Get a Jump On Your Best Body Ever with These 8 Quick Fat-Loss Tips You Can Use Today

We would love to tell you that shedding unwanted pounds is easier than scoring touchdowns in the Arena Football League. However, if you’ve been studiously and furiously doing your cardio, lifting weights, and eating clean, and not seeing the physical changes you’re hoping for, you already know better.

Well, consider this story your TD — and two-point conversion — in the battle against fat. Here, you’ll find eight simple-to-implement tips and strategies to help you improve your get-lean game plan. It won’t be as easy as playing football in a 50-yard roller rink, sure, but your results may just prompt you to break into an impromptu end-zone celebration anyway.

1) VARY YOUR CARDIO:

Steady-state aerobic sessions — those where you maintain a constant pace throughout your workout — do not burn as much body fat as interval training, in which you fluctuate your pace between slower and near-max efforts. This can be as simple as doing a 15-second all-out sprint every minute during a jog, or can be slightly more complicated, such as the interval programs built into most treadmills, ellipticals and exercise bikes at your health club.

2) KEEP THE FIRE BURNING:

Some cardio options are better than others — at least when it comes to the calorie burn they promote after the workout is over. Yes, you read that correctly: certain forms of aerobic training elevate your metabolism higher and for a extended period of time long after you’ve stopped exercising. Methods to increase your EPOC (i.e. your excess post-exercise oxygen consumption) include doing cardio activities of 60 minutes in duration (versus 40 or less), weight training after your cardio, and using the interval-type training outlined in tip #1.

3) BREAK A SWEAT:

You may be doing cardio, sure … but if you’re not burning appreciable amounts of fat and your diet isn’t the likely culprit, you have to ask the question, Are you exercising hard enough? It seems so clear-cut, but take a look around the cardio room at your local gym and you’ll see plenty of people plodding along, not breathing all that hard and in no need of a towel. The truth is, burning fat and transforming your physique is hard, hard work. Sweat equity is the only viable road to a lean body, so put in the effort and push yourself as hard as you can.

4) BUILD MUSCLE:

The more lean muscle mass you have, the more calories your body burns, even at rest. So an effective weight-training program is key. And by “effective,” we mean this: Don’t follow misguided advice to up your repetitions to 15-20 or more per set in some convoluted effort to turn your lifting sessions into wildly inefficient cardio workouts. Instead, stick with the heavier-weight, 6-12 rep sets that are best for prompting muscular growth.

5) DIVIDE AND CONQUER:

How many meals are you eating per day? If it’s four or less, try this: Take the same amount of food and divide it over 6-8 meals, spaced two-and-a-half to three hours apart. (Make sure you include 20-30 grams of protein minimum with each meal.) This helps keep you fueled while lessening the chances that excess calories taken in will be stored as body fat.

6) INCREASE YOUR PROTEIN:

A recent study out of University College London found that Peptide YY, a hormone that travels to the brain from the gastrointestinal system to indicate satiety, increased in those who ate a high protein meal (65% protein), versus high-carb and high-fat meals. In basic terms, the high-protein meals led to a significant decrease in hunger pangs — and obviously, the less hungry you are, the less excess food you’ll eat. Not only does protein keep you feeling fuller longer than carbohydrates or fat, as the study suggests, it takes more overall energy for your body to digest, meaning it prompts calorie burning. Perhaps most notably, protein is the critical nutrient in ensuring you can successfully build muscle, which is important, as you learned in Tip #4.

7) QUICK TRICKS:

On their own, none of the following will make a monumental difference, but if you want to leave no detail to chance, try cold water (one study found that drinking two cups between meals raised resting metabolic rate by around 30% for over 60 minutes), add chili peppers to spice up meals (the capsaicin in chilis has fat-burning properties), and drink plenty of sugar-free green tea throughout the day (as green tea contains EGCG, which has been shown to have thermogenic effects).

SUPPLEMENT SMART:

When trying to shed pounds and get ripped, a host of powerful supps can help. The fundamentals include a caffeine/green tea formula, conjugated linoleic acid (CLA), citrulline malate, konjac glucomannan, 7-keto DHEA, pure South African Hoodia gordonii, yohimbine, glutamine, and protein powders and bars to augment a clean diet.

“How much do ya bench?” It’s arguably the most oft-asked question of bodybuilders and gym rats, and we’re here to tell you, the answer doesn’t matter all that much. In fact, concentrating too hard on the bench press to inflate your max to impressive proportions is counterproductive. The same is true of less celebrated but no-less-common exercises you may rely on workout after workout.

Blasphemy, you say? Read on, and see if we can’t change your mind - and improve your results.

Chest: Barbell Bench Press
We don’t lead off this list with the ever-popular bench press because it’s a lousy exercise. It’s not. However, it’s here because far too many people attribute way too much importance to it, performing it to the detriment of their overall chest development. Too much emphasis on the barbell press leads to thick meaty muscle in your middle chest, while the larger upper-pectoral area lags woefully behind.

Best alternative: To attack the most important area of your chest, Dumbbell and Barbell Incline Presses can’t be beat. Both also hit your middle chest (much more effectively than the flat-bench press hits the upper pecs), making them a solid anchor in any chest-training workout.

