You’ve probably heard about the benefits of a weight training routine and you want to build muscle but lifting weights just isn’t your cup of tea. Bodybuilding does not have to be all about lifting weights. In fact, you don’t need to use dumbbells at all. Instead, you can rely on a great free asset, your body. By using the weight of your own body, callisthenic exercises can help you to successfully tone and build muscle.

To maximize your muscles without lifting weights, you’re going to need to work hard. The most common method of bulking up without weights is to perform super sets of regular calisthenics such as pushups, pull-ups, crunches, and sit-ups. Super sets are sets of 50, 60, or even 100 repetitions. Many bodybuilders use this method to increase their endurance. If you decide to lift weights in the future, you’ll find that you can now lift a heavier load.

Isotension or flexing is a great way to exercise the muscles. Former Mr. Olympia, Arnold Schwarzenegger is a popular proponent of this technique. After you exercise a muscle group, flex it and hold the pose for as long as you can. This will lead to a more chiseled appearance. A variation on this technique is to flex the muscle group that you want to workout before exercising. This forces the muscles to work harder during your routine and will lead to quicker results.

Many people find that steady, slow tension provides great results in a short time. To accomplish this, perform each move very slowly; instead of a 4 count, use a 12 count. In addition, instead of pausing between repetitions, continue fluidly between reps. This means not locking into the top position and not resting in the bottom position. This technique works great with pull-ups, pushups, and sit-ups. You won’t be able to do many repetitions but the rewards will be much greater than with a normal workout.

With these easy techniques, you can bulk up without joining a gym or spending money on expensive equipment.

If you are after a well-defined posterior, then you will certainly be interested in a recent study by the American Council on Exercise (ACE) on the best exercises to tone the gluteal muscles. These three exercises will quickly tone up your rear, hips, and thighs, ensuring you look good from behind. Exercises were compared to the squat, which, thus far, is the easiest and most effective way to tone the butt muscles. These exercises will enrich your exercise routine, whether you have trouble performing squats because of a bad back or bothersome knees, or you just want to add some variation to your workout.

The ‘Step Up’

What it works: Butt

• Stand in front of your step.
• Shift your weight to one foot, using only this foot, step on to the riser.
• Hold position for 3 seconds and then inhale to step down.
• Repeat this exercise 10 times on each leg.

To make this exercise more challenging you can add dumbbells.

The Lunge

What it works: Thighs & Butt

• Stand with feet together.
• Keeping your back straight, step forward with one foot until your thigh is parallel to the floor (Bend your back knee to help lower yourself to the floor)
• Exhale to return to starting position and complete repetition.
• Perform this exercise 12 times on each leg.

When performing this exercise, be sure that front knee does not extend beyond toes.

The Quadruped Hip Extension

What it works: Thighs and butt

• Begin on your hands and knees.
• With your knee bent, raise one leg into the air until the bottom of your foot faces the ceiling. Your leg will be bent 90 degrees into the shape of an ‘L’.
• Lower your leg to the starting position.
• Repeat this exercise 12 times on each leg.

While performing this exercise, keep your abs contracted to help stabilize your back.

All of these exercises were found to work the gluteal muscles as effectively as squats. Add these easy moves to your lower body routine and you will firm up your rear in no time.

To get the best results when weight training, you don’t need to lift heavier weights, or do more repetitions. If you want a quick workout that will make the most of your time and efforts, then you need to focus on ways to increase your muscle endurance and boost cardiovascular fitness. Concentrating on these two elements will target more muscle fibers to release anabolic hormones that build muscle.

Compound Exercises

This strategy of working multiple muscle groups simultaneously is becoming increasingly popular as people have less time to dedicate to the gym. Why do a set of lunges and then a set of dumbbell rows when you can combine the two and finish twice as fast? You’ll save time, burn more calories, and increase your muscle gain when combining exercises. Some familiar compound exercises are bicep curls with a forward lunge and bicycle crunches.

Use Free Weights Instead of Machines

Save time and money by using free weights instead of machines. Why waste time running between different machines to exercise only one part of your body? Dumbbells are an inexpensive way to maximize your workout. When exercising with dumbbells instead of machines, your body must work harder. Without a machine stabilizing your body, your core muscles are actively engaged to maintain your balance and form as you perform each exercise. A great benefit of dumbbells is that they allow you to equally train both sides of your body by forcing your weak side to perform without assistance.

