Quick Answer: What Are The Best Ab Exercises? We tested 30 popular ab exercises with EMG, scoring each against three criteria: how easily you can progressively overload it, whether it loads the abs in a deep stretch, and how much it works the abs relative to the hip flexors. A handful of cable-crunch and pelvis-curl […]

Quick Answer: Can Fake Steroids Produce Real Results? Sort of — but not the way it sounds. Ray believed he was taking steroids for 100 days, but the pills were actually flour placebos. He still went from 19.4% to 11.9% body fat, gained around 10 pounds of lean mass, and got significantly stronger. That progress […]

Quick Answer: How To Lose Stubborn Fat? Different areas of body fat can appear to come off at very different rates. Visceral fat is relatively responsive to diet and exercise, while visible areas such as love handles and lower-belly fat tend to hang on until you’ve lost considerably more overall body fat. You can’t simply […]

Quick Answer: Can You Lose Weight With High Volume Low Calorie Foods? Yes, for 30 days, two experienced lifters lost substantial fat on a diet built around high volume low calorie foods, without counting a single calorie and rarely feeling hungry. Melody lost just over 8 pounds and dropped from 32.5% to 29.7% body fat, […]

Quick Answer Three participants agreed to train a muscle every day for 30 days on one side of their body, while training the same muscle on the other side normally, twice per week. All three gained more strength and MRI-measured muscle on the everyday side. However, the everyday side also performed far more total work […]

How To Build Muscle And Lose Fat At The Same Time (Body Recomposition) Primary researcher for this article: Daniel Plotkin, PhD student Discover the exact number of calories you need to eat to successfully achieve a body recomposition:  Click the button below to figure out how many calories you need to eat for body recomposition […]

How To Stop Overeating: TL;DR For 24 hours, I ate the exact diet that got a man to over 50% body fat while he and his wife ate the diet that keeps me at 10%. His day came to 8,312 calories; theirs came to 1,994. But the biggest differences weren’t on the plate — they […]

Quick Answer To strengthen weak or painful tendons, manage increases in your training carefully and load the affected tendon with isometric exercises rather than relying on complete rest. Choose an isometric that closely matches the movement causing your pain, hold it for at least 30 seconds, and complete three sets, twice a day to start. […]

Quick Answer Over 30 days of adding 30 minutes of cardio a day alongside lifting, my VO2 max rose from 58 to 61, my body fat dropped 1%, and MRI scans showed no upper-body muscle loss, with a small trend toward lower-body growth. So no, 30 minutes of cardio a day did not kill my […]

TL;DR You probably can't target belly fat directly — but a 60-day MRI experiment found that calorie tracking and strength training beat the spot-reduction protocol for belly-fat loss and overall body-composition change. Key Takeaways Quick Answer: Can You Target Belly Fat? You probably cannot reliably choose exactly where your body loses fat first. Newer research […]

Quick Answer What every body type actually looks like and how to change it comes down to four starting points: skinny, skinny fat, bulky, and high body fat. Each one has a different mix of muscle mass and body fat, and each one needs a different combination of training and nutrition to actually change. The […]

Quick Answer If you want to know how well your body is likely to hold up as you age, do not just look at how much you lift or how lean you look. These seven fitness tests for aging measure power, lower body strength, upper body pulling strength, cardio, upper body mobility, core strength, and […]

Quick Answer How long does it take to get abs? For most people, getting visible abs takes anywhere from about 6 months to over a year, depending on starting body fat, muscle mass, and how well they preserve muscle while dieting. Under an aggressive, well-executed plan, visible abs can start to show much sooner — […]

Quick Answer If you want to know how to build 20 pounds of muscle, the fastest path is to combine effective training volume, hard sets taken close enough to failure, smart exercise selection, the right calorie strategy for your body fat level and training age, enough protein, solid pre-workout fueling, and consistent recovery. Key Takeaways […]

If you’re trying to figure out how to get a bigger butt, the simplest answer is: train your glutes consistently and cover the main movement patterns that grow them. In this 90-day experiment, Tahnee trained with no squats, no deadlifts, and no heavy spinal loading, and still focused on building her glutes. The plan used […]

If you want to know how to bulk without getting fluffy, it comes down to one decision: lean bulk, fast bulk, or maingaining. In this 90-day experiment, Dayton (my brother-in-law) tested all three. We tracked his results with DXA scans plus ultrasound/skinfolds/circumference measurements and compared them to what happened in the gym — because the […]

If you've ever tried to figure out how many calories you should be eating, you've probably run into two terms that sound like they mean the same thing: TDEE and BMR. They get thrown around interchangeably in fitness circles, which is confusing because they're actually measuring two different things. Here's the short version: BMR is […]

A calorie deficit is the only thing that makes fat loss happen. You can eat clean, cut carbs, do intermittent fasting, or follow whatever diet is trending this month, but if you're not in a deficit, you're not losing fat. That's not opinion. That's thermodynamics. The good news is that calculating your deficit isn't complicated. […]

What happens if you train forearms every day? We trained only one forearm every day for 30 days — pitting a gym plan vs rice bucket training vs a hand gripper — to find the fastest way to grow forearms and build real grip strength. Three of us trained only our left forearms for 30 […]

The best diet to lose weight is the one that makes overeating hard and consistency automatic. So I built the simplest fat-loss diet possible — buffet-style meals, no calorie tracking, no strict portions — and tested it for 30 days (with DEXA scans) to see what happened to cravings, habits, and body fat. If you’ve […]

Three days a week. Full body. Best bang for your time. This full body workout routine gives you 6 main lifts, plus 1–2 add-ons customized to you. After 10+ years of testing every workout split and coaching thousands of people, I’ve found that a full body workout routine run 3x/week gives you the best results […]

Most belly fat plans fail because they treat it like one problem. Here’s how to get rid of belly fat with a 3-layer method that tells you exactly what to do first, what to do when you plateau, and how to finally lose the “last bit.” This is Nimesh, who, at the age of 35, […]

Cardio for weight loss isn’t about sweating more or chasing 10,000 steps. Debunk 10 myths and learn what actually moves the scale without burning out. Running burns fat faster than walking.  A 30-second workout can never compete with 40 minutes. And if you do too much cardio, then you’re gonna lose muscle.  But are these […]

Most glute workouts throw 8–10 random exercises at you when you only need two. In this guide, you’ll learn the best gluteus maximus exercises—the two science-backed moves that give you the deep stretch and hard squeeze your glutes need to grow. This is what weak, underdeveloped glutes look like.  They’re often the hidden reason your […]

For years, lifters have heard that going deep in the stretch is the “secret” to size. In this article, we break down what our $40K MRI experiment on stretch mediated hypertrophy actually found: when stretch really helps, when it doesn’t, and how to use it intelligently in your training. In the past few years, everyone […]

Before you spend another dollar, see how a sports nutrition PhD ranks a list of the best muscle mass building supplement — by real evidence, cost per pound of lean mass, and results that actually show up. I asked a Doctor of Sports Nutrition to rank the top 8 supplements for building muscle (the best […]