6 Mass-Gain Hacks To Try In 2015!

New Exercise and Fitness Review

Sometimes, the quest for even modest gains in muscle can seem more perilous than a journey through Middle Earth: epic, drudging, and never-ending. But it doesn’t have to be. To plot a more direct course, you need only source the experience of those who have done it successfully—those who have tested and amended the journals, textbooks, and tactics that you’ve likely already tried.

And it’s not always what you’d expect. A keyword summary of effective strategies for mass usually contains familiar suspects like “progression,” “the big 3,” “recovery,” “creatine,” and “intensity.” But these blanket strategies only work to a certain point for any one person. After that, you’re left to lean on improvisation, experimentation, and the personal experiences of trusted sources.

Sometimes, the quest for even modest gains in muscle can seem more perilous than a journey through Middle Earth: epic, drudging, and never-ending.

You can put the following six hacks to work for you with confidence, knowing they’ve already led other people to new hypertrophic heights.

1 DON’T TRAIN FOR MORE THAN AN HOUR

Every action hero has an evil villain that fights them to the bitter end. Your body’s hormonal hero, testosterone, is no different. Its archenemy is a hormone known as cortisol. While testosterone helps your body recover from training and use it as a springboard to growth, cortisol tries to break muscle down. It’s a constant battle between progress and regression.

The push-and-pull is both inevitable and necessary. However, just like in the movies, you want testosterone to win out in the end. And the longer you train intensely, the more you stack the odds against your hero. When reviewing the existing data, a common trend that appears is that cortisol levels rise and testosterone levels dip starting somewhere around the 60-minute mark of an intense training session.

To maximize your strength training workouts and the muscle growth that happens between them, I suggest limiting your training to no more than 60 minutes at a time. On occasion, you can stretch it to 75 minutes—at most.

If that doesn’t sound like much time, then make up for it with your intensity. Shorten rest periods, place your muscles under an adequately heavy load, and cut out all time-wasting at the gym. Give yourself a solid hour, and you’ll give yourself a better chance to grow.

2 DO PLYOMETRICS FIRST

A workout before a workout? You betcha. This hardcore approach, used for years by strength and power athletes, is just now coming into vogue for more casual lifters because of its ability to help your body recruit more muscle fibers.

“Increasing strength to produce additional muscle-building stimulus starts with increasing nervous signal impulses,” says Craig Stevenson, BPE (Hon.), a 20-year vet of the health and fitness industry:

“The larger the muscle fibers, the larger the motor neuron attached. Large, fast-twitch muscle fibers are designed to produce a high level of force, and in doing so also require a large electrical signal from your nervous system. Doing plyometrics like box jumps before training legs is a great way to force your muscles into recruiting more fibers. Similarly, implementing plyometric push-ups before training chest can set the stage for your body to deliver large electrical signals via the nervous system to recruit more and larger muscle fibers during your working sets.”

“Implementing plyometric push-ups before training chest can set the stage for your body to deliver large electrical signals via the nervous system to recruit more and larger muscle fibers during your working sets.”

More muscle recruited to the task will allow you to move more weight more efficiently, and therefore could lead to more rapid size gains. In addition to some of the bodyweight-only plyo moves mentioned, the Smith machine offers some safe resistance-based alternatives such as bench-press throws for chest, squat jumps for legs, and explosive curls for biceps.

When performing these moves, focus on being as explosive as possible—your feet should leave the floor when jump-squatting, and your hands should leave the floor when doing push-ups—which is why the Smith machine is safer. Do 2-3 sets of no more than 3-5 reps (not to failure) before your working sets.

3 DO A VERY HEAVY TEST RUN

If you’ve gotten into the habit of preceding your heavy benches with 2-3 sets of high-rep work under the bar, then you might be shortchanging yourself in the intensity department. Stevenson instead prefers to pyramid up to a very heavy load, which may initially seem counterproductive when you’re about to knock out some big working sets.

