avoid the common mistakes and get the most out of your workouts.
Are You Lifting Too Much?
At any given time at any big-box gym, you'll see at least one guy doing biceps curls or shoulder raises, and he has to throw his lower back into it each time he brings the weight up. If you don't see that dude at your gym, it may be because it's you.
It's easy to make this mistake. After all, you're in the gym to lift weights, and the previous section did mention that lifting heavy loads is an effective stimulus for muscle growth, right? Well, sort of. Training to maximize muscle is not about becoming a "weightlifter." It's about using weights as a tool to increase your muscle size. Simply throwing as much weight around as you can move to boost your ego and impress the people around you is the wrong approach.
When you use weights that are too heavy, here's what happens:
- You reduce the time under (mechanical) tension because you're forced to use momentum to cheat.
- You're unable to lower the weight slowly and with control, further reducing your time under (mechanical) tension.
- You utilize more muscles, which reduces the accumulated pump (i.e., metabolic stress) in muscles you intend to target.
Training to maximize muscle isn't just about moving the weight - that's weightlifting - but about controlling the weight through the entire range of motion involved in the exercise you're doing. The point of emphasis on each repetition is to avoid swinging the weight up or "cheating" by using other areas of your bodyweight to move the load.
Do Cheat Reps Work?
There is research showing that using moderate momentum (cheating) increases the torque of the target muscles even without an increase in the load. That moderate increase in load and using momentum allows the torque to be increased even further. While an excessive use of momentum results in lower demands on the target muscles, an excessive increase of the load reduces the total hypertrophy stimulus by virtue of the decreased number of repetitions that can be performed successfully. The time under tension is shortened dramatically.
It can appear as if the results of this study validate cheating by incorporating momentum into the sets, but it doesn't. The results of this study shouldn't surprise you, because mechanical tension on the muscles is still present during cheat reps. However, this doesn't mean that cheating with momentum is just as effective as not cheating by avoiding momentum. Cheating is basically only applying mechanical tension in part of the range of motion and using momentum to get through the rest of the range. Although cheating may still have you moving through the full range of motion involved in the exercise, from a mechanical tension perspective, it's essentially a partial rep performed by target muscles. We have good evidence demonstrating that a partial range of motion rep creates less muscle growth than a full range of motion rep.
How Are You Lowering the Lift?
Controlling the weight while minimizing momentum in exercises to maximize muscle gains also applies to the eccentric portion of each rep. People who cheat the weight up (on the concentric portion of the rep) normally also let the weight come crashing back down (on the eccentric portion of the rep) instead of maintaining deliberate control by slowing the weight down when they lower it. Not controlling the weight on the way down could be less effective. We have evidence demonstrating that a slower (4 second) eccentric lowering action during biceps curls produced superior increases in arm growth than did a one-second eccentric action. This makes perfect sense. A slower eccentric action causes more time under tension, which creates more mechanical tension on the working muscles than a shorter eccentric portion does.
Additionally, from a training safety perspective, since cheating creates an overload of mechanical tension in a small piece of the range of motion involved in an exercise, it is more likely that you'll use a weight that's too heavy for you, making the muscles deal with forces that exceed the structural integrity of your tendons and ligaments and increasing your risk of injury.
If you want to maximize your gains in muscle size, maximize your time under (mechanical) tension on every rep by using strict form as well as controlled eccentric (lowering) movements of around three to five seconds.
Are You Avoiding Machines?
The whole idea of pitting free weights against machines is like pitting fruits against vegetables. Both training modalities offer a unique benefit the other misses, so it makes sense to do them both to make your muscle-building workouts more comprehensive, just like eating both fruits and vegetables will make your diet more nourishing.
Free weights excel by requiring you stabilize and control not just the load being moved but also the path of the movement. However, free weights fall short when it comes to keeping consistent mechanical tension on the working muscles throughout the range of motion involved in most exercises. That's where machines excel and therefore offer distinct benefits for building muscle.
All free-weight exercises have one disadvantage that a machine doesn't - gravity! Free weights use a single load vector, gravity, to create resistance. If you use a pulley cable machine, you're also working against a single load vector, which is the line of the cable itself. When you work against a single load vector, you're going to have points within the range of motion involved in the exercise where the lever arm is long, creating high levels of mechanical tension on the involved muscles, and ranges where the lever arm is short, resulting in little to no mechanical tension on those same muscles.
