Today I’m going to teach a quick tip on how to increase muscular strength which will out last other types of increases in strength.

The concept is simple, the more sets of an exercise you can lift thats challenging without overly fatiguing yourself will yield huge results

The key point is to not use the same weight For All Sets

Lets say you have an exercise , like the benchpress.
And you’ve figured a good weight for you is 185 pounds.
And lets say you wanted to lift it 5 times.

Well if you are going to do 4 sets, don’t just do 185 for 4sets.

This will easily cause you to plateau and stagnate.

There are two steps to increase your strength with this weight.

The first is to ramp up the weight and warm up for more volume. Meaning that before you start sets at 185 you are going to warm up with several lighter sets with the same reps.

So from your training weight of 185, select a weight that is at least 50 pounds less (women need small increments but the effect is the same)

First warm up with 135 and do 5 reps

Then add 20 pounds each set until you get to your training weight
So set 2 would be 155 pounds for 5 reps
Set 3 would be 175 pounds for 5 reps

After this set, you are ready to begin your TRUE sets. By ramping before it primes the nervous system and gets in extra volume without stressing your body because you are using a lighter weight.

It also will make you more efficient at this exercise because you are doing it more frequently. At first you might be tired by the extra sets, but your body will quickly adapt. Rest little, lift the weight fast and pick an appropriate weight.

After you got to your training weight. Its time to wave the weight you use.

Instead of just doing 185 for four sets. Heres what you are going to do.

Set 1 185 for 5 Reps
Set 2 175 for 5 Reps (-10 pounds)
Set 3 180 for 5 Reps (+5 pounds)
Set 4 185 for 5 Reps (+5 pounds)

This is the basic concept of wave loading for leg exercises it would be (Max Weight -40, +20, +20)

Wave loading is smart because force equals mass multiplied by acceleration. The heavier the weight, the less you can accelerate, the lighter the weight the faster you can lift it. This will allow you to recruit all muscle fibres. Translation, this is smart and will work and you should do it.

For more information make sure to check out the description!

Now this only applies to compound movements, not isolation exercises and if you are doing a leg exercise, its 40 pound increments, not 20 pounds. Every 3 weeks, you can increase your training weight by 5 or 10 pounds, so instead of 185, you would do 190 using the same principles.

So guys, girls, go out, lift more weight and scare the people in your gym!

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Omar Isuf is a no nonsense health and fitness guru aimed at getting you the body you want. Make sure to join the Facebook Page and Youtube Channel to stay connected to all things Buff. You can also see his tweets about drugs, women and sometimes fitness HERE. Want to get trained by Chef Buff? Click Here to See Online Coaching (LIMITED BASIS).

This is probably the biggest problem everyone who works out has, yet they have no clue about it.

I’m talking about imbalances and no I don’t mean like Charlie Sheen cracking up, I mean muscular imbalances. This shit ain’t funny.

What I mean is EVERYONE, EVERYONE, has one side that they are stronger on. Its also the side they look better on, more defined and leaner on.

Who cares? You do if you want to be leaner, stronger, and more muscular.

Because if you have an imbalance like that, you are exposing yourself to injury, which will happen to everyone, you won’t be as strong on any lift, so you won’t burn as many calories, you won’t get your beach body and the world might end.

Ok I was extreme, but I wanted to get my point across. This is serious shit. Now, what side are you more dominant on? For most this is your right side, right? Think about it, do you train your right side more than your left side?

No, I hope, yet if you measure your right arm compared to your left arm, you’ll notice a big difference, probably at least a quarter of an inch.

This is because its neutrally more efficient. You see, imbalances happen because you are more coordinated on that side, the muscle fibres fire more efficiently. This is because you use it more. Why do you think athletes are so well coordinated?

There are FOUR major things you must do to fix an imbalance.

1. The first doesn’t require a gym. Its called switching your dominant side. If you do everything on your right side. Start with your left. Brush your teeth with your left hand, write with it, knock people out with it, touch yourself whatever! You’ll be training this side to be more neurally efficient and this is incredibly important.

2. The second is to be conscious whenever you lift a bi-lateral weight, which means to use both hands, that you are emphasizing your weak side. What I mean is most people lift more of the weight with their strong side. Don’t! Focus on the weak side and push more with it, if you have to use less weight, go for it!

3. Do purely unilateral work.
At the end of the work out, in areas that need work its fine to do some extra sets of unilateral exercises such as one-arm rows, dumbbell presses and bicep curls. Shoot for about 1-3 exercises and 1-3 sets each, go by feel.