“Do your last warm-up set before your working sets with a weight that approaches your one-rep max,” he recommends. “By doing this, you’re recruiting more muscle fibers than you will in your working sets of say 8-10 reps, so you can usually handle that small amount of extra weight that’ll produce stimulus and growth.”

By performing a more intense activity first (the very heavy set), you summon more total muscle fibers into play for the work sets ahead.

This works through a mechanism called post-activation potentiation, a neuromuscular phenomenon in which strength and power output is immediately enhanced after heavy resistance exercise.¹ Basically, by performing a more intense activity first (the very heavy set), you summon more total muscle fibers into play for the work sets ahead, like a baseball player swinging a weighted bat before stepping up to the plate.

Here’s how this approach might look for someone with a 300 lb. one-rep max on the bench press, and who wants to knock out 4 working sets of 8-10 reps.

• Warm-up set 1: 135 lbs., 10-12 reps, rest 2 min.


• Warm-up set 2: 225 lbs., 5-6 reps, rest 2 min.


• Warm-up set 3: 275 lbs., 1 rep, rest 2 min.


• Work sets 1-4: 240 lbs., 8-10 reps, rest 2-3 min.

By adding a very heavy set with 90-95 percent of your one-rep max (1RM), by the time you do your working sets with 80-85 percent of your 1RM, the weight will actually feel lighter, which means you may be able to do more reps for greater overall muscle stimulation.

4 ROCK OUT

“Music can make all the difference in the world while training,” says bodybuilder and powerlifter Nick Wright. “Studies have actually shown that an athlete’s mind doesn’t view training as ‘work’ while music is playing.^2,3 Music can also alter your mindset, and with the right song it can greatly help fire you up, get your adrenaline and even anger flowing, and allow you to break through those walls of nerves and lethargy that can stand between you and new muscle.”

A study out of Brunel University in London found that faster tempo tunes and higher-intensity music before performance may enhance an athlete’s visual perception, attention, and motor control.⁴ So, in addition to your wrist straps and protein shaker, it’s a good idea to gear up with a quality playlist before hitting the gym, choosing tracks that get your motor running. The right jams may also help you get past the mental milieus discussed in point number three.

5 PROTEIN, PLUSSED

We all know that protein powders are an invaluable and ubiquitous part of the gym life. But the science on protein and muscle-building continues to evolve, leading researchers to new nutritional avenues for maximizing muscle growth.

“Science has shown us that although there are literally hundreds of variables—training intensity, sleep, stress, etc.—that affect the amount of protein our bodies need and can utilize during each feeding, the consensus is many athletes consume far more protein than their bodies can synthesize,” says Stephen Adele, CEO of Isatori. “That’s where bioactive peptides come into play. It’s theorized that they can maximize the body’s ability to synthesize more protein by signaling the muscle cell to call for and speed up the rate of protein synthesis, thus allowing the muscle cell to rebuild itself bigger or stronger, depending on your training goals.”

Put simply, bioactive peptides, or BAPs, help you get more bang for your buck with the protein you’re already taking. Take BAPs as directed with your morning and post-workout shakes, when your muscles are most in need of a quality feeding.

6 STAY HEALTHY

You have to train to grow. But you have to train in a way that keeps you healthy for the long haul. Jumping onto an active treadmill, forgetting to load the other side of the barbell, improperly using a piece of equipment—these lapses in judgment are the stuff of gym fail legend.

No one will ever be able to fully injury-proof themselves, but any time spent on the disabled list serves as a setback in your quest for growth. And unfortunately, mitigating risk is something that very few lifters factor into their conscious planning.

You have to train to grow. But you have to train in a way that keeps you healthy for the long haul.

“After 30-plus years of crushing iron and making every mistake possible, I’ve learned the older we get, the smarter we need to be,” says Jason “Big J” English, owner of Big J’s Extreme Fitness in Red Oak, Texas. “This is especially true in the weight room, as any slight infraction could either cause discomfort or send us straight to the hospital.”

One of Big J’s favorite injury-control methods adds a few minutes to workouts, but he says it’s well worth the effort:

“Almost every dumbbell rack at any gym, family-oriented or hardcore, will have two tiers of racks. The upper tier will usually go to around 60 pounds. Then the lower rack will have the heavier weights up to 100 and even 150 pounds.