Back: Supported T-Bar Row
The T-bar row is a wonderful exercise, directly engaging the muscles of your mid- and upper back. However, a certain variation of the T-bar row includes a pad that you rest your chest on during the exercise. Bad idea - the heavier you lift, the more the weight compresses your chest (and lungs) against the pad as you lift. It’s a lot harder to maintain good form and continue a set to the point of failure when you’re struggling for a deep breath.

Best alternative: Thankfully, equipment manufacturers make a freestanding version of the T-Bar Row, without the pad, allowing you to breathe easy during your sets. You can also do T-bar rows the old-fashioned way, placing one end of an Olympic barbell in the corner and loading the other end. Just straddle the bar and get into position, and you can perform either one-arm or two-arm rows.

Shoulders: Reverse Pec-Deck Flye
The problem with the reverse pec-deck flye is that it’s a poor replacement for the more valuable bent-over dumbbell lateral raise. Try a set of reverse pec decks and you’ll see what we mean - not only are they relatively easy because of the mechanical advantage (due to the design of the machine and the fact you’re upright and not working directly against gravity), but most people find it difficult to focus the effort on their rear delts no matter how well they perform each rep.

Best alternative: Many people do struggle with their form on bent-over dumbbell lateral raises, mainly because they try to lift too much - think about how small the target muscles actually are, and you’ll soon realize that hoisting 50s is calling on more momentum and back muscles than the rear delts. Lighten the load, take each rep slowly and deliberately, and focus on contracting your rear delts on each rep, and you’ll get much better results from this exercise than even pec-deck flyes done with perfect form.

Legs: Leg Press
There’s a reason scrawny-legged guys can press hundreds of pounds on the leg press, but can barely eke out reps with 185 pounds on the barbell squat: The leg press has too much mechanical advantage inherent in its design. Impressive tree-trunk thighs are not forged on a steady diet of leg presses - to really get at the tough muscle fibers of the quadriceps, hamstrings and glutes, you need to challenge them fiercely, and the leg press doesn’t do that. It’s just too easy in comparison to other superior movements.

Best alternative: The barbell squat and hack squat are a much truer test of mettle for your thighs and glutes - in these two exercises, you’re not at a mechanical advantage, putting your muscles under maximal stress, which is the quickest way to muscle-building results.

Triceps: Dumbbell Kickback
Of all the excellent triceps exercises available to you - close-grip bench presses, dips, lying French presses, two-arm overhead extensions, cable pressdowns, among many others - why would you ever want to cycle in a less-effective move like kickbacks? People commonly bring the weight too far forward at the start of the repetition, taking stress off the triceps and generating momentum to lift the weight back up to an arms-straight position. If you eliminate this issue and stop the weight before your elbow gets to 90 degrees, you are working in a compromised range of motion.

Best alternative: Any of the aforementioned exercises would be better, but one that mimics the kickback closely is the One-Arm Overhead Dumbbell Extension. The bonus? You use gravity to your advantage, eliminating the growth-robbing momentum and the “dead zone” where the stress is taken off the triceps.

Biceps: Standing Barbell Curl
Although the preacher curl machine, with its one-size-does-not-fit-all handles and awkward range of motion, could easily get the nod here, the standing barbell curl has hurt the productivity of many more biceps routines over the years. Like the bench press, this exercise isn’t overrated because it’s a bad exercise - it’s on this list because many guys not only put way too much emphasis on it in their workouts, but insist on letting their ego dictate how much weight they pile on the bar. From there, it’s all about hip thrust and body contortion to swing the weight to the top.

Best alternative: The Incline Dumbbell Curl puts your biceps on stretch for a more forceful and complete contraction, and being on a bench takes away the opportunity to use excess body movement to generate momentum on the lift.

Ready to get back to the basics of growing? Here’s a simple workout regimen that only requires an adjustable bench, barbell and plates, perfect for home or the gym.

On a quick lap around the typical health club, you’ll likely pass a lot of shiny, complicated equipment - cables that adjust to every conceivable angle, multifunctional apparatus with space age levers and handles, and stations for each and every muscle group. Impressive, maybe, but here’s the truth: You don’t need any of it to build a great physique.

This program (which can be done at home or that aforementioned club) centers around the bare-bones basics you need to craft a strong, muscular body. If you’re just starting out and want to keep your cash outlay to a minimum, here’s the good news: All that’s required is an adjustable bench, a barbell with a set of locking safety collars, and a selection of weight plates. That’s it - no high-tech machines necessary.

With the major body parts broken over a four-day split, you can either train four days per week, resting the other three, or get more aggressive, starting over at workout #1 before the week’s up and only taking one or two rest days per seven. Below, we break down the four training days for you, and offer instruction on the more esoteric exercises.

Good Morning: Clean a moderately light barbell up from the floor and over your head so it rests across your shoulders, as if you were about to squat. Keeping your lumbar region tight and in its natural curve, bend at the hips to lower your upper body to a point where it forms a 90-degree angle with your legs (or as close as you can without rounding your lower back), then return to a standing position. Avoid the tendency to look up - your head should remain in line with your spine at all times.

Wide-Grip Push-Up: This is the same as a standard push-up, except place your hands outside of shoulder width, your elbows out and away from your body.

Hack Squat: Place a loaded barbell on the floor behind your ankles. Bend at your knees and hips to lower yourself, grasp the barbell with an overhand or mixed grip, and drive through your heels, engaging your thighs to get to a standing position. Then lower the bar to the floor and repeat. Your back should be tight and straight throughout the exercise.