4. Pre-fatigue your weak side to better recruit those muscles.
This is one of my favourite methods. Remember, if you can feel a muscle, you can recruit it more. So before every major exercise, awaken the muscle on the weak side by performing a light recruitment exercise. Heres an example.

This is the best explanation of fixing a muscular imbalance. Now you’ll be able to lift more weight, lose more fat and get that beach body. With this in hand, you will no look like a hunchback or lift like a Barbie. This is seriously probably the most underrated component of training and a hidden weak point.

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Omar Isuf is a no nonsense health and fitness guru aimed at getting you the body you want. Make sure to join the Facebook Page and Youtube Channel to stay connected to all things Buff. You can also see his tweets about drugs, women and sometimes fitness HERE. Want to get trained by Chef Buff? Click Here to See Online Coaching (LIMITED BASIS).

Running is useless. So is doing high reps of low weight repeatedly. If you do those two things you can expect to waste a lot of time and get very frustrated and maybe even make a sad face ?.

If there are areas of your body that are flabby and you want to tone and tighten then up, this video is for you. I’m once again going to unveil my Ninja tactics concerning developing a harder, firmer look, wait what the heck are we talking about? HIT ME

You seeing, toning for guys or girls is really about increasing myogenic tonus, or how firm the muscle feels and looks at rest.

A perfect example for guys is an Olympic lifter or for a woman is any bikini body that looks nice and firm. Jessica Alba might not know what she’s doing, but her trainer does.

Myogenic tonus determines how firm the muscles look. This is where the word tone comes from. Toning does not come from running or lifting high reps of a lighter weight. Those are muscular endurance exercises.

To increase myogenic tonus, you have to increase the density of the muscle. To do this, you need to lift heavier weights explosively, consistently!

Sounds simple, but let me explain. The faster you lift a weight, the more muscle fibres you recruit, and the heavier the weight, the denser the muscle will become. The more times you do this, the firmer the muscle will be.

This is true for males, females, dogs, everyone!

Here are 5 simple Rules to Live By

Rules to Live By
1. Never exceed 15 reps in any major movement unless its a circuit

2. Targeting a muscle will stimulate it and cause it to grow. If your arms are flabby, train those arms!

3. Integrate compound movements that work multiple muscles as your top workout priority

4. Balance your hormones by ensuring 8 hours of sleep
5. proper nutrition

Your diet should be low in sugar, grains, caffeine, empty carbs and any other junk thats not useful for your body. Fuel your body with plenty of protein, high fibre, healthy fats and carbs around work outs. This will balance your hormones and keep you in awesome shape.

In summary.
Nobody likes chicken wings for arms and you should have to settle for less. Change your work outs to be more intense, explosive, and accumulate enough time in the gym and you too will be sporting that beach body on the beach and you can even impress all your friends by explaining all about myogenic tonus.

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Omar Isuf is a no nonsense health and fitness guru aimed at getting you the body you want. Make sure to join the Facebook Page and Youtube Channel to stay connected to all things Buff. You can also see his tweets about drugs, women and sometimes fitness HERE. Want to get trained by Chef Buff? Click Here to See Online Coaching (LIMITED BASIS).

Do you want to lose more weight without more exercise or dieting?

An office worker sits all day, doing nothing for his body. In fact those that work an active job like a trainer, bartender, geologist vs a sedentary job like a bus driver, office worker, burn about 500 calories a day more on average. Thats 1 pound of fat a week. If your results have been less than stellar in the gym and you don’t want to dedicate more time to the sweat factory. Do more NEPA!

Here are some Chef Buff approved ways to jack up your metabolism without going to the gym.

1. Take the stairs
2. Cleaning your own house
3. Never sit for more than 15 minutes *alarm sounds when its time to stand up*
4. Sports
5. Cooking your own food.
6. Sex
7. A More Active Job

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Omar Isuf is a no nonsense health and fitness guru aimed at getting you the body you want. Make sure to join the Facebook Page and Youtube Channel to stay connected to all things Buff. You can also see his tweets about drugs, women and sometimes fitness HERE. Want to get trained by Chef Buff? Click Here to See Online Coaching (LIMITED BASIS).

The average person gains 8-12 pounds between Thanksgiving and New Years. Thats like a little baby. A little baby made out of fat and lard!

People get out of control with their bon bons, dancing sugar plums, candy canes and other crap and before you know it, BOOM, you blow up like a blimp.

Will this be you-hell no because Chef Buff is here and I`m going to help you out.

I`m going to give you my five BIG rules on surviving the holidays or eating out so you can stay lean year around!

