Introduction – Track Your Triumphs: Why Training Logs and Progress Tracking Matter When it comes to building strength, sculpting muscle, or improving athletic performance, enthusiasm will only take you so far. Without a clear way to measure progress, training becomes guesswork. A well-maintained training log is your roadmap—documenting where you’ve been, where you are, and…
Count Every Ounce: Why You Must Include the Bar Weight In strength training, precision matters. Your total load isn’t just the weight plates you add — the barbell weight itself is part of the equation. A standard Olympic bar in most gyms weighs 20 kg (45 lbs) and that mass contributes directly to the resistance…
Instant Calculation: Discover Your Ideal Lift A weight lifting calculator is your shortcut to finding the right training load without the risk of attempting a true max lift. By inputting the number of reps you perform with a given weight, the calculator estimates your one-rep max (1RM)—the most weight you could lift for a single…
Launchpad: Lifting the Question Immediately Ask five people whether weight lifting is a high-impact exercise, and you’ll often get varied answers—some assume that moving heavy weight must mean high impact, while others refer to it as joint-friendly resistance training. To settle this, we need to strip away assumptions and focus on the science of exercise…
Turbocharge Your Gains from Day One When it comes to building strength, muscle size, and long-term physical resilience, the fastest way to see results is to focus on proven, science-backed exercises that recruit multiple muscle groups at once. As a coach who’s spent years both studying hypertrophy and grinding through thousands of training hours, I…
First Reps: Your Calorie Burn Answer Right off the Barbell Weight lifting is more than just building strength and muscle mass—it’s also a legitimate tool for calorie expenditure. On average, a typical weight lifting workout can burn anywhere from 200 to 600 calories per hour. If you’re training for 30 minutes, expect that number to…
Lift Off: How to Find Your Starting Weight in a Snap Finding your starting weight in weightlifting is part art, part science—it’s about balancing challenge with safety. The right load should allow you to complete your prescribed repetitions with proper form while still feeling like you’ve worked. Start too heavy, and your technique will crumble;…
Don’t Worry, Yes – Weight Lifting Can Cause Bruising Weight lifting, whether you’re pushing through heavy squats, grinding out deadlifts, or performing high-intensity resistance training, places significant mechanical stress on your muscles, connective tissue, and blood vessels. In some cases, that stress can cause visible bruising—discolorations you might notice as red, purple, or black-and-blue marks…
Crack the Code: Safe Lifting with Tennis Elbow Tennis elbow, or lateral epicondylitis, is a frustrating condition that can derail your training if not handled with precision. It involves microscopic tears and inflammation in the tendons that attach to the outside of your elbow, often aggravated by repetitive gripping and wrist extension patterns. For lifters,…