The Clarence Ross Muscle Man Workout

You’re a skinny 16 year old who wants to build some muscle.

Scenario #1: 2018

You Google “how to build muscle”.

9,970,000 results… well, fuck.

You start cycling through articles about creatine supplementation, anabolic windows, supersets and dropsets, optimal rep ranges for hypertrophy, periodisation, what is cockdocking (you get distracted), maximum recoverable volume…

Shitting buggery this is complicated, where do I start?

Scenario #2: 1958

You walk into the local gymnasium which smells of sweat, rust and Bovril.

What’s that over there – a human man or a baby rhino, it’s hard to tell?

Whatever it is, it’s deadlifting 500 pounds, smoking a fag and wearing Brylcreem.

“How do I get big and strong”? you ask.

He dumps a barbell on you.

“Kid, lift this until you’re exhausted, stuff your face with food, rest up and get some sleep, then come back again in two days time.”

Now, while these two scenarios may be slightly exaggerated, many people starting their fitness journey in the modern era will almost certainly be afflicted by the former example of analysis paralysis.

With all the noise out there on social media, conflicting advice in internet articles, science bogged down with complexity for complexity’s sake, the supplement industry constantly selling you shit, it can be difficult to know where to start and who to believe.

And, sure, while the 1950s were plagued with economic austerity, polio, having to crap in a garden shed and the public subjugation of blacks, gays and women, at least things were simple when it came to building muscle.

You picked heavy things up and put them down again, you ate lots of food, you slept, and you took life easy.

This was the uncomplicated gospel preached by the top bodybuilders of the day – all of them natural, all with attainable physiques.

Anyone could follow their weightlifting routines and dietary advice and, with consistency and perseverance, achieve success.

In this article we’re going to look at one such routine from a true bodybuilding legend – Clarence Ross.

Clarence Ross

Winner of the 1945 Mr America contest, Clarence Ross was one of the most recognisable faces of ‘golden age’ bodybuilding.

He adorned the cover of numerous muscle magazines in the 40s, 50s and 60s and was, along with John Grimek, one of only two men to twice defeat Steve Reeves in competition.

Ross was one of the first bodybuilders to pioneer the thick chest, and his classical physique, a Da Vinci wet dream made flesh, a near perfect blend of size and definition, is today still regarded as one of the best to ever grace the stage.

Importantly, like many of his contemporaries, such as Grimek and Reg Park, Ross was as strong as a bull.

His outlook was that if you wanted to build muscle, first you needed to prioritise getting strong and powerful, as, quite simply, strength equals size.

Ross could squat over 400 pounds for 10 reps and, on one occasion when training together, Park was shocked to see him nonchalantly incline press a pair of 160 pound dumbbells like they were baby cauliflowers.

And, like the other golden era greats, Ross acquired his strength, muscles and knowledge of what worked best by his own trial-and-error (covered below), not by reading peer reviewed articles in the NSCA about bosu balls or subscribing to some attention-seeking cumtrumpet on YouTube.

Training evolution

In the late 1930s, when Ross started training, he followed a single set system for building muscle, which was the conventional wisdom of the time.

These three-day-per-week routines would usually comprise a dozen or so exercises, with no more than one set of ten reps performed per exercise.

Although he gained 30 pounds in 18 months on this routine, Ross plateaued and his interest in bodybuilding waned.

Then, in 1942, while enlisted in the forces, he came under the wing of veteran bodybuilder Leo Stern, who reignited Ross’s interest in lifting weights with what he termed a ‘split set’ routine.

These routines were a type of circuit training where exercises were revisited throughout the workout.

Again, the routine was performed three days per week, and Ross began to relax his form and bring in more ‘cheating’ style movements in order to shift heavier weight.

This routine yielded significant gains in size and strength, and, with a few modifications, such as splitting upper and lower body work into two sessions on training days, introducing some specialisation blocks and Olympic style lifts for power work, Ross used this protocol to train for the 1945 Mr America contest.

The Muscle Man workout

After his victory in 1945, Ross became one of the first bodybuilders to advocate a new trend – the ‘multiple set system’ for building size and strength.

After the Mr. America contest, which I am proud to have won, I went into a regular set series program for the first time, performing this routine three times a week, 3 sets, 10 reps each exercise: squat, calf raise, bench press, bentover rowing, upright rowing, barbell curl, reverse curl, triceps curl and situp.

Later in life, Ross advocated this training methodology as the most effective way to build size and strength, and admitted that his progress would have been far better had he followed it when starting his training.

During the post-1945 era of his training, Earle Liederman, a writer for Muscle Power magazine, watched Ross train at Bert Goodrich’s gym in Hollywood (where Steve Reeves also trained and worked as an instructor) prior to the filming of ‘So You Want To Be A Muscle Man’, a 1949 comedy short in which Ross starred.

This exact workout appeared in the January 1950 edition of Muscle Power magazine in an article entitled ‘Watching Clarence Ross Train’.

Here is the mammoth full-body workout in its entirety (including sets, reps and poundage) which, according to Liederman, took Ross two hours to complete, taking roughly one minute rest between all sets and working out like “a mass of energy leaping from one thing to another with forced determination”.

Exercise	Sets and reps	Poundage
Squat	4 x 10	260, 310, 380, 310
Leg Press	2 x 16-20	585
Leg press calf raises	1 x 100	275
Bench press	3 x 10	260
Incline press	3 x 10	105 dumbbells
Barbell row	3 x 10	170
Side raises	3 x 10	50, 40, 35
Barbell curl	3 x 10	170, 170, 165
One arm bent over curl	1 x 10	60
Behind the neck press	3 x 10	120
Behind the neck chins	1 x 10
Forward bends/twists	3 sets
Bench push ups	3 x 20
Sit ups	1 set
Leg raises	1 set
Bar hanging	1 set
Neck work	1 set

Notes

Here are some guidelines for following this routine.

Workout frequency

Work out three times per week on non-consecutive days.

For example: Monday, Wednesday, Friday or Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday.

This full-body approach allows you to hit the main compound lift three times per week while still getting fours days to recover and grow.

It should be self-evident that squatting three times per week is going to disrupt homeostasis and trigger growth far more effectively than squatting once per week.

Progression

For each exercise, start the routine with a weight you can easily lift for the prescribed reps.

Then, in a linear progression fashion, add 2.5kg/5lbs to the bar each session.

If progress stalls, make doubly sure you’re in a caloric surplus and getting enough rest and sleep, as this is usually where the problem lies.

If you are, then it’s time to change things up – I would suggest something like Reg Park’s 1960 ‘Strength and Bulk Training’ 5×5 course.

As Ross pointed out, a routine “must be changed from time to time to make it more progressive and interesting to avoid the sticking point in training and to keep enthusiasm going strong”.

Nutrition

In his own magazine articles, Ross advocated a balanced and substantial diet, with lots protein, clean carbs, and fruit and veg.

He avoided “fattening” foods, and, like many of golden era bodybuilders, drank inordinate quantities of fresh milk.

For hardgainers, he prescribed drinking a glass of milk five to six times per day, between and with regular meals.

Recovery

Ensure you are getting at least eight hours of uninterrupted sleep every night, and, in the words of Ross, as much as possible “take life easy”.

Remember, your muscles don’t grow when you’re lifting weights, they grow when you’re recovering from lifting weights.

Cheat reps

Like Reg Park, Ross was an advocate of employing ‘cheat reps’ with certain movements such as barbell rows in order to up the intensity.

