Life throws a lot of curveballs at us sometimes. It’s always when we’re making our best gains in bench press numbers that we’ll tweak our shoulder tendon during warm-ups and lose three months of progress while recovering. It’s always when our diet is going so well that our job will throw us a bevy of new duties which will disrupt our eating schedule. Finally, it’s always when we finally seem to find that perfect workout plan that our gym access disappears and we’re limited to a nice set of 40 pounds dumbbells in our garage, until the gym remodeling or our financial problems subside. It’s at these times that we need to make adjustments to our training protocols and find ways to continue making progress – or at the very least maintaining our recent gains – ...

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One of the major limiting factors in home gyms is that most don’t offer adequate equipment for leg training. Using a standard adjustable bench, you can train chest to satisfaction with a large number of bench pressing movements. Back can be trained adequately using deadlifts and barbell rows, as well as T-bar rowing in a corner of the weight room. Shoulders are stimulated with overhead barbell presses. Biceps can be trained with barbell curls, and triceps are adequately hit with close-grip bench presses and barbell skull crushers. Mind you, the key word here is ‘adequately’. You’re not going to achieve a world-class chest workout without dumbbells and some cables, but you can adequately stimulate the region. If you have a set of dumbbells in various weights, you can improve your training efficiency greatly. Dumbbell side and ...

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As you may already know, each exercise you complete will target a different specific area of the body. Squats, leg press, hack squats, lunges, leg extensions, and many other movements all target different parts of the quads, so all are essential. But one movement – sissy squats – are often overlooked. Let’s learn more about them. First off, why are they called sissy squats? You don’t use weight when you complete them. Well, you may use some weight as you become very good at them, but for the initial few months of training with sissy squats, you won’t use a barbell or dumbbell. Since you’re a “manly man”, moving from 300-pound squats to 1000-pound leg presses, to a bodyweight movement, the nickname “sissy squat” isn’t going away anytime soon. How are sissy squats performed? Begin by standing in a ...

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Q:  I have a lot of lower mass on my legs, down toward the knee. The tear drops are great. But I don't have that hugely developed sartorius that starts thick like a tree trunk in the groin area and then descends to compliment the bulk I have down toward the knee. I need some good exercises for upper thigh mass. I'm including the usual suspects in my routine: Leg press, squats, sissy squats, extensions... Any ideas? A: The problem isn't your routine, as much as probably how you are performing these exercises. Though, I will say that sissy squats and extensions are MUCH MORE for the lower quad than upper quad and that's part of the problem. Take sissies out for awhile and replace them with hack squats. Take extensions out and replace them with heavy adductor work. ...

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