Exercise In Circuits

A circuit routine combines weight training and aerobics to boost muscle endurance and cardiovascular fitness. Exercises are performed with no rest in between, forcing your body to be more efficient and change. Among the many benefits of circuit training is that the routine can always be changed to fit your needs. Exercises can be added and adjusted to accommodate a new fitness goal or an injury.

Many women avoid strength training because they are afraid that they will bulk up, gain weight, and look masculine. This belief is simply untrue. Lifting weights is an effective way to burn fat and increase lean muscle, making you stronger and more toned. When strength training to stay lean, it is important to work your entire body – upper, lower, and core.

Upper Body: The upper body includes your arms, shoulders, chest, and back. Women should focus on this area as they have less innate strength here than men. Increased upper body strength will make it easier to perform everyday tasks such as carrying groceries or moving heavy objects, reducing strain on your heart. Common upper body exercises include pushups, pull-ups, and bicep curls.

Core: The core is composed of more than your abs. The obliques, hips, lower back, and pelvic muscles are all integral components of this important area. A strong core will help with your balance and posture, making just about everything- from tying your shoes to waiting in line- easier for you. Popular exercises to build a strong core are sit-ups, crunches, Pilates, and dancing. (Yes, dancing is exercise too. This activity forces you to maintain proper posture and engages all core muscles.)

Lower Body: This large muscle group that includes the hamstrings, quads, and calves is a key contributor to fat loss during exercise. So it’s important to work them into your strength training routine. Lower body exercises such as lunges, squats, and leg raises are all excellent ways to strengthen and tone this group of muscles.

Before any workout, it is important to warm up and stretch. These activities elevate the heart rate and prepare your body for exercise. Skipping stretching or warm up periods can lead to injury. After your workouts, it is important to give your muscles adequate recovery time. Allow one or two days between workouts for muscles to repair themselves.

Happy Holidays everyone! It’s been an exciting few weeks (and months) and I’m looking forward to bringing you many more updates and improvements to the site in the new year.

The other week a blog was linked on a board I read, and it was a discussion loosely titled as “explosive movements don’t make you explosive”. This is a recurring theme amongst some elements of the strength & conditioning field, most notably the more rapid later-comers of the HIT and SuperSlow schools of thought.

I added a few comments to the discussion, because I felt the gentleman in question was mistaken on a few assumptions. Firstly, I linked to several studies that showed the addition of elastic bands to regular strength-training to be more effective at developing both strength and power when compared to regular weights (PMID: 16686552, PMID: 18550975).

This sparked a tangential discussion – namely, what does variable resistance training (the fancy name for adding bands or chains or anything that changes the normal resistance curve) have to do with training explosively?

As I explained, explosiveness has to do with force production in the working muscles. My opponent however was under the impression that explosive training implied high speed. Since this is a misconception that comes up all the time, I figured it’d make for a good blog post.

Disclaimer: This post is going to involve a tiny bit of math. For you folks that may be somewhat hazy on the subject (like myself), I’ll be keeping this as visual and non-technical as I can, though you do have to invoke some small amount of calculus to discuss the topic meaningfully. Don’t worry, I don’t understand it that well either so this isn’t going to be equation-heavy. More equations means more room for me to screw up – and if any of you readers more savvy than I catch errors, please bring them to my attention.

A Little Math Background

The first and most important thing to understand when talking about any motion-related value is that we’re dealing with rates of change; we’re dealing with how some value x changes over time t.

The classic example of this is the relationship between position and velocity. Position is just what it sounds like; the location of an object in relation to some other point. It can be a set of coordinates on a graph or it can be “down at the corner of 5th and Main”.

Now the object moves. If you plot this motion on a graph, showing how the object’s position changes as each second passes, you’ll get a line that represents position with respect to time; this is the velocity of the object. Phrased in other terms, each point on that graphed line represents the rate of change of position. The value of each point on this line represents the object’s velocity (which is the rate of change of position, just so you don’t get confused).

You’ll usually see velocity given by the formula Δx/Δt (the Δ is the Greek letter delta, which means “change in value”) – the change in velocity with respect to the change in time. However this is only the formula for the average velocity over a given interval of time. If you want to know the velocity at any given point on that interval, we have to use other trickery. That’s where calculus comes into the picture.

