GAINS, YOU NEED GAINS PT 1 - Consistency & Macros

Gains, gains you say? Gains I say, what are gains you say? A measurement of success I say, not just in the gym, in all aspects of life.

There's many reasons and also many excuses as to why people lack gains. This will be a series of articles addressing many of the common mistakes people unwittingly find themselves making when it comes to the gym.

Lack of consistency

By consistency, I mean going to the gym 3-5 times/week and very rarely missing more than a consecutive week or two throughout the year. Even following the most horribly designed program and nutrition, someone consistently pounding away at the gym will be able to make some form of progress over the guy who goes once or twice a month.

The most common issue with inconsistency is lack of patience, adaptation is a slow gradual progress. You are not going to achieve your idealistic Tyler Durden body overnight, a year of consistent lifting with a good program however? More than possible! When people complain about the lack of progress after a few weeks with a program and then hop to another program, not only does it fuel anger for my squats, but it's probably one of the biggest reason why gyms these days are full of physiques that look like they haven't touched a weight in their lives.

The other issue with consistency is lack of a goal, just going to the gym and lifting weights is great and all, but your program should be designed with a goal in mind and a time in which that goal is achievable. This can be applied to many aspects of life, want to save £1000 by Christmas? Bench 100kg by the new year? Don't talk about it, plan to make it happen. Not only does this allow much more focused programming it's also a lot more motivating to come into the gym with a goal in mind.

Goals can be missed, which is why I like setting small achievable goals under time constraints and just keep the big goals in mind, if you set a time constraint on big goals then you're far more likely to rush them near the end. A nice example of this is weight loss, a lot of people set arbitrary dates regarding this and end up trying to rush it when they don't look like they're going to hit that date, crash dieting is obviously never ever good and comes with a lot of complications. If you need to hit a certain weight for something important like a contest/holiday then it needs to be planned well in advance, but setting an arbitrary date is more than likely going to do more long-term harm than good.

Ultimately, being motivated and having both a long term and a short term goal that contributes to said long term goal will increase your consistency in all aspects of life.

Tracking macros

Eyeing things up is not acceptable, swaying from macro targets constantly because of lack of will power is not acceptable.

This is also a matter of consistency. How is one meant to make progress when one is eating an extra 250 calories from what they are prescribed due to lazy tracking? (This is easy to consume in just cooking oil alone) That's an extra 1750 calories a week which works out to half a pound of fat per week that could have been burnt just from pure laziness when it comes to tracking. One cannot simply disobey the laws of thermodynamics. Track wrongly for a few weeks and suddenly that half a pound is several pounds, you wonder why you're not making progress, your motivation is down, was it really worth eyeing things up instead of taking the extra 30 seconds to weigh and measure things?

The same goes in reverse for bulking, while some may advocate the eat-everything-in-sight bulk method it's not advisable for health reasons, excess fat gained while bulking is also fat that will need to be burnt at some point. As anyone who has ever cut to a low percentage of body fat knows, the longer you're in a choleric deficit, the more people are going to want to avoid you.

The point is, track everything, to the gram/ml! For the extra 5 minutes a day you're saving yourself a lot of time wasted trying to cut/bulk, http://www.myfitnesspal.com is a great resource for this.

Programming and supplements shall be covered in part 2, if anyone is looking for a program for the New Year please drop by our Facebook page from the link on the side as we would be happy to help.

5 ways to increase the manly man exercise, the Overhead Press

When you see an object on the ground, your initial testosterone fuelled primordial instinct is to lift it above your head. To clarify what I mean by an overhead press - a bar, taken out of a rack, pressed to overhead lockout, while standing, with a narrow grip and no kind of push pressing (leg assistance). With this in mind, why is it that there is a serious lack of any kind of heavy overhead work in most gyms today? Struggling to lift 40% of your bench press over your head in a strict press indicates an incredible imbalance in muscular function between anterior and posterior muscles and also leaves you primed for a shoulder injury that sadly won't be prevented by a sophomoric obsession with curls. 

