Fit and 50

When you’re young, after a workout, you can go to the pub. Watch a game with friends. Head home after, and the next day, be no worse for the wear unless you ended up drinking too much, but no thought of muscle or joint pain. Now us, older guys we go straight home from the gym or in my case, I workout at home, eat and head to bed. The next morning, when we get up, we’re reminded of our workout. The difference is over 50; We may have lost muscle mass, our joints have incurred damage or arthritis, and our circulatory system may be compromised, supplying less nutrient-rich blood to our muscles and slowing waste removal. If you would like help losing excess body fat and building muscle, check out my website https://fitand50.ca/ for information on my personal training services. To purchase the tee shirt and shorts I’m wearing in this video or any Fit and 50 workout wear, click here, https://fit-and-50.creator-spring.com 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 Bells of Steel is a home gym equipment supplier, they have everything from the basics to commercial gym quality products https://www.bellsofsteel.us/#a_aid=FITAND50 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4299735/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5623674/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6341249/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2697134/ https://journals.lww.com/acsm-healthfitness/fulltext/2013/07000/exercise_and_fluid_replacement__brought_to_you_by.3.aspx Today, we’ll look at ways to speed up our recovery, starting with something called the repeat bout effect. If you’ve been training for a while, you’ve experienced this. After your first workout on a new program or if it’s your first time working out in a long time, you’ll have more muscle damage after the first session and less and less on the following ones because the muscle adapts to protect itself from future damage. the more active you are, and the more you use those muscles in day-to-day life the less muscle damage you’ll experience when training. This is another reason why many over 50 need more recovery time than someone younger; they aren’t as active. Active recovery can be done post-workout to aid in flushing out lactic acid and encourage blood flow. You can cycle, do callisthenics or swim anything that is low intensity for 5 to 10 minutes Active recovery can also be done on non-workout days to relieve stiffness and improve blood flow. Again, this shouldn’t be intense. It could be a walk or cleaning the car. Foam rolling has been shown to reduce the effects of delayed onset muscle soreness or DOMS One study I read had them foam roll after 10 sets of squats. They did this right after and again 24 and 48 hrs later, each time for 20 minutes in 5 different locations on the legs and glutes. Finding “foam rolling effectively reduced DOMS and associated decrements in most dynamic performance measures.” Foam rolling isn’t something I do, but it would certainly be worth trying. I use my massage gun on areas that are sore and tight. Some areas are more susceptible to damage than others, such as calves and hamstrings. The research on massage guns and recovery really isn’t there, but they have studied massage, with a meta-analysis published in 2017 finding, “ massage therapy after strenuous exercise could be effective for alleviating DOMS and improving muscle performance. An interesting thing we can do with recovery is compression clothing; they did a study where the participants did squats, lunges, and calf raises with a slow 4-second eccentric or lowering phase while giving them a small electric pulse to intensify the contraction. After comparing their recovery with the control group, the researchers “recommended athletes wear compression tights for faster recovery, particularly after intense exercise with a pronounced eccentric aspect.” water and hydration are the unsung heroes of recovery. The American College of Sports Medicine recommends “drinking 16 to 20 fluid ounces 4 hours before exercise, hydrate according to your thirst during exercise and drink 16 to 24 ounces of fluid for every pound lost post-exercise.” One of the best supplements to help us with recovery is creatine Protein, sleep, including naps, and when you should and shouldn’t use cold water immersion

If you want to build a statuesque Physique that looks like it’s been carved out of stone, then you need to train your whole body with balanced development. If you’re starting out, it can be hard to know which exercises to choose. An excellent place to start is compound movements, although they aren’t always the best choice. For example, shoulder presses are a great exercise but not for everyone. If your shoulder hurts every time you do the movement, then it’s not a good exercise for you. The best way to choose exercises for muscle growth includes understanding what works and doesn’t work for your specific situation. After this, we have to consider the equipment we have, energy levels and movement patterns. 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. To purchase the tee shirt and shorts I’m wearing in this video or any Fit and 50 workout wear, click here, https://fit-and-50.creator-spring.com 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 is a home gym equipment supplier, they have everything from the basics to commercial gym quality products https://www.bellsofsteel.us/#a_aid=FITAND50 Movement patterns are the easiest way to choose the exercises needed for muscle growth, and if you’re a beginner, making sure you’ve included specific movement patterns in your program with exercises you can easily apply progressive overload to is a great place to start. First, we’ll look at push and pull movements, fundamentals that need to be in everyone’s mass gain program. This is where it gets interesting; we can do pushing and pulling exercises at many different angles, each one stimulates the muscles differently. You should generally have a horizontal and vertical push and pull exercise in your program. The shoulder press is a vertical push, and as I mentioned before, not everyone can do a shoulder press; using a neutral grip is easier on the shoulders and will work for some; for others, lifting anything overhead is a problem. This is where isolation exercises like lateral raises come in. Isolation exercises are great for filling in the holes in our training or providing extra work to bring up a stubborn muscle group. To build an efficient workout program, we must understand what muscles crossover from one exercise to the next. For example, the primary muscles involved in the flat bench press are the chest and front delt, with the triceps being worked as a secondary muscle. Compare this to the shoulder press, where the primary muscle worked is the front delt, with the triceps and lateral delts playing a secondary role. Knowing that the front delts are being worked when bench pressing and if you’re doing an incline press, they’re working even harder allows us to make room for a lateral raise, which targets the side delt much better than a shoulder press. So, how would we put this into a program? I’d set it up as an A and B workout with bench press in workout A and shoulder press in workout B. If you can’t do shoulder press, then I’d switch it out for an incline chest press to target the upper chest and front delt more. The steeper you set your bench, the more the front delt will be working and less upper chest involvement. Usually, I have mine at a 30-degrees, but if you want more front delt engagement, increase it to 45. I haven’t forgotten about lateral raises. I’d put these towards the end of a workout. Now, let’s talk about pull exercises; we’re looking for a horizontal and a vertical pull. Bent-over rows or seated cable rows are good examples of a horizontal pulls, with pull-ups and lat pull-downs being examples of vertical pulls. Horizontal pulls are often called back thickening exercises as they primarily hit the traps, rear delts and lats. The secondary muscles worked are biceps, low back and rotator cuff. Vertical pulls are a superior lat exercise as they work the lats through a full range of motion. Again, there are other angles we can perform pull exercises at. One example is the 45-degree elbow out row, the best compound exercise for hitting both the lateral and rear delts. Another movement pattern that’s a must is a hip hinge. The most common is a deadlift; although a hip thrust would work in this category, too. Let’s talk a little bit more about isolation exercises. Even though biceps, triceps, abs and calves will be worked as secondary muscles with these compound movements, you’ll find to get that Greek god Physique; they’ll need to be worked on their own as well. You’ve probably noticed I missed the most important movement pattern, and that’s Squats

https://rumble.com/v3a708l-build-muscle-faster-according-to-science-steroid-free.html Mike Mentzer has made a permanent mark on the fitness community, especially with his high-intensity training system called heavy-duty training. Today, we’ll look at how he developed this system, as he didn’t always train this way. He first started training at the age of 11, working out 3 times a week, probably full body workouts as that’s what was typical back then. Once he was old enough, he joined the Air Force; it was here that he started training 3 hours a day, 6 days a week, nothing like a high-intensity program. It was in 1971 that his thinking on the best way to train started to change. 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. To purchase the tee shirt and shorts I’m wearing in this video or any Fit and 50 workout wear, click here, https://fit-and-50.creator-spring.com 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 is a home gym equipment supplier, they have everything from the basics to commercial gym quality products https://www.bellsofsteel.us/#a_aid=FITAND50 https://archive.org/details/hight-intensity-training-the-mike-mentzer-way-with-john-little/page/n217/mode/2up?view=theater 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://www.facebook.com/116733248412758/photos/a.758901990862544/2420562384696488/?type=3 http://www.caseyviator.com/flexarticle.pdf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Mentzer#:~:text=It%20was%20during%20this%20time,won%20the%20Mr.%20Lancaster%20contest. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9068575/ https://physicalculturestudy.com/2014/12/29/how-to-gain-63-pounds-of-muscle-in-28-days-the-infamous-colorado-experiment/ https://houseofhypertrophy.com/high-intensity-training/ It was at the AAU Mr. America competition where Mike suffered his worst defeat ever, finishing 10th. The event was won by none other than Casey Viator who, a few years later, would be part of the famed Colorado experiment. Mike met Casey and learned how he was training with these very high-intensity workouts that were only 20 to 40 minutes long—training almost exclusively on Nautilus equipment designed by Arthur Jones, who’s the originator of this training style. I want to comment briefly on the Colorado experiment conducted by Arthur Jones in 1973, where they took a detrained and dieted-down version of Casey Viator. According to Bill Pearl, Casey weighed 218 lbs at the Mr. America contest in 1971. Casey said in a Flex magazine article, “ I really had to diet hard to get my body weight down to 168 pounds before the Colorado experiment, but when we finished it 28 days later, I gained 45 pounds of muscle; we calculated that my diet before the experiment was less than 800 cal per day.” The claim was made that while he had gained 45.28 pounds of body weight, he also lost 17.93 pounds of body fat, making the muscle gain 63.21 pounds—an insane amount for only one month of brief, intense training. Casey had incredible genetics along with muscle memory aiding him in this feat; it was stated he didn’t do steroids during this month. But I have no idea how past steroid use would have affected this result. All of this brings into question how well it would work for the average guy, but Mike Mentzer saw something in this training style and worked to perfect it. One of the big things about this program and Mike’s heavy-duty training is intensity, and I’ve often said volume without intensity is a waste of time. High-intensity training is one set to failure, usually with a couple of warm-up sets done first. They did a meta-analysis on the “ effects of resistance training performed to repetition failure or non-failure on muscular strength and hypertrophy,” finding “ there was no significant difference between resistance training to Failure versus non-failure on strength and hypertrophy.” Many of the studies in this analysis had the non-failure training done within one to three reps of failure. Even if you choose not to train to failure, you still need to train close to failure within 1 to 3 reps, and how would you know how close to you are if you have never trained to failure? There’s merit to training to failure, at least some of the time There’s a meta-analysis focusing on weekly training volume where 14 of the 15 studies compared doing one set to three. Finding “a graded dose-response relationship whereby increases in resistance training volume produce greater gains in muscle hypertrophy.” The reality is the more frequently you can train a muscle and fully recover between sessions, the quicker you’ll build muscle.

