Training

by jasonferruggia.com

By now we all know that in order to get bigger and stronger you have to use a barbell in your training. This is obviously not any kind of new and exciting revelation. You want bigger legs you squat. You want bigger shoulders you overhead press. You want a bigger back you deadlift.

Now, to play devils advocate I could make a valid argument why the only barbell exercises you truly need are the squat and deadlift and why for the upper body you could get away with dumbbells and bodyweight exercises only. Hell, standing dumbbell presses would probably get the job done just as effectively, in many cases, as a bar.

The obvious problem is the incremental weight jumps you can make from workout to workout. With a bar you could go from 135 to 140. Or if you had fractional plates, as I recommend most people do, you could go up to 136 or 137.5. With dumbbells you’re usually going to be making ten pound jumps. That makes slow and steady progression a little bit more difficult. Not the end of the world but worth considering.

Secondly, some exercises done with dumbbells for low reps just aren’t that safe. If you want to train maximal strength and press for a triple it’s safer to do so with a bar. Even just getting dumbbells that heavy into position can be a little risky sometimes. For those reasons I very rarely prescribe a dumbbell exercise (other than a one arm snatch) for less than five reps.

But, in my opinion, here is the real magic and advantage of using barbells in a training center where you want to create a great atmosphere and have all of your clients loving their experience at your place…

When you base your programs around the power rack and big barbell exercises everything changes. There is more camaraderie, more team work, more competition and a better atmosphere in the gym overall.

You know why that is?

It’s pretty simple, actually.

Because in a properly run barbell workout everyone is involved in every single set their training partners do. Let’s say you have four guys in a group training together and they’re squatting. You have position 1- spot left, position 2- spot right, position 3- spot from behind, position 4- you’re up to squat. And you repeat and keep moving.

Doing this keeps every single member of the group engaged and focused. Each person is changing weights, spotting, coaching, learning and paying attention… They are FULLY entrenched in every single rep of squats that goes on during that workout.

Let’s say you were a bodyweight only guy or a guy who didn’t believe in loading the spine. I can guarantee you that your training center will never have a great atmosphere and build that same type of camaraderie and competition if you replaced the squat with the dumbbell split squat. There will be very little intensity when compared to barbell training. Guys will just wander around staring at the ceiling or counting birds outside the window.

There’s no need for them to spot, there’s no need for them to change weights and therefore they’re in their own world, concerned only about their own set or their own performance; not everyone else’s. And that creates a really shitty environment.

Of course you have to do single leg work and pushups and chins and all that kind of stuff which I’m a huge fan of, but it should be done after you get your one big barbell exercise out of the way.

That’s all it really takes is one big barbell exercise per workout to completely change everything. If all the assistance exercises are the exact same but you start with barbell military presses instead of dumbbell military presses it makes all the difference in the world for the numerous reasons I mentioned above.

After guys get their fill of the excitement, intensity and camaraderie of doing that one big lift together you can move on to assistance work.

One thing to note is that guys and girls are completely different. The majority of females (unless they are athletes) don’t enjoy healthy competition like guys do. You and I might get pissed if Billy squats more than us but it will force us to slap another five pounds on the bar or come back and whip Billy’s ass next week. Our day won’t be ruined over it.

If Susie out squats Sally, Sally will get pissed too. But not the way a guy will. She will just be pissed off in a bitter way and ready to quit. Mind you I’m not talking about every female, and especially not the ones you want in your gym. But on average this stereotype does hold true.

Same goes for coaching complicated exercises. Guys will be frustrated with themselves if they can’t do it but will desperately want to get better at it and keep trying. Girls will get very bitter and say “fuck this.”

Most females also don’t develop the same sense of camaraderie that guys do. Instead, they may “develop a sense of bitterness,” like my friend, John Alvino said, if you force them to stay put around a power rack and work together as a team.

Just keep those things in mind if you train females. Most of those types of females are better off in a bootcamp type setting and actually NOT doing barbell training.

Side rant done.

So while coaches will continue to argue the merits of dumbbells versus kettlebells versus bodyweight versus machines versus barbells I think they are missing one of the single most important factors.

For creating an incredible training atmosphere with camaraderie and competition, that people will absolutely love and tell their friends about, nothing beats the almighty barbell.

By Eric Cressey, C.S.C.S., Photographs by Aaron Hewitt

Lawyers have a word for accused criminals who represent themselves in court: convicts. Similarly, trainers like me have a word for guys who write their own workouts. Several words, actually: “weak,” “injured,” “skinny,” “fat,” and, worst of all, “skinny-fat.”

Why? Because it’s human nature for us to make it easy on ourselves. We pick exercises we like. We design workouts that play to our strengths and ignore our weaknesses.

And yet the most successful programs I’ve used are ones I created for myself. My secret? I follow the same process I use to write workouts for my clients, starting with the five considerations on the following pages. Guide yourself with them, and you’ll create a custom routine that can have you looking stronger and more buff in no time.

