Category: Building Muscle mass

Building Muscle and Strength, Building Muscle mass, Building Strength, mass training, Pyramid Training

How to Correctly Perform Pyramid Training

Pyramiding your weights is a great way to build muscle size and strength. Working up from relatively lightweight to a heavyweight over multiple sets ensures you stimulate your muscles with the right amount of volume to stimulate growth and at the right intensity to produce strength adaptations. It’s best used on compound barbell exercises, but it can be used with machines and dumbells as well. 

Unfortunately, most programs don’t properly explain how to perform a pyramid correctly.  I used Pyramid training when I was in high school bulking for football. I gained approximately 30 pounds of muscle during those years, despite performing them incorrectly. Like most people, I over-taxed myself on the early sets, and couldn’t progress in weight as well as I could have.

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Building Muscle, Building Muscle and Strength, Building Muscle mass, Building Strength, effective strength training, mass training, optimal strength trainining volume, Optimal Training Volume, strenght training, strength trainining volume, Uncategorized, Willpower is like a muscle

Optimal Training Volume Made Simple

“Exercise to stimulate, not to annihilate. The world wasn’t formed in a day, and neither were we. Set small goals and build upon them.” Lee Haney

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Determining optimal training volume is not a straight forward proposition. There is no one size fits all solution. I will simplify the process and provide some parameters, but you will have to discover what is optimal for YOU. Scientific studies should guide our training, but ultimately, we must decide what works best for us through trial and error. The primary factor to consider is your ability to recover.

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Building Muscle and Strength, Building Muscle mass, Building Strength, effective strength training, mass training, RPE, strenght training, strength training circuit, Strength Training Intensity, Strength training RPE, training to failure, Uncategorized

Strength Training Intensity – How Much is Optimal

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The latest issue of Muscle & Fiction and all the High-Intensity zealots would have you believe that if you don’t take a set to absolute muscular failure, you are wasting your time. That just isn’t true. On an effective strength training program for the natural lifter, most sets should stop 1 or 2 repetitions short of failure. We should avoid going to failure on all but the last set of each exercise. A simple, yet effective way to evaluate your rating of perceived exertion (RPE), is using this table developed by respected strength coach and competitive powerlifter Mike Tuchscherer.

RPE Scale (lifting)

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break a plateau, Building Muscle, Building Muscle and Strength, Building Muscle mass, Building Strength, fat loss, fat loss motivation, food log, food logging, goal, goal setting, logging, natural bodybuilding, strenght training, strength training circuit, Technology, training log, Uncategorized, workout log

5 Reasons To Keep A Training Log

“If you want it, measure it. If you can’t measure it, forget it.”

Peter Drucker

basic program log

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If you want to improve your performance, you MUST track it. This sounds like common sense because it is, but how many people do you see in the gym keeping a training log? Do you keep a training log? The difference between exercising and training is a training log.

 Here are the 5 Reasons You Should Keep a Training Log:

  1. It is what athlete’s do.
  2. It allows you to measure the effectiveness of your program.
  3. It will cause you to consistently train harder.
  4. Recording small wins helps to sustain motivation.
  5. It is your best tool for overcoming training plateaus.

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action triggers, attitude, attitude of gratitude, bad habits, Building Muscle mass, Building Strength, commitment, Consistency, DECISIONS, Discipline, dream, dream big, fat, fat loss, fat loss motivation, Fitness, food log, food logging, food portions, goal, goal setting, good habits, gratitude, habit, habit loop, habit of success, happines, happy, impulse control, keystone habits, lifting, lose body fat, lose fat, mind set, myfitnesspal, positive attitude, positive thinking, self-improvement, strenght training, weight loss, weight loss motivation

The Fat Loss Habit – Book Introduction

Most people know more than enough about nutrition and exercise to lose weight, but fail to take action. This book takes a new approach to getting leaner, fitter, and stronger. The program uses high impact change strategies that make the process of adopting a healthy lifestyle easier. The nutrition and workout program like the change techniques, have all been proven effective and are all backed by research and scientific studies.
This book is full of change strategies and provides a blueprint for how they can be applied to transforming your body. These strategies can also be used to transform your relationships, build your career, and improve your life. You will learn the importance of creating a sense of urgency around your goal, tweaking your environment to foster new habits, finding bright spots, and generating short term wins to help you sustain momentum. Motivation is fleeting, that is why you will learn techniques to keep you stoked. You will learn how to apply solution based therapy’s miracle question to subdue personal struggles. You will learn how Starbucks teaches willpower to their baristas to produce a first-class customer experience. You will learn about action triggers, and how they are the key to adopting instant habits. You will learn how to use your smart phone to lose body fat, improve your workouts, and create new habits.
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