Strength and hypertrophy or muscle growth will always be connected, but how you train for each isn’t exactly the same. This is why a guy like Richard Hawthorne, standing 5’3” and 132 lbs, can deadlift 610 pounds 4 times! There is a genetic component here, too, but strength and muscle mass aren’t directly proportional and depending on how we choose to train, we can emphasize one over the other. Strength training involves our nervous system, and through neuromuscular adaptations, our nervous system becomes better able to communicate with our muscles to produce movement and create force. This allows us to increase the weight we’re lifting without increasing muscle size, which happens much slower than our ability to increase strength. Especially when we first start training. Link to limited edition FortisFights hoodie available only until August 20, use my affiliate code FITAND50 for 15% off; https://www.fortisfight.com/product/fortis-predator-hoodie/ 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. Bells of Steel is a home gym equipment supplier, they have everything from the basics to commercial gym quality products https://www.bellsofsteel.us/#a_aid=FITAND50 The muscle tee I was wearing in this video was 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. To purchase Fit and 50 workout wear, click here, https://fit-and-50.creator-spring.com Richard Hawthorne deadlift https://youtu.be/FkRkPigvO9Y Strict curl https://youtu.be/1Sc7YdN_Mvk The average guy who lifts weights wants a bit of both. He wants to build some muscle and get stronger. But when taken to the extreme, you get powerlifting on the strength side and bodybuilding with muscle growth. One of the most significant differences is strength training focuses on a few compound lifts, primarily the squat, bench and deadlift, as these are the main competitive lifts. I would add to these bent-over rows and shoulder press. There’s a strict curl competition where you curl the heaviest weight you can for a single repetition with your back up against a wall using perfect form. this is a strength competition, although, in general isolation movements like curls, leg extensions or lateral raises are more associated with muscle growth. Compound lifts are the foundation of any good program, whether strength or hypertrophy-focused. The difference comes in the intensity, which refers to how heavy you lift. Strength training is done heavy and low rep, typically in the 1 to 5 range, using 85 to 100% of your one rep max. When your goal is muscle growth, you’ll train with higher repetitions in the 6 to 15 range, but it could be as high as 20. You’ll want to work within 1 to 3 reps of technical failure, which is the last rep you can do with perfect form. You’ll get stronger within this range, but there is no need ever to attempt a one-rep max. Progressive overload is something both strength and muscle growth share, especially on compound movements. Many strength-focused programs do this by linear progression, where you try to increase the weight every workout and keep the number of repetitions the same. Double progression is more common with hypertrophy programs, where you’re either attempting to do one more repetition than last time or adding weight to the bar. Bodybuilding programs have higher training volumes and accomplish this by doing a wider variety of exercises and sets. Much of this extra work is done with isolation moves and is often set up to provide added stimulus to bring up a lagging body part. Strength programs will have accessory work, too, but they focus on improving a weak link in a lift; for example, if you’re having trouble locking out your bench press, you might add in floor presses to improve that last part of the movement. The mental focus is different, too, with strength training being about performance, so the focus is more external and on moving the weight from point A to point B. Hypertrophy is more about the appearance of the muscle, and we’ll want to internally focus, feeling the muscle working as we do the exercise. This ensures we are working the muscle we desire to target. Diet is important whether you’re strength training or prioritizing muscle growth. The main difference comes down to how lean you want to get.

People trying to build muscle while losing fat can be broken into 3 groups. The first group is overweight and wants to get lean. The second one is guys who are gaintaining, they keep their weight the same while building muscle. Both these groups can build muscle while losing fat. The last group are guys that want to get lean, shredded and see their abs. These guys are going to have a tough time building muscle. Their goal should be to keep the muscle they have while they cut. I was in this group over a year ago when I cut down to about 10% body fat. I did a long slow cut, eating the same types of food I ate before starting, just reduced the amount of carbs and fats while keeping the protein intake appropriately the same I’ve added over 10 pounds of body weight. Now I’m in the second group where I’m gaintaining, and when I see my physique tightening up and my abs becoming more visible, I add in more food and gain a couple more pounds. This works better for experienced lifters than trying to do a true body recomp. 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. To purchase the tee shirt and shorts I’m wearing in this video or any Fit and 50 workout wear, click here, https://fit-and-50.creator-spring.com 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. Are you in the market for a fun way to get cardio in? If you are here is my affiliate link for 30 dollars off and free shipping on a set of 2 heavy jump ropes http://vip.torroband.com/heavyrope/?ref=codd&affId=555B3E5D Bells of Steel is a home gym equipment supplier, they have everything from the basics to commercial gym quality products https://www.bellsofsteel.us/#a_aid=FITAND50 When it comes to foods, you should focus on mainly whole foods; the less processed, the better. You need enough protein; lots of veggies. If you are over 18% body fat, you should go into a calorie deficit, reducing your food intake by 300 to 500 calories depending on how fast you want to lose weight until you reach 13%. Here, you have the option of gaintaining between 13 and 15%, or you can cut right down to 10%, where you can really see your gains and then go into a small calorie surplus until you reach at least 13 to 15% body fat or you can continue to add mass until you’re up to 18% as it’s easier to build muscle in a calorie surplus up to a point. High-protein foods should be prioritized but not over-emphasized, as we need a balanced diet, including all macronutrients. One study on weight loss in athletes found “that 2.3 g/kg or 35% protein was significantly superior to 1 g/kg or 15% energy protein for maintenance of lean body mass in young, healthy athletes during short-term hypo-energetic weight loss.” 2.3 g/kg is just over a gram per pound of body weight. It should be noted that these athletes were already reasonably lean. So, if you are overweight, this will have you eating excessive amounts of protein. You’re better off going by lean body mass. Which is your body weight, less your fat mass or using a percentage of daily calories consumed. The last thing I want to mention in this study is the macro split; we already know it was 35% protein, with the other two macros being divided into 15% fats and 50% carbs. To get a better idea how much protein we should be taking in, let’s look at a meta-analysis that analyzed 49 different studies involving 1863 people. They found that “protein intakes at amounts greater than 1.6 g per kilogram per day do not further contribute to resistance training-induced gains in fat-free mass.” This was in healthy men under 45; for those over 45, they felt there weren’t enough studies done to make a recommendation. 1.6g/kg/day works out to be .73g/lb/day, so if you are under 45, that’s a good number. Because of anabolic resistance in older men, we might want to increase that to a gram per pound, although the research is inconclusive. Personally, my protein intake is about 30% of my daily calories. I would bump the fats to at least 20% to ensure good hormone function. Eventually, I’ll be cutting weight, and the first foods to go are peanut butter and cheese; these foods have a high-fat content but very little food volume, so they don't have much of an effect on fullness. When I cut these foods, and I eat them daily, I reduce my calorie intake by 200 calories a day, and it won’t make me any hungrier. Carbs aren’t something healthy men should be afraid of, and we need to make sure we’re taking in enough to replenish our muscle's energy stores after hard training. So, we’re ready to give 100% in our next workout.

To understand why anyone would ever think doing full-body workouts every day is a good idea, we need to recognize where the theory of frequency training fits into our overall plan to build muscle. To do this, we have to look at the different stages of progressive overload as it goes beyond continually lifting heavier and heavier weights. There comes a point when we can no longer lift any heavier. Then, our only option is to increase training volume; this is often done by adding another set. To keep our workouts from becoming too long, because of these additional sets, we add another training day If we’ve been training whole body workouts 3 times a week, we might go to 4 days and switch to an upper lower body split. This allows for more weekly training volume, but it reduces the training frequency of each muscle from 3 times to 2 times a week. With volume being a major driver of hypertrophy, does the reduced training frequency matter? To answer this, we must examine how long muscle protein synthesis is elevated in experienced lifters. Muscle protein synthesis is a metabolic process where amino acids from protein are produced to repair and build muscle tissue damaged from exercise. 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. To purchase the tee shirt and shorts I’m wearing in this video or any Fit and 50 workout wear, click here, https://fit-and-50.creator-spring.com 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. Are you in the market for a fun way to get cardio in? If you are here is my affiliate link for 30 dollars off and free shipping on a set of 2 heavy jump ropes http://vip.torroband.com/heavyrope/?ref=codd&affId=555B3E5D Bells of Steel is a home gym equipment supplier, they have everything from the basics to commercial gym quality products https://www.bellsofsteel.us/#a_aid=FITAND50 https://paulogentil.com/pdf/Frequency%20-%20The%20Overlooked%20Resistance%20Training%20Variable%20for%20Inducing%20Muscle%20Hypertrophy.pdf https://mennohenselmans.com/high-resistance-training-frequency-enhances-muscle-thickness-resistance-trained-men/ https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326055694_High_Resistance-Training_Frequency_Enhances_Muscle_Thickness_in_Resistance-Trained_Men https://www.researchgate.net/publication/301578131_Effects_of_Resistance_Training_Frequency_on_Measures_of_Muscle_Hypertrophy_A_Systematic_Review_and_Meta-Analysis For newer lifters or people just getting back to the gym, muscle protein synthesis remains elevated for longer, typically about 48 hours, but it can last up to 72. And these newer ones will progress without needing a lot of training volume. With more experienced lifters, muscle protein synthesis can return to baseline in under 24 hours, which makes the thought of re-stimulating it through another training session appealing. There’s a study that supports this hypothesis. It compared training each body part once a week on its own day to training every muscle group daily for 5 days every week for 8 weeks. Menno Henselmans made a chart graphing the results of this study, and you can see right away the full-body group’s one rep max for the squat improved substantially over the split group while the bench press and row improved at approximately the same amount. Regarding muscle growth, we see daily full-body workouts produced superior progress in the biceps, triceps and quad development. Now what I’d like to see is a study using a five-day upper, lower, push, pull, legs, split where every body part is trained twice a week and compare that to 5 days of full-body workouts. A meta-analysis was done on Training Frequency back in 2016. It found that “the current body of evidence indicates the frequencies of training twice a week promote superior hypertrophic outcomes to once a week.” Still, there’s a lack of research to determine if training a muscle group more than twice a week would bring about even better growth. The study I referred to earlier had them training 5 days straight without a rest day in between. How were they able to recover? The main reason is the volume was lower on each muscle group per workout when it’s split up over 5 days, reducing the amount of time it takes to recover. It makes sense to do like the study and perform a different chest exercise each day to vary the stimulus. If you wanted to add some mid-week recovery, you could take Wednesday off and make Saturday a training day. Even if your nutrition and sleep are on point, there’ll be cumulative fatigue, so if you’re training full body workouts 5 or 6 days a week, you’d want to deload for a week every 6 to 8 weeks.

