Mikael Simillides

Stay in your lane.

Find people that share the same passion as you, push & help each other to grow. Finding like-minded people that have the same goals are you are the people you should surround yourself with.

However, keep in mind comparison is the thief of joy. Always keep your focus on yourself and use others as motivation to get better. Comparing with others will only leave you feeling unsatisfied, as people tend to overlook their strengths and focus on their weaknesses.

Focus on doing you but don’t forget it’s always better to share the lessons & celebrate the wins with others.
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The Best Training Split.

It’s the “it doesn’t really matter split”. At the end of the day the most efficient & effective training split is they one you enjoy doing & allows you to hit your required training volumes.

Each individual has an specific amount of volume (for example a total amount of sets)required to be done to progress. It can really vary between people & it may even vary for the same person at different times.

That’s why cookie cutter plans are horsesh*t. Yes its great if you are following a structured plan but it may not be efficient for you. You should pay attention to how you recover & adjust volumes/intensities accordingly.

At the end of the day when everything else is equal, it doesn’t really make a huge difference if you do full body training, upper/lower, push/pull/legs etc.

As long as you are hitting your required volume marks with the right intensity while managing your recovery then you are doing the best you can.

Stick to that, progressively overload while eating on a surplus & be patient. Improvements will acquire as long as you are putting in the hard work & being patient.

Your weight is a contribution of your caloric intake, NOT of the nutritional value of a food. Stop categorizing foods into bad ones & good ones. Look your diet as a whole & don’t focus on a single food.

Exercise selection.

There are numerous of exercises to choose from. Choose a few for each body part & perform them until you master them & keep progressing with them.

People always changing their exercises too often. Varying them too frequently doesn’t leave your muscles to adapt to the exercise stimuli in order to create an adaptation for growth.

A huge myth about varying exercises frequently is to shock the muscles to keep them from adapting. But that’s what we need to grow, an adaptation. Your muscles need a overloading stimulus to grow & that doesn’t come from any kind of “shocking”. If that was the case, how do you explain that powerlifters get bigger & stronger? Their whole career is around 3 main exercises!

Choose a few exercises for each muscle group & try to progress on them for as long as possible. No need to change anything if you aren’t plateaued. Don’t fix something that’s not broken.

As long as you are able to keep progressing with an exercise no need to change it. Keep doing it & keep getting stronger at it.

Want an effective workout? Focus on the things that actually matter.

Optimize your Performance.

Optimizing your performance comes from handling the right components constantly.

The more you are in control of the points which will be mentioned below the more predictable your performance will be.

When you are aware & in track of what you handling or not, you can figure out in advance how your next training session will go.

I’m an advocate of believing that your performance is not dependent only from what you have controlled/done the hours or even that day before your training but also everything from the previous days.

Some components you can take care of to optimize your performance are:
🔸Training volume management - Perform volume you can recover from.
🔸Sleep quantity & quality - Aim for 6-9h daily of good sleep.
🔸Hydration - Be constantly hydrated throughout the day.
🔸Nutrition - Being in a surplus will most likely benefit you but make sure you get an adequate amount of protein, emphasize your peri workout nutrition, eat your veggies.
🔸Mindset - If you don’t believe it yourself, no one else will.
🔸Stress - We all know stress is no good in any way.

Without getting into deep details of each one of these in this post, the better you handle the points above, the better & more predictable your performance will be.

As mentioned above, a key factor of optimizing your performance is handling things on daily basis overtime. In my opinion, it’s a crucial part of progression.

Your body weight can fluctuate for various reasons as the above.

That’s why it’s important to be comparing weekly or even monthly averages than fixating over a daily weigh in that can be very inaccurate due to fluctuations.