Walking Lunge: Standing upright, hold a plate in each hand, or clean a loaded barbell up and over your head to your upper back. Step forward with your left foot and descend into a lunge - at the bottom, your left knee will be at a 90-degree angle, your right leg will be straight and out behind you. Now extend your front knee and come back to a standing position before stepping forward with your right leg. One step with each leg equals one rep.

Standing and Seated Calf Raise: For standing raises, grasp a barbell and hold it at your thighs as you step onto a raised object such as a block, your heels hanging off the edge. For the seated version, place the block next to the bench and put a loaded barbell across your lap (or you can place weight plates on your lap) for resistance.

Bust boredom in your workouts and get the most out of the common machines at your gym with these five unique exercises

Versatility isn’t an attribute limited to switch-hitting infielders and infomercial products. (Hey, who hasn’t needed their Ginsu knife to slice through nails and tin cans?) Indeed, at the gym, you can find this trait in an unexpected place - the typical machines that populate weight rooms.

For instance, did you realize you could do biceps curls on two different types of back machines? Or train your legs on an assisted pull-up machine? The following are five ways you can squeeze brand new benefits out of the same old equipment, thus giving you more options to keep your workouts fresh and your muscles growing.

1. Shrugs on a Standing Calf Raise Machine
Shrugs with a barbell or dumbbell are excellent trapezius builders, but both have one limiting flaw: the strength of your grip. Without straps, if your grip gives out before your traps, you’re forced to end the set prematurely. Doing shrugs instead on a standing calf raise machine eliminates this issue. And although a calf raise machine comes with a limitation of its own - the amount of total weight on the stack - a beginner or intermediate lifter who hasn’t advanced to super-heavy poundages can benefit from adding calf-raise machine shrugs to their regimen. Performing them is simple: Step into the machine, feet centered on the toe supports, body upright, back and abs taut, with your shoulders squarely under the pads. From there, shrug your shoulder caps upward as high as you can, then lower them deep and repeat. Make sure the machine is adjusted so the weight stack does not touch down at the bottom of each rep.

OPTION B: Another machine option for shrugging? If your gym has one, try using a flat-bench press machine, straddling the seat and taking a handle in each hand.

2. One-Legged Presses on an Assisted Pull-Up Machine
Outside of pull-ups and dips, the assisted pull-up machine may seem pretty limited in what you can do with it. But did you know you could also work your legs on it? By using the platform where your knees usually rest as a footplate, you can do presses one leg at a time - a handy option if a leg press isn’t available or if you’re just looking for an occasional twist to add to your usual leg-training regimen. To perform it, place one foot on the side support, the other in the center of the knee platform; you should also brace yourself by holding onto the rails with both hands. Then, flex the muscles of your thigh to press the platform down until your leg is straight, pause for a second and reverse, bringing your knee back up until your thigh is parallel to the floor before starting the descent into the next rep.

3. Lying Biceps Curls at a Seated Row Station
Biceps training can get tedious. After all, there’s only so many ways to do a curl, and curling is the one and only viable way to work your bi’s. So a lot of keeping your biceps routine invigorated is cycling in new exercises, and that’s where lying curls come in. For this exercise, you lie flat on the bench of a seated row station, feet firmly on the platforms, knees partially bent, holding a short straight bar or short cambered bar attached to the cable. From this position, bend your arms, doing a curl the same as if you were standing up, keeping your elbows at your sides throughout. The benefit of the lying curl is the reduction of body english - when you stand, you can use your hips to help swing the weight up, but in a prone position, it’s just your biceps versus the weight.

OPTION B: You can also do this lying on the floor in front of a lower cable pulley, which allows you to keep your legs flat and out of the way of the range of motion.

4. Overhead Curls on a Seated Pulldown Machine
Here’s another biceps curling option - sit in a pulldown machine, take an underhand, shoulder-width grip on the bar overhead and keep your upper arms alongside your ears. Now, curl the bar down behind your head, hold and flex your biceps for a moment, then slowly re-extend your arms.

5. Calf Raises on a Leg Press Machine
Of the five variations outlined in this article, this one is the most common. But if you haven’t tried calf raises using a leg-press machine, you’re missing out on an incredible way to attack your gastrocnemius, the larger, thicker muscle on the back of your lower leg. Here’s how you do it: Sit in the machine and place your feet at the bottom of the platform, your toes and balls of your feet on it, your heels off the edge. Then extend your legs to straighten your knees, release the safety latches, and start doing full calf raises. Be sure to work through a full range of motion, with complete flexion at the top of each rep and a deep stretch at the bottom. To give each calf undivided attention, this movement can be done one leg at a time.

OPTION B: Calf raises can also be done on a hack squat machine, by hanging your heels off the bottom edge.

When you glance at some of those old black and white pictures of Arnold Schwarzenegger, taken in the original Gold’s Gym in Venice on Pacific Avenue, what’s most noticeable about his physique is his massive chest. It is full and thick and when he does his side chest pose it swells up and seems to stick out a mile. Just standing there relaxed it appeared thick and dense like two massive slabs of beef sitting on his rib cage.

In fact a lot of the old school guys had thick chests back in the day, Lou Ferrigno, Serge Nubret, Franco Columbu, but it seems these days very few bodybuilders have that really impressive chest development. Thick, sweeping chest muscles have been overtaken by monstrous front delts making it obvious where all the pec muscles went.

