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- Written by: Greg Sushinsky
Are you building muscle?
Are you making progress right now in your workouts? Many of you are not, even though you’re dedicated and disciplined. You show up for your scheduled workouts, you never miss one, and you work out hard, don’t you? So why aren’t you getting the results you want?
There can be many things that contribute to a lack of progress: unrecognized fatigue that adds up after successive workouts, or perhaps you’re not doing the right exercises you need to do at the time, or maybe you’re not working as hard as you think; maybe you’re even working too hard. And there’s nutrition, too, of course. Maybe you’re not eating the way you need to eat right now.
Then again, maybe you are doing all these things right. So why aren’t you gaining?
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So now that you’ve been working out at home for two months, it’s likely going to be time to shift gears soon and get back to the gym. Many places around the country are slowly beginning the process of gradual re-opening of businesses such as nail salons, barber shops, retail stores, and even restaurants and bars. Gyms and fitness centers will be opening in many parts of the country soon.
Image by David Mark from Pixabay
So what do you do next? Well, the first thing to remember is that you don’t have to go to your gym right away even if it re-opens. Most Americans (64% by one survey), at least initially, feel that the re-opening of these businesses is premature. So you don’t have to go, it just may be an option to do so.
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Gym closed? Join the crowd that was sent home. For many, working out at a commercial gym is an important facet of a fitness lifestyle. Having access to good equipment and traveling to a place dedicated to exercise helps form and keep up the habit of working out. There’s also the social element, undeniable, which some care more for than others. Serious lifters, bodybuilders and athletes can be among those who share each other’s interest in serious training, which makes working out harder, well, easier, or at least motivates you more.
But with the current coronavirus pandemic, now stretching into more than six weeks and counting, you have to find other alternatives to get your workout in. For many under stay-at-home government orders, the logical—and maybe only—answer is working out at home. If you have a home gym set up already, or at least a workout area, great. You’re a long way to solving your workout problem. But what do you do if you don’t have a home gym setup, with ample weights and maybe even a choice of a few machines?
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- Written by: Greg Sushinsky
These are difficult times for everyone around the world as we face what was once an unknown enemy, the novel Coronavirus Covid-19. Now well known and in full bloom, the virus has attacked people all around the globe, as we have watched the virus wreaking havoc with health everywhere. No one seems to be beyond its reach.
The media is filled with reports 24/7 with harrowing details of how the illness has spread to just about every city and town in our country and most of the world. It’s easy to get caught up in a litany of panic or despair as we watch one discouraging report after another.
Ray Raridon, Ron Kosloff and Vince Gironda
The bodybuilding world lost another leading light when Ron Kosloff died in August 2019. He was not a big-name competitor so many don’t even know who he was. Nonetheless, he was an important figure in the sport.
Ron Kosloff, who lived in the Detroit, Michigan area, was a nutritionist and bodybuilder, but he was foremost an ardent teacher and passionate advocate of the training and nutrition principles of Vince Gironda. Decades ago, Ron went out to California to Vince’s Gym and spent an intensive six weeks learning under the Iron Guru, Vince Gironda. It changed Ron’s life.
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So you don’t have time to work out, right? You’ve got a demanding job, maybe a family with a husband or wife and even a couple of kids, and you’re on the go from the time the alarm goes off in the morning until the time you fall into bed at night. Okay, we get it, you’re busy.
Maybe you still work out haphazardly, whenever there’s a rare gap in your congested schedule, or maybe you stopped working out altogether.You used to have the time to work out, but now you feel you can’t do justice to a workout, so you figure, why bother?
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Greg Sushinsky is a natural bodybuilder who has trained for several years. He is a professional writer who has written extensively about bodybuilding, with numerous training articles appearing in Musclemag International, Ironman magazine, Reps! and others.Greg continues to train hard and enthusiastically. He strives to maintain a lean, proportionate physique, write and publish on bodybuilding, and continues to do and pursue many writing and publishing projects in his other areas of interest. He continues to advise and consult with bodybuilders, athletes and fitness people.
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Summer is certainly over—with a vengeance, if you live in the east or the midwest, as you know from shivering every time you go outside now, so thus usually begins the season of shifting your training from training for cuts, to training for mass.
Six Things To Do:
1. Increase Calories Slowly. Some people still do bulk up. There may be a place for this if your sport is football or pro wrestling, but if you’re bodybuilding, don’t think you are going to add twenty pounds of drug-free pure muscle in two or three weeks by eating everything in sight. Add some good calories gradually to your eating, especially if you were on a very strict contest-type diet. This will help you gain muscle mass instead of fat. This is a simple concept, but if you practice it, it will pay off.
