Book Recommendation: Strength Training Anatomy

Strength Training Anatomy by Frederic Delavier

Quite literally the best book out there for anyone interested in strength training, fitness or anatomy in general. 

The book is broken down into target muscle groups: back, chest, legs etc. This latest edition even has sections on stretching and injuries.

Every exercise is broken down in this book with great information and even better illustrations. The last few pages have great illustrations on muscles and the skeleton; listing muscle and bone names. Get clued up on what you're training!


Visit the Books page for more awesome book recommendations! Get inspired.

Mean and Lean HIIT Workout

Hey! So we all want to burn fat in the quickest time possible. Lucky for us, there's HIIT. HIIT stands for High Intensity Interval Training, and there's loads of different styles and variants. But the basic idea is to raise your heart rate with really intense short bursts of physical activity.

So today I'm gonna share with you a really great, quick and simple HIIT workout that is customisable as well.

You will need:

• Yourself
• 20m stretch of area, be it a garden, a field or the street.

To start off with make sure you do a proper warm up and dynamic stretching routine, always train safe.

Mark out your 20m (roughly) stretch, this is your sprinting section.

So here's what you're going to do:

• 10 press ups
• Sprint 20m and back
• 10 jump squats
• Sprint 20m and back
• 10 jumping lunges
• Sprint 20m and back
• 10 sit ups
• Sprint 20m and back
• Rest 30-60 seconds
• Repeat

Do this for 5 rounds. It's going to be tough, but keep it up.

The distance is customisable, if a total 40m sprint is too much, drop it, if it's not enough, raise it.

The exercises and the reps are customisable too, change the rep range up or down and change up the exercises too.

Hope you enjoy this HIIT routine and benefit from it! 

Read our top post: The Misconceptions of Women Lifting Weights

3 Great Exercises for Big Traps

When we think about traps and training traps usually it's shrugs that pops right into your head. While shrugs are a great trap-builder and should be done there are some other exercises which are also great at targeting traps. Here are 3 great exercises for big traps.

Deadlifts

Deadlifts are such a great mass-builder for your entire posterior chain. Part of that chain being your traps. Traps should be trained through different planes of movement and deadlifts do just that. Imagine all the angles of strain your traps are put under throughout the entire movement of a deadlift. From the bent over position all the way through to the upright position.

Cleans

Cleans are definitely an underestimated movement for training traps. It's a powerful movement and involves your entire upper body but especially the traps. I feel the best pump in my traps after a good clean session. The hang, training the traps, the shrugging part of the movent, traps again. The nature of the clean means using momentum as well as strength and power to clean that bar up and as so you can move some heavy weight.

Facepulls

People tend to forget that the traps aren't just the chunky parts at the top, they also connect much lower down the back. They need training on a horizontal plane as well as through the vertical. With the facepulls you should really focus on squeezing at the end of the concentric phase and this will help build thickness in your traps.

I really hope this post has helped you out and given you some tips and idea's to improve your workouts. Please do subscribe to the blog and follow me on social media: Instagram and Twitter.

Most viewed post: Misconceptions of Women Weightlifting

Footwear for Fitness

We should really have different footwear for different types of training and I'll go through what's best for different activities.

Weightlifting

For weightlifting we want to be as stable as possible. Stability comes through the ground, our feet, ankles and all the way up through our body. If the ground we're on is unstable we wobble, we fall and lifting weight is dangerous. So the next link up, our feet, also follows the same rules. If what we wear on our feet is unstable... we wobble, we fall and lifting weight is dangerous.

So bearing this in mind, what kind of shoes are the best to lift in?

Flat and firm soled shoes are best suited to weightlifting. We want to have an unbroken surface area, flat and firm soles, something to feel strong against the ground with.

I wear Lonsdale Leyton shoes. They're nothing special, cheap and cheerful. Comfortable? Yes. Flat and firm soles? Yes.

There's loads of great shoes out there, I'd get some awesome Nike ones but I'm a cheapskate. There are also some great specialized weightlifting shoes coming out, Romeleos and adipowers. These are specifically designed for weightlifting and even give a solid higher heel for those of us with poor ankle mobility. 

Some people like to lift barefooted which I also do enjoy sometimes, but you must put safety first in a gym environment, lots of heavy things being thrown about means please do protect yourself as much as you can.

Running

There are different thoughts on footwear for running. Some people believe a minimal shoe which basically gives the soles of your feet protection and that's it is the best. However, I personally believe that with the impact of running; your feet, ankle joints and knee joints all need a bit more protection. Always go with a proper running shoe, breathable material on top with a 'spongy' heel and sole. It's definitely worth spending a little more money on running shoes, you can't really put a price on healthy joints. 

