Your body uses protein to build new muscle. It also uses protein to repair damaged muscle tissue after your workouts. You need about 0. Use your lean body mass instead without the fat. If you have a normal weight there will be little difference between your body-weight and lean body mass. Just use 0.
Protein shakes can be tempting. They take less time to prepare, and are cheap. And real food contains tons of micro-nutrients on top of just the protein. You need the minerals and vitamins to help recovery, as well as fiber to improve digestion.
Most of your protein should therefore come from real food. If you eat like an omnivore this is easy. Eat some meat, chicken, fish or eggs with every meal. Your body uses water to cool you down through sweat during workouts.
It also uses water for muscle recovery from your workouts. Your body uses it for every process. Dehydration causes strength loss, joint pain, stiff muscles, tiredness and constipation. Headaches are a common symptom. Think of hangovers the day after drinking alcohol — it dehydrates. Drinking more water often fixes that. The usual advice is to drink 8x8oz or 3 liters of water a day. But this is aimed at the average sedentary joe. You lift weights and sweat. You need to drink more to replace the water lost during workouts.
And the warmer the season or place where you lift, the more water you need to drink. You want to optimize for maximum strength and muscle gains. Your body has more critical uses for water than your muscles.
An abundant intake of water ensures that you recover well between workouts and function effectively. Better is to pay attention to the color of your urine. It should be clear through the day unless you take vitamin B. Plus going to the toilet will stop you from sitting for hours non-stop. I start my days by drinking two glasses of water. I always take a bottle of water with me to the gym, and sip on it during my workout. Stick with it to get used to it.
You can add pieces of lemon to give the water taste if you want. Your body releases muscle building hormones like testosterone and growth hormone when you sleep. They help you recover from your workouts. Sleep eight hours a night to maximize recovery.
Many people only sleep six hours a night. But this makes it harder to train hard. You feel more tired and less motivated. The weight feels heavier and more challenging. Getting through your workouts takes more out of you. You fail reps more which slows or stops your progress. Lack of sleep also hurts your recovery. You go through five stages when you sleep.
Each cycle lasts about 90 minutes. Your body releases growth hormone during stage three and four. You get less cycles if you sleep six hours than eight. More cycles is more hormones is more recovery. Lack of sleep weakens your immune system. It also causes hunger and sugar cravings that make you fat. And people who sleep less are more likely to be obese — one simple reason is less time sleeping is more time you can spend eating.
You can get away with sleeping less than eight hours some nights. Keeping a sleep diary helps. I use the iPhone health app and bedtime alarm.
Set your wake and bedtime so you have your eight hours of sleep. Then track your average sleeping time in the health app. If you can take a nap before doing your workouts, do it.
And relax. Psychological stress adds on top of the physical stress you get from lifting weights. Take several deep breaths before you do your set to calm yourself down.
Assistance exercises target small muscles which grow more slowly like your arms, abs and calves. Your arm muscles work to pull the weight on rows and push it on presses.
They hold the bar on every exercise. Meanwhile your abs support your spine. And your calves stabilize you. These lifts work a lot of muscles with heavy weights.
They therefore trigger overall muscle growth. They try to make up for a lack of intensity with quantity. Thing is, the only way you can do assistance exercises after the main ones is if you lift light. Besides, the more assistance exercises you do, the longer your workout takes. This makes it tempting to take shorter rest times between sets. But that makes it harder to lift heavy as already discussed. It ends up hurting your progress on the main exercises that trigger most growth.
Focus on increasing your strength on the main exercises. Consider this…. Your arm muscles also contract isometrically during Squats and Deadlifts. This is similar to how your lower back muscles contract during these lifts to keep your spine neutral. This makes them stronger and more muscular. His muscles had to become stronger and bigger to lift the heavier weights. And since his arms hold and press the bar, they had to get stronger and bigger too.
You can also find guys with man boobs and girls who are flat-chested. But most women have bigger boobs than men. And most strong people have bigger muscles than weak people.