Cheating, in this case, refers to using added body motion and looser form (e.g. using shoulders and legs for rows) to allow the handling of heavier weights.

Heavier weights = better strength gains.

Record progress

Ross always maintained a careful record of all of his workouts and routines, detailing sets, reps and exercises, as well as notes concerning his week-to-week progress.

He also stressed the importance of tracking progress with photographs:

Having photos taken is a more satisfactory way of evaluating the physique than looking in a mirror or relying on the observations of friends.

For with pictures you have a permanent record and can study each detail of your development at your leisure and intelligently decide what corrective training measures must be taken.

Slow and steady wins the race

Bodybuilding is a long-term pursuit, so don’t set yourself up to achieve your goals overnight.

Allow yourself enough time to get into shape – if not you’ll grow impatient, worry about progress, commit training errors or maybe even incur an injury.

Keep adding weight to the bar, maintaining a caloric surplus, and sleeping eight hours a night.

Be consistent and you’ll get there.

Summary

Clarence Ross’s approach to training was characterised by simplicity, consistency and hard work.

If you’re new to training or have hit a plateau, take a cue from Ross and his buddies from the golden era, not from a £79 workout PDF that’s being flogged by some roidy moron prescribing HIIT, tricep kickbacks and protein pancakes.

Cut out all the extraneous bullshit and get back to old-school basics – a heavy barbell, full body workouts three times a week, and plenty of good quality food and rest.

Stop wasting time on the details, on articles discussing the latest research into optimal hypertrophy rep ranges, and focus on the bigger picture, i.e. doggedly getting your squat up to 200kg.

Do that and everything else will fall into place.

Over to you

If you’re thinking of giving this routine a go, or have any comments or questions about anything raised in this article, I’d love to hear from you.

Please get in touch via the comments section below!

The post The Clarence Ross Muscle Man Workout appeared first on Gymtalk.

from Gymtalk https://ift.tt/2HTxCOJ
via IFTTT

The Clarence Ross Muscle Man Workout

You’re a skinny 16 year old who wants to build some muscle.

Scenario #1: 2018

You Google “how to build muscle”.

9,970,000 results… well, fuck.

You start cycling through articles about creatine supplementation, anabolic windows, supersets and dropsets, optimal rep ranges for hypertrophy, periodisation, what is cockdocking (you get distracted), maximum recoverable volume…

Shitting buggery this is complicated, where do I start?

Scenario #2: 1958

You walk into the local gymnasium which smells of sweat, rust and Bovril.

What’s that over there – a human man or a baby rhino, it’s hard to tell?

Whatever it is, it’s deadlifting 500 pounds, smoking a fag and wearing Brylcreem.

“How do I get big and strong”? you ask.

He dumps a barbell on you.

“Kid, lift this until you’re exhausted, stuff your face with food, rest up and get some sleep, then come back again in two days time.”

Now, while these two scenarios may be slightly exaggerated, many people starting their fitness journey in the modern era will almost certainly be afflicted by the former example of analysis paralysis.

With all the noise out there on social media, conflicting advice in internet articles, science bogged down with complexity for complexity’s sake, the supplement industry constantly selling you shit, it can be difficult to know where to start and who to believe.

And, sure, while the 1950s were plagued with economic austerity, polio, having to crap in a garden shed and the public subjugation of blacks, gays and women, at least things were simple when it came to building muscle.

You picked heavy things up and put them down again, you ate lots of food, you slept, and you took life easy.

This was the uncomplicated gospel preached by the top bodybuilders of the day – all of them natural, all with attainable physiques.

Anyone could follow their weightlifting routines and dietary advice and, with consistency and perseverance, achieve success.

In this article we’re going to look at one such routine from a true bodybuilding legend – Clarence Ross.

Clarence Ross

Winner of the 1945 Mr America contest, Clarence Ross was one of the most recognisable faces of ‘golden age’ bodybuilding.

He adorned the cover of numerous muscle magazines in the 40s, 50s and 60s and was, along with John Grimek, one of only two men to twice defeat Steve Reeves in competition.

Ross was one of the first bodybuilders to pioneer the thick chest, and his classical physique, a Da Vinci wet dream made flesh, a near perfect blend of size and definition, is today still regarded as one of the best to ever grace the stage.

Importantly, like many of his contemporaries, such as Grimek and Reg Park, Ross was as strong as a bull.

His outlook was that if you wanted to build muscle, first you needed to prioritise getting strong and powerful, as, quite simply, strength equals size.

Ross could squat over 400 pounds for 10 reps and, on one occasion when training together, Park was shocked to see him nonchalantly incline press a pair of 160 pound dumbbells like they were baby cauliflowers.

And, like the other golden era greats, Ross acquired his strength, muscles and knowledge of what worked best by his own trial-and-error (covered below), not by reading peer reviewed articles in the NSCA about bosu balls or subscribing to some attention-seeking cumtrumpet on YouTube.

Training evolution

In the late 1930s, when Ross started training, he followed a single set system for building muscle, which was the conventional wisdom of the time.

These three-day-per-week routines would usually comprise a dozen or so exercises, with no more than one set of ten reps performed per exercise.

Although he gained 30 pounds in 18 months on this routine, Ross plateaued and his interest in bodybuilding waned.

Then, in 1942, while enlisted in the forces, he came under the wing of veteran bodybuilder Leo Stern, who reignited Ross’s interest in lifting weights with what he termed a ‘split set’ routine.

These routines were a type of circuit training where exercises were revisited throughout the workout.

Again, the routine was performed three days per week, and Ross began to relax his form and bring in more ‘cheating’ style movements in order to shift heavier weight.

This routine yielded significant gains in size and strength, and, with a few modifications, such as splitting upper and lower body work into two sessions on training days, introducing some specialisation blocks and Olympic style lifts for power work, Ross used this protocol to train for the 1945 Mr America contest.

The Muscle Man workout

After his victory in 1945, Ross became one of the first bodybuilders to advocate a new trend – the ‘multiple set system’ for building size and strength.

After the Mr. America contest, which I am proud to have won, I went into a regular set series program for the first time, performing this routine three times a week, 3 sets, 10 reps each exercise: squat, calf raise, bench press, bentover rowing, upright rowing, barbell curl, reverse curl, triceps curl and situp.

Later in life, Ross advocated this training methodology as the most effective way to build size and strength, and admitted that his progress would have been far better had he followed it when starting his training.

During the post-1945 era of his training, Earle Liederman, a writer for Muscle Power magazine, watched Ross train at Bert Goodrich’s gym in Hollywood (where Steve Reeves also trained and worked as an instructor) prior to the filming of ‘So You Want To Be A Muscle Man’, a 1949 comedy short in which Ross starred.

This exact workout appeared in the January 1950 edition of Muscle Power magazine in an article entitled ‘Watching Clarence Ross Train’.

Here is the mammoth full-body workout in its entirety (including sets, reps and poundage) which, according to Liederman, took Ross two hours to complete, taking roughly one minute rest between all sets and working out like “a mass of energy leaping from one thing to another with forced determination”.

