Fit and 50

To check your testosterone levels from home, click this link http://trylgc.com/laurence and receive 30% off with code: LAURENCE30 I receive commissions on referrals to LetsGetChecked. I only recommend services I know and trust. Our hormones play a crucial role in sexual function, with testosterone getting most of the attention. Many men feel how much testosterone they have is a direct gauge of how high they rank on the manly meter. As we age, testosterone, on average, goes down by 1 percent a year. But this isn’t a fixed hard and fast number. There’s research in “the healthy man study” that found no decrease in Serum testosterone associated with age among men over 40 who were in very good or excellent health. Today we’re going to focus on functional hypogonadism which is when our testes produce very little testosterone, but it is still reversible. How do you know if your testosterone or other hormones are out of whack? The best way to find out is to get them tested with your doctor or a company like my sponsor, LetsGetChecked. With LetsGetChecked, you don’t need to take time off for a doctor's appointment. They discreetly deliver the test. You activate it and collect the blood sample in the morning. Then you send it off using the packaging and prepaid shipping label they provide. When I first got this done, I ordered the male hormone complete kit, which tests for testosterone, your free T or free androgen index, prolactin, estradiol, cortisol and SHBG, which has a big effect on your testosterone. Of all of these hormones, SHBG or sex hormone-binding globulin is the one I have to most trouble with as it binds to testosterone, making it almost useless. Last year when I was at my all-time leanest, my SHBG was at its all-time highest. Currently, I’m in a mass gain, and once I reach my target weight, I’ll test again. I expect to see my SHBG much lower with an increase in free T. There’s an optional body fat percentage Having too little or too much body fat negatively affects your hormones. I’ll leave a link in the top comment to LetsGetChecked so you can find out where your hormone levels are at and use the discount code Laurence30 for 30% off. Over 40% of people over 40 are obese. The way obesity causes ED is through generalized inflammation of the body, lowering testosterone and damage to the blood vessels. People with obesity are also 6 times more likely to suffer from diabetes, and depending on the source, around 50% of men with diabetes have erectile issues. There is good news, though, with plenty of research showing in many cases, we can reverse the harmful effects of obesity through lifestyle changes, including reversing ED and increasing testosterone. A literature review and perspective published in the journal of clinical endocrinology and metabolism on middle-aged and older men with functional hypogonadism observed that late-onset hypogonadism was uncommon in men who were lean or healthy and was relatively rare in men who were both. Lean and healthy men break the 1 percent decline per-year rule. So the question is, once you’re obese, does becoming leaner and healthier increase testosterone? The same literature review answers this, and I’ll be referring to it throughout the rest of this video. It mentioned the findings from the European male ageing study, where a weight loss of 5% was associated with an increase in total testosterone. A loss of 15 percent was associated with more marked increases in both total and free testosterone. Weight loss has also been shown to improve erectile function in relatively healthy, obese middle age men The connection between weight loss and testosterone is so strong that one should consider they may be suffering from organic hypogonadism if their testosterone does not increase with weight loss, and this needs to be treated with TRT. Low T is associated with inactivity in older men and conditions like sarcopenia, reduced bone mass and metabolic syndrome. When it comes to weight loss, exercise ensures what’s lost is body fat and not our valuable lean muscle tissue. The benefits of exercise not only in reducing symptoms of ED and increasing testosterone but to our whole body's health can not be underestimated. Obstructive sleep apnoea is associated with low testosterone, and a CPAP machine has been shown to improve erectile dysfunction and reduce fatigue. It doesn’t have a consistent effect on T levels. Nor did testosterone treatment enhance sexual function in men suffering from sleep apnoea. This is the simplest and most straightforward way to improve erectile function. In many cases, you only need it temporarily, as just being more sexually active can increase T levels by 30%. Combine this with weight loss and becoming more physically active, and you’ll be back on top https://academic.oup.com/jcem/article/102/3/1067/2919025 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22563890/ https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/06/120625124914.htm

When I’m talking about bodybuilding, I’m not talking about standing on a stage, drug-enhanced with a fake tan in a little g-string, having stripped away every ounce of body fat. This is not healthy and not what bodybuilding is supposed to be. What we need over 50 is to build our bodies, developing them in such a way to protect us from injury, illness and disease, things that we become more susceptible to as we age. Bodybuilding should be about creating a natural, strong, muscular and aesthetic physique through resistance training and good nutrition. The muscle balance that comes with this improves our posture and protects our joints, like our knees, where they work as shock absorbers. Making sure our joints stay in proper alignment with a symmetrical aesthetic that doesn’t allow one muscle to be over-developed, pulling us out of line against a weaker underdeveloped muscle. Protecting us from pain, especially in the most common areas like knees, hips and back. If you would like help losing excess body fat and building muscle, please email me at 1shark1bite@gmail.com for information on my personal training services. Check your testosterone levels from home. Just click this link http://trylgc.com/laurence and receive 30% off with code: LAURENCE30 I receive commissions on referrals to LetsGetChecked. I only recommend services I know and trust. The shorts I was wearing in this video were supplied by FortisFight. Here is the link to their website for all your gym apparel needs; https://www.fortisfight.com/product-category/men/ and use my affiliate discount code FITAND50 at checkout for 15% off your next purchase on all of their apparel. If you would like to purchase a set of Torrobands for yourself, here is my affiliate link so you can receive 50% off on your purchase https://sale.torroband.com/?affId=555B3E5D Osteoarthritis is a disease that affects the tissue in our joints, causing them to break down and is more common in older people. Knee Osteoarthritis is well studied, and they’ve found a relationship between muscle weakness and the symptoms of osteoarthritis, including pain. The more muscle strength you have, the less pain you’ll experience. We should look at this in two ways those of us who are over 50 and still relatively pain-free want to continue to train and build muscle to protect our joints and ourselves from future debilitating pain. For those who are already experiencing pain from arthritis and may feel any sort of strength training would be far too painful, they did an interesting study using people over 50. When we think of strength training, we might think we need to train heavy, like with 80 percent of our one rep max. Well, in this study, they had one group exercise with 60 percent of their one rep max for 3 sets of 8 reps which isn’t anywhere near failure. Then they had a second group work with only 10 percent of their one rep max, but they increased the volume to 10 sets of 15 repetitions 3 times a week. We need to make our workouts progressive, but we can start light and gradually work our way up as our joints and tendons allow us. What they found after 8 weeks is both groups had significant improvement in knee pain, physical function and muscle torque. Weight training, when done right, doesn’t just protect our joints, but it strengthens our bones, keeping them strong and protecting us from fractures. One thing bodybuilders are very good at is getting super lean into single-digit body fat levels. Much of this is done through nutrition, but another thing that helps is their increased resting metabolic rate. Now I’m not proposing we should be striving for single-digit fat levels. There is a healthy range, but as we get older and our metabolism starts to slow down. We can use weight training to reverse this and reignite our metabolism. They took 12 untrained men and put them on an 18-week resistance training program. They found while the weight training subject's overall body mass didn’t change, they gained 2.1 kg of fat-free mass and lost the equivalent in fat mass. This additional lean mass resulted in a significant increase in their average daily metabolic rate. So they burned more calories every day even though they were only training twice a week. Staying at a healthy body fat percentage helps to protect us from a host of Illnesses They took a group adults did progressive Resistance training program 3 times a week for 16 weeks annd increased lean mass, reduced Systolic blood pressure, and decreased trunk fat mass. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/234016035_The_Role_of_Resistance_Training_in_the_Prevention_and_Treatment_of_Chronic_Disease https://diabetesjournals.org/care/article/25/12/2335/22113/A-Randomized-Controlled-Trial-of-Resistance https://www.researchgate.net/publication/14181223_Effect_of_an_18-wk_weight-training_program_on_energy_expenditure_and_physical_activity https://academic.oup.com/ptj/article/88/4/427/2742305

Today we’re going to look at 6 old-school bicep exercises that are effective muscle-builders. Including a variation that Arnold Schwarzenegger did to help develop those famous peaks. First, we’ll look at incline curls and compare them to drag curls as both work the biceps in the stretched position. Both Arnold and Steve Reeves were fans of the incline curl, but it's not Arnold’s forgotten exercise that comes later in the video. Steve worked off a homemade wooden structure to achieve the correct working angle. In his second book, “dynamic muscle building,” he said 45 degrees is the best angle. If you are interested in losing body fat and adding muscle, please email me at 1shark1bite@gmail.com for information on my personal training services. Here is the link to FortisFight https://www.fortisfight.com/product-category/men/ and use my affiliate discount code FITAND50 at checkout for 15% off you next purchase on all of their apparel. If you would like a set of Torrobands for yourself, here is my affiliate link so you can receive 50% off on your purchase https://sale.torroband.com/?affId=555B3E5D Check your testosterone levels from home. Just click this link http://trylgc.com/laurence and receive 30% off with code: LAURENCE30 I receive commissions on referrals to LetsGetChecked. I only recommend services I know and trust. Bells of Steel. Home gym equipment supplier https://www.bellsofsteel.com/#a_aid=FITAND50 My Affiliate link to Lebert for their Equalizer bars and more; https://lebertfitness.com/?ref=FitAnd50 and use the discount code FITAND50 you will receive 20% off your purchase Facebook; https://www.facebook.com/Fit-and-50-5... My Amazon page link; https://www.amazon.com/shop/fitand50 This position creates a stretch on not only the long head of the biceps, which is responsible for the peak, but also the tendon that attaches it to the shoulder. And this is where we need to be careful to not overstretch this tendon, as it could cause an injury. I do this exercise at 45 degrees, but if you’re new to it, you might want to set the bench a little higher, say at 60 degrees, especially if you’ve had shoulder issues. This is where the drag curl has an advantage, you’re in that fully stretched position at the top, but you don’t have a continual stretch on that tendon through the whole set. There’s more and more evidence coming out that stretched position exercises build more muscle. So it makes sense to add these to your program. If your shoulders are healthy, I would make incline curls my main stretched position exercise, either at 60 or 45 degrees and occasionally rotate drag curls in for variety to give that tendon a break. I’m not sure what exercise I should compare this next one to. It’s one I’m currently doing in my training, and it’s a tough one. It was invented by an 1800s strongman named George Zottman. This curl works the brachioradialis in the negative part of the movement, and by the last few reps, it’s all I can do to control the weight on the way down. You curl the weight up like a traditional curl. Then once you reach the top, you pronate your hands, engaging the brachioradialis and reducing the amount of work your biceps are doing. The advantage of this exercise over, say, reverse grip curls is you can use heavier weight, and it really overloads the forearms on the negative. Anyone who’s watched pumping iron will have seen this exercise. There’s only a brief clip of Arnold doing it in the movie, and that’s the standing concentration curl. I like this movement better than the seated version, but both have pros and cons. In theory, one of the great things about the seated concentration curl is it’s hard to cheat the move. This isn’t really true, and I’ll showcase another old-school exercise that’s much harder to cheat in a bit. When we have our elbow pushed into our thigh, it helps to keep from swinging our arm, but it also creates a lever making the exercise easier, and you can cheat it with a slight rocking motion of the upper body. In the standing variation, you have your hips back like when doing a bent-over row. You can still cheat the move with your legs, so we should be aware of this and resist the temptation. Arnold does something interesting on his last repetitions with this forgotten variation. Once he goes to failure, he pauses, sets the weight down for a second to recover, which allows him to get in a couple more reps. Next up is lying cable curls, another exercise Steve Reeves liked to do, and we’ll compare it to spider curls. Both of these exercises have your arms in front and allow you to contract the biceps fully, making it a perfect complement to incline curls which work the muscle in the fully stretched position. If you only have dumbbells to work with, spider curls make an excellent option even over preacher curls which puts your arm at an extreme leverage disadvantage in the fully extended position and increases the risk of injury.

