Military Press Technique and Proper Form
I used to hate the military press when I first started working out simply because I was very bad at it. This is an exercise that is difficult to perform correctly as it doesn’t just work the arms, shoulders, and upper back but also stimulates your core muscles. Just to keep yourself steady during this exercise is a challenge. I’m not kidding. I see people swaying like leaves in the wind while performing a military press.
Now, that I’ve become stronger and better with my technique, I find that this is one of the best exercises that you can do to build all around upper body strength. The only problem is that a lot of people can’t seem to do it right.
In this article I want to talk about the proper form and technique of doing a military press. I hope that my step by step explanation will help you to do it right.
How to Do a Barbell Military Press
1. Place the appropriate weight on your barbell (and make it even). This changes from one person to the next so you need to adjust the weight according to your ability and workout method.
2. If you’re doing this exercise in the gym, set the bar on a Smith Machine at the height of your shoulders. This way you won’t have to make the additional movement of lifting it upward.
3. Grab the bar with both hands in an overhand grip. I recommend using workout gloves to reduce friction with the bar and improving your grip.
4. Stand with your feet about shoulder width apart. I stand with my feet a bit wider as it’s easier to stabilize myself this way.
5. Clench your abs and press the barbell over your head in one fluid movement.
6. You may need to move your head backward a bit in order to let the bar pass cleanly over your head. Make sure to not sway your back while doing so.
7. Hold the bar with outstretched arms over your head for a second.
8. Lower the bar down to the starting position.
There you go. This is one rep. Ready for another? Go!
Tips
1. Don’t use your legs to force the bar higher. The movement needs to come from your arms alone. All your legs need to do is to hold steady.
2. Always make sure that your abs are tight before performing the military press itself. You want maximum stability.
3. The movement has to be even. If you’re compensating with one arm for the weakness of the other, you need to use a different weight. By the way, I am referring to the movement up and the one down.
4. Keep your knees slightly bent.
5. Ask someone to watch you do the exercise. Sometimes, you can’t tell that you’re swaying your back yourself.
Here’s a video which shows how the exercise is done:
In Conclusion
The military press is an excellent exercise that you can perform to improve upper body strength and size and achieve a powerful core. Try it with different barbells and weight and always make sure to maintain the correct form and technique.
5 Ways To Make Exercise Harder
To build muscles you need to train hard. This isn’t anything new. We all know that. What you may not know is how easy it is to make every minute of your time in the gym that much harder and more effective.
In this post I want to talk about ways to make exercise harder and smarter. This isn’t about spending more time in the gym. It’s about making the most of each workout and ensuring that you get better muscle stimulation and growth from it.
Here are 5 tips to make your workouts harder
1. Use free weights instead of machines
The reason why free weights top machines is that when you’re using a fitness machine, you don’t have to keep the weights stable. The machine does some of the work for you. Usually, the weights move along a groove, up and down or forward and backward. This makes the exercise much easier.
When you use free weights, you’re training in a free environment in which you need to stabilize the dumbbells or barbell, or whatever you’re lifting, yourself. This requires you to use more muscles and to put in more effort.
2. Do Supersets
Supersets can transform your workouts. I’m talking about a massive increase in intensity. Supersets are one of the easiest ways you can get more from each workout. Supersets are simply 2 or more exercises done one after the other during a single set with no rest in between. These 2 exercises can target the same muscle group in a different way, such as a chest press and chest flies, or, in the case of antagonistic supersets, target opposing muscles, such as tricep extensions and bicep hammer curls.
You can play around with supersets, sometimes even doing 3 exercises back-to-back. The main thing is that you’re squeezing in more work into your workout and pushing your muscles beyond their usual endurance. I will write a complete post about supersets soon.
3. Do More Big Movements
Not all exercises are made equal. You can’t expect a bicep curl to be as hard as a split squat. One is a small movement and the other a big one. If you want to engage more muscles and make your workouts harder, I recommend focusing on exercises with big movements. These include exercises such as squats, lunges, jumping exercises, pull ups, etc. Small movement exercises include bicep curls, tricep extensions, forearm reverse curls, etc. Both type of exercises have merit, but do more big movements and you will get faster results.