1. Which exercises should I include?

The best workouts are built on basic compound exercises: squats, deadlifts, bench and shoulder presses, chinups, rows. As your own trainer, your job is to fit these exercises into a balanced program. Below are the exercise categories I draw from to do just that, along with the number of times I use a category in a week. But to make it easy, my Ultimate Strength Workout shows you exactly how to put it all together. Add in a great warmup and some core work, and you’ll have a template you can use to build the body you want.

SQUAT (1 or 2 times a week)
Includes barbell back and front squats and all the dumbbell variations.

DEADLIFT (1 or 2 times a week)
Includes traditional barbell deadlifts (arms outside legs), sumo-style (wide stance, arms inside legs) and straight-leg lifts, and more variations than most of us could do in a lifetime.

SINGLE LEG (2 or 3 times a week)
Includes lunges; stepups; single-leg squats; and deadlifts with body weight, a barbell, dumbbells, or kettlebells.

HORIZONTAL PULL (2 or 3 times a week)
“Horizontal” refers to the direction of movement if you were standing up. So if you’re doing a seated cable row or a bent-over dumbbell row, it’s still considered a horizontal pull. This category also includes face pulls and inverted rows.

HORIZONTAL PUSH (2 times a week)
Examples of these exercises include the classic pushup; the bench press with barbell or dumbbells; dips; and all their variations.

VERTICAL PULL (1 or 2 times a week)
Includes chinups, pullups, and lat pulldowns.

VERTICAL PUSH (0 or 1 time a week)
Includes all the variations of the shoulder press.

2. What should I do first?

The first exercise in each workout should be the one that requires the most effort. If your goal is overall strength, begin one workout with a squat and another with a deadlift, and separate them as much as possible. So if you do squats on Monday, do deadlifts on Friday. On Wednesday, you could start with an upper-body exercise. If your main goal is upper-body size, do the reverse and start your Monday and Friday workouts with upper-body exercises.

3. How many sets/reps?

Most of us do well with a mix of heavy (for strength), medium (for muscle size), and light (for muscular endurance) weights. This calls for a combination of low-rep (3 to 6), moderate-rep (7 to 10), and high-rep (11 to 15) sets.

Your set count should be inversely related to your number of reps per set. If you’re doing high reps (15, say), 1 to 2 sets might be enough. For 10 to 12 reps, do 2 or 3 sets. For 8 reps, 3 or 4 sets would work well. And if you’re doing 3 or 4 reps per set, you probably want to do 5 or 6 sets.

The key is to manage the total volume of each workout. On this month’s workout poster, you’ll see that each sample workout includes 14 total sets of strength exercises. Add in core training and perhaps another exercise to shore up a weakness, and you could end up with 20 total sets.

That’s not a magic number; you may see better results with more or less volume. But it’s a good benchmark for most men, most of the time.

4. How will I make progress?

This, of course, depends on your main goal.

STRENGTH
You measure progress by the number of plates on the bar, so you want to increase the weight on your main exercises each week. Let’s say you’re doing 5 sets of 3 reps of the front squat. In the first week, you use 135 pounds for your fourth and fifth sets. The second week, you might go up to 155 pounds for the final sets.

You can continue like this for a few weeks, but eventually you’ll hit a point when your strength gains are smaller than the weights you can add to the bar. To use heavier weights, you have to reduce your number of repetitions. So instead of 5 sets of 3, you might do 3 sets of 3 and 2 sets of 2. Or you could do 6 sets of 2, using progressively heavier weights in each set, with the goal of using the heaviest weight possible in your final set each week. You can apply this strategy to any exercise, with any configuration of sets and reps.

SIZE
Muscles grow bigger when you make them stronger, which is easy enough to understand even if it’s sometimes hard to pull off. They grow because you make them do more work. You can accomplish that by adding a rep or two to each set or by adding a set to each exercise.

Let’s say you’re doing the barbell incline bench press. You start with 4 sets of 6. For the first few weeks, you should see steady increases in strength simply by adding more weight to the bar. When you feel your strength reaching a plateau, try to squeeze out an extra repetition or two—that is, do 7 or 8 reps—with the same weight on your final 2 sets. Or you could add a fifth set. That gives you more total work, which should lead to bigger muscles.

5. How can I keep my program fresh?

Your workouts will turn boring—maybe even counterproductive—if you don’t revise them every 4 to 6 weeks. You have two ways to keep them challenging.

1. Change exercises within each category—switch from chinups to pullups, for example.

2. Change order. If you’ve been doing 3 sets of 10 reps of the final exercise in a workout, try doing it first, using heavier weights for 5 sets of 3 reps.

Whichever strategy you choose, I highly recommend that you give yourself a weeklong break between programs. You don’t need to take the week off; just use that week to do less—fewer sets, lighter weights. You’ll likely find that this “rest” helps boost future gains. And it’s especially important if you’re feeling beaten up and run-down.

