Strength training can provide significant functional benefits and improvement in overall health and well-being including increased bone, muscle, tendon and ligament strength and toughness, improved joint function, reduced potential for injury, improved cardiac function and elevated good cholesterol.

My name is Saro and I’m here to help you get stronger the fastest way possible. Welcome to my site.

Most people who want to get in shape don’t know where to begin. They also lack the experience and know-how when it comes to training in general. A lot of it has to do with general lazyness, the overwhelming amount of (bad) information that’s available in magazines, books, friends, on the web, and overall intimidation that stems from the word “strength training”. A lot of training “routines” out there are garbage, inefficient and are a waste of time. I will show you what works to maximize your gains as a newcomer to training and get you up to top speed.

The target audience of this site is for absolute beginners to [weight] training in general. People with a few months, a year or two of experience are also welcome. People who are getting back into shape will benefit highly from this routine. There is nothing complicated about it and is used by athletes, trainers, strongmen, powerlifters, bodybuilders and more worldwide. It is no secret either: it has been buried by the wealth of misinformation and myths out there, toppled over by the ad-ridden “training” magazines that do nothing but waste people’s times.

On this website, I will teach you how to lift weights properly, give you an easy to follow training program and how to manage your overall diet. Before you cringe at the mention of “diet”, it does not necessarily mean that you will be eating less. In fact, with this type of program, eating more is encouraged (of course clean, healthy foods are preferred). I will talk about this further throughout my site.

The information on this site is totally free and I won’t charge you a cent for it. What’s the catch? None; there is no catch. I don’t even want your email address to send you a lame e-book. Everything on this website is the knowledge I have learned from several years of weight training experience and a few key books I have read that I want to share with you. It is my gift to the newcomers to training and people willing to learn something classic. I was once too a beginner in the world of training and have come a long way, but still have years ahead of me in terms of gaining more knowledge. I’m your everyday average guy who wanted to change his life for the better. I wasn’t overweight, but I wasn’t exactly healthy either. My eating habits were a mess (junk food aplenty) and I was very, very weak. Luckily for me, I had friends help me get started in basic weight training, but efficiency was never achieved. Over the years, however, I learned what worked — and more specifically, what didn’t.

I’m not going to lie to you — you definitely need to get a copy of Mark Rippetoe’s Starting Strength book. If you actually want to learn how to squat, deadlift, bench, power clean and press properly, this book is mandatory. If I were to teach it to you myself, I would have to meet you in person and coach you. Copy/pasting the information from the book onto this website would be copyright infringement and would get me in a lot of trouble.

I promise you one thing: this book is all you need to read to get started. It is totally written for the beginner, and it gets straight to the point with no BS thrown in. Mark Rippetoe has 30+ years of experience under his belt, and this guy knows what he’s doing. Just because his name isn’t “Arnold Schwarzanegger” doesn’t mean he’s not strong and fit. Google his name and see who Mark Rippetoe is.

Do yourself a favour, just purchase a copy of the book. If you don’t like it, just send it back to Amazon and have your money refunded. Chances are, if you do actually read it, you’ll keep it and most likely refer to it as the other bible: the strength training bible.

If you ever get lost, need more information on the book, don’t quite understand how it all works — shoot me an email, or visit the Bodybuilding.com forums for a wealth of information on this subject.

So, what are you waiting for? Get healthy already and become physically stronger. Lose the beer gut and feel good for once: Mark Rippetoe’s Starting Strength book is all you need to get started.

Buy the book!

After, take a look at your workout routine and what you’ll be training exactly.

The solution was simple: use chalk. As a famous strength training coach once wrote in his book, “[Chalk] increases traction between the bar and the hand, reducing the likelihood of lost bars and grip accidents. It reduces callus formation, since stress against the skin of the palm and the fingers is a function of the movement of the bar against it, and callus forms in response to this stress.” (p. 211) Putting this little experiment to the test, I had a wonderful workout with the chalk. Well, except the first time I actually put it on my hands, it made a bit of a mess around me. One trainee looked at me and smirked at my novice attempt (there was a cloud of chalk around me). I quickly apologized for the mess. I understood to use minimal amounts of the substance upon the next time I applied it. Luckily, my local gym (the Monster Gym in Montreal) allows the usage of chalk (I made sure to ask one of the staff members about this). This is a great thing as many gyms do not permit such a commodity. Of course, every real gym should allow it, as the coach goes as far to mention that “A gym without chalk is a health spa.”