When Arnold was growing up, everyone trained chest and biceps and didn’t pay as much attention to other muscle groups, like shoulders for instance. Since shoulder muscles were weaker, they didn’t take over all the work when training chest. Stretching the shoulder girdle and chest was a common practice years ago in an effort to expand the rib cage and increase the overall measurement of the chest. Inadvertently this created more flexibility through the chest and shoulders so when a bodybuilder performed a full range of movement on his chest exercises, his chest muscles were flexible enough that the load was not as easily transferred to the shoulder muscles which would then do much of the work.

When chest muscles are not very flexible they can only stretch so far before they will either tear or the load will be transferred to another muscle group or connective tissue in the shoulder joint. If you are doing dumbbell presses for instance, as you lower the dumbbells to your chest you will reach a point where your chest muscles cannot stretch beyond. If you continue to lower the dumbbells past that point then the shoulders will take over most of the work. If that happens you will feel tightness in your shoulders at the lower part of the movement and after doing the set your shoulders will feel pumped and burning. When you over-stretched at the bottom of the movement your shoulder muscles took over the workload. You thought you were training your chest and just doing your best to perform a full range of movement but instead you have just trained your shoulders, which explains why your shoulders grow but your chest doesn’t.

One obvious solution might be to perform partial movements when training chest (meaning not lowering the weight all the way down to your chest). While partial movements have their place in an advanced training program, your chest muscles won’t be getting much work if the range of motion is limited by inflexibility. The further a muscle group has to travel when performing an exercise, the more work it does and the more it will grow. Muscle inflexibility will stop your progress cold.

Increasing flexibility and Range of Motion is the goal

• Muscle tissue can be trained to be more flexible by stretching regularly. But it’s always important to ensure your muscle tissue is warm before you try stretching it. For the next 4 weeks, do 3 sets of pushups to warm up and stretch for a couple minutes between each warm-up set. For the first set of pushups just go 2/3 of the way down to keep your shoulders out of the movement until you are more flexible. After stretching between the 1st and 2nd set, the rest of your pushups should be full movements.
• Stretch between every set during the entire workout.
• Since your chest has not been doing all the work during your chest training you will have to teach those muscles to contract through the entire movement because they are used to your shoulders taking over at the bottom. Start with a weight about 50% less than you normally use and add weight each set. Be prepared to use a lot less weight than you have been doing because you will perform your reps slowly going the same speed up and the same speed down like a hydraulic piston.
• When you get to the bottom of the movement feel your chest muscles stretch and then don’t go beyond to the point where you feel your shoulders stretching. As you get more flexible you will be able to go deeper but you will always gauge the depth you go on your chest exercises by whether or not your shoulders are involved in the movement and not how far the weight travels.
• Don’t use weight training as a stretching exercise, stretch between sets and after you train. Using your sets to stretch your chest muscles will just involved your shoulders in the work.
• Finally, lay off your front delt training for 4 weeks while you do this chest specialization program. They could probably use a break anyway while your chest catches up.
• Train chest 2 times a week for 4 weeks then return to your normal training cycle.

Day 1

Day 2

Shock Treatment Series: Part I

It’s easy to think that bodybuilding is just about building big muscles and getting lean enough to show them off. It’s easy because getting big is easy and so is getting lean, or at least it’s easy compared to balancing all that muscle development so that your body is symmetrical and proportionate. The problem with easy is that one day you look in the mirror and realize you have lagging muscle groups that seem so far behind the rest of your body that you think they will never catch up.

Size for the sake of size is meaningless. We’ve all seen those guys with one or two incredible body parts and nothing else. Building a well-developed body that is both symmetrical and balanced is what bodybuilding has always been about.

That’s easier said than done because despite how much hard work you do sometimes, there are muscle groups that simply refuse to co-operate and grow. This series of training articles is designed to help solve any problems you may have with one of those stubborn muscle groups.

Build Those Stubborn Calves

Calves are the one muscle group that almost everyone trains incorrectly. Isolating the workload on muscle groups that have only one fulcrum (one joint involved in the exercise) like seated calf raises for instance is theoretically the most direct way to train a muscle group and in most cases that theory holds true. Calves are a different animal, pun intended, because of how the lower leg is constructed so just isolating the movement isn’t enough to necessarily make them grow.

The Gastrocnemius muscle or calf muscle is attached to a tendon that attaches on the other end to your heel (your Achilles tendon). The Achilles tendon is very strong and if you train your calves improperly it is very easy for some of that workload to be transferred from the muscle to the Achilles tendon. That will logically result in a lot of work with very little return in the way of calf muscle growth.

If you have calves like a homing pigeon and no matter what you do they refuse to grow, then try these four things for 8 weeks and just see if those calves don’t start turning into cows.

• Keep constant tension on the calf muscle during the entire set
  

  When you are training calves you want to avoid movement that will transfer the load onto your Achilles tendon from your calf muscles. The best way to do this is to keep constant tension on the calf muscle through the entire set by keeping your calf flexed as hard as possible through the complete arc of movement. This will be hard to do the first few times you try as you need to teach your muscles to stay contracted while they move through the movement of the exercise. It’s easiest to learn this by starting with seated calf raises. Position yourself in he calf machine and remove the safety placing the load on your calves. Reach down and feel your calves as you apply tension to your calf muscles by flexing them. Slowly raise the weight keeping your calves flexed. When you reach the top of the movement flex as hard as you can for a 3 count then slowly start to lower the weight while keeping the muscle tight (this is the tricky part). You will really need to go slow and concentrate on keeping your calf muscles flexed. By holding your hand on your calves you will be able to tell if the tension goes away or remains through the whole movement.

