Biceps. The ultimate show muscle. From age 10 on, every boy, teenager, and man wants to have huge bulging biceps. This is, apparently, a true sign of manliness and strength, and is also attainable if you incorporate these best biceps exercises into your routine.
Biceps are among the most famous muscles in the body. When somebody asks you to “make a muscle” or “flex”, they aren’t asking you to flex your hamstrings. They want to see your biceps!
This whole notion of flexing the biceps as a measure of anything, is completely ludicrous to me, but it is a reality. When someone asks me to flex, I ask them if they’d much rather discuss max effort PRs, perhaps dynamic powerlifting strategies, or better yet how to put together the most effective HIIT complexes. Most folks walk away thus.
There are about 8,675,309 workout routines that you can try. One of the most effective types of routines I have found in the first 14 years of my training career is total body training. A full body workout will stimulate all of your muscle chains sufficiently to elicit a powerful physiological response.
The Principles of Total Body Training
Train every muscle group 3 times per week.
Select one exercise per muscle group, per day.
Hit each muscle group from a different angle or intensity in each workout.
Never go to absolute failure on any exercise; leave one rep in the bank, except sometimes on the last set.
Keep workouts under one hour, not counting warm-ups and stretching.
Change everything up after two months.
Why Might This Be the Most Effective Form of Training?
High frequency (how often you train any given muscle) means more chances to recover and grow stronger/bigger.
Low daily stimulus (# of exercises and sets per day for any given muscle) lowers your chances of overtraining.
Avoiding training to failure also lowers the chances of overtraining.
Hitting muscles from all angles each week strengthens stabilizers and is proactive injury prevention.
Avoid muscle adaptation by changing up the whole routine after 2 months.
Serious fitness enthusiasts and athletes want to be bigger, stronger, and leaner. The number one way to make that happen? Train your legs with complex free weight exercises.
Your legs are the largest group of muscle in your body. They are the foundation of your strength and power. Never will you be able to bench press 315 if you can’t squat 315 first.
By training your legs hard, you will be setting yourself up to gain the most progress compared to every other muscle group.
Arnold loved squatting, and look what happened to him. If you want to be Mr. Olympia, a famous Hollywood actor, and the governor of Alaska, you need to squat!
By training your legs, you will:
Lift the most weight of all muscle groups.
Burn the most calories of all muscle groups.
Form the foundation of your body’s strength chain.
Stimulate the highest growth hormone release through training.
Serious fitness enthusiasts and athletes want to be able to lift thousands of pounds off the ground with minimal effort. It makes us feel good to be able to pick up anything we want. Especially when most guys in the world struggle to pick up even 100 lbs off the floor.
The number one way to make all these things happen? Train your hamstrings, lower back, and glutes (your bum) with complex free weight exercises.
Men and women alike should use these training tips. No amount of deadlifts are going to make a woman huge and bulky unless they TRY REALLY HARD to get huge and bulky on purpose. At the same time, no amount of body weight squats or lunges are going to get you big, strong, or conditioned. Train heavy and train hard, no matter who you are. And if you are a woman who is overly concerned about getting “too big” and just doesn’t want to lift weights, check out this mostly non-load bearing leg exercises for women to get an idea of some other exercises to work into a routine.
As I mentioned in my top 5 quad exercises post, your legs are the largest group of muscles in your body. By training your legs hard, you will be setting yourself up to gain the most progress compared to every other muscle group.
Strong hamstrings will allow you to:
Pick up anything heavy off the floor or ground.
Burn as many calories during training as you would when training quads.
Form the foundation of your body’s posterior strength chain.
Strengthen your lower back to protect from injury.
Are you in the gym day in and day out, but feel like you just are not seeing results like you used to? Well, it is completely possible that you might be overtraining, which is a lot more common than you might imagine.
Overtraining means that you are training so hard your body does not have the time to rest and recover, as it normally should. This condition can lead to a slew of negative side effects, like muscle atrophy, motivational loss, and mood swings.
Overtraining can even diminish the results that you worked so hard to earn, so it is imperative that you never let this happen to you. Stick to the following tips and information to ensure that you never over train.(more…)
Strength training is a popular, effective and growing form of exercise which aims to use different apparatus in order to strengthen and refine your muscles. Often relying on body weight and muscle control, one of the benefits of strength training is that it teaches users to get to know how their bodies and muscles work, and to focus on how different muscles work together to initiate movement.
As with any form of exercise, different moves and sets develop popularity, based on their perceived efficacy. A form of strength training called ‘hanging’ is one such exercise. Below we’ll take a look at what hanging is, and why it’s a good thing to integrate into your routine.