Example: During any style of biceps curl, the point at which your biceps is being maximally loaded (stimulated) is range of motion when your forearm is at a 90-degree angle with the load vector. If you're using free weights, gravity is your load vector. The point of maximal mechanical tension on the biceps would be when your elbow reaches 90 degrees of flexion or when your forearm is parallel to the floor. If you're doing biceps curls using a cable machine, however, the cable itself is the load vector. The point of maximal mechanical tension to your biceps is when your forearm makes a 90-degree angle with the cable.
Here's the kicker: The farther away you move from a 90-degree angle in either direction of the load vector, the shorter the lever arm and the less work your biceps have to do; therefore, your biceps experience less mechanical tension. That's why, in a free-weight biceps curl, the closer you move toward the bottom or top of the range of motion, the less work your biceps do because the lever arm is shortening. People tend to rest between reps at the top and bottom positions when doing barbell or dumbbell curls.
This applies to any free-weight exercise in that they're all being loaded by a single load vector (gravity or a pulley cable). On the other hand, selectorized machines have a cam system, which isn't dependent on a single load vector like free weights or cables. Instead, the cam is set up to offer you a much more consistent resistance throughout a larger portion of the range of motion. This gives you much more time under tension because your working muscles don't get the same chance to rest at the bottom or top position of the range like they do when you are using free weights.
While you can absolutely build plenty of muscle size exclusively using free weights, there's no reason to avoid machines if you have access to them. Both types of exercises have advantages, so don't let popular misconceptions blind you to machines' unique muscle-building benefits. For muscle gains (and strength gains, which are discussed in the Function and Performance chapter), machines can be very beneficial when used with free weights.
Should Men and Women Train Differently?
It's common to see men stampede toward the free weights, while women pack into the Pilates and yoga studios and line up on cardio and weight machines. Should men and women train as differently as they do? There's a lot of confusion, and here's the truth.
I've written workout programs that were featured in major men's exercise magazines, only to see those exact programs later printed in the same publisher's women's exercise magazines. The only thing that changed was the terminology. In the men's version, it said something like, "Use this workout program to build a stronger and more ripped body,"whereas in the women's version, it said something like, "Use this workout program to shape the tight and toned body of a goddess."
Despite what it might seem, this common practice is not dishonest or misleading. After all, even the best workout won't do anyone any good if it's not put into practice.
The publishers of these exercise magazines are merely trying to reach their readers using the goals they commonly hear them expressing. Put another way: If exercise is medicine, then we're much more likely to take our daily dose when it tastes good to us. If you do a quick Internet search for body-part specific exercises for the glutes, arms, chest, and shoulders, you'll see many of those terms are commonly followed with "for women" or "for men." This isn't by accident. People are including those words in their Internet searches.
The truth is, there are no exercises for men or exercises for women. There are just exercises. We're different sexes, but our bones, connective tissues, nerves, and muscles fibers are all made of the same raw material and function in the same way. There's nothing inherently male about a barbell exercise or nothing inherently female about machine exercises. They're both effective resistance training methods, and each can be used safely and effectively depending on your ability and goals - not your sex.
Don't be afraid of a machine or resistance exercise. The entire gym is open to you, so learn how to use it to your advantage. This book is designed to help you do that.
Learn more about Your Workout PERFECTED.
Dumbbell front shoulder raise
Setup: Stand tall, with your feet hip-width apart. Hold a pair of dumbbells at your sides (see figure a).
Setup
Stand tall, with your feet hip-width apart. Hold a pair of dumbbells at your sides (see figure a).
Action and Coaching Tips
With your elbows slightly bent, raise your arms out in front of your body until your elbows go just above your forehead (see figure b). Do not swing the weight up. Slowly lower the dumbbells back to your sides. Use deliberate control on the lifting and lowering portion of each rep.
Why It's Better
You increase range of motion when lifting your arms up during this exercise. Stopping when your arms are parallel to the floor is like stopping a biceps curl when your forearm is parallel to the floor.
Many lifters say they don't lift their arms above shoulder level - even keeping them slightly below shoulder level - when doing shoulders raises to minimize the involvement of the upper traps. Interestingly, many of these same people do shrugs, upright rows, and other trap-oriented exercises.