• Don’t over stretch during your calf exercises
  

  When you stretch your calf muscle as far as it will stretch under a load, it becomes hard to keep tension on the muscle and if you can’t keep tension on the muscle then it can’t contract as hard as it possibly can, stimulating growth while you lift the weight. If you over stretch on the bottom you will take the workload off the calf muscle and distribute it elsewhere which will result in a lot of work with very little calf muscle growth. You only need to lower the weight a little but not all the way to get enough work done to grow.

• Don’t bounce to get higher on your toes at the top of the movement
  

  So often you will see a bodybuilder bouncing at the top of the movement trying to get a peak contraction. Since the Achilles tendon and not the calf muscle is being used to lift the weight into position there is very little benefit from getting the extra height. At very best you perform an isometric contraction at the very top of the movement after the weight has been bounced into place and isometric contractions are not effective for building size. As you perform your calf raise with tension on the calf muscle through the whole movement you will reach a point at the top of the movement where you cannot go any higher without bouncing. Don’t Bounce! When you are at the top of the movement just hold the contraction for a 3 count then start back down again. Getting as high as you can on your tip toes by bouncing is completely ineffective for building calf size and just because your muscles are burning doesn’t mean they are being stimulated to grow, it just means you have a high amount of lactic acid in your muscles from metabolizing glucose. You can get a burn and not have stimulated your muscle effectively enough to grow.

• Keep your movement slow and steady – same speed up, same speed down
  

  By performing each calf exercise with a controlled, steady pace, it is much easier to keep constant tension on the calf muscle and you need that tension to be able to contract hard enough to stimulate growth. Think of your car for a minute. It will go 60 miles an hour but it takes a few seconds to get there. Your muscles will contract very hard but that is not instantaneous. If you keep tension on the muscle all the time it is much easier for that muscle group to contract near 100% of it’s capability much quicker. The harder you can contract through a movement the more that muscle group will ultimately grow. Theoretically, the purpose of weight is to force the muscle to contract harder by adding resistance but in the real world the load is not always handled by the muscle alone. Keeping tension on the muscle will help focus as much muscle building tension on those stubborn calf muscles as possible.

Sample 8 week calf program – train calves no more than 2 times a week for 8 weeks

Add a muscle-building twist to your next workout with these five innovative uses for the power rack.

You’re probably familiar with the power rack - a tall, metal-framed structure usually found in the free-weight area of the gym. It’s also likely that, if you include barbell squats in your training routine, you’ve done them within the confines of one.

However, outside of squatters, most power racks see about as much action as the local library on a Friday night. With this article, we at ProSource are hoping to change that, introducing you to five other exercises you can perform in the rack, for your back, chest, traps, shoulders and legs. There are many others - indeed, there are multiple options for every body part - and once you get a taste of its worth, we’re sure you’ll find your way to the rack in almost every workout. Sure beats an evening of amateur poetry reading, doesn’t it?

1) Bench Press Partials

The power rack can play a valuable role in improving your bench press max, allowing you to focus on a specific portion of the range of motion by setting the safety rods at a corresponding height. For example, say you’re having trouble getting 315 pounds through the midpoint of the rep to full extension. To work on it, place a flat bench in the power rack, and set the rods so they “catch” the barbell just below the midpoint. Then put 315 on the bar and try anywhere from three to five sets of 1-3 reps each in the upper range of motion, pressing the barbell from the supports to full extension. Rest the barbell on the rods between each rep. After a few chest workouts that incorporate these partials, you may find your strength has improved enough to allow you to get 315 on a regular bench.

2) Behind-the-Back Shrug

The power rack is a great place to do standard barbell shrugs. And it’s an even better place to do a variation favored by eight-time Mr. Olympia Lee Haney - behind-the-back shrugs. By setting the safety rods just below your typical shrug range of motion, an awkward part of the exercise becomes easy: Picking up the barbell to get into starting position. Simply bend slightly at the knees and grasp the bar behind you with an overhand, palms-facing-back grip. Another benefit of doing this move in a power rack? You can rep until complete failure, as you can put the bar straight down without having to maneuver it onto hooks or dropping it to the floor.

3) Seated Military Press

Seated barbell military press stations are quickly becoming a rarity in health clubs, both because of insurance reasons and an unfortunate lack of popularity among the lesser motivated among us. However, as long as there is a power rack present, you can still perform this excellent delt-building exercise. Place an adjustable bench that goes all the way up to a sitting position, or a low-back seated bench, in the rack. Set the two barbell support pins at a point above your head, where you can lift the bar off of them while seated, and insert the safety rods at a point just below the bottom of your range of motion. Not only can you do military presses in the rack, but you can do them without the need of a spotter, which is a necessity in a traditional military press station - if you fail, just drop the bar to the strategically-placed rods, and you’re free and clear. Heck, maybe the disappearance of military press stations isn’t such a major loss after all.

4) Three-Quarter Rep Deadlift

Deadlifts from the floor are one of the most effective exercises you can do for your legs, back and as a synergistic power generator through your whole body. But, similar to the bench press, you can work through the upper range of motion by setting the rods - in this case just below your knees - to help you improve your max. Three-quarter rep deads are also a solid stand-alone exercise for use during your back routine; this range is where your back sees most of the action in comparison with your legs, which generate much of the force needed to lift the bar from the floor.