Today we’ll put together a full-body dumbbell workout that builds muscle. We’ll look at how to adapt it to your fitness level and suggest adjustments to the exercise or what to change if you are experiencing joint pain, as many of us over 50 do. I’ll post the entire workout at the end so you can screenshot it. We’ll start with squats, you pick one of four exercises. If you’re an absolute beginner, start with the low dumbbell sumo squat; this is the easiest and safest variation. The wide stance keeps your shin perpendicular to the floor, reducing knee stress. Having the weight down low reduces the demand on the core and low back. The first progression is the goblet squat, where you hold the dumbbell up in front of you; this increases the range of motion and demands more core stability, although it’s easier on the back than a traditional squat because your torso is more upright. If you maintain a wide stance like with the sumo squat, it keeps the stress off the knees. 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. To purchase the tee shirt and shorts I’m wearing in this video or any Fit and 50 workout wear, click here, https://fit-and-50.creator-spring.com 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. Are you in the market for a fun way to get cardio in? If you are here is my affiliate link for 30 dollars off and free shipping on a set of 2 heavy jump ropes http://vip.torroband.com/heavyrope/?ref=codd&affId=555B3E5D Bells of Steel is a home gym equipment supplier, they have everything from the basics to commercial gym quality products https://www.bellsofsteel.us/#a_aid=FITAND50 https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/17/19/7339 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7449336/ As long as you’re progressing on an exercise, there’s no reason to change it, but if you are training at home, you’ll find; as you progressively overload the movement you’ll end up using the heaviest weight you own and doing so many reps it feels like cardio. At this point, it’s time to change to a harder variation and for squats, I’d recommend bench or box squats. This allows you to use two dumbbells, and because you’re using a bench, it gives you a defined stopping point. If you ever fail on a rep, you just sit on the bench. The key to this movement is to push your hips back as you sit down; this engages the glutes more and protects the knee. An honourable mention goes to split squats, as that’s the next progression, especially if you have limited weight to use. For our chest, the bench press is a staple movement that we can adjust according to our needs. If you have shoulder issues, consider doing a neutral grip press with your palms facing each other. Another thing you can try is setting the bench at a slight 15-degree incline; this puts your shoulder in a more favourable position and increases the difficulty of the exercise, the bonus being increased emphasis on the upper chest an area that’s weak on most guys. For the back, I recommend a chest-supported dumbbell row. These are excellent for beginners, right to advanced lifters; there’s no load on the low back, and they are easy to set up and do. You set your bench on the lowest incline possible so that you can shift from one side to the other to reach the dumbbells, but high enough, they don’t hit the floor as you row. To effectively work our posture chain, it’s essential to learn how to hip hinge, and an excellent exercise for this is the Romanian deadlift or RDL for short. This exercise strengthens your low back, glutes and hamstrings. You move your hips back as you lower the weight until you feel a good stretch in your hamstrings or stop just before your low back starts to round. Then you drive your hips forward as you squeeze your glutes. You can regress this movement by replacing it with a hip thrust off a bench, or you can progress it by either doing a kickstand or staggered stance RDL where you put one foot back behind the primary working leg for stability, or you can take it up another notch and put it up on a bench and do a Bulgarian deadlift. We’ll do another pull exercise next with the 45% elbow out row. For arms, I find hammer curls to be the most elbow friendly. you can do incline curls on a bench set at 45 degrees. This puts the long head of the tricep in a stretched position. I like lying dumbbell triceps extensions in the neutral position. If this bothers your elbow, try adjusting your hand position halfway between neutral and palms up. To advance this move, I’d do a standing dumbbell tricep extension for the extra stretch.

In a discussion about how strong we should be over 50, a man like Mark Felix is a genetic outlier, having in February of this year once again broken the world record for the Hercules hold. He’s such a genetic anomaly that he is nicknamed “The Miracle Man.” Not many of us have the ability to become elite-level strongmen, but even in our 50s, we want to be able to hold our own. But what does the average 50-year-old lift in the gym? Being strong for life entails more than gym lifts, but it’s a good place to start. They can be done in a controlled environment and are relatively safe to do. They’re very measurable, which allows for accurate comparison and goal setting. To test our full body strength, we need a push exercise like a bench or shoulder press. Then we need a pull exercise like bent-over rows or pull-ups. Of course, a strength test wouldn’t be complete without a squat and deadlift. I train with dumbbells, so we’ll look at dumbbell options too. 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. To purchase the tee shirt and shorts I’m wearing in this video or any Fit and 50 workout wear, click here, https://fit-and-50.creator-spring.com 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. Are you in the market for a fun way to get cardio in? If you are here is my affiliate link for 30 dollars off and free shipping on a set of 2 heavy jump ropes http://vip.torroband.com/heavyrope/?ref=codd&affId=555B3E5D Bells of Steel is a home gym equipment supplier, they have everything from the basics to commercial gym quality products https://www.bellsofsteel.us/#a_aid=FITAND50 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. https://strengthlevel.com/ https://youtu.be/06E-0m4bnZQ https://youtu.be/7LDvnw9G2iA https://youtu.be/j0NSF4mVXEs https://www.livestrong.com/slideshow/1009383-9-essential-strength-benchmarks-men/ We’re going to look at beginner, novice, intermediate, advanced, and even elite levels for you hardcore lifters. Mark Felix’s best squat is 770 lbs at a body weight of 310 lbs. which is almost 2.5 times his body weight. Now the general rule of thumb is you should be able to squat twice your body weight, and they give us guys over 45 a break and reduce it to 1.6 times. But is this what the average guy can do? I’d recommend using a weight that has you reaching failure between 5 to 10 reps and take this data to find your one-rep maximum, especially If you aren’t a powerlifter and don’t do single-repetition lifts. I use a one-rep max conversion chart, and if I was to do 9 reps with 200 lbs, I’d times this by 1.30, giving me an estimated one-rep max of 260 lbs. When I tried this, I ended up doing 11 repetitions making my estimated max 286 lbs. You can also use an online calculator, and the one I recommend is found at strength level dot com. One of the things I like about their site is they’ve compiled data from over 93 million lifts that we compare our results to. And this is the best way to see how we match up with the average 50-year-old. You put in your age, weight, choose the exercise you want to compare, how much you lifted and for how many repetitions. As a side note, they have dumbbell exercises for those use the weight of one dumbbell. So my 11 reps with a total of 200 lbs put me in the advanced level and has me lifting more than 82% of the people in my age and weight category. To see how we measure up regardless of weight, we switch to the standards page, where they break down the squat stats by age and experience with 55-year-old beginners, one rep max being between 116 to 169 lbs. Mark Felix’s all-time best bench press was 530 lbs. My estimated one-rep max is only 234 lbs. A man should be able to bench 1.5 times his weight; again, guys over 45 get a break with that number dropping to 1.2. Mark Felix benched 1.7 times his body weight, and I did 1.45, making the younger man's goal of 1.5 times their body weight a great target for me to shoot for. beginners at the age of 55 are benching anywhere from 85 to 127 pounds for a single repetition and intermediates are doing between 179 and 240 lbs. We can also see where we rank on bodyweight exercises; we’ll look at pull-ups because we haven’t discussed a pulling exercise yet. It shows 55-year-old beginners not being able to do a single pull-up, with intermediates doing between 7 to 16 reps before becoming advanced.

The thing about myths is they’re often based on half-truths, and as the story is passed on from one person to the next, the details change slightly; once we’ve heard it often enough, we start to believe it as fact. There are a lot of squat myths and misconceptions, but today we’ll look at 3, including whether or not squats cause hemorrhoids. The first myth; squats are the only exercise you need for your lower body, and they’re often called a whole body exercise. They do work more than just your quads. 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. To purchase the tee shirt and shorts I’m wearing in this video or any Fit and 50 workout wear, click here, https://fit-and-50.creator-spring.com 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. 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 Are you in the market for a fun way to get cardio in? If you are here is my affiliate link for 30 dollars off and free shipping on a set of 2 heavy jump ropes http://vip.torroband.com/heavyrope/?ref=codd&affId=555B3E5D Bells of Steel is a home gym equipment supplier, they have everything from the basics to commercial gym quality products https://www.bellsofsteel.us/#a_aid=FITAND50 One study that compared leg muscle growth after 10 weeks of squats between parallel squats and full-depth squats found that the knee extensor or quads, adductors and gluteus maximus muscles grew in both groups, but the hamstrings and rectus femoris, which is one of the quad muscles didn’t grow at all illustrating the need for more exercises to achieve complete leg development. We can’t forget our calves either; they’re a leg muscle that, again, isn’t sufficiently worked with squats alone. Adding Romanian deadlifts, hamstring curls, leg extensions, and calf raises goes a long way in rounding out our leg training. What about squats being bad for our knees? This comes down to squat form and any pre-existing injuries to your knees. The main form issues are not squatting with your hips back far enough and your knees going too far forward, having your weight shift from midfoot to the balls of your feet, raising your heels off the ground. This less stable position increases your risk of injury, particularly to your ACL or MCL ligaments. This happens when your knees cave inwards. Other causes of this are weak abductors. Most of the time, we can resist the tendency of our knees to cave in by conscientiously focusing on pulling our knees outward as we rise out of a squat. Because we’re talking about knee pain, we think of the knee joint, but a squat involves 3 joints, our hips, knees and ankles, and we need to think about all three when we squat. Trying to keep our knees from going over our toes will affect the other joints and, in particular, are hips, with one study finding restricting the forward movement of the knees on the barbell squat inappropriately transfers the force to the hips and low back. Concluding appropriate joint loading during this exercise may require the knees to move slightly past the toes.” I recently discovered that squats can cause hemorrhoids or plies. And what it comes down to is breathing and bracing technique during the squat. The way you breathe and brace for a high rep squat is different than when doing heavy low repetitions. When we do a higher rep squat, we brace our core; this includes tightening our pelvic floor and glutes. Then we inhale as we descend, and once we reach the bottom, we might hold our breath briefly as we reverse direction and move out of the most challenging part of the squat, then we exhale, releasing internal pressure. With a heavy squat, we do what’s called the Valsulva maneuver This creates intra-abdominal pressure allowing for superior stabilization of the spine, which can cause hemorrhoids, especially when we push out of the bottom position. That’s why we need to brace against it by tightening our pelvic floor and glutes along with the rest of our core muscles. https://academic.oup.com/ptj/article/88/4/427/2742305 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14636100/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31230110/ https://journals.lww.com/nsca-jscr/Fulltext/2010/12000/Squatting_Kinematics_and_Kinetics_and_Their.40.aspx#O4-40-6 https://journals.lww.com/nsca-jscr/Fulltext/2010/12000/Squatting_Kinematics_and_Kinetics_and_Their.40.aspx https://journals.lww.com/nsca-jscr/Fulltext/2013/08000/The_Valsalva_Maneuver__Its_Effect_on.39.aspx

