Tag: weightlifting

3 Reasons To Not Do Cardio Before Lifting

Post author By Remson
Post date May 8, 2017

Tribe By Noire

3 Reasons To Not Do Cardio Before Lifting

One of the most common mistakes that people make in the gym is setting cardio as priority number one. The first thing most people do when they first enter the gym is hop on a treadmill, elliptical, or recumbent bike. In a society plagued with overwhelming levels of obesity, cardio becomes an obsession, due to the belief that its the best and quickest way to lose weight. The truth is, resistance training should be priority number one if your goal is weight loss, and body re-composition. Let’s talk about 3 reasons to not do cardio before lifting.

Lifting is way better than cardio for weight loss

First lets talk about cardio and its primary focus. The purpose of cardio is implied in the name “cardio” as in training your cardiovascular system. There is great benefit to improving your cardio performance, and you’ll even lose some weight from it, but primarily focusing on cardio for weight loss will cause you to neglect training the bodily systems that use the most fat for energy.

Its during rest and other low intensity activities where you burn the most fat. This is why cardio activity like running isn’t the best for fat reduction and definitely not good for your knees. You’re better off walking long distance rather than running. During your workout, your body will use carbs for energy which brings me to my next point. If fat is mostly used during rest, it would be wise to prioritize the activity that causes the most energy usage after the workout (rest). That activity is weight lifting, or resistance training in general.

The reason for this is recovery. It takes longer and requires more energy for the body to recover from lifting than cardio does. I wouldn’t tell you to completely cut out cardio, but if you’re gonna do it, do it at the end of your workout, or on days where you’re not lifting.

3 Reasons To Not Do Cardio Before Lifting

Cardio Before Lifting Will Hurt Your Training Performance

You only have a certain amount of energy to give within your workout, so you don’t want to be wasting it on cardio if you’re trying to build muscle and drop body fat. Lifting or any type of resistance training only builds muscle if the muscle is challenged and stimulated enough. You won’t be able to really challenge your muscle enough if you’re fatigued.

Cardio Before Lifting Will Hinder Movement Quality

When I say movement quality I mean muscular function and range of motion. The reason why this happens is because pre-exhausting the body will cause certain muscles to not fire with the amount of force that they are supposed to. For example, running can cause fatigue and tightness of the quadriceps and calve muscles, often results in excessive stress at the knee joint, hip, and lower back. This will not only hinder movement and create discomfort, but it often results in various injuries.

Cardio Before Lifting Can Lead To Over Training & Muscle Loss

Overall work volume is a big component to effective training. One of the fatal flaws that hold most people back from their fitness goals is doing too much! Doing cardio and then pushing your body through a rough lifting session on a consistent basis can lead to over training and muscle loss. A lot of work and not enough recovery leads to frustration and often causes people to lose motivation and quit. For more info on how over training works, read this.

The Perfect Warm Up

As far as warm ups go, the best way to warm up is to work your way through a couple of dynamic mobility exercises that specifically prep the muscle groups you’ll be using in that training session. For example, if you’re going to be doing legs, prep and get blood flow to the muscles that move your hips, knees and ankles.

Tribe By Noire

I’ve created this platform to help you become the most powerful version of yourself through fitness, plant based nutrition, and mindset coaching.

Tags bodybuilding, fat loss, fitness tips, muscle growth, powerlifting, training strategies, weight loss, weightlifting

Fitness & Training

The Truth About Squat Depth

Post author By Remson
Post date May 5, 2017

Tribe By Noire

The Truth About Squat Depth

How deep should you squat? This is a question I get very often and its also a pretty loaded question. There is an ideal form of squat depth, but you also have to work within the confines of your mobility all while working to improve your mobility. So let’s dive a bit deeper into the truth about squat depth.

3 Things You Need To Know About Squat Depth

1. We all have the same parts, but we also have those parts in different measurements. Our proportions range differently from person to person which means our squat depth should as well. Even though our depth will range from person to person, it does not serve as an excuse to squat shallow.

