28 Things Every Bodybuilder Should Do

1) Stare at yourself in car windows

Car windows have the best lighting and shadow for you to see the results of your hard work.

Do not be too shy to stare and admire what you have built and created.

One of the great perks of being a cocky bodybuilder is viewing your work in the best light of car windows.

2) Train like it’s your job

To build the best body you can build, you must train like it’s your job not like it’s your hobby. Hobbyists go nowhere, people who are serious train like they are serious.

Train like it is your job, do not miss meals, do not miss workouts, do not take unscheduled days off, do not train like a weakling when you are scheduled to train hard.

Do the damn work required or you will never know the pleasure of car windows.

3) Train your weaknesses

Part of training like it is your job is training what you need to train, not only training what you want to train.

Always target the weakness, just like when you were a bully in high school. Do not have a lagging muscle group, it can stall progress and cause injury.

You have to build all of your body to be a badass bodybuilder you cannot be a badass bodybuilder with half of your body missing.

4) Train your ankle mobility

Yes I’m damn serious, train your ankles.

What connects your body to the earth? Your feet and ankles, they are the base of your entire body.

Weak ankles = weak everything else.

Nobody thinks to train their ankles, and this is why you will have an advantage, you will build yourself from the ground up, literally.

5) Pay careful attention to posterior chain training

You HAVE to train your butt, lower back, and hamstrings.

We cannot see these areas on our own body so they are very easy to ignore. Don’t ignore them! They have to be trained every bit as hard as quads, chest, and back.

After ankles, the posterior chain, mainly the glutes, are the base of the power of your entire body.

Weak glutes = weak body.

YOU HAVE TO TRAIN GLUTES, HAMSTRINGS AND LOWER BACK.

Good exercises are good mornings, glute-ham raises, and barbell glute thrusts.

6) Stay out of the locker rooms

Gym locker rooms are full of old, gay, weirdo perverts.

Go to the gym and train hard, then get the hell out of there and go shower at home.

7) Use partial reps for maximum gains

100% of the time when some chump is bragging about using a full range of motion they have NO MUSCLE! to show for it.

You have to be a goddamn fool to brag about using a full range of motion when you have no muscle. This is BODYBUILDING! this is not a full range of motion jerkoff contest.

Partial reps build huge muscles because partial reps keep the focus on the muscle. Full range of motion completely takes off the pressure on the muscles at certain parts of the movement.

I train only 1/2-3/4 reps for bench press and my chest grows like magic. If I’d wasted my time on full range of motion bench press I’d have a bird chest like your mom.

8) Train your neck

A big neck is what makes you look powerful! Having a big neck also helps you prevent injuries to your neck.

The neck is certainly the most undertrained muscle in the bodybuilder’s body and this is a mistake.

Everything has to be trained! Especially the neck.

9) Train your abs standing up.

You don’t go to war laying on your back, do you? That’s why you need to train your abs standing up.

In fact, most everything needs to be trained standing up. Sitting down is for lazy asses who want to go nowhere.

10) Eat a dirty diet to GET BIG

Eating clean to GET BIG is the biggest joke in the industry. They tell you to eat chicken and broccoli and when you don’t GET BIG, they have protein powders for you. Don’t make me laugh.

If you want to gain weight you have to motherfucking eat!

I got big by eating a gallon of ice-cream and a 2-liter of Dr. Pepper every day (with special supplements). Clean eating is the worst thing you can ever do if you want to get big.

Some of your meals can be clean but if you’re eating to get big you have to put “dirty food” in your diet. Pizza, burgers, wings, ice cream.

Your body needs this stuff to grow so give your body what it actually needs, not what the magazines lie to you about.

11) Eat clean to get lean

Eating to lean out is different than eating to get lean. To get lean, eat clean.

Clean food (plus fat burners) is what sheds the fat from your body.

You should eat clean for 6 days and on the 7th day, be like God and have yourself a relaxing cheat meal.

You will see that after one week of clean eating plus one cheat meal you will look absolutely fantastic.