4. Work the Negatives
One simple way to make any set harder is to do the releasing part of each repetition more slowly. Each rep is made up of lifting and release parts. The lifting part is the one in which you exert the most effort, but it doesn’t have to be the only one. When you release the weight, by which I mean go back to the starting point of the exercise, you also work your muscles. Most people do so too fast so their muscles hardly get any work done. If you do it slowly it’s an entirely different story.
Working the “release” is also known as Negative training. You’re using the negative movement to train your muscles. A classic example of this is to hang from a pull up bar and to go down to the outstretched position very slowly. You will not believe how hard this can be and how this can help you build big biceps (in the pull up example) and bigger muscles all over your body, in general.
5. Notch It Up
Some people work with a certain weight until they feel very comfortable with it. Only then do they try to use a heavier weight. I like to use a different approach. I call it: Notch It Up.
What I mean by notching it up is to use increasingly heavier weight, even if it’s just by a half a pound weight or less. I want you to train a little beyond your comfort zone on each workout. This will keep your muscles under the right kind of tension and will make each workout count. Try it the next time you visit the gym, keep it firmly in mind, and you will see results.
Finally, remember that working out isn’t enough to build muscles. You also need to eat correctly. If you’re having trouble with your nutrition, use some of the recipes from the Anabolic Cooking plan. I’m sure you’ll find a lot of tasty options there and they’re all designed for building muscles faster.
Epic Warrior Diet
When you read the first page of The Epic Warrior Diet by Thomas Calkins, you get the sense that this is not your run-of-the-mill muscle building program, at least not where Calkins is concerned. It’s almost as if this program holds the essence of a physical and emotional process that Calkins underwent himself.
On that first page, Calkins talks about the 2 inner selves which you may have living inside of you: the “inner wimp” who is afraid of change and challenges and the “inner warrior” who works toward his goals without being affected by what other people say, who has the determination to strive toward a better body and a better life.
Following this short intro, the Epic Warrior Diet begins with an overall examination of the eating habits you need to adopt to grow big muscles and increase strength. This is called the Conqueror’s Meal and it’s a discussion of how processed foods need to be avoided and an eating plan which is comprised of healthy and lean foods must be adhered to.
Calkins recommends a 40-40-20 eating plan in which 40% of your calories come from carbs, 40% from protein, and 20% from fat. However, it is the sources of these calories that are the key to your success or failure. The Epic Warrior Diet is founded on the fact that unless you feed your muscles correctly they will not grow regardless of how much you train.
The rest of the main manual of the Epic Warrior Diet focuses on what you should and shouldn’t eat and how you can create a simple, affordable, and healthy eating routine for big muscle building. There is a chapter devoted to each of the 3 major macro-nutrients and two which deal with beverages (both good and bad) and how your body reacts to them.
After going through each macro-nutrient in detail, Calkins provides direction on how to create a 5 meals a day eating plan for yourself. He provides valuable tips to help fit this eating plan to your schedule.
He then proceeds to show you what you need to eat before and after your workouts are done. He also provides tips on how to find healthy and affordable food and to tell it apart from the mostly unhealthy food you may find at supermarkets.
All the manual is written in a “warrrior style” manner which may appeal to you or it may not. However, the thing to do is to go beyond the writing style and make use of the tips that Calkins provides.
Additional Material in the Epic Warrior Diet
While the main part of the Epic Warrior Diet is the nutrition guide, you also get a variety of other resources:
1. Meal plans – Thomas Calkins has created a variety of meal plans for various total calorie daily consumption. This is great because you can calculate your daily calorie needs and quickly find the right meal plan for you.
2. Workout guide – A 29 pages long workout manual which covers things such as injury prevention, the right way to create a workout plan, free weights and machine based exercises, etc.
This workout guide also teaches a useful goal setting technique which I recommend you follow. Goal setting is vital for your ultimate success.
3. Exercise guide – You get access to videos of dozens of different exercises that you can do to build more muscle mass. These will help you train correctly.
4. Supplement guide – A 31 pages manual which talks about various supplements, the good and bad things you should know about supplements, and where to find them at great prices.