More than two months ago, I learned the above the hard way when I was performing the squats incorrectly and this resulted in me experiencing a slight pain in my hamstrings. For the next month and a half, I had a hard time performing the squats because of this pain. Until I realized my form was to blame, I wasted more than a month performing incorrect squatting techniques. To fix my problem, I re-read the squat section in the Starting Strength book and figured out what I was doing wrong (my knees were too inward). Coupled with some key stretching exercises, I was back in the squatting game and have been lifting heavier since with the proper form. Sometimes you need to re-evaluate your exercise techniques to make sure you’re getting the best out of your workouts.

One of my weakest areas of training is the bench press I have to admit. As of this post, I am going up in weight on the squat and deadlift on a weekly basis, while the power clean and shoulder press are progressing slowly. This is to be expected according to a professional strength training coach as the squat and deaf-lift use more muscles than the other exercises, so you will go up in weight much quicker on them as opposed to the shoulder press, power clean and bench press.

If you are interested in breaking a bench press plateau, take a look at the following suggestions.

1. Eat well and check your diet: most rookies who start training will go up in weight and strength quite quickly without eating properly, but will end up plateauing eventually. Nutrition is probably the biggest cause of plateaus. If you want your muscles to recover and get stronger, proper nutrition is required during this phase. Remember, muscle is not made in the gym; it’s when you go home and recover after your workouts with good, clean food that allows your muscles to grow. Double check your diet; take in more protein and (clean) carbohydrates during the day. After your workout, have more protein (shakes are good) and eat well. Sometimes, people don’t eat enough and hence plateau since the muscles don’t have enough (or any) food to recover.
2. Make sure your triceps and shoulders are good: weak triceps and shoulders will definitely stall your bench press, so make sure they’re up to par with the rest of your body. Are you doing the shoulder presses properly? Perhaps you may need additional triceps work (weighted dips are great!) to help with the load. This is usually overlooked by a lot of people.
3. Switch to dumbbells: some people have better results with dumbbells than barbells. Rippetoe even says that dumbbells are a great (actually, better) alternative to barbells when it comes to the bench press, as it allows greater range of motion. Of course, you should definitely master the barbell bench press first before you switch to dumbbells.
4. Take a break if you are over-training: if you have been training for months without taking a break, you should really consider laying off the weights for a week to let your fatigued body heal completely. Chances are you will come back stronger than when you left the weights. I have personally seen my strength shoot up quite a bit when I did this once, so I recommend this to anyone who has been training non-stop for months. Of course, if you’re a newcomer to weight training, taking a week off during the first 6 months to a year (in my opinion) is useless. Rookies should train as much and not miss a workout for a year (at least) as over-training their bodies during this stage is almost non-existent. For a rookie, there is no such thing as over-training. No such thing.

A lot of people will also recommend doing high repetitions for a month or two. I personally think this “recommendation” isn’t that great since it defeats the whole purpose of a strength training routine. Just my opinion, anyway.

While I’m not a doctor or have any sort of certificate in the training field, I do feel confident enough about my knowledge in the world of strength training to give the reader an insight into this fabulous way to transform your body. As of this writing, I have been training at my local gym (Monster Gym) for the past 6 years of my life and have seen all kinds of people train there, of all sizes, without so much knowing what they’re doing. Some of the people I’ve seen really have no idea where or how to start working out. I feel that with this site, I will be able to educate those people for the better and maybe give them a pointer or two on how to effectively train and get stronger.

Right now, this website is still in its primary stages of development, so a lot of content is missing. Hopefully, within the next few weeks, I will have the majority of the sections up and running for everyone to see.