Little Big Gains

I am touching 40. I have a family, a demanding career, and a ton of excuses. I also have a passion for fitness and nutrition, which I’ve learned to smuggle into my busy schedule. I’m still learning but I have to admit that 15+ years of lifting do make it somewhat easier to learn. I’ve been a gym member since the first year of college. Things I know now I wish I’d known when I was starting. But just like everything else in life, fitness is a practical lesson. Effective training does not exist in theory. It’s taken me years of practice, failed experiments and injuries to develop my tactics. I have had pauses, longer and shorter, either due to injuries or life in general, but I always came back to training. My journey continues - I am staging another comeback now, surely the most distinctive one so far, powered by a smarter and more responsible approach that dovetails into my busy lifestyle without compromising my priorities. I don't go as heavy as I used to and yet my workouts are way more effective. I mostly train at home to a strict self-imposed regimen. I don't train long but I do it with intensity and regularity. I watch my nutrition. It’s all about consistency and discipline. When sustained over a period of time, consistency and discipline permeate into other aspects of life and strengthen the character just like training strengthens the body. Eventually you achieve some sort of a physical and emotional equilibrium. I am not there yet, but I know I am going the right way. Most importantly, I am enjoying my journey a lot more now than ever before.

[littlebiggains]

Just a quick post to show you this excellent bicep isolation curl I’ve been doing lately. It’s a real blast. Initially, I used it as part of my deload routine but I quickly realized that - when loaded properly - it can very well function as a primary movement for biceps. Why is it so effective?

There are two force vectors at play here. The band is pulling the handle away from you and the plate is trying to pull you vertically downwards. Gravity.

The space in between those two vectors, which is where your forearm travels, is made up of the various combinations of those two forces. This means the resultant force which you have to resist to execute a repetition is stronger than either of the borderline forces on their own.

And whilst it fluctuates as your forearm travels up and down, it’s multidimensional and remains sufficiently strong throughout the range of motion. Thanks to this, your bicep is kept under tension until the set is completed. There is no way it can rest, even partially, between reps.

This movement can be performed with a cable instead of a resistance band, but the band has an advantage. It’s lighter at the bottom of the movement, allowing you to initiate reps without yanking (which often leads to bicep injury). And it's heavier at the top, which is where peak contraction occurs. The heavier the resistance on peak contraction, the better. A band offers the best of both worlds.

[littlebiggains]

Here’s a quick video summary of the pushup experiment of which you can read more in the post below.

[littlebiggains]

Results of my pushup experiment. 400 reps a day for a month.

I’m done with the 400-pushups-a-day affair. What an ordeal. Over the course of 31 days I squeezed out exactly 12,431 reps of pushups. I tried using different variants to cheer myself up, hoping this might distract me from how excruciating an experience I was putting my body through. Overall, was it worth it? Um, no.

I never expected much real benefit from this anyway so I can’t say I’m disappointed. From the very beginning I considered this to be an experiment whose aim was to prove (or disprove) the hypothesis whereby high-rep pushups over an extended period of time are senseless. I’m still in two minds about whether the experiment has fully born out the hypothesis. What I can say for certain, though, is that the ‘investment' dwarfed the returns. Look at this picture:

The difference that immediately jumps out at you is that I've got tanned. Yes, it’s summertime. What you can’t see though is the toll those 12K pushups have taken on me - I’ve seriously aggravated my elbow tendonitis and developed wrist pain as a bonus.

On the positive note, I’ve got slightly leaner and a wee bit more vascular. But was that the pushups? I’m not sure. It may as well be the lighting in the ‘after’ picture or a slightly different pose that’s making those veins pop out a little more. You can’t re-create the exact same pose after a month.

Still, I do look a tad smaller now, which is interesting because I haven’t lost any weight. I did get a little stronger though, and that is what's got me intrigued. After all, hundreds of pushups on top of my normal routine (and I do a lot of volume training) should have absolutely fried my chest! And yet, I’ve actually been able to add a bit of weight to some exercises I do for chest and crank up the volume.

Counterintuitive as it appeared, I carried out an investigation. I am about to share my conclusions so those of you who cannot be bothered with pseudo-scientific gibberish, it’s fine to drop off now, I won’t be offended. Others, read on…

This will be about muscle mitochondria, their role in providing energy to the muscle and stimulating hypertrophy (ie, growth).

What’s a mitochondrion? Wikipedia says it’s a "double membrane-bound organelle found in all eukaryotic organisms”. Yea, whatever. It’s enough to know that mitochondria are tiny power-generators which use the oxidative energy system (ie, respiration) to produce energy that’s then delivered into the contractile muscle threads (called myofibrils) to enable contraction. You will find them floating in the sarcoplasm surrounding those myofibrils.