Now, if for some reason you're avoiding upper trap exercises and do not want activity in your upper traps, just know that research has found that, out of 16 commonly used shoulder training and rehabilitation exercises - such as seated row, knee push-up plus, or biceps curl - all but one exercise showed moderate to low activity in the upper traps. And none of the 16 exercises investigated in this study were a shoulder shrug or upright row. The one exercise mentioned here is commonly known as the full can, which is where you're standing with your arm at your side in external rotation. Then you lift your arm in the scapular plane (at a 30-degree angle to your torso) until your arm is 90 degrees to the floor. In short, it's very much like a side shoulder raise.
The point is, don't have the delusion that your upper traps aren't being activated in upper-body exercises that you didn't think involved that muscle group.
Benefits
- Greater range of motion
- More comprehensive shoulder training
Learn more about Your Workout PERFECTED.
Nutrition for fat loss: made simple
We can’t talk about fat loss without talking about eating behaviors (a.k.a. diet). You won’t find a more common question than, How should I eat for fat loss?
We can't talk about fat loss without talking about eating behaviors (a.k.a. diet). You won't find a more common question than, How should I eat for fat loss? For an answer you'll get lots of different opinions. The fact is, this issue, along with other issues like it, isn't about what this or that so-called expert says, and it's definitely not about what some athlete, trainer, or lean person at gym says. It's about what the body of scientific evidence - not just a single study - says when taken as a whole.
The International Society of Sports Nutrition (ISSN) has provided a list of conclusions and recommendations (for eating and exercising) in their position stand paper on diets and body composition. Here are a few of major takeaways from the ISSN's scientific paper:
- There are many diet types and eating styles. The various diet archetypes are wide-ranging in total energy and macronutrient distribution. Each type carries varying degrees of supporting data and unfounded claims.
- A wide range of dietary approaches (low-fat to low-carbohydrate/ketogenic, and all points between) can be similarly effective for improving body composition, and this allows flexibility with program design. To date, no controlled, inpatient isocaloric (i.e., calories matched) diet comparison, where protein is matched between groups, has reported a clinically meaningful fat loss or thermic (i.e., metabolic) advantage to the lower-carbohydrate or ketogenic diet.
- Common threads run through the diets in terms of the mechanism of action for weight loss and weight gain (i.e., sustained hypocaloric versus hypercaloric conditions), but there are also potentially unique means by which certain diets achieve their intended objectives (e.g., factors that facilitate greater satiety, ease of compliance, support of training demands).
- Diets focused primarily on fat loss (and weight loss beyond initial reductions in body water) operate under the fundamental mechanism of a sustained caloric deficit. This net hypocaloric (i.e., reduced calorie) balance can either be imposed daily or over the course of the week.
- The collective body of research about intermittent caloric restriction (i.e., intermittent fasting) demonstrates no significant advantage over daily caloric restriction for improving body composition. Increasing dietary protein to levels significantly beyond current recommendations for athletic populations may improve body composition. The ISSN's original 2007 position on protein intake (1.4-2.0 g/kg) has gained further support from subsequent investigations arriving at similar requirements in athletic populations. Higher protein intakes (2.3-3.1 g/kg Fat Free Mass) may be required to maximize muscle retention in lean, resistance-trained subjects in hypocaloric conditions. Emerging research on very high protein intakes (>3 g/kg) has demonstrated that the known thermic, satiating, and lean mass-preserving effects of dietary protein might be amplified in resistance training subjects.
- Most existing research showing adaptive thermogenesis (i.e.,a slowing of metabolism) has involved diets that combine aggressive caloric restriction with low protein intakes and an absence of resistance training, essentially creating a perfect storm for slowing metabolism. Research that has mindfully included resistance training and adequate protein has circumvented the problem of adaptive thermogenesis and muscle loss, despite very low-calorie intakes.
- The long-term success of a diet depends on compliance.
As you can see, the relationship of how many calories you consume per day to the number you expend per day is the single most important factor when it comes to determining whether you lose fat.
Now, whenever someone says this, someone else tries to refute it by bringing up the fact that the quality or composition of the calories you eat matters. They present it as an either/or proposition. But this relationship doesn't discount that some calories are more nutrient dense than others. (After all, we've all heard the term "empty calories.") It simply demonstrates that one can be both well nourished and overfed. Food quality and food quantity are important factors that should be considered together; as important as it is to eat high-quality, nutrient-dense foods for general health, you can still gain fat from eating "healthy" if you eat too many calories relative to what you're expending.