I want to talk about the guys in the thumbnail of this video, myself included. One of the first things you’ll notice is that we’re very lean and shredded. This is different than muscle growth, this is more about displaying the muscle you have, and I can say that I am a good example of how lean you can get naturally over 50, but if your goal is to build muscle, then you don’t want to be this lean. Okay, I gotta talk about Mike O’Hearn. He’s 54 years old, claims he’s natural and has been drug tested a lot; never failed a test, but his fat-free mass index is around 27, which is a full 2 points over what’s considered naturally possible for the genetically gifted, making him a poor example of what the average guy over 50 can achieve. But something that’s a good indicator of how much muscle you can naturally add is health. Maximizing our health reduces the amount of age-related decline we experience, allowing us to build muscle like a much younger man. 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. To purchase the tee shirt and shorts I’m wearing in this video or any Fit and 50 workout wear, click here, https://fit-and-50.creator-spring.com 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. 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 Are you in the market for a fun way to get cardio in? If you are here is my affiliate link for 30 dollars off and free shipping on a set of 2 heavy jump ropes http://vip.torroband.com/heavyrope/?ref=codd&affId=555B3E5D Bells of Steel is a home gym equipment supplier, they have everything from the basics to commercial gym quality products https://www.bellsofsteel.us/#a_aid=FITAND50 Over 50? Age well with these researched backed tips. https://youtu.be/VV2-hfVK_cc Optimize your hormones https://youtu.be/qH9LlK3QJ0Y Genetic muscular potential calculator https://mennohenselmans.com/ffmi-calculator/ https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2458-10-508 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2991130/ https://youtu.be/8w1WTqP7EPc https://youtu.be/AhvuLe2_sNE Before we leave the topic of health, we should talk about testosterone; it’s a primary hormonal driver of muscle growth, and statistically, it goes down as we age. But research is discovering that it’s more connected to health and body composition than age. Again I’ll leave a link in the top comment to a video that explains this. Next, we’ll talk about genetics, including muscle and bone structure. Philip Ricardo Jr is the guy in the thumbnail I haven’t talked about a natural Masters Olympia champion. To compete in the natural Olympia, you must be drug tested and agree to be randomly tested throughout the year to the World anti-doping agency standards. He’s 5’ 9”, and his competition weight is between 175 and 180 lbs., which for a natural, is a big guy. It’s commonly thought African Americans can build muscle better than Caucasians. But is this true? I found a few studies indicating they naturally have more muscle mass, with one study stating it was about 5% more than us white guys. I could only find one study related to muscle growth, and it found no difference between the races' ability to build muscle It could be broken down even further; for example, there is an exceptional amount of strong men that come from Iceland and they have a reputation for being big and strong. Muscle insertions affect how big individual muscles can grow. If you have high calves, it will be much harder to build that muscle. With biceps, when you flex your arm, the less distance between your forearm and where the bicep peak starts, the better your genetics for building big biceps. This can happen with any muscle. Our lats can have high or low insertions, those with low lat insertions are able to build bigger and fuller backs. The good news is just because we have one area that doesn’t have good insertions doesn’t mean our whole body is that way. The larger your skeleton, the more muscle you can build. Casey Butt has done the most research on this and has developed a calculator using our wrist and ankle measurements to help us determine our natural potential. Menno Henselman has a version of the calculator, and I like it the best. I am currently about 13% body fat. my desired fat percentage, 10%. height is 5’9”, I weigh 161. My wrist circumference is 7,” and my ankle circumference is 8.25.” my natural maximum weight would be 183.8 lbs at 10% body fat. I see 165 to 170 lbs at 10% body fat as a more realistic goal, bringing my fat-free mass index in between 22 and 23

There are things about aging that suck. Some people might say everything about aging sucks. The truth is it doesn’t have to, or at least we can condense it so that we have more good years than bad allowing us to truly enjoy life over 50 as we did in our 30s and keep the reaper at bay. Today we’ll look at the research into getting fit and reversing the harmful effects of aging. But first, let’s go through a quick list of everything ageing does to our bodies that exercise can or helps to reverse. 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. To purchase the tee shirt and shorts I’m wearing in this video or any Fit and 50 workout wear, click here, https://fit-and-50.creator-spring.com 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. 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 Are you in the market for a fun way to get cardio in? If you are here is my affiliate link for 30 dollars off and free shipping on a set of 2 heavy jump ropes http://vip.torroband.com/heavyrope/?ref=codd&affId=555B3E5D Bells of Steel is a home gym equipment supplier, they have everything from the basics to commercial gym quality products https://www.bellsofsteel.us/#a_aid=FITAND50 https://diabetesjournals.org/care/article/39/11/2065/37249/Physical-Activity-Exercise-and-Diabetes-A-Position https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6322789/ https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/full/10.7326/0003-4819-147-6-200709180-00005#a1-5 When it comes to our heart, Resting heart rate increases over time; Max heart rate decreases; our ability to pump blood through the body declines; our Heart and blood vessels stiffen, Blood pressure goes up. The intestines take longer to expel waste, our bones lose calcium and strength, and we lose muscle. Our metabolism slows down, we gain body fat, blood sugar and insulin increase, bad cholesterol goes up, and good cholesterol goes down, our sex hormones plummet, our reflexes slow down, a quality night's sleep escapes us, the risk of depression goes up, and our memory begins to fade. Exercise has the power to hold all of these negative effects of aging at bay, and it’s one of the few tools we control in the fight against aging. The first thought that comes to mind is, how much exercise should we be doing and what type? A study compared the “effectiveness of aerobic, resistance, and combined training on cardiovascular disease risk factors.” They took 3 groups of people with an average age of 58. They were sedentary, overweight and with high blood pressure. All groups trained 3 times a week, each session lasting 60 minutes, one doing only aerobic exercise on either a treadmill or cycling; the next group did resistance training starting with 2 sets of 12 different exercises and worked their way up to three sets of 10 to 14 repetitions. The final group did 30 minutes of cardio followed by 2 sets of 8 resistance exercises, with the goal to take every set to failure. Each group had improved health, with the greatest benefits being achieved with the combined cardio and resistance training group; they improved blood pressure, cardiorespiratory fitness and increased total body strength and lean mass. Another similar study was done to see how these same training types, individually and combined affected glycemic control in type 2 diabetes. They found improvements in blood sugar and cholesterol levels with all forms of exercise, but “the improvements are greatest with combined aerobic and resistance training.” To get more specific recommendations, we’ll look at a position statement by the American diabetes association on physical activity and exercise. These recommendations help to reverse the effects of diabetes and heart disease, so they’ll most certainly protect us from getting them in the first place, and the benefits have been shown to go beyond these conditions. For aerobic exercise, they suggest starting with about 10 minutes a day most days and working your way up to at least 150 minutes a week of moderate-intensity cardio. For resistance training, The goal here is to work out at least twice a week doing 1 to 3 sets of 8 to 10 different exercises so that you work the whole body. You don’t have to do all 10 in one session; you could split them into two “A” and “B” workouts You can start with one set of each exercise, and once you have worked your way up to 3 sets on all of them, you can increase your training to 3 times a week. The goal for each set is to bring it close to failure between 10 to 15 repetitions. Once you can do more than 15, you increase the weight.

Squats are considered to be the king of all exercises. So this should be a short discussion, or is it? While the king sits on the throne, those beneath him get the work done. Are lunges one of those unsung heroes working in the trenches helping us reach our goals, and should be legitimized as a prince and a true heir to the throne instead of just being the bastard son of the king? Squats deserve the title of king, but in life, most of our leg movements are unilateral. Walking, running, climbing stairs, jumping, and kicking are the exact movements lunges work. Some of our top reasons for doing resistance exercises are to develop strength, hypertrophy, athleticism and mobility. We’ve already established squats are a bilateral exercise because we use both feet at the same time and equally. In contrast, lunges are unilateral, and we emphasize one leg over the other. Split squats are also a unilateral movement, and we’ll talk about where they fit into the debate. But first, the advantages of bilateral training. 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. To purchase the tee shirt and shorts I’m wearing in this video or any Fit and 50 workout wear, click here, https://fit-and-50.creator-spring.com 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. 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 Are you in the market for a fun way to get cardio in? If you are here is my affiliate link for 30 dollars off and free shipping on a set of 2 heavy jump ropes http://vip.torroband.com/heavyrope/?ref=codd&affId=555B3E5D Bells of Steel is a home gym equipment supplier, they have everything from the basics to commercial gym quality products https://www.bellsofsteel.us/#a_aid=FITAND50 The biggest plus is stability; there’s less of a balance issue, allowing us to lift heavier with a reduced risk of injury resulting in the biggest gains in pure strength and power. This translates well into sports like Olympic and powerlifting or American football. European football, on the other hand, is where lunges wear the crown. Soccer’s a sport that requires a lot of running, which can be strengthened with walking lunges. The ability to change directions quickly? Injury proof this skill with a lateral lunge. How about kicking a ball? Try pendulum or step through lunges. To be fair American football needs all these skills too. The point I’m making is lunges do an excellent job of strengthening us in movement, and as a result, I’d give it top marks for helping us develop athleticism. Start with regular squats or a goblet squat which is one of the easiest squats to master; get comfortable with the movement pattern and range of motion. Most people will always have some form of bilateral squat in their program. Regarding hypertrophy and balanced muscle development, single-leg training is a must. With a regular squat, your dominant leg could easily end up doing more work and, as a result, be bigger and stronger than your non-dominant side. I wouldn’t recommend lunges; this is where split squats come in; even though your feet are staggered, they are stationary, keeping you more stable, you’ll be working your stability and core muscles more than a regular squat, but you can safely load it heavier than a lunge. Since you’re working one leg at a time, you’re using less weight than a regular squat making it easier on your spine. This is also an advantage for guys who don't have that much weight to work with. Make sure you start with your weaker leg and do all your repetitions on one side before resting, then switch to the other leg and match the number of repetitions you did on your weaker side. I rest a minute between each leg. A popular variation of the split squat is the Bulgarian split squat, I favour a regular split squat when it comes to loading heavier and build muscle. The Bulgarian has some unique advantages. One of them is it improves our balance; because of this, I wouldn’t advance straight from a traditional split squat to a Bulgarian. First, I’d go to a reverse lunge; it requires more stability and balance, but it’s easier to perform than the Bulgarian. It’s a great glute exercise because our rear leg is elevated, increasing the hips' range of motion, and it has to work harder to help stabilize the body as it moves. The stretch we get with this extra range improves our mobility too. Elevating our front foot on a step when doing a Bulgarian split squat increases the range of motion even further, allowing us to get our quads below parallel. This also works with a regular split squat.