Exercise	Sets and reps	Poundage
Squat	4 x 10	260, 310, 380, 310
Leg Press	2 x 16-20	585
Leg press calf raises	1 x 100	275
Bench press	3 x 10	260
Incline press	3 x 10	105 dumbbells
Barbell row	3 x 10	170
Side raises	3 x 10	50, 40, 35
Barbell curl	3 x 10	170, 170, 165
One arm bent over curl	1 x 10	60
Behind the neck press	3 x 10	120
Behind the neck chins	1 x 10
Forward bends/twists	3 sets
Bench push ups	3 x 20
Sit ups	1 set
Leg raises	1 set
Bar hanging	1 set
Neck work	1 set

Notes

Here are some guidelines for following this routine.

Workout frequency

Work out three times per week on non-consecutive days.

For example: Monday, Wednesday, Friday or Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday.

This full-body approach allows you to hit the main compound lift three times per week while still getting fours days to recover and grow.

It should be self-evident that squatting three times per week is going to disrupt homeostasis and trigger growth far more effectively than squatting once per week.

Progression

For each exercise, start the routine with a weight you can easily lift for the prescribed reps.

Then, in a linear progression fashion, add 2.5kg/5lbs to the bar each session.

If progress stalls, make doubly sure you’re in a caloric surplus and getting enough rest and sleep, as this is usually where the problem lies.

If you are, then it’s time to change things up – I would suggest something like Reg Park’s 1960 ‘Strength and Bulk Training’ 5×5 course.

As Ross pointed out, a routine “must be changed from time to time to make it more progressive and interesting to avoid the sticking point in training and to keep enthusiasm going strong”.

Nutrition

In his own magazine articles, Ross advocated a balanced and substantial diet, with lots protein, clean carbs, and fruit and veg.

He avoided “fattening” foods, and, like many of golden era bodybuilders, drank inordinate quantities of fresh milk.

For hardgainers, he prescribed drinking a glass of milk five to six times per day, between and with regular meals.

Recovery

Ensure you are getting at least eight hours of uninterrupted sleep every night, and, in the words of Ross, as much as possible “take life easy”.

Remember, your muscles don’t grow when you’re lifting weights, they grow when you’re recovering from lifting weights.

Cheat reps

Like Reg Park, Ross was an advocate of employing ‘cheat reps’ with certain movements such as barbell rows in order to up the intensity.

Cheating, in this case, refers to using added body motion and looser form (e.g. using shoulders and legs for rows) to allow the handling of heavier weights.

Heavier weights = better strength gains.

Record progress

Ross always maintained a careful record of all of his workouts and routines, detailing sets, reps and exercises, as well as notes concerning his week-to-week progress.

He also stressed the importance of tracking progress with photographs:

Having photos taken is a more satisfactory way of evaluating the physique than looking in a mirror or relying on the observations of friends.

For with pictures you have a permanent record and can study each detail of your development at your leisure and intelligently decide what corrective training measures must be taken.

Slow and steady wins the race

Bodybuilding is a long-term pursuit, so don’t set yourself up to achieve your goals overnight.

Allow yourself enough time to get into shape – if not you’ll grow impatient, worry about progress, commit training errors or maybe even incur an injury.

Keep adding weight to the bar, maintaining a caloric surplus, and sleeping eight hours a night.

Be consistent and you’ll get there.

Summary

Clarence Ross’s approach to training was characterised by simplicity, consistency and hard work.

If you’re new to training or have hit a plateau, take a cue from Ross and his buddies from the golden era, not from a £79 workout PDF that’s being flogged by some roidy moron prescribing HIIT, tricep kickbacks and protein pancakes.

Cut out all the extraneous bullshit and get back to old-school basics – a heavy barbell, full body workouts three times a week, and plenty of good quality food and rest.

Stop wasting time on the details, on articles discussing the latest research into optimal hypertrophy rep ranges, and focus on the bigger picture, i.e. doggedly getting your squat up to 200kg.

Do that and everything else will fall into place.

Over to you

If you’re thinking of giving this routine a go, or have any comments or questions about anything raised in this article, I’d love to hear from you.

Please get in touch via the comments section below!

The post The Clarence Ross Muscle Man Workout appeared first on Gymtalk.

from Gymtalk https://ift.tt/2HTxCOJ
via IFTTT

Advice To My 18-Year-Old Self

On January 1st of this year I turned 30.

As well as ushering in a malaise of cynicism and despair, crippling hangovers, an aversion to doing anything other than drinking tea in my pyjamas on a Friday night, and the weary acceptance that we will all soon die in the incendiary light of a nuclear explosion, I’ve found myself in a reflective mood.

One of the constants in my life has always been been sport and fitness, and while I have by no means set the world alight with feats of strength and athleticism, I’ve certainly learned a great deal, especially in regard to lifting weights, which has been something I’ve pursued on and off for most of the last decade.

In my late teens and early twenties I was your typical bicep-curling, six-pack striving, non-squatting, skinny novice, who had no sodding clue what he was doing.

Below are some pictures which perfectly encapsulate this point in time – a period where I was seemingly in training to become ‘Britain’s Biggest Tosser’.

These were posted to Facebook and inundated (justifiably) with responses such as “sort your life out”, “bender”, “you look like a post-op Clare Balding who has just discovered protein shakes”.

In my defence, topless photos are permissible as youthful vanity, whereas having a photo of a car as your profile pic will always make you a cunt.

Over the next 10 years, by trial and error (mostly error) I figured out what worked and what didn’t when it came to muscle and strength development.

I reckoned that some of this accumulated knowledge might be of use to someone out there, so here it is…

Eat more

If I could only dish out one piece of advice to my 18-year-old self, it would be this.

If you want to get bigger and stronger, eat as much you can.

When I first started out, I believed the pump I was getting in the gym was the sole driver of muscle growth.

A key distinction, which took me so many years to grasp, is that whereas muscles are placed under the stress by lifting weights, actual growth is facilitated by adequate diet (and rest).

And adequate diet, in the context of getting big and strong, means consistently putting yourself in a caloric surplus with good quality food.

It doesn’t mean chugging down a protein shake during the 45 minutes post-workout anabolic window and then scarcely eating or grazing on Doritos and cocktail sausages for the rest of the day (true story).

If you’re serious about making progress, you should be eating at lest four meals per day which comprise good protein sources (meat, fish, eggs) with some decent carbs (rice, potatoes) and huge mounds of fruit and vegetables.

To drive muscle growth, protein intake should be around one gram per pound of bodyweight per day and your daily caloric intake should fall between 3,500 and 6,000 calories.

Don’t worry about meticulous calorie counting with apps like MyFitnessPal, nobody’s got time for that, just fucking get it all in, eat as much you can.

Take your diet as serious as your workouts, and you’ll be on the right track.

To grease the wheels, old-school strength and bodybuilding coaches – including Mark Rippetoe – recommend, with decades of experience behind them, that ectomorphs consume a gallon (8 pints) of whole milk every day (GOMAD) while starting out, adding in pints with meals and at regular intervals during the day.

To novices this might seem like an awful lot of food, but if you want to disrupt homeostasis and force muscle growth, eating everything that isn’t nailed down is as important – actually more important – than lifting heavy weights.

If you’re anything like I was at 18, you’re probably thinking that all this food is going to destroy you hard-earned six pack.

And you’d be right.

But here’s the truth, which you probably don’t want to hear:

No-one, apart from you, gives a lubricated fuck about your low body fat and six pack abs.

In a t-shirt you look just like any other average guy who doesn’t lift.

Narcissism aside, do you really think women are going to find your skinny frame more attractive than a guy with wide shoulders and powerful legs who could hammer throw you over a two story building without breaking sweat?