5. Smoothies – A short manual which shows you how to prepare 25 smoothies for added nutritional value.
In Conclusion
The Epic Warrior Diet may not be the most advanced program you can find but it certainly shows you the right way to eat in order to build lean muscle and burn body fat. I think this program is right for the beginner-intermediate trainer who needs general guidance to get his muscle building quest going in the right way.
Dave Ruel Interview
Today, I want to share with you an interview I did with Dave Ruel, the Muscle Cook himself, author of the Anabolic Cooking plan and the Metabolic Cooking nutrition plan.
This is just part of the interview as I talked with Dave about nutrition for muscle building and nutrition for fat loss. As the interview got pretty long, I decided to post only the section about muscle building here and to post the other half on our sister site (World Of Diets). I’ll post a link at the bottom to this other part.
John: Hey Dave, for those people who are listening to us and who don’t you as well as I do yet, what can you tell us about yourself and your experience in bodybuilding, in fitness and nutrition?
Dave: All right. As you said, my name is Dave Ruel. I’m from Eastern Canada, New Brunswick, Canada. I am currently 28 years old. I’ve been in the fitness industry for almost 10 years now. Actually, I started training seriously about 10 years ago, I’d say, and quickly got my personal training certification, and then my nutrition certification.
My fitness career took a bit of an interesting path, in that I started getting specialized in creating recipes for fitness and healthy recipes in general. That’s what I’ve been doing actually for the past couple of years now. I’m a full time coach, nutritionist, and cook. I help people, mostly online, with their goals in regards to fitness and nutrition, and there you go.
For bodybuilding and fitness, I competed in multiple bodybuilding shows as well. I’ve done four shows actually over the past couple of years; actually over the past five years. I won actually one of them and I’ve placed pretty well in pretty much all of them. So, that’s my big passion, bodybuilding.
John: And obviously, cooking. You’re even known and you have a very unusual nickname, The Muscle Cook. How did this nickname come about?
Dave: People know me as the The Muscle Cook because it started actually out of – I was helping a lot of people offline before I started working online. I was helping them with their diets and with their nutrition. I started creating very interesting recipes because I was realizing that nutrition could get boring and it needed a little bit more challenge for my clients, so I started developing some healthy recipe and the nickname The Muscle Cook came out of it. I can’t remember who said it, but some friends just started calling me The Muscle Cook and the nickname just stayed and that’s the nickname I’ve been using ever since.
John: Is that when you created the Anabolic Cooking Nutrition Program?
Dave: That was about that time because Anabolic Cooking was created over a period of about four years.
John: Wow.
Dave: The little story behind Anabolic Cooking was, well, as I said, I was starting developing recipes. I don’t have any cooking degree or I didn’t go to school or anything like? I’m truly your a self made cook.
I got all my grades in my own kitchen, and basically, I started developing these recipes. I started collecting lots and lots of recipes and after like four years, I realized that, “Holy moly,” I had a big binder full of recipes. The idea came up and I was like, “Wow, there’s no really, like good cookbook out there to help bodybuilders and fitness enthusiasts in reaching your goals and cooking healthy.” That was something that was missing. I was like, “Well, let’s do a cookbook.” So I started working on a cookbook.
The original idea was actually was created when I was staying at my friend’s; you guys are probably familiar with Lee Hayward; he’s a very famous muscle building coach. Lee is a personal friend and we’ve been friends for many, many years now. We were just brainstorming on a couple of things and the idea came out. I was like, “Yeah, there you go. Why don’t you do a cookbook? You have everything. You’re a good cook. You have all the recipes. I mean, get your information out there.”
So I started Anabolic Cooking cookbook and next thing we know, we released the book and it became pretty much an instant bestseller.
John: Very nice. I’ve read through the Anabolic Cooking and I noticed that all the recipes are very simple to do. Basically, you need very few ingredients and it doesn’t take long. Is this something that you planned on? Is this one of the requirements of guys who are into bodybuilding and maybe not too much into cooking?
Dave: Well, I really wanted to make those recipes convenient and that was the big thing because that cookbook is based basically on my own experience in the kitchen. I developed the recipes for myself first and when I first started developing these recipes, I started developing them for my clients and then started applying them to my own diets. I really started cooking heavily when I was dieting for my first bodybuilding show. I was with my nutritionist – I’m working with a different nutritionist for my own diets and for my bodybuilding shows, and we’re like, “There must be another way to do boiled chicken breast, steamed broccoli or baked potato. That’s ridiculous, why do we have to go through like for four months.