Today we’re going to talk about seven things you should never do during a workout. These go beyond basic gym etiquette and can negatively affect your muscle-building ability. The first one starts before your workout. You should never go to the gym without a plan or a goal. Before you begin, you know what exercises you will do, how many sets and how long your rest times are. Then during your workout, you build on this by having a goal for each and every set you do. Before starting each set, you need to know how much weight you lifted last time and how many repetitions. We use this information to set the load and target reps for your current set. If you are interested in losing body fat and adding muscle, please email me at 1shark1bite@gmail.com for information on my personal training services. Here is the link to FortisFight https://www.fortisfight.com/product-category/men/ and use my affiliate discount code FITAND50 at checkout for 15% off you next purchase on all of their apparel. If you would like a set of Torrobands for yourself, here is my affiliate link so you can receive 50% off on your purchase https://sale.torroband.com/?affId=555B3E5D Check your testosterone levels from home. Just click this link http://trylgc.com/laurence and receive 30% off with code: LAURENCE30 I receive commissions on referrals to LetsGetChecked. I only recommend services I know and trust. My Affiliate link to Lebert for their Equalizer bars and more; https://lebertfitness.com/?ref=FitAnd50 and use the discount code FITAND50 you will receive 20% off your purchase Facebook; https://www.facebook.com/Fit-and-50-5... My Amazon page link; https://www.amazon.com/shop/fitand50 While doing your set, you’re focusing on doing a full range of motion on each repetition, with proper breathing technique, breathing in as you lower the weight and exhaling as you lift it. We don’t want to hold our breath or be out of sink with our lifting cadence. I should point out that sometimes we hold our breath for just a moment as we begin to lift the weight and breath out as we reach the top. This is okay as long as we’re breathing rhythmically. There’s also something called the Valsalva maneuver that powerlifters use when lifting extremely heavy weights to help stabilize the spine. Which involves holding your breath and is an exception to the rule, not something the general public will be doing. After you’ve done your set and during your rest time, you don’t scroll through Instagram, check out the hot girls in the gym, or take selfies. You log the weight, and the number of reps you did, review how the set felt and your energy levels. You use this data, along with the information from your last workout, to set the goal for your next set. I time my rest between sets to ensure I complete my workouts in a prompt manner. It’s okay to track your workouts on your phone and use it as a timer. It can also track data like heart rate. Another good use for your phone is to play music that motivates you. This pumps you up for your workout, and with your headphones on, it blocks out distractions in the gym. You should avoid scrolling through your phone looking for your favourite song. Your playlist should be put together ahead of time so you can put it on and forget about it. If, for some reason, you have to take a phone call at the gym, leave your piece of equipment so someone else can use it and go outside or into the change room to take the call. If you don’t want to lose your spot in the gym to take the call, then it isn’t that important. Let it go to the message and check it later. Another thing you should never do is work out with more than 3 people at a time. Have you ever seen a group of 5 guys working out on the same piece of equipment? Invariably it ends up with half of them goofing around while one is doing their set. Nobody is paying attention to his form, and it’s distracting his focus as well as those around them. A training partner has a job to do, and that‘s to keep an eye on his friend's form and give him a spot or encouragement when needed. Lifting too heavy and using poor form should go without saying but you see it a lot. The last time I was in a public gym, there was a large number of people who were only doing a part range of motion because the weight was too heavy. There are different kinds of pain and what I’m talking about isn’t the pain of the pump, which that full tight feeling we get in a muscle that’s sometimes accompanied by a burning sensation from lactic acid buildup. Bad pain that we shouldn’t train through and stop doing an exercise immediately is a sharp pointed pain in one area like a joint. If we hear a pop followed by a sudden pain, this could be a torn ligament, tendon or dislocation. Even a mild persistent pain that continues over multiple sets is a sign you should stop doing that exercise and work on another body part away from the affected area.

Before the days of the internet and even steroids, training secrets were passed from one lifter to the next. Nowadays, we often look to modern research for guidance and lifting advice. And while we shouldn’t discount this research. We also shouldn’t forget our lifting heritage and the knowledge of those who came before us. People like Steve Reeves, Bill Pearl and Rick Drasin have done a great job of passing on their knowledge and sharing the history of lifting and bodybuilding. Today we’re focusing on the triceps, which make up about 2/3rds of our upper arm. So if we want arms like Bill Pearl, we gotta train’em If you are interested in losing body fat and adding muscle, please email me at 1shark1bite@gmail.com for information on my personal training services. Here is the link to FortisFight https://www.fortisfight.com/product-category/men/ and use my affiliate discount code FITAND50 at checkout for 15% off you next purchase on all of their apparel. If you would like a set of Torrobands for yourself, here is my affiliate link so you can receive 50% off on your purchase https://sale.torroband.com/?affId=555B3E5D Check your testosterone levels from home. Just click this link http://trylgc.com/laurence and receive 30% off with code: LAURENCE30 I receive commissions on referrals to LetsGetChecked. I only recommend services I know and trust. My Affiliate link to Lebert for their Equalizer bars and more; https://lebertfitness.com/?ref=FitAnd50 and use the discount code FITAND50 you will receive 20% off your purchase Facebook; https://www.facebook.com/Fit-and-50-5... My Amazon page link; https://www.amazon.com/shop/fitand50 This first exercise is one I’m not fond of, but Bill Pearl did them, and it was common among old-school lifters, and that’s Bench dips. In the picture I have of Bill doing them, his feet are elevated quite high. This increases the resistance on the triceps compared to having them on the floor. The reason I don’t like this exercise is it bugs my shoulders even with my hands turned outward which reduces the internal rotation of the shoulder. One thing about the old-school guys is if it built muscle, they didn’t care how uncomfortable it was. Steve Reeves had a better exercise to hit the triceps in its fully contracted position, and how he did this is unique to how we do it today. He’d rest his head on a high bench to do dumbbell triceps kickbacks. This increases the range of motion. I’m demonstrating this on my bench with it set at a 15-degree incline to stimulate a higher bench. The way I do these in my program is I set the bench at 30 degrees and rest my chest on it. This way, I still get a greater range of motion than kneeling on a flat bench without the potential neck strain of Steve’s method. The reason we train our triceps this way is because the long head attaches to the scapula, and one of its jobs is to bring our arm behind our body. There’s a side benefit to this exercise as the rear delts get a good workout, too, helping to hold your arm in place during the movement. Those with access to resistance bands or cables can get a similar result by extending their arm fully behind them when doing tricep extensions. Another exercise Steve liked to do, was a crossbody triceps extension. I find this move to be the absolute best for isolating the triceps. You do this by lying on a bench holding a dumbbell in one hand straight up in the air, then lower it down to the opposite shoulder, with your free hand against your bicep, ensuring there’s no movement in the upper arm. With skull crushers, we often cheat the move when we get tired by dropping our upper arm out of the vertical position allowing us to use shoulders and chest to push the weights up, taking the load off the triceps. Bill Pearl did the following combination of exercises for the triceps. I found it in an article written by Rick Drasin, again illustrating how lifting knowledge got passed down from one lifter to the next. This combination of exercises works much like a drop set and is a fantastic tricep finisher giving you a massive pump and fully burning out your triceps. You start with 8 reps of French presses while lying on a bench. This is where you lower the weight behind your head. I’m using dumbbells here, but Bill would have used a barbell. Then, without rest, you go to skull crushers and do 8 more repetitions. I switch to a neutral grip and let the dumbbells drop down by my ears. After this, the final 8 repetitions are done like a close grip bench press. If you’re doing this on your last set, there is no reason to stop at 8 just keep going until you hit failure. We can find some surprising gems in the training of these old-school masters. But how do they measure up to modern-day science? Watch this video next to learn how effective Steve Reeve's workout was based on science, and keep working out while having fun.

If you’re lifting heavy at some point, you’ll have a joint that starts getting cranky and sore. This is a warning we should listen to. We may need to take a break from working the muscles that affect the joint. But often, with a few simple adjustments, we can work around the troublesome area, let it heal and keep making gains. One of the great things about dumbbells is they allow us more flexibility in where we choose to position our arms and hands. These slight changes can put us into a pain-free movement pattern. Today we’re going to look at exercises and ways to modify them to allow us to train our whole body without joint discomfort. If you are interested in losing body fat and adding muscle, please email me at 1shark1bite@gmail.com for information on my personal training services. Bells of Steel. Home gym equipment supplier https://www.bellsofsteel.com/#a_aid=FITAND50 Here is the link to FortisFight https://www.fortisfight.com/product-category/men/ and use my affiliate discount code FITAND50 at checkout for 15% off you next purchase on all of their apparel. If you would like a set of Torrobands for yourself, here is my affiliate link so you can receive 50% off on your purchase https://sale.torroband.com/?affId=555B3E5D Check your testosterone levels from home. Just click this link http://trylgc.com/laurence and receive 30% off with code: LAURENCE30 I receive commissions on referrals to LetsGetChecked. I only recommend services I know and trust. My Affiliate link to Lebert for their Equalizer bars and more; https://lebertfitness.com/?ref=FitAnd50 and use the discount code FITAND50 you will receive 20% off your purchase Facebook; https://www.facebook.com/Fit-and-50-5... My Amazon page link; https://www.amazon.com/shop/fitand50 The bench press is a basic compound movement everyone loves to do, but shoulder issues can arise. One of the places we could feel pain is in the stretched position at the bottom of the movement as your elbow drops below the bench. With a floor press, the ground becomes a stopper keeping your elbows from going too low. The next adjustment we can make is the angle of our upper arm in Relation to our torso. Changing this angle from 90 to 45 degrees reduces the risk of shoulder injury and discomfort. One of the disadvantages of the floor press is getting the weight in place, as you can lift heavy with this exercise. If you don’t have someone to hand you the dumbbells, you can do this exercise unilaterally. You don’t need to press from the floor in every case, simply adjusting the angle of your upper arm on a regular bench may be all you need to do to find a pain-free spot. Another simple adjustment is to slightly increase the angle of the bench to about 15 degrees. On most benches it’s the first adjustment above flat. This has helps by reducing the internal rotation of the shoulder. While we’re talking about pressing, a great exercise to work our triceps pain-free is the dumbbell squeeze press. It’s also easier on the joints, so if you can’t find a good pressing movement for the chest, give the dumbbell squeeze press a try, and you can do it in both flat and incline positions. When you’re low back is bugging you and bent over rows are out of the question. Chest-supported incline rows are a great option. You set the bench at about 30 degrees. One of the best squat variations to protect our low back and take some stress off our knees is the dumbbell bench squat. I do this by holding the dumbbells in the suitcase position, which makes it easier to maintain a neutral spine, as when the weight’s up high, there can be a tendency to be pulled forward as you lower down. By consciously sitting back farther as you squat, you cause the shin to stay vertical, making it a more hip-dominant move. Doing this creates less stress on the knees, and it’s an effective modification for those with knee issues. Hip thrusts are a great way to strengthen these muscles without stressing our knees and hips. Hammer curls are the most elbow friendly, and if you’re troubled with elbow pain, varying your hand positioning can help—even turning them into a slightly pronated position, not a full-on reverse grip curl just enough to change the positioning of the tendons and bones in the forearm. If we want to develop that superman width in our shoulders, we need to build the middle head of the delts. When it comes to compound exercises that work this head, we think of shoulder presses and upright rows. Both of these exercises are ones that often bother our shoulder joint. It’s been found in a study done by the American council on exercise to target the middle delt even better than lateral raises. While also working the rear delt almost effectively as the seated rear delt raises, this is the 45% elbow out row. https://www.acefitness.org/continuing-education/prosource/september-2014/4972/dynamite-delts-ace-research-identifies-top-shoulder-exercises/

