[Video] Bodybuilding Made Simple Addendum 2015

Exercising releases testosterone and growth hormone? In my compendium, I made reference to heavy core compound movements and Olympic-style movements increasing testosterone and gH production. Machines versus free weights? In terms of injury prevention and growth, both machines and free weights offer similar facets. The real difference between the two comes from the fact that free weight exercises serve to teach the body how to cope with heavy load bearing exercises, in addition to CNS force proprioceptions. 

This is the concept behind CNS force proprioceptions - once your body learns to handle the weight, it never forgets. Obviously, this applies to machines as well as free weights - if it did not, you would never be able to increase your weight on exercises such as cable rows and lat pulldowns! The main difference comes from the fact that the concept is more strongly enforced with free weights. Your body knows the difference between a free weight, a smith machine, and a cable machine exercise, and gives preference to free weight exercises before machines. The difference between these two lifts is open versus close chained - in one of them you are bringing the weight to you, in the other you are moving your body toward the 'weight'. What you should take away from this discussion is that when given a choice between a free weight exercise and a cable/smith machine, try to select the free weight. 

Machines do have their places; however, try to stick with free weight exercises for the majority of your routine. Are pushups useless? As mentioned above, the body knows the difference between a free weight and a smith machine, and acts accordingly. This same concept applies to bodyweight and free weight exercises - your body will 'prefer' and respond better to bodyweight exercises than free weights. The one caveat to this is that you need progressive resistance - with dips, once you can do a certain number of reps, you grab a dip belt and add weight. Adding weight to pushups is a very tricky task because, after one or two weight plates, it becomes very dangerous. For this reason, pushups usually fall behind bench pressing very quickly. If you are able to find a way to safely add weight to the pushup, then you have an exercise that can easily outdistance bench pressing in the long run. 

Making an exercise harder makes it better? For some reason, people seem to feel that making an exercise harder will produce better gains. Some like to perform the bench press with their feet up on the bench, or even wiggling in the air, instead of driving them into the ground. If you have never experimented with TUT before, expect a significant drop in weight used - the first time I played around with it, I found that I was using ~60% of my estimated 1RM, for approximately 5-7reps. The motion is the same as when you go to the bathroom, the only difference is that now you have a heavy weight across your back, which causes physiological issues, which, in turn, cause form degradation. 

Most of the time these muscles have not been trained adequately for proper formed squatting, so when you start you have to take a huge weight hit to train them. I have found that they are best suited towards lats - they are not crucial to building a good back, but they can be used when you are looking for a change of exercises because you are bored with your current routine. Bench dips are just as good as parallel bar dips, right? Parallel bar dips are superior in every way to bench dips, especially when it comes to adding weight - there are only so many plates you can stack on your lap with bench dips before you start creating a safety risk. 

Shoulder impingement scares mewhat movements should I avoid? The following motions are exercises that you should not do if you want to preserve your shoulder health: Bench press with super wide grip. Keeping elbows pointed in does take stress of the pecs and places it on the tricep, but it is worth it to keep your shoulders healthy Arnold press - shifting heavy weight through those multiple planes just is not safe. Reverse-grip pressing motions? Reverse-grip pressing motions are generally reserved for advanced lifters because of the amount of effort it requires to control the bar. Unusual exercises? There are a lot of different exercises out there.

 The advantage of these to deadlifts is that you can move more weight if the top portion of the deadlift is your strongest point. Scott pressing - A traditional dumbbell shoulder press, except you hold the dumbbells at the ends instead of in the middle. As a result, when you press, the dumbbells will be at an angle, which will target the shoulders harder. You set the safety pins in the power rack 4-5'' below lockout, and then press the bar from the pins to lockout. Very effective for working the top portion of your bench press, and for adding tricep mass. Floor pressing - Bench press done lying on the floor. Be certain to do floor pressing in the power rack so if you have to dump the bar, you can. Seated half pressing - Another tricep movement - put a bench in the power rack and set the safety pins to a hair above the top of your head. Take a shoulder width grip, keep a straight back, and start pressing the barbell. This is very good for the lateral tricep head. One could almost think of this as a partial seated military press.