Chasing aesthetics is not going to get you strong and it’s not going to get you laid.

Pick up a fucking fork.

Focus on getting strong

If you want to get big (naturally) you need to get strong.

Bigger muscles are a side-effect of getting stronger, and by focusing on strength training (with adequate diet and rest) everything else will fall into place.

I may be paraphrasing here, but I’m pretty sure it was Ghandi who once said, “If you’re not lifting heavy fucking weights, what’s the fucking point?”

For a novice, the most efficient way to get strong is with linear progression on the main compound lifts (squat, deadlift, overhead press, bench press).

At this stage in your training, your routine should NOT incorporate any of the following:

• ‘Hypertophy’ rep ranges (the typical 3 x 8-12 you see in bodybuilding routines)
• ‘Bro splits’ (‘arm day’, ‘ankle day’, ‘spleen day’)
• Time under tension
• Negative reps
• Mind-muscle connection
• Resistance machines
• Isolation exercises
• Supersets/dropsets
• HIIT/excessive cardio

If you’re just starting out and your lifting regimen draws on any of these, you’re not just wasting your time but hindering progress as well.

Yes, you’ll see no doubt see some initial gains from some of this bodybuilding guff, but this will be down to the well-documented ‘novice effect’, whereby any weightlifting work will disrupt homeostatis.

Standing on one leg while juggling and having your rectum vacuumed by a chimpanzee will give you muscle gains up to a point.

Bottom line, if your routine does not revolve around consistently adding weight to the bar on the big lifts, five years down the line you’ll be no stronger and look just the same.

“But this study… blah blah… hypertrophy… blah blah… if you’ve read the literature, it actually proves… blah blah… and this guy on YouTube said…”

For fuck sake, who do you think is going to end up with bigger muscles, someone who has steadily built their 5RM bench press to 130kg or someone who can bench 3 x 10 with 50kg using a reverse grip on a bosu ball with 20 seconds rest betweens sets?

Use some common sense, cum swamp.

Master the main compound lifts

Rather than mastering the squat, deadlift, bench and press as a novice, I, like many others, spent far too much time on unnecessary shite.

After listening to unsolicited advice from the biggest guy at Dunstable leisure centre gym (imagine a shaved Splinter from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles after 10 years of nonstop bicep curls and multiple ASBOs) and reading every issue of Muscle & Fitness magazine, I became an ardent disciple of the school of muscle confusion.

“Your muscles won’t grow if you keep hitting them with the same exercises every week” was what my new coach would tell me every time I saw him (usually in Asda car park where he would walk around in a high-vis jacket – I later found out he didn’t even work there).

Despite the fact his advice typically resembled the maniacal musings of someone who hasn’t left a fruit machine for 7 hours (politicians are all shapeshifting lizards, the best way to finger a girl, how he once wired a sex doll up to the mains, etc etc), I believed him.

I was also determined to try all those useless routines in muscle magazines: “8 Week Bicep Building Bonanza”, “Power Up Your Pec To Pussy Ratio”, “The Secret Kryptonian Muscle Building Secret Superman Uses To Bend Iron Bars”, “How I Spent 10 Years In A High-Security Sex Dungeon But Still Maintained My Muscular Chest”.

There was only one way I was getting massive and that was by constantly attacking my muscles from different angles and confusing the merry shit out of them.

I would constantly rotate exercises, routines and rep ranges to stop my muscles getting used the stress I was putting them through, and I would smirk at the rugby players who would come in and spend 45 minutes squatting with heavy weights three times a week.

Idiots, if only they knew…

I must have tried 10 different variations of the bicep curl, high rep prone legs curls, one leg bosu ball squats, reverse-close-grip-paused incline bench presses, Arnold press standing on one leg.

There was not a proper squat or deadlift in site.

And I got nowhere.

Even when I did figure out where I was going wrong, the compound lifts that started to find there way into my workout were done with terrible form.

If I’d only got proper instruction on how to squat, deadlift, bench and press when I started out, and spent the following years perfecting my technique and persevering when things got tough rather than just switching up my programme again, I would have prevented years of wasted gains.

Increasing volume, intensity and frequency on the main lifts are the only effective stressors for long-term increases in strength and muscle size.

Constantly varying exercises is not an effective training stress.

Train like a beginner, not Arnold Schwarzenegger

One of the first bodybuilding books I owned was The New Encyclopaedia of Modern Bodybuilding by Arnold Schwarzenegger.

I remember the excitement I felt flicking through these pages for the first time (this is it! this is like Moses coming down from Mount Sinai!) and jotting down what was to be my new, devastatingly effective training routine.

Following Arnold’s secret My Olmypia training principles was going to transform me from a skinny weakling who bore a passing resemblance to the bully from Karate Kid to an irresistible He-Man with a sex life so extreme that it would make the world’s most penetrated porn star throw up in disgust.

If only.

What I failed to appreciate at the time was that Arnold was a genetic freak who had been training for decades and used powerful anabolic steroids.

Following his high volume split routines to the letter caused me an awful lot of soreness, a great deal of fatigue and precious little in the way of strength and muscle gain.

I failed to grasp that in order to produce optimal results as a novice I needed to train like a novice, and not a seven-time Mr Olympia.

The training stress was far too high and because I was training almost every day recovery was insufficient to drive adaption.

As a beginner, the most effective way to make progress quickly is with full body workouts, three days a week, focusing on the main compound lifts.

This schedule (at least for 4-9 months) perfectly balances training stress and recovery allowing you to add weight to the bar every session and drive adaption/growth.

This approach to progression is called linear periodisaton.

As a teenager, this is the protocol Arnold followed to establish his foundation, not high-volume splits, and the one he would recommend to novice trainees at his gym and dub ‘The Golden Six‘.

Similarly, as a beginner Arnold also followed the blueprint laid down by Reg Park, his hero and mentor, who first established the 5×5 protocol now prescribed in popular routines such as Starting Strength and Stronglifts.

Learn the difference between ‘training’ and ‘exercise’

The vast majority of gym goers accomplish precious little other than working up a sweat and making themselves sore the next day.

And this is all well and good if your goal is to maintain your current physique or lose weight by burning calories.

But most people, if they’re being honest, want more than this.

As a teenager I certainly did.

I wanted to be big and strong, I wanted to fill out a t-shirt, I wanted women to look at me and immediately feel the urge to expose their nipples and fanny in my general direction.

But what I was doing in the gym usually amounted to mere ‘exercise’ – not proper training geared to muscle and strength development.

When I was chasing a big, lean, muscular physique, a typical session would be 10 minutes warm up on the cross trainer, 10 minutes foam rolling and stretching, one random compound lift (whatever equipment was free), then maybe 3 sets of 8-12 reps on 3-5 isolation exercises, capped off with a max effort mile on the treadmill and some situps.

Sure, this was a busy routine which burnt a load of calories and got me working up a sweat, but I wasn’t developing strength and size, which was what I really wanted.

I was trying to cover too many bases – get strong, get big biceps, lose bodyfat, have razor abs, improve aerobic fitness (basically Crossfit).

There was too much cardio, too much unnecessary shit, and not enough time spent under a progressively heavy barbell, which was evident in my lack of real progress on the compound lifts.

If you’re new to the gym, avoid my mistake and follow a long-term training schedule which is wholly geared towards driving improvement on the main lifts, not just a random ‘what shall I do today’ programme that amounts to a whole lot of nothing.