5) Inverted Pull-Up

This back exercise, a variation of a traditional pull-up, resembles an upside-down push-up. Set the two pins at a height 6-12 inches above your hips and lay a barbell across them. From there, get under the bar in a plank position, grasping it overhand style. Your whole body, except the heels of your feet (which remain on the ground throughout), should be off the floor in the starting position. To rep, pull yourself up until your chest touches the bar, then lower and repeat.

By John Davies

By definition, to isolate is to set something apart, detach it from others or other environments.

Within the exercise world, the notion of “isolation” is for the most part the norm in virtually every avenue. Exercise facilities are designed in carefully laid out plans with machinery that focuses on certain isolated muscle groups, in essence leading the user from “station to station” so that they can “workout” in an orderly assembly-line like fashion. Typically to the side there is a “cardio” area with treadmills, elliptical, rowers and stair-climbers and a much smaller area for general floor exercises. Depending upon clientele and size limitations, a club might further offer a separate room that houses fitness, yoga and any assortment of this year’s (decade’s) top exercise class. With this well laid out plan, individuals will enter the facility and proceed through their workout in an orderly and predictable manner ensuring each aspect of their body’s development “in isolation” (whether intentional or not). The expanding home gym environment is much the same with cleverly engineered exercise equipment that features multiple stations so that you can; you guessed it, isolate your muscular development.

At this stage of an article on fat loss I would typically mention to the reader that given that the world’s obesity is growing at alarming rates and health care costs associated with this problem are devastating government and corporate budgets, action is needed. Since this problem has come at the same time as the “exercise revolution,” isn’t it abundantly obvious and quite logical that one of the greatest obstacles to improving “health and fitness” is the health and fitness industry itself? Simply stated, what is being “done” and recommended is far from what is needed.

As you consider this peculiar problem, you will begin to realize that part of the weight management problem stems from the fact that physiologically nothing occurs in an “isolated” fashion is the body. In fact, I would go as far as to say that somehow the modern exercise industry somehow derailed itself, took isolationist work out of context and forgot the synergistic effect of a properly laid-out plan that will have a greater effect than individual sections ( “the whole is greater than the sum of the parts”). I should also point out it is not the chief culprit in creating the enormous problem but part of a series of pratfalls that has complicated the issue and without serious changes it will be irreversible.

How and why the “isolationist” approach came into fashion is anyone’s guess. However it relates heavily to our topic of fat loss. While the rationale may be very well steeped in the development of the fitness industry, the elimination of the “small” independent gym and the gradual movement towards (expensive) exercise machinery, the acceptance of this broad training model (isolation) is deeply entrenched in society and any dissenting voice is far outside the norm.

Yet this is where it gets interesting. Through somewhat of a grassroots program, you’ve seen the public, likely without considering it, move towards a broader notion of “exercise” and begin to return to protocols which stress “harmony”. Whether it be “boot-camp fitness” classes that merge fitness and strength training through compounding lifts and non-conforming objects in a high intensity setting or even a Pilates^TM or Yoga class, there is a growing segment of the public that is starting to implicitly realize that as you abandon notions of strict isolationist work in a stabilized manner, health and fitness can be attained in a fun, addictive and engaging manner. I’ve even seen this emerge through my writing career. When I first started to discuss the classic Olympic lifts and training complexes they were virtually unseen and now are rather common-place throughout the field. This trend will continue to grow as it spreads to the major gym chains and gains notoriety in the major fitness magazines as well. Slowly small sections of the public are starting to see that the lessons of the past will solve the problems of today.

With this in mind I want to approach our fat-loss regime using the firm backdrop of promoting health, fitness and total body wellness / internal strength with a regime that will utilize movements to promote total body harmony. The route to promoting fat loss is in essence the optimizing of hormonal conditions, primarily dealing with growth hormone, thyroxine and cortisol. For a weight management program to be truly successful it must address these facts and approach the issue with a three-pronged attack in the following areas:

Combine your back and chest training into a pair of powerful muscle-building workouts.

In recalling a few of the famous (and infamous) duos throughout history, a truism emerges - they are often stronger together than separately. Abbott without Costello? Bert sans Ernie? Cheech minus Chong? Hell, Wile E. Coyote would be nothing more than a demented desert drifter without his raison d’être and nemesis the Road Runner.

That same pattern holds true in weight training as well. Many bodybuilders smartly pool their biceps and triceps exercises into one workout, and “leg day” generally infers a collection of moves aimed squarely at the quadriceps and hamstrings, which work in concert to flex and extend your legs and the hip and knee joint.

Along those same lines, your chest and back also work synergistically - as the muscles of your chest flex, muscles in your back extend, and vice versa. Thus, it makes some sense to take advantage of this link, driving more blood into your torso for a better muscle-inducing pump.

The two workouts we provide here are meant to be cycled each time your “chest and back” day comes up in your own training split. (We also provide a sample split you can use.) The first workout is meant to be done heavy, aggressively pyramiding up the weight on the first six exercises to near max levels at the end. The second regimen switches back and forth between chest and back movements, and while you’ll still pyramid up the weight, instead of using more explosive reps as in workout one, you’ll take each rep through a slow and steady rep cadence - two seconds up, one second pause, three seconds down. The following is a quick walk-through of each training session.