First, I should say I like the concept of a 5x5 program, and it’s straightforward and trackable system of progressive overload. Currently, I’m doing a dumbbell version and enjoying it. But everything has pros and cons. Some of the criticisms against 5x5s are unfounded, and others are valid. We’ll review these today to help you decide if this training system is right for you. The critique I hear the most is unbalanced volume—too much leg work and not enough upper body. Rows, bench and overhead presses are done 3 times in 2 weeks, whereas squats are done 6 times. 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. To purchase the tee shirt and shorts I’m wearing in this video or any Fit and 50 workout wear, click here, https://fit-and-50.creator-spring.com 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. 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 Are you in the market for a fun way to get cardio in? If you are here is my affiliate link for 30 dollars off and free shipping on a set of 2 heavy jump ropes http://vip.torroband.com/heavyrope/?ref=codd&affId=555B3E5D Bells of Steel is a home gym equipment supplier, they have everything from the basics to commercial gym quality products https://www.bellsofsteel.us/#a_aid=FITAND50 There’s a little crossover between the overhead press and bench—mainly front delt and triceps. For the back, you should have both a horizontal and a vertical pull in your program. Stronglifts does have a couple of exercises you can add after the 8-week mark that help fix this problem. They do it for a different reason, but we’ll get to these exercises in a bit. There’s nothing wrong with starting with 5 movements perfecting them first, then, once you have them mastered, adding in more exercises. I’ve heard that it’s too intense for beginners, and this workout does get intense and isn’t easy. This is why it’s crucial if you are new to start light and perfect form; even videotape yourself to ensure you’re doing the exercises correctly. Most new lifters don’t train hard enough. 5x5s have you increasing the amount of weight you lift every workout, so it’s inevitable as long as you keep adding weight, you will end up training hard and intense, making it essential to take de-loads as the program prescribes. Joint pain can be a side effect of lifting heavy and a risk with 5x5s. This can be because our form starts to break down, and we end up moving out of the plain of motion we’ve developed our strength in. Adding accessory work to build strength in different plains will help. Increasing the number of warm-up sets is another option. A couple of notes on exercise selection traditionally, Stronglifts are done with a low bar squat and Pendlay rows. I’d use different exercise variations nothing wrong with a high bar squat, and in my own dumbbell 5x5, I could see beginners starting with a goblet squat. Once they’ve outgrown that, move on to a bench squat and even go to a heel-elevated suitcase squat for a greater range of motion. Occasionally changing the exercise variation can also help to protect us from joint pain. With rows, doing a traditional bent-over row, maintaining your spine in the neutral position with less body English is easier for a beginner and reduces the risk of injury. One of the strange criticisms I hear of 5x5s is, eventually, you’ll plateau, and the answer is yes. Find me a program where you never hit a plateau. Such a plan doesn’t exist. What you need is systems to help you get past these sticking points in your training. Tracking your rest times helps with this; when you’re stuck, try increasing the time between sets. If typically you rest a minute and a half between sets, increase this to 3 minutes. At some point, you have to work at shortening those rest times back down and realize that every time you reduce your rest by 30 seconds. The second method when you hit a plateau is to deload, reducing the weight by 10% and gradually increase it again each workout. The main focus of a 5x5 is to get you strong it will build muscle, but this is secondary to overall strength. The exercises Stronglifts 5x5 initially add-in for arms are better back and chest exercises, at least the way I like to do them, and that’s chin-ups and dips. You can also add in 2 sets of curls and skull crushers; these are effective arm builders. With each exercise you add, the workouts get longer, and Stronglifts does suggest adding a fourth day, making it a designated arm day doing pull-ups, dips, curls and skull crushers.

There’s no denying the influence Steve Reeves has had on the weightlifting community. Before the days of Arnold, his success as an actor helped to bring bodybuilding into the mainstream. Today we’ll look at how his views on a beginner workout changed from when he first started compared to what he’d recommend as an older, more experienced lifter. Steve started training at the age of 16 after being beaten in an arm wrestling competition by a much smaller boy, and it was his boy who introduced Steve to his garage gym and weightlifting. In the book “Building the Classic Physique,” Reeves has his first workout listed, having 11 different exercises, each done for one set of ten repetitions. 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. To purchase the tee shirt and shorts I’m wearing in this video or any Fit and 50 workout wear, click here, https://fit-and-50.creator-spring.com 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. 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 Are you in the market for a fun way to get cardio in? If you are here is my affiliate link for 30 dollars off and free shipping on a set of 2 heavy jump ropes http://vip.torroband.com/heavyrope/?ref=codd&affId=555B3E5D Bells of Steel is a home gym equipment supplier, they have everything from the basics to commercial gym quality products https://www.bellsofsteel.us/#a_aid=FITAND50 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. John Meadows video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quVjBtH-aFU 6 of these exercises he doesn’t repeat in his future recommended workout despite that program having a total of 17 different exercises. The warm-up for his training session at 16 was dumbbell swings, like his Mr. America program. But in his Dynamic Muscle beginners program, he suggests warming up on a treadmill or bike. Another exercise he did at 16 that would take some practice is the clean. Back in his day, many lifters would incorporate Olympic lifts into their routine as these were the common weight training movements. It’s interesting to note that in his first workout, there was no direct tricep or abdominal work. In his Dynamic Muscle beginners program, he has two exercises for every body part but only one set of each exercise, which makes it easy to split into an A and B workout, having every major muscle group being worked each session and since this cuts the number of exercises in half. I’m doing two sets as it’s quicker to do an extra set than set up for a whole new exercise, getting more done in less time. He chose 12 to 15 for his rep range; this is higher than his Mr. America program, where he used 8 to 12 repetitions. Either way, as the lifter gets stronger and can lift more than 15 repetitions on an exercise, he increases the weight and starts working his way back up to 15 again. The first one I changed was chest flyes; he has these after chest press, which works great, but just doing chest flyes on their own in a training session compared to an incline chest press is going to be suboptimal, so I swapped them. The next one is pullovers. Steve has them after bent over rows again, a good combination but pullovers on their own? Better off switching them for lat pulldowns or pull-ups if you can do them. Interestingly, he doesn’t have squats in this program, as he had them in his first workout. Here he opted for leg extensions for quads and leg curls for hamstrings. These would be simpler movements for a beginner; you could swap them out for squats and RDL’s if you wanted. For the low back, he did seated forward bends with a barbell. The first time I saw this exercise being done was in a John Meadows video, and he used a dumbbell. It’s like a seated good morning, except it takes the hamstrings and glutes out of the movement. If you chose to do Romanian deadlifts instead of hamstrings curls, I don’t think you’d need this exercise. He has 3 core exercises sit-ups, leg raises, and side bends. I’d change sit-ups to crunches, I don’t mind leg raises; you could start lying on the floor and gradually advance them to an incline and then a captain's chair. The obliques are worked better with a twisting movement like Russian twists or a cable or band wood chop.

Have you ever heard someone say, “I can’t eat like I used to without getting fat,” or “I hardly eat anything anymore, and I still gain weight.” Losing weight over 50 has some unique challenges, especially if we haven’t regularly exercised our whole lives. But now we’re older, and we want our health and bodies back. Losing body fat and not just weight is vital, as losing lean mass or muscle reduces our resting metabolic rate, which is how many calories we burn while we’re asleep and not doing anything at all. Choosing the right exercises will bring our rate back up, where it belongs. 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. To purchase the tee shirt and shorts I’m wearing in this video or any Fit and 50 workout wear, click here, https://fit-and-50.creator-spring.com 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. 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 Are you in the market for a fun way to get cardio in? If you are here is my affiliate link for 30 dollars off and free shipping on a set of 2 heavy jump ropes http://vip.torroband.com/heavyrope/?ref=codd&affId=555B3E5D Bells of Steel is a home gym equipment supplier, they have everything from the basics to commercial gym quality products https://www.bellsofsteel.us/#a_aid=FITAND50 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 our goal is to lose fat, we must be in a calorie deficit. Exercise helps with this by increasing our calorie demand, with the other side of the coin being nutrition; we need to monitor the quality and quantity of the foods we intake. Exercise for fat loss breaks into 2 categories; resistance training and aerobic exercise. Aerobic exercise breaks down further into steady state and HIIT cardio. Resistance training is effective for fat loss in 2 ways. First, it counteracts age-related muscle loss that reduces our daily calorie burn, increasing our resting metabolic rate. A study found after 24 weeks of strength training, both young and older men’s resting metabolic rates increased by 9%. This establishes a solid foundation for a fat loss program. Not all resistance exercises are equal to maximizing our muscle growth and, in turn, our ability to torch fat. We need to focus on compound movements; these build the most muscle in the long term and burn more calories while you perform them, even providing an after-burn effect, much like HIIT cardio. Compound movements like squats, deadlifts, bent-over rows, bench press, lat pulldowns, and shoulder press all work multiple muscle groups and can easily be progressed to keep you building muscle. Dumbbell and resistance band variations are great for those over 50 as they are easier on the joints. So many people focus on cardio for fat loss, but it should be viewed as an accessory to resistance training. To make fat loss permanent, adding calorie-burning muscle to our frame should come first. This is confirmed by a study done in 2013 that compared various blends of resistance training and cardio finding; “High-intensity resistance training-induced a faster visceral fat loss, and thus the potential of resistance training should not be undervalued.” When we’re pushing our limits with every training session, we can get burned out, so I recommend starting easy and focusing on building the intensity of your resistance training first and keeping the cardio more moderate and enjoyable. Walking, swimming, and cycling are all aerobic exercises that are low-impact, enjoyable and relaxing. They also can be scaled as our fitness level improves. This is what they call rucking; it has a military background where soldiers train with full backpacks to carry weapons, food and supplies long distances. Swimming and cycling can be advanced by increasing the pace or duration and are great candidates for HIIT training, which is high-intensity interval training. This gives you a higher calorie burn in a shorter amount of time. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0167527313009212 https://journals.lww.com/acsm-msse/Fulltext/2001/04000/Effect_of_strength_training_on_resting_metabolic.5.aspx

One of the incredible things about squats is they fit with many different goals. Want to improve your cardio? Add in high-rep squats or even jump squats. Speaking of jump squats, it's a great way to increase explosive power. An excellent reason to squat every day is mobility. As a child, we’d think nothing of getting into a deep squat to pick something off the floor. Now we need to train to regain this skill. We can do this by simply squatting as low as we comfortably can and holding it for ten seconds. A wide stance will help you go lower, and having a light dumbbell in the goblet position encourages you to maintain a more upright posture. 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. To purchase the tee shirt and shorts I’m wearing in this video or any Fit and 50 workout wear, click here, https://fit-and-50.creator-spring.com 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. 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 Are you in the market for a fun way to get cardio in? If you are here is my affiliate link for 30 dollars off and free shipping on a set of 2 heavy jump ropes http://vip.torroband.com/heavyrope/?ref=codd&affId=555B3E5D Bells of Steel is a home gym equipment supplier, they have everything from the basics to commercial gym quality products https://www.bellsofsteel.us/#a_aid=FITAND50 This can be done every day, anywhere from one to 5 times. I wouldn’t do it just before your workout, but it could be done at the end as part of your cooldown. People do activities like jogging, swimming or jump rope every day. Squatting to improve mobility or for cardio fits right in. But what about strength? We’ll look at 2 different methods to build squatting strength using daily squats. The Bulgarian weightlifting team would snatch, clean and jerk and front squat 5 sets with 85 or 90% of their daily maximum multiple times daily. To be clear, the Bulgarian team was on steroids, they got busted more than once in competition, and the systems creator and Bulgarian coach Ivan Abadzhiev openly admits his lifters used steroids, enhancing their recovery time. For this to work with a natural lifter, we’d have to focus on one lift and working it once per day. This is exactly what they did in a 2015 study where they took 3 competitive powerlifters with between 5 and 10 years of experience. They had them do 5 sets of back squats daily for 30 days, then tapered off the volume before testing for their new max. The weight used was determined based on their daily one rep max. They estimated this by having them do a 10-rep set to failure. The only other exercises during this time were 3 to 5 sets of bench and military presses done 2 or 3 times a week. Within the first 3 days, all the lifters lost strength. Once they were over this initial adaptation period, their strength began to increase. Every day for 30 days, they alternated, one day, 5 sets of 3 reps at 85% of their daily max and then the next doing 5 sets of 2 reps at 90%. By day 31, they started to taper off the volume for 7 days; then, they did their final one-rep max test. Overall there was a 5.2% increase in the participant's strength. The researchers concluded the test subjects made this high degree of progress through neuromuscular adaptations that came from the high frequency of training. Another system that develops neuromuscular efficiency with lighter weights and a reduced risk of injury is called grease the groove. To do this, you use a weight between 30 to 50% of your working weight. So if you squat 200 pounds for 10 repetitions, you’d use between 60 to 100lbs for 10 reps. The weight should always feel easy, and because of this, the focus should be on perfect form. People with a home gym have an advantage as they can squat multiple times a day. The more frequently you squat, the lighter weight you’d use. Greasing the groove can be done as often as every hour on the hour. For guys who go to the gym, you need to squat at least once a day, which means going to the gym every day, even if it’s for just one set of squats. On your workout days, it’s easy to incorporate one set into your warm-up. After a month, retest your squat. This can be a good plateau buster if you’ve been stuck at a weight for a while. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/284179354_Efficacy_of_Daily_1RM_Training_in_Well-Trained_Powerlifters_and_Weightlifters_A_Case_Series