The running shoes I have are Nike Pegasus 32's, they're really comfortable to run in and give me all the proper protection.

Most specialist running shops, or even some mainstream sport shops, now have treadmills in which measure various things about your gait and running style. They can match you up with the best shoe possible for you.

Thanks for reading! I hope this post has been helpful for you, if it has please do subscribe to the blog and follow me on all the social media stuff. Instagram @neverforgottenfitness & Twitter @NF_Fitness. 

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BodypowerUK 2015: May Mayhem

Image above: Mattdoesfitness and I at the Machine booth.

Bodypower!!!!!!! As part of May Mayhem I hopped on over to Birmingham for Bodypower. I went the previous year as well so I will being comparing the two.

First of all I want to say Bodypower is a great event and I really enjoyed it. I'll go over some good points and bad points of the event but I do definitely recommend going because it is really good.

From Colchester to Birmingham it takes around 3 and half hours, I think we left around 9.30am, I think next year we'll leave a bit earlier or even stay over the night before because there's just so much to see and do that really you do need a whole day or even a couple.

So what is Bodypower? Here's me rambling on, Bodypower is a fitness expo for those of us in the UK. It has hundreds of stalls from food to clothes and of course supplements. There's also bodybuilding shows, talks from fitness superstars and demonstrations from chefs.

What do we all love? FOOD. So what was the food like? Let's just say that weirdly enough (at a fitness expo) it's probably not the most macro friendly day. Lots of burgers, sausages, sandwiches, protein icecream (oh yeh!). Yes, yes, meat is great for the ol' protein, and most was advertised as 'lean' meat etc, but it was all cooked in oil and wrapped in bread haha. Having said that, and again weirdly enough, let's just ignore macros for a sec, the food was damn tasty and let's face it we're there for an awesome day so let's enjoy some awesome food! The queue for Muscle Food was horrendous (well done them for being so popular, I'm a customer and a fan of 'The Diet Kitchen' Simon [who was at the stand] as well), but there was no way I was gonna queue for an hour to get some food. From other stalls I tried a lovely Wild Boar and apple sausage and a really fantastic Ostrich burger. I'd never tried Ostrich before but it was really, really good.

I'm a big fan of a few YouTube channels so I was really happy to meet a few, but I found that a lot of the people I wanted to meet were at the Gym Shark booth. Now, I'm all up for a decent queue, I am British after all, but 4+ hours in a queue to meet someone and have a picture? My god. I decided that I met a lot of them last year so I didn't really need to meet them all again, but we did queue for about half an hour or so so Chloe (my partner) could meet Nikki B.

So if you enjoy a good rant, here's my bad points, but please do bear in mind that I did really enjoy the day (just in case that doesn't come across much).

Gym Shark. Love the products, love the YouTube stars they've managed to attain. But! They have too many big stars at one booth, too many, it's really just greedy. It was a massive and really intelligent move from the Gym Shark owners to target popular YouTubers to rep their gear and to come to expos, but I feel like now there's just too many. People were queueing for hours, 4+ hours, some people were just queueing to meet one person but had to wait to get through everyone else. Stop being so greedy, drop some people and let them go to other stands so people can actually spend the day at different places and get to meet their fitness 'idols' in a normal amount of time. It was enough last year to have Ogus, Guzman and Furious Pete etc, but this year to add the Hodge Twins and Steve Cook? People already queue for hours to meet Steve Cook at the ON stand and the Hodge Twins could probably do with their own stand really.

Ok, so we workout and we wear clothes whilst we workout (most of us anyway), but seriously, anybody with a snazzy logo has decided to make a clothing brand. That's great if it's original, but a lot of the stuff was just copies of the more popular brands (like Gym Shark). I'd say at least 50% of the stands there were clothing brands, repetitive, unoriginal clothing brands (sorry guys), but it gets very, very boring after a while. The problem is if you pay enough you can have a stand and there doesn't seem to be any sort of weeding out process for the 'not so great' stands.

Food stands, I don't know what happened but we went on the 1st day and yet a couple of food stands had already run out of grub! "Hi, can I get a..." Sorry, out of this, that, this, oh oh and that, sorry. It's the first day guys, the first day. Get yourselves together.

Supplement stands. There was a lot of great supplement stands, but what constitutes a great stand for supplement company in the eyes of a consumer? Samples. Samples let us know that you trust your own product. It let's us taste it, see it, smell it. That's how you get us to buy your products. Why would you go up to a supplement company you've never seen and just randomly buy their products? You wouldn't. So I don't know why a few didn't do this simple thing. One stand I was hugely disappointed in was the iSatori stand, it was huge and took up a fair bit of floor space, but they had hardly anything on show, what was on show was so far away from the counter you couldn't see it and there were no samples. I really wanted to try and possibly buy their protein as I'd heard it was pretty good, but ended up walking away.

