by Siim Land
● As the bar passes the knees, engage hip drive and stand up straight. DON’T round your shoulders at the top. “Open” your upper body once you reach the top. DON’T lean back at the top, arch your lower back or shrug the bar.
The deadlift is a full body exercise and it involves a lot more than pulling. If you do it correctly, then the actual pull part starts after the bar passes your knees. Your arms are there to simply hold the bar in place and don’t get engaged in any other way. The initial part of the lift is all about pushing and generating torque with leg drive. It’s as if you’re screwing your feet into the ground.
Your form has to be impeccable for you to be able to lift heavy weights without damaging your spine and discs. False movement patterns will stick because of the neuromuscular aspect of training. If you deadlift with a rounded back, you’ll do so with lighter weights as well. One day you’ll reach down to pick up some books or a bag and you’ll snap your sh*t up!
The Row
Rowing is the best exercise for developing a thick and wide back. It’s an important skill to pull heavy objects towards you while maintaining proper form.
Barbell rows are also a full body compound exercise that works your entire back, hips, and arms. They’re also great for building biceps, much better than curls. Like with the deadlift, it’s important to keep a neutral spine throughout the motion. The bar should start from the floor and returns to the ground on every rep.
● Walk to the bar and stand with your mid-foot under it. Take a medium, shoulder-width stance with your toes pointing out.
● Grab the bar with a medium-width grip. It should be slightly narrower than on the bench press but wider than on the deadlift. Squeeze the bar.
● Unlock your knees and keep them higher than on the deadlift. Bend the knees, but keep them back, so you won’t hit them with the bar.
● Lift your chest up and straighten your back. DON’T move the bar towards you. DON’T drop your hips. DON’T squeeze your shoulder blades together.
● Take a big breath, hold it, keep your core tight and pull the bar against your lower chest. Lead with your elbows and pull them to the ceiling. DON’T raise your torso, or it will become a deadlift. DON’T use momentum to jerk the weight up and down.
● Drop the weight on the ground and repeat the process.
The king of all bodyweight exercises is the pull-up because it works your entire upper body. It’s also a great indicator of your relative level of fitness. There’s nothing else but you and your own muscles. It’s you versus gravity. Being big and muscular isn’t noteworthy if you can’t do at least a dozen dead-hang pull-ups.
● Jump up to a bar and grip it about shoulder-width apart. Leave yourself into a dead-hang with your hands completely extended.
● Take the hollow body hold and keep your core tight. Your elbows have to be locked out and your feet can be slightly in front of you.
● Pull yourself up by pulling your elbows down on the floor. Keep them close. DON’T swing yourself up or use legs as assistance. Maintain the hollow body position and a tight core.
● Pull yourself up until your chin passes the bar. DON’T do half reps. Lower yourself all the way down into a dead-hang again with your elbows locked out. Take a deep breath and pull-up again.
Once you get stronger, you can make them even more difficult, by doing L-sit pull-ups. Elevate your straight legs in front of you, parallel to the ground, by engaging your quads and hip extensors. You should look like a big “L”. Do the same motion as you would with the regular pull up. Eventually, you can also start adding extra weights to a lifting belt to make it even more difficult.
Core and Abs
To get visible six pack abs you have to have a low body fat percentage, which is achieved by being in a caloric deficit. You have to burn more calories than you consume to lose fat.
The purpose of abdominal training isn’t to get you a six-pack. Instead, it’s about strengthening your core muscles that support your entire body. All compound movements engage the core and to maintain proper form you have to have integrity in your posture.
The Best Core Exercises:
Hollow body hold – the most fundamental static hold in all bodyweight exercises we talked about earlier.
Ab wheel rollouts – use a special ab wheel of a regular basketball.
Hanging leg or knee raises – hang from a bad with your elbows locked out. Raise your legs or knees as high as possible.
Dragon flags – lie down on a bench and grab hold of it with your hands. Raise your entire lower body up into the air and move it down as slow as possible. That’s the exercise Silvester Stallone did in The Rocky.
Your core strength will determine how well you’ll maintain good form during movements and will also give you a rock solid abdominal wall. It’s literally the foundation to getting stronger in everything you do. DON’T neglect it.
Conditioning and Cardio
We already talked about the benefits of high-intensity training and cardio in Chapter Five. The main idea is to not spend hours and hours on low impact activities that yield insignificant responses. We want to focus on the 80/20 of most benefits, which is why HIIT is superior to LISS in most cases. Not only is HIIT better for anaerobic fitness but it’s also more effective for fat loss. Dr. Doug McGuff writes in his book Body by Science:
There is an assumption that low-intensity exercise is necessary for fat burning and also that it burns more fat than high-intensity exercise. The reality is that no exercise, per se, burns a lot of body fat.
The average person weighing 150 pounds burns roughly 100 calories per mile—whether the person walks or runs that mile. Since there are 3,500 calories in a pound of body fat, it would be necessary to run or jog for thirty-five miles to burn 1 pound of body fat.