There’s a method used to find that value for any point on a graphed equation like this, which is called taking the derivative. The derivative is just a way of finding the curvature at any point of the line – which in turn gives you the rate of change at any point. Note that this works for any quantities that change with respect to another quantity; in the physics of motion this tends to be a change with respect to time, but any quantities will work.

To reiterate, we’re looking at how a value changes over time. The specifics of the math are helpful to understand it, but that’s the key point to remember.

The Force-Time Curve

Analyzing human movements mathematically will come down to plotting force with respect to time – called the force-time curve. Or, how force changes over the duration of the movement.

I want to point out that force created by your muscles is responsible for any and every movement your body makes. This is regardless of speed or any other property – it all comes down to the contraction of your muscles to create force.

It’s also important to distinguish between internal and external activity. Regardless of any movement in the barbell, or dumbbell, or shotput, or your own body, or anything else that you’re moving, your muscles always have to contract to create force. The external action (what moves) and the internal action (what your muscles do to make it move) are not identical.

From that understanding, we can go on to look at the other properties of movement.

Defining Speed and Power

I’ve already mentioned that velocity is the rate of change of an object’s position. This is effectively the same thing as the object’s speed, although there is a subtle difference – speed is just the magnitude of the object’s motion, while velocity has both magnitude and direction. I bring this up just for the sake of correctness; for my purposes here it won’t really come up.

Speed of movement is usually tied up in most people’s understanding of “explosive training”, and both of those terms get conflated with “power” – a term that is so misused that it hurts me deep down inside.

I want to point out that speed is a purely external property – that is, it’s only relevant to the object being moved. Your muscles still have to contract to apply force, one way or another; creating speed is only one outcome of that. Remember this, because it will be important soon.

So we know what speed is. What about power?

Power requires us to talk about a slightly different concept: work, which can be thought of as how far a given force moves an object. If you move a 100kg barbell over half a meter, you’ve done work with that barbell. This is one instance where internal and external action are important to note: if you hold that barbell in place, the bar isn’t doing any work because it’s stationary. Your muscles, however, are having to do work to hold the bar in place – they have to overcome the force of gravity to hold it there.

That’s all I’m going to say about that because you don’t really need to know much more about work itself. Now that you have an idea of that, we can say that power is the rate of doing work, with average power being given by the formula W/t. To continue with the idea of rates of change, power is the change in work with respect to time. If force is constant, then power can be defined as Force times Velocity. Unfortunately force is rarely constant, so we usually have to look at the integral equation for power…which I’m not gonna do.

You can just think of power as being the motion that results from force in a given amount of time; a high power value implies that a relatively large force created a relatively large motion. This is why plyometric exercises and the Olympic lifts are considered high-power exercises – they both involve very large (if brief) forces that create rapid motion. Both of these “fast” movements do a large amount of work in a short interval of time.

I would have you note that both speed and power are related quantities, in that they both imply “fast” external motion. Note that high power doesn’t always involve maximum velocity, or vice versa. I do need to point out something else: both speed and power are often used synonymously with the word “explosive”, which is wrong.

Power is related to explosiveness, yes. The speed of an object is related to explosiveness in the same sense. Yet neither of them actually implies “explosive” movement. So what’s going on here?

So What is Explosiveness, Then?

Go back to the force-time curve I mentioned before, and recall what I said about how each point on the graph gives you the rate of change at that point. On the force-time curve, the slope of the graph at any point is the rate of change in force with respect to time. If you plot that value on a graph, you get another piece of terminology: Rate of Force Development (RFD). Mathematically, this is defined as (dF/dt), or the derivative of force with respect to time.

Force itself is defined as the change in the momentum of some mass; this is the source of the commonly-cited F = ma equation. Force implies a change in an object’s motion. I’d have you notice that there are some implications to this: namely, a large mass with a low acceleration can still imply high force just as a small mass with a high acceleration.

This is why you see coaches speaking of different “kinds” of strength. A heavy but slow maximum-effort lift requires a lot of force to move, even though it’s going slow. Likewise, a low-mass object that is accelerated very rapidly, aka speed-strength like the baseball or tennis-serve examples, requires a lot of force to move. There are differences in how force is developed and applied in both cases, but high muscular forces are involved regardless.

Which brings me, finally, to explosiveness. If you consider the RFD curve, which can be defined as “how quickly force is developed by the working muscles”, then explosiveness is simply the maximum value of that curve. Phrased differently, we can say that explosiveness is the ability to produce maximum force in minimum time.