Workout #1: You’ll begin on the incline barbell press, starting with a light warm-up set of 15 reps before pushing up the poundage from a 10-rep set to a nine, eight and finally a five repper. From there, you’ll follow suit with two more presses, flat and decline, hitting your chest from top to bottom along the way.

After that pectoral thrashing, it’s time for three back moves following the same rep pattern, attempting to really max out on the last set of each by tackling as much weight as you can handle with good form for five reps.

The session winds down with four more moves, alternating between chest and back, finishing with three sets of deadlifts. Often, you’ll see deadlifts performed early in a routine, but we use it here as a finisher - the weight you use is not as important as nice, solid reps and perfect form, giving your back one last blast before wrapping up and sitting down to your post-workout meal.

Workout #2: Unlike Workout #1, which focuses on ratcheting up your strength levels, this training session keeps the rep range a bit higher, and focuses more on developing a muscle pump (while still having you move challenging amounts of weight). You start with a bodyweight-only superset that pairs two classic exercises, pull-ups and dips. On the dips, be sure to lean your torso forward instead of remaining upright, which helps focus the attention on your pectorals instead of your triceps taking the full brunt.

Next, it’s four basic and effective exercises, two back interspersed with two chest moves. Do them all as straight sets (completing all the sets of one exercise before moving onto the next), and performing each rep in the slow 2-1-3-second pattern previously noted in the article. To finish with a flourish, you’ll do another superset, this time pairing back extensions with push-ups, both to failure.

If your chest or back training hasn’t been quite up to par of late, and you haven’t built the size you’ve wanted in those two areas, this training strategy should wake them both out of their doldrums. Leaving no part of either muscle group untapped, you’ll find it a challenge at first, but over a few weeks you’ll find yourself feeling more powerful and moving more weight than ever before. In no time you’ll be thicker and more impressive - front to back.

Workout #1:

Heavy

* Week to week, switch off which group of three exercises you start your workout with, the chest exercises one week, the back the next.

Workout #2:

Pump

Sample Training Split
You can cycle the above chest and back workouts into your own split, or if you want a new split to try, here’s an example that incorporates both of the workouts above.

There was a time years ago when working out in the gym meant something more than a strenuous hour of super-setting ‘hang-outs’ with ‘check-out-chicks’ followed by 30 minutes on the treadmill watching a giant television screen among an endless sea of cardio equipment. Weight training equipment back then didn’t come with speakers and silky voices cautiously encouraging you through your set. In fact silky voices of any kind were rarely heard and machines for the most part were frowned upon as the “easy” way out. They were believed to be less effective as basic movements with barbells and dumbbells for building those enviable mounds of thick dense muscle.

A lot of things have changed since way back then, gyms are getting bigger, supplements are getting better, and there is far more knowledge out there about what works and what doesn’t. Yet as much as things have changed, many simple truths about building muscle have prevailed.

The simplicity of training with basic compound movements combined with lots and lots of hard work and good food was the accepted path to building muscle. Back in those days loudly proclaiming in front of everyone at the gym that you were about to “Clean and Jerk” or get that “Snatch” you dreamed about the night before, would not get you tossed out of the gym by the politically correct gym management.

Rather, it would set you apart as one of the elite few that incorporated traditional Olympic weightlifting movements into your training program. Times and trends may have changed over the years and while the rules about building muscle have for the most part remained the same, some secrets to getting there seem to have been forgotten. Nowadays power cleans are usually reserved for athletes like football players that want to improve their explosive strength. But there is so much more this super-exercise can do for a bodybuilder. It could well be the secret bullet that adds mounds of thick muscle on your eagerly awaiting body.

Not far away from your local gym some of the top athletes in the country and perhaps the world are using power cleans in their training routines to increase strength, speed and muscle size and density. An example is Mark Philippi CSCS, world champion powerlifter and 6-time world strongest man competitor, who owns and operates a training center in Las Vegas for elite athletes called PSI (Philippi Strength Institute). Despite his lengthy history with powerlifting’s 3 lifts (squat, bench press and deadlift), he relies heavily on a wide variety of power movements including variations of power cleans to train his athletes now. Mark feels there is a distinct advantage to incorporating power cleans into a workout. “It’s going to develop more power than a squat or deadlift because of the speed of the movement and the distance the movement travels, so you are going to get more work done at a faster rate.” Mark also explains that power cleans work your entire body through the movement—legs, hips, lower and upper back, shoulders, arms and even chest to a small degree—making it the most complete all-round muscle and power building exercise there is.

Fast and Slow Twitch Muscle Fibers

Mark teaches the athletes he trains about slow and fast twitch muscle fibers and explains the difference between a typical bodybuilding method of training with time over tension and power training like an athlete would experience training with power-cleans. “Slow twitch muscle fibers contain more mitochondria and myoglobin which makes them more efficient at using oxygen to generate energy without lactic acid build-up. In this way, slow muscle fibers can repeatedly and for an extended period of time fuel muscle contractions such as those required for endurance or time over tension training (slow repetition training) like most bodybuilding workouts. Fast twitch and slow twitch muscle fibers generally produce the same amount of force per contraction but fast twitch muscle fibers produce that force at a much higher rate which makes them more suited for explosive movements like sprinting or power-cleans.”