2. Ultimately you should be able to sit in a squat position comfortably, pretty much how a toddler normally would. When did we lose our ability to sit in a proper squat position? Probably when we started spending most of our days sitting in a chair. That 90 degree knee bend, inherited from the chair has now become most people’s standard for squat depth.

3. Squatting to full depth is only bad for your knees if you have imbalances like, weak glutes, overly developed quadriceps, and/ or limited ankle limited ankle mobility. If your bottom position feels uncomfortable, mobility is definitely an issue and needs to be addressed on a daily basis.

Learn To Squat Like A Toddler

Watch a one year old squat down to grasp something from the floor. Their feet stay roughly at hip distance, their knees abduct from their mid-line, and their hips drop to a full knee bend. Try to copy it and make note of where you feel the most discomfort.

Rounding of the back and falling backwards is usually a sign of limited ankle flexion. Push your knees out more and lean forward. If you can’t push your knees apart, it means you need to stretch the muscles in the inner thighs.

Grab hold of a door frame, or a pole fixture of some kind and use it to hold yourself up while you practice sitting in that bottom squat position. It may be tedious at first, but if you’re serious about getting good at squatting, you’ll stay consistent and work at this habitually.

Here’s a look at what the technical anatomy of your squat should look like. When working on improving your squat depth, record yourself in video form and see how close to this illustration you get.

Tribe By Noire

I’ve created this platform to help you become the most powerful version of yourself through fitness, plant based nutrition, and mindset coaching.

Tags bodybuilding, fitness tips, muscle growth, power building, powerlifting, training strategies, weightlifting

Fitness & Training

3 Keys To Building Muscle And Burning Fat At The Same Time

Post author By Remson
Post date May 1, 2017

3 Keys To Building Muscle And Burning Fat At The Same Time

One of the biggest myths in fitness today is the belief that you can’t build muscle and drop body fat at the same time, atleast not a substantial amount. Because of this belief, it is a common practice to alternate between 3 different phases known as bulking, cutting, and maintenance. My goal here in this article is to simplify the process and explain the 3 keys to building muscle and burning fat at the same time.

The Vicious Cycle Of Cutting & Bulking

This vicious cycle will have you bouncing back and forth from one extreme to the next. You want to get lean and sexy, so you neurotically cut calories in efforts to drop weight fast. You drop the weight, and a clothing size or two. You feel good about it for a bit, but the feeling fades when you realize you look flat. You’ve gotta put some muscle on, and add some shape to this now thinned out physique. Popular opinion says you’ve gotta eat big to get big, so you begin doing just that, over eating. You hit it hard in the gym and pack on some good size, but only a small portion of it being actual lean mass. Ladies and gentlemen, the vicious cycle of bulking and cutting.

Debunking the calorie myth

Before we go any further I need to clarify what calorie is and is not. A calorie is not a form of nutrients, it is actually a measure of thermo energy. To be specific it is the energy needed to raise the temperature of 1 gram of water through 1 °C. Basically food works in the body much like how gas works in your car. The fuel heats up creating a caloric output (energy use). The more “calories” we consume, the more potential caloric output we have.

Understanding that, we can now see that the only purpose for increasing calorie intake is to have more usable energy. Whatever potential energy we have left over is stored in either the liver, muscle tissue, or fat cells. If you have your calorie surplus too high, you’ll gain body fat. If your calorie deficit is too low, you’ll lose muscle. Sounds simple enough, but this is actually where calorie counting falls on its face.

Are all calories created equal?
Does it matter where the calories come from?
How do you calculate how many calories you need?

I’ve often had clients drop body fat and increase muscle mass by increasing their food intake, so what’s the missing link here?

Quality Over Quantity

When thinking about food, quality comes first. The quality of your food is its macro and micro nutrient balance. A good example of this would be fruit vs cake.

Cake has little to no nutritional value, and very high in “calories”. Cake is known to be fattening because not only is it high in “calories, its also low in fiber, so you end up eating way too much of it before actually feeling full.