That said, focus on the quality of the foods you eat. Emphasize fruits and vegetables and high-quality meats, eggs, and fish (or protein substitutes, for vegetarians and vegans), while limiting refined foods, simple sugars, hydrogenated oil, and alcohol. Fruits, veggies, and lean proteins are generally lower in calories than things like fast food and candy. Don't overeat. Stop before you feel bloated and stuffed. You'll likely end up taking in fewer calories without even actually counting them.
You don't just want to be well fed; you want to be well nourished. Emphasizing the quality (i.e., nutrient density) of the foods you eat over the quantity (i.e., number of calories) is an easy approach. Try it and see where that gets you. It spells success for most people.
But it's certainly possible to eat too many calories from nutrient-dense, high-quality foods. Don't think for a second that you can't gain fat from eating "healthy." While you can first emphasize the quality of the foods you eat and see where that strategy gets you, it may only take you so far. You may need another strategy as well. The next step is to focus on the caloric quantity of the food you're eating and put yourself into a caloric deficit. The ways to create a caloric deficit involve eating fewer calories, increasing your activity level to expend more calories, or a combination of both.
Learn more about Your Workout PERFECTED.
Questions to ask yourself before the lift
Evaluating your lifting program gives you the chance to see if you could be doing things more effectively.
Evaluating your lifting program gives you the chance to see if you could be doing things more effectively. The following details a variety of questions to ask yourself before you lift along with what you need to know in order to avoid the common mistakes and get the most out of your workouts.
Are You Lifting Too Much?
At any given time at any big-box gym, you'll see at least one guy doing biceps curls or shoulder raises, and he has to throw his lower back into it each time he brings the weight up. If you don't see that dude at your gym, it may be because it's you.
It's easy to make this mistake. After all, you're in the gym to lift weights, and the previous section did mention that lifting heavy loads is an effective stimulus for muscle growth, right? Well, sort of. Training to maximize muscle is not about becoming a "weightlifter." It's about using weights as a tool to increase your muscle size. Simply throwing as much weight around as you can move to boost your ego and impress the people around you is the wrong approach.
When you use weights that are too heavy, here's what happens:
- You reduce the time under (mechanical) tension because you're forced to use momentum to cheat.
- You're unable to lower the weight slowly and with control, further reducing your time under (mechanical) tension.
- You utilize more muscles, which reduces the accumulated pump (i.e., metabolic stress) in muscles you intend to target.
Training to maximize muscle isn't just about moving the weight - that's weightlifting - but about controlling the weight through the entire range of motion involved in the exercise you're doing. The point of emphasis on each repetition is to avoid swinging the weight up or "cheating" by using other areas of your bodyweight to move the load.
Do Cheat Reps Work?
There is research showing that using moderate momentum (cheating) increases the torque of the target muscles even without an increase in the load. That moderate increase in load and using momentum allows the torque to be increased even further. While an excessive use of momentum results in lower demands on the target muscles, an excessive increase of the load reduces the total hypertrophy stimulus by virtue of the decreased number of repetitions that can be performed successfully. The time under tension is shortened dramatically.
It can appear as if the results of this study validate cheating by incorporating momentum into the sets, but it doesn't. The results of this study shouldn't surprise you, because mechanical tension on the muscles is still present during cheat reps. However, this doesn't mean that cheating with momentum is just as effective as not cheating by avoiding momentum. Cheating is basically only applying mechanical tension in part of the range of motion and using momentum to get through the rest of the range. Although cheating may still have you moving through the full range of motion involved in the exercise, from a mechanical tension perspective, it's essentially a partial rep performed by target muscles. We have good evidence demonstrating that a partial range of motion rep creates less muscle growth than a full range of motion rep.
How Are You Lowering the Lift?
Controlling the weight while minimizing momentum in exercises to maximize muscle gains also applies to the eccentric portion of each rep. People who cheat the weight up (on the concentric portion of the rep) normally also let the weight come crashing back down (on the eccentric portion of the rep) instead of maintaining deliberate control by slowing the weight down when they lower it. Not controlling the weight on the way down could be less effective. We have evidence demonstrating that a slower (4 second) eccentric lowering action during biceps curls produced superior increases in arm growth than did a one-second eccentric action. This makes perfect sense. A slower eccentric action causes more time under tension, which creates more mechanical tension on the working muscles than a shorter eccentric portion does.
Additionally, from a training safety perspective, since cheating creates an overload of mechanical tension in a small piece of the range of motion involved in an exercise, it is more likely that you'll use a weight that's too heavy for you, making the muscles deal with forces that exceed the structural integrity of your tendons and ligaments and increasing your risk of injury.