Don’t waste money on supplements

Although the fitness industry would have you believe otherwise, you do not need supplements to get big and strong.

There is nothing in supplements that you cannot get from an adequate diet.

If you are training properly, eating properly and resting properly there is no need to throw your cash away, especially if you’re a beginner.

People that stack their cupboards high with pills and powders often do not want to hear the simple, hard-to-swallow truth:

The only way you’re getting bigger is through lifting heavy weights, maintaining a caloric surplus and perseverance.

It’s just easier to keep telling yourself that your programme is to blame or you’re not getting enough creatine or that maybe this new study from Japan which shows how eating a boiled rhino’s vagina can enhance cellular function is the answer to your training plateau.

Fact is, there’s no supplement that works as well as doggedly getting your 5RM squat up to 150kg and eating a shit tonne of meat and veg.

The only reason to take supplements is if you honestly struggle to maintain a healthy diet or you’re just too lazy to get yourself organised.

In that case, get yourself some good quality whey protein to make sure you hit a gram of protein per pound of bodyweight every day and take a multivitamin and fish oil as some general nutrition insurance.

But, honestly, how hard is it to have sardines or mackerel a few times a week instead of resorting to pills?

And do you really need a big tub of whey every month when you can get the same amount of protein from whole milk and regular meals?

And while creatine might be one of the most well-studied supplements out there, my personal experience, in over ten years of lifting, is that it delivers very little in the way of performance benefit.

And while I’m not going to fly in the face of science (I trust the research), I believe that most lifters would be better off forgetting about supplements that may or may not enhance performance by 0.05% and instead focus on something more important.

Ultimately, a good night’s sleep and a strong cup of coffee will do more for your squat PR than religiously supplementing 5g creatine every day.

Sleep!

“I’ll sleep when I’m dead,” used to be the adage of someone I knew when I was in my early twenties.

Well, he is dead now.

Turns out all those 3am smack sessions aren’t very good for the heart.

The point being, I guess, is that you should look after yourself, and consistently depriving yourself of sleep is a surefire way to fuck your body up.

And it should go without saying that injecting heroin is probably going to hinder progress on your 5rm deadlift.

If you’re training for any sport, getting at least 8 hours sleep every night is one of the most powerful weapons in your arsenal.

Sleep is a powerful anabolic aid that is absolutely critical to the stress/adaptation model (along with nutrition).

It is where the most potent recovery occurs, and deserves as much attention as your nutrition and training.

Don’t treat it as an inconvenience that happens at the end of your day, take it as seriously as mapping out your training schedule.

And by 8 hours, I don’t mean getting into bed at 10:30pm, scrolling on your iPhone for an hour, bashing one out, nipping for a quick wee, finally getting some shuteye around 1am, then waking up at 7 to hit ‘snooze’ every 15 minutes.

Do everything you can to ensure you’re sleeping soundly for a full eight hours – invest in a decent mattress and pillow, get some proper blinds, read a book before dozing off (a great help, apparently).

Signing off

So, there we have it, seven pieces of advice that would have spared my 18-year-old self a lot of wasted time and effort.

I apologise to those of you who were expecting a grand reveal of some powerful Soviet muscle building secrets that the Kremlin have been keeping under lock and key since 1920.

Truth is, to see results you don’t need to sacrifice a baby unicorn or commit to ten years of study in a temple in Kathmandu.

For the most part, you just need to rely on common sense, consistency and hard work – i.e. squatting heavy for a decade.

And while a lot of this stuff may elicit a “no shit” response from some – like hearing that Hitler once upended a table and punched someone in the head after losing a game of Risk – most beginners, like my 18-year-old self, fail to see the wood for the trees.

But, to strike a final philosophical point, as most articles of this nature do, if I could go back in time, would I really change everything?

No of c… YES, YES I FUCKING WOULD.

Obviously I would.

By now I would be absolutely bloody MASSIVE.

Over to you

Experienced lifters out there – what advice would you give to your 18-year-old self?

Let me know in the comments section below, I’d love to hear from you!

The post Advice To My 18-Year-Old Self appeared first on Gymtalk.

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Advice To My 18-Year-Old Self

On January 1st of this year I turned 30.

As well as ushering in a malaise of cynicism and despair, crippling hangovers, an aversion to doing anything other than drinking tea in my pyjamas on a Friday night, and the weary acceptance that we will all soon die in the incendiary light of a nuclear explosion, I’ve found myself in a reflective mood.

One of the constants in my life has always been been sport and fitness, and while I have by no means set the world alight with feats of strength and athleticism, I’ve certainly learned a great deal, especially in regard to lifting weights, which has been something I’ve pursued on and off for most of the last decade.

In my late teens and early twenties I was your typical bicep-curling, six-pack striving, non-squatting, skinny novice, who had no sodding clue what he was doing.

Below are some pictures which perfectly encapsulate this point in time – a period where I was seemingly in training to become ‘Britain’s Biggest Tosser’.

These were posted to Facebook and inundated (justifiably) with responses such as “sort your life out”, “bender”, “you look like a post-op Clare Balding who has just discovered protein shakes”.

In my defence, topless photos are permissible as youthful vanity, whereas having a photo of a car as your profile pic will always make you a cunt.

Over the next 10 years, by trial and error (mostly error) I figured out what worked and what didn’t when it came to muscle and strength development.

I reckoned that some of this accumulated knowledge might be of use to someone out there, so here it is…

Eat more

If I could only dish out one piece of advice to my 18-year-old self, it would be this.

If you want to get bigger and stronger, eat as much you can.

When I first started out, I believed the pump I was getting in the gym was the sole driver of muscle growth.

A key distinction, which took me so many years to grasp, is that whereas muscles are placed under the stress by lifting weights, actual growth is facilitated by adequate diet (and rest).

And adequate diet, in the context of getting big and strong, means consistently putting yourself in a caloric surplus with good quality food.

It doesn’t mean chugging down a protein shake during the 45 minutes post-workout anabolic window and then scarcely eating or grazing on Doritos and cocktail sausages for the rest of the day (true story).

If you’re serious about making progress, you should be eating at lest four meals per day which comprise good protein sources (meat, fish, eggs) with some decent carbs (rice, potatoes) and huge mounds of fruit and vegetables.

To drive muscle growth, protein intake should be around one gram per pound of bodyweight per day and your daily caloric intake should fall between 3,500 and 6,000 calories.

Don’t worry about meticulous calorie counting with apps like MyFitnessPal, nobody’s got time for that, just fucking get it all in, eat as much you can.

Take your diet as serious as your workouts, and you’ll be on the right track.

To grease the wheels, old-school strength and bodybuilding coaches – including Mark Rippetoe – recommend, with decades of experience behind them, that ectomorphs consume a gallon (8 pints) of whole milk every day (GOMAD) while starting out, adding in pints with meals and at regular intervals during the day.

To novices this might seem like an awful lot of food, but if you want to disrupt homeostasis and force muscle growth, eating everything that isn’t nailed down is as important – actually more important – than lifting heavy weights.

If you’re anything like I was at 18, you’re probably thinking that all this food is going to destroy you hard-earned six pack.

And you’d be right.

But here’s the truth, which you probably don’t want to hear:

No-one, apart from you, gives a lubricated fuck about your low body fat and six pack abs.

In a t-shirt you look just like any other average guy who doesn’t lift.