1. Don`t `fall off the wagon“ there is no wagon. Have you fallen off the wagon- well I got news for you, wagons suck. The mindset of all or northing is defeating. Every action you do is easy helping your body or hurting your body. The translation is, DON`T beat up on yourself when you slip up, we`re all human, it happens, just get back on track.

2. Always eat and drink water before. Going to a party or buffet hungry is like releasing a caged dog, you`ll eat whatever is put in front of you. Be smart and eat something before hand.

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Omar Isuf is a no nonsense health and fitness guru aimed at getting you the body you want. Make sure to join the Facebook Page and Youtube Channel to stay connected to all things Buff. You can also see his tweets about drugs, women and sometimes fitness HERE. Want to get trained by Chef Buff? Click Here to See Online Coaching (LIMITED BASIS).

Scales suck. This is not a rant but a fact. As a trainer I can safely say that its one of the worst ways of measuring progress. If you are measuring yourself only by weight, you are setting yourself up for a roller coaster ride of emotions.

How many times have you had this happen to you?

“I’ve been eating right, exercising a lot. Life is good I love myself. FUCK its UP”

See what I mean? Just because your weight is up doesn’t mean you got fatter and just because you are down doesn’t mean you lost weight.

The truth is that there are too many factors that go into your weight and only a small percent (about 15%-30%) of your body weight is fat.

Translation: chill out. Let me list some of the more important factors that go towards your weight.

1. The amount of sodium you’ve recently consumed (more salt= more stored water= more weight, more weight= broken mirror, so check your labels and only consume max 2400mg sodium a day) Water consumption- how much you drank prior to the weigh-in and whether it is still in your body or not.

2. Time of the month (for women can cause bloating and extra weight, for men extra sass) Stress levels- the more stressed out you are, the more likely you are to retain your fat and hold water (don’t let this stress you out!)

3. Time of the day (when you wake up with an empty stomach, you weigh less than in the evening, much less so always weigh at the same time).

4. Your stomach content (what you’ve eaten so far today, whether there is indigestion in there and/or food intolerances that can cause bloating) and if you’ve used the washroom or not.

5. The amount of carbohydrates recently consumed (every 1 gram of carbohydrate attracts 2.8 grams of water so that pasta could be making you hold an additional 2-3 pounds. This is why people believe low carb diets work, when they drop the carbs they drop radical weight)

Lastly Scale calibration- is the thing EVEN WORKING? Most scales differ by at least a small difference and when you weigh week to week this could prove fatal to your ego!

What you should do instead to measure progress are the following:
1. Photos
2. Tape Measurements
3. Bodyfat

Trust me, I did this with my body transformation and the result was very sexy. If I used the scale only, I probably would have killed someone. Kidding. I’m not kidding. So the next time you are thinking about doing a weigh in, put the scale down and walk away, before someone gets hurt.

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Omar Isuf is a no nonsense health and fitness guru aimed at getting you the body you want. Make sure to join the Facebook Page and Youtube Channel to stay connected to all things Buff. You can also see his tweets about drugs, women and sometimes fitness HERE. Want to get trained by Chef Buff? Click Here to See Online Coaching (LIMITED BASIS)

News flash: celebrities have better bodies than the average bear.

So it’d make sense that if you wanted to look like a celebrity, you should train like a celebrity, right?

Work out like Madonna to look like Madonna, right? WRONG. Here is the truth, courtesy of Chef Buff!

To summarize
1. Celebrity work outs are tailored specific to their bodies, it won’t work on yours, period.
2. The work outs in the magazines are NOT
3. They achieve their body like everyone else: hard work and effort, there are no quick fixes
4. They use performance enhancers.

Now go forth and do whats right for YOUR body .

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Omar Isuf is a no nonsense health and fitness guru aimed at getting you the body you want. Make sure to join the Facebook Page and Youtube Channel to stay connected to all things Buff. You can also see his tweets about drugs, women and sometimes fitness HERE. Want to get trained by Chef Buff? Click Here to See Online Coaching (LIMITED BASIS).

A common misconception I hear is how people believe you should ONLY work out a certain number of hours, otherwise you will overtrain. This is complete bullshit and I tell you WHY.

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Omar Isuf is a no nonsense health and fitness guru aimed at getting you the body you want. Make sure to join the Facebook Page and Youtube Channel to stay connected to all things Buff. You can also see his tweets about drugs, women and sometimes fitness HERE. Want to get trained by Chef Buff? Click Here to See Online Coaching (LIMITED BASIS).

Like Tic Tac Toe rest while training is One of Life’s Greatest Mysteries!

I mean how long are you supposed to rest? Until you catch your breath?

Or should you do a set when your heart rate is normalized. Or is it better just to keep going and work through it.

What about for fat loss, is it different than training to gain strength.

First what is with ALL THE QUESTIONS.

I’m joking those are good questions, but what people don’t understand about rest it depends on your goals and current fitness level.

Learning how long to rest and to listen to your body will give you EVEN MORE results than ever before!

First of all, the more fit you are, the less you’ll have to rest to lift the same weight.
The more you train, the less you’ll find you’ll have to rest.

The more stressful an exercise is, like lifting a heavy ass weight, the more time you’ll need to rest to restore your CNS, central nervous system and the more you should rest.

Aerobic fatigue, like running out of breath while doing a fat loss circuit requires minimum rest.

Rest truly depends on your goals and what type of exercise you are doing and the number of reps.

What might take someone 90 secs to recover from will only take someone else 30 secs!
And what took you 2 minutes to recover from will only take 1 minute in time!

I’m going to give you general guidelines here.

For a fat loss phase attempt to rest between 45 seconds and 90 secs.
For building muscle between 60 seconds and 120 seconds
And for pure strength 90 secs and over, to upwards of 3-4 minutes

However here’s a scary truth, you SHOULDN’T time your rests! Instead you should learn to listen to your body!

I’m serious. Here is the REAL rule to rest. You should rest the MINIMUM amount of time to give your BEST performance in the gym. What do I mean?

You have to listen to your body to find out what the minimum amount of time you need to rest to give the next set the performance it deserves.

Its called autoregulation. By reading your body you’ll be much more capable of understanding of how fatigued you are and what you are capable of.

Initially when you put the timer away, you might be scared and rest either too long or too little but with time you’ll get used to it.

And this ain’t some excuse for guys to slack off and chat at the water fountain for five minutes.

The purpose of rest is to recover enough energy to training efficiently. Rest is not only for your aerobic and anerobic systems but for your nervous system to recover as well.

By going by your internal clock you’ll minimize the downtime and maximize the results, regardless of goals!

Like the Riddle of the sphinx or how to tie your shoes, rest is a mystery that has been solved by me, Sherlock Buff.

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Omar Isuf is a no nonsense health and fitness guru aimed at getting you the body you want. Make sure to join the Facebook Page and Youtube Channel to stay connected to all things Buff. You can also see his tweets about drugs, women and sometimes fitness HERE. Want to get trained by Chef Buff? Click Here to See Online Coaching (LIMITED BASIS).

No bull, no hype, today is just about 3 quick easy to implement work out strategies for increased fat loss and gaining muscle for sexy ladies and buff dudes.

Don’t Have Training ADD, Pick Particular Exercises and Become Great at Them
While your body does need variety, there are certain types of big compound lifts that you should emphasize and keep in regular rotation in your training. Squats, deadlifts, rows, pull-ups, a shoulder press, a benchpress. To become good at an exercise…you have to do it frequently! To be constantly changing your work out every week to “shock your muscles” will leave you weak as a kitten and smaller than Justin Bieber.

Whether its weight loss or gaining muscle my philosophy is to have a variety of energy system work, so change up the cardio and to keep your bread and butter on the main compound movements for exercise.

Don’t Count How Long You Are Resting
Its true, in work outs for clients I write down times to rest. And for beginners its a great idea to have a ball park figure on how long to rest. But the truth is, once you start listening to your body, you’ll find that you can determine how long you should rest.

You can auto regulate this by feeling when your heart rate returns to normal and you feel primed to lift the weight. Lots of trainers will try to look fancy by always timing you, but really they’re just trying to look busy.

Have a Back Up Plan
You should be planning your work outs every time you come into the gym. But you should have three different versions of your work outs, an easy one, a regular one, and a difficult one. But what if the work out you just planned is way too intense for the day? You know what I mean. You’re tired, you don’t want to work out and you just aren’t feeling it. Well instead of committing suicide by doing a routine thats too hard, have a back up plan and do your lighter work out. At the same time, if you just got a promotion, snorted some coke and are flying as high as a kite- do your harder work out.

Listening to your body day by day is far more important for progress, that way you won’t over train or under training on any day, you’ll be targeting your muscles perfectly.

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Omar Isuf is a no nonsense health and fitness guru aimed at getting you the body you want. Make sure to join the Facebook Page and Youtube Channel to stay connected to all things Buff. You can also see his tweets about drugs, women and sometimes fitness HERE. Want to get trained by Chef Buff? Click Here to See Online Coaching (LIMITED BASIS).