By incorporating power movements that recruit fast twitch muscle fibers into your regular bodybuilding workout which predominantly recruits slow twitch muscle fibers, you stimulate more growth by forcing your muscles to adapt to a different workload. Since power-cleans recruit such a wide variety of muscle groups to complete the movement, it is the ideal exercise to incorporate into your bodybuilding routine to stimulate growth of fast twitch muscle fibers.

Anatomy of a Power Clean

Power cleans are a complex exercise where the weight travels a great distance and a wide variety of muscle groups are used. So using proper form in the execution of the movement is absolutely vital to avoid injury and gain all the benefits possible from doing the exercise. Balancing and controlling the weight is key throughout the movement and gaining that control starts at the beginning in how you set up the lift.

Step One – The Pull

Positioning your feet, hands and body at the start of the exercise is known as “setting up” the movement. Properly setting up the movement is key to avoiding injury and performing a successful lift so strict attention must be paid to this portion of the movement.

• Hands are positioned evenly on the bar, palms facing downward and shoulder width apart.
• Feet are also approximately shoulder width apart, toes and knees pointing forward.
• As you position your hands and feet you sit your hips down so they are slightly lower than your shoulders so you can more readily incorporate your hips and legs in the pull.
• Your back should be flat and most importantly your head and eyes should be facing forward.
• The bar is positioned just behind the toes but not on top of the arches of your feet.
• As you set up the pull your core should be tight to protect your back by tightening your abdominal muscles. Mark suggests visualizing drawing your navel into your spine to tighten your abdominals.
• The pull is a sequence of 3 events that must take place in the proper order for the movement to be performed properly. The first event is to drive upward using the hips and legs while keeping the back flat and head facing forward then simultaneously shrug the bar upwards with your traps and shoulders until the bar rises to a full shrug position where the arms will continue the pull until the body is fully extended.

Step Two- The Catch

The catch is the second part of the movement where the bar has been lifted in the air to a full body extension, the hips are fully extended and then the body drops beneath the bar as the elbows thrust forward to catch the bar in a low squat position with the bar resting in the hands on the top of the front deltoids. From this position the athlete stands up with the bar resting on his front deltoids just as you would with a front squat except the hands remain under the bar ready for the pressing position.

• For the catch to be successful the body and hips must be fully extended in a straight line jumping motion with the bar shrugged and pulled as high as possible keeping the elbows high above the bar.
• From this point the elbows are thrust under the bar and forward as the knees bend and the body drops underneath the bar to catch it as it falls.
• The bar should come to a final rest with the hands or fingers underneath the bar as the bar sits across the front deltoids.
• Once stable the bar is squatted upward to a standing position similar to a front squat.
• The core muscles must remain stabilized by contracting the abdominal muscles to support the torso and the back must remain flat through the entire movement.

Step Three – The Press or Jerk

From the standing position with the bar resting on the front deltoids you have an option to either simply press the weight up over head or you can jerk it overhead to a position where the arms are fully extended.

• Pressing the weight overhead is simply a matter of shoulder pressing the bar.
• Jerking the weight overhead is slightly more complex and involves generating more power to perform the movement. The knees bend slightly and as the bar is rapidly pressed upward to where the arms are fully extended while simultaneously the hips drop lower while one leg moves forward while the other moves back in a scissor position. Once the arms are fully extended and the weight is stabilized, the feet are brought back together in a standing position.
• When the exercise is completed the weight is dropped to the lifting platform provided rubber Olympic Weightlifting plates are being used. If not then the weight must be lowered slowly to the start position.

Mark Philippi’s Power Clean Program Mark Philippi recommends that power cleans be trained two times per week preferably on back day or if need be can be done on leg day. Warm up doing squats, pulls, and presses with an empty bar to prepare your muscles as well as rehearse the movements before adding any weight.

Exercise 1 – Pulls 2 sets of 5 reps

Pulls are just the first part of the movement from the floor to a full shrug

Exercise 2 – High Pulls 2 sets of 5 reps

High pulls are the same as pulls except you pull the bar as high as possible while keeping the elbows high and above the bar. This is the final position before transitioning into the catch.

Exercise 3 – Power cleans 1 set of 5 reps, 1 set of 3 reps, 1 set of 2 reps, one set of 1 rep

This is the full power clean with either a press or a jerk at the end to bring the bar overhead at arms length. Mark will change the sets and even have some reps in a set performed with a press and the rest as a jerk just for variety. These last 4 working sets are heavy and each set the weight is increased but never to the point where good form is sacrificed

Exercise 4 – Stiff Legged Deadlifts 2 sets of 5 reps

These are a traditional stiff legged deadlift but not performed with speed or acceleration.

Exercise 5 – Bent Over Barbell Row 2 sets of 5 reps

Again this is a traditional barbell row with a wide grip and the bar is pulled into the midsection. Maintain a flat back with your head up to avoid back injury.

Marks Training Tips

• Always train power cleans first because if you fatigue your muscles doing other exercises before doing power cleans technique can break down and you risk an injury.
• Warm up with the empty bar on all components of the movement so you prepare the muscles as well as rehearse the technique before adding heavy loads
• Train power cleans using rubber Olympic weightlifting weights so that if you are unable to complete the movement at any time you can simply drop the weight to avoid injury.
• “Never try to save a bad lift”. Drop the weight and try it again.
• At the start of the movement you perform the pull by shrugging first rather than finishing the movement by pulling with your arms and keeping your elbows high above the bar.
• Always keep your head and eyes facing forward and your back flat.