Explosiveness (or explosive strength if you prefer) is given by this equation: S_e = F_max / t_max (as Newtons per second). For any given force created, the lower the time value (i.e., the faster that force is applied), the more explosive the movement. In real terms, a 100kg bench press completed in 0.5 seconds is more explosive than a 100kg bench press completed in 3 seconds, and a 150kg bench press done in 2 seconds is more explosive than the same lift in 3 or 4 seconds.

Effectively, explosive strength is an “internal” or muscular value; it applies only to what’s happening within your muscles as they work to produce force against the external object. The actual speed or power of that external movement is largely irrelevant. I say largely because obviously there is a very real overlap with power here.

Paraphrasing Dr. Zatsiorsky who summed the issue up in The Science and Practice of Strength Training, “a powerful athlete is always strong, but a strong athlete is not always powerful”. The implication is that a powerful person must be strong, and thus capable of producing high forces; but being able to produce high forces alone is not a guarantee that a person will be powerful.

You can see that explosiveness as defined by the RFD curve really has nothing to do with fast movement, although they can be closely related. A fast movement and a powerful movement will result from a high RFD, but a high RFD doesn’t always mean that a movement was fast or powerful. This is why using bands and other methods of accommodating or variable resistance qualifies as “explosive training” – they involve rapid generation of force in the working muscles.

Now as noted there is a difference between rapid, impulsive generation of force, as with the baseball pitch, and slower movement like the 1-rep max lift. You always hear a lot of HIT and SuperSlow aficionados talking about how momentum “lifts the weight for you” in “explosive” (fast) movements. That’s not strictly true; any moving object has momentum. You can define a subtle difference in the momentum of a slow lift, whereas a faster motion will tend to be more impulsive (responsive to change in velocity), but momentum is there in both cases.

What is relevant is the amount of time that force is generated in the working muscles. I’ve discussed before why this is probably a factor when you’re talking muscle-building goals, for the simple reason that hypertrophy seems to be a result of maximizing the force-time curve (see? It’s everywhere!) for the targeted muscle(s). On that same note, though, the working muscles don’t seem to differentiate between very heavy/impulsive reps or somewhat lighter sets with a more gradual tempo – as long as the total “area under the curve” is similar, the specifics don’t seem to matter.

In practical terms, this means if you want to do short, explosive sets, you’ll need to do a lot of them to equal the same growth stimulus as a handful of longer, slower sets (aka what bodybuilders already tend to do). If you’re after strength gains or especially athletic performance, though, you’re going to be better off doing a combo of heavy/slow training, lighter/faster training, and stuff in the moderate “power” range that’s both moderately heavy and moderately fast.

Practically, we tend to find that there are optimal RFD and power values for any given movement and resistance, so you’ll need to train specifically for your goal (who’d have thought???). That said, it appears that there are some benefits to training heavier and/or lighter than your target, as well. Powerlifters in the last 10-15 years have started to learn the benefits of explosive or “speed” training, and it’s long been known that improving maximum strength almost always improves power and speed (or at least lays the foundation for that improvement).

It’s started already. Every year, The Holiday Season seems to creep back earlier and earlier. When I left the US, you could see Christmas ads starting in October. Halloween be damned! Thanksgiving gets some kind of individual respect, though you can tell that it too is being assimilated into this vague “holiday season” that seems to last about four months.

I don’t mind the holiday spirit. I do hate how it’s become so commercialized that the entirety of Q4 is given over to a continuous spree of BUY! messages. Halloween seems to kick it off, and it doesn’t really quit until New Year’s Day. Then everybody wakes up on January 1st with a hangover and a new stack of credit card bills.

And of course we have the infamous dietary speedbump that is the month of December. With a flurry of Christmas parties, oh-so-tasty foods, and a nigh-inconsiderable number of days off work (which begets heavy drinking, let’s face it), the number one complaint you’ll hear in January is how badly the diet went last month.

Combine this with the on-going tradition of the New Year’s resolution – which is always “I’m really gonna get in shape this year! Really!” – and you’ve got a perfect storm that makes the sales staff at gyms world-wide salivate with the thought of their late Christmas bonuses.

Like the predictable beasts that humans are, every year we collectively give the waiting gyms our money for memberships that will not be used past February. If you look at the numbers, something like 1% of new joins in January will still be there at the end of the year. I totally made that statistic up, but it’s still depressing.