A strong press these days has become an oddity, something rarely seen, the overhead press declined greatly in popularity after it's removal from the Olympics as the athletic merit of a strong press quickly became irrelevent. A guy with horribly proportioned weak shoulders and a general lack of gains? Your weight room is more than likely full of them.

Why should you overhead press with a barbell? Here's a few reasons -

• Balances anterior/posterior deltoid development, this will prevent a lot of bench press related injuries and shoulder issues. If your press is weak (under 50% of your bench press) it would be an idea to replace your bench press sets with press sets, your bench won't stagnate and your pecs won't fall off so don't worry.
• Incredible tricep strength builder, if you're a weak presser but have a strong bench, expect your bench to shoot up with the addition of overhead presses.
• Involves the whole body, when you're standing with a heavy weight locked out above your head your entire body is under compressive tension. While it may be seen as a shoulder exercise, learning to press heavy weights will make your whole body that much more stable from neck to toe. This again carries over very well to things like the bench press.

Do not confuse it with a seated press/dumbbell press/some kind of machine though, they are very different exercises with very different contributions from different muscle groups!

So now you're convinced that you should man up and lift heavy things above your head, here are 5 tips that will help you along your way -

1. PUSH THE BAR STRAIGHT UP

Many people will have a tendency to either overextend their hips or curl the bar around their face, the bar should be incredibly close to touching your face (once you've hit yourself once you won't do it again, trust me). Both of these result in the bar being away from the centre of gravity (the middle of your foot). This results in a leverage force being applied to the bar which again makes it harder to lift and results in you lifting less weight. “A” has the correct position, “B” shows hyperextension and a lot of stress being placed on the lumbar spine. The line through the bodies indicate where the center of gravity lies.

2. KEEP YOUR CHEST UP

If your chest is not up, your upper back is not tight, if your upper back is not tight, you cannot press properly. It sounds simple enough, and it is, if your upper back is not engaged your ability to press heavy will be greatly diminished.

3. SETUP BY MOVING UNDER THE BAR

As in, don't have the bar set too far down on the rack, unrack the bar in a tight posistion. Don't push press the bar out of the rack, you will lose stability doing so. Saying this, it's ok to slightly take the bar out with your legs (a few cm), but if you're having to bend under the bar to take it then you're not going to be in a stable position from the get-go and the bar should be set higher.

4. FLAT SHOES

If you're working out in shoes with an air padded base, take them off and do it bare foot. If your gym does not allow you to work out bare foot for your sets, find a new gym. Solid base shoes are fine. The reason for this? The air will absorb some of your force production, a good press is pushed through the heels and if some of this force is being absorbed by empty space then your muscles are going to have to work harder to make up for this resulting in you lifting less weight. This also applies to squats/deadlifts/any lift where your feet are in contact with the ground!

5. TENSE GLUTES/QUADS

By tensing your quads and glutes not only are you making the whole kinetic chain more stable, you're firing up the spinal erectors and greatly lessening the chance of hyperextending your back. You can see this by simply standing up, tensing your quads/glutes and trying to lean forward/back, it's incredibly difficult and it puts you in a very stable position to press from.

With these things in mind and your reacquaintance with your long lost love of putting things over your head, man up and get under a bar next time you train your shoulders.

10 reasons why you should be squatting!

At your local gym, there's most likely a rack. It's probably a bit dusty and lonely from the lack of use. Occasionally some bros will curl in it.

These are sad times. With the current obsession with functional training, functional being balancing on a bosu ball and doing pump and squeeze curls with 4kg dumbbells to really tax your 'core', it is a tragedy that a far more effective and legitimately functional exercise is often forgotten in most commercial gyms. Ladies (because men would already know this), I present to you. THE SQUAT!

Here are 10 reasons why you should never forgo the squat being an integral part of any workout program!

1. AESTHETICS DON'T BEGIN AT THE WAIST UP

Human aesthetics, like most things, can be governed by maths. We call it, 'the golden ratio'. The golden ratio dictates the proportions of the human body that are most aesthetically pleasing and is what artists and sculptors have used to create their works. To this day it is even used by medical staff for body reconstruction. The golden ratio is why an X shaped physique for men (not a V on pencils) and an hourglass shaped physique for women are the most desirable physiques.