In order to adapt to a training regimen, the body needs to produce more power, ie, more mitochondria. Whilst the body is perfectly capable of creating new mitochondria, early studies seemed to argue that resistance training had no stimulating impact on that process. Unlike cardio which - so the argument went - naturally 'forces’ the muscle to create more mitochondria in order to get more power from oxidation, on which it solely relies, to allow us to withstand hours on the treadmill. In other words, cardio is able to utilise the mitochondria’s power-generating abilities much more efficiently than weight training, and thus stimulate the creation of new ones.

At least that’s what they used to say until more recent studies showed up. This is where it gets interesting. Apparently, regular high-rep light-weight resistance training (approx. 30% or your 1 rep max for as many reps as possible) triggers various kinds of adaptation processes that alter the composition of sarcoplasmic mitochondria, effectively leading to oxidation-generated ATP being recruited by fast-twitch muscle activation (as when lifting weights) and not just by slow-twitch activation (as when doing cardio). It also - just like cardio - promotes the production of more mitochondria.

Effectively, high-volume training with light to moderate resistance will lead to an increased engagement of the oxidative energy system in delivering energy to the myofibrils when you lift weights, not just when you run an ultra marathon… You will be tapping into more energy sources during weight training, including those which are normally reserved for cardio.

This would explain why my strength gains. But why have I not put on additional muscle size from doing all those pushups?

Well, as you may know there are two types of hypertrophy. In order to build size over a relatively short period of time you're shooting for sarcoplasmic hypertrophy, which is basically size gains caused by increased protein synthesis in the sarcoplasm. You can easily pump up the sarcoplasm by doing high-rep exercises with moderate or light weights (often referred to as metabolic stress) which, when performed repeatedly will cause your cells to stock up on glycogen and create more organelles (like the mitochondria) in the sarcoplasm, all of which will lead to the muscle cells growing in size.

Sounds good but, unfortunately, most of it is hogwash. The extent to which sarcoplasmic hypertrophy contributes to the overall muscle size is biblically overestimated. The idea that you can build huge muscle by going light for high reps is attractive enough to gain traction - I get that. But science has no mercy. Research proves that not only is the size of the sarcoplasm barely affected by resistance training but also it amounts to no more than 20% of muscle size. You'd have to double or triple its volume to see any difference on the outside. Good luck with that.

The real size is in the myofibrils and those need mechanical damage for protein synthesis to kick in and actually build new muscle cells. That means you need to lift heavy to grow and there's simply no way around it.

Sarcoplasmic protein synthesis, however, does have its merits. It functions as an excellent power generator for myofibrillic hypertrophy and, as such, it does ultimately lead to muscle growth, although not directly. If you do pushups in addition to heavy resistance training, as opposed to just pushups, you should see extra gains eventually. That’s because you will be getting stronger. You will be recruiting more ATP to fuel the myofibrillic hypertrophy, of which size gains are a side effect. Don’t expect anything noticeable in a month though, it’s just not enough time. Strength gains are a different matter. You will notice these quite quickly. When you do, add weight to the bar. Otherwise there’ll be no gains, only your workouts will feel less taxing.

OK, so how do we explain those ‘body transformations’ from hundreds of pushups a day over a few weeks, as seen online? Well, most of them are fake. Those that aren’t are actually quite easily accounted for. The gains are optical. If you add an extra 3 or 4 hundred pushups to your daily routine you are going to be burning off a lot more calories than usual. After a month you are inevitably going to look more shredded, having gotten rid of the flabby layer that covered your muscles and veins. Notice that in their ‘after’ photos those guys don’t look bigger - they look more athletic.

So, are high-rep pushups worth doing in addition to your normal workouts? As I said at the beginning, I don’t think so. They are really taxing on your tendons and wrists and that does impact your weight training in a bad way. And the benefits? Well, an extra vein coming into view or an extra few pounds on your bench press are achievable via other, less torturous methods, I’m sure.  

What I do think is worth doing, however, is a variant of this where you perform fewer reps but do it consistently (as opposed to periodically). Rather than do crazy numbers of reps every day for a month, I’ll just do a quick set of, say, a hundred every day before bedtime. Just enough to stimulate the mitochondria to convey energy into the contractile muscle threads during my day workouts. Consistent provision of stimuli should, in theory, ‘teach’ the mitochondria to behave in a certain way and allow me to tap into the benefits of daily pushups without incurring the risks of overdoing it. I guess time will tell if this is a good approach.

[littlebiggains]

The barn workout and why I think lifting outdoors is awesome.

I took a few days off work last week, grabbed my boy (5yo) and my portable gym, and drove nearly a thousand miles west to a place my mom owns, being an old red-brick house in the middle of a forest, by a river that happens to be one of the country’s cleanest. The house is pretty run down these days but still, what a place!

By ‘portable gym’ I mean a bag filled with resistance bands and some other lightweight exercise paraphernalia, including even a deflated soft ball. I was going to take it easy lifting-wise and let my injuries heal. I’d been working out like a madman and got myself a real bad case of tendonitis in both elbows. You cannot just keep taking anti-inflammatory drugs to ease the pain - you have to rest it. So rest it I would...