“When grabbing the heavier weights from the bottom tier and walking over to your bench or seat, you risk not only injury, but you may also lose you a rep or two over time since this process fatigues muscle. So I always grab the heavier dumbbells and put them on the top rack sideways along the top of the already-racked dumbbells. I’ll also bring the seat or bench closer so that as soon as the dumbbells are secure, the next step is to sit down and press.

These two easy steps will cut the risk of injury, and may even allow you to get that extra rep.”

As his physique will attest, those reps add up! Keeping yourself in the gym and out of urgent care is the most elemental strategy for appreciable muscle gains.

REFERENCES

1. Docherty, D., Robbins, D., & Hodgson, M. (2004). Complex Training Revisited: A Review of its Current Status as a Viable Training Approach. Strength and Conditioning Journal, 26(6), 52-52.


2. Szmedra, L., & Bacharach, D. (1998). Effect Of Music On Perceived Exertion, Plasma Lactate, Norepinephrine And Cardiovascular Hemodynamics During Treadmill Running. International Journal of Sports Medicine, 19(1), 32-37.


3. Stork, M., Kwan, M., Gibala, M., & Ginis, K. (2014). Music Enhances Performance and Perceived Enjoyment of Sprint Interval Exercise. Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, 1-1.


4. Tempo and intensity of pre-task music modulate neural activity during reactive task performance. (2014, January 1). Retrieved from http://pom.sagepub.com/content/42/5/714

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6 Mass-Gain Hacks To Try In 2015!

11 Training Hacks You Have To Try

New Exercise and Fitness Review

It’s no secret that doing the same workouts with the same internal variables over and over again won’t lead to muscle growth. But you don’t need to completely abandon your routine every time you need a change. Instead, implement one or more of these 11 simple hacks to kick your results back into overdrive!

1 Do Your Monday Workout on Sunday

I hate to ruin your love affair with pro football, but unless you enjoy standing in lines reminiscent of your childhood trip to Disneyland, Monday is absolutely the worst day to be in the gym—especially if you’re planning to train your chest. Ironically, if you were to hit that same athletic club a mere 24 hours earlier, you’d find it practically empty. I’ve come to find the most serious lifters at my gym are there on Sundays to skip the crowds. In fact, maybe I shouldn’t even have shared this tip…

2 Bust Out Your Cardio Between Sets

We know you’re popular: You’ve got friends to text, selfies to post, and conversations to catch up on with your crew at the gym. None of this changes the fact that you’ve still got a cardio session waiting for you at the end of your workout. Why not get your cardio done alongside your lifting so you can get back to life faster?

Instead of sitting your butt on a bench between sets, you can speed things up, get your heart going, and burn calories at the same time. Active rest (doing a mild cardio activity between sets) will help you get a more productive workout and cut your time in the gym substantially. Try jumping rope, doing step-ups, or hitting box jumps for 45-60 seconds between weight-training sets. Just make sure you pace yourself.

“Adding a fast-paced, active-rest workout once or twice a week will do two things,” says David Sandler, CSCS*D, Director of Science and Education for iSatori. “First, your athletic ability will improve as balance, core strength, footwork, and muscle endurance improve within only a few weeks. Second, you’ll increase your work capacity and burn more calories in less time. The downside is that you’ll sacrifice some strength, but you’ll lean out faster and get a better overall pump.”

Active rest (doing a mild cardio activity between sets) will help you get a more productive workout and cut your time in the gym substantially.

3 Add Weight To The Bar With Smaller Plates

Working out with a partner has some huge advantages. But creating a partner-friendly workout means finding convenient ways to load and unload weights, says Sandler. Nothing feels more like wasted effort than continually having to make 45-pound weight changes. By using the smaller plates—5s, 10s, 25s, even 35s—you can more easily make weight changes, saving time and effort. Bonus: If you do dropsets, you can simply pull off the right amount of weight without having to take off one of the big wheels and replace it with a smaller plate.