So we started brainstorming on a couple of things and I came up with these recipes. The main key for me was them to be simple and that I can do pretty fast because most of us don’t have a whole lot of time to cook. If I started doing the long recipes that took a full day to prepare, that would be defeating the purpose of it.
So, that pretty much goes along with the fitness lifestyle and the busy lifestyle that most of us have now. I really wanted it to be simple, with ingredients that you can find pretty much every where and very easy to do as well.
John: What are the specific or special nutritional challenges that bodybuilders and guys who want to build muscles face?
How is it different from – well, most people usually eat to maybe burn fat or to just keep going, but what are the special things that guys need to eat or how to eat just to build a lot of muscle mass?
Dave: The thing is, I think the main problem that people have is that there’s a lot of information out there and there’s a lot of contradicting ideas as well out there. You hear a lot of people and there are different methods, so many methods to lose fat or build muscle.
To be honest, a lot of them are totally good, totally valid. You can actually use pretty much any good approach by any good nutritionist in order to manage your nutrition, but the thing is, people just get confused and start to over complicate things. I think, if they can find a good, simple approach they can rely on, to base their nutrition on and start building their – I don’t really like the word diet, but their daily nutrition out of it, that’s the main thing.
I think a lot of guys don’t see the results they want because of the confusion they get. You hear lot as well, one big mistakes that people make, is the whole bulking, cutting approach that people are using because that’s an old bodybuilder mentality, that you have to bulk heavily when you want to build muscle and then you have to go on a strict cutting diet if you want to lose the body fat.
That was actually a mistake I made when I started dieting. I’ve brought myself up to 262 pounds during the bulking phase and that was crazy. I was there, training hard in the gym, busting my butt and I wasn’t seeing the results. I was just looking as a – I look big in a T-shirt, I’d say, but if I would have taken my shirt off, you would have been like, “Well, this guy is just chubby,” you know what I mean?
John: Yeah. You have those puffy muscles, those swollen muscles that don’t have any shape to them? Is that what you mean?
Dave: Exactly. As Elliott Hulse would say, I had the male PMS syndrome, the muscle syndrome. I brought my body way too heavy. I carried on way too much body fat and I had to work very hard for six months to drop down to about eight percent of body fat. That was actually six months, and less than that actually because in six months later, I competed in my first bodybuilding show and I weighed in at 197 pounds.
John: So you dropped more than more than 60 pounds?
Dave: I dropped 65 pounds in a matter of six months, but that was totally insane. I had to really work hard for it. My meal plans were very tight, my nutrition was very tight and there was, of course, the exercise that was going on with the cardio and everything. So that was a tough six months and I realized that, that’s crazy. There’s no way that the absolute truth is that you have to bulk and then cut.
So, I was like, really doubting of that approach and what I came out with is that you don’t have to do that. You can absolutely stay lean and still gain muscle. Think about it. Technically, you need to do a caloric surplus in order to build muscle, right? So, how come you need, why would you need 500 calorie daily surplus? It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Technically, you just need one calorie surplus and you’re good because your body has all the nutrients it needs in order to build muscle. The key thing as well is to feed your body the right nutrients and the right food in order to build muscle. There’s no way that you have to pack on and eat a tremendous amount of calories in order to build muscles, it’s just the quality of your food that really matters and how you prepare it.
Another big mistake is that, people, by eating bland and boring food tend to turn to cheat meals more often just because they need that satisfaction of flavor. They need to have tasty food in their mouth, not just that plain boring, usual bodybuilding and fitness food.
John: So let me see if I understand. So, the recipes in Anabolic Cooking are meant to help guys build muscles in a more, let say, lean way, in a more controlled way, and because the recipes are tasty and not bland let’s say, like a lot of people say that muscle building food is or should be. Because the food is tasty, people don’t eat a lot of snacks on the side that just make them look bulkier and not leaner. Is that what you’re saying?