High Jackman is 54 years old and preparing for what could be his last time ever portraying the character of Wolverine in Deadpool 3. The first time was back in 2000, so we can say he has at least 22 or 23 year’s training experience. That’s the first thing I noticed about his workout; it’s not definitely for beginners. There’s a wide range of fitness levels over 50; some are in good shape like myself or even better, and on the other end of the spectrum, there are those who have never trained or haven’t for years. There are things I like about this workout, and I’d try in my program as well as one big flaw. This might make sense if you’re trying to build a Hollywood body, but if you want a fit, balanced physique, it’s a mistake, at least for the average guy. 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. To purchase the tee shirt and shorts I’m wearing in this video or any Fit and 50 workout wear, click here, https://fit-and-50.creator-spring.com 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. 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 Are you in the market for a fun way to get cardio in? If you are here is my affiliate link for 30 dollars off and free shipping on a set of 2 heavy jump ropes http://vip.torroband.com/heavyrope/?ref=codd&affId=555B3E5D Bells of Steel is a home gym equipment supplier, they have everything from the basics to commercial gym quality products https://www.bellsofsteel.us/#a_aid=FITAND50 This program has a power building element to it, with the first exercise every day is based on your one rep max and over 3 weeks, you increase the weight until you reach 90% of this max which you do for 3 reps. On the fourth week, your working sets drop to 60% of your max for ten reps. The exercises they did this way were bench press, back squat, weighted pull-ups, incline bench, and deadlifts. The way his training days are laid out is 5 days of resistance workouts with 6 days of cardio. During his shred and after his morning workouts, he did low-intensity cardio for 45 minutes and, in the evening, 15 minutes of HITT cardio. He would do his workouts and cardio fasted, something I can’t do. I’ve tried training fasted, and my workouts sucked. You can’t build muscle if you don’t have the energy to move the weight. It’s a great plan for those who love training fasted, but for the rest of us, eat something first. When I put together a 5 day a week program, I set it up as an upper, lower, push, pull, legs, split. The way The Wolverine workout is designed, Monday is chest and shoulders, Tuesday, legs and abs; I typically do abs with legs as well; Wednesday’s, a cardio-only day with 90 mins of low-intensity cardio at 60 to 65% of your max heart rate. Everything is getting worked twice a week except for back and biceps. I think it would be better to have made Monday an upper body day so all body parts are stimulated twice a week. But this program was designed for Hugh Jackman, and it may be that he needs extra work on his chest and triceps, and his back and biceps were strong points. the Cuban press an excellent exercise to warm up the shoulders. It’s done by combining an upright row with shoulder rotation into a shoulder press. Not an exercise I would do heavy or close to failure, because it’s a warmup exercise I’d move it to the first exercise or maybe after bench press before the shoulder work. I like the shoulder giant set. I’ve done tri-sets with lateral, front raises and rear delt flyes before, but finishing it off with shoulder presses Before we get back to the workout, I want to call out Hugh Jackman’s claim on eating 8,000 calories daily while training. He may have eaten 8,000 calories one day, but every day. This seems to me like the Hollywood hype machine in action—a way to get attention on the movie and promote it. They used to say 5,000 calories, then Jonathan Majors said he ate over 6,000 calories for one of his roles. It almost seems like a case of one-upmanship. The number has to keep going up to continue to impress the general public. There are a lot of supersets and tri-sets in this workout; the bicep one looks particularly brutal; it starts with Zottman curls, then goes to cross-body curls and finishes with prone curls. https://fitnessvolt.com/wolverine-workout-program/

Statistics tell us we lose muscle by 3 to 8 percent every decade after 30. Our testosterone and growth hormone levels go down. We have an increased risk of diabetes and insulin insensitivity as we age. On top of this, our bone mass declines and our joints get weaker, and we start to suffer from ailments like osteoarthritis. With all this working against us, how can anyone expect to build muscle over 50? Let’s face it, if we can build muscle and continue to improve ourselves physically over 50, then why don’t we have Olympic athletes over that age? Now I’m not denying ageing, it happens to all of us, but most of us have never trained like an Olympic athlete bring our bodies to their absolute peak physical condition. Whether that be muscular or cardiovascular fitness, something I want to make clear here is there’s a big difference between the statistics of ageing and optimal ageing. 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. To purchase the tee shirt and shorts I’m wearing in this video or any Fit and 50 workout wear, click here, https://fit-and-50.creator-spring.com 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. 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 Are you in the market for a fun way to get cardio in? If you are here is my affiliate link for 30 dollars off and free shipping on a set of 2 heavy jump ropes http://vip.torroband.com/heavyrope/?ref=codd&affId=555B3E5D Bells of Steel is a home gym equipment supplier, they have everything from the basics to commercial gym quality products https://www.bellsofsteel.us/#a_aid=FITAND50 When we work to build muscle and strength, we’re not only improving how we look but also how we age, and this positively affects our body composition, joints, bones and hormones. No matter what your age, you need to apply progressive overload to your workouts, gradually lifting heavier over time, but something those of us over 50 have to keep in mind and especially if we have sore joints or osteoarthritis, is that we might need to start out using lighter weights and training farther from failure. To illustrate, in a study they had older adults with osteoarthritis train for eight weeks with 60% of their one-rep max doing only 8 repetitions that’s about 12 away from failure and yet at the end of the study they reduced the amount of pain they felt, increased physical function and muscle torque. All of this would allow them to train heavier in the future. As we age, we can suffer from anabolic resistance, which blunts our body’s response to ingesting protein. A research paper published in, Frontiers in Nutrition states that protein intake should be increased closer to 1.2g per kg per day for older adults. This would be good for sedentary older ones, but for the hard-training ones over ’50, I’d recommend at least 1.72g This paper adds an interesting finding that “resistance exercise, in particular, seems to DRASTICALLY INCREASE the dietary amino acid sensitivity of older muscle to protein ingestion.” They go on to suggest having protein post-workout as “targeted exercise prior to Protein ingestion has been shown to enhance the dietary amino acid sensitivity of ageing muscle, and that is a clear fountain of youth for muscle.” Insulin insensitivity is another thing that can negatively affect muscle protein metabolism. They took a group with an average age of 70 and had them walk on a treadmill for 45 minutes finding that this was enough to restore the anabolic response of muscle proteins to insulin. Another study examined master athletes with an average age of 68 and found that “long-term exercise, decreased reaction time and increased VO two max, testosterone and growth hormone in elderly males.” master athletes have an increased health span reducing the number of years spent weak and frail. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/8503910_Serum_testosterone_growth_hormone_and_insulin-like_growth_factor-1_levels_mental_reaction_time_and_maximal_aerobic_exercise_in_sedentary_and_long-term_physically_trained_elderly_males https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24030238/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22563890/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8131552/#:~:text=Anabolic%20resistance%20is%20defined%20by,as%20dietary%20protein%20and%20exercise https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17351147/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3606891/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8092084/

There’re many reasons to do a 5x5 program as a beginner. One is you learn and perfect basic movements that build a solid foundation enabling you to progress your training into a powerlifting or bodybuilding program, two different goals, the same solid foundation. This isn't to underestimate what can be done with a 5x5; you’ll get stronger and build muscle, especially as a beginner. There are different 5x5 workouts. The one we’re talking about today is called stronglifts, and because I train at home with dumbbells, I’ll be presenting a dumbbell alternate as well. The program has 5 exercises broken into “A” and “B” workouts. The “A” workout has squats, bench press and a barbell row; each one of these exercises is done for five sets plus the warm-up sets. In workout “B,” we have squats and overhead press. These are also done for 5 sets, along with one set of deadlifts. The reason is the cross-over of muscles between squats and deadlifts, making it difficult to do more sets of deads after squats. The total number of repetitions on all sets in the “A” and “B” workouts is 5. This is where a 5x5 gets its name 5 sets of 5 reps. Bells of Steel is a home gym equipment supplier, they have everything from the basics to commercial gym quality products https://www.bellsofsteel.us/#a_aid=FITAND50 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. To purchase the tee shirt and shorts I’m wearing in this video or any Fit and 50 workout wear, click here, https://fit-and-50.creator-spring.com 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. 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 Are you in the market for a fun way to get cardio in? If you are here is my affiliate link for 30 dollars off and free shipping on a set of 2 heavy jump ropes http://vip.torroband.com/heavyrope/?ref=codd&affId=555B3E5D In my dumbbell version, I have heel-elevated suitcase squats, dumbbell bench press and neutral grip bent over rows in the ”A” workout. For the “B,” again, the heel elevated squats, dumbbell shoulder press either in a neutral or prone grip, whatever’s more comfortable and Romanian deadlifts. An alternative squat you could use is a bench or box squat. These exercises have been chosen because they are compound movements that work the entire body with a minimalist approach that’s perfect for a beginner. Eventually, you’ll need to advance and add exercises to address muscle balances and weaknesses. If there’s enough interest in this video, I’ll do another one explaining how to do this. The same number of sets are done with both the barbell and dumbbell versions, but we’ll have to manipulate the number of reps as it’s tougher to get the dumbbells in place for some lifts and home workout guys often don’t have as much weight. So, for now, let’s say 5 to 9 reps. These workouts are done 3 times a week with at least one rest day in between, alternating “A” and ”B” workouts. Traditionally they’re done Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. But I do mine Monday, Thursday, and Saturday. So it’s easy to flex to your schedule. Recovery plays a significant role in getting stronger and building muscle; with a 3-day-a-week plan, you get 4 off for recovery. Rest between sets can last a minute and a half to 5 minutes. You don’t want to rest more than necessary, or the workouts get needlessly long. If the set you just finished felt relatively easy with your breathing and heart rate recovering, you should do your next set. If you struggled on your last set, take a longer 3-minute break. But if you failed to get all 5 reps on your set or your heart rate and breathing haven’t recovered, increase your rest time to 5 minutes. If you’re an absolute beginner and this is a beginner's guide, you’ll want to start with as light a weight as possible. If you’re doing a 5x5 with a barbell, that would be the weight of the bar, 45 lbs. This is your starting weight for squats, bench and overhead press. If you’re using dumbbells, you’ll start with 20 or 25 lbs. This might seem light, but it goes up fast, especially with squats, which are done every workout. In 4 weeks, you’ll have increased the weight 11 times, and if you start too heavy, you can end up too sore to continue. Deadlifts and rows start on the floor, and you want the bar to be shin height; to do this, you add plates. For bent-over rows, you’d add a 10 lb bumper plate on each side. https://stronglifts.com/