Even if direct arm work was better, curling lb works your biceps muscles harder than 50lb. That allows you to work your biceps harder than before. The best assistance exercise for your biceps is the Chinup. It works them more than Rows because you grip the bar with your palms facing up.
Your elbows start straight and bend like on biceps curls. But you also bend at the shoulder to pull your arm down — this engages your back. Chinups work more muscles than curls. Every rep forces you to lift your own body-weight. Chinups trigger more arm growth because they uses more muscle with more weight.
Dips are the best assistance exercise for your triceps. Your arms straighten to lift the weight, like on skullcrushers. But you can engage your chest muscles. More muscles working is more weight you can lift. Dips trigger your triceps muscle to grow more than skullcrushers do. If you want extra arm work, add Dips to workout A and Chinups to workout B.
Three sets is enough since the main exercises already work your arms. Your program will look like this…. My app will show you how to progress when you upgrade to StrongLifts Pro. Use it to save yourself having to think about all this. Give your body time to get used to the extra arm work before adding more.
This way you can also see the impact adding Chinups and Dips has on your arm development. After that you can add direct arm work if needed. The best isolation exercises for your biceps and triceps are Barbell Curls and Skullcrushers. Barbell Curl with the same Olympic bar you use for the Squat and Deadlift. You can use the EZ bar for Skullcrushers but not for curls. Two sets is enough with all the work your arms already get. Just focus on doing the exercise correctly, with proper form, moving your muscles over the full range of motion.
Straight arms at the bottom of curls, touch your nose with the bar at the top. Feel the muscle. DO NOT train your arms on rest days!
They need to recover from your last workout so you can press and pull heavier next workout. This gives your arms Sunday to recover and get stronger for your workout on Monday. Isolation at the end. Your legs are large muscles. The main function of your abdominal muscles is to support your spine. They contract to keep your spine neutral when you stand, move, Squat , Deadlift , etc.
The heavier the weight you lift, the harder your abs must work to keep your spine neutral. This triggers your ab muscles to grow. Your abs may not be visible if a layer of fat covers them. Endless situps and crunches does not burn fat locally.
You have to lower your overall body-fat to see your abs. You do this mostly by improving your nutrition. You have to build your ab muscles first. Better, lifting heavy can make your abs so strong and muscular, that they stick out more. Keep in mind that there is no such thing as lower abs. Your lower and upper abs contract as a whole. Learn to stand properly.
But if you want to add some, do hanging knee raises and prone bridges. Add one to each workout. Two sets of eight on the former. Sets of sec for the latter. Upgrade to StrongLifts Pro in my app and it will show you how to progress. Squats and Deadlifts work your calves — the muscles contract to straighten your ankles when you lift the weight. The range of motion is limited though compared to doing standing or seated calf raises.
So it can make sense to add these exercises to give your calf muscles extra work. But it can be a waste of time if you have high calf muscle insertions. My calves muscles hang high in the top third of my lower leg. The bottom two thirds is all tendons and bones.
The muscle bellies are strong and muscular. But nothing can make them hang lower. This creates a skinny look. Your calves are used to a lot of stress from walking every day. Make sure you go heavy with the weights.
And be realistic. If you have high calves like me, the muscles are unlikely to ever stick out from every direction like some guys. Like they say, if you want big calves, choose better parents. Best thing in that case is to get over it. It will shut them up. Cardio helps fat loss by increasing the amount of calories you burn. Your body burns calories to fuel your cardio. But it also burns more calories for up to 48 hours after your cardio if you do HIIT.
If the total calories you burn is higher than the calories you eat, you lose fat. But lifting weights is always more important than cardio. Many people try to lose fat by doing cardio only. They usually lose a ton of muscle and end up skinny-fat. Lifting weights prevents muscle loss and builds muscle. It makes you look better. It therefore has priority over cardio. Nutrition is also more important than cardio. One Big Mac has kcal while 30min cardio only burns kcal.
You have to improve your nutrition as well. You can create a caloric deficit by eating less while lifting weights. Cardio just allows you to eat maintenance calories while creating a deficit. Or it can create a bigger deficit to speed up fat loss. But you can get lean without doing any cardio. LISS burns more calories. The intensity is higher than when walking.