If you want to maximize your gains in muscle size, maximize your time under (mechanical) tension on every rep by using strict form as well as controlled eccentric (lowering) movements of around three to five seconds.
Are You Avoiding Machines?
The whole idea of pitting free weights against machines is like pitting fruits against vegetables. Both training modalities offer a unique benefit the other misses, so it makes sense to do them both to make your muscle-building workouts more comprehensive, just like eating both fruits and vegetables will make your diet more nourishing.
Free weights excel by requiring you stabilize and control not just the load being moved but also the path of the movement. However, free weights fall short when it comes to keeping consistent mechanical tension on the working muscles throughout the range of motion involved in most exercises. That's where machines excel and therefore offer distinct benefits for building muscle.
All free-weight exercises have one disadvantage that a machine doesn't - gravity! Free weights use a single load vector, gravity, to create resistance. If you use a pulley cable machine, you're also working against a single load vector, which is the line of the cable itself. When you work against a single load vector, you're going to have points within the range of motion involved in the exercise where the lever arm is long, creating high levels of mechanical tension on the involved muscles, and ranges where the lever arm is short, resulting in little to no mechanical tension on those same muscles.
Example: During any style of biceps curl, the point at which your biceps is being maximally loaded (stimulated) is range of motion when your forearm is at a 90-degree angle with the load vector. If you're using free weights, gravity is your load vector. The point of maximal mechanical tension on the biceps would be when your elbow reaches 90 degrees of flexion or when your forearm is parallel to the floor. If you're doing biceps curls using a cable machine, however, the cable itself is the load vector. The point of maximal mechanical tension to your biceps is when your forearm makes a 90-degree angle with the cable.
Here's the kicker: The farther away you move from a 90-degree angle in either direction of the load vector, the shorter the lever arm and the less work your biceps have to do; therefore, your biceps experience less mechanical tension. That's why, in a free-weight biceps curl, the closer you move toward the bottom or top of the range of motion, the less work your biceps do because the lever arm is shortening. People tend to rest between reps at the top and bottom positions when doing barbell or dumbbell curls.
This applies to any free-weight exercise in that they're all being loaded by a single load vector (gravity or a pulley cable). On the other hand, selectorized machines have a cam system, which isn't dependent on a single load vector like free weights or cables. Instead, the cam is set up to offer you a much more consistent resistance throughout a larger portion of the range of motion. This gives you much more time under tension because your working muscles don't get the same chance to rest at the bottom or top position of the range like they do when you are using free weights.
While you can absolutely build plenty of muscle size exclusively using free weights, there's no reason to avoid machines if you have access to them. Both types of exercises have advantages, so don't let popular misconceptions blind you to machines' unique muscle-building benefits. For muscle gains (and strength gains, which are discussed in the Function and Performance chapter), machines can be very beneficial when used with free weights.
Should Men and Women Train Differently?
It's common to see men stampede toward the free weights, while women pack into the Pilates and yoga studios and line up on cardio and weight machines. Should men and women train as differently as they do? There's a lot of confusion, and here's the truth.
I've written workout programs that were featured in major men's exercise magazines, only to see those exact programs later printed in the same publisher's women's exercise magazines. The only thing that changed was the terminology. In the men's version, it said something like, "Use this workout program to build a stronger and more ripped body,"whereas in the women's version, it said something like, "Use this workout program to shape the tight and toned body of a goddess."
Despite what it might seem, this common practice is not dishonest or misleading. After all, even the best workout won't do anyone any good if it's not put into practice.
The publishers of these exercise magazines are merely trying to reach their readers using the goals they commonly hear them expressing. Put another way: If exercise is medicine, then we're much more likely to take our daily dose when it tastes good to us. If you do a quick Internet search for body-part specific exercises for the glutes, arms, chest, and shoulders, you'll see many of those terms are commonly followed with "for women" or "for men." This isn't by accident. People are including those words in their Internet searches.
The truth is, there are no exercises for men or exercises for women. There are just exercises. We're different sexes, but our bones, connective tissues, nerves, and muscles fibers are all made of the same raw material and function in the same way. There's nothing inherently male about a barbell exercise or nothing inherently female about machine exercises. They're both effective resistance training methods, and each can be used safely and effectively depending on your ability and goals - not your sex.
Don't be afraid of a machine or resistance exercise. The entire gym is open to you, so learn how to use it to your advantage. This book is designed to help you do that.
Learn more about Your Workout PERFECTED.