Yeah, right. Two days into my stay and I started displaying symptoms of gym withdrawal. I needed my fix of lifting. Bands wouldn’t cut it, nor would even the freakiest calisthenics stunts. I needed to lift some iron…

I’m sure I would have gotten though this weakness all right, had I not decided to clean up the barn a little. No one had been to the barn for two years. Since my dad passed away (the barn was his favourite place on earth) no one's had any reason to go there. Being in a strong need of physical exercise, I thought I’d dust the place, clean the cobwebs and so on.

My plans changed almost immediately after opening the barn door. Inside were my old weights from way back in the day when, as a school kid, I’d spend my entire summers in that house and I would work out nearly every day. I’d accumulated a fairly respectable collection of plates and barbells. Nothing too fancy but well enough to crank out a proper workout. Needless to say, I was no longer going to clean the rafters - I was going to get my fix of gym life!

I decided to do shoulders. The reason being you don’t really need more than a barbell and a few pairs of dumbbells to do a good shoulder workout. All I needed was there in front of me. I kicked the barn door wide open to let the air in and got cracking. Because I hadn’t planned to work out that day, I had no carbs in me. This got me a little worried that I might not last the workout, energy-deficient as I was. And here’s the surprise, and the reason I am writing this post: I had an absolutely GREAT workout, the greatest in many months, by far.

I needed to find out why, so that I could repeat this at home. Surely, it couldn’t have just been down to the fact that I was off work - I am off work during weekends all right and I almost never enjoy that level of stamina even if I down a pre-workout. I did some research and shortlisted two reasons which I believe contributed to my super-human powers that day:

Temperature. July is a summer month here and the temperature was around 30 centigrades. I was working out in shade so it wasn’t scorching hot, but the air was pretty warm and, needless to say, the barn wasn't air conditioned. There’s a study I found that talks about there being a positive correlation between outdoor training in warm weather and increased athletic performance. Apparently, exercising in heat improves our ability to regulate body temperature (we’re breaking a sweat much earlier in the workout) which leads to the heart pumping more blood into the muscle. More blood means more strength. The same study also points out that 'heat exposure' training causes the heart to increase oxygen delivery to the muscles. They’re unable to explain why that happens, but a fact is a fact. Speaking of oxygen...

Oxygen. The amount and quality thereof, to be precise. Pure oxygen, a theory says, acts as a natural performance-enhancer and optimal oxygen levels in the blood lead to increased physical performance (and mental clarity). Studies have proven this to be a fact over and over again, even though a scientific explanation as to why that is is yet to be published. Whilst it would be nice to learn the science behind it, the theory in its current shape ties in with my experience so I’m happy with it. The amount of oxygen I was inhaling whilst gasping for air in between sets was much greater than what I normally get when I work out at home or at my local gym. I live in a place that’s notorious for smog. It’s an adorable place but the air is shit most of the year. Not only that. I normally work out indoors, like most of us, and when it’s warm outside we pull the windows down and put on aircon. We end up breathing the same air that goes round in circles. Indoor air - studies say - is twice as polluted as the air outside, so with bad air outside, the indoors becomes an even nastier place. It’s not healthy to even be in, let alone work out in. But it is what it is - you don’t always have a barn at your disposal, the sun doesn’t always shine, the air isn’t always clean and you’re not always on vacation…

So these are the two things that got me an excellent workout. I wish I could do that more often. You though, if you live in a warm place on earth and are able to set up an outdoor gym in your backyard - do it. You will see a massive improvement in the quality of your training, and you will feel great during and after your workout.

I’m sure there’s more benefits to outdoor lifting, too, although they may not necessarily have much to do with physical performance. Google will list things like a good dose of vitamin D (duh), mental stimulation (duh), or an opportunity to make new friends. That last one’s actually true - I made friends with a bat and a family of cats who live in the barn. We’re still in touch and I’m hoping to see them again next year.

But seriously, guys, lift outdoors if you can. It’s awesome.

[littlebiggains]

Photoshop & Instagram. My take on Adobe gains.

I only recently started an Instagram page. I never needed one nor thought I needed one now, but having consulted a few people I trust, I understood that if you want to blog about fitness with credibility and/or legitimacy, you should support your content with some imagery. In the era of ‘photo or it didn’t happen’ written content on its own won't do it. It needs visual reinforcement. Having fallen into this trap myself a couple of times, I couldn’t argue. So there, I’m on Instagram...

The first thing I did after signing in was search for profiles similar to where I thought I was going with mine. I saw plenty of badly Photoshopped locker-room selfies. Some were so sloppy they made my eye twitch. People tend to make their body parts abnormally huge or small to emphasise a feature but end up looking like victims to all sorts of extraordinary deformities. One guy is notorious for shrinking his waist with the Liquify tool (Photoshop>Filter>Liquify…) beyond what I’d consider aesthetically acceptable. Browsing thorough his posts is like watching a 16th-century freak show. It’s not impressive, dude - it’s pitiful. Clearly you have no clue about how human anatomy works. Also, when making your side deltoid look bigger, don’t warp the freaking background! Did you think I wasn’t going to notice?