Fruit is low in “calories” but loaded with vitamins, minerals, and fiber which greatly improve energy, recovery, and digestion. This means more muscle growth and fat burn.

The 3 Keys To The Right Gains & Losses

1. NITROGEN SURPLUS

Consuming protein increases the nitrogen levels in your body. This nitrogen is what builds the muscle tissue in the body. Simply put, you will build muscle as long as you have a nitrogen surplus in the body during recovery. Studies show that the optimal consumption of protein per day for muscle building is 1.5 to 1.8 grams per kilogram of lean body mass.

2. TRAIN INTENSE & TIME EFFICIENT

Your training sessions should be fairly quick and intense, typically within 40 – 45 minutes. Having long drawn out training sessions can drastically reduce performance and inhibit your recover because of over use to the nervous system. Your body only has but so much fuel available at a given time so make every minute count.

3. RECOVERY

The body builds muscle at rest almost entirely when you sleep, which is why the best thing you can do for muscle growth is sleep. The body also metabolizes the most fat at rest in order to generate and stabilize your hormones and other functions. Its pretty much impossible to get the results you want without sufficient recovery.

Leave a comment below! Let me know what info you’ve found most useful here and feel free to ask if you have any further questions. Thanks for reading!

BECOME A TRIBE MEMBER

Get full access to all of my online training programs & training guides with detailed video tutorials.
Get full access to my weight loss & mass gain meal plans, nutrition guides, video tutorials, and grocery guide.
The lifestyle development guide is a growing library of personal development videos and written articles.

Tags bodybuilding, diet strategies, fat loss, fitness tips, muscle growth, nutrition plans, power building, powerlifting, training strategies, weight loss, weightlifting

Fitness & Training

The Best Training Routine For Muscle growth And Fat Loss

Post author By Remson
Post date April 30, 2017

The Best Training Routine For Muscle growth And Fat Loss

There are those who train and there are those who just workout. Working out is great and all, and its better than just sitting on the couch binge watching your favorite tv show, but training is where the real progress happens. Training implies programming, following a routine to reach a specific goal with efficiency. In this article I’m going to go over the 3 main types of training routines for muscle growth and fat loss as well as the best training routine for muscle growth and fat loss.

The 3 Main Types of Training Routines

THE BODY PART SPLIT

This is where you train each specific muscle group once a week. This is most commonly used by body builders. The purpose is to isolate and stimulate a specific muscle or muscle group as much as possible in a given session and let it recover for the rest of the week. Doing this can help you fine tune your physique specifically for aesthetics on stage. Here’s an example

Monday – Chest & Triceps
Tuesday – Back & Biceps
Wednesday – Rest
Thursday – Legs
Friday – Arms
Saturday – Accessory work
Sunday – Rest

The body part split will vary according to what muscles you want to focus on the most and what your schedule will allow.

UPPER & LOWER SPLIT

With this type of routine, your training days will alternate between upper body and lower body. This will allow you to hit each muscle group at least twice per week. This type of training routine is ideal for anyone needing to practice specific movement patterns because of the increased training frequency of each muscle group. Here’s an example

Monday – Lower Body (Squat & Deadlift)
Tuesday – Upper Body (Bench Press & Pull Ups)
Wednesday – Rest
Thursday – Lower Body (Deadlift & Squat)
Friday – Upper Body (Bench Press & Rows)
Saturday – Accessory work
Sunday – Rest

FULL BODY

From what I’ve seen in my own clients and the studies I’ve read, full body routines are the best type of routine for overall weight loss. Each training day combines upper body and lower body exercises, preferably back to back to raise and sustain the body’s metabolic rate. The higher your metabolic rate is, the more glucose and fat you burn. Here’s an example

Monday – Deadlift & Chest Press
Tuesday – Rest
Wednesday – Squat & Push Press
Thursday – Rest
Friday – Box Jumps & Farmers Carries
Saturday – Rest
Sunday – Low intensity distance walk

The Best Of Both Worlds

In my 11 years of coaching I’ve had the ability to test hundreds of different programs with hundreds of different clients, and from that experience I’ve been able to learn what works most.