HIIT is therefore better. But you burn more calories through EPOC aka the afterburn — your metabolism is higher for up to 48 hours after the cardio. Add a 5min warmup and 5min cool down and you have 30mins total, burning just as much as with 30mins LISS. You have to push yourself to get the most out of it. This also makes HIIT cardio harder to recover from. If you try to do this every day, it will hinder your recovery.
Do the minimum amount of cardio you need to get results first. This way when you get stuck and you will, everyone does , you can add more cardio to get unstuck. Only competitive bodybuilders trying to get to low single digit body-fat level need cardio six times a week. Best case you plateau, worst case you get an overuse injury. Best is to start with two HIIT cardio sessions a week first.
After a few weeks you can add cardio on Wednesday too if needed. This gives you four rest days a week to recover. It will pre-exhaust your legs for Squats and limit how heavy you can go. Lifting weight is more important than cardio as already explained. Do your cardio at the end. Yes this is hard. Cardio on your rest days is a terrible idea. When does your body recover for your next workout if you train five days in a row? The only exception is Saturday. You have Sunday to recover before the next workout on Monday.
Like this…. The simplest way to do HIIT cardio is on the stationary bike. Warmup five minutes at a low intensity. Then pedal as fast as you can for 30 seconds. Go back to an easy pace for 90seconds. Repeat for five rounds and cool down with 5min at a low intensity.
This will take you about 20mins. The key is to push hard during the intensity bout. Increase the resistance so you can pedal fast and hard. You should be out of breath within ten seconds. Do sets of 20 reps and take as much rest as you need to make it.
Use good form by engaging your hips. Be warned this will get you sore the first time. Lifting weights is good for your heart. It decreases your heart rate and blood pressure. My resting heart rate has been around 50 for years despite never running and barely doing cardio.
Doctors are usually surprised by this as the main thing I do is lifting heavy weights several times a week. The people who do such routines need to add cardio. We do compound exercises that work our whole body. We increase the weight progressively. And we reach high training intensities. Your heart rate increases and you get out of breath. After resting three minutes, you do your next set.
This like high intensity interval cardio — it trains your heart and lungs. Everything under the bar gets stronger when you Squat heavy — muscles, joints, bones. Your heart is a muscle. It gets stronger like every other muscle. It has to so it can pump blood to your muscles and the rest of your body when you lift heavy weights. This strengthens your heart muscle.
It works like this: your muscles contract when you lift weights. They compress your blood vessels which increases your blood pressure. Your heart must pump harder against this resistance to deliver blood. This strengthens it — your left ventricle increases in strength and muscle size. Your blood pressure comes back to normal after your set is done.
But it also decreases over time. Lifting heavy weights strengthens your muscles. Stronger muscles are more efficient — it takes more effort to tire them. Stronger muscles therefore also put less demand on your heart. As an example, think of walking up stairs. Each step is like a single leg Squat. Double your Squat and your legs get twice as strong. Each step now takes your legs half the effort. So they puts less demand on your heart.
Stronger muscles basically makes your heart more efficient. It will become above average level, and things like walking up stairs or even short runs will become easier. Stronger muscles last longer. It takes longer before they get tired because every movement takes less effort than before. So the stronger your muscles, the longer you last and thus the further you can go.
Think about it — marathon runners rarely have to quit running because they got out of breath. They quit running because their legs are tired. Just like you have to Squat to become good at Squatting , you have to run to be good at running — at the minimum to improve the skill of running.
To get more efficient at it. Strength training makes weak endurance runners better at long distance running. Instead it hurts strength gains by making you less explosive and hindering recovery. Strength and endurance are at opposite ends of the spectrum. There are freaks who manage to get good at both. What you need for strength is different than what you need for endurance.
As long as you can modulate the weight used the 5x5 sessions can also be paired with CrossFit or running schedules depending on your training goals. The cons of the 5x5 workouts are its lack of specificity, boredom, and lack of auto-regulation. This makes it a suboptimal training method for athletes and professionals of advantages stages. As 5x5 sets are the middle of the road approach to weight training, athletes and professionals might be better off spending their time with other rep schemes.