A great stand: Bulk Powders. Loads of things to try and taste, a vast array of products from protein to pre-workouts and even protein hot chocolate! Interesting products, flavours and you could TRY THEM. Awesome.

I was very unimpressed by the US supplement companies. As in there wasn't many. We live in Britain, we have easy access to all the UK based brands, PhD, USN etc, they're in supermarkets even. We want to buy the stuff we can't get usually, MTS, Cellucor etc. Last year Predator Nutrition had a stand and did have some great US products but I didn't see it this year. The Cellucor stand just had their pre-workout (in one flavour...) and their fat burner, that was it! They have so many products and their protein is AMAZING. Why the hell wasn't that represented? It's a huge event, thousands of people go, and you didn't bring any protein to sell? Bit weird.

I seem to remember last year receiving a 'map' on entry to Bodypower to help navigate around, but not this year, so I did find it difficult to find some stuff. There were some navigation points by a couple of the entrances but some stall weren't in their listed places, helpful. Also, there wasn't a lot of info about time and places for certain events being held, an announcement would've been great, "cooking demo to be held by the blahblah stand in 15 mins", that'd would've been super helpful!

Anyway, as I said earlier, don't let these bad points put you off, it was a really awesome day with much fun to be had! It's an amazing opportunity to meet anyone who you admire or respect in the fitness community, Kai Greene, Dana Linn Bailey, Christian Guzman etc. Branch Warren was just wandering around at one point! I will defo be going next year, I will see you there!

Be sure to go grab your tickets from BodypowerExpo site!

Thanks for reading!

Don't forget to follow on Twitter @NF_Fitness and on Instagram @neverforgottenfitness.

For training in Colchester or surrounding areas visit the Training Services info page above.

Karl

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The Misconceptions of Women Lifting Weights

So many women are missing out on the incredible health benefits that come with lifting weights due to misconceptions that come from friends, family and possibly most importantly the media. We are constantly bombarded with images of overly muscular women and so naturally I don’t blame women for thinking that if they lift weights they will turn into something resembling a she-hulk. However what some women don’t realise is that those images we see of women with incredible bums, lean arms and perfect stomachs that we all aspire to look like actually achieve their physics through weight lifting. Through this post I hope to squash some of the rumours surrounding female weight lifting and hopefully encourage some of you to incorporate weight training into your workouts.

Misconception # 1: If I lift weights I will get ‘bulky’

This is the most common misconception and I hear it all the time. Even my own family ask me; aren’t I scared of getting too big? The short answer, no, no, NO! As females we don’t have the levels of testosterone in our bodies that is needed to support a ‘bulky’ physique. The women we see who are incredibly muscular have either achieved that through years and years of targeted and controlled training or most likely through hormone supplementation. However if you go into the gym and pick up a dumbbell you’re not automatically going to develop huge muscles. Muscle growth is slow and achieved by specific training designed to increase muscle size, so if your not aiming to get ‘bulky’ then you won’t.

Misconception # 2: If I stop lifting weights my muscle will turn into fat

The second misconception that I hear on a regular basis is if I stop lifting weights my muscle will turn into fat. This could not be more wrong. Muscle and fat are two completely different tissues and cannot turn from one into the other. Most people if they stop lifting weights will also stop exercise altogether and so naturally will start to lose muscle and gain fat. This therefore leads to the assumption that it is the muscle turning into fat when in fact it isn’t.

So why should you lift weights?

Bone Health

Weight lifting is the best weight bearing activity you can do. Lifting weights over a sustained period of time increases bone density. This may not seem very important if your between 20-30 however as you age, increased bone density helps prevents conditions such as osteoporosis.

Fat Loss

Many women think that running for hours on a treadmill will burn calories far more effectively then lifting weights. This may be true in the short term while you running. However the minute you stop running you stop burning calories. With weight lifting you’re burning calories while you do it but also because lifting weights involves tearing muscle fibres you will still burn calories when you stop as your body repairs the muscle. As you develop more muscle you will also burn more calories at rest as sustaining muscle requires more energy then fat therefore increasing your metabolism.

Confidence

This isn’t strictly a health benefit however there is something about being able to open that jar by yourself or carry something heavy without having to call on your husband/boyfriend. You’ll also notice that as your physique improves your confidence will improve too, as you feel happier about the way you look.

I hope having read this that I have convinced some of you to start incorporating weight training into your workouts. If I have, make sure you subscribe for handy tips and workout programmes to help you get started. Good luck!

Chloe