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There’s still a lot of interest in Vince Gironda these days. Many bodybuilders are intrigued by Vince’s methods and views on bodybuilding, while many other bodybuilders who are more familiar with his work have a vivid impression of him. After all, Vince Gironda was bombastic, opinionated and strong willed. His views on squatting and dieting have become legendary. He voiced his opinions as if they were holy writ, so his emphatic views usually provoked an equally strong reaction in those who heard of them. You can find controversy surrounding his methods and practices as people still debate them today. Vince Gironda was a polarizing figure in the history of bodybuilding.
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- Written by: Hercules Invictus
Voice of Olympus Interview -- Originally published at Hercules Invictus, February 2017
Greg Sushinsky was inspired by Steve Reeves and wrote two books about him, Training the Steve Reeves Way and Eating the Steve Reeves Way. Greg is a Natural Bodybuilder, a Cyclist, a Trainer and Advisor as well as an Author. He has been a Powerlifter and a writer for various Bodybuilding, Business and Sports Magazines. I greatly admire Greg as he lives the life and walks the path!
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- Written by: Hercules Invictus
Originally published at Hercules Invictus, February 2017
Having experienced immediate results by applying one simple principle from Greg Sushinsky's e-book Training the Steve Reeves Way, I was greatly looking forward to experimenting with all the other techniques shared therein and reading the companion volume, Eating the Steve Reeves Way.
Extending my ability to proactively build my physique beyond my workouts would be a great boon indeed. Fortunately Greg Sushinsky delivers once again. He knows his subject matter extremely well and has a talent for teaching conversationally. The information he presents is painless to absorb, easy to understand and simple to apply.
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If you are fifty or one hundred or more pounds overweight, you don’t need anybody to tell you what you want to do. You want to lose that excess weight—permanently. You want it to be the last time you have to do this.
You also know that before you undertake any serious weight loss program, especially one that involves a great deal of weight loss, you should consult your physician and find out what you can and cannot do concerning diet and exercise, and even have them monitor you along the way. Once you get that squared away, you can proceed safely as well as effectively.
This is not going to be an article that tells you exactly what nutrition and exercise programs you must choose. Instead, we’ll give you a framework, with some ideas and directions on how to go about setting up your plan. These things can help.
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- Written by: Greg Sushinsky
So you want to make the team? You’ve seen the others out on the field on crisp, cool, autumn nights, clashing in their one hundred yard pit, and you want some of this. You want to be a part of this—you need to be a part of it—and if someone has to ask you why, well, they just don’t understand. Oh, you’ve got it bad. You want to make the team.
The good news is you can. These guys are—or were, at one time—just like you. But maybe you’re thinking, “ah, I’m not like them. I’m not good enough.” Stop! Don’t think that. Maybe you’re not as good as they are right now, but the good news is you can do something—maybe an awful lot—about it. Whether athletes are born or made is not as important as the reality that you can always put in the effort to get better, you can improve. The good news is you can work at it, and that good news can pay off.
Where you are right now, you’re not quite sure how to proceed. You know what you want, but you don’t know how to get there. You’ve not played organized football, and you know you need to work on some things before you can even try out for the team. You’ve played sports informally, but you haven’t lifted weights and you can tell that strength is one of the things you need for football, and you’d feel a lot better about trying out if you could get stronger, for sure, and maybe bigger, too. So how does a beginner start?
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- Written by: Hercules Invictus
Originally published at Hercules Invictus, January 2017
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- Written by: Greg Sushinsky
Randy Roach has done it yet again. In his new book, “Comebacks,” which is the first book in Volume III of his “Muscle, Smoke & Mirrors” saga, he has achieved a minor bodybuilding masterpiece.
The book follows the 1980 and 1981 Mr. Olympia contests, or more precisely, the firestorm that surrounded the returns to competition of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Franco Columbu and their controversial, unpopular wins.
To those that remember these contests and the events that surrounded them, they’ll recall the highly emotionally charged times they were. Everybody had their favorite alternative winners: Dickerson, Mentzer, Coe, Platz, etc. While most bodybuilders, fans and observers of the sport have a variety of opinions as to what and why things happened, most felt it was one of the darkest times in the sport. Simply put, the bodybuilding world by and large thought the two contest verdicts were outrageous; the popular belief was that the outcomes were pre-determined. Yes, that means fixed.
by Greg Sushinsky
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- Written by: Greg Sushinsky
by Greg Sushinsky
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1. Get on a good, general workout.- Details
- Written by: Greg Sushinsky
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- Written by: Greg Sushinsky
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“Bulking Up” ♦ “Steroid Weight”♦ “Bulking Up Again”
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- Written by: Greg Sushinsky
Book by Steve Davis
We’re very proud and excited to present a terrific book by one of the greatest classical bodybuilders of all time, Steve Davis. Achieving Total Muscularity is a complete volume that tells you in detail how to train for the unique brand of symmetry, proportion, aesthetics and definition that made Steve’s physique one of the sensations of the 1970s and after. The book contains a wealth of Steve’s hard earned knowledge, and while it was written with the information he gained from the 70s and the 80s, the book, just as Steve’s physique, was and is still ahead of its time.