The inspiration for today's video is a study I read that compared increasing load without changing the number of repetitions to keeping the weight the same and just increasing reps as a person gets stronger. The goal was to see which method builds the most muscle, adding weight or increasing repetitions. We’ll come back to the study at the end of the video but let me know in the comments which one you think builds the most muscle. This got me thinking of all the different ways we could increase the training stimulus on a muscle to keep it growing without increasing load, and I came up with a total of 12 different ways. If you are interested in losing body fat and adding muscle, please email me at 1shark1bite@gmail.com for information on my personal training services. Here is the link to FortisFight https://www.fortisfight.com/product-category/men/ and use my affiliate discount code FITAND50 at checkout for 15% off you next purchase on all of their apparel. If you would like a set of Torrobands for yourself, here is my affiliate link so you can receive 50% off on your purchase https://sale.torroband.com/?affId=555B3E5D Check your testosterone levels from home. Just click this link http://trylgc.com/laurence and receive 30% off with code: LAURENCE30 I receive commissions on referrals to LetsGetChecked. I only recommend services I know and trust. My Affiliate link to Lebert for their Equalizer bars and more; https://lebertfitness.com/?ref=FitAnd50 and use the discount code FITAND50 you will receive 20% off your purchase Facebook; https://www.facebook.com/Fit-and-50-5... My Amazon page link; https://www.amazon.com/shop/fitand50 But why would we want to progress our workouts without lifting heavier weights? I can think of 3 main reasons. The first one, which seems to affect us more as we get older, is it allows our joints and tendons more time to strengthen and get used to a weight. Next, if you’re a guy like me and mainly train with dumbbells, as you get stronger and start moving weights heavier than your body, it becomes difficult to get into certain exercises like the bench press safely. Finally, you simply may not have that much weight to work with. The two most common ways to progress without adding weight are to increase the number of repetitions you’re doing or the number of sets. These methods are commonly used in double or triple-progression programs. In double progression, you have a specific rep range, say 8 to 12 repetitions. You start with weight doing 8 reps and slowly working your way up until you can do 12 on all sets, then you increase the weight and start working from 8 up to 12 again. Now, if you don’t want to increase the weight, then you could increase the rep range to 15 before increasing weight or even going to 20. Studies have shown you can build muscle in ranges as high as 30 to 35 reps, but from a practical standpoint, I cap mine off at 20. Alternatively, if you don’t want to do more repetitions, you could slow down the pace instead of doing a 1-second concentric and a 2-second eccentric, cut the speed in half and do a 2-second concentric and a 4-second eccentric. That’s the third method for those who are keeping track. Going back to increasing the number of sets, this works, but you can’t continually add more sets, or your workouts get too long. There are 3 ways we can offset this. First, we can reduce our rest times between sets or eliminate them, as in the case of drop sets. Eventually, we may have to look at increasing training frequency by adding another training day to keep our individual workouts down to a reasonable length. There’s one more way we can manipulate rest to increase our training intensity, and that’s a rest pause. This is where you rest at the end of a set for 10 seconds or less so you recover enough to force another rep or two before failure. Some programs will go with longer rest pauses of 15 to 30 seconds. Another intensity method I like to use is part repetitions. I do this quite often on my last set of pull-ups. I’ll keep going even after I can no longer get my chin over the bar, with each rep having a shorter range of motion until I can’t even move. Pre exhausting a muscle is when we do an isolation exercise before a compound moment to tire out a muscle allowing us to effectively work it with less weight. For the bench press, we do chest flyes first to pre-exhaust our pecs. Another way we can exhaust a muscle is with static holds. I was talking to a guy in the comments of a recent video, and he likes to pause and hold at the bottom of a squat. This is how I like to do my static holds as part of a repetition. The following two things I should’ve mentioned first as they’re the things you need to look at before adding another repetition or even more weight, and that’s perfecting our form and improving range of motion. https://peerj.com/articles/14142/

One of the first things we need to recognize when it comes to squatting for muscle growth is that our bone structure, mobility and strength all affect how low we can squat and how are squat should be set up. For example, people with long femurs and short torsos aren’t going to be able to squat as deep because they have to lean farther forward to maintain the bar path over their feet, increasing the risk of their low back rounding. Our hips and, in particular, the angle and depth of the socket affect our squat. Typically our hip socket angle is about 15 degrees. If it’s less than this, then as we squat and reach the bottom position, the neck of the femur can hit the edge of the socket, stopping us from going any lower. If you are interested in losing body fat and adding muscle, please email me at 1shark1bite@gmail.com for information on my personal training services. Here is the link to FortisFight https://www.fortisfight.com/product-category/men/ and use my affiliate discount code FITAND50 at checkout for 15% off you next purchase on all of their apparel. If you would like a set of Torrobands for yourself, here is my affiliate link so you can receive 50% off on your purchase https://sale.torroband.com/?affId=555B3E5D Check your testosterone levels from home. Just click this link http://trylgc.com/laurence and receive 30% off with code: LAURENCE30 I receive commissions on referrals to LetsGetChecked. I only recommend services I know and trust. My Affiliate link to Lebert for their Equalizer bars and more; https://lebertfitness.com/?ref=FitAnd50 and use the discount code FITAND50 you will receive 20% off your purchase Facebook; https://www.facebook.com/Fit-and-50-5... My Amazon page link; https://www.amazon.com/shop/fitand50 With hip socket depth, the deeper the socket, the more stable the joint, but the more apt we are to hit bone-on-bone in the bottom position. The more shallow the socket, the deeper we can squat, but the trade-off is less stability. Finally, the shape of our femur affects depth. The more vertical the top of the bone is where it attaches to the socket, the more difficult it will be to achieve a deep squat. So no matter what the science says, we first and foremost need to recognize the limitations of our body and make adjustments to compensate. A study done in 2019 did find muscle growth in the gluteus Maximus, and the adductor muscles were significantly greater in the full squat than in what they called a half squat, but they were doing a parallel squat. When it comes to building muscle, we always train with a full range of motion. We don’t do half repetitions when we bench press or arm curl. Unless, of course, we’re ego-lifting. But that’s about trying to impress in the gym and has nothing to do with muscle growth. A study published in the journal of strength and conditioning that included squats agrees with this. Finding “where increased muscle strength and size are the objectives, we demonstrate here that range of motion should not be compromised for greater external loading. There are things we can do to increase the range of motion on our squats. The most common one is elevating our heels. This helps if we have mobility issues in our ankles, which tight calves can cause. When you buy shoes made for squatting, they come with a raised heel, so you don’t need to use plates. When I first started to deep squat, I needed to stack up 3 plates to get right ass to grass without rounding my low back, but now that I have been squatting deep for a while, I only need a single plate as my ankle mobility has improved from doing deep squats. For us home workout guys, another advantage is deep squats bring us to technical failure with less weight. I use goblet squats so I can do a full range of motion. Having the resistance in front allows for a more upright body position and can help those guys with long femurs get a deeper squat. A front squat is going to allow you to go deeper than a back squat, and in turn, a high bar squat will be easier to squat deep with than a low bar squat as the low bar squat has you leaning farther forward in order to keep the bar path over the middle of the foot. Going with a wider stance allows us to squat deeper for a couple of reasons. It reduces the amount of our leg or femur that travels behind the bar path enabling us to remain in a more upright position resulting in a deeper squat. Squatting with a wide stance opens up the hips changing the orientation of the neck of the femur in relation to the hip socket. This, too, allows for a deeper squat. When it comes to our knees, and I have one that gets cranky from time to time. If they are causing you pain, then it’s best to avoid any range of motion where you feel discomfort. You’re better off doing a part squat pain-free. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31230110/ https://journals.lww.com/nsca-jscr/Fulltext/2014/01000/Impact_of_Range_of_Motion_During_Ecologically.32.aspx

In 2020 I made a muscle growth priority pyramid, and today we’re going to tear it apart. Reorganize it and add some things in. The idea behind this isn’t so we can have a pretty chart we can post on social media. It’s to get us thinking about our training, where the weak links are and what we can do to fix them. We’re going to start at the bottom and work our way up. I’ve often said consistency is the foundation of muscle growth. If we’re not training consistently, then we aren’t going to build muscle. That said, we can consistently train once a month, maybe even 2 or 3 times a month, but that’s not enough. We need a greater frequency than this. This is why I’m moving frequency to the bottom of the pyramid. I’m going to replace its old spot with something else. If you are interested in losing body fat and adding muscle, please email me at 1shark1bite@gmail.com for information on my personal training services. Here is the link to FortisFight https://www.fortisfight.com/product-category/men/ and use my affiliate discount code FITAND50 at checkout for 15% off you next purchase on all of their apparel. If you would like a set of Torrobands for yourself, here is my affiliate link so you can receive 50% off on your purchase https://sale.torroband.com/?affId=555B3E5D Check your testosterone levels from home. Just click this link http://trylgc.com/laurence and receive 30% off with code: LAURENCE30 I receive commissions on referrals to LetsGetChecked. I only recommend services I know and trust. My Affiliate link to Lebert for their Equalizer bars and more; https://lebertfitness.com/?ref=FitAnd50 and use the discount code FITAND50 you will receive 20% off your purchase Facebook; https://www.facebook.com/Fit-and-50-5... My Amazon page link; https://www.amazon.com/shop/fitand50 You need to train a muscle group at least once a week, and twice is even better. The more frequently we train, the more it increases our weekly training volume. So it’s time to move to the next level. I’m keeping volume and intensity here as they are like the siamese twins of muscle growth. When building muscle, volume without intensity is a waste of time. And intensity needs some degree of volume for growth. You can’t just do your one rep max on the squat, bench and deadlift every day and think you’re going to build muscle. Training intensity is often defined as a percentage of your one rep maximum. I prefer to look at intensity as how close you train to failure: another way to word this reps in reserve. For example, if you’re training with a weight that brings you to failure at 12 repetitions, but on each set, you only do 5 reps leaving 7 in reserve. This isn’t enough intensity to build muscle. The general rule of thumb is you need to be within at least 3 or 4 repetitions from failure to build muscle. Volume is often defined as sets x reps x weight or load. The problem with this is the same as with intensity. It doesn’t recognize how close to failure these sets are. Most studies look at volume as the number of sets done close to failure. So how many working sets per body part per week should we be doing for maximum muscle growth? The truth is the more volume we can do and fully recover from is what will build the most muscle. This is why I’m adding recovery to this layer of the pyramid. It’s the limiting factor to how much volume and intensity we can train within a given week. The most significant factors affecting recovery are sleep, nutrition, stress and training experience. Nutrition is important enough that it should have its own spot on the pyramid. But I wouldn’t put it before progression because no matter how perfect your diet is, if you aren’t training, then you won’t build any muscle. Nutrition alone doesn't build muscle. To continue to grow, we need to make our training progressive. There are 3 main ways we do this. The most basic is called linear progression. This is when we simply add weight to the bar over time. The most common one is called double progression, where you gradually increase the number of repetitions you’re doing within a range, say 8 to 12. Once you can do 12 repetitions, you increase the weight and start back at 8 reps, and as you get stronger, you slowly work your way back up to 12. The final way is triple progression, where you not only increase the weight and repetitions but also the number of sets you do. The basic movements need to train our whole body are a squat, a pressing move, a row, and a deadlift. I’d add a vertical pull which would include pull-ups or lat pull downs, and do both a horizontal press like the bench press and a vertical press like a shoulder press. A example of this is the chest also brings our arm a cross our body so it makes sense to include chest flyes into our programming. This is where I’m adding in nutrition. It could be argued that nutrition is important enough that it should get its own pyramid and be set right next to this one.