4 Train Your Internal Alarm To Go Off At 10 Reps

“If you’re in fact going for 10 reps, you should barely be able to squeak out a 10th rep,” says Sandler.

Too many lifters—at least the ones who never make any progress—come to the gym and choose weights they can lift for 10 reps, rest, and repeat. The problem with this approach is that the body has already grown accustomed to the load, and no further adaptation is taking place. You can literally train like this for years and never see progress.

Instead of hitting the usual 10 reps after your warm-up sets, choose challenging weights you can do for 6-8 reps—especially early in your workout, when your energy levels are high—and then employ sets of 8-10 later in your training session.

“If you’re in fact going for 10 reps, you should barely be able to squeak out a 10th rep,” says Sandler. “When you can hit 10 reps without cheating or help, then it’s time to add a small plate to each side of the bar.”

If you find that you’re taking every set to 10 reps, your internal alarm should go off. As soon as you hear yourself say the number 10, automatically add a plate to increase the overload. Don’t get lazy and work out on autopilot.

This tip applies mainly to multijoint movements, especially for individuals looking to increase their size and strength.

5 Do The 10-Minute Arm Workout For The Pump Of Your Life

Try this workout once and I promise you’ll swear by it. Let’s say you’re doing chest and triceps. Do your chest workout as usual, consisting of lots of heavy presses. Rather than doing your normal triceps routine afterward—they’ve already been hit hard with all those multijoint moves—choose a single exercise like a rope press-down or rope overhead extension and do it for 10 minutes straight.

Here’s the plan: Choose a weight you can lift for just 10-12 reps. Do your set, but then rest for only 20 seconds—no more—between sets. Fatigue will build up quickly as your arms are unable to completely recover. When you can’t complete 8 reps, drop the weight by one plate on the stack.

The next set will be slightly easier now, and you may be able to do 12 again. But by keeping rest periods to just 20 seconds, that lighter weight will soon feel heavy and you can drop the weight again.

When done for 10 minutes, this simple combination of rest-pause and dropsets will deliver the best triceps pump you’ve ever had, and you’ll feel sore for days afterward.

Try the same technique with biceps for a killer arm pump after training your back.

When done for 10 minutes, this simple combination of rest-pause and dropsets will deliver the best triceps pump you’ve ever had, and you’ll feel sore for days afterward.

6 Invest In Straps For Extra Reps

Oftentimes when training your back, your grip will give out before your lats. Never sacrifice your back for your hands. When your grip starts to fail, put on a pair of lifting straps and you’ll be able to get an extra rep or two on each set, which translates into more muscle growth. Don’t let your grip be your limiting factor on lat day. If you want to work on grip or forearm development, throw those on to the end of your biceps workout.

“When using straps, be sure to isolate your lats and let the straps do their job,” says Sandler. “You don’t need to use an overly firm grip with straps. Just press lightly on them, allowing your forearms to relax a little to send the focus of the movement toward your back.”

7 Get In, Get It Done, Get Out

If your workouts are taking two hours, work on increasing the intensity (and texting less between sets) by making each set heavier and harder.

When is 60 minutes better than 120? When it’s the length of your workout. Unless you wear a capital “S” on your shirt and leap tall buildings in a single bound, you probably can’t sustain a high-intensity workout for long periods of time. You can, however, do a long workout with moderate intensity, but even that’s suboptimal for big-time muscle gains. Powerlifters are known for longer workouts, but that’s typically due to more warm-ups and substantially longer rest periods between sets.

If your workouts are taking two hours, work on increasing the intensity (and texting less between sets) by making each set heavier and harder. Don’t just add more sets and exercises; that only serves to lengthen your workout.

“Unless you’re a powerlifter, a faster pace does two things,” says Sandler. “First, it has been shown that shorter rest times and higher volume may improve your hormone activity, which means you’ll likely build size at a quicker rate. And second, it’s easier to stay focused for the duration of your session. Mental fatigue contributes to less-than-perfect focus and form, not to mention increased risk of injury.”