Dave: That’s exactly it. Why would you need to go and turn to sugary or very high fatty foods when you have perfectly healthy and tasty meals in your plate everyday? You know what I’m saying?
John: Yeah, and another thing is that I found that you can do it in a much more affordable way because if you can cook most of the food yourself, and you know how to feed the right nutrients, you don’t have to go and buy all those supplements in large quantities. This can cost hundreds of dollars a month, and guys do that. So, they can save a lot of money and eat better food with the right recipes.
Dave: Exactly. And that’s actually another big mistake, that a lot of people relying on very expensive supplements in order to build muscle.
To be honest, I do use supplements and I’m not going to say that supplements are bad because supplements do help; however, they do help under one condition, it’s that you are in total control of your nutrition and you’re eating the right things at the right time. If you are not on top of your nutrition, the supplements are not going to make a difference at all.
Even though, your nutrition is perfect, supplements are going to contribute to about, I would say, maybe about five to 10 percent of your results. They’re not going to be a deal breaker. So you should focus on your nutrition first. Make sure you have healthy meals, nutritious meals, and the right nutrients at the right time before jumping to any supplements that you could use. There are good supplements, but if you don’t eat the right food at the right time, in the right quantities, you’re not going to make the results you want. So of course, you’re going to save a lot of money by just focusing on the right things.
John: You just said that you need not just to eat the right food, but to eat it in the right quantity and in the right ways. Is that something that you also teach in Anabolic Cooking or do you just give recipes and instructions on how to prepare meals?
Dave: No. I’ve got a full nutrition guide coming with it. It’s a quick start nutrition guide. I’m basically teaching all the basics, but there are also some of my advanced techniques to build muscle. I basically cover everything that you need to know in order to be successful with your nutrition. So I’m not just throwing you recipes with some nutritional info, I’m saying like, “Okay well, that’s it, that’s what you have to eat to be successful.” No, it goes a bit further.
So the nutrition and cooking guide, basically I’m explaining what’s in your food, what the basic nutrients are, and how much you really need and so on. Of course, all the Anabolic Cooking and nutrition fundamentals that you need to know, how to read the recipes properly, how to prepare your meals for the week, how to manage your post workout nutrition. For example, I have grocery shopping tips, money saving tips as well. Tips for the kitchen, what you need in your kitchen, and so and so. It’s a quick guide that pretty much helps you figure out how to use Anabolic Cooking in your daily life, basically.
John: Do you still get questions and concerns from guys who never cook, and they worry that they won’t be able to prepare the meals?
Dave: I get that pretty often actually. That’s one of the main objections that I get out of people is that, “Well, Dave, I don’t cook at all. I’m not a good cook. I can’t even cook chicken.”
Jonathan: Make an omelette, okay.
Dave: It’s understandable, what you don’t know and what you’re not good at is kind of intimidating.
My answer is, take me as an example. When I started, I just went into the kitchen and started cooking. I experimented. Of course, all my meals didn’t come out perfect at the first attempt. I just experimented and I improved my skills basically overtime, but the cool thing with Anabolic Cooking is that I’m telling you step by step exactly what to do. I’ve got a couple of videos on my YouTube channel and people like, “Wow, actually it doesn’t look that difficult to do.” I’m like, “No, nothing is difficult to do. If you follow the steps and if you follow exactly what I’m saying, your meals are going to come out perfect. So don’t worry.”
John: I’m a witness to that. I think the first video that I watched of you making of a recipe that you were showing was the one for the homemade protein bars. I looked at that and I said, “Wow, is that so easy?” You go to a store and you pay a lot of money for protein bars and you don’t control all the ingredients like you do when you cook them yourself. It’s so easy; it’s affordable, so, why not? It takes about five to 10 minutes of work and then you’re good to go.
Dave: Exactly and it’s healthy. Look at the protein bars in the market; they’re highly overpriced, first. Protein bar is like four to five bucks now, and look at all the crap that you’ve got in there; all the chemicals, all the nasty stuff that your body is never going to digest. It’s stuff your body doesn’t need and you put that into your body. You pay actually to put that crap in your body, you know what I mean? I always say that the protein bar is a glorified candy bar and that’s pretty much what it is. Most of them are very high in sugar as well.