If you are into developing maximum strength and explosiveness you might be doing well to mix in more work in the repetition range. If you need to build mass you might want to change gears to 5x10 or even German Volume Training.
Professional athletes will most likely use 5x5 workouts as a module in a built up to a peak or offseason, but not as the only tool in the box as it lacks the specificity at the extreme edges of weight training. Another factor to consider with 5x5 workouts is the mental challenge. If you do 5x5 for many years and that is all you do the program will get very stale and you might not be in the mental place anymore to train as hard as you can.
Even though empirical evidence for this is hard to come by, I can see the merit of sharpening the mind and body bu doing something unexpected and different. The last disadvantage of 5x5 programs compared to more sophisticated approaches is the lack of autoregulation. Autoregulation means that you will alter the program with fewer or more work on a given day depending on how you feel.
A program with autoregulation will allow you to push yourself beyond the prescription on good days and take it down a nudge on bad days. This can be especially important in professional settings where travel, performance and other training commitments enter the mix. The main alternatives to the 5x5 workouts are. German Volume Training. Wendler Juggernaut Training Systems. German Volume Training will be a full commitment to muscle growth.
This is a great program for teenagers who have all the right ingredients to grow fast as long as they are supervised. German Volume Training has a 10x10 structure at its heart.
This means you will do a lot of work and ingrain good technique if you are taught well. It will also mike you swell like a balloon, given the right diet to go along. Wendler is, in my opinion, one of the best choices of a cookie-cutter program for busy athletes. The routine is usually done within half an hour, includes autoregulation and has a one month cycle.
This does not make it too boring, addressed athleticism and strength while not eating up too much time. Only con is that it does not work a lot in absolute one repetition ranges as it does not have peaking blocks. Brace your abs and push your hips up, driving through your heels until your torso and hips are parallel to the floor. Set an adjustable bench to a degree incline, and lie back against it with a dumbbell in each hand.
Press the dumbbells from shoulder level to overhead and then lower back down. Attach a rope handle to the top pulley of a cable station. Grasp an end in each hand with your palms facing each other. Step back to place tension on the cable. Draw your shoulder blades together and down as you pull the handle to your forehead, so your palms face your ears and your upper back is fully contracted.
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Read more about our editorial process. Join the Onnit Tribe. Onnit Academy is the most comprehensive database of information related to Unconventional Training, a unique new form of fitness methodology that focuses on functional strength, conditioning, and agility using the most efficient means and tools possible. The online database includes articles, videos, tutorials, and workouts featuring alternative implements like kettlebells, sandbags, steel maces, steel clubs, battle ropes, and more.
More articles by Onnit Academy. Follow Onnit Academy. We just ask that you try it out for at least two weeks to give it a fair shot. Failure to achieve 5x5 with a given weight for three consecutive workouts calls for a deload, which means you decrease the weight by 10 percent for your next workout. This deload, however, is only employed for a single workout, not an entire training week.
You'll then dust yourself off and try again. Keeping meticulous records of your weights and reps is important for tracking your progress. The StrongLifts 5x5 protocol has a number of positive attributes, especially for beginning lifters. It's simple, which is important. Beginners often want to inaugurate their training career with a overly complex bodybuilding-style regime, or some ritualistic Eastern Bloc strength cycle.
No matter the goal, complexity is actually the beginner's enemy. Simplicity is infused into the program in several ways.
For one, the trainee knows exactly how many days per week to work out, and exactly which exercises to use on each training day. There's no guesswork. A simple bit of math allows the lifter to plan training weights for weeks in advance, again saving mental energy. Simplicity preludes practice. Since the program uses only five lifts, and three of them are done three times per week, there are a lot of opportunities to practice becoming a good lifter. Frequency of practice—good practice on these core lifts—is paramount for beginning-level lifters.
The positives continue with the emphasis on building strength. Even if a newbie's eventual goal is to become a muscled colossus, strength gets a body big faster. You'll build a bigger, stronger foundation with this kind of approach.
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