Last point: The only way to figure out what works best for you is to haul your butt into the weight room, push yourself, and see what happens. Until then, the best-written plans are just pieces of paper in your gym bag.

Eric Cressey’s Ultimate Strength Workout is available exclusively on Men’s Health Personal Trainer.

The ability to squat safely and effectively is an important arrow in the lifter’s quiver— properly performed, squats dramatically improve your strength, power, mobility, lean bodymass, and as my friend Father John Peck might add, a big squat also improves your “gym cred.” The downside? Only one: if you’re long of limb, they can be difficult to master. Here then, are 7 tips that have served me well in my 20+ years of teaching the squat:

1) Weightlifting Shoes: Only those with ideal leverages can squat well without proper footwear. My clients are almost uniformly amazed at how much better they can squat with proper lifting shoes. You’ll get more depth and better stability. Instantly.

If you watch any weightlifting meet at the National level or higher, you’ll never see an athlete wearing any other type of shoe— ever. In my experience, about 7 out of 10 “problem squatters” find their cure through better shoe selection alone.

2) Warm-Up With “Wall Balls:” I first discovered this drill through the Cross Fit community, and we use it extensively as a warm-up at Staley Performance Institute. I find it to be not only the least “invasive” way to warm up the whole body, but also a great way to hone squat mechanics prior to getting under the bar.

Your initial reps can/should be shallow— as you start warming up, start sinking the squats deeper and deeper. Try 3 sets of 10 reps using a progressively heavier ball with each set.

Wall Ball Link:
http://youtu.be/zeaHC3CNBrA

3) Overhead Squats: If back squats are currently the most difficult drill you do with a bar, overhead squats might move them down to second place. No need to go heavy with these— a wooden dowel or a 25-pound aluminum bar will be plenty for most people at the beginning.

Overheads are fantastic for thoracic mobility an also for teaching how to “sit between your feet” as opposed to “folding over.”

Try overheads as a secondary warm-up drill, done after wall-balls. If you’ve always had mobility issues on squats, you’d be stunned at the difference proper shoes, wall-balls, and overheads will make. And I’ve still got 4 more tips to go!

http://www.bodybuilding.com/exercises/detail/view/name/overhead-squat

4) Wall Squats: I learned this drill from my friend Pavel Tsatsouline. It’s a great way to improve hip mobility and to learn how to push the knees outward during the squat— use the wall squat as a warm-up drill or as a discrete practice drill.

5) Front Squats: The primary value of front squats is that they teach you how to stay more upright. Make sure to assume an Olympic style “shelf” which is more stable than crossing your arms. Front squats can be used as a way to incorporate variety into your lower-body program, and/or as a dynamic warm-up for back squats.

http://www.bodybuilding.com/exercises/detail/view/name/front-barbell-squat

6) The Wet Ice Cube: Here’s the greatest cue for learning low back “set:” Stand normally and vividly imagine how your posture would change if someone came up behind you and touched your low back with a wet ice cube. You’ll find that your low back arches big-time, and simultaneously, your chest pushes forward and up, while your shoulders pull down and back. That’s the position you’re looking for.

7) Box Squats: I’m not referring to the infamous Westside Barbell box squats here, but rather, using a box or a bench as a target that you touch with your glutes at the bottom of your squat. This not only helps beginners to link “the known to the unknown,” it also helps to regulate consistent depth and offers feedback on bilateral symmetry.

Simply descend under full control, touch the box lightly, and ascend back to the starting position. Note: you can also use a box with overhead and front squats.

http://www.bodybuilding.com/exercises/detail/view/name/box-squat

Now Go Apply These Tips!

If you never thought you could achieve a great squat position, I challenge you to apply all of these tips simultaneously. I promise you’ll surprise yourself.

by Adam

The Shapeshifter crusade against office aches and pains continues…!

In earlier “desk jockey” installments we introduced exercises to open the shoulders and upper back. We hope you’re already well on your way to banishing the dreaded “office worker hunch.”

The Shapeshifter has also received a pile of requests to film an exercise for the office slave’s aching knees.

At first we thought you said “We kneed you” — our knee-jerk reaction was to assume someone drilled Adam in the private parts. And to be honest, we kinda suspected he’d done something to deserve it…. (Ryan: …it starts with cir- and ends with -cuit…)

And then we thought you said “We knead you” — and gee, Ryan really could use a good massage now that you mention it…

We’re glad you didn’t say “We need ewe” — we don’t want to know your plans for that sheep!

Sorry, our brains do get a little overactive at times. But we finally clued in to the fact that what YOU actually NEED is a movement to free up your knees.

In that case, we can help.

Here’s the problem. When you spend all day sitting at a desk, your legs find it easier to stay in that 90 degree position. All the ergonomic chairs in the world won’t help, because your body will adapt to get better at holding the pose. If you want to “break the mold” so to speak, it all begins with mobility. You must move your knees through their full, healthy range of motion each day.

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