There seems to be, at least in certain places online, a lot of “chatter” about whether or not you should practice intermittent fasting. Many folks who used to previously tout intermittent fasting as some sort of miracle of modern dieting have backtracked, and now a lot of those “influencers” (or whoever-the-heck they might be) recommend a more standard, traditional approach to dieting for building muscle and burning fat. Recently, there was even that god-awful “study” from the American Heart Association that showed a “91% increased likelihood of death” from heart complications by following intermittent fasting. Now, this isn’t the place to discuss the real problems and politics around that so-called study, it will suffice for now to point out that its metrics were just plain wrong. And, of course, on the flip side of all of that you also have the defenders, rightly so, of the benefits of various forms of fasting. My point in this essay, however, is that most of the a
Muscle Mass AND Serious Strength: The Best Way to Train for Both! There seems to be quite a bit of confusion out there—whether it’s on the internet or at the gym—about how to train for BOTH hypertrophy and serious strength gains. The first problem seems to be that some folks just don’t know how to do either. Guys go to the gym to “get big” but then spend most of their time attempting to max out on a lift. Or, conversely, a guy wants to be massively strong but spends too much of his time training for a pump or doing a lot of repetitions. If your goal is just hypertrophy, then don’t train like a strength athlete. You should focus on pump-style training, “feeling a muscle” instead of working the movement, and ensuring that you can do more and more work for each individual bodypart. If your goal is just strength, then you need to train for strength. This means doing only a few core exercises—the ones you are training to get stronger on—and doing either a “Westside-st