Built By Burds

Make some damn noise. Don’t make it weird.

If you’ve ever lifted something heavy in your life you probably made a grunt at least once. That’s normal. You are tensing your core while exhaling while generating force. Good!

If someone gets mad about that, show them a tennis match and tell them it’s called being an athlete. Only you are picking up way more weight than a tennis racket and should sound way less erotic with your reps (sorry but some of your players are excessive with the noise).

Get aggressive and get after it.

Identify. Adapt. Overcome.

“I feel it but I’m not getting any bigger or stronger”

Well it’s simple - activation doesn’t mean optimal growth. Know what the best activating exercise is for the glute medius aka the side glutes? Side planks with hip abduction…

If you want to really grow your glutes, guess what, you are going to need to do more than just some banded side planks with a leg lift. Here’s why.

Loading matters. You need to lift heavy and challenge your muscles. Are you able to load the side plank with hip abduction in a heavy manner without compromising the rest of the kinematic chain? Not really.

This exercise shown is a Single Leg Bridge with Resisted Hip Abduction/Hip Flexion. It’s going to activate a lot of stabilizers. Great for stability work. Great for body awareness. Great for growth? No.

But in order to load heavy, you need stability. So yes, you will see people with good physiques do these type of movements, but if a trainer isn’t telling you to also load the muscle with the fundamentals hinges like squats or RDLs… get a new coach.

You may feel it, but it ain’t it.

Identify. Adapt. Overcome.

How old is your gym age?

I’m not talking about your “biological age” your bio markers are predicting. I mean what was popular when you were starting out?

The videos that inspired a young me didn’t involve a bunch of guys doing CrossFit or Hyrox combos with sloppy burpees or hybrid gymnastics. They invoked the most mild progressions of basic fundamentals.

Clapping push-ups was one of the first skills you’d see in fitness videos on YouTube that would make you think you just saw a magic trick. Now there are people trying to hang on pull-up bars with their armpits while riding an exercise bike.

We have become so confused by the entertainment factor of health and fitness. Most people can’t do a simple push-up, let alone try to rep out 100 of them each morning. The same goes for body weight squats.

So what’s your gym age? What did you use to think was the wildest thing to see before you started working out?