The character Christian Bale plays in American psycho is one messed up guy and not a very good lover. He only thinks of himself, and in the bedroom, your focus should be on pleasing your partner. But outside the bedroom and in life, you need to think of yourself and your health and fitness to have the most amazing sex possible. Because great sex is truly an athletic endeavour, sometimes you gotta sweat. That’s why we’re going to look at the best cardio exercises we can do to improve our sex life. Studies have shown cardio to be effective in keeping our bone in the zone, and it can improve our endurance for a longer-lasting, more satisfying, treat between the sheets. So far in this series, we’ve mainly talked about exercises which strengthen the pelvic floor and improve blood flow to the region. Good blood flow starts with the heart, and any activity that enhances the function of the heart is going to improve your performance in the bedroom. If you are interested in losing body fat and adding muscle, please email me at 1shark1bite@gmail.com for information on my personal training services. Here is the link to FortisFight https://www.fortisfight.com/product-category/men/ and use my affiliate discount code FITAND50 at checkout for 15% off you next purchase on all of their apparel. If you would like a set of Torrobands for yourself, here is my affiliate link so you can receive 50% off on your purchase https://sale.torroband.com/?affId=555B3E5D Check your testosterone levels from home. Just click this link http://trylgc.com/laurence and receive 30% off with code: LAURENCE30 I receive commissions on referrals to LetsGetChecked. I only recommend services I know and trust. My Affiliate link to Lebert for their Equalizer bars and more; https://lebertfitness.com/?ref=FitAnd50 and use the discount code FITAND50 you will receive 20% off your purchase Facebook; https://www.facebook.com/Fit-and-50-5... My Amazon page link; https://www.amazon.com/shop/fitand50 We’re going to look at 4 different types of cardio and see how they stack up when it comes to improving heart health and curing ED. Based on a meta-analysis done in 2018, in which all of the test subjects did some form of cardio, including 3 of the ones we’ll be looking at. With the result being they all experienced improved erectile function. I’ve mentioned this paper before because it gives a goal to work towards. It recommends moderate to vigorous intensity exercise 4 times a week for 40 minutes totalling 160 mins every week. You might think that’s a lot, and depending on the shape you’re in, it might be. We need to slowly and gradually build up our endurance, which brings me to the first form of cardio and one I like to do, running and its less intense form, walking. Something most of us can do, and it’s a straightforward way to start. Like most forms of cardio, it lowers your resting heart rate, improves oxygen intake and delivers a large amount of blood to the body with every beat. What about these people you hear having heart attacks while out jogging? First, I’d like to emphasize if you haven’t exercised in a long time or are new to exercise, you should consult your doctor before starting any exercise program. This is one of those cases where we need to look at the big picture. Unfortunately, there is no guarantee against having a heart attack. What we should look at is, are the odds greater or lesser of having a heart attack if we’re a runner? They did a study of 538 members of a running club that were 50 years or older and compared them to a group of non-runners over 21 years, and at the 19-year mark when the participants were now 69 years or older, 15% of the runners had died compared to 34% of the non-runners. Cycling has one big area of concern when it comes to sexual performance. I enjoy cycling. It’s something I do more for fun than for a workout. The concern is with the seat, and how it puts pressure on the perineum, that’s the area between your butt hole and your main member. This area is filled with arteries and nerves that supply blood and sensation to the penis to get us up and ready for action. The issue usually happens when you ride a lot and for a long time. I’ve never experienced it and I have a seat with a lowered or hollowed-out area to make room for the perineum, but from talking to others, that isn’t always enough. You can get wider bike seats that don’t have a nose on them and support your entire bottom much like a chair, taking the pressure off the perineum. If you're going to the gym to train, you might want to use a recumbent bike again because it has a full support seat. Now, if you want a full-body cardiovascular workout like swimming and you don’t want to drown, maybe try something on top of the water, like rowing. Most of the time, we’re using a rowing machine. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22244035/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3175643/

Choosing the right number of sets per muscle group to achieve maximum muscle growth is a very individual thing. What’s right for you may not be best for me, and it changes over time. To illustrate, Steve Reeves, an iconic pre-golden era bodybuilder, is well known for doing 9 sets per body part 3 times a week, totalling 27 sets a week! But he didn’t start there, nor does he recommend it for beginners. In a beginner workout, he suggests only 2 sets per body part each training session totalling 6 sets a week. He had a progression when it came to sets. So how do we go from 2 sets to 27? And does current research even support 27 sets per body part? More importantly, how do we apply this to ourselves, so we’re training with the optimum amount of sets? In this video, we’re going to answer all these questions. Including a little-known study that establishes how many sets we should add based on our training history to achieve maximum new muscle growth. If you are interested in losing body fat and adding muscle, please email me at 1shark1bite@gmail.com for information on my personal training services. Here is the link to FortisFight https://www.fortisfight.com/product-category/men/ and use my affiliate discount code FITAND50 at checkout for 15% off you next purchase on all of their apparel. If you would like a set of Torrobands for yourself, here is my affiliate link so you can receive 50% off on your purchase https://sale.torroband.com/?affId=555B3E5D Check your testosterone levels from home. Just click this link http://trylgc.com/laurence and receive 30% off with code: LAURENCE30 I receive commissions on referrals to LetsGetChecked. I only recommend services I know and trust. My Affiliate link to Lebert for their Equalizer bars and more; https://lebertfitness.com/?ref=FitAnd50 and use the discount code FITAND50 you will receive 20% off your purchase Facebook; https://www.facebook.com/Fit-and-50-5... My Amazon page link; https://www.amazon.com/shop/fitand50 For an overview, let's look at a systematic review on training volume published this year in February. It looked at 7 studies where the participants had at least one year of training experience. They were broken into one of three groups, under 12 weekly sets, 12 to 20, and over 20. These were hard sets with the test subjects training to failure in all the studies except for one where they trained within 2 repetitions from failure. The cool thing about this review is it’s the first time there’s been enough information to look at set ranges over 12. A previous meta-analysis released in 2016 looked at 3 lower set groups, with one being under 5 sets a week, another 5 to 9 and finally 10 or more sets. This was a more inclusive analysis as it had studies with both new and experienced lifters. It found a dose-response to the number of sets done. Meaning the more sets you do per week, the more muscle growth you’ll experience, at least up to 10 sets. The new research found an upper limit where we can no longer build muscle faster by adding more sets. Stating the limit was between 12 to 20 sets. Kind of a big range, but this is where individualizing the number of sets comes in. Most of us have full-time jobs, and our training is done on top of this, leaving us with much less time for recovery. The bottom line is the maximum amount of volume you can do and fully recover from is what will give you the most muscle growth. If we’re not completely recovering from our current level of training, it makes no sense to increase our training volume by adding another set. We may need to look at other factors, such as sleep and nutrition. Now, if we feel fresh and ready for our next workout, then we need to look at the intensity of our training. Are we training close to failure on all are working sets? If not, we should increase the intensity first. To determine how much volume to add, we’ll look at individualizing how many sets a person is currently doing. They did this by having the participants train one leg with 22 sets a week and the other with 20% more training volume than they previously had been doing. They did leg presses and extensions. Half the test subjects were doing between 30 to 120% more volume on the 22-set leg, and yet they had greater muscle growth on the leg than that was only training with 20% more work, indicating that a rapid increase in training volume doesn’t bring about a rapid increase in muscle growth. The number of sets we should be doing in our programs should be increased gradually, just like the amount of weight or the number of reps we’re doing. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/305455324_Dose-response_relationship_between_weekly_resistance_training_volume_and_increases_in_muscle_mass_A_systematic_review_and_meta-analysis https://journals.lww.com/nsca-jscr/Fulltext/2022/04000/Muscle_Hypertrophy_Response_Is_Affected_by.40.aspx https://www.sciendo.com/article/10.2478/hukin-2022-0017

Desire a Massively Muscular Chest? Watch This (Bench Press 🤝 Push Ups) When it comes to building a muscular chest, what is the better exercise? The bench press or push-ups? Now you might think it’s total BS even having this conversation as the answer is obvious but isn’t as black and white as you might think. To properly answer this, we must set aside preconceived ideas about the push-up. With the bench press, it’s easy to see how we’d progressively overload it, which is fundamental to muscle growth. We simply add weight once we’ve reached the upper end of our target rep range. We’ll look at two ways to progressively overload push-ups and a couple of studies that back up the effectiveness of each method. When it comes to cool factor, guys like to brag about how much they can bench, and it isn’t unusual when someone finds out you lift for them to ask. That being said, how cool would it be to rep out a few one-arm push-ups at a party? A little awkward bringing weights and a bench to show them your new PR. Which do you think would be more impressive to the ladies, hearing about your new bench record or seeing you rep out a few one-arm push-ups? If you are interested in losing body fat and adding muscle, please email me at 1shark1bite@gmail.com for information on my personal training services. Here is the link to FortisFight https://www.fortisfight.com/product-category/men/ and use my affiliate discount code FITAND50 at checkout for 15% off you next purchase on all of their apparel. If you would like a set of Torrobands for yourself, here is my affiliate link so you can receive 50% off on your purchase https://sale.torroband.com/?affId=555B3E5D Check your testosterone levels from home. Just click this link http://trylgc.com/laurence and receive 30% off with code: LAURENCE30 I receive commissions on referrals to LetsGetChecked. I only recommend services I know and trust. My Affiliate link to Lebert for their Equalizer bars and more; https://lebertfitness.com/?ref=FitAnd50 and use the discount code FITAND50 you will receive 20% off your purchase Facebook; https://www.facebook.com/Fit-and-50-5... My Amazon page link; https://www.amazon.com/shop/fitand50 Both these movements are compound exercises working the chest, triceps and front delts. After that, there’re some pretty substantial differences. Push-ups are a closed chain exercise where your hands are fixed against the ground. The bench press is an open chain exercise where your hands are not fixed in one place and move through space—making the push-up the more stable exercise. A couple of years ago, I injured my shoulder, and it hurt to bench. The pain came from stabilizing the weight as I pressed. So I switched to push-ups, and I could do them pain-free using a weighted backpack for resistance, keeping the repetitions slow and deliberate with a pause at the top and bottom to eliminate any momentum. This allowed me to continue to progress while my shoulder healed up. Now, was I really progressing or were the resisted push-ups just helping me maintain my muscle mass? To find out, let’s look at a study where they used lifters who had at least one year of lifting experience, and they compared strength gains between bench press and push-ups. To make sure they’re comparing the two as evenly as possible, they had them do the same volume, rest between sets, exercise tempo and intensity. To match intensity, they had both groups training at their 6 rep max. To find this, they tested them at the beginning of the program for both 1 and 6 repetition maximums on the bench press and resistance band push-ups, increasing either the thickness or number of bands they were using until they couldn’t do more than six reps. They did five sets with 4 minutes rest in between, 2 times a week for 5 weeks. The result being both groups had significant increases in strength. They did another study comparing bench presses to bodyweight push-up progressions. There were 10 progressions, with 4 being easier than a full range of motion push-up and 5 being more challenging. The most difficult was the one-arm push-up. I’m someone who likes to train with a variety of different methods, and I don’t exclude push-ups from my training. A great way to use them is as a drop set after benching. As soon as you finish your last set, go straight to the floor and rep out push-ups to failure, rest a minute and then do it again. Because they’re a closed chain exercise, they’re safer to bring to total failure, and you don’t need a spotter to help you re-rack the bar. https://journals.lww.com/nsca-jscr/Fulltext/2015/01000/Bench_Press_and_Push_up_at_Comparable_Levels_of.31.aspx https://journals.lww.com/nsca-jscr/Fulltext/2018/03000/Effect_of_Progressive_Calisthenic_Push_up_Training.9.aspx

56 yr Old New DB Bench PR Still Getting Stronger Last year I set a goal to dumbbell bench press 90lb dumbbells 12 times. Then I was training with 75 lb dumbbells. This video shows me pressing 90 lb dumbbells for the second time at a body weight of 157 lbs. This is well over my body weight. BTS Prolog by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Source: http://freepd.com/Unclassified/BTS%20Prolog Artist: http://incompetech.com/