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- Written by: Greg Sushinsky
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Serge Nubret, 1976
Photo: Wayne R. Gallasch
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Read more: Killer Cable Flye Push Up: One Plus One Equals Three
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- Written by: Greg Sushinsky
Many in bodybuilding, particularly those who’ve been around for awhile, are well aware of Dan Lurie. Dan’s story is an inspirational one; as a skinny kid with a heart murmur, he threw himself into exercising of all kinds, including gymnastics, boxing, then of course his fateful entry into bodybuilding. Dan transformed his physique so much so as to become the winner of the “Most Muscular Man” in the Mr. America contest, three times running. At 5’6½” tall and 165 pounds, Dan developed a muscular, pleasing, athletic physique which many could relate to and aspire to. Dan also entered the business world, as he began manufacturing and selling exercise equipment, later he owned and operated gyms, finding a solid place in the bodybuilding industry, building a considerable business empire from his own unstinting efforts. His accomplishments in the sport as well as his entertaining personality even landed him a role as a strongman, “Sealtest Dan, the Muscle Man,” appearing in “The Sealtest Big Top Circus” on CBS tv.
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- Written by: Greg Sushinsky
All of a sudden you see him; the shock of dark black hair, the ruggedly handsome face, the tall, rangy figure emerges as if from another realm--the figure overwhelms the senses at first appearance, then you start to see, as your eyes flash from place to place on that legendary physical terrain--the triceps, fully formed and popping out three-dee, wriggling as if trying to escape their skin; the long, sculpted biceps which swell and fall across your view, massive yet portioned out just so, then, that carved chest which sits under unendingly wide shoulders, gives way to a vision of thick delts that rise and cap not a mountain, but a statue of a man; the non-existent waist supported by powerful legs and outrageous, flared calves, glide this heroic figure across the screen. You have just witnessed something incomparable, and though your mind knows it’s Hercules--cinema make-believe, your bodybuilding awareness tells you the physique is real enough: Steve Reeves’ physique. Steve Reeves, the man.- Details
- Written by: Greg Sushinsky
Vince Gironda–the name reverberates. Though he’s been dead for a couple of years now, Vince Gironda’s training ideas still live on–or should. Perhaps no trainer in the history of bodybuilding has been more controversial, loved, hated, disputed, ignored, embraced or misunderstood than the legendary champion of the lean, symmetrical, Apollo-type physique was. It’s unfortunate, but says more about the world of bodybuilding than about Vince, that he became known to some only for his opposition to squats, his advocacy of the meat and eggs zero carb diet (a.k.a. “meat and water” ), his tirades against running and aerobics, and numerous other bodybuilding rants that a lot of people found fault with. Some simply felt that his ideas on training and nutrition were okay for Hollywood stars, but not applicable for hardcore bodybuilders, and dismissed him. What’s been overlooked is the great value of his approach, his teachings, and the great contributions the man himself made to bodybuilding.- Details
- Written by: Greg Sushinsky
We’ve probably all done this workout, or something like it. Maybe you began with it, or maybe you’ve returned to it, or maybe someday you will. We all know it, like an old acquaintance, maybe even a friend, as it more than likely was responsible for some of our earliest muscle and strength gains. So, yeah, it’s an old, comfortable friend. It’s the three days-a-week, whole body workout. Right now, you may think you’re too advanced for that workout, even if at one time it did something for your muscle and strength, but before you stop reading and go away, you should realize that this workout is a foundation for all the other workouts you are doing or have ever done. It is like the trunk of a great tree, and in the genealogy of workouts, all other workouts come from it, branch out from it. Reviewing this seemingly dull standard workout may reveal some of the bodybuilding treasures it holds. And these surprising treasures may also unlock better workouts for you now and in the future, which should mean more muscle and strength for you. Can’t afford to ignore that, can you?
NOTE: This website concerns the use of nutritional principles and vigorous exercise programs, which can potentially pose physical risks to anyone who may undertake them. No liability is assumed by the author(s) or owner for the use of any of the information on this website or affiliates. No medical advice or information is intended or implied. You should always exercise safely and you should first consult your health professionals, physicians and/or nutritionists, before using any of the information contained on this website.