If these vids don’t motivate you then nothing will ! >_<

Everybody wants to be a bodybuilder, but don’t nobody want to lift no
heavy-ass weights!”

-Ronnie Coleman

Ok back in action. I’ve been hitting the gym 4-5 days a week now, with the primary focus of getting strong, and hopefully as a result: big! I’m using a strategy that has worked well for me in the past: low-rep workout at the start of the week and repeated at the end of the week using high reps.

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Although there is a good correlation between being slim and being healthy, being slim does not automatically guarantee that you are healthy.

Being naturally slim most of my life, I experienced this fact first hand. There were long periods where I was not involved in any active training and ate large amounts of unhealthy food. I did feel unfit, less healthy, and much more lethargic; fall asleep in classes, etc. Being slim, people assumed I was naturally fit and healthy. I tried to explain to them that I was not, but they would not listen, saying “oh, but you’re much more fit than <insert a fat guys name here>”. Well that wasn’t always true!

Of course, being overweight is not a good thing either, but improving your fitness is of even greater importance.

According to a report on MSNBC:

Men and women who were fit, as judged by a treadmill test, but were overweight or obese had a lower mortality risk than those of normal weight but low fitness levels, the study in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed.

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Stick to these principles for at least the first 3-6 months of training if you are new to bodybuilding. Your needs will be vastly different from someone who’s been lifting consistently for more than 12 months – don’t try to copy an advanced trainee’s methods.

Never blindly follow anyone’s advice, including mine! These are general, rule-of-thumb, principles that have proven to be an effective basis for a beginner bodybuilders training (of course you should keep a lot of them in mind even if you are advanced!). Everyone’s different. By keeping these principles in mind you will be able to enjoy impressive gains while, over time, learning what works for you and how to experiment safely with different training methodologies.

I’ve separated these principles into 3 equally important sections – training, resting and diet. I consider them equally important because if you neglect any single one of these you will get nowhere at all!

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Some aimless internet wanderings I stumbled across some articles about a gene called the Myostatin gene, nicknamed the “Schwarzenegger Gene”. Apparently the gene produces a protein called Myostatin which (for god knows what reason!!) regulates muscle growth.

Experiments in mutating the gene (which lowered the Myostatin levels) has resulted in up to 30% muscular gains in cattle and up to 300% in mice. Read the rest of this entry »

Ok, so I was googling myself the other day, as you do, and one of the sites that popped up was a spam blog with a post “how do boxers lose weight so fast”? Obviously it was just junk, but let’s see if I can beat that site to the top of the google results by writing a real post about how boxers lose weight so fast.

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One of my goals over the next few months is to be able to complete a few tuck planche pushups. This will be quite a feat seeing as I have never attempted a planche before. Such an exercise requires a massive strength-to-weight ratio and a fair bit of coordination (at least for a beginner like me). After contemplating the best strategy for progressing towards this goal, I thought back to the massive frequency-volume training approach I successfully used last year to improve my chin-up strength. I decided to share a few words on what I learnt about this approach to training and to help anyone decide whether this style of training may help them off a plateau.
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