Successful bodybuilders get in and out of the gym fast—in 60-75 minutes, tops. But what they sacrifice in duration, they more than make up for with intensity. Plus, you’ll save yourself an extra 45-60 minutes each day!

8 Learn To Keep Your Back Arched

You can save your spine and properly target your working muscles by learning how to hold the arch in your back.

Learning how to keep your lower back arched correctly when training is like learning how to ride a bike: It doesn’t come naturally at first, and you’re going to make mistakes along the way. But while falling off a bike may result in only a few scrapes, using bad form and rounding your back when training with heavy weights disrupts spinal alignment and can cause permanent damage. Disc herniation can happen when you don’t protect your spine during lifting.

You can save your spine and properly target your working muscles by learning how to hold the arch in your back. This is especially important for bent-over exercises like Romanian deadlifts, bent-over rows, and bent-over lateral raises.

“By having normal curvature or even a slightly modified arch in your lower back, you’ll also gain stability across the core,” explains Sandler. “By breathing in on the negative and having your chest up, if you squeeze your abdominals in tight, you’ll increase your intra-abdominal pressure and actually provide much greater strength across your core. As an added benefit, contracting you ab muscles will actually help build them to a degree.”

To check your form, stand perpendicular (sideways) to the mirror (without weights), bend over about 45 degrees, stick your butt out, keep your chest big and open, and bend your knees slightly. Look sideways at the mirror and check your body position, ensuring you have a tight arch in your lower back—not a humpback that’s rounded forward. You must practice this until you get it right, and few beginners naturally get the hang of it.

9 Don’t Duplicate Nearly Identical Exercises

You’ve probably heard that you want to hit a large muscle group with exercises from multiple angles over the course of your workout. Pay attention to bench angle and hand, foot, and body position so you’re not repeating very similar movements. Incline, decline, and flat-bench presses work the pecs from multiple angles, but there are only small differences between flat-bench barbell, flat-bench dumbbell, and flat-bench machine presses.

“Angle training ensures that you hit every muscle fiber, especially in muscles that have multiple attachment points,” says Sandler. “Performing a similar exercise with a different piece of equipment may help improve stabilizer muscle contribution, but going from a machine to a barbell, or barbell to a dumbbell, still hits the muscles at almost the same angle. At the very least, if you’re going to do the same exercise at the same angle with a different piece of equipment, vary your grip or your stance [with leg exercises]. A varied grip changes the emphasis of the primary muscles and the activation pattern of the assisting muscles.”

Below are some sample exercises and their similar cousins. Avoid mindlessly doing them both in the same workout:

Sample Exercise	Similar Exercise
Wide-Grip Bent-Over Barbell Row	Wide-Grip Bent-Over T-Bar Row
Smith Machine One-Arm Upright Row	One-Arm Dumbbell Row
Close-Grip Seated Cable Row	Close-Grip Seated Machine Row
Bent-Over Lateral Raise	Reverse Pec-Deck Fly
Weighted Bench Dip	Machine Triceps Dip
Flat-Bench Dumbbell Fly	Pec-Deck Machine
Incline Dumbbell Fly	Low-Pulley Cable Crossover

10 Finish Your Workouts with Lower Back
and Forearm Exercises

Want to know the best way to ensure you’re physically incapable of doing anything later in your workout? Try taking your body’s weakest links and train them to failure. For nearly everyone, that’s your grip and your lower back.

Blow your grip with forearm or grip training, and you can forget about holding on to anything afterward.

Once your lower back is fatigued, standing upright becomes nearly impossible, let alone maintaining good form with heavy weights. For safety’s sake, do lower-back exercises at the end of your training session, most likely on back day.

Likewise, blow your grip with forearm or grip training, and you can forget about holding on to anything afterward. A heavy set of bent-over barbell rows after forearm training? Fuhgetaboutit. So save the forearm and grip training until the end of your biceps workout, with no other body parts to follow. It’s also a good idea to skip training those body parts if they’ll be necessary for the next day’s workout.

