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How to Get Stronger and More Athletic

How to Get Stronger and More Athletic
How to Get Stronger and More Athletic

Being fat and weak is not how our body is created to be.  An excess of body fat shows your diet is poor and hormonally things are out of whack. Of course, there are a small handful of medical conditions and medications that increase the likelihood that you are going to be overweight but in reality, this is pretty rare.

In the majority of cases, being fat is a choice; you choose to eat the wrong foods, you choose to do little or no exercise and you therefore suffer the ignominy of hormone imbalance. Wishing you could lose weight won’t help – only action will fix the problem. Being weak is a crime against your manhood. You don’t have to be out winning powerlifting competitions or have biceps the size of basketballs but every man should be strong enough to do at least 30 push-ups, ten or more full pull-ups, deadlift his bodyweight and basically be able to push a car, lift a couple of heavy suitcase or be able to work a physically demanding job if it was necessary.

Go back 50 or so years and most men were quite capable of performing these feats. Now, a large percentage of us make a living sat on our behinds and are as weak as kittens. And if we do exercise, it’s by doing stuff that has little long term benefit and no carryover to real life. 

Like being overweight, being weak is a choice. You choose cardio over strength training, you choose leg extensions over squats, you choose triceps pushdowns over dips, and you choose Zumba over sprints and circuit training. In almost every case, if you show me a weak man, I’ll show you a lazy man who prefers easy exercises to hard but productive training.

SO, WHAT IS THE SOLUTION TO THIS EPIDEMIC OF FATNESS AND WEAKNESS? MAN UP DAMMIT!

Men shouldn’t diet for fat loss. Diets are short term fixes that don’t address the long term issues of eating badly. You go on a diet, lose five-lbs and then go back to eating crap and regain the weight you have just lost plus an extra couple of pounds. Then you do it all over and over and over again. End result? You end up dieting yourself fatter! Forget diets; they do not work. Instead, start eating like a man. Base your meals around real foods that you could catch and kill or grow or make yourself. By eating more natural foods and ditching food-like substances packed with sugar and trans fat, you will give your body the nutrients it needs without the massive calorific excess it doesn’t. Eating a good diet is a big factor in balancing your hormones.

Elevate your testosterone levels, manage your insulin levels, increase human growth hormone levels and magic starts to happen. You go from being primed for fat storage to primed for fat burning. 

Ultimately, you choose the foods you eat and how much you consume; nobody force-feeds you at gun-point. If you want to lose weight, you simply have to choose to eat better and eat less. Hard? Yes. Complicated? No. 

And how do you get strong? Go old school in the gym. Build your workouts around the essential nine exercises below to maximize your workout results while minimizing your gym time.

It doesn’t matter whether you use dumbbells or barbells; so long as you are lifting freeweights and not using machines you’ll be golden. Strive to get stronger in each one of these exercises and you’ll develop real-world strength and a physique better than 90-percent of gym goes. Yes – these exercises are harder than leg curls and triceps kick backs but that is why they work. 

And for goodness sake, stop doing “cardio” or aerobics or whatever the hell steady state exercise is called nowadays. Do some sprints, bang out some interval training, hit a heavy bag, try Tabata, swing a sledgehammer…

HERE’S YOUR MAN-UP WORKOUT PRESCRIPTION…

Monday 


Squats

Chins 

Overhead press

3 x 3-minute rounds of heavy bag

Wednesday


Deadlifts

Dips

Bent over rows  

10 x 60-yard hill sprints 

Friday

Power cleans

Bench press

Barbell Curls

Tabata sledgehammer swings 

Sets and reps? It doesn’t matter much so long as you are striving to get stronger week by week. Five sets of five, four sets of six, eight sets of three, three sets of eight – they all work. Just keep adding weight to the bar and you’ll get stronger. 

If you have the time and inclination, get out on the days in between and walk for 30 minutes or so – not on a treadmill but outside in the real world, in nature.

Put on a weighted vest or a heavy rucksack and walk like you mean it.

And if, after sorting your diet and changing your training, you find you are still not seeing the results you think you should, check with your doctor and get your T-levels tested.

Because of environmental factors and a previously unhealthy lifestyle, you may be running low on testosterone.

If you are medically low, you might end up being prescribed testosterone replacement but if you are only marginally low, you should consider using a good quality testosterone booster like this one.

Like you chose to blink your eyes or eat a donut or sit on your butt surfing the internet for amusing YouTube videos, you choose to be fat and weak. It is in your power to become lean and strong but only if you take action.

Break out of your current diet and exercise rut and take control of your body.

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