Muscle for Life

As fun as it can be to geek out on obscure and advanced muscle-building strategies, most people looking for advice on how to gain more muscle and strength just need to double down on the fundamentals instead. You know, compound exercises, heavy weights, progressive overload, and the like. There comes a point, though, where a basic understanding of the basics is no longer enough to keep the needle moving. Then, you should add some more advanced tools to the shed, including programming techniques like periodization, set schemes like drop and rest-pause sets, and exercise variations to address weak points. That last point—exercise variations—is what Chris Barakat and I talk about today, and specifically, how to use different types of exercises and ways of performing those exercises to maximize muscle gain in every major muscle group you train. As you’ll learn, relatively small changes to the exercises you do and how you do them can make quite a big difference in the bottom-line results. If you’re not familiar wi