The Only Way To Know You’re Building Muscle Doing Very Little Exercise (Age Makes A Difference) There are many reasons one might end up doing the absolute minimum amount of exercise. You could be busy at work. Or right now, we’re in the middle of summer with the kids out of school, and it’s the peak of vacation season, taking time away from our ability to train. Or maybe you just don’t want to spend any more time than absolutely necessary getting fit. How little exercise we can do and still build muscle will depend on our genetics, age and how long we’ve been working out. These variables affect our ability to progress. How do we know we're getting any results from the minimum amount of training? If you are interested in losing body fat and adding muscle, please email me at 1shark1bite@gmail.com for information on my personal training services. Here is the link to FortisFight https://www.fortisfight.com/product-category/men/ and use my affiliate discount code FITAND50 at checkout for 15% off you next purchase on all of their apparel. If you would like a set of Torrobands for yourself, here is my affiliate link so you can receive 50% off on your purchase https://sale.torroband.com/?affId=555B3E5D Check your testosterone levels from home. Just click this link http://trylgc.com/laurence and receive 30% off with code: LAURENCE30 I receive commissions on referrals to LetsGetChecked. I only recommend services I know and trust. My Affiliate link to Lebert for their Equalizer bars and more; https://lebertfitness.com/?ref=FitAnd50 and use the discount code FITAND50 you will receive 20% off your purchase Facebook; https://www.facebook.com/Fit-and-50-5... My Amazon page link; https://www.amazon.com/shop/fitand50 Well, A 2011 study illustrates how different variables affect our progress when we’ve reduced our training volume. The study focuses on hypertrophy or muscle growth and strength. Looking at how different volumes affect us and at what point we start losing our gains because we’re not training enough. They split the test subjects into two age groups, one of younger people between the ages of 20 to 35 and another group between the ages of 60 to 75. These were healthy untrained men that were put on a 16-week progressive lower body resistance training program. It wasn’t a balance lower body workout either. It was totally quad-focused, doing leg extensions, leg presses and squats. 3 sets of each exercise, 3 times a week. For a total of 27 weekly sets. They did between 8 to 12 reps and increased the weight on an exercise once they could do at least 12 perfect repetitions on 2 of the 3 sets. After 16 weeks, they all got stronger and built muscle. The next phase saw them broken into 3 groups, one that quit training altogether. A second group that only trained one day a week and did 9 total sets. Finally, a third group did only 3 sets once a week. No surprise, the group that stopped training altogether lost their gains. However, they lost their strength gains much slower than their muscle mass. The young group that only did 3 sets one day per week did pretty good with no strength losses and maintained muscle mass for 16 weeks before they started to see a decline. The older groups also maintained strength but lost more muscle mass than the young ones. Based on this study, if you’re between 20 to 35, you should be able to maintain your gains for 3 or 4 months with only 3 sets per body part per week. You don’t have to do this all in one day. You could split it up over the week. If you trained 3 times a week, you’d only have to do one set for each body part each workout. So what we’re the results for the 9 sets a week group? The younger group aced this one with increases in strength and muscle growth. The older group showed a clear separation between strength and hypertrophy, continuing to gain strength but losing muscle size. I’m interested in hearing your options on this. Can you really get stronger while losing muscle size? Does that make any sense to you? I still have 4 years to go before I’m in the older group, but I’m 21 years older than the most senior guy in the young group. I’m currently doing full-body workouts 3 times a week. With my total sets per body part being in that 9 to 12 range. And I’m building muscle despite being closer to the age group losing size around the same set range. And how do I know this? Well, there is only one way, and that’s by tracking our progress and logging the number of repetitions and weights we’re using to track strength gains. For hypertrophy, the best way is with a measuring tape, scale, and progress photos. If your waist is getting bigger, but there is no change in your arms, chest, shoulders and quads, you need to cut back on the food and increase the training intensity. https://journals.lww.com/acsm-msse/Fulltext/2011/07000/Exercise_Dosing_to_Retain_Resistance_Training.7.aspx

Who doesn't want to be able to last long enough to satisfy their lover? Nobody wants to be a dime-ride drugstore pony finishing too early. We want our ladies thinking they're riding a wild bull. Kegels have been shown to improve erectile function, with one study looking at men between the ages of 22 to 78. Who did daily Kegels for 3 months, after which 75% of the men experienced an improvement in function, and 40% no longer had ED. Today we’re going to look at the exact exercises they did. But first, when should we not be doing Kegels? If you are interested in losing body fat and adding muscle, please email me at 1shark1bite@gmail.com for information on my personal training services. Here is the link to FortisFight https://www.fortisfight.com/product-category/men/ and use my affiliate discount code FITAND50 at checkout for 15% off you next purchase on all of their apparel. If you would like a set of Torrobands for yourself, here is my affiliate link so you can receive 50% off on your purchase https://sale.torroband.com/?affId=555B3E5D Check your testosterone levels from home. Just click this link http://trylgc.com/laurence and receive 30% off with code: LAURENCE30 I receive commissions on referrals to LetsGetChecked. I only recommend services I know and trust. My Affiliate link to Lebert for their Equalizer bars and more; https://lebertfitness.com/?ref=FitAnd50 and use the discount code FITAND50 you will receive 20% off your purchase Facebook; https://www.facebook.com/Fit-and-50-5... My Amazon page link; https://www.amazon.com/shop/fitand50 The reason we do Kegel exercises is to strengthen our pelvic floor muscles. The stronger they are and the more control we have over them, the better our ability to last longer in the bedroom. But a weak pelvic floor isn’t the only problem we can have. These muscles can be tight, often being both weak and tight. If they’re too tight, we need to fix this first. Some signs of a tight pelvic floor are having trouble starting your pee stream and you can’t completely empty your bladder, resulting in more frequent trips to the bathroom. When we have a tight or overactive pelvic floor, often the muscles around the pelvis are tight too. Like piriformis muscle in our glutes, when it’s tight, it splays our feet outward, giving us what they call duck feet. Stretching and relaxing are the best ways to address a tight pelvic floor The pelvic pain foundation of Australia recommends the following 7 stretches to relax the pelvis. Knee to the chest, where you lie on your back with both legs straight. Then bring one knee up to your chest. Hold, then repeat with the other leg. Following this, you raise your knee again, except this time, instead of taking it straight up, you bring it diagonally across your body toward the opposite shoulder. After this, lie with your feet on the floor, your knees bent, and cross your one foot over the opposite knee. Then lift the knee towards your chest. Hold for a nice easy stretch. Once this is completed, we put our hands out from our sides and lift one knee bringing it over our body and lowering it toward the hand on the opposite side. A simple stretch called the child’s pose is next. Then do what they call a flat frog where you lie on your back with the soles of your feet together and your knees apart and relaxed. A well-known yoga pose called the happy baby follows this. Another technique we can use to relax our pelvic muscles is a reverse Kegel. And it’s just as it sounds. With a Kegel, we’re contracting and releasing our pelvic floor muscles. When doing it in reverse, we’re doing the opposite by releasing and relaxing the pelvic region. The best way to figure out how to do a Kegel is the next time you go to the washroom, stop your pee mid-stream. The muscles you’re contracting are the Kegel muscles. The sensation you’re looking for when you do a reverse Kegel is similar to the release you feel when you relax your muscles so you can start to pee. Because it’s a similar feeling, it’s best to go to the washroom before trying reverse Kegels. You can do reverse Kegels in any position. When you relax your pelvic floor, you should feel that area between your scrotum and anus relax and move downward, giving you the feeling of more space between your pubic bone and tailbone. If you can’t get the feeling of contracting or releasing your pelvic region, then you should contact your doctor to recommend a physiotherapist that specializes in the pelvic floor. The kegel protocol used in the study I mentioned at the beginning of the video to reverse ED. Has 7 steps https://www.pelvicpain.org.au/easy-stretches-to-relax-the-pelvis-men/?v=ef10366317f4 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1324914/ https://www.healthline.com/health/fitness-exercise/reverse-kegel#how-to-do-a-reverse-kegel

It takes more than squats, bent-over rows and bench press to develop real-world strength. I drew inspiration for today’s video from modern-day strongmen who have taken functional strength to the next level. To choose the only dumbbell exercises, you need to get strong. We first have to develop a solid foundation, then blend these exercises to create functional strength movements. One of the exercises strongmen and powerlifters excel at is the deadlift. To do a dumbbell deadlift, you start with the handles of the dumbbells just in front of the shins. If you are interested in losing body fat and adding muscle, please email me at 1shark1bite@gmail.com for information on my personal training services. Here is the link to FortisFight https://www.fortisfight.com/product-category/men/ and use my affiliate discount code FITAND50 at checkout for 15% off you next purchase on all of their apparel. If you would like a set of Torrobands for yourself, here is my affiliate link so you can receive 50% off on your purchase https://sale.torroband.com/?affId=555B3E5D Check your testosterone levels from home. Just click this link http://trylgc.com/laurence and receive 30% off with code: LAURENCE30 I receive commissions on referrals to LetsGetChecked. I only recommend services I know and trust. My Affiliate link to Lebert for their Equalizer bars and more; https://lebertfitness.com/?ref=FitAnd50 and use the discount code FITAND50 you will receive 20% off your purchase Facebook; https://www.facebook.com/Fit-and-50-5... My Amazon page link; https://www.amazon.com/shop/fitand50 I find it more comfortable with the dumbbells at a slight angle to my body than parallel, but your hands need to stay in front of your legs as you go up. This hand position is what makes this exercise different than the suitcase squat, where the dumbbells and your hands stay by your side. The result is your hips will be farther back when doing the deadlift, engaging the glutes and hamstrings as you drive your hips forward to complete the movement. The stone carry and atlas stones inspire this next exercise. In both of these exercises, you’re required to handle a heavy weight in front of your body, much like when you pick up a box or help a buddy move a couch. To build strength for this type of movement, we’ll use a goblet squat, where our body works to stay properly aligned with a heavy dumbbell in front of us. Ways you can upgrade this is to elevate your heels on a couple of plates to help increase the range of motion, and as you get stronger, try 2 dumbbells as it allows you to load the exercise even heavier. When we come up out of the bottom position of a goblet squat, it mirrors the movement strongmen do when they stand up with an atlas stone. The farmer's walk is a very popular exercise and straightforward to do with two dumbbells. To upgrade this exercise, I would suggest doing walking lunges. This increases the range of motion and the overall muscle-building effectiveness of the movement. The truck pull is one of the most impressive of the strongman events. You need strong legs to drive yourself forward with the weight of a semi-truck strapped to your back, or I’ve even seen them pull an airplane. Back and lat strength is required, too, as some of the pulling power is generated from the upper body as they pull themselves forward using the rope. To build upper body pulling power, we’re going to do one-arm dumbbell rows, but instead of doing it with one knee on a bench like I traditionally do. We’ll do it standing perpendicular to the bench. We hinge forward with our hips back, kind of like when we do a Romanian deadlift—placing one hand on the bench. We want to focus on the larger lat muscle. We do this by thinking about rotating our elbow back toward our hip and pivoting around the shoulder joint instead of pulling the weight straight up, which would use more bicep and take away from the lats. The log press inspires the next exercise. To accomplish this, you have to combine multiple movements. It starts like a deadlift with the weight in front. Then once he lifts the weight to waist height, he sits down into a front squat. From there, as he squats up, he rolls the weight to shoulder height. Finally, he push presses the log overhead. The dumbbell exercise that best emulates this is the hang clean and press. It’s done in one fluid motion without the pauses that the strongmen have when doing a log press, but it starts much the same way with your hips back and the dumbbells in front of your legs just below the knees. Then you explode up, driving your hips forward. It’s the momentum created by this force with a shrug at the top that brings the dumbbells to shoulder height, not your arms. You drop into a part squat and push press the weight up overhead. To get stronger at all these exercises, you need to increase the repetitions or the weight you are using over time.

