In just a few weeks the cast of Spartacus were able to tone and trim their bodies into sculpted gladiator physiques. How was this performed in just a short space of time, well for one you can watch the Spartacus training video and see what went on. Through a mixture of diet, cardio, bodyweight training, weights, sword fighting and martial arts/gymnastics, they were able to get down to a low body fat and toned muscular lean and mean look. This training program was called ‘Gladiator Bootcamp’. 4 hours of training each morning followed by protein shakes and NO FOOD.
Spartacus Training Workout Results
March 29, 2011 By 1 Comment
How To Build Muscle – Shoulder Training 101
March 1, 2011 By 2 Comments
When most people start training to build muscle and look better they focus on certain specific bodyparts like their arms and chest. After all, those are two very important “show” muscles on the beach. While it is completely fine to try to build those two areas, we have to remember that physique building is all about your look, at certain times it is an illusion. By illusion, I’m talking about looking bigger, tighter and harder than you actually are.
There’s only one area on the body that can make you look better and leaner and that is your shoulders. If more people focused on building shoulders, more people would be happy with their physique. After all, who likes dieting for weeks on end trying to get a smaller waist when a set of shoulders can make you tighter than anything?
First, we have to get into a quick anatomy discussion about the shoulder. The shoulder is made up of three distinct areas. The front, medial (side) and rear deltoids. Here’s a pop quiz for you. Which of the three shoulder muscles is most visual from the side? Most people would answer “side delt” since after all that is what we have focused on for so long.
Caveman Posture
Good or bad, our poor postural habits due to too much time at the computer and too much bench pressing have caused us to adopt this rounded shoulder, “cave man” like posture. Due to this, our rear delt is actually more visible from the side. This should now become a priority in our training
The most effective way to train the rear delts is with heavy; compound movements like deadlifts, chin-ups and dumbbell rows. While that s the best way to add size to the rear delts we will need to directly hit them as well. The problem with the advice of heavy compound movements all the time is that the muscles will fatigue since they are smaller than some other back muscles and as a result won’t get hit as hard.
The solution here is to use a pre-fatigue method where we would use a movement like a bent over dumbbell fly before we did a bent over row. The purpose behind this is to fully work the rear delts before we perform the heavy movement so we know that our rear delts are getting hit.
The important thing about the rear delts that I keep trying to emphasize is that they are the only muscles that give us the wide shoulder look from the side. Most people want to look wide when viewed from the sides and rear delt development is our fastest way to get there.
This simple trick is both effective and time saving since it is done in a superset fashion. Now the question turns to the absolute best exercise to build big shoulders. In reality, presses are good but only really stimulate one head of the shoulder, the front delt. Now pressing with various grips and forms such as neutral grip shoulder presses or side presses are both excellent methods to use to build big shoulders. At the end of the day, it comes to how many angles that you’ve used to hit your shoulders.
Work The Shoulders With This Routine
Here’s a routine to use ASAP
A1) Seated Neutral Grip Dumbbell Shoulder Press
4 sets of 10/8/8/6 reps
superset with
A2) Cable Side Raises
4 sets of 10-12 reps
Rest:45 seconds
B1)Seated Side Dumbbell Press
3 sets of 10-15 reps
superset with
B2) Seated Dumbbell Side Raises
3 sets of 10-15
superset with
B3) Standing Dumbbell Side Raises
3 sets of 15-20 reps
How To Build Muscle
February 20, 2011 By 2 Comments
Is the question that I am often asked about. While most people want the magic pill, what they really need are a few simple tweaks to their training programs that I am about to outline. Nothing comes easy right? Every reward you are given is a direct result of the effort you put in.
Things You Can Do Today
1) There are two things that people can do immediately to build muscle:
A) People can focus on both full body training and body part splits. We’ve knocked training “arms” for too long but the only thing that will make us grow is training a muscle with a big amount of volume. At that same time, we can also use an upper body day to get stronger. It is the best of both worlds
B) People can sleep more.It sounds simple but going to bed by 10:30 and not getting up before 6 am will go a long way in helping us build muscle.
2) Train your legs more. Leg training is so essential for growing muscle everywhere. By training your legs hard you raise the anabolic signals in your body that tell you to grow. Nothing stimulates more muscle heavy squats or deadlifts. They raise your natural muscle building hormones, which cause you to grow
3) Use the correct sets and reps. To build muscle we need to realize that, we have to perform enough volume so we breakdown muscle then build new muscle. So that being said I usually advise sets and reps like 4 sets of 8 reps or 6 sets of 4 reps. Remember, low reps can make us grow to
simple because our body adapts to whatever we do for awhile so we need to change it up.
Secret Tricks For Building Muscle
4) Use this secret trick. First, if everyone isn’t doing pull-ups or squats then they need to do it right now. My best piece of advice is to tell everyone to do a back off set per exercise. For example, if you are training on the bench press and doing 4 sets of 8 reps then do a 5th set of 20-25 reps. This will push more blood into the muscle which will force more growth.
Never Give Up
Building muscle is all about the quality of your workouts. Most people get caught up in the typical 3 sets of 10 reps dogma. While that will work for a certain period of time, it won’t work forever. In my opinion, the best way to design your training for growth is to use 4-6 week spurts of volume phases where you train with sets of 3-4 and reps of 8-15. For the next 4-6 weeks, you should go with more sets of 4-6 and lower reps of 5-8. Both of these methods
will lay you to have both muscle and strength gains.