Narcissism aside, do you really think women are going to find your skinny frame more attractive than a guy with wide shoulders and powerful legs who could hammer throw you over a two story building without breaking sweat?

Chasing aesthetics is not going to get you strong and it’s not going to get you laid.

Pick up a fucking fork.

Focus on getting strong

If you want to get big (naturally) you need to get strong.

Bigger muscles are a side-effect of getting stronger, and by focusing on strength training (with adequate diet and rest) everything else will fall into place.

I may be paraphrasing here, but I’m pretty sure it was Ghandi who once said, “If you’re not lifting heavy fucking weights, what’s the fucking point?”

For a novice, the most efficient way to get strong is with linear progression on the main compound lifts (squat, deadlift, overhead press, bench press).

At this stage in your training, your routine should NOT incorporate any of the following:

• ‘Hypertophy’ rep ranges (the typical 3 x 8-12 you see in bodybuilding routines)
• ‘Bro splits’ (‘arm day’, ‘ankle day’, ‘spleen day’)
• Time under tension
• Negative reps
• Mind-muscle connection
• Resistance machines
• Isolation exercises
• Supersets/dropsets
• HIIT/excessive cardio

If you’re just starting out and your lifting regimen draws on any of these, you’re not just wasting your time but hindering progress as well.

Yes, you’ll see no doubt see some initial gains from some of this bodybuilding guff, but this will be down to the well-documented ‘novice effect’, whereby any weightlifting work will disrupt homeostatis.

Standing on one leg while juggling and having your rectum vacuumed by a chimpanzee will give you muscle gains up to a point.

Bottom line, if your routine does not revolve around consistently adding weight to the bar on the big lifts, five years down the line you’ll be no stronger and look just the same.

“But this study… blah blah… hypertrophy… blah blah… if you’ve read the literature, it actually proves… blah blah… and this guy on YouTube said…”

For fuck sake, who do you think is going to end up with bigger muscles, someone who has steadily built their 5RM bench press to 130kg or someone who can bench 3 x 10 with 50kg using a reverse grip on a bosu ball with 20 seconds rest betweens sets?

Use some common sense, cum swamp.

Master the main compound lifts

Rather than mastering the squat, deadlift, bench and press as a novice, I, like many others, spent far too much time on unnecessary shite.

After listening to unsolicited advice from the biggest guy at Dunstable leisure centre gym (imagine a shaved Splinter from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles after 10 years of nonstop bicep curls and multiple ASBOs) and reading every issue of Muscle & Fitness magazine, I became an ardent disciple of the school of muscle confusion.

“Your muscles won’t grow if you keep hitting them with the same exercises every week” was what my new coach would tell me every time I saw him (usually in Asda car park where he would walk around in a high-vis jacket – I later found out he didn’t even work there).

Despite the fact his advice typically resembled the maniacal musings of someone who hasn’t left a fruit machine for 7 hours (politicians are all shapeshifting lizards, the best way to finger a girl, how he once wired a sex doll up to the mains, etc etc), I believed him.

I was also determined to try all those useless routines in muscle magazines: “8 Week Bicep Building Bonanza”, “Power Up Your Pec To Pussy Ratio”, “The Secret Kryptonian Muscle Building Secret Superman Uses To Bend Iron Bars”, “How I Spent 10 Years In A High-Security Sex Dungeon But Still Maintained My Muscular Chest”.

There was only one way I was getting massive and that was by constantly attacking my muscles from different angles and confusing the merry shit out of them.

I would constantly rotate exercises, routines and rep ranges to stop my muscles getting used the stress I was putting them through, and I would smirk at the rugby players who would come in and spend 45 minutes squatting with heavy weights three times a week.

Idiots, if only they knew…

I must have tried 10 different variations of the bicep curl, high rep prone legs curls, one leg bosu ball squats, reverse-close-grip-paused incline bench presses, Arnold press standing on one leg.

There was not a proper squat or deadlift in site.

And I got nowhere.

Even when I did figure out where I was going wrong, the compound lifts that started to find there way into my workout were done with terrible form.

If I’d only got proper instruction on how to squat, deadlift, bench and press when I started out, and spent the following years perfecting my technique and persevering when things got tough rather than just switching up my programme again, I would have prevented years of wasted gains.

Increasing volume, intensity and frequency on the main lifts are the only effective stressors for long-term increases in strength and muscle size.

Constantly varying exercises is not an effective training stress.

Train like a beginner, not Arnold Schwarzenegger

One of the first bodybuilding books I owned was The New Encyclopaedia of Modern Bodybuilding by Arnold Schwarzenegger.

I remember the excitement I felt flicking through these pages for the first time (this is it! this is like Moses coming down from Mount Sinai!) and jotting down what was to be my new, devastatingly effective training routine.

Following Arnold’s secret My Olmypia training principles was going to transform me from a skinny weakling who bore a passing resemblance to the bully from Karate Kid to an irresistible He-Man with a sex life so extreme that it would make the world’s most penetrated porn star throw up in disgust.

If only.

What I failed to appreciate at the time was that Arnold was a genetic freak who had been training for decades and used powerful anabolic steroids.

Following his high volume split routines to the letter caused me an awful lot of soreness, a great deal of fatigue and precious little in the way of strength and muscle gain.

I failed to grasp that in order to produce optimal results as a novice I needed to train like a novice, and not a seven-time Mr Olympia.

The training stress was far too high and because I was training almost every day recovery was insufficient to drive adaption.

As a beginner, the most effective way to make progress quickly is with full body workouts, three days a week, focusing on the main compound lifts.

This schedule (at least for 4-9 months) perfectly balances training stress and recovery allowing you to add weight to the bar every session and drive adaption/growth.

This approach to progression is called linear periodisaton.

As a teenager, this is the protocol Arnold followed to establish his foundation, not high-volume splits, and the one he would recommend to novice trainees at his gym and dub ‘The Golden Six‘.

Similarly, as a beginner Arnold also followed the blueprint laid down by Reg Park, his hero and mentor, who first established the 5×5 protocol now prescribed in popular routines such as Starting Strength and Stronglifts.

Learn the difference between ‘training’ and ‘exercise’

The vast majority of gym goers accomplish precious little other than working up a sweat and making themselves sore the next day.

And this is all well and good if your goal is to maintain your current physique or lose weight by burning calories.

But most people, if they’re being honest, want more than this.

As a teenager I certainly did.

I wanted to be big and strong, I wanted to fill out a t-shirt, I wanted women to look at me and immediately feel the urge to expose their nipples and fanny in my general direction.

But what I was doing in the gym usually amounted to mere ‘exercise’ – not proper training geared to muscle and strength development.

When I was chasing a big, lean, muscular physique, a typical session would be 10 minutes warm up on the cross trainer, 10 minutes foam rolling and stretching, one random compound lift (whatever equipment was free), then maybe 3 sets of 8-12 reps on 3-5 isolation exercises, capped off with a max effort mile on the treadmill and some situps.

Sure, this was a busy routine which burnt a load of calories and got me working up a sweat, but I wasn’t developing strength and size, which was what I really wanted.

I was trying to cover too many bases – get strong, get big biceps, lose bodyfat, have razor abs, improve aerobic fitness (basically Crossfit).

There was too much cardio, too much unnecessary shit, and not enough time spent under a progressively heavy barbell, which was evident in my lack of real progress on the compound lifts.