Having spent over a decade in various design jobs, I was really annoyed to see this. I’m not expecting Instagrammers to be able to use Photoshop on a pro level, but if they could at least show some respect for human biological characteristics and not embarrass themselves in front of their audience.

And then, there is ‘covert’ fakery. You see, when someone sucks at Photoshop, at least they're obvious. But when they know what they’re doing, you’ll struggle to spot the enhancements unless you know the various tricks of the trade. Most followers on Instagram do not have a design background to prevent them from accepting things at face value. As such, they are fairly easily fooled into believing in the superhuman achievements they’re shown. This is actually worse that an amateur playing with Liquify for the first time. It’s worse because it’s a sneaky and sophisticated tactic aimed at deceiving people for clicks.

But that’s the Internet. Not much you can do. So I thought I’d whip up a quick video to show how some of the basic photo-manipulation techniques can enhance an otherwise very dull picture:

You can see in the Photoshopped one I’m broader across the chest, leaner, and generally more fierce-looking (I think the tattoo helped - I’m actually thinking about getting inked now). I’m a proper gym bro in that pic, too, and I am actually at the gym as opposed to my laundry room with a single lightbulb dangling above my head. So there you have it. Who knows, maybe this will help you spot and expose those Adobe gains next time you see them online.

[littlebiggains]

400 pushups a day. Pointless?

I may have said this before - I think the various fitness ‘challenges’ on social media these days are pretty stupid. People will put their nervous system though a completely unnecessary ordeal, potentially causing a number of negative side effects. I also hate it when people do stupid things for views, which I think those challenges a really for. Predominantly, if not exclusively.  

I’ve seen a few before-and-afters, mostly on Youtube. A few looked legit and those were the ones where you’d see next to no effects, no matter how hard they tried with different light angles and so on. One guy went beast mode and did a thousand reps a day of various exercises. He pretty much spent a month not doing much else but this every day. After 30 days, having drained himself of energy, he lost a little fat, fried his pecks and shoulders causing them to shrink noticeably, and set himself up for two weeks of recovery during which he probably put all that fat back on, plus a bit extra. He never reported on the aftermath. I’m really not sure if the views ever paid off…

But certainly the most popular challenges are pushup challenges. Again, results are either barely noticeable or fabricated. There’s a video with over 7 million views that’s so obviously fake it hurts. It shows a 30-day transformation from 300 pushups a day. If you compare the before and after photos, the guy not only got 10 years older in a month but apparently also had a turbulent relationship with anabolic-androgenic vitamins somewhere in the interim. Definitely the longest 30 days in history...

But fakes aside, there are a number of genuine-looking result videos that make you question the whole idea. None or hardly any positive effects, so why bother?

Well, I’ve dug around and there seems to be some science to justify it. Bodyweight pushups may offer no progressive overload, but by doing high-rep sets on a daily basis you are inevitably going to create some metabolic stress and mechanical damage to the muscle, both of which are growth mechanisms. So, in theory, if I were to knock out a couple of hundred pushups everyday, alongside my regular workouts, I should be creating new myonuclei in the muscle. Those, in turn, should afford me some extra gains from my normal chest routines once I’m done with the ‘challenge’. So maybe, just maybe, that additional stress over a period of a month or so is not that pointless after all?

It is one of my life rules to not discount things up front until you’ve either done some quality research on them or self-tested them. Or both. I therefore thought to myself I’d give this one a try. My kid’s away on summer holidays for a few weeks - I’ve got some extra time. Repping out pushups isn't probably the best use of that time, I know, but I’m quite good with pushups so that shouldn’t be too much of a hassle. As a matter of fact, I’ve already started doing this. It’s day 4.

[littlebiggains]

Sperm shakes for gains!

I sometimes read popular fitness forums. Some threads can get pretty damn eccentric. Recently, I stumbled on one that got me a little perplexed.

Allegedly, so the story went, there’s this hype among gym bro in the US to drink your own semen which is purported to act like a natural steroid. I googled the subject and found a ton more threads where guys would not only theorise about it but also describe the actual experience and its supposedly fabulous physique enhancing effects. Basically, right after your workout you go to the bathroom, jerk off directly into your post-workout shake and down it. And bang! - you get jacked.

I kept reading in hope of finding out the bro science behind it. Reportedly, a load of cum is believed to contain approximately 30-40g of fast absorbable protein as well as an impressive dose of testosterone. One guy wrote he drinks it every day now and it’s working just as good as regular testosterone injections. Make a statement like this on a bodybuilding forum and next thing you know there is a long line of guys ready to try this…

As an open-minded adult, I am not shocked or scandalised by this, although - admittedly - I am a little embarrassed to be part of the same breed of natural lifters. If drinking sperm is your thing, I’m not going to judge you. Neither is this the first time the ‘industry’ comes up with an extravagant dietary hack. I remember reading an article by a real doctor wherein he’d advocate drinking one’s own urine for health benefits. Personally I think that a nutritious diet and regular exercise will afford you much greater and longer-term health benefits than if you were to drink pee every day… But what do I know, I’m not a doctor.