While both low- and high-intensity physical activity burn calories, high-intensity exercise does something that is highly important in the fat-burning process that its lower intensity counterpart does not: it activates hormone-sensitive lipase.
When we’re mobilizing glycogen out of a cell during high-intensity exercise, we’re also able to activate hormone-sensitive lipase, which permits the mobilization of body fat. If insulin levels are high, even in the face of a calorie deficit, hormone-sensitive lipase will be inhibited, and mobilizing fat out of the adipocytes will become essentially impossible. This may explain why people who diet and take up either walking or jogging often find it difficult to lose much in the way of body fat.
That’s exactly my point – most people who are doing a bunch of cardio don’t look very fit and they tend to have some health issues. It means that simply exercising won’t work.
Doing 1 hour of cardio may indeed burn more calories than doing 10 minutes of HIIT. It can help you create a negative energy balance, but weight loss doesn’t necessarily equal fat loss because you can also lose lean muscle mass. In this case, HIIT is more effective because you won't be tapping into gluconeogenesis during exercise and will torch fat burning afterwards. Plus there’s the afterburn effect of HIIT that makes you consume more oxygen after exercise.
How to do HIIT:
Pick an exercise that you can easily max out on, such as sprinting, burpees, kettlebell swings, push-ups, jumping squats etc.
Warm up for 1-2 minutes with easy aerobic
Then, go all out for 20 seconds
Rest for 10 seconds
Maximum effort for 20 seconds
Recover for 10
Repeat for 8-10 rounds
Because of the intense nature of this exercise protocol, you have to remain mindful of how fit you are. It’s very effective but can be easily taken too far. Know your limits and medical condition before you try it out.
Doing 10 minutes of steady state cardio burns about 100 calories. Now, one single banana has about as many calories. Would it be easier to not eat it in the first place? Even worse, one slice of pizza and a can of soda has about 600 calories, which you can consume in less than 5 minutes.
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Exercise is 1 step forward in the right direction. But a poor nutritional plan is 2 steps back. Simply put, you can’t out-exercise a bad diet.
It’s the treadmill effect – you have to keep trying harder and harder to keep yourself in one spot. You just have to keep on running and running. Otherwise, the ground beneath you will wipe you off. No matter how many hours you spend rolling inside the wheel like a hamster, you’ll never reach your results if you make it all go down the drain.
Training Structure
When you’re constructing your workouts, you should follow a few simple rules of hierarchy to maximize the amount of your training ability and efficiency. This should be a template upon which you structure your exercises.
Warmup. The first thing you want to do is warm up. This will increase your core temperature, directs some blood to your muscles and puts you in the mood. Do about 3-5 minutes of light cardio or something aerobic.
Spend at least 5 minutes doing mobility work. Do arm circles, deep lunges, squats, some pushups, hang from a bar, and get rid of all of the cracks you might have. Focus more on the body parts you’re about to train.
DON’T do static stretching. This is the complete opposite of what we want to achieve with our training. Your muscles have to be tight and strong if you’re lifting heavy weights. Stretching can lead to injuries because you’ll soften your fascia. Do dynamic stretching with mobility instead.
Skill work. This is the part in which you’re practicing a technique of some sort. It’s second because you’ll still be fresh and ready to go. Do handstand holds, snatches, focus on perfect form and proper ranges of motion. Skill work is almost like an extended warm-up, as you’ll be still priming your muscles for the actual work. Do this for about 5-10 minutes.
Strength work. This is the core of your workout – the most difficult and taxing part. In here you’ll be doing your key lifts, such as the squat, deadlift, pressing, rows or benching. All of your efforts should be directed into improving the weight you can move. Power and explosive work can also be included here, as you want to be as fresh as possible so that you could get stronger. Don’t think about getting a cardio workout in this phase and focus solely on your lifts. This is the bulk of your training and should last for about 30-45 minutes, depending on how long your workout lasts in total.
Accessory/hypertrophy work. After you’ve finished your compound lifts, you can also do some accessory work. Isolation exercises can add the extra benefit of sculpting your physique exactly the way you envision it to be. It’s also a great way to build those smaller muscles, such as the forearms, calves and elbow tendons, that benefit more from higher reps. This is the hypertrophy part of your workout, that’s actually necessary for increasing your key lifts as well. Do about 3 sets of 8-15 reps each and focus on the pump. Accessory exercises should complement the major lifts you did that workout. For instance, if you did squats, then you should do walking lunges, Bulgarian split squats or leg extensions, instead of biceps curls or dips. If you deadlift, then do rows and pull-ups.
Metabolic conditioning. To improve your cardiovascular fitness and burn more fat, you should also include some metcons. You can either do aerobics or HIIT, we know which one yields better results. Do 5 minutes of Tabata or about 10-20 minutes of LISS cardio. These exercises are done to take advantage of the state in which your muscles are at after resistance training. They’re not as taxing on the nervous system as the main lifts. You can still have a good conditioning session after strength training, whereas it wouldn’t work the other way around.