If you’re new to the gym, avoid my mistake and follow a long-term training schedule which is wholly geared towards driving improvement on the main lifts, not just a random ‘what shall I do today’ programme that amounts to a whole lot of nothing.

Don’t waste money on supplements

Although the fitness industry would have you believe otherwise, you do not need supplements to get big and strong.

There is nothing in supplements that you cannot get from an adequate diet.

If you are training properly, eating properly and resting properly there is no need to throw your cash away, especially if you’re a beginner.

People that stack their cupboards high with pills and powders often do not want to hear the simple, hard-to-swallow truth:

The only way you’re getting bigger is through lifting heavy weights, maintaining a caloric surplus and perseverance.

It’s just easier to keep telling yourself that your programme is to blame or you’re not getting enough creatine or that maybe this new study from Japan which shows how eating a boiled rhino’s vagina can enhance cellular function is the answer to your training plateau.

Fact is, there’s no supplement that works as well as doggedly getting your 5RM squat up to 150kg and eating a shit tonne of meat and veg.

The only reason to take supplements is if you honestly struggle to maintain a healthy diet or you’re just too lazy to get yourself organised.

In that case, get yourself some good quality whey protein to make sure you hit a gram of protein per pound of bodyweight every day and take a multivitamin and fish oil as some general nutrition insurance.

But, honestly, how hard is it to have sardines or mackerel a few times a week instead of resorting to pills?

And do you really need a big tub of whey every month when you can get the same amount of protein from whole milk and regular meals?

And while creatine might be one of the most well-studied supplements out there, my personal experience, in over ten years of lifting, is that it delivers very little in the way of performance benefit.

And while I’m not going to fly in the face of science (I trust the research), I believe that most lifters would be better off forgetting about supplements that may or may not enhance performance by 0.05% and instead focus on something more important.

Ultimately, a good night’s sleep and a strong cup of coffee will do more for your squat PR than religiously supplementing 5g creatine every day.

Sleep!

“I’ll sleep when I’m dead,” used to be the adage of someone I knew when I was in my early twenties.

Well, he is dead now.

Turns out all those 3am smack sessions aren’t very good for the heart.

The point being, I guess, is that you should look after yourself, and consistently depriving yourself of sleep is a surefire way to fuck your body up.

And it should go without saying that injecting heroin is probably going to hinder progress on your 5rm deadlift.

If you’re training for any sport, getting at least 8 hours sleep every night is one of the most powerful weapons in your arsenal.

Sleep is a powerful anabolic aid that is absolutely critical to the stress/adaptation model (along with nutrition).

It is where the most potent recovery occurs, and deserves as much attention as your nutrition and training.

Don’t treat it as an inconvenience that happens at the end of your day, take it as seriously as mapping out your training schedule.

And by 8 hours, I don’t mean getting into bed at 10:30pm, scrolling on your iPhone for an hour, bashing one out, nipping for a quick wee, finally getting some shuteye around 1am, then waking up at 7 to hit ‘snooze’ every 15 minutes.

Do everything you can to ensure you’re sleeping soundly for a full eight hours – invest in a decent mattress and pillow, get some proper blinds, read a book before dozing off (a great help, apparently).

Signing off

So, there we have it, seven pieces of advice that would have spared my 18-year-old self a lot of wasted time and effort.

I apologise to those of you who were expecting a grand reveal of some powerful Soviet muscle building secrets that the Kremlin have been keeping under lock and key since 1920.

Truth is, to see results you don’t need to sacrifice a baby unicorn or commit to ten years of study in a temple in Kathmandu.

For the most part, you just need to rely on common sense, consistency and hard work – i.e. squatting heavy for a decade.

And while a lot of this stuff may elicit a “no shit” response from some – like hearing that Hitler once upended a table and punched someone in the head after losing a game of Risk – most beginners, like my 18-year-old self, fail to see the wood for the trees.

But, to strike a final philosophical point, as most articles of this nature do, if I could go back in time, would I really change everything?

No of c… YES, YES I FUCKING WOULD.

Obviously I would.

By now I would be absolutely bloody MASSIVE.

Over to you

Experienced lifters out there – what advice would you give to your 18-year-old self?

Let me know in the comments section below, I’d love to hear from you!

The post Advice To My 18-Year-Old Self appeared first on Gymtalk.

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Common Gym Phrases And What They Actually Mean

The gym can be an intimidating place.

Well, sort of.

Not as intimidating as being chained up in a Belgium sex bunker, being asked to call a coin toss by Anton Chigurh or having your CV marked up by Claude Littner.

Or being forced to sleep opposite a pickled jar containing the severed head of your murdered lover as a punishment for being unfaithful.

To be fair on Peter the Great, this was fairly mild as punishments from Russian Czars go – the equivalent, nowadays, of purposefully making your partner a rubbish cup of tea.

But, for newcomers especially, the gym can be a discomfiting environment.

As you wonder out of the changing rooms for the first time, you’ll feel like a new recruit in a buddy cop movie who’s been transferred to a department in a corrupt precinct.

You’ll get dirty looks from the tough guys free weights area (all ‘on the take’), an unhinged Mel Gibson type will accost you at the water fountain with unsolicited fitness tips and weapons-grade viagra, and there’ll be a by-the-books personal trainer trying to avenge the memory of his father who was murdered in the line of duty (crushed by a bosu ball in the steam room).

As you get to know the lay of the land you’ll pick up a few valuable titbits.

You’ll learn, for example, that the gym is a place where you can seemingly break wind with total impunity.

You’ll learn to avoid that one guy who wonders around with a Foreigner t-shirt, flip-flops and a permanent demiboner.

You’ll learn to avoid peak times where the gym floor resembles a flock of seagulls going mental over a dropped ice cream.

And you’ll also learn that in the gym there is a big difference between what people say and what they actually mean.

One wrong word and the situation will escalate quicker than a late-night confrontation with Joe Pesci in a petrol station.

“I didn’t call you a prick, Joe, I was just trying to grab a Ginsters pasty from the fridge.”

So, if you’re new to the gym and want to avoid committing any faux pas that will land you in hot water, here is a collection of common phrases and what they actually mean…

Gym lingo – translated

Are you using this?

You’re quite clearly not using this, I’m merely feigning politeness, so please get off your phone and move before I lodge this bottle of Lucozade Sport so far up your rectum you’ll be shitting electrolytes for the next six months.

Have you got many sets left?

I’ve been wanting to use this piece of equipment for the last 15 minutes and if I see you attempt one more set I’m going to burst a blood vessel in my ballbag.

Do you need this 20kg?

I’ve made the assumption just by looking at your pathetic bag-of-bones physique that you will have no use for these weights, so I’m just going to take them, deal with it you human skidmark.

Can I work in with you?

Even though the gym is empty, I am now going to annoy you by unracking your weights, making small talk about protein supplements and sweating everywhere when I could have just done something else for 10 minutes.

Can I get a spot?

You’re the only person who actually looks like they know what they’re doing in here so can you please assist me with this lift.

I’m maxing out

I’ve put far too much weight on this bar and will certainly not be hitting the prescribed reps, but I don’t want to admit this by removing any plates.

One… more… rep

I’ll shit a potato before I ever lift this weight so please get ready to step in.

It’s all you!

This is 50% me, you have no business lifting this weight, you’re wasting both of our time, and I have a good mind to drop this bar on your stupid face.

You’ve got this!

If it wasn’t for me supporting this weight you’d be going home in an ambulance with a spine that looks like a dropped burrito.