This ratio is normally 1:1.618 and this appears all over your body, by far the most visible one is shoulder to waist, or 'v-taper' as it's known. What does this have to do with squats? For the golden ratio to apply to your legs, we compare the size of your knee bone to your thigh. The thigh should be 175% of the knee bone diameter. This alone should be enough of a reason for you to give up on the notion of fitting into your sister's skinny jeans.

2. SQUATTING IS ONE OF THE MOST PRIMITIVE MOVEMENTS KNOWN TO MAN

Since the dawn of time squatting has been one of the most natural movements for humans, to lift, to grab, to sit on the toilet, it's a natural movement that you do every single day. Having a weak posterior chain (the muscles responsible for squatting) is a great way to injure yourself later in life. Not only are hip based injuries incredibly common in the elderly, it could all be prevented by a healthy diet of squats. An interesting and related note is that heavy weight training is a great aid for preventing an early onset of osteoporosis from the increased bone density.

3. SQUATTING TRAINS THE WHOLE BODY

“I just want big arms man, chest and bis all day ery' day"

In reference to the golden ratio above, not only do you look ridiculous with the legs of an emaciated chicken, but squats train the whole body. Under a heavy squat there is not one muscle in the entire body that is not under tension maintaining stability.

4. ONE OF THE FEW EXERCISES THAT YOU CANNOT EVER SUBSTITUTE WITH MACHINES

Yes leg press is easier, yes leg curls may make you 'feel' it more in your quads. But neither of these train the entire posterior chain in quite the same way that squats do. Not only do these isolation movements take individual muscles out of the kinetic chain, they also train them in ways that they're not intended to be used. It would also take a good 6-10 machines depending on how well equipped your gym is to even isolate the amount of muscles that a squat recruits. Think of it like a football team that had never played together vs one that practices together the whole time, the one that plays together will have a huge advantage in both coordination and functionality!

5. “That big guy over there doesn't squat”
   
   

   

6. IT'S EFFICIENT

In point 4 I mentioned that you would need 6-10 machines to replicate the squat, this is incredibly time consuming over doing a few sets of squats. There is also the fact that in this day and age of bosu ball curls and endless variations of crunches, we're missing one of the most functional and useful exercises for core stability. Nothing builds a good set of abdominal/lumbar musculature like heavy squats and nothing more so in a functional way to operate under a compressive load. So ditch the 15 mins of crunch variations and get squatting.

7. YOUR GENERAL FITNESS ACROSS THE BOARD WILL IMPROVE!

A stronger muscle can produce more force, this means that basic movements such as running use far less of your maximal effort. This in turn leads to a large increase in performance correlating with the strength of your legs. The muscles that benefit from squatting make this applicable to pretty much every sport under the sun.

8. MENTAL DETERMINATION

To squat close to your maximum, it requires a certain amount of mental will power, a bit of emotion and perhaps a bit of insanity. Squats are difficult, people don't like doing difficult things, pushing through difficult things not only teaches you work ethic but it also carries over into many aspects of life. I mean, why do squats when you can just go to the gym, do your curls and leave just as skinny and unimpressive as you were when you came in?

9. IT WILL BENEFIT EVERY OTHER LIFT, EVEN YOUR BENCH PRESS

Your legs make up 50% of your body. Movements such as bench press and overhead press largely rely on stability for maximal force production (and the biggest weights lifted). If HALF, note, the half that often gets 1 day a week of training from the people who actually bother to train it, the half that gets ignored by the large majority of trainees. Yes if HALF of your body is small, weak and untrained, then half of your body is not going to be anywhere near as stable as it should be. This will limit your stability and limit your lifts regardless of how strong your upper body is.

10. IT TURNS HEADS AND LOOKS BADASS TO SQUAT HEAVY

If the rack is in use by team brocurl

Now get squatting!