Trainer's Blog | FastTwitch Fitness Performance
FastTwitch Fitness Performance on Facebook
Personal training instruction on how to do a barbell row in Apollo Beach.

Trainer's Blog


Follow my blog for a constant stream of great fitness tips and information.

Request Information
Error Submitting Form:
No Contracts/No Obligations!
Showing 6-7 of 7 articles.

Common Misconceptions

If it's too hard, you're doing it wrong...

There are many misconceptions regarding weightlifting. There are those who believe that it is not necessary since the invention of Zumba-whose slogan is “Ditch the workout, join the party!” Great, if it’s a party why don’t we drink beer while we’re at it! But I digress. I would like to clear up some of these misunderstandings and hopefully make you see how absolutely essential weight-lifting is for looking good and feeling good.

Misconception #1: Weight-lifting will make you big and bulky. I’ve heard this one many times, especially from women, but even from a few men. They think that lifting weights will automatically make their muscles swell up like balloons all over their body and that they’ll look thick because of it. Well, the truth is that only fat will make you look thick, added muscle acquired through weightlifting can only make you look leaner. I’m going to guess that people who are having near-seizures every time they do a Zumba workout are doing so because they want to be leaner. Now, I didn’t say ‘thinner’, I used the word ‘leaner’ for a reason. Most people who want to improve their overall body composition (look better in a bathing suit) usually want to be lean, which is the state of having a low level of body fat, where your muscularity shows through very clearly. Brad Pitt was lean in Fight Club, not thin, and he even looked...

Read Full Article

Old School Weight Lifting

1) Find something heavy 2) Lift it over your head

The old timers had it all figured out, and I don’t mean Arnold Schwartzenegger, I mean Eugene Sandow, the very first weight lifter (after the Romans of course, but nobody has been able to find the stone tablets that held records of their workouts). The philosophy was simple, lift weight off the ground and put it overhead. It was simple, but not easy, which is perhaps why people stopped doing it and instead switched to using weight-lifting machines. Who can blame them? Machines are comfy, padded, require little exertion except for the specific muscle you’re targeting, and afterwards you feel like you’ve had a productive workout. Well, you haven’t had a productive workout (in my opinion anyway), but that’s another subject entirely.

The original weightlifters from the 1800’s and before didn’t have fancy gyms or nice equipment to help them build their bodies, they just had primitive barbells and dumbbells (the Romans just had stones!), and not even benches to bench press off of! And guess what, they were extremely strong human beings and their bodies showed it. They couldn’t do regular bench pressing but knew the chest was worked by horizontal pushing, so they did it on the ground, what we today call Floor Presses. They didn’t have squat racks that held a bar in mid-air for them so they could position the bar on their backs before doing heavy squats, they didn’t...

Read Full Article

Posts Per Page: