21 Practical Ways to Improve Your Training Today-Ben Bruno

21 PRACTICAL WAYS TO IMPROVE YOUR TRAINING TODAY

PRACTICAL WAYS TO IMPROVE YOUR TRAINING TODAY21BY: BEN BRUNO


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If you’re having trouble getting comfortable with SPLIT SQUATS AND/OR BULGARIAN SPLIT SQUATS, try starting them from the “bottom up” with your back knee on the floor. Most of the trouble with these exercises stems from taking a stance that’s too short or too long, so starting in the proper position at the bottom helps ensure that you’re set up correctly.

Starting with a small weight in the goblet hold helps a lot, too.

LOOKING TO GAIN WEIGHT? Try drinking a shake during your workout, preferably a carb/protein blend. Most people tend to focus just on pre and post workout nutrition, but the workout itself can be a great time to sneak in some extra calories at a time where your body is primed to partition those calories most effectively, not to mention it can give you extra energy to train harder.

HAVING TROUBLE BALANCING WITH SINGLE LEG RDLS? Try split stance RDLs instead. Set up with a split stance with your feet staggered 12-18 inches apart and then perform the movement just as you would a tradition bilateral RDL. The front leg handles the brunt of the work while the back leg helps to provide stability so you don’t have to worry about tipping over.

While split stance RDLs are a great way to train the posterior chain without the heavy stability demands of true single leg RDLs, you still may want to work towards SINGLE LEG RDLS. In that case, try assisted single leg RDLs. Hold a suspension strap set to waist height in one hand and hold a small weight in the other hand. Hinge at the hips while you reach the hand with the strap in it straight out in front of you while you lower the hand with the weight in it straight down and extend the leg on that side straight back behind you. Like so:


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The strap provides a bit of external stability to help with balance, but not so much that it becomes a crutch. The goal is to put as little weight on the strap as possible and in time be able to do it without the strap.

LOOKING TO LOSE FAT? Eliminate carbs from your pre-workout meal. Conventional wisdom says that you must eat carbs prior to your workout to give you the energy to train hard, but taking them out is an easy way to help you burn more fat during the workout.

Only SQUAT as low as you can go with a STILL MAINTAINING A GOOD NEUTRAL SPINE POSITION. You’ll often hear that you must squat “rock bottom” or below parallel for the squat to be legitimate. Unless you’re competing in powerlifting, this just isn’t true, and if people would squat within their limits there would be a whole lot less lifting-induced back pain in gyms. If you’re pelvis starts to tuck under, you’ve gone too far. If that ends up being a little bit above parallel, so be it.

Now if you’re unable to come even close to parallel then it’s time to take a serious look at your hip mobility, and it’s probably wise to put heavy squats on the back burner until you get that sorted out better.

STRUGGLING TO DO YOUR FIRST CHIN-UP? Don’t waste your time with band-assisted chin-ups. They’re great for allowing you to complete chin-ups through a full range of motion if you’re unable to do so on your own, but they don’t have a good carryover to regular bodyweight chin-ups. Instead, try doing isometric holds at the top of the chin-up followed by slow eccentrics.

Jump up to the top (or have a friend give you a boost), hold for five seconds with your chin above the bar (or as long as possible if five seconds is too much) and then lower yourself down as slowly as possible. That’s one rep. Perform 2-3 sets of 3 reps, striving for a more controlled eccentric each time. Once you can master that, you’ll be well on your way to a full chin-up.

Try doing your SINGLE LEG WORK at the start of your leg workouts. Most people start with heavy bilateral exercises like squats and deadlifts and finish up with single leg work as an afterthought, but doing it first allows you to get a lot more out if because it is much easier to stabilize and balance when you’re fresh. Don’t worry; your bilateral exercises won’t suffer nearly as much when you put them later in the workout since stability isn’t as much of a factor.


Don’t think of the SLED as just a conditioning tool. If you load it up, it can also a great tool to increase leg strength or even leg size and can be a great choice for those experiencing lower back and/or knee pain to work the legs in a more “joint-friendly” manner than most traditional strength training exercises. Alternate between sled pushes (pushing forward) and reverse drags (walking backwards).

To make your BENCH PRESSING more joint-friendly, try making your regular bench press grip a little close and your close-grip bench press grip a little wider. A lot of guys will take a really side grip on the bench press in an effort to reduce the range of motion and ultimately lift more weight, which puts a lot of stress on the shoulders. Similarly, a lot of guys will also take a really narrow grip on their close-grip bench presses in an effort to hone in more on the triceps, which puts a lot of undue stress on the wrists. To make both exercises more joint-friendly, try taking a regular bench press grip no wider than your pinky finger on the rings and a close-grip bench press grip no closer than your index finger touching where the rough part of the bar meets the smooth part.

MOBILITY WORK isn’t just for the warm-up. You can also pair mobility work with strength work during the workout. This allows you to cut down on the time of the warm-up and serves as “active rest” between sets of your strength exercises. If you choose your mobility drills judiciously, they can also augment the subsequent exercises. For example, doing ankle mobility drills between sets of squats with not only give you a chance to catch your breath, but it will also help your squat form, too.

LOOKING TO IMPROVE A LAGGING BODY PART? Try hitting it with increased frequency, but be sure to use joint-friendly exercise. High frequency training is a great way to bring up a weak point in a hurry, but using higher frequency with “big bang” barbell lifts—squats, deadlifts, presses, etc.—is recipe for overuse injuries if you’re not careful.

So for example, if you’re looking to improve

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your quads and you’re currently hitting your legs twice a week, try do reverse sled drags on an additional 1-2 weeks a week. Or if you’re looking to improve your chest, add in pushups or dumbbell presses on those extra days. Or add in glute-ham raises or sliding leg curls for hamstrings, or bodyweight inverted rows for your upper back. That way you get the benefits of high frequency training without all the joint stress.

IN A TRAINING RUT? Try changing your split. Most people tend to keep the same split but change exercises, sets, and reps. That’s fine, but changing up your split can also help push you past plateaus. If you also do full body training, try an upper/lower split or even a push-pull-legs split. Or if you already employ split training, try full body workouts. You might be very pleasantly surprised with the results.

Most people that follow an upper/lower training split do their CORE WORK on lower body days. It can be tricky pairing core work with heavy lower body exercises like squats and deadlifts though because you don’t want to fatigue the core since it plays such a crucial role in the heavier lifts. Instead, try moving your core work to upper body days and pairing it with presses, rows, or chin-ups, or if you must do it on lower body days, save it for the end of the workout after you’ve completed your heavy work.

SHORT ON TIME? Do all your “accessory” work as a circuit. Once you’ve got your main heavy lift out of the way, do all your “little” exercises in one continuous circuit: arms, lateral raises, core, etc. This not only saves time, it also leaves you with one heck of a pump and really jacks up your heart rate!

Most guys tend to prioritize the weak muscles we can see in the mirror and neglect the muscles we can’t (i.e. the POSTERIOR CHAIN). To make sure you don’t fall into that trap, try starting your workouts with some posterior chain work. For example, do your chin-ups or rows before you hit the bench press, or do some hamstring and/or glute work before you squat.

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If you’ve been slogging away doing hours upon hours of “gerbil cardio” on the treadmill, bike, or elliptical trying to lose fat but just aren’t getting the results you want, try “WEIGHTED CARDIO” instead: complexes, sleds, kettlebell work, etc. This can be a great way to lose fat and build muscle at the same time, not to mention it’ll save you a heck of a lot of time.

Stick with a PROGRAM for at least two months, but don’t keep the same program for longer than 10 months. You have to give a program time to work so you don’t want to hop around between too programs for too long, but on the flip side, staying on the same program for too long will usually lead to stagnation, plus variety will help you avoid nagging overuse injuries.

If you have a specific TRAINING GOAL in mind, put everything else on “maintenance mode” and go after it with everything you have. Achieving goals (especially lofty goals) takes extreme focus, and you can’t focus on everything at once. The way in which you allocate your training time should reflect your goals.

Don’t fall into the trap of thinking you “have to” do certain exercises because you’ve read they’re effective. DIFFERENT EXERCISES WORK BETTER (OR WORSE) for different people. If an exercise doesn’t feel right to you, or if you’re continually getting injured doing an exercise, swap it out for something else that’s similar. For example, if conventional deadlifts bother you’re lower back, try trap bar deadlifts or sumo deadlifts. For if the flat bench press bothers you’re shoulders, try putting the bench on a slight incline, or switch to using dumbbells. As long as you’re choosing similar compound movements you’ll be all set.

Try doing your warm-up sets for DEADLIFTS FROM A DEFICIT. This will help develop hip mobility and reinforce the idea of keeping your hips down as you initiate the pull, plus when you remove the deficit for your working sets, it will feel a lot easier. Best of all, it doesn’t add any extra time to your workout!

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Think of this last bonus tip as dessert, a fun way to finish everything up.

Sick of your current program? Try implementing a “FREE DAY” into your training split.

The topic of “cheat days” or “free days” is big in the nutrition world, and a lot of people absolutely swear by them for both psychological and physiological reasons. A training “free day” is very similar. On the last day of the training week, you go in and do whatever you feel like doing on that particular day. Just about anything is fair game, so long as it’s not (too) reckless and it doesn’t interfere with subsequent training sessions.

The rationale for the free day is mostly psychological. In order to make progress in the gym it’s important to stick to a logical plan, but once you’ve been training hard for a while you can start to get bored or stale, especially when you aren’t competing in anything or training for something in specific and instead are mostly training just for the love of it.

Maybe you do your regularly scheduled workouts Monday, Wednesday, and Friday and follow it up with a free day on the weekend, or maybe you lift Monday-Friday with Friday being the free day. The setup isn’t too important; just make sure it’s the last training day of the week. To liken it to food, the idea is that you’re making sure to eat all your healthy food first and then following it up with dessert so to speak.

Bonus “Fun” Tip


21 Practical Ways to Improve Your Training Today-Ben Bruno

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