Drinking your own cum though… Come the fuck on! Unless you’re intellectually challenged, you know that ‘test’ cannot be absorbed via oral ingestion! The liver will deactivate it (to its own detriment, I might add, as it will get badly toxicated while doing so). Neither is there really that much protein in your sperm. An average ejaculate contains less protein than a small egg white (I don’t know about you but I’d just have an egg instead…).

It amazes me how gym bro will indiscrimately accept any kind of bullshit that promises steroid-like effects. You can perpetuate literally any kind of idiocy as long as you provide a credible account of its amazing effects on you.

Ridiculous as it is, it kind of struck me with an idea. What if I signed up to a bunch of mainstream bodybuilding forums and started to talk about how reading Harry Potter novels leads to rapid muscle growth. Think about it… What if reading Rowling’s prose caused the brain to mobilise an enzyme that acts upon the testosterone substrate in a way which alters its molecular composition, effectively causing testosterone to multiply itself irrespective of your age or nutrition, and that this process was intensified by compound movements such as the barbell squat. Moronic (and scientifically incorrect) as it sounds, I am willing to bet that sometime after that, somewhere at your local gym, you’d see a guy thumbing through the Goblet of Fire at the squat rack.

And what if I gave that enzyme a scientific-sounding name and hit the forums again, this time equipped with a made-up study (no one ever verifies those) which ‘proves' that the very same enzyme it activated each time you do something good in life, like fix the picket fence or help your ma with groceries. I mean, if vanity-driven gullibility is apparently powerful enough to make dudes do stupid and disgusting things, why would it not be used to make them do good and productive things instead…  

In summation, drinking your own produce (or - indeed - anyone else’s) is not going to get you big and shredded. There are no natural steroids. Anyone who’s ready to do idiotic things like this in chase of muscle growth needs to seriously rethink their goals and priorities. I’ll say it again - natural bodybuilding is a life-long journey and size isn’t even the be-all and end-all. The appreciation of this comes with age, I guess. So if it takes those kids gallons of sperm shakes sent down their throats, so be it. After all, a lesson is always a lesson.

[littlebiggains]

Home gym gear worth getting

I had this idea to write a post about the various home-gym paraphernalia which I have used and consider worth owning. I took a look around my lifting corner and noticed there’s quite a lot of stuff I’ve collected over the past months and years. Certainly too much to review in a single post. I will bring up a few must-haves down here and perhaps follow this up with a shame list of what turned out to be a total waste of dime and space.

Actually, ‘review’ isn’t the best word choice, let me take that back. I will not be reviewing anything per se, so much as mentioning the items which - in principle - meet the criteria of being functional. Why would you want to read this? Well, not all of these things are cheap so a practical opinion might come in handy before you decide on a purchase. A bit of a disclaimer up front - I have absolutely nothing to do with whoever manufactures these so if there’s a label in the photo, that’s purely because I happen to have bought it from that manufacturer. I’m not going to discuss which brand it better then the other. Quite frankly, I don’t care who makes them. Let’s cut to the chase:

Soft ball. An absolute staple. If you don’t own one - get one. It’s cheap. You can use it for a lot of things, which is kind of the point when you’re building a home gym. I use it for core exercises like planks or pikes. I’ve made tremendous progress in that department since I dumped crunch-intensive routines for exercises that utilise the ball a lot. A tip here though, the balls come in various sizes. Get the medium one. Large balls will make your pikes and planks too easy. I own one small one too but, to be honest, I got it by mistake and I can’t find much use for it.

Bosu. These can get a bit pricey for some reason but they’re definitely worth owning. They’re great for 'heals to the heaven' type of ab workouts but also as a replacement for a bench. Depending on the position at which you rest your back on a bosu, you can emulate various degrees of an incline bench as well as the flat bench. You can then do heavy dumbbell presses without a spotter (which is rather important for a lone lifter) because the leg-assisted initial press is just so much easier to execute when you and the dumbbells are all lying on the floor to start with. Excellent for chest fly’s, pullovers, and more.

Pull-up bar. I got a free-standing one because I didn’t want to drill any holes. This one’s a definite must-have. I use it for back exercises, bicep and core. It’s also just the right height to anchor a band and do some tricep pushdowns. Getting the pull-up bar was a real game-changer for me. It's an excellent trap and bicep builder, not to mention the hanging leg raises that punish the lower abs like no other exercise.

Dip bars. I could have gotten the more sturdy ones but these get the job done nonetheless. Actually, wobbly as they can get, they enforce a lot of discipline when doing weighted dips. If you swing too much you may topple over. Which is something I really don’t want to do, especially when I have a 40lbs plate dangling between my legs. So I keep my form impeccable and it servers me right.

