How do you get stronger, improve your maximum lifts and also improve your physique overall if you only have two days a week to dedicate for lifting? What’s the best approach to weight training when increasing both strength and muscle is the goal but you have extremely limited time?

Rating your body type using the classic system invented by William Sheldon is called “somatotyping.” Most people just use the term body type instead of somatotype, but whatever you call it, people have been intrigued by this concept for years…

When should you increase the weight you’re lifting? How much weight should you add? How do you know if the weight is too heavy? How do you know if the weight is too light? If you’re attempting 3 sets of 8 to 12, do you have to get all 3 sets of 12 before you increase the weight, or just hit 12 on one set? If you increase the weight but then you can’t get enough reps, what then?  What if your left arm doesn’t get as many reps as your right arm, with the same weight? What if you flat-out can’t increase the weight at all? What then?

Author George Leonard (1923-2010) described mastery as, “The mysterious process by which what is at first difficult becomes progressively easier and more pleasurable through practice.  His proposition: If there is a certain way to success and fulfillment in life, it is found in the long-term, essentially goalless process of mastery.

When you pause and reflect on the past year as you look ahead to a new one, it really makes you think. It makes you appreciate how short life is, how valuable time is and how quickly the time can pass you by – with nothing to show for it, if you don’t plan otherwise. That’s why the passing of another year can sometimes feel like a wake up call as much as a fresh start.  On the eve of another new year, looking at the technological wonders that surround us, I also can’t help thinking it feels like science fiction…

Once you’ve planned out a weight training routine that follows all the best practices of good program design, the single most important thing you can do to gain muscle is consistently apply the principle of progressive overload…

How hard must you train to gain muscle? Is pushing yourself all the way to failure – when you can’t do another rep – a critical part making muscle gains? How high does your intensity of effort have to be when you train? If you’re not gaining muscle, is it because you’re not training hard enough? If it’s not intensity, what is the real trigger for muscle growth?

Do muscle mass gains always follow strength gains? Are they one in the same? How do lean powerlifters stay in the same weight class but keep lifting heavier? How do bodybuilders get bigger when they’re not lifting heavier? If your strength is down in a workout (no personal bests) does that mean your workout wasn’t productive and you won’t gain muscle?

There are some long-held and well-revered rules and laws in the science of resistance training that are rarely challenged – we could even call them “sacred cows” – and the ideal number of repetitions for gaining muscle has always been one of them. Everyone knows that to gain muscle, you need to lift moderate to heavy weights for low to medium reps, right? … wrong! Read on to find out what breaking new research says about high reps and muscle growth…

How do you make your muscles grow? That’s easy! All you have to do is lift more weight every time you go into the gym. Everyone knows that. Just keep getting stronger! If you gradually lift more weight, that’s called progressive overload and that’s the trigger to gain more muscle, right? Well, not exactly…