The thing I did with my protein bars is that I only used natural ingredients and I’ve made them more so where you can get actually really tasty. I’ve made a test with a lot of people. I made them try different types of protein bars and try my protein bars as well, and 100 percent never misses that they like my protein bars better than the commercial protein bars. They’re that good.
John: Yeah, I know. I made a batch myself awhile ago and these were the best bars that I’ve ever eaten. There’s no point in me going out to buy any protein bars ever again now that I know I can make them so easily myself. I think that this is something that anyone who’s listening should take away from this interview is that, when you control the food that you’re making, it’s going to be the healthiest food that you’ll be eating because no company and no manufacturer is about to make money on you, and you take the best care of yourself. I think that’s the main thing.
Dave: Exactly. You know exactly what’s in your food and that’s what really matters basically.
To learn more about nutrition for muscle building visit: Anabolic Cooking Cookbook
For the second part of my interview with Dave go here: Dave Ruel interview. You can also read more about his new program here: Metabolic Cooking review
Workout Buddy – The Ultimate Guide To Training With A Partner
Taking yourself to the next level, whether it’s in terms of muscle building, atheltic ability, or fat loss, will come faster if you don’t do it alone.
This is why having a workout buddy to train with is something you should consider. But how do you go about finding a workout buddy and how do you make the most of your time together?
Let’s go over some quick tips that will help:
1. Workout with someone who wants to train as much as you do
If you want to workout 4 times a week you partner with someone who wants to train twice. It won’t last. While you and your partner don’t need to be joined at the hip, you need to be able to train together often.
2. A Partner with similar goals
If you want to build muscle mass and you partner wants to train for the marathon, you’re not likely to occupy the same section of the gym any time soon. You need a workout partner with similar goals to yours, someone who trains in a similar way, and who can appreciate what you want to achieve.
3. Someone who is focused on their workouts
If your partner spends half of his time at the gym checking out the blonde in the blue shorts or the redhead with the tank top, he’s not likely to be there for you when you need him. I wouldn’t want such a guy to spot me when I’m doing barbell presses, that’s for sure.
You want a workout buddy who comes to the gym to actually train. I’m not saying you can’t socialize but do it in moderation. The gym may be a great pickup place but the ultimate goal is to do an awesome workout. That’s the key.
4. Someone you can talk to
This isn’t limited to a workout buddy but is the same for any type of interaction you have with another person. You have to be able to actually talk with them. This will make your workouts a lot more fun and you’ll look forward to them.
5. Find a competitive workout partner
A little healthy competition can help push you to new heights. While you don’t want to workout with someone who’s always looking to “beat you down”, there’s no better way to lift a little extra weight than having someone you want to beat yourself… in a friendly way.
6. A Workout Buddy Who Motivates you
Your physical ability isn’t the only thing which determines how much weight you can lift at the gym. Your mindset, mood, and motivation also play a key part. While developing motivation within you is very important, your partner also needs to motivate you. Some are better than others at it. You need to find someone who will cut you very little slack and “make” you go beyond what you believe your limits are (just make sure to not do anything which is unhealthy).
7. Give and ye shall receive
To get the most help from your partner, be ready to help him as well. The more you give, the closer your relationship will be and the more you will receive in return so your priority should be to help your partner in every step of the way.
8. Plan your workout together
You and your buddy need to be on the same page. If you want to do lat pulldowns and he wants to do tricep extensions, you’re not on the same page. It’s important that you plan your workout together even if it’s just a 3 minute chat at the beginning of each workout.
9. Create a good rhythm together
The best way for partners to workout together is to rotate rest and lifting periods. While you’re resting your partner should be lifting (with you spotting if need be) and vice verse. You need to work out a good rhythm to make your workout as effective as possible.
10. Be able to workout alone
While you may have the most fun training together, you two need to be able to also workout alone without fearing that this will insult the other guy. Things happen, people get a cold or go on vacation or have a long day at work. Don’t let this affect your workouts. You need to do them according to your schedule whether your partner can make it or not.
In Conclusion
Having a workout buddy is great but finding the right one and knowing how to make the most of your time together is the challenge. Use my tips above and let me know in the comments below if you have more that I’ve neglected to share.