When is the dumbbell bench press the absolute worst exercise you can do in the gym? Today we’re going to cover that along with all the worst exercises for muscle growth if you haven’t worked out in a while. These tips will also help those who are new to training. If it’s been years since your last workout, you are basically a new lifter all over again and even if you’ve only been off from lifting for a month or two. You can’t go back into the gym thinking you’ll be able to lift the same amount of weight as you did before. Every exercise is a bad exercise if you are lifting too heavy, using poor form or partial repetitions. One of the best examples of this is the leg press. If you are interested in losing body fat and adding muscle, please email me at 1shark1bite@gmail.com for information on my personal training services. Here is the link to FortisFight https://www.fortisfight.com/product-category/men/ and use my affiliate discount code FITAND50 at checkout for 15% off you next purchase on all of their apparel. If you would like a set of Torrobands for yourself, here is my affiliate link so you can receive 50% off on your purchase https://sale.torroband.com/?affId=555B3E5D Check your testosterone levels from home. Just click this link http://trylgc.com/laurence and receive 30% off with code: LAURENCE30 I receive commissions on referrals to LetsGetChecked. I only recommend services I know and trust. My Affiliate link to Lebert for their Equalizer bars and more; https://lebertfitness.com/?ref=FitAnd50 and use the discount code FITAND50 you will receive 20% off your purchase Facebook; https://www.facebook.com/Fit-and-50-5... My Amazon page link; https://www.amazon.com/shop/fitand50 How many of you who go to the gym have seen a guy overload this exercise and only do a six-inch range of motion. You’re better off lightening up the weight and getting a feel for a full range of motion. You put your low back at risk by going too far down with this exercise. You need to stop just before your butt lifts off the seat or your low back loses contact with it. There’re exercises we do at home that make the worst list simply because they’re not good exercises to build muscle—for example, the renegade row. The added instability created by doing a row in the plank position will challenge the core stability muscles more. Because of this instability, you aren’t able to lift heavy enough to stimulate new muscle growth in your lats. You’re better off sticking to the basics, and for our back, that’s bent over rows, pull-ups and chin-ups. An exercise that comes to mind is the dumbbell clean and press. It’s a great exercise often used in metabolic circuits and develops whole-body explosive power. But it’s not the best for building glutes, hamstrings, or even your delts. Because of the cardiovascular nature of this exercise, our circulatory system becomes exhausted before the muscles do. There are loading, momentum and range of motion issues too. You’re better off breaking it up into 3 different exercises. Romanian deadlifts for the glutes and hamstrings, squats for the quads, and of course, shoulder press for the delts. These are basic muscle builders and allow us to focus on the working muscles instead of the movement pattern. Every exercise that’s done without a proper warm-up first is dangerous and puts you at a higher risk of injury. I break warm-ups into 2 parts, a general warmup at the start of our training session. This should last 5 to no more than 10 minutes. I timed mine, and it worked out to about 7 minutes. You start with light cardio to get the blood pumping and then do some mobility work, Basic callisthenics or dynamics stretches to get the joints warmed up. Then we have our warm-up sets before our main lifts. I tend to train with higher repetitions, so I don’t do many warm-up sets, but the heavier and lower rep you lift, the more you’ll need. I recommend at least 1 to 3 sets done between 50 to 70 percent of your working weight. These are done early in your workout and on your compound lifts. As you get to the end of your training session and into isolation work, you should be warmed up and don’t need to do anymore. Many guys fall into the trap of only training their mirror muscles. All they’re doing is chest and arms. This is when the bench press, dumbbell, or barbell doesn’t matter. Becomes the worst exercise you can do. All that happens is as you train your chest, it gets tighter, and your shoulders round forward. Your underdeveloped back isn’t strong enough to pull them into their proper place. The result is you can’t even display your chest correctly because of the poor posture you’ve developed. You need to cut back on the benching and double up on the back work. Make sure you’re not only doing a lat-focused exercise but also something for your upper back, like elbow out rows or face-pulls.

How to recover faster at any age (Build More Muscle) Recovery is critical to the success of any training program. It’s during this time that our body builds itself back up better than before. The quicker we recover and the more often we can work out, the sooner we reach our goals. But fast isn’t always better when it comes to recovery from hard training, depending on our goal. And that’s what we’re going to look at today. What is the best and fastest way to recover at any age? A couple of the things we’ll look at are when cold water immersion is effective and when it hurts our training. We all know sleep is critical for recovery, with 7 to 9 hours being optimum, but what about naps? Do they aid recovery when we can’t get a full night's sleep? And how long should they be? If you are interested in losing body fat and adding muscle, please email me at 1shark1bite@gmail.com for information on my personal training services. Here is the link to FortisFight https://www.fortisfight.com/product-category/men/ and use my affiliate discount code FITAND50 at checkout for 15% off you next purchase on all of their apparel. If you would like a set of Torrobands for yourself, here is my affiliate link so you can receive 50% off on your purchase https://sale.torroband.com/?affId=555B3E5D Check your testosterone levels from home. Just click this link http://trylgc.com/laurence and receive 30% off with code: LAURENCE30 I receive commissions on referrals to LetsGetChecked. I only recommend services I know and trust. My Affiliate link to Lebert for their Equalizer bars and more; https://lebertfitness.com/?ref=FitAnd50 and use the discount code FITAND50 you will receive 20% off your purchase Facebook; https://www.facebook.com/Fit-and-50-5... My Amazon page link; https://www.amazon.com/shop/fitand50 First, we’re going to look at a nutritional strategy to aid in recovery. Protein is the most talked-about Macro when it comes to recovery. It was once thought to maximize muscle protein synthesis and recovery, we needed to ingest protein right after workouts, or we would miss the anabolic window. It turns out this window is more like an anabolic double garage door leaving us lots of room or time to get our protein in. Those original studies that found a benefit to eating protein right after your workout were done on people who trained fasted. Because of this, it makes sense to break your fast soon after training with a high-protein meal. For the rest of us who would’ve eaten at some point before our workouts, I’ll reference an article published in “the journal of the International Society of sports nutrition” that looked at all the existing literature on the topic and made this recommendation recognizing the benefit of a pre-workout meal. Pre-and post-exercise meals should not be separated by more than approximately 3 to 4 hours, given a typical resistance training bout lasting 45 to 90 minutes. If protein is delivered within a particularly large mixed-meal (which are inherently more anti-catabolic), a case can be made for lengthening the interval to 5 or 6 hours. They also discuss how much protein, noting that younger men required only 20 grams of protein to maximumly stimulate muscle protein synthesis, whereas older adults needed 40 grams In a research review published in 2019, they found that. “Protein ingestion prior to sleep can be applied in combination with resistance-type exercise training to further augment the gains in muscle mass and strength when compared to no protein supplementation.” One study examined the performance of sleep-deprived subjects after either a 20 min or a 90 min nap and found; that “A short nap opportunity could be more beneficial when the subsequent effort is brief and requires frequent decision-making. However, a longer nap opportunity could be preventative against muscle and oxidative damage, even for higher performances.” So it supports my conclusion that my short naps helped my workouts, but to aid in recovery, longer naps like 90 minutes are more beneficial. Inflammation signals to the body it needs to repair and build up the muscle we just trained. We dampen this signal, and the body's response will lessen. One of the often recommended strategies for recovery is cold-water immersion. This should be avoided after resistance training, especially when your goal is muscle hypertrophy, because it reduces inflammation and, in turn, muscle growth, with one study finding that “ Cold water immersion reduced long-term gains in muscle mass and strength. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6415027/ https://jissn.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1550-2783-10-5 https://journals.humankinetics.com/view/journals/ijspp/15/6/article-p874.xml https://mennohenselmans.com/inflammation-muscle-growth/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4594298/#:~:text=Cold%20water%20immersion%20attenuated%20long,2%20days%20after%20strength%20exercise.

Make “it” bigger for more amazing sex (Nutrition & Exercise Strategies) Today we’re going to look beyond kegals because if you want to be the biggest you can be for the most amazing sex ever, you have to do more than kegals. To accomplish this, we need to step back and look at the big picture to understand what things negatively affect our ability to get pumped up to full size. Physical inactivity, Obesity, diabetes, high cholesterol, and vascular disease affect blood flow and result in erectile issues. If you are interested in losing body fat and adding muscle, please email me at 1shark1bite@gmail.com for information on my personal training services. Here is the link to FortisFight https://www.fortisfight.com/product-category/men/ and use my affiliate discount code FITAND50 at checkout for 15% off you next purchase on all of their apparel. If you would like a set of Torrobands for yourself, here is my affiliate link so you can receive 50% off on your purchase https://sale.torroband.com/?affId=555B3E5D Check your testosterone levels from home. Just click this link http://trylgc.com/laurence and receive 30% off with code: LAURENCE30 I receive commissions on referrals to LetsGetChecked. I only recommend services I know and trust. My Affiliate link to Lebert for their Equalizer bars and more; https://lebertfitness.com/?ref=FitAnd50 and use the discount code FITAND50 you will receive 20% off your purchase Facebook; https://www.facebook.com/Fit-and-50-5... My Amazon page link; https://www.amazon.com/shop/fitand50 Obesity can create the illusion of being smaller than you really are by having part of the shaft buried behind a layer of fat. It can get so bad it becomes what is called turtling syndrome. The good news all these things can be improve through diet and exercise. There’re a couple of issues that can’t be improved through nutrition and increased activity. One of them is a build-up of Scar tissue from an injury to our main member. If the damage is bad enough, our penis can develop an extreme curvature. This is called Peyronie’s disease and can be quite painful, with surgery being needed to repair it by removing the scar tissue, resulting in a reduction of overall size. 70% of men have a 1/2” to 3/4” shorter manhood after prostate surgery, but in most cases, it will regain size after 6 to 12 months. The Mediterranean diethas been shown to improve erectile function. According to one research paper that looked at 4 different clinical trials, the Mediterranean diet contributes to preventing ED through improved lipid and glucose metabolism, increased antioxidant defenses, and increased arginine levels which could raise nitric oxide activity. It’s a whole food way of eating. Once you have done this, I would look at increasing the number of veggies you are consuming every day. I encourage everyone to eat at least 6 cups of veggies a day, and if you’re using the plate method, half of your plate should be veggies. Fruit consumption is encouraged in this diet, and it makes a great dessert. Nuts and seeds are a big part of the plan. Other healthy fat sources that are included are olive oil and avocado. Much like nuts, these are high calorie and easy to overconsume. So if weight loss is required to turn that limp noodle into a steel rod, be aware of your portion sizes. For complex carbs, legumes like beans and lentils and tubers like potatoes and yams are encouraged. When it comes to protein sources, chicken, turkey, along with other poultry, are in. Fish, eggs and dairy are also included. The macro split for this diet is 15 to 20% protein, 30 to 35% fats, and 50% carbohydrates. This is not enough protein for hard-training older adults, and if you want to be the biggest and hardest you can be, you need to be exercising regularly. So I would bump the protein number to at least 25 to 30% and reduce the carbs to 40 or 45 %. To find out how much exercise per week is recommended, I looked at a systemic review. For training, the participants did various activities, including running, cycling, swimming, and skiing. 3 of these studies used a combination of aerobic activity 3 times a week and resistance training twice a week. It’s important that we include both types of exercise in our programs. After reviewing all these studies, the researchers concluded we need to be doing 40 minutes of aerobic exercise of moderate to vigorous intensity four times a week. Overall, weekly exercise of 160 minutes for six months will contribute to decreasing erectile problems in men caused by physical inactivity, obesity, hypertension, metabolic syndrome and cardiovascular diseases. Some other things this paper recommends are diet, weight loss, pelvic floor muscle training, and quitting smoking to improve erectile function. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5510347/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5960035/