11 Don’t Look For
The Easy Way Out

Everyone wants big muscles, but no one wants to lift heavy-ass weights. Eight-time Mr. Olympia Ronnie Coleman popularized that phrase, and he was dead-on. If you’re looking for shortcuts or otherwise trying to make your workouts easier—avoiding free-weight squats, bench presses, and deadlifts, for example—I’m sorry to say that you’re taking the wrong approach.

Looking for the easy way out may also mean excessive cheating on your movements, such as bouncing the bar off your pecs when benching or bringing your elbows forward when curling. Although there is a time and a place for cheating, relying on it takes stress and tension off the muscle, which is counterproductive in bodybuilding.

Find ways to increase the degree of difficulty and make movements harder, not easier. Add chains to your bench press, do negative reps, extend sets with dropsets, or decrease your rest intervals: whatever it takes to make a movement more difficult. When you substitute machine movements for free weights, do seated motions instead of standing, or otherwise look for ways to make your workout easier, you only shortchange yourself—and the results you see in the end.

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11 Training Hacks You Have To Try

7 Gym Hacks You Need To Know

New Exercise and Fitness Review

Vital Stats

Name: Nick Tuminello
Occupation: Trainer, owner of Performance University, author of Strength Training for Fat Loss.
Location: Ft. Lauderdale, FL

Effective training is all about getting the most out of using the equipment you have. You can dream all you want about the specialized gear you see lifters and athletes using in online videos, but until you strike it rich, they’re about as real as light sabers.

So are you out of luck? Hardly! The weight room is an ideal laboratory for crafting “hacks,” which are clever, non-obvious ways to solve problems and increase efficiency. In action, they can easily mean the difference between an airtight 45-minute workout and an inefficient hour or more. They can also help you stay uninjured, work around an injury you have, or get stronger in a way you thought was beyond your options.

Sure, you may already know about some of these hacks, but keep in mind that many people haven’t heard of or tried them. So instead of commenting “I’ve known this for years” or “every serious lifter should already be doing this,” share some of your own hacks and tricks that can help the community!

Think of it this way: There’s nothing more frustrating than waiting while someone else uses the equipment you need, so when you share your knowledge, the time you save may be your own!

1 How to Strip Plates Off the Bar After Heavy Lifting

Slipping a 5-pound plate between your 45-pounders gives you space to get your fingers under the big plates.

Our first hack comes from my man Bret “The Rear Admiral” Contreras. It involves a simple and easy way to drag plates off the bar after doing heavy deadlifts or hip thrusts, a cumbersome task that often requires lots of extra time and energy. Take a minute to watch the life-changing video below.

Did I just hear the sound of your palm hitting your forehead? Maybe it was a glute-smack. In either case, this technique may be common knowledge to many serious weightlifters, but here’s a newsflash: Serious lifters aren’t the only people doing deads and hip thrusts anymore. That’s a good thing—a great thing, in fact.

Iron game legend Richard Sorin told me, “Athletes are not in the gym to be weightlifters. They’re there to be athletes made stronger.” This applies to people with physique and general fitness goals, as well.

All of us can benefit from building stronger posterior chains, and now we can shave off a few precious seconds when we do it.

How to Strip Plates Off the Bar
Watch The Video – 00:50

2 How to Rack Weight Plates

I’ve been all over the world and seen hundreds of weight rooms and fitness facilities. Unfortunately, the way almost all of them have their weights plates set up simply doesn’t make sense. And when I say, “doesn’t make sense,” I mean that it puts all of their clients, athletes, coaches, and members at a higher risk of injury.

If you’re a gym owner, work at a training facility, or just want to rack weights in the safest and most considerate way possible, try this method. If you’ve ever tweaked your back before even setting up under a barbell, you know how important simple solutions like this can be!

Your weight room is set up wrong!
Watch The Video – 01:18

3 How to Stack Plates on a Sled or Prowler

If you use a sled, you know it can be a real pain in the butt pulling the plates off the vertical weight-retaining bars. If you’re not careful, it can be an even bigger pain in the finger. It doesn’t have to be!