You’re looking massive!

What steroids have you been taking?

I don’t want to get too big

I no absolutely nothing about lifting weights or human physiology.

It really engages your core

I’ve learnt everything I know about weightlifting from a pullout in The Mail On Sunday entitled “Sizzling Summer Abs” and therefore believe crunches to be more effective at strengthening your core than heavy squats.

Squats are really bad for your knees

My PT qualification came free with a box of Kellog’s Crunchy Nut.

It’s really good for muscle toning

I couldn’t be much more of a cunt if I tried.

You need to confuse your muscles

I will believe anything I read – even if it’s been scrawled in human faeces on the wall of a public toilet by a blind toddler.

This machine will hep you get rid of belly fat

If someone told me that fisting your grandma burns body fat I would be the first to give it a go.

Squats/deadlift/pressing really kills my back/knee/shoulder

I can’t be bothered to work hard or spend time learning correct form so I’m just going to do some isolation exercises instead.

I leg press 400kg

I don’t want to squat or deadlift so I’m distracting myself from the real task at hand with an exercise that’s about as pointless as a clay sculpture of a dog’s colon.

I’m not lifting heavy at the moment

I have never lifted heavy in my entire life.

Lightweight baby!

Everybody look at me, look at me, I’ve watched some Ronnie Coleman YouTube videos, look at me!

I don’t go to the gym much anymore

I’ve been working out four times a week every week for the last year.

Hmm, interesting, I’ll give that a try

What kind of babbling bullshit is this?

Do you still train much?

Bloody hell you look small.

What are you lifting today?

I have nothing else to say to you but we’ve made eye contact now.

Signing off

Hopefully this decoded gym lingo will save some of you newbies from social embarrassment next time a fellow lifter strikes up a conversation with you.

Alternatively, you can just eschew all human interaction by donning a massive pair of headphones and scowling at everyone who makes eye contact with you – it works for a lot of people.

If you have any more translations of common gym phrases please get in touch via the comments section below, I’d love to hear from you!

The post Common Gym Phrases And What They Actually Mean appeared first on Gymtalk.

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Common Gym Phrases And What They Actually Mean

The gym can be an intimidating place.

Well, sort of.

Not as intimidating as being chained up in a Belgium sex bunker, being asked to call a coin toss by Anton Chigurh or having your CV marked up by Claude Littner.

Or being forced to sleep opposite a pickled jar containing the severed head of your murdered lover as a punishment for being unfaithful.

To be fair on Peter the Great, this was fairly mild as punishments from Russian Czars go – the equivalent, nowadays, of purposefully making your partner a rubbish cup of tea.

But, for newcomers especially, the gym can be a discomfiting environment.

As you wonder out of the changing rooms for the first time, you’ll feel like a new recruit in a buddy cop movie who’s been transferred to a department in a corrupt precinct.

You’ll get dirty looks from the tough guys free weights area (all ‘on the take’), an unhinged Mel Gibson type will accost you at the water fountain with unsolicited fitness tips and weapons-grade viagra, and there’ll be a by-the-books personal trainer trying to avenge the memory of his father who was murdered in the line of duty (crushed by a bosu ball in the steam room).

As you get to know the lay of the land you’ll pick up a few valuable titbits.

You’ll learn, for example, that the gym is a place where you can seemingly break wind with total impunity.

You’ll learn to avoid that one guy who wonders around with a Foreigner t-shirt, flip-flops and a permanent demiboner.

You’ll learn to avoid peak times where the gym floor resembles a flock of seagulls going mental over a dropped ice cream.

And you’ll also learn that in the gym there is a big difference between what people say and what they actually mean.

One wrong word and the situation will escalate quicker than a late-night confrontation with Joe Pesci in a petrol station.

“I didn’t call you a prick, Joe, I was just trying to grab a Ginsters pasty from the fridge.”

So, if you’re new to the gym and want to avoid committing any faux pas that will land you in hot water, here is a collection of common phrases and what they actually mean…

Gym lingo – translated

Are you using this?

You’re quite clearly not using this, I’m merely feigning politeness, so please get off your phone and move before I lodge this bottle of Lucozade Sport so far up your rectum you’ll be shitting electrolytes for the next six months.

Have you got many sets left?

I’ve been wanting to use this piece of equipment for the last 15 minutes and if I see you attempt one more set I’m going to burst a blood vessel in my ballbag.

Do you need this 20kg?

I’ve made the assumption just by looking at your pathetic bag-of-bones physique that you will have no use for these weights, so I’m just going to take them, deal with it you human skidmark.

Can I work in with you?

Even though the gym is empty, I am now going to annoy you by unracking your weights, making small talk about protein supplements and sweating everywhere when I could have just done something else for 10 minutes.

Can I get a spot?

You’re the only person who actually looks like they know what they’re doing in here so can you please assist me with this lift.

I’m maxing out

I’ve put far too much weight on this bar and will certainly not be hitting the prescribed reps, but I don’t want to admit this by removing any plates.

One… more… rep

I’ll shit a potato before I ever lift this weight so please get ready to step in.

It’s all you!

This is 50% me, you have no business lifting this weight, you’re wasting both of our time, and I have a good mind to drop this bar on your stupid face.

You’ve got this!

If it wasn’t for me supporting this weight you’d be going home in an ambulance with a spine that looks like a dropped burrito.

You’re looking massive!

What steroids have you been taking?

I don’t want to get too big

I no absolutely nothing about lifting weights or human physiology.

It really engages your core

I’ve learnt everything I know about weightlifting from a pullout in The Mail On Sunday entitled “Sizzling Summer Abs” and therefore believe crunches to be more effective at strengthening your core than heavy squats.

Squats are really bad for your knees

My PT qualification came free with a box of Kellog’s Crunchy Nut.

It’s really good for muscle toning

I couldn’t be much more of a cunt if I tried.

You need to confuse your muscles

I will believe anything I read – even if it’s been scrawled in human faeces on the wall of a public toilet by a blind toddler.

This machine will hep you get rid of belly fat

If someone told me that fisting your grandma burns body fat I would be the first to give it a go.

Squats/deadlift/pressing really kills my back/knee/shoulder

I can’t be bothered to work hard or spend time learning correct form so I’m just going to do some isolation exercises instead.

I leg press 400kg

I don’t want to squat or deadlift so I’m distracting myself from the real task at hand with an exercise that’s about as pointless as a clay sculpture of a dog’s colon.

I’m not lifting heavy at the moment

I have never lifted heavy in my entire life.

Lightweight baby!

Everybody look at me, look at me, I’ve watched some Ronnie Coleman YouTube videos, look at me!

I don’t go to the gym much anymore

I’ve been working out four times a week every week for the last year.

Hmm, interesting, I’ll give that a try

What kind of babbling bullshit is this?

Do you still train much?

Bloody hell you look small.

What are you lifting today?

I have nothing else to say to you but we’ve made eye contact now.

Signing off

Hopefully this decoded gym lingo will save some of you newbies from social embarrassment next time a fellow lifter strikes up a conversation with you.

Alternatively, you can just eschew all human interaction by donning a massive pair of headphones and scowling at everyone who makes eye contact with you – it works for a lot of people.

If you have any more translations of common gym phrases please get in touch via the comments section below, I’d love to hear from you!

The post Common Gym Phrases And What They Actually Mean appeared first on Gymtalk.

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