Bodybuilding Tips

Know Your Limits

Seriously, know your personal limits. I can't tell you how many times I've seen somebody give up too early or get hurt during training or racing because they simply had no idea what their real thresholds were. The whole idea behind training and/or competing is to push your thresholds to the limits to fulfill your potential. If you don't know what your limits are, how can you possibly know what your potential is

How do you figure out your limits? It's not easy, and it's the #1 reason why people hire coaches. Experiment with training variable until you establish your comfort zone, and then systematically push out of that zone to force adaptation. If you're competing in your comfort zone, then you're not trying hard enough

No Pain, No Gain

You would think that this myth has been beaten to death or at least shooed from popularity, but I hear it surprisingly often from people who honestly believe that they need to kill themselves every day during training to maximize their workouts

Don't do that

Is your resting heart rate jacked up today? Are you too sore from your last workout to walk? Did you only sleep a few hours the last night? Skipped breakfast and lunch? Congrats, you just earned yourself a rest day. In other words - go home. You aren't going to get anything but an increased risk of injury by training in any one of these conditions.

Forget about fighting through the pain

Discomfort is your body telling you that you've stepped well out of your comfort zone. Pain is your body telling you to knock off whatever you're doing. If you're an endurance athlete, listen to it

The Farce Of The Low-Carb Diet For Athletes

True, monitoring carb intake is one of the best ways to play around with your weight, I don't dispute that. I do it myself, and it can be a powerful tool for people who need to lose a significant amount of weight. But the everyman athlete has no need to go bonkers cutting out all kinds of carbs just for the sake of it, because that sort of eating behavior is not sustainable for an endurance athlete

Atkins crazed low-carb lifestyle promoters need to buy a clue. Carbohydrates are absolutely essential to your diet, especially if you're an athlete

There are no such things as good carbs or bad carbs - just too much carbs! If you're an athlete on a low carb diet, you're basically sabotaging yourself. Good luck topping off your muscle glycogen stores by eating a protein and fat centric diet

Put the proverbial fork in this one - this fad diet has finally bit the dust amongst athletes who know better. Next time your spin instructor starts touting the amazing low-carb lifestyle he or she leads, throw your used sweat towel at them and switch gyms

Create Variety In Your Training

Any good training regimen needs to include variables that can be toggled to alter training for specific purposes. A weight lifter, for example, would take into consideration their specific exercise techniques, pounds lifted, sets per lift, reps per set, tempo per rep, rest between reps, rest between sets, emphasis between concentric, eccentric, and/or static contractions, number of sets, set order, supersetting, and so on, ad nauseum

That's a lot to take into consideration, and by adjusting just a few of those variables you can focus your training down to hone in on your strengths or weaknesses

Perhaps most important though, is that creating variety in your program keeps you from getting bored with what you're doing

Obviously though, no matter how many variables you might switch around during, say, your bench press, if you are just plum bored with bench pressing, you're still stuck

So don't be afraid to completely switch around your workouts to keep yourself entertained and sharp. If you're an endurance runner, toss some speed work into the mix, or vice versa. If you're a power lifter, mix in some yoga

Adding variety is the best way to keep yourself on track without getting bored, as well as a great way to keep your body sharp by forcing it to adapt to something new

Always Second Guess Yourself

That's right; always second guess your motives, your training, your goals, and your accomplishments. Keep a running tally of where you are, where you want to be, and what you need to do to get there. Don't kid yourself into thinking you can do this on autopilot - this needs to be a conscious effort

Always ask why. Why am I running stairs? Why am I doing this particular exercise? Why is my 400 meter split time still not improving? Why did my trainer/coach have me do this? (If your coach can't answer this, get a new coach.)

Why did I just eat that whole pizza

You get the picture

You Cannot Spot Check Fat

If I had a nickel for every time I heard this myth, I would be a very, very rich man.

The fact of the matter is that fat goes on to, and comes off of, your body the way it wants to, not the way you want it to. The only way around this is targeted liposuction

A brief, fairly unscientific explanation will do for this one. You cannot work the fat off any specific area of your body because, well, you cannot work fat. People mistake that good old muscle burn for something that magically removes adipose proximally from wherever it burns. Those were your oblique abdominals being worked, not the love handles next to them

There are only two ways to shed those lbs, and they work best in tandem; diet and exercise

Create a reasonable caloric deficit as often as you can while eating in a manner that's in line with your nutritional needs (a third curtain call please for the low-carbers) and get yourself into an exercise regimen that will help you maintain your lean body mass and prevent catabolism