All you have to do is load a 5-pound plate first, then alternate 45-pound plates with 5-pound plates afterward. Not only does this make it easier to grab and pull off the 45s, it also gives you nice and simple 50-pound increments to monitor your resistance.

Feel like you’ve seen this technique before somewhere? As some physique training enthusiasts know, this sandwich technique is also great for loading and unloading the seated calf-raise apparatus.

4 Use Ab Straps for More Than Just Hanging Leg Raises

If an injury affects your grip, it doesn’t have to mean the end of your upper-body training. You can use ab straps as a handle option even if you’re unable to hold anything in your hands.

For example, you can use them to perform bent-over rows at the cable stack. Sure, it’s not the full range of motion you’d get with a dumbbell or cable handle, but it’s far better than doing nothing at all. You can also keep up your rotational power by using the same straps for a rotary cable pull.

Bent-over cable rows

Give either of these moves a try, and you’ll start to see what a versatile tool these can be. Let me know in the comments if you have success using them for anything else.

The bigger lesson here is that an injury, joint pain, or limitation doesn’t have to cancel your workout. This was the focus of my Joint Friendly Strength Training DVD set, which includes more than 100 innovative exercises for building muscle and strength while sparing your joints and working around wounded knees, shell-shocked shoulders, hand and wrist limitations, and a bad back.

5 Use Barbells As a Personalized Dips Station

A common knock against strength training machines is that they don’t allow us to follow our “natural” path of movement. Every user has to set up the same way, with the same hand width, foot placement, and so on. But the same people making this complaint happily head over to the dip station, where—you guessed it—they put their hand placement at the same width, regardless of their respective shape and size.

You may think there’s no way to adjust the width of your hands on a parallel bar dip station, since the handles are already preset at a specific width—and you’re right! Even the adjustable parallel bar dip stations only have one adjustment, where you rotate the handles either farther apart or closer together. This still leaves out plenty of people whose ideal placement would be in the middle or outside those two positions.

Parallel bar dip

Don’t try to fit yourself to a movement. Make the movement fit you by abandoning the dip station and performing dips in a way that’s fully adjustable to every individual. All you need is a squat rack and two empty barbells. Set the safety pins a little higher than waist height, set up between the barbells, and start dipping.

If you’re worried about the barbells rolling when you perform the dips, don’t be. They won’t budge once you put your weight on them. That said, as with every other exercise, there is always some idiot factor involved, so don’t do anything you know may push your luck.

6 Wrist-Wrap Front Squats

Just when I think that using wrist straps to perform front squats is a hack that everyone knows, I find someone who has never seen this technique before. So it’s definitely worth sharing—especially if it eliminates your best excuse not to do front squats!

This trick is simplicity itself. If you feel like front squats bother your wrists, or you are simply unable to get your wrists into the proper position, loop the wrist straps around the bar (as shown in the photo below) and hold on tight as you squat.

Wrist-Wrap Front Squats

When using wrist straps to perform front squats, keep upward tension on the straps by pulling them vertically throughout the exercise. Keep your elbows at a roughly 90-degree angle to your torso in order to maintain the bar in proper “racked” position. Otherwise, the same cues that apply to regular front squats apply.

7 Use a Trap Bar as A Four-Way Neck Machine

I’m a big fan of neck-strengthening exercises, especially for athletes competing in impact sports such as rugby, football, grappling, boxing, Muay Thai, and MMA. An effective tool for strengthening the neck is a four-way neck machine, but it’s rare to see one outside of specialized training centers. Even such centers struggle to find the space and budget for this machine.

No neck machine? No problem! In this video, Richard Sorin shows you how to turn a trap bar into a four-way neck machine:

DIY Neck Machine and Shoulder Press
Watch The Video – 02:39

As you can see in the video, this technique works best with a trap bar that’s long enough to be placed in a rack, like the Sorinex Diamond Bar. If you’ve got a good one, you’ll find that, like ab straps, it’s a great tool that can be put to many uses in the gym.

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7 Gym Hacks You Need To Know