When things get stale and you've lost that lovin' feeling, you've gotta' spice things up a bit, both in the bedroom AND in the weight room.
People rarely ask themselves questions because they fear the answer will expose them as weak, hypocritical, or plain wrong. If you fear the truth, don't read this article.
Building strength and size at the same time isn't crazy; in fact, it's smart. Here's a smart, easy-to-follow workout that will make it happen.
Coach Staley is at his physical peak at age 53. If you want to ensure that your best days are still ahead of you, implement these 7 operational principles now!
Charles Staley reveals 6 awesome training epiphanies; any one of which, if implemented, could markedly improve your training and your physique.
A beautiful, logical, and simple step-by-step guide to doing power cleans.
If you've ever grappled with the rationale behind trying to constantly lift more weight or accrue more muscle mass, Charles Staley has some answers for you.
Five methods to satisfy your need for training variety, including "going nuts on the last set," "reward sets," and "rolling the dice."
To get bigger and stronger, you need to manage your body like you'd manage a business. Here are 7 ways you can make your workouts much, much, better.
If there's some health or fitness trend you hold dear, hang on tight because Charles Staley is about to blow it to smithereens. Let's get ready to rumble!
A long-time strength coach finally enters a powerlifting meet. Here's what you can learn from his experiments.
It's better to use your performance as a gauge of what you've accomplished than how much you hurt the next day. Numbers don't lie; if your numbers are going up, so is your progress. The reverse is not true however. I trashed my back a few years ago doing something really stupid, and trust me, the fact that I couldn't tie my shoes for a while wasn't a sign of progress!
Unfortunately, your old "what do ya wanna work today?" spur of the moment type training works a whole lot better than anything the Soviet Ministry Of Sport managed to cook up behind the Iron Curtain back in the 50's and 60's. Charles Staley explains why.
Stress isn't bad; excessive stress is bad. We need stress to grow. For example, you can't train a muscle without placing stress on the corresponding joint. You must bend your knee if you want to get your quads to grow — you can't have it both ways. The trick is to find the happy middle ground where the stress is sufficient for growth, but not more.
Twenty percent of your actions are responsible for eighty percent of your results. Figure out what those actions are and do more of them. A common example would be a workout that starts out with heavy deadlifts, then progresses to leg extensions, leg curls, calf raises, and crunches. In this workout, the deadlifts are responsible for at LEAST eighty percent of the result. Do some self-analysis and apply this rule to your training!
EDT is one of the simplest, most effective bodybuilding programs ever devised. If you're not familiar with it, here's your chance.
Smart trainees focus on performance, not pain. Don't select exercises or techniques based on how much they hurt! While it's true that effective training techniques often hurt, sometimes they don't. Whenever a technique potentiates performance, it also maximizes the gain you'll experience from that performance.
It's a simple training strategy, but oh-so effective. Charles has just one question: Why aren't you using it!?!
Most people do what's fun. Do what's needed . Once you've accepted that performance is a better measure of progress than pain, make sure the underlying purpose is rational and healthy. Is your desire for a 500-pound bench press tied to any worthy context outside of just having a huuggge bench? If you're a competitive powerlifter, and powerlifting adds purpose to your life, your answer is yes. But for the rest of you, maybe not. Only you can answer this question, and it's probably worth some exploration.
Whenever you can make a workout more time-efficient, you're stacking the odds heavily in your favor. Not only do you complete your training in less time, but you've also got more time to recover before the next onslaught!
When I look at all the questions that people send me, one of the more common themes I notice is confusion around the topic of putting together your weekly training cycle. So for my first edition of The Staley Strategies , I thought I'd elaborate on one of my all-time favorite strategies (this one being a tactic, technically speaking): the A-B split.
A thought on safety and injury prevention: Stress isn't bad — EXCESSIVE stress is bad. We need stress to grow. For example, you can't train a muscle without placing stress on the corresponding joint. You must bend your knee if you want to get your quads to grow — you can't have it both ways. The trick is to find the happy middle ground where the stress is sufficient for growth, but not more.
Imagine if there were no barriers to strength attainment: we'd all be power cleaning 500, squatting 1000, and benching 600 in no time.
In most gyms, overhead lifting is about as popular as Ann Coulter at an ACLU convention. Many people — coaches, trainers, and doctors alike — adamantly believe that overhead lifting will lead to or exacerbate shoulder problems and therefore should be avoided if you want to keep your shoulder joints healthy.
The posterior chain includes your spinal erectors, glutes, hamstrings, and calf musculature. If your physique goals include becoming massive, you simply can't put these muscle groups on the back burner. They're among the biggest and strongest you've got and when developed properly, they increase your capacity to perform scary-big squats, pulls, and similar feats of gym-studliness. If you're all about sports performance, developing the posterior chain is priority one. Strong, explosive glutes and hams in particular, are the engines that drive elite-level performance in jumping, sprinting, throwing, kicking, and striking skills.