Bench. This one here was really cheap. It’s not much to look at but it’s got everything I need in a bench. It supports me plus an additional 230lbs of iron. I don’t do barbell bench presses at home so 230lbs is already way in excess of what I need. This one cost me something in the region of 40 USD, delivery included. It’s also pretty light and easy to move around and quickly adjust to my workouts... [read on]

Bands. I could not imagine a home gym (or any other gym, for that matter) without resistance bands. These guys are absolutely constitutional. You want them. In fact, you want as many of them in your kit as you can get. I could write a book about why bands are the cornerstone of any training facility. Long story short, they are 3-dimensional. Unlike weights, which only succumb to the vertical force of gravity, bands work in all vectors. As do your muscles. It’s like yin and yang. You have to contract the muscle to stretch the band, and stretch the muscle to allow the band to contract. You can train all muscle groups with bands. You can do heavy compounds as well as isolation movements. You can take your bands with you on a business trip or holiday. Contrary to popular belief, you can build muscle with bands. In fact, a number of exercises are considerably more effective when performed with bands than weights. But the best thing about bands is that you can double-whammy the effectiveness of your training by combining weights with bands. At some point I will write a post about how doing a few sets of band-resisted dumbbell fly’s for the first time afforded me the craziest pump ever and left my upper chest sore for nearly two weeks. If you can only get one thing from this list, make it a good kit of resistance bands.

EZ bar. Excellent for bi’s and tri’s. I frequently suffer from tendonitis around my elbow joints and this one makes bicep curls nearly completely pain-free. It’s light (approx. 12lbs) so you can also use it as a portable grip when doing rows or tricep pushdowns with a band. I love rowing with it - it offers many grip options, underhand, overhand, narrow, wide, you name it. All in all, a pretty multi-functional utensil, definitely worth your nickel.

Plates with grip handles. Unlike standard cast plates, these guys are extremely easy to move, load and unload. The speed of handling your plates makes an incredible difference when doing high-intensity volume training, like when you have to quickly switch weights in the middle of a time-boxed cluster set. Also, I’ve found these to be a lot more comfortable when used as a replacement for dumbbells when doing shoulder lateral raises, front raises, overhead tricep extensions or pullovers. Very multifunctional. Totally worth it.

Ab slings. These enable me to do hanging leg raises with ease, which is probably the best lower ab exercise humanity has invented so far. Before I got these I would just grab the bar and go about my set. Unfortunately, my grip would fatigue before my abs would and block me from ever doing enough reps to actually flare up the muscles I was trying to work. Ab slings took grip strength out of the equation and allowed me to focus on contracting my abs. This was a massive improvement, trust me. You will see the results pretty quickly.

Lifting hooks. Another gadget I didn’t think much of until I tested it. Hooks are incredible strength boosters in pulling movements. They fortified my grip so much that I was able to double the weight on the dumbbell row. They also instantly enabled me to do more weighted pull-ups, effectively leading to a very noticeable size increase in my traps. Overall, my back training became more comfortable, enjoyable, and effective. Get lifting hooks. They’re a small (and cheap) improvement that goes a very long way. Easily the most practical and powerful gym gizmo you can get for less than 20 bucks.

Kettlebells. These definitely belong in the hall of fame of fitness equipment. Dumbbells may rule the roost but - truth be told - some exercises typically performed with dumbbells are actually much more effective when performed using kettlebells. Usually associated with freaky crossfit swings, kettelbells don’t seem to have much of a reputation in bodybuilding. Wrongly so. I use kettlebells for bicep curls and the pump I’m getting is simply unachievable with dumbbells. It’s because kettlebells enforce a certain form. Your grip is fully supinated throughout the movement and you keep your wrist bent back to keep the kettlebell from bouncing off your forearm at the top of the curl, which is seriously painful. Continuous supination and back-bent wrists will guarantee a supreme squeeze in the bicep, like something you’ve not experienced before. It’s pretty damn effective, too. There’s a ton of other exercises you should be doing with kettlebells, simply because it’s more comfortable that way. So whilst kettlebells could not fully replace dumbbells, they are an excellent (and affordable) addition to your gym arsenal.

Weight belt. I suffered from a back injury last year and I have to be cautious with things like rows, squats or overhead presses. The belt helps a great deal. It feels comfortable and safe. I got a small carabiner too which I use to attach weights to the buckle when doing weighted dips. This belt was dirt cheap. It uses a velcro type fastener which makes it quick and easy to put on and off. Another significant improvement you can get for next to nothing.

Power pads. I use these when doing bodyweight pull-ups or chin-ups where they magically reduce the discomfort of a bare-handed grip. Excellent for weighted dips, too. Or exercises that involve grabbing a band. Or when you’re doing pushups (especially wide pushups) on a slippery floor. Not recommended for heavy dumbbell/kettlebell curls because they increase the diameter of the handle which makes it harder to control the weight. Otherwise very useful and easy to handle. Much more so than gloves.