What Does ‘Hanging’ Mean, Exactly?
Hanging is almost exactly what it sounds like – it involves using the grip strength in your hands and forearms to suspend your body from an object. As an exercise, the main use for it is to really develop our often-underutilised grip strength; a type of strength which has been eroded by modern life as it’s not something which we use much in our domesticated lives.
Hanging can be performed as a passive exercise or as an active exercise (or even combined with a power band). In the passive form, once you have ably suspended yourself from a bar or an object using your hand grip strength, your concentration moves to relaxing your muscles – apart from those in your hands and forearms. Pay particular attention to any tightness in the shoulders and trapezius muscles – this is a good opportunity to focus on keeping these muscles relaxed and disengaged.
The active form of hanging introduces extra tension into the body. In this version of the exercise, concentrate on flexing each of your muscle groups, including your abdomen muscles, your biceps, and your glutes. Flex your shoulders while keeping their posture fixed back. (more…)
Summer is right around the corner and the road bikes for sale signs popping up everywhere will have any keen cyclist excited to get back on two wheels. But after a long Winter of little riding, you might notice that your fitness isn’t quite what it used to be.
When our time is precious, we want the time we do spend working out to give us the maximum results possible, and while cycling for long periods means slowly and gradually plodding towards a steady upshot in stamina over the course of months, here are three exercises that will help you get back to your peak level of fitness as quickly as possible.
This article is exclusively on the right exercises to improve the strength of motorcyclists and make them better riders. For the record, the exercises will yield other desirable results such as improved metabolic activities, improved body detoxing, reduced unwanted fat, improved sleeping orders, improved looks etc., but these are only peripheral perks. The sole essence is to improve the riding performance of the motorcyclists.
These exercises are great for beginner riders and veteran riders alike. If you think you are not fit enough to ride your bike and you are not motivated enough to try to get into riding shape, you can always visit sellbike.com for quick valuation of your motorbike and then unsubscribe to Project Swole, because those without ambition might not bother wasting their time reading these posts.
Lower Body Conditioning
Your lower body and ‘core’ plays the most crucial role in establishing contact with your motorcycle and balancing you on it, as a rider. Therefore, these exercises will be focused on those parts of your body.
Exercising to improve those parts of your body is essential because, while riding, there’s a need to do a number of things, some of which are the need to shift the weight of your body between opposite pegs as your motorbike tilts from side to side when negotiating bends. There’s also a need to engage your legs as props and shock absorbers while doing an off road, and so on. (more…)
Night owls are in for a treat as many gyms are embracing the 24-hour policy. Fitness centers around the world have realized that the demand is high due to the fact that so many people are working hectic schedules and are unable to exercise with any regularity due to other commitments. By offering around-the-clock service hours, not only can a gym goer can work out whenever he or she likes but it also means that everyone who had used lack of free time as their major excuse not to work out will now be able to work out irrespective of their schedule.
No matter if one is a gym rat or first-timer, 24 hour gyms are now open across the globe to help anyone reach their fitness goals, notwithstanding their schedules and lack of consistent free time. We are well aware that exercise is a crucial part in our daily lives and now people have a much greater chance at reaping the benefits.(more…)
It doesn’t matter how big your chest and biceps are, if you have narrow shoulders you will appear to be weak and puny. Someone will surely kick sand on you at the beach, and Arnold would not approve of that.
For bodybuilders, powerlifters, athletes, and all other fitness buffs in between, wide shoulders will make you look tall, broad, and powerful so that you can be the one defending geeks from sand kicking bullies and they can help you throw the ball hard enough to win the game. Flabby or narrow shoulders lend absolutely nothing to your physique.
Everyone needs to train their shoulders.
Strong shoulders help with every other exercise from bench press to pull ups, and for all you boxers and MMA guys, well conditioned shoulders will help you to win a fight.
It is also very important to have a strong shoulder girdle, including the rotator cuff area, to prevent injuries from sports and heavy lifting.
How to Get Strong Shoulders
Firstly, chest and back are two muscle groups that are important to train, when training for stronger shoulders. As a unit, the chest, shoulders, and back form the core of your upper body strength. Once you’ve read this article you can move on to the top 5 best chest exercises and the top 5 best back exercises.
Secondly, no one developed great shoulders by focusing on dumbbell side raises or shoulder pressing on machines. The compound exercises that involve your whole body will be most effective at building big, strong shoulders. Isolation exercises will be necessary, but only for developing super strong rotator cuffs.
We should have a working knowledge of how the shoulder is put together, to better understand how to train them effectively. (more…)