The Best Dumbbell Exercises for Explosive Strength (Real World Athleticism) When we think of explosive strength, we tend to think of being able to throw a better punch, jump higher or sprint faster. It also allows us to catch ourselves when we stumble or slip on some ice. Step out onto the street only to see a speeding car heading straight for you. Explosive strength allows you to get out of the way in the nick of time. I first became familiar with this type of exercise early in my fitness journey. When I started doing metabolic circuits at home back then, they were part of a program I was doing by Men’s health called “The Spartacus Workout” these were done with light weights and high reps, giving you a crazy cardio workout. They also can be done with heavier weights, and we’ll explore a program in this video that tests our explosive strength to see where we rank. If you are interested in losing body fat and adding muscle, please email me at 1shark1bite@gmail.com for information on my personal training services. Here is the link to FortisFight https://www.fortisfight.com/product-category/men/ and use my affiliate discount code FITAND50 at checkout for 15% off you next purchase on all of their apparel. If you would like a set of Torrobands for yourself, here is my affiliate link so you can receive 50% off on your purchase https://sale.torroband.com/?affId=555B3E5D Check your testosterone levels from home. Just click this link http://trylgc.com/laurence and receive 30% off with code: LAURENCE30 I receive commissions on referrals to LetsGetChecked. I only recommend services I know and trust. My Affiliate link to Lebert for their Equalizer bars and more; https://lebertfitness.com/?ref=FitAnd50 and use the discount code FITAND50 you will receive 20% off your purchase Facebook; https://www.facebook.com/Fit-and-50-5... My Amazon page link; https://www.amazon.com/shop/fitand50 The first exercise we’ll look at is the dumbbell hang clean. These moves are a little more complicated and require a bit of practice. So start with a lighter weight until you’re comfortable with the exercise. To begin this move, you have your hips back and the dumbbells just below the knee. As you drive your hips forward, you explode up and fully extend your body as you shrug the weight up. Keeping the dumbbells close to your torso. Then drop down under the weight into a part squat. You’ll know you’re using your arms if the weight goes out and away from your body as it goes up. Often this is accompanied by not fully extending the hips in an attempt to make it easier to get under the weight. Once you’re comfortable cleaning the weight to your shoulder, this puts you in position for a great upper body power move called the dumbbell push press. The difference between a shoulder press and a push press is that you use your legs by dropping down into a quarter squat and then extending them to help drive the weight up overhead. This allows us to use more weight than when doing a strict press. These two exercises work naturally together, creating a full-body movement called the dumbbell clean and press. When you receive the dumbbells to your shoulders after doing a clean, your knees are already bent in the perfect position to press the dumbbells overhead. You can do this as a unilateral exercise. The setup is the same, except you hold the single dumbbell between your legs. Then you drive it up into position with your hips and legs and press it overhead with the help of your quads. In the following exercise, we’ll look at the dumbbell snatch, and use it to test our explosive strength. The difference between a dumbbell snatch and a dumbbell clean and press is the dumbbell goes from the start position just below the knees to the top position with the arm fully extended in one fluid motion. Men's Journal has a challenge that tests our explosive strength using a dumbbell snatch. They recommend taking a month to learn the move before doing the test and give us a 3-week program to help prepare us after we have mastered the exercise. Before one of your regular workouts every week, you’ll do a few sets of dumbbell snatches. In the first week, perform 5 sets of 5 reps with a weight that you can move very fast for each rep—allowing 60 seconds between sets. For the second week, do 6 sets of 3 reps with 60 seconds rest again. For the third week, you move to 6 to 8 sets of only 2 reps. Week 4 is the test. After a good warm-up of at least 4 one rep sets, do 2 to 3 working sets of 3 reps, working your way up to the heaviest weight you can. The rating goes like this if you can only press 25% of your bodyweight, you need work. 35% is okay. 45% brings you into the world of strong, and 55% of your body weight or more gives you freak status. https://www.mensjournal.com/health-fitness/dumbbell-challenge-test-your-explosive-strength/

Animal VS Plant Protein for a Longer Life When I think of a longer life, I don’t think of it as sick and dying. I think active, vibrant, and free of disease and limitations. This is the mindset we want to have when comparing animal and plant protein. And which will allow us to live the longest life free from age-related disease. Things like sarcopenia, osteoporosis, cardiovascular disease and cancer are all associated with aging. How we eat makes a difference, too, we can choose to eat a healthy meat-based diet or an unhealthy one. The same is true when it comes to plant-based diets. If you are interested in losing body fat and adding muscle, please email me at 1shark1bite@gmail.com for information on my personal training services. If you would like a set of Torrobands for yourself, here is my affiliate link so you can receive 50% off on your purchase https://sale.torroband.com/?affId=555B3E5D Here is the link to FortisFight https://www.fortisfight.com/product-category/men/ and use my affiliate discount code FITAND50 at checkout for 15% off you next purchase on all of their apparel. Check your testosterone levels from home. Just click this link http://trylgc.com/laurence and receive 30% off with code: LAURENCE30 I receive commissions on referrals to LetsGetChecked. I only recommend services I know and trust. My Affiliate link to Lebert for their Equalizer bars and more; https://lebertfitness.com/?ref=FitAnd50 and use the discount code FITAND50 you will receive 20% off your purchase Facebook; https://www.facebook.com/Fit-and-50-5... My Amazon page link; https://www.amazon.com/shop/fitand50 They studied over 100,000 people who ate plant-based and found diets that emphasized less healthy plant foods were associated with a higher risk for coronary heart disease. These unhealthy plant-based foods were things like juices, sweetened beverages, refined grains, french fries and sweets. When it comes to meat-based diets, one of the most unhealthy things we can consume is processed meat. The World Health Organization classifies processed meats as a group one carcinogenic, stating that there is sufficient evidence from epidemiological studies that processed meat causes colorectal cancer. Sarcopenia is age-related muscle loss to the extent that it lowers the quality of life and leaves us vulnerable to falls, fractures and cardio-metabolic diseases. Animal proteins better stimulate muscle protein synthesis Plant eaters can offset this deficiency by eating more and a wider variety of plant proteins, including peanuts and lentils. Another place where meat eaters have an edge is bone health. A study published in 2020 compared meat, fish eaters, vegetarians and vegans, finding that compared with meat-eaters, vegans had a higher risk of total, hip, leg and vertebrae fractures, while fish eaters and vegetarians had a higher risk of hip fractures. They attributed this to vegans having a lower overall protein intake and lower calcium levels. So if you’ve chosen to eat vegan or vegetarian, you might want to increase your protein intake and consider calcium supplementation. When it comes to cardiovascular disease, whole food plant-based diets have been shown to reduce heart disease risk. Meat-based is more controversial, especially with red meat. This is partially because many studies include processed meats and red meat together, and these should be looked at separately. After doing this, one meta-analysis found that processed meats and not red meats are associated with coronary heart disease and diabetes mellitus. Fish intake is also associated with a reduced risk of coronary heart disease and stroke. There has been no connection found between poultry and increased heart disease risk. I did find a study review that compared the long-term health of vegetarians and vegans to Non-vegetarians. It looked at obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and cancer. I would say the review gave a slight edge to vegetarians, but in the end, it found overall mortality is similar for vegetarians and non-vegetarians What they’re finding is that there are advantages and disadvantages to both. To get the most out of our diet, we need to get our protein from a wide variety of different sources, including both meat and plants https://www.who.int/news-room/questions-and-answers/item/cancer-carcinogenicity-of-the-consumption-of-red-meat-and-processed-meat https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28728684/ https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/proceedings-of-the-nutrition-society/article/longterm-health-of-vegetarians-and-vegans/263822873377096A7BAC4F887D42A4CA https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12916-020-01815-3#Sec8 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20479151/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6723444/ https://www.jandonline.org/article/S2212-2672(18)31397-2/fulltext#secsectitle0110 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23497300/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28967596/

The best single leg exercises for amazing sex 🚀 Before we get started, let’s discuss our third leg. Some might call it a pocket rocket. And how exercising your other legs helps to ready it for launch and not prematurely. It’ll wait until it’s time and the countdown is finished. The penis itself isn’t a muscle. It’s made up of a spongy tissue that fills with blood to get erect and ready to launch. The better the blood flows, the more erect and fuller we become. This is where leg training plays a role. I know I’ve mentioned this before, so stay with me for a few seconds while I catch up the new viewers. Blood flows to our legs from the common iliac artery. An offshoot of this artery supplies blood to our penis, pelvic floor, glutes and adductors. Exercise does more than improve the flow into these areas. It strengthens these muscles, making it so we can last longer. The biggest advantage to using single-leg exercises is it allows us to work the muscles with less weight making it much easier on our spine and low back. They also improve balance and mobility. If you are interested in losing body fat and adding muscle, please email me at 1shark1bite@gmail.com for information on my personal training services. If you would like a set of Torrobands for yourself, here is my affiliate link so you can receive 50% off on your purchase https://sale.torroband.com/?affId=555B3E5D Here is the link to FortisFight https://www.fortisfight.com/product-category/men/ and use my affiliate discount code FITAND50 at checkout for 15% off you next purchase on all of their apparel. Check your testosterone levels from home. Just click this link http://trylgc.com/laurence and receive 30% off with code: LAURENCE30 I receive commissions on referrals to LetsGetChecked. I only recommend services I know and trust. My Affiliate link to Lebert for their Equalizer bars and more; https://lebertfitness.com/?ref=FitAnd50 and use the discount code FITAND50 you will receive 20% off your purchase Facebook; https://www.facebook.com/Fit-and-50-5... My Amazon page link; https://www.amazon.com/shop/fitand50 Better mobility in the bedroom is always a plus when it comes to having amazing sex. If you’re not used to single-leg training, a great place to start is the basic split squat. To begin this movement, stand with your legs hip-width apart and step back a comfortable distance with one leg. It needs to be far enough that your leg is well behind the heel of your front foot, keeping your leg's hip-distance apart. You go down until your back knee almost touches the floor or lightly touches it. To emphasize the glutes, keep the shin of the front leg vertical and maintain a slight lean in your upper body. Allowing your shin to lean forward and keeping your torso more upright puts greater emphasis on the quads. To encourage blood flow into the pelvic region, we want to make all of our single-leg exercises more glute focused. A study published in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research comparing a squat, split squat and step up finding that the load on the glutes was greater with both the split squat and a step up compared to a traditional squat. This brings us to the next exercise, step-ups. You’ll want to use a bench or sturdy chair. I like something that is over 14 inches tall. The higher the step, the more the glutes and hamstrings become involved. When you step up, lean forward a bit to put the weight on the front leg, then press through the heel of the raised leg to bring yourself up off the floor. Try to use the back leg as little as possible. If you’re new to these exercises, it’s best to get used to the movement pattern without weights first. When doing unilateral or single-leg exercises, it’s better to do all the repetitions on the same leg before switching to the other one. Taking a minute rest between each leg Bulgarian split squats can be done in two ways, either as a quad or a glute dominant move. To emphasize the glutes, you want to start a little farther away from the bench. This makes it easier to keep the front shin at a 90 to the floor This gives us more hip hinge, which targets the glutes—having our rear leg elevated increases the challenge over a basic split squat by forcing all three glute muscles, the Maximus, medius and minimus, to work harder to stabilize the body while in motion. The walking lunge works more muscles in the legsgives us quite the cardio workout boosting our heart rate and increasing blood flow. Taking longer strides will help keep our shin vertical, and having a slightly outward step gives us a zigzag walk and puts more emphasis on the glutes because one of the jobs of the gluteus maximus is to rotate the leg externally. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/342393414_Muscle_Forces_During_the_Squat_Split_Squat_and_Step-Up_Across_a_Range_of_External_Loads_in_College-Aged_Men