This will be my second year living in the southern hemisphere for Christmas, and let me tell you it’s a little different when you’re used to the end-of-year festivities being a winter thing. My last Christmas was spent in 35 degree swamp heat (that’s 95 F for you ‘merkans), and while this year won’t be so bad due to change of venue, the point remains: it’s still summertime, so we can add the typical “gotta get abs for summer!” motivation on top of the extant Resolutioner behavior.

What does all this mean? Well, for starters, it’s also a good time for the Back-Scratchin’ Blog Crew to gear up for their holiday hustlin’. Thanks to the Internets, no longer are the membership consultants at local gyms the only ones that can make a few bucks off the institutionalized insecurity that Western culture relies on to exist.

People already have Program Fever. It’s in the blood, and the fitness industry won’t tell you differently because it’s not profitable. Canned programs are the kernel of “working out”, really, and everyone has The Best Program Ever – as long as they’re using it when you ask, it will be beyond reproach. Ask them a month later and the opinion may not be the same, though. We’ve always been at war with Eastasia, of course.

For those of you that don’t know, Program Fever is what I call the obsession with canned, pre-made programs that come out every so often, be it in magazine articles or when the latest Big Name Rising Star of Fitness releases a new book from Rodale Publishing.

These programs become the fad-of-the-month; people follow them religiously, recommend them to each and every person on forums, and otherwise fall over themselves to sing the praises of the new workout. Fast forward six months later and maybe 10% of the original disciples will still be talking about it, let alone still doing the thing.

I’m not even sure I can blame the fitness industry for this one, as much as I want to. This is just the Disposable Society at work, a product of collective ADD that we’ve acquired in our on-demand culture. We want everything now, with the end result being that we have so many options that we literally cannot process them all.

I shouldn’t have to remind you that this thought process is at odds with the actual results-getting quintessence of any strength-building or physique-improving process. When I bitch about Program Fever, there’s a few points I always have to hammer home:

• A canned program is just a collection of rules, which in turn force you into specific behaviors. It just happens that those behaviors (ideally, anyway) bring you closer to the goal. Think of it like a recipe. It’s not doing 3×5 with a 3/0/X tempo and 60 seconds of rest that matters – what’s important is that if you follow the recipe, you get a cake. That doesn’t mean other recipes won’t work just as well, nor does it mean that an expert chef can’t whip up the best cake you’ve ever seen without looking at anything more than the ingredients list.
• You know what’s more important than the precisely-defined workout you’re doing? Consistency. Getting your ass to the gym when you’re supposed to be there. Working hard when you get there, instead of half-assing your sets and chatting for most of the time you’re supposed to be lifting. Focusing on getting stronger, instead of doing 50 sets for your biceps and telling everyone you’re training for size – and completely failing at both. I won’t suggest that you ignore the role of a well-designed workout, but I do suggest that it matters a whole lot less than most people think. It’s the effort and consistency that matters a whole lot more, and you can’t write that down.

But that doesn’t sell, does it? I mean, I might get one good long book out of that. I say might, because even that doesn’t have the marketable hook that claims of 35 LBS OF LEAN MASS IN JUST 7 WEEKS!!!!! can bring you. Bullshit talks, man.

Instead, if you market things as innovative programs, intricate masterpieces of flowing design that only the experienced coach, holder of all things knowledge-y, can bring you – well, if you sell things as Programs rather than teaching the man to fish by explaining guidelines, hell you can sell as many books as you want. There’s an infinite number of ways to create a Program, based on the simple principles that define “What Works”.

Gurus like to exploit the variety concept to make this work; how often are you told you need a new program every 4-6 weeks? Really? That’s kinda true, but here’s the fun part: “variety” is sufficiently vague that it can be used to justify just about anything. Yeah, if you do the same program for months on end, you’re gonna stall out.

At the same time, that doesn’t mean you need to haphazardly change your whole workout routine every month, either. Here’s a dirty little secret: a well-designed program that incorporates some kind of daily or weekly periodization scheme already incorporates all the variety you need. You can make progress off that one “program” for months if not years without changing a damn thing.

But that only sells one program; why do that when you can sell twenty by just re-writing the same concepts in different ways?

If that’s your bag of chips, eat it and be merry. I just don’t see the point if you’re after results.