When I decided I wanted to do a video on manly activities that boost testosterone, I never thought I would be talking about the Haka (haa kuh), a ceremonial Māori Wardance. So let me tell you how I came across this testosterone-boosting gem. I was researching the manly activity of watching sports and came across an abstract for a study on how watching specific types of video clips before doing squats significantly improved their 3-rep max. Unfortunately, I didn’t have access to the complete study, so I couldn't find out what these clips were of specifically, but one of them was considered to be aggressive. I wanted to know what they watched that made them stronger. From here, I found a full study that looked at “Aggression and testosterone in men exposed to aggressive video stimulus.” The test subjects were shown a 4 min silent video of the New Zealand rugby team performing the Haka plus rugby tackles. This increased both testosterone and aggression levels in the viewers. 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. 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. To purchase the tee shirt and shorts I’m wearing in this video or any Fit and 50 workout wear, click here, https://fit-and-50.creator-spring.com 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 Are you in the market for a fun way to get cardio in? If you are here is my affiliate link for 30 dollars off and free shipping on a set of 2 heavy jump ropes http://vip.torroband.com/heavyrope/?ref=codd&affId=555B3E5D Bells of Steel is a home gym equipment supplier, they have everything from the basics to commercial gym quality products https://www.bellsofsteel.us/#a_aid=FITAND50 What this does show is there is a strong mental connection with testosterone and increasing it when it’s needed. Another time we see this is when we experience our favourite sports team winning, our testosterone spikes. Winning or even identifying with the winning team is hormonally positive. Unfortunately, the reverse is true; if our team loses, are t levels go down. Resistance training has temporary and permanent effects on our testosterone; we add in the positive power of winning by making our workouts goal based. Anyone who trains regularly to build muscle or get stronger and has a properly set up program will have a goal-based workout, as every training session will have both short and long-term goals. The way it works is before you start an exercise, you have a goal number of repetitions to reach; often, it’s one more than the last time. When you achieve this small win, savour it. A long-term goal might be to add ten or 20 lbs to your bench or squat. These take longer to reach, but the bigger the goal, the more substantial that feeling is. They tested the testosterone levels of the Tsimane people of Bolivia before and after an hour of wood chopping and found a 46.8 % increase in testosterone, and age had no effect on this increase. This was 17% higher than the change caused by playing soccer. The best way to permanently enhance our T levels is to improve our body composition. This is done in two parts, first by losing excess body fat and secondly by increasing your muscle mass. Part of the muscle-building process is recovery, and a vital component is sleep. A good night's sleep not only allows us to build more muscle but allows us to have optimal T during the day, with research finding sleeping less than 5 hrs a night lowers your daytime levels by 10 to 15%. Compared to those who spent 8 to 10 hrs in bed. One study showing men who participated in sex had a testosterone boost of 61% above those who only watched the activity. sex helps us fall asleep by releasing hormones like oxytocin(ox-see-tow-sin) and prolactin that induce pleasant and relaxing feelings. It also reduces cortisol which is connected with stress. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/147470491301100502#:~:text=A%20haka%20is%20a%20ritualized,Cook%20and%20Crewther%2C%202012). https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21983238/ https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1090513813000652 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9811365/ https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/08/180808193647.htm https://www.researchgate.net/publication/49690517_Salivary_Testosterone_Levels_in_Men_at_a_US_Sex_Club https://www.sleepfoundation.org/physical-health/sex-sleep#references-81678 https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/05/110531162142.htm https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4445839/

Today we’ll limit our conversation of how often we should squat to between 1 to 4 days a week. We can squat every day. In my mind, there’s only one reason we’d want to do this, and that’d be to improve squat efficiency and technique. But there are programs out there designed to rapidly increase your strength that involve squatting every day or nearly daily. Because of this, I want to look at squatting every day in a separate video. Let’s start with 3 or 4 days a week. What first comes to mind with 3 times a week is full-body workouts; your volume isn’t that high on any individual body part, and you might be doing 3 or 4 sets of squats for 9 to 12 sets a week. This would be good for a beginner. Someone new to training could make progress with even less volume than this. Intensity needs to be factored in as the closer you train to failure and the more sets you do to technical failure, the more time you’ll need for recovery between training sessions. 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. To purchase the tee shirt and shorts I’m wearing in this video or any Fit and 50 workout wear, click here, https://fit-and-50.creator-spring.com 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. 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 Are you in the market for a fun way to get cardio in? If you are here is my affiliate link for 30 dollars off and free shipping on a set of 2 heavy jump ropes http://vip.torroband.com/heavyrope/?ref=codd&affId=555B3E5D Bells of Steel is a home gym equipment supplier, they have everything from the basics to commercial gym quality products https://www.bellsofsteel.us/#a_aid=FITAND50 The advantage of doing 12 sets over 3 workouts as opposed to doing them all in one training session once a week is cumulative fatigue; by that 12th set, you’re going to be tired out from the previous sets, and you won’t be able to lift as heavy as you would’ve if you split them up over 3 days and instead of only 3 minutes rest between each set in one session. You have 48hrs rest between sets 4 and 5 and sets 8 and 9. Studies have shown when training volume is matched; training frequency doesn’t matter. But what does matter is recovery. You need to allow enough time to recover from your last training session. But there’s no advantage to allowing an excessive amount of recovery time between sessions either. Squats are very demanding and work multiple muscles, including the low back. I find my back tends to recover slower than the rest of my body. Making the amount of work my low back is doing a consideration on how frequently I can squat and the variations I choose. We don’t always have to do a heavy back squat. For example, a split squat or Bulgarian split squat allows us to train each leg unilaterally with less weight reducing the load on our back. So how would we use a fourth day? We should generally allow 48 to 72 hours for recovery between training sessions so that a fourth training day would be within this time frame. This should be a technique day where we train light and focus on improving the movement. When lifting heavy, we tend to pick up bad habits. One of mine is I’ll shift my weight slightly over my stronger leg. Another common mistake is not going low enough. By using lightweight or even no weight, you remove the fear of injury, allowing you to focus on the range of motion and really get to know how low you can safely go without compromising your form. A technique day helps us improve the movement pattern without the stress of moving heavy weights. The more frequently we practice squatting, the better we get. If I were training Monday, Wednesday and Friday, I’d have my technique day on Saturday, so I’ll have a full day's rest on Sunday before starting again on Monday. For a beginner, training full body workouts 3 times a week is ultimate, but you can make progress with just twice a week. As a more experienced lifter, you will need more volume, which can be achieved by splitting up your training into separate upper and lower body workouts with 2 lower body sessions a week, doing your upper body on different days. Splitting them in half allows more energy to be focused on leg training. Say you have a lower body workout with 18 total sets, 11 of those being squats and squat variations. The rest are for hamstrings and calves. Making 22 sets a week, almost double what you did for legs when training 3 times a week with more recovery time between training sessions.

Steve Reeves was a silver-era bodybuilder with arguably the best aesthetics of anyone who has ever entered the iron game. He’s written two books, and I based my workout on his Mr. America and Universe training program found in chapter 5 of his book, dynamic muscle building. It’s a full-body workout designed to be done 3 times a week with 22 exercises and over 56 sets. As you can imagine, this is a long workout. Steve said it shouldn’t take more than 2.5 hrs, but it takes me 3. There are things I like about this program. One of them was beginning the session with shoulders. I’ve never started a workout this way. Usually, it’s back or legs as they’re my weakest muscle groups. My thought was because we use delts when performing chest and back exercises, having them first would negatively affect those lifts, but this didn’t seem to be the case at all. 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. To purchase the tee shirt and shorts I’m wearing in this video or any Fit and 50 workout wear, click here, https://fit-and-50.creator-spring.com 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. 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 Are you in the market for a fun way to get cardio in? If you are here is my affiliate link for 30 dollars off and free shipping on a set of 2 heavy jump ropes http://vip.torroband.com/heavyrope/?ref=codd&affId=555B3E5D Bells of Steel is a home gym equipment supplier, they have everything from the basics to commercial gym quality products https://www.bellsofsteel.us/#a_aid=FITAND50 Before we get into delts, we have to warm up. Steve would do dumbbell swings as a warm-up. I did 20 repetitions with a lightweight. He started this workout with upright rows for the lateral and front delts. I did this initially but switched this exercise as my traps would get tight and knotted up. They weren’t recovering fast enough. I changed it to a 45-degree elbow out row, which works the lateral and rear delts, so not a perfect substitution. My traps were still pretty tight, so I would hit them with my massage gun every morning, then again before I worked out or in the evening, and this was enough to keep me going. Next up was the behind the neck press And finally, side lateral raises, I bent over when doing these for more rear delt work as this is the weakest part of my shoulder. Every set is to failure, or the last rep you can do with good form and a full range of motion, keeping within 8 to 12 reps. I didn’t like changing the weight all the time, and I was trying to keep the rests as short as possible, so I increased the rep range to between 6 and 15, picking a weight that had me fail on my first set between 12 and 15 repetitions. On each subsequent set, I was doing fewer repetitions. Next was chest, as Steve likes to work his muscle groups from the top down. As with most body parts, he did 3 sets of 3 different exercises totalling 9 sets per workout and 27 per body part per week. The way he did incline presses and flies was a bit different. For presses, he’d turn his arms as he pressed the weight up so that his hands were facing each other at the top. With flies, he would offset the weight so that there was more weight on the pinky side and have the thumb side right tight to the plate, and instead of having your palms face each other, you would have your thumbs towards each other creating a little more resistance to gravity as you did the fly. I really liked doing behind-the-neck lat pulldowns and then seated low cable rows. Steve Reeves did behind-the-neck pull-ups The last exercise for the lats was a bent-over-one-arm dumbbell row done in the standing position. For the biceps, he only did 3 sets of one exercise, and that was incline dumbbell curls. He would supinate the dumbbells with the weight offset, this time having the offset to the thumb side, and the weight plate tight to the palm side of the hand, making for an extreme contraction in the top position. cross-body tricep extension incline tricep extension or even a behind-the-neck dumbbell press. For legs, he would start with what he called a half squat with you going down until your quads were parallel with the floor, Next was a front squat, and I did a goblet squat. I didn’t go to failure on the leg exercises. For hamstrings, he did 3 sets of hamstring curls. He would talk about doing this against the resistance of another guy holding your legs standing calf raises. incline crunches hyperextensions