The best foods for building muscle and strength aren’t about one macronutrient. It’s the combination of protein, fats and carbs. One thing we need to make clear before we continue is no matter how perfect your diet is, if you’re not training hard and progressively, you’re not going to build muscle. No one has ever built muscle or increased their strength with diet alone. Whole foods are always the best choice to build muscle as they contain more than just the primary macronutrient we’re looking for. They also have micronutrients we need, like vitamins and minerals. If you are interested in losing body fat and adding muscle, please email me at 1shark1bite@gmail.com for information on my personal training services. If you would like a set of Torrobands for yourself, here is my affiliate link so you can receive 50% off on your purchase https://sale.torroband.com/?affId=555B3E5D Here is the link to FortisFight https://www.fortisfight.com/product-category/men/ and use my affiliate discount code FITAND50 at checkout for 15% off you next purchase on all of their apparel. Check your testosterone levels from home. Just click this link http://trylgc.com/laurence and receive 30% off with code: LAURENCE30 I receive commissions on referrals to LetsGetChecked. I only recommend services I know and trust. My Affiliate link to Lebert for their Equalizer bars and more; https://lebertfitness.com/?ref=FitAnd50 and use the discount code FITAND50 you will receive 20% off your purchase Facebook; https://www.facebook.com/Fit-and-50-5... My Amazon page link; https://www.amazon.com/shop/fitand50 Carbs provide us with the energy to train hard. When we eat carbohydrates, they get converted into glucose or glycogen. Glucose is used immediately for energy, and glycogen gets stored either in the muscle or as fat. It's the fat part that scares many people, but the leaner you are and the more active you are, the more carbs you’ll want to take in. If you have diabetes, are pre-diabetic, or are very overweight, you may want to limit your carbs, but those you do eat should be whole foods, like the ones I’m about to list. Carbohydrates play an essential role in muscle recovery, replenishing the glycogen stores in the muscle, and as they’re drawn in, they bring in other nutrients that aid in recovery. Oatmeal is an excellent source of carbs that provides lasting energy. It’s very satiating too. So for those who are striving to lose weight, it’ll help you feel full longer. Oats also contain av-en-an-thram-ides which increases nitric oxide production improving blood flow. This is important because the more efficiently our blood circulates, the better it is at bringing nutrition into the muscle and removing waste. Beans, and in particular black beans, are another great carbohydrate source. For those trying to limit animal protein, it contains a reasonable amount of protein Black beans also contain many micronutrients like potassium, iron, zinc and magnesium My last carb source was a toss-up between quinoa, rice, or potatoes. White potatoes are my personal favourite. And are high in potassium, even higher than bananas If we’re low on potassium, we’ll experience muscle weakness and cramping. Fats play an integral role in building muscle. A meta-analysis published in 2021 found significant decreases in sex hormones on low fat versus high-fat diets. We tend to think of eggs as a protein because it contains a very digestible form, but it actually has almost twice the amount of fat as protein. Most of the fat in an egg is unsaturated. The reason people fear eggs is because of the high level of cholesterol they contain. Many studies have shown that there is no connection between dietary cholesterol and serum cholesterol levels. But if you have issues with high cholesterol, listen to your doctor and dietitian. There may be a connection between cholesterol and muscle growth. They did a study on 49 people between the ages of 60 and 69 and found after 12 weeks of high-intensity resistance training and nutritional supplementation. There’s a dose-response between dietary cholesterol and gains in lean mass. For unsaturated fat, salmon is a good source, again, we think of it as a protein, but it contains a bit more fat than protein. A couple of great non-meat unsaturated fats are nuts like almonds, peanuts and walnuts. Avocado is a fruit that’s mainly unsaturated fat. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33741447/#:~:text=Conclusions%3A%20Low%2Dfat%20diets%20appear,to%20a%20low%2Dfat%20diet. https://jissn.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1550-2783-11-20 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16139284/ https://www.researchgate.net/publication/279303939_Dietary_cholesterol_and_cardiovascular_disease_A_systematic_review_and_meta-analysis https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17921432/ https://mennohenselmans.com/cholesterol-anabolic/

Dumbbell exercises you need to build muscle mass (Maximum Results) There’re some unique advantages to using dumbbells to build muscle. We’ll talk about these advantages as we go over the best dumbbell exercises you need to build muscle. The first thing to understand is the best exercise you need could be different than someone else. Depending on your experience level and how heavy of dumbbells you have to work with. If you train at a gym, you might have up to 120 lbs dumbbells available. My home gym goes up to 95 lbs. A lot of sets top out a around 50. This’ll affect your exercise selection. As we go through the exercises, we’ll look at ways to progressively overload the muscle no matter what weight of dumbbells you have. If you are interested in losing body fat and adding muscle, please email me at 1shark1bite@gmail.com for information on my personal training services. If you would like a set of Torrobands for yourself, here is my affiliate link so you can receive 50% off on your purchase https://sale.torroband.com/?affId=555B3E5D Here is the link to FortisFight https://www.fortisfight.com/product-category/men/ and use my affiliate discount code FITAND50 at checkout for 15% off you next purchase on all of their apparel. Check your testosterone levels from home. Just click this link http://trylgc.com/laurence and receive 30% off with code: LAURENCE30 I receive commissions on referrals to LetsGetChecked. I only recommend services I know and trust. My Affiliate link to Lebert for their Equalizer bars and more; https://lebertfitness.com/?ref=FitAnd50 and use the discount code FITAND50 you will receive 20% off your purchase Facebook; https://www.facebook.com/Fit-and-50-5... My Amazon page link; https://www.amazon.com/shop/fitand50 Right now, I’ve been enjoying heal elevated goblet squats as they allow me to go right ass to grass. We are weaker in this lower position and don’t need as heavy a resistance. There was a time if I was to go that low, it would bug my knees. As I’ve strengthened the muscles around them, it allows me to squat lower, pain-free. This is one way to progressively overload a muscle by gradually increasing the range of motion. If you only have 50 lbs dumbbells to work with, eventually, you’ll want to go heavier than one dumbbell as increasing resistance is the number 1 way we apply progressive overload. I’ve shown in other videos how to safely set up, and lift into position a heavy dumbbell for a goblet squat. We do this by setting it on a bench. The best way to get two dumbbells into place is to do a dumbbell clean. This movement starts with a hip hinge and the dumbbells at about knee height. Then you drive your hips forward as you shrug the dumbbells up into position. I tend to do a bit of an explosive squat to get the dumbbells into place. It works, but it makes sense to do a proper clean that’ll prepare you for a more advanced movement in the future. The following way to build muscle on our legs is to train them unilaterally, eliminating any muscle imbalances. It also allows us to work our legs to technical failure with less weight. The Bulgarian split squat is my favourite singe leg exercise. If you’re new to unilateral leg training, then I wouldn’t start there. The best way to begin is with a split squat and once you become proficient at them, advance to a reverse lunge and then finally to the Bulgarian split squat. This is another way we progressively overload a muscle by moving to more challenging and complex variations as we advance. We absolutely have to have some pull movements in our workouts if we’re serious about building muscle. A bent-over dumbbell row is an obvious choice. A couple of ways we can increase the intensity is to first hold the dumbbell for a second in the contracted or top position and make sure you are controlling the weight on the way down. The exercise becomes a lot harder when we brace our torso against a bench. I do this 2 ways, either by resting my chest on the back of a bench and rowing with a neutral grip or lying in a prone position on a bench set at roughly 30 degrees, again rowing with my elbows by my side and palms facing each other in a neutral grip. To better hit your upper back, row in the same position but with your elbows out away from your body. This hits the rear delts and mid traps. While we’re on the back of the body, let’s cover off the erector Spinae, glutes and hamstrings. The Romanian deadlift is my go-to exercise for the lower body posture chain. This starts just like the dumbbell clean with your hips back while keeping your back in a neutral position. You go down until you feel a stretch in the hamstrings. Then drive your hips forward as you raise. For those with limited weights or if you want to correct a muscle imbalance, as most of us have one leg that is stronger than the other, I recommend Kickstand RDLs.

The Best Glute Exercises For Amazing Sex (More Endurance, Power)(Better Thrusting) There’re a few reasons why glute exercises make our sex life even more amazing! Strong glutes help us last longer. We don’t want to be a little 2 stroke engine. We want to be a V12 with enough power to go all night. (Engine revving) Glute exercises also improve blood flow to our pelvic region. Keeping our Giant Anaconda strong. (Thanks Sir Mix A Lot, for that analogy.) Making sure it doesn’t turn into a garden snake or, even worse, a little earthworm. When building our glutes, we look should at it in 2 ways. One, exercises that make them strong and powerful in the movement pattern that we’re using them and exercises to activate our glutes, so we can feel them working. If you are interested in losing body fat and adding muscle, please email me at 1shark1bite@gmail.com for information on my personal training services. If you would like a set of Torrobands for yourself, here is my affiliate link so you can receive 50% off on your purchase https://sale.torroband.com/?affId=555B3E5D Here is the link to FortisFight https://www.fortisfight.com/product-category/men/ and use my affiliate discount code FITAND50 at checkout for 15% off you next purchase on all of their apparel. Check your testosterone levels from home. Just click this link http://trylgc.com/laurence and receive 30% off with code: LAURENCE30 I receive commissions on referrals to LetsGetChecked. I only recommend services I know and trust. My Affiliate link to Lebert for their Equalizer bars and more; https://lebertfitness.com/?ref=FitAnd50 and use the discount code FITAND50 you will receive 20% off your purchase Facebook; https://www.facebook.com/Fit-and-50-5... My Amazon page link; https://www.amazon.com/shop/fitand50 Many people spend most of their day sitting on their butts instead of using them. As a result, they’re practically a dead muscle. One of the most common exercises you see when talking about glutes and sexual health is the glute bridge. This exercise often gets combined with a kegal, and it’s a good way to use it, but it’s not a great butt builder. This exercise is better as a warm-up or to wake up the glutes and help develop that mind-muscle connection. You really feel the glutes working when you add weight. Squeeze your glutes to lift your hips off the floor and hold them in the top position for five seconds. Doing 10 to 15 repetitions for 1 to 2 sets gets those glutes fired up. The best way to work a muscle and build it is by moving it through a full range of motion. This is another area where the glute bridge falls short. To rectify this, there’re several different exercises we can do. The one that is closest to a glute bridge is a hip thrust. To do this exercise, start with your shoulder blades up against a bench. It’s a good idea to have the bench against a wall so that it doesn’t slip backwards when doing the exercise. It can be done with or without weight; if you’re new to the movement, start with bodyweight until you’re comfortable with the exercise. Like the glute bridge, you tighten your glutes as you drive your hips upward. Again pause at the top for a second and feel those glutes working. By raising one leg, you can train the glutes unilaterally to eliminate any muscle imbalances you might have. I call it a band donkey kick, but it’s actually a quadruple hip extension. I’ve been doing these for the last month on all fours with my hands up against the door to brace against the force of the bands. The upgrade is to set a bench up against the door. This allows you to be farther from the anchor, increasing the resistance at the beginning of the movement. You also stabilize your back better because you're lying on the bench as you do the exercise. A standing hip thrust using resistance bands. You can set this up using a door anchor, positioning it a little lower than glute height. You connect the bands to the anchor making a loop. Then step into the bands and move forward until they naturally pull you back into a hip hinge position. You’ll find you need to lean forward to maintain balance when doing the exercise. This movement does a phenomenal job of helping a guy get a feel for the hip hinge position. The mistake people make when doing a Romanian Deadlift is they make it a squat and not a hip hinge. The difference is with a hip hinge, your hips go back, not down, and your knees don’t move forward at all. Having a resistance band wrapped around your waist while doing RDL’s helps to reinforce this movement. It actually does more than that. When doing a Romanian deadlift, you have the most tension on the glutes when you’re bent forward with your hips back and virtually no load on them when you’re standing straight up as your skeletal structure is supporting the weight. When you add a band to RDL’s, you have constant tension on the glutes even when you’re fully upright—doubling the value of this exercise.