The body part split works best to build lagging muscle groups, but it definitely isn’t the best way to cut body fat or improve movement quality and strength.
Full body has shown incredible results for weight loss, but muscle growth tends to be slow with this process which means this isn’t ideal for aesthetic purposes.

THE WINNER

The Upper & Lower Split reign supreme in my book. Whether you’re a beginner, or advanced, fat, skinny, or in between, this routine has got you covered. This is a type of routine that mostly use for myself. When I want to gain mass, I just increase the weight load and calorie intake and when I want to lean out, I just increase the rep volume, lower the weight a bit, and drop my calories by a few hundred.

Subscribe, leave a comment and let me know if you’ve found this information useful, or if you have any other questions. Thanks for reading, family!

The Tribe Strength Formula

Get the formula behind the Tribe Strength Program for free

Tags bodybuilding, fitness tips, power building, powerlifting, training strategies, weightlifting

Fitness & Training

6 Signs Of Over Training In The Gym

Post author By Remson
Post date April 30, 2017

Tribe By Noire

6 Signs Of Over Training In The Gym

Ambition is a great thing of course! We get pumped and we go after what we want every chance we get, but it seems sometimes like we can never do enough. The question is though, are we doing too much? Here’s 6 signs of over training in the gym.

1. Trouble Sleeping At Night

Here’s usually where it starts. You get that weird feeling where you’re tired, but you can’t get your body to settle down. You might feel your heart racing like you’re on tons of caffeine. This is a result of excessive stress to the nervous system and hormone imbalance.

2. Increased Fatigue

This of course goes hand in hand with a lack of sleep, but is not exclusive to a simple bad night’s rest. This increased fatigue can last for an entire week depending on how long you’ve been over training and to what degree.

This type of fatigue doesn’t just feel like sleepiness, or muscle soreness. It feels more like complete exhaustion physically and even mentally.

3. Loss Of Appetite

Over training can disrupt your hormone balance to the point that it causes you to even lose your appetite. Your metabolism slows down drastically in order to dedicate more energy to re-establish homeostasis, which is the body’s natural balance.

4. Muscle Loss

For the body to repair and grow muscle, it has to be in a balanced state. Over training causes you to be in a state of chronic inflammation and this is what causes muscle loss.

5. Increased Body Fat

Not only does over training impede muscle gain, but it also can come coupled with an increase in body fat. Fat storage in the body comes from either stress, or poor diet, which ultimately stresses the body anyway.

6. Joint Pain & Injury

These two things are a huge indication that its time to lay off the grind for a bit. If you’re starting to feel new pains in your joints that you haven’t had before, you’re over training. If you ignore the signs, you run the risk of all kinds of injuries. These types of injuries are called over use in juries.

Tennis elbow
Runners knee
Shin splints
Shoulder impingement

These are some just to name a few. My advice is to slow it down now and get some deep tissue massages.

*Train from a place of self love, not from a place of frustration for where you are now.

Tribe By Noire

I’ve created this platform to help you become the most powerful version of yourself through fitness, plant based nutrition, and mindset coaching.

Tags bodybuilding, fitness tips, power building, powerlifting, weightlifting

Fitness & Training

6 Benefits Of Heavy Weightlifting

Post author By Remson
Post date April 29, 2017

6 Benefits Of Heavy Weightlifting

The human body has the ability to adapt to almost any environment, and or lifestyle. An adaption can be anything from weight gain, to sweating, to a nice bronze tan. You actually have a great deal of control over the way you respond and adapt by way of your lifestyle and habits. What I want to talk about today are the 6 benefits of heavy weightlifting. Let’s get started!

1. Rapid Strength Gain

It is obvious but necessary to mention the strength gains from heavy weightlifting. Human beings have an incredible potential to lift over 2.5x their body weight. Imagine how easy day to day activities would be with that kind of strength and how developing that kind of strength would benefit you as you age. I don’t know about you, but I damn sure don’t want to be shrimped up in my senior years.