Slides. These are pretty interesting. I nearly never use them at home but I always take them on the road. They are the dream of portable fitness gear come true - they weigh nothing and take up next to no space. Yes, you could use towels or a t-shirts or any other type of cloth instead but what if there’s a carpet in the room? Slides will slide on virtually any surface. And the number of pike variations they will allow you to do is almost limitless. These guys -accompanied by 2 or 3 bands of various resistance and a door anchor - form my portable gym set which I always take with me when traveling for business or leisure. I can do any workout using this set, pretty much anywhere. They weren’t cheap but they’re an excellent workout enabler and really worth their price.

Floor mat. Another essential tool for anyone who is into fitness in some way. Even if you’re not doing crunches (I nearly stopped completely, in favour of more vertical core routines) you will want a mat for stretching. And if you don’t stretch, stretch. Start today. I made the mistake of not stretching a few times and always regretted it. Make sure the mat is thick and firm. A good mat may cost a good penny, but it’s money well spent.

Band accessories. These guys are very useful. Particularly the door anchor. It allows me to attach my band/s at the desired height, pretty much anywhere there is a door of some kind. Like a hotel room. Handles further expand my possibilities. These types of paraphernalia are usually included in a band kit but if you’re buying bands individually as opposed to in a kit, consider getting these extras.

So this is it, for the time being. If anyone’s read the whole post and made it to here, please let me know of any other home gym equipment you are using and finding effective. I’d love to give it a go.

[littlebiggains]

What I’ve learned from Youtube fitness

‘Youtube fitness’ is a challenge to all conventional definitions of fitness. It is a category on its own and a whole different ball game. On the face of it, Youtube fitness teaches us how to be ripped and strong and healthy. But look a little closer and it becomes a bustling microcosm of the modern society that provides a riveting daily account of its current condition. Like many of us, I first turned to Youtube fitness for advice on lifting and nutrition. What I’ve found there exceeded even the wildest expectations. This post will sum up some of the lessons I’ve learned...

Lesson 1. Youtube fitness is a parade of egotism and idiocy. Sometimes it takes a few videos to know you’re dealing with a moron; other times it only takes a few seconds. Some Youtubers are hilariously clueless, some dangerously delusional, some will expose the cluelessness and delusion and turn it into comedy. Some are straight up demented... 

There’s also a good deal of opportunism and hostility in the mix. Personal attacks are frequently used as a traffic-boosting tactic. It is almost fascinating to watch people fight their little virtual wars, get triggered and sport verbal abuse against each other, dog on each other, have each other’s videos taken down, and so on. A 'diss’ video usually sparks a response video, and on it goes. At the end of the cycle there’s often an apology video. It’s like show business or politics - repetitive and predictable but at the same time oddly entertaining. And just like in show business or politics, a legitimate specimen is an extreme rarity. Thankfully a handful of them exist and are deservedly doing pretty well.

Lesson 2. Youtube fitness is full of bullshit advice, bullshit stories, bullshit products. After years of training, when you’ve gotten to understand that bodybuilding is a long-term game, to spot a mercenary with an agenda becomes a lot easier. The word ‘shortcut’ makes me cringe because I know there are no shortcuts unless via the syringe. But I wasn’t always like that. An eon ago when I was starting my adventure with fitness I was so gullible I’d probably pay for a sham program it if was packaged nicely. Thankfully there was no Youtube. There wasn’t even the Internet. On the bright side though, there is some legitimate advice on Youtube, too, but it does take a little bit of experience and critical thinking to spot the real deal.

Lesson 3. Youtube fitness is a business and businesses exist to make money. You must invest to get a return. By the laws of economy, the amount of money spent on producing a professional video is in inverse proportion to the value of information that video contains. It’s logical - you don't spend a fortune on advertising a product only to give it away for free afterwards. A professional crew, expensive light rigs, cameras for A-roll and B-roll, post-production - that’s a king’s ransom right there! The outcome is simply a prestigious-looking sales pitch (which is still just a sales pitch) aimed to create an impression of credibility and lure you into signing up for paid content.

Lesson 4. Youtube fitness rails against bro science but has little to offer instead, other than more bro science dressed up in sophisticated terminology. Most Youtube nutrition tutors and health experts could not answer a simple practical question. The advice is often chaotic and self-contradictory but when it is delivered in a confident manner by a guy wearing a white coat, it sure makes an impact. Sadly, the question in the title of the video hardly ever gets answered. The idea is to confuse you with vague collateral (loosely related to the subject, at best) and keep you coming back in search of answers.

Lesson 5. Youtube fitness insists on busting myths but all it does is introduce more myths. I’ll give you an example. I’ve seen videos discrediting bulking and cutting as a myth. During a bulk - so the argument goes - you’re gaining muscle but you’re also gaining fat, while during a cut you’re losing fat but also losing muscle. At the bottom of the balance sheet you’re back to where you started. That’s just silly! Fat loss is much easier and happens quicker than muscle breakdown. Plus, if you keep your routine going and ensure proper nutrition, the muscle will stay, guys. Some of the muscle glycogen will wear off and you may look a little less bulky, but you will retain the muscle. You will actually become more defined and vascular, and overall more shredded-looking. 

