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Years ago I saw strongman competitor Derek Poundstone doing 100-rep work and asked him why he was doing it. One of his main reasons? Mental toughness. Different kinds of work in the gym require different mindsets. A 20-rep set of squats – with a maximum load for that rep range – is brutally...

Shake off a bad mood with frigid water. Get your energy and motivation up instantly. Make Your Next Shower Cold This sounds like an exercise in unnecessary suffering, but it gets easier and the benefits outweigh the first 30 seconds of hell. Plus there are some tricks that make it more...

Want to make a connection and not come off as a creeper? You'll need some guidelines written by a woman. Here they are. A lot of lifters say the gym isn't the place to meet people. But if you're single, wouldn't you want to find someone with your shared interests and healthier lifestyle? The...

7 Dumb Things People Say About Nutrition Stop Saying That! You Sound Like a Moron. Years ago, people, usually well-meaning mothers, would tell you not to go swimming after a big meal because you'd cramp up and sink to the bottom of the lake like a moribund turtle. Medical experts dispensed...

Struggle to keep your eyes open during class? Always find yourself dozing off in the middle of the afternoon? It's no secret, sleep is one of the most important regulators of our energy levels. We live in a culture that is sleep deprived 24/7. Teenagers, college students, working adults, and...

It’s no surprise, you work lots of long hours. You're up before the sun rises and still working long after it sets. But yet, even in spite of all of that, you somehow find a way to fit in your workouts during the week. Whether it be a crossfit WOD, insane circuit, or maybe just lots of heavy...

Why You Need Weight Training To Lose Fat By Conray Knox There've so many misunderstanding in weight training. People often think that weight training is just for weight lifting and bodybuilding exercise. Now, the weightlifters and bodybuilders do train with weights. However, a certified...

Power Up With Plyometric Training By Andy G Improve conditioning, increase muscle development and propel your physique to new heights! While these moves may seem better suited for the playground, they're actually beneficial to those of us a few years beyond playtime. These explosive...

So you're slaving away in the gym, hour after hour and day after day. You've been hard at work for several months (or years) but now you're hitting that brick wall. You're trying to stay motivated, but it's tough. You just can't see any new way to make gains, you're working with 225 on the...

The next time you're in the gym, take a look around you and watch how many people are half-assing their sets. Ask yourself how much their muscles really contracted during the movement. Anyone can bust out a quick set of curls or presses and appear to have done 10 or 12 reps. But the muscles did...

Listen, I'm not claiming to be Arnold Schwarzenegger here, I'm just writing this so some of you get an idea of the difference between a bodybuilder and a weightlifter. For years I pounded away at heavy weights, personal bests, and a bar that was bending because I ain't pretending. It's a stupid...

TOP 10 BENEFITS OF CARDIOVASCULAR TRAINING #1) Your heart is the most important muscle of the body, without a healthy heart you have nothing! Cardiovascular training strengthens the heart. This is even more important to the guys who use performance enhancing drugs or even a lot of supplements...

It's easy to get caught up in status as a lifter. And I'm not just talking about "how much ya bench" conversations, either. It's often a question of how long we've been lifting. Do these sound familiar? "You're a beginner? Just get your reps in." "I'd be careful doing that. It's only for...

If you're tired of struggling to lose weight and are impatient to see some results, we have good news: You have options. And here's better news: We're not talking about crash dieting or doing hours of cardio. Instead, try weaving one or more of these fat-blasting techniques into your...

By now you've probably heard about intensity-boosting techniques like dropsets, rest-pause, and supersets. You know they can be beneficial for increasing muscle. But if you're relatively new to the iron game, you'll need to know when to add them into your workout and which equipment will do the...

So you want to get huge, do you? Not just larger than you are now—we're talking objectively massive. You want to stand out from all those anonymous gym rats and get so big no one would ever need to murmur those dreaded words, "Do you even lift?" You want it to be obvious from a hundred yards...

One of the biggest misconceptions when it comes to hypertrophy (the scientific term for muscle growth) is that the only factor in building bigger muscles is lifting heavier weights—and that one automatically leads to the other. This myth has been perpetuated for decades by the bodybuilding and...

We all have a vision in our heads of what we would ultimately like to look like. Maybe you want to have an athletic, streamlined look with nice abs and just enough muscle to turn heads at a Vegas pool party. Or…maybe you aspire to be massive, with slabs of thick, dense muscle. You want people to...

If you're honest, when someone asks how your workout went, you can't always say, "Awesome!" Sometimes it's just "Meh." Why is that? Why aren't all your workouts incredibly productive—maybe even exciting? What can you do to make sure your workouts are not only "awesome," but moving you closer to...

There are two things that almost every lifter in the weight room cares about: growing their chest and increasing their bench. Fortunately, if you focus on one, you can usually improve the other. Although strength is usually a bigger priority for powerlifters, bodybuilders can also benefit from...