2. Accelerated Muscle Gain

Your body is literally shaped by muscle, which means that in order to get “in shape” you have to develop muscle. It is impossible to tone anything on the body without developing some muscle. The reason why heavy weightlifting is so beneficial to muscle gain is the direct effect it has on your CNS (central nervous system). Your brain sends signals through your CNS, which creates muscular activation. In order to grow muscle, you have to first stimulate that muscle through forms of resistance training which provoke muscular activation. As resistance increases, activation increases, causing more stimulation and more stimulation, increases the opportunity for more growth.

CNS+ACTIVITY+STIMULI=GROWTH

3. Greater Fat Loss Capability

Fat is more than just belly rolls, cellulite, love handles, and a double chin. Fat is an essential energy source that serves many life sustaining functions such as brain function, digestive health, hormone stability, tissue regeneration, etc. The problem people face is that they store too much of it because their body isn’t using it.

Fat metabolism is your ultimate goal to the freedom of a flexible diet and the confidence in knowing that the donut you want won’t go straight to your belly. So how do you metabolize fat? How can you start using it? The answer is simply to make your body use it! Remember fat is fuel for your body and brain. Heavy weightlifting forces your body to breakdown fat and use it for the energy to not only lift the weight, but also to recover from lifting the weight. You’ll be burning fat and calories all day after you’re done at the gym, and even more so, while you sleep.

4. Increased Bone Density & Connective Tissue

Two of the biggest things your body is going to need to sustain a heavy weightlifting lifestyle is strong bone and connective tissue. When I say connective tissue, I mean tendons and ligaments. Tendons connect muscle to bone and ligaments connect bone to bone. Muscle is meant to take the bulk of the tension, but none of it will last long without the support and integrity of dense bone and connective tissue. Your body was design in a way where once the body is exposed to consistent weightlifting, it will adapt by growing and strengthening those two things as well. This makes weightlifting a great asset to anyone needing increased bone density and connective, especially women, being that they typically lose more bone density as they age and run a higher risk for osteoporosis and arthritis.

5. Stabilize Your Hormones, Brain & Gut Function

I see so many in their 30s and 40s suffering from low testosterone and high estrogen, and woman who struggle with fat retention and weight gain due to excessive estrogen and low testosterone. Understand that neither testosterone or estrogen are exclusive to any gender, only that the levels are different between the two.

Testosterone is a great contributing factor in muscle gain and fat loss, and if too low can cause fat retention in the torso, inhibited muscle retention, erectile dysfunction, etc. Estrogen is greatly responsible for the shape of the female body, the stability of the menstrual cycle. Having an imbalance with it can cause the following.

excess fat retention in the lower body and arms
late period and severe cramps
inhibited muscle gain
low libido and more

Insulin is a hormone released from the pancreas that supports sugar metabolism. Lack of insulin can cause the following.

rapid fat gain
low energy levels
diabetes and a whole lot of other problems.

The list goes on, but the point is that heavy weightlifting, causes the body to adapt in ways that bring everything to a stable and efficient level in order to support and sustain a healthy and strong lifestyle.

6. Higher Self Esteem & Mental Toughness

The feeling you get from strength is like endless victory and invincibility! No average person is going to willingly walk up to a huge weight with overwhelming vigor and start working. To rush toward challenge like that takes a strong positive mindset and you don’t just get like that over night. Living the Strength & wellness Lifestyle and getting over and under some heavy weight on a consistent basis is going to train your mind to be strong as well as your body. That kind of strength spills over to every aspect of your life whether it be in the work place, socially, even dating and intimacy. Get on a good strength program, get in the gym, and start growing!

Thanks for reading, I appreciate you.

The Tribe Strength Formula

Get the formula behind the Tribe Strength Program for free

Tags bodybuilding, fitness tips, power building, powerlifting, weightlifting