Another example of a myth that Youtube is so eager to bust these days is the myth of overtraining. I see plenty of buff guys on there explaining to me how I’m never going to reach overtraining because overtraining is reserved for a small percentage of high-performance athletes who train extremely hard for hours every day. Oh, really? What about hormones? Each day of the week I spend 10 hours at work absolutely grilling my nervous system, which elicits the same type of stress response as does hours of training. And I do that even before I even get to the gym! So yes, I am very much at risk of experiencing overtraining symptoms, people. And so are you. You don’t have to be a professional athlete for that. I am producing cortisol like crazy for 13 to 14 hours each day, sometimes longer. It adds up!

Lesson 6. In an endless chase for click traffic, Youtubers will focus their videos on what’s popular at the time, as opposed to what’s important or valuable. Whenever a trend comes along everyone will rush to make videos about it. If you don’t offer an opinion on a popular subject your subscribers may ditch you for someone who does. And if there’s little to no research on the subject and you’re not willing or smart enough to investigate it yourself, just rip off what others did. Don’t forget to sound like you’re the smartest guy in the room. Then upload your video and call it good. A week later you won’t remember what you were advocating. Next time a trend comes along you will make a video on it too. Basically, you’ll keep replicating superficial and unverified information other Youtubers post on their channels. There will be no coherence across your content and you will contradict yourself from video to video. Worse still, you will be using whatever scant information you manage to pick up to support your agenda. That’s opportunism. And a scam.

Lesson 7. There are predominantly 4 types of Youtube fitness personalities. There’s the jacked guy with no fat on him whose looks everybody wants. There’s the blocky natural lifter, strong and intimidating, with excessive fat and barely any definition, whose deadlift is enviable, unlike his physique. There’s the almost muscular, almost shredded guy who looks like any gym debutante after a couple of months of lifting on a junk diet. Finally there’s the smart guy who doesn’t need gains because he has the brains - this one's usually fully dressed, talks like a book and likes to call himself a doctor. The jacked guy - whose bulky frame and chiseled structure are the very embodiment of your dream physique - is the type most of us will want to take advice from, in hope that it might get us his looks. Sadly - and here’s my lesson - this guy is usually on some type of synthetic compound. Whatever he preaches couldn’t work for you, unless you’re part of the Anabolic-Androgenic Syndicate… You want to listen to the naturals even if they look like shit. The nerdy doctor type may need to be taken with an extra pinch of salt though. He can quote from the book but whether he's able to relate that to fitness if he’s never done any serious lifting is another matter.

Lesson 8. Youtube is full of ‘easy' diet and exercise programs, all of which are just as worthless as they are overpriced. The truth is this: any diet or exercise plan that’s not radical is not going to produce noticeable changes. Period. To guarantee results from short- or medium-term moderate-intensity workout programmes and nutrition plans is the epitome of bullshitterism and should ring all your alarm bells. If someone is telling me I can get a jacked chest from doing twenty pushups every day, that’s not just stupid but also disrespectful of my intellectual capabilities, and of me as a viewer. Those 'x pushups a day for a month' challenges and transformation videos are fun to watch but, guys, all of this is hogwash. Muscle takes years to build and it builds in barely noticeable increments. My lesson is to remain consistent, enjoy working out, and take pride in my willpower.  

To sum up, trust no one. There are a lot of channels on Youtube where you can occasionally pick up a good tip but if you’re looking for a game changer you will have to design it yourself. No one on Youtube is always right. Some advice is down right dangerous. There is no 'one size fits all' in fitness. Things that work for Peter may cause Paul a lifelong injury. Don’t take anything at face value. Personally, I use Youtube to collect exercise ideas from a few channels I’m subscribed to. I test them to see what they do to me. If I can get good quality contraction and my joints are generally OK with the movement pattern, I will include the exercise in my repertoire. But never without criticism. I apply a filter to everything I see on Youtube and make my own research outside of it. It’s safest to assume that everyone has a hidden agenda, or some sort of a bias, like when they’re covertly sponsored by a supplement company. I repeat, don’t be gullible. Investigate things yourself. Stay safe. Have fun.

[littlebiggains]

I make gains at home

Training at home isn’t my philosophy - it’s a necessity. I don’t really have time to go to the gym so I built a ‘gym’ in my study. It’s not much equipment-wise but trust me, it gets the job done if you know how to use the gear. I have two spin lock dumbbell sets, a basic curl bar, some plates, a bosu ball, a medicine ball, a pull-up bar, a set of dip parallettes, two pairs of kettle bells, some resistance bands. Excluding accessories like wrist wraps, this is it. All this takes up about 9 square meters of space, including two book stands and a sofa! Not much of a ‘gym', I know, but combined with years of experimentation, this rough set of essentials offers virtually unlimited possibilities when designing workout routines. It’s an excellent time saver versus the gym. And it’s dirt cheap.