Back in 2013, Mark Cuban from the show Shark Tank invested in a company that sold bars made with cricket protein powder or flour. What Mark was interested in wasn’t in selling the bars as much as supplying cricket flour. This can be used like regular protein powder in recipes, replacing a portion of the flour to increase the amount of protein in whatever you’re baking. We already have protein powder. Why bring in a new source? And is it a high-quality bioavailable protein? If it can be shown to help us build muscle better than a whey protein isolate, then I can guarantee guys who lift aren’t going to care it came from insects. In January, the World Economic Forum met in Switzerland, and one of the items on their agenda was on how eating insects could reduce climate change. I’m not going to go into everything. Still, they brought up an interesting projection stating by 2050. The earth will have nearly 10 billion people on it, and the demand for protein will exceed our ability to acquire it. 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. To purchase the tee shirt and shorts I’m wearing in this video or any Fit and 50 workout wear, click here, https://fit-and-50.creator-spring.com 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. 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 Are you in the market for a fun way to get cardio in? If you are here is my affiliate link for 30 dollars off and free shipping on a set of 2 heavy jump ropes http://vip.torroband.com/heavyrope/?ref=codd&affId=555B3E5D Bells of Steel is a home gym equipment supplier, they have everything from the basics to commercial gym quality products https://www.bellsofsteel.us/#a_aid=FITAND50 Not enough protein to support our gains now that’s a problem, I’ll be 85 in 2050, but I’m still going to be lifting. Whoop paw! Whoo paw? Whoop paw! This is where insects come in; they can be farmed using fewer resources than traditional meat sources, and with their short life cycle and high reproductive rate, a female cricket lays close to 3000 eggs in her lifetime. Making it a very sustainable food source. But back to my 85-year-old gains. Will insects be as effective in helping me build muscle as current protein sources? At this time cricket powder seems to be the most marketable product. I looked for a cricket protein isolate so I could compare it to whey isolate, and as far as I can see, they currently don’t sell this product, or it’s not readily available. I did find a study that compared the bioavailability of amino acids between Whey, soy and lesser mealworm protein isolate. They had the same 6 men on different days receive one of the three proteins and took blood samples one before ingesting, then right after and again at the 20, 40, 60, 90 and 120-minute mark. They looked at essential amino acids, branched-chain amino acids, and leucine. Whey protein had the greatest concentration of amino acids, and at the 60-minute mark, both whey and soy protein ingestion peaked. With insect protein not peaking until 120 minutes, making it a slow-releasing protein, its concentration of amino acids was comparable to soy isolate. (Show this in the study, it’s found in the discussion section) This isn’t bad. When you look at where soy is on the protein quality score, it’s not that much lower than whey. If you are taking protein throughout the day, the fact it’s slow digesting shouldn’t matter. But if you’re training fasted and are looking for a quick protein source after your workout, mealworm isolate wouldn’t be it. The researchers had thought the insect protein should have rated higher and hypothesized it was because of chitin which is found mainly in an insect’s exoskeleton and negatively affects the absorbability of protein. There shouldn’t be much chitin in an isolate. But in a cricket flour or powder? There will be guaranteed. Remember this as we move into the next portion of our discussion, where we compare insects to beef, chicken and pork. For many of us workout guys, chicken and beef is the foundation of our protein intake. https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/10/10/1357 https://www.nature.com/articles/ejcn2015149 https://www.sharktankblog.com/business/chapul/#:~:text=Crowley%20started%20making%20Chapul%20Energy,using%20a%20special%20cricket%20flour. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/02/how-insects-positively-impact-climate-change/ https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/10/10/1357

What are the things that make an exercise controversial? Risk of injury has to be considered, as well as; whether it is genuinely an effective exercise to build muscle. Old School lifters were often ahead of the curve when finding the best ways to grow. So today, we’ll look at 4 different exercises you should consider adding to your program. I’ve been doing Steve Reeves's Mr. America workout, and it has behind-the-neck pulldowns, or alternatively, you could do a behind-the-neck pull-up. I opted for the lat pulldown as I couldn’t comfortably do a pull-up behind my neck. It definitely feels different in my lats than a front pulldown, and for this reason, it’s worth occasionally adding to my personal program. However, it’s not one I’d prescribe to a client. To purchase the tee shirt and shorts I’m wearing in this video or any Fit and 50 workout wear click here, https://fit-and-50.creator-spring.com 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. Bells of Steel is a home gym equipment supplier, they have everything from the basics to commercial gym quality products https://www.bellsofsteel.us/#a_aid=FITAND50 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 Are you in the market for a fun way to get cardio in? If you are here is my affiliate link for 30 dollars off and free shipping on a set of 2 heavy jump ropes http://vip.torroband.com/heavyrope/?ref=codd&affId=555B3E5D It’s controversial because you have to ask yourself what is the risk to reward. Or Do you have the body mechanics to do the movement properly? If you need to shove your head way forward to let the bar pass, you may not have the mobility to do this exercise, and a front lat pulldown would be the better option. A study compared behind the neck to a front and V bar pulldown. I don’t think too many gyms have a V bar but what they found was EMG activation was the same in the lats for all 3 movements. That doesn’t mean there weren’t any advantages as there was more rear delt activation with the behind the neck. This study found no strong evidence of a relationship between a behind-the-neck lat pulldown and shoulder injury. But it does ask the question with no sport or daily life activities that match the movement pattern of a behind-the-neck pulldown Why do one? Next is the wide grip pull-up and specifically the way Franco Columbu did them. These days I prefer mine weighted with a hand grip just outside of shoulder width, and I pull relatively straight up. This provides a greater range of motion than a wide-grip pull-up. Franco didn’t believe we needed to use weight, just a wider grip and something he did that’s unique is how he arched his back with his chest up and pulled the bar passed his chin to his chest. When I pull up like this, as opposed to keeping my torso straight, I feel more of a contraction in the lats in the top position. The only controversy with this, is which is better, the heavy weighted pull-up with a shoulder-width grip or the wide grip using only body weight. Dumbbell pullovers. Are they a lat or a chest exercise? Do they expand our rib cage? That’s how it was initially used as part of a breathing exercise to expand our rib cage. If that’s your goal, then you’re wasting your time. Our rib cage, or rib box as they used to call it, is fixed in size once we’re adults. Old school guys did this exercise diagonally to the bench instead of lying on top of it, parallel. With their hips down as a counterbalance to create a better stretch in the lats. This is another exercise that, if you lack shoulder mobility, you may not be able to do. Dorian Yates used a lat pullover machine in the training video Blood and Guts. The advantage of this piece of equipment is you can work the lats through a full range of motion as opposed to using a dumbbell where the resistance ends as you raise it overhead. The Yates row is more than just a reverse grip bent over row as you have a more upright stance. With a bent-over row, you try and keep your back as parallel to the floor as possible, which puts a greater load on the lats and erector Spinae. The Yates row is done with your back at about a 45-degree angle, which allows you to use a lot more weight and puts a greater emphasis on the upper back, including the traps. One of the benefits is there’s less strain on the lower back. https://journals.lww.com/nsca-jscr/Fulltext/2009/10000/Electromyographic_Analysis_of_Three_Different.17.aspx

Today we’re going to compare a few basic variations of the squat to see which is the easiest and safest to do and how we can progress these to the point where we can do a full back squat. I hear people tell me that they can’t squat, but if you can sit in a chair or on the toilet, then you can squat. The two areas most commonly cited as reasons not to squat are the knees and low back. One more spot of potential concern is the shoulders, as some lack the mobility to reach back and hold the bar without pain when doing a back squat. The first two squat variations we’ll look at are the low dumbbell sumo squat and a bench or box squat. Remember I said if you can sit in a chair, you can do a squat, while essentially, doing a bench squat is just that sitting on a bench or a box. There are a couple of things to keep in mind when doing bench squats. Taking a wider stance gives you a more vertical shin reducing the stress on the knee. Sitting back on the bench reduces it even more. When you do this, your hips go back, and you bend deeper at the waist, boosting hip activation and increasing glute and hamstring involvement in addition to the quads making this a more whole-leg exercise. When you squat like this, you won’t be able to use as much weight as when doing a suitcase or back squat. I recommend dumbbells for this exercise over a barbell as it’s easier to stabilize a weight down low, taking some of the stress off the low back. Because you’re sitting on a bench, it gives you a defined stopping point and ensures you’re going deep enough on every rep. You pause at the bottom, so there’s no bounce and continue to keep your core braced throughout the movement. An additional bonus is it helps to develop more power out of the bottom of a squat. Next up is the low dumbbell sumo squat. Having the dumbbell down low makes for an easy setup, as you don’t have to get it into the goblet position, which can be somewhat awkward. The dumbbell provides a stopper keeping you from going too low. Mind you, as you get stronger and start to use a heavier dumbbell, it will reduce your range of motion. Because the sumo stance is wide, again, this reduces the stress on the knees and increases adductor, abductor and glute involvement. Next up is the suitcase squat. The body mechanics are much like a trap bar deadlift with a little less hip flexion when compared to a traditional deadlift. I place the dumbbells on a bench and start in the standing position. This allows me to control the depth of my squat based on my body mechanics. Protecting my back and ensuring I don’t compromise my posture while picking up the dumbbells from the floor at the beginning of each set. Before we move to an exercise that requires more core stabilization, I want to mention a piece of equipment I tried out when I was at Bells of Steel, and that’s their belt squat machine. It provides all the benefits of a squat without the stress on your back because the load is on the hips and not the upper back. So if you have one of these in your gym, you should give it a try or consider making it an addition to your home gym. Because the weight is in front on a goblet squat, it puts you in a more upright position taking stress off the back. But it’ll require more core stability than either a suitcase or low dumbbell sumo squat. In addition, you may find you get a greater range of motion and might have to lighten up the weight until you gain strength in this new range. Another advantage of a goblet squat over a back squat is holding the weight in front is more shoulder-friendly than having a straight bar on your back. There’s what’s called a safety bar which allows you to back squat while keeping your shoulders in a comfortable position with your hands in front. Getting the weight into the goblet position can become challenging as the weight gets heavier. The heaviest dumbbell I own is 100 lbs, and I get it into place by standing it on a bench and then squatting down to pick it up. If I want to use more than 100 lbs, I’ll use 2 dumbbells and clean them into place. This becomes a dumbbell front squat with all the same advantages as a goblet squat. As you gain strength, you may want to elevate your heels to increase the range of motion, making it more challenging without increasing weight. I want to bring up split squats. Because of the balance component, I wouldn’t list them as the easiest squat, but by the time we are at this level, we’re well past the easiest squats. Split squats allow us to train each leg unilaterally for even development and cut the weight we need to use in half.