Recovery from the gym can take anyway from 48-96 hrs so if you train regularly, that means your body is in a constant state of repair.
Without a periodic break from this, you’ll quickly burn out. Aim to a full week of rest every 12 weeks.
You will probably still grow during this rest period and it will completely refresh you physically and mentally.
Form is everything to ensuring maximum muscle stimulation & also help avoid injury.
Let the target muscles do the work, not momentum, or other muscles.
Your goal is to fatigue the target muscles to their absolute maximum.
Forget trying to impress others, focus on working the muscle!
To the bodybuilder, sleep is viewed as an enforced fasting period.
Bodybuilders need a constant supply of protein to maintain a high nitrogen balance, helping to fend off catabolism & maintain the anabolic state .
Your last meal before bed should consist mainly of slow digesting protein such as casein, cottage cheese & egg whites.
When lowering during the squat, your knees shouldn’t extend ahead any further than the end of your toes.
Over extending can cause extra stress on the knee joints.
Ensure that your knees remain vertically in line with your feet, not jutting out to the left or right.
Negative reps, done correctly, are essential for muscle growth.
Negative reps stretch the muscle fascia, creating microtrauma, the stimulus for individual muscle fibers to heal & rebuild, larger &stronger.
Cardio is often avoided by many bodybuilders, the misconception being that it cannot possibly help to build muscle.
Bodybuilders should think of cardio as streamlining the efficiency of their bodies, as that is exactly what it does through increasing oxygen utilization & ultimately, potential.
Chewing each mouthful of food at least 20 times, preferably more, greatly improves the nutritional intake efficiency.
This in turn helps support a healthy metabolism & can even prevent colon buildup or cancer.
Going to failure on every single rep for every single exercise is only going to completey exhaust your central nervous system.
This will leave you unable to progress and in fact, you’ll struggle to lift the weights you used to.
Instead, aim for one to two reps short of failure. This is still more than enough to stimulate growth but won’t completely exhaust you.
Rather than trying to lift the bar, focus instead on ‘pushing’ your legs down into the ground.
You’ll find this actually makes the lift ‘seem’ easier.
This approach also helps you maintain proper form with a straight back by thinking about your legs ‘pushing’ rather than your body ‘lifting’.
The very word “supplement” means to cooperate with something else in order to achieve a common goal.
Too many bodybuilders treat supplements as meal replacements & lose out on nutrition that only food can provide.
Use supplement to ‘top up’ your food intake and/or used only when clean food is not readily available.
There’s been endless discussions on just how deep you should squat.
Some say you should never go below thighs parallel to the floor to minimise knee stress.
Others say deep squats are the only way to truly work the quads.
Best advice?, don’t stick to just one depth, vary the depth of your squats regularly.
Eliminating the external force, momentum, is key.
Let the targeted muscle do the work, & nothing else.
You should concentrate on moving the weight with a cadence of 2 seconds on the positive motion, & 3 seconds on the negative.
Remember, this is weight lifting, not weight throwing.
If mass and power are your goals then you absolutely must include heavy squats into your routine.
The Squat has deservedly earned the title, ‘King of Exercises’.
No other exercise hits the muscle harder than a solid set of squats, no other single exercise can get the lungs & heart racing like the squat, no other single exercise can stimulate growth like the squat.
If you’re not squatting, it’s time you did!