Prehabilitation/mobility and cool down. Lastly, flexibility and mobility work are done at the end. These help your body to relax and help to prevent injury. Try to increase your mobility by doing deep squats, back bridges, splits and foam rolling. Work on your rotator cuffs, hips and elbows so that they would get stronger.
We can manipulate intensity by (1) increasing the difficulty of our exercise, by adding more weight to the bar or progressing in bodyweight movements. Volume can be modulated by (2) the number of reps done per set, (3) the number of sets per exercise, and (4) the total amount of exercises we do. To continually get stronger, we can’t be repeating the same workout over and over again, because our body has already adapted to the stress. Therefore, improving at least in some of those 4 metrics indicates progress.
Immediately after a workout we actually get weaker. However, as our body heals itself and the nervous system recovers, we’ll go through super-compensation and come back stronger. The training stimulus must exceed a certain threshold that causes good adaptations (to not undertrain), and it mustn’t be too much that causes excessive damage from which we can’t recover from. More is not always better and we should always be mindful of under which conditions our body is at.
Figure 56 How you should progressively get stronger
Generally speaking, optimal recovery from workouts takes about 48-72 hours. If you didn’t push yourself through the dirt like a maniac, then your muscles should be repaired by that time. However, the central nervous system may need up to 6-7 days of rest. That’s why it’s important to not overdo the intensity and volume. You’ll feel it when you’ve fried your CNS. Your motor control and balance will decrease and you’ll be more tired.
Periodization is about strategically designing our workouts by systematically manipulating variations in training specificity, intensity, and volume.
The goal is to maximize your gains while reducing the risk of injury, staleness and overtraining. It will also address peak performance for competitions or events. An intelligently structured design will include several different chunks or periods of time across the entire year that each has its own priorities.
There are a lot of ways you can structure this, too many if you ask me. Anyone can benefit from clever periodization, but only the serious competitive athlete would need to dial down very deeply into the subject. If you simply want to get stronger then you don’t need to go crazy with this because your career isn’t dependent on this. If you’re getting weaker then you won’t miss out on anything if you take a few extra days for recovery. However, there should still be a few guidelines we should follow. I’m going to give you an example of very simple and basic periodization.
There are 4 weeks in a month. Each week represents certain aspects of your training you’re trying to improve. Every workout ought to progress you towards what you’re trying to accomplish. To let your body rest while still maintaining high output in your performance, you can follow a cycle of overreaching and recovery. The same cycle applies to weeks as well as workouts. You have a hard workout, followed by an easier one. After your hard week, you’ll have an easier one. The first training session focuses on strength, whereas the next one on hypertrophy etc. This way you’ll be able to hit all of your lifts hard and allow the super-compensation to kick in.
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday
Week 1
Hard Week
Hard Lower Body
Easy Upper Body
Light Cardio
Hard Upper Body
Easy Lower Body
HIIT
Rest
Week 2
Easy Week
Hard Lower Body
Light Cardio
Easy Upper Body
Light Cardio
Hard Upper Body
Easy Lower Body
Rest
Week 3
Hard Week
Hard Upper Body
Easy Lower Body
Light Cardio
Hard Lower Body
Easy Upper Body
HIIT
Rest
Week 4
De-Load
Hard Lower Body
Rest
Light Cardio
Hard Upper Body
Rest
Light Cardio
Easy Full Bo
dy Workout
This is a very sustainable way to progress and can be adjusted according to your own preference. You can also use the push/pull/legs split with this. Just make sure you cycle between harder and easier days.
What I mean by hard is 80-95% of your 1RM maximum. In strength training, it follows the rep range of 2-6 reps with 4-8 sets. On easier days, the load should be slightly smaller and should fall somewhere between 60-80% with 8-12 reps and 3-4 sets each exercise.
You should also take into account the principle of auto-regulative training. Basically, it’s about structuring your workouts based on how you’re feeling on that day.
It’s much wiser to back off when you feel like you’re still too exhausted from your previous session. Adding more stress on top won’t give you the desired results. Our pursuit towards excellence can be overshadowed by our type-A personalities that think that we’re simply being lazy and need to grind through the pain. The ego is the enemy here and we should learn to listen to the signals our body is sending us.
Based on a scale of 1 to 10, start measuring how you feeling each morning and then act according to that.
10 would mean that you can literally run through a wall. In that case, go for a heavy workout with no regrets.
Number 1 would mean that you can’t even make it out of the bed and need to be hospitalized, which is a sign of serious overtraining.
Number 5 and anything below that feels like you have some joint pain, too much muscle soreness, troubles finding balance, forgetting things, mental fatigue, and shivering limbs. Back off and have a rest day.
If you’re between 6 or 7, have an easier day – you’ll be feeling quite fine but don’t have that explosive spring in your step if you know what I mean.