In this world, time is the ultimate resource. You can always make more money, meet new friends, and find just about another resource through a combination of good luck and hard work. Time, however, is the one thing that is ultimately finite for all, and eventually, unfortunately, we will all run out of it! Barring all of this serious stuff, bodybuilding training is also affected in a major way by our time limitations. Sure, we have all seen the clips of professional bodybuilders training for two hours per day. Toss in time for cooking meals and taking showers, and you wonder how any of them have time for a job or social life! The truth is that many of these men don’t hold regular 40-hour per week jobs, which affords them the luxury of training ...

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You know what the meaty back days entail. You walk into the weight room, and you crawl out. You spend an hour and a half clubbing the back with set after heavy set of deadlifts, rows, and other assorted painful movements. At the end of the day, your back is pumped, you don’t fit in your shirt, and you know tomorrow is going to being some soreness. This is the way you should always train, right? Not exactly. There are going to be times when you don’t want to all-out destroy the back with heavy barbell and dumbbell movements. Maybe your central nervous system is a bit down, and you’re fighting off an illness. Maybe you’re letting a tweaked or overly sore area recover from what has been a bad week. Perhaps your joints ...

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Do you have an extremely poor back? Has it cost you a few spots’ worth of placing in shows? At the local and regional level of shows, it is usually conditioning and structure that wins shows. At the national and professional levels, most bodybuilders already have superior shape and structure, and conditioning is usually pretty similar among the top 5 or 7 athletes in each class. At the lower levels of bodybuilding, having an excellent back is a rarity, as many people just getting into bodybuilding have spent their first few years of training focusing upon the showcase muscle groups of chest and arms. It’s never too late to make back a focus if you wish to go far in the sport of competitive bodybuilding, but the time to act is now. If your ...

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Many bodybuilders find success with brief, high intensity training. They discover the magic secrets to feeling peak contraction, and can manage to elicit some growth despite only using a few sets. For steroid users, this sort of success is easy with low-volume, extremely heavy training. For naturals, it can be much harder. Meeting peak intensity and training to actual failure isn’t always possible, especially when training without a spotter. For this reason, many bodybuilders resort to higher volume training. Hitting that peak failure point or achieving absolutely perfect repetition tempo isn’t as necessary, when you hit the muscle group with enough quality sets. Let’s look at a sample back day utilizing high volume training. You don’t have to train to failure on any set, although it is productive to toss that method ...

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Many bodybuilders frequently notice that their back workouts hamper their ability to perform as well as needed on leg day. It’s true that some back exercises do require the hamstrings remain fully flexed while supporting a great deal of weight. Deadlifts are an extremely heavy compound movement which forces the trainer to keep the hamstrings fully flexed throughout. Hyperextensions are another movement which results in the hamstrings briefly receiving the brunt of your body weight (along with any plate you are holding as well), which can leave the hamstrings very pumped at the end of back day. Your initial reaction might be one of optimistic surprise. After all, who wouldn’t want to add a quick pump to their hamstrings to see some new progress? Training them twice a week means they’ll grow twice as fast, ...

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Many bodybuilders tend to ignore the importance of including back training in there training regimen. The back is very important and as such it needs to be adequately trained. There are various types of exercises which can help a bodybuilder work out the back muscles. Most novice bodybuilders and even some veteran bodybuilders are not aware how to perfect these techniques of exercising the back. In order to train the back you need to lie down on your back and then put your hands on an outstretched position with the palms of your hand on the floor. While looking upwards you need to lift your left leg as well as your right leg a few inches from the ground. You should ensure during this time that your thighs and the arm which is not touching the ground are still raised during the ...

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There are essentially two ways to train the back to add muscle. First, you can opt for the traditional type of training performed by trainers at most gyms in America. These workouts usually involve 4 sets of four exercises, in which your repetitions span from 8 to 15. You train for muscle, but mainly for the pump as well. This type of training is fairly effective, but you are probably aware (if you’ve been training in this manner for years) that you’re not going to see a lot of changes in your physique from week to week on it. There is a second method of training the back, and while the goals parallel those of bodybuilders (to gain muscle mass), the means by which this is achieved involve lifting in a method consistent with powerlifting. You keep ...

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We are all put together differently. Some of us are tall and lanky. We are called ectomorphs, and we have a terrible time adding mass to our frame. Others are shorter and carry more body fat. Referred to as endomorphs, we can add muscle without too much effort, but the fat surely comes with us. Finally, some of us are blessed to fall into a group known as mesomorphs. These people have no problem adding muscle mass, and fat usually isn’t a concern. In addition to possessing different body types, our frames vary as well. In bodybuilding, a narrow waist and wide shoulders are referred to as a classic V-frame, and are very desirable. Being born with a genetically wide waist is something that curses bodybuilders of all body types mentioned above. Here are ...

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The Weider Muscle Confusion Principle was made popular decades ago by bodybuilders including Bill Pearl and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Essentially, they dictated that the bodybuilder was to make every workout different so that the bodybuilder’s muscles would never become accustomed to one particular workout or set of exercises. After all, our muscles only grow when they are subjected to a set of stimulus below their current capacity. If you can bench press 225 x 12 times consistently, your muscles will never grow any bigger. It’s only when you include new chest movements, and/or add more weight to the bar during your benching, that the muscles of the chest will be forced to grow in order to adapt to this new workload. The muscles of the back adapt very quickly to workloads places upon it. The back is a ...

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Q:  My lats are actually one of my best body parts, and definitely the best part of my back. I have only been training for about 2 years and they are super wide and connect pretty deep into my waist. The problem is my buddies always comment on the fact that, when I diet down, the rest of my back is really shallow and not dense or thick at all! In fact, they say it’s really noticeable and is a liability on stage. I already feel like I am training like an animal, so how can I change that? A: You’re right, you’re a freak of nature, dude! But keep in mind, there’s no such thing as too wide a back! Who would hate looking like they were going to fly away at any minute? Thank your lucky stars that you don’t ...

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