Articles & Guides
Learn how to build muscle, burn fat and stay motivated.
The Science Behind Optimizing Injury Recovery
Suffering an injury as a result of training or sports practice can spell the end of an athlete's career as they know it. It can be an incredibly frustrating, and scary time, regardless of your expertise or lack thereof. Does it have to mean the end of your competitive life, the wet blanket thrown on...
Rest Day Strategies: Active Recovery vs. Passive Recovery
The better your recovery, the harder you can train. The harder you can train without exceeding your capacity to recover, the better your results. In my recent article 3 Program Design Principles to Maximize Muscle Recovery, I identified the key principles of program design to maximize the efficiency...
Dealing with the Dreaded DOMS: 5 Ways To Reduce Muscle Soreness
Soreness might not be an indicator of muscle growth. And the jury is out on the real reasons behind DOMS. But one thing is certain. Being sore sucks! And it's downright uncomfortable. A little soreness is fine. But chronic soreness that keeps you from training as often as you'd like is another thing...
Natty Lifter's Guide to Recovery: Build Quality Gainz w/out Steroids
There are three types of people in the gym… You have those who work exceptionally hard and perceive their recovery abilities as limitless. They live their lives with reckless abandonment and it seems their physical capabilities (at least to themselves) are only limited by the depth of their minds. B...
Overtraining & Testosterone: Does Too Much Exercise Ruin Your T Levels?
No pain, no gain—people see this often enough that some actually end up overtraining themselves to their own demise1. You should always remember that recovery and rest are also part of the equation. Exercise is a must for a healthy lifestyle, but more is not necessarily better, and instead, can lead...
Deload Weeks: Everything You Need to Know on How to Deload
If you’re like most people, you probably spend a lot of time focusing on what you are doing inside of the gym. You smash your workouts day in and day out for weeks on end (maybe even months!). Then, all of a sudden, you hit a plateau. No matter how hard you try, you just can’t break through this one...
Defeating DOMS: 5 Science Based Suggestions
6:45am. Your eyes flutter open as you become faintly aware of the vibrating Fitbit on your wrist. As you slowly sit up in bed, your legs remind you of the brutal training session from the day before. “Why did I want to do 8 sets of squats again?” Shaking your head, you somehow manage to hobble crawl...
5 Key Tips to Improve Recovery After a Workout
When it comes to reaching your fitness goals most people optimize training and nutrition but fail to pay attention to another key variable, recovery. Well, while diet and training are certainly key, what if I told you that optimizing your recovery could improve your performance in the gym as well as...
5 Recovery Tips to Help You Build Muscle Faster
There’s a lot of talk online, in the gym, and on Instagram about workouts, specific training sessions, and intensity techniques. But almost no one ever truly discusses muscle recovery. If athletes and hard training folks discussed their rest days in the same way that they discussed their training da...
3 Simple Recovery Methods to Train Harder Than Ever Before
What is your most limiting factor when it comes to achieving your training goals? The average person would likely answer getting to the gym multiple times a week or not giving in to their late night ice cream addiction. As lifters, we are not average people, and to say we have “average” goals would...
3 Foam Rolling Mistakes You’re Probably Making
“Just smash it!” It seems to have become the rallying cry of Crossfitters everywhere as self-myofascial release continues to grow in popularity amongst a variety of fitness circles. Admittedly, recovery is a hot topic these days, I even wrote about it in passing given all the recent hype. In fact, i...