12) Think about the weights like you think about sex

Not to get too rude or crude but if you want to get jacked like Jack Lalanne you have to REALLY want it.

You have to really think about it and envision it. You have to become OBSESSED with it.

If you aren’t obsessed with getting jacked & developing Super-Human “Genetics”, then don’t even bother.

13) Take before and after photos

It is important to take before and after photos so that you can look back and feel pride of the work you have accomplished.

Your before and after photos are also the way you are going to be able to earn money from your physique.

Put in the hard work, then make the BIG BUCKS.

14) Make money from your physique

It’s pointless to build a body and NOT make money from it.

When you have a great body, you have FREE advertising. Your body is your billboard, and you can make money from it.

You can develop your OWN program and show other people the light.

15) Change your workout every 3-4 weeks

Like Louie Simmons always says, if you don’t constantly change you will never get any better.

If you do the same workout over and over, your body will eventually adapt and become accustomed to the work. Then you will regress.

Do the same thing over and over = get worse.

You have to change your workout every 3-4 weeks, no exceptions. Even if you just make small tweaks, you cannot do the same thing over and over.

16) Always hold your breath when lifting heavy weight

Holding your breath when making a heavy lift helps you to focus on the weight.

Holding your breath will make you hold your abs tight and it will make your body stronger.

Do not take a deep breath right in the middle of a big lift because it will make you weaker and it may cause you to miss the lift or cause injury.

Take a deep breath in, do the lift, breathe out.

17) Don’t kill yourself with cardio

Cardio as a bodybuilder should be kept fairly light. Walking and sex are the best cardio for a bodybuilder.

20-45 minutes per day of walking is enough cardio for a bodybuilder. Sex every day is enough cardio.

You should not be running or jogging, this is activity for a skinny twerp or a girl. Jogging will kill your gains so stay away from long drawn-out cardio.

Sprints are great cardio for the bodybuilder. Pulling a sled is great cardio for a bodybuilder. Keeping your rest periods in the gym to a minimum is also good cardio.

“If you do too much aerobic work you’ll destroy anaerobic capacity.” -Louie Simmons

18) Train for strength AND muscle, strength and power is the KEY to everything

Don’t make the mistake of just training for the pump and not training for strength.

Strength and power is the key to gaining everything in the gym and in life.

You HAVE TO develop strength and power, so you must pay attention to build your strength and power as well as your beach muscles.

19) NEVER QUIT!

Quitting is the worst thing any bodybuilder can do.

You will eventually come back to it but you will always have the nagging questions in your head, what if I didn’t quit for those years? What if I’d kept training? Where would my progress be now if I didn’t quit?

Eliminate those questions by NEVER quitting in the first place.

20) Do more work to recover and eliminate soreness

A lot of crybabies train 4 days per week and cry about DOMS (delayed onset muscle soreness).

NEWSFLASH: If you are getting sore it is because you are not training enough.

The more you train the less you get sore. When I train 10+ times per week I NEVER get sore.

The clue is in the title: DELAYED ONSET Muscle Soreness.

The soreness always comes the worst 2 days after training and it is simply from not moving and not getting the blood flowing. The more you train, the less sore you get.

The more advanced you get, the more work you need to do to recover.

You have to do more and more, that’s how you recover.

DOMS appears when you are resting too long, don’t rest too much.

21) Train optimally, not minimally, not maximally

You can’t always train heavy like a mindless animal and you can’t always train light like a wimp.

You have to find the optimal balance. Don’t lift too light and don’t lift too heavy.

It takes time to understand the best balance for you, but I like a 50% bodybuilding style and 50% strength/power style split.

That’s 50% of the workouts based on strength and 50% based on bodybuilding movements like curls for the girls.

Badass Bodybuilding is a great split between strength training and bodybuilding.

22) Train your lower back

Lower back is susceptible to injury and many people experience lower back pain because most people never, ever train it.

The lower back has to be strong as all hell. Get used to having good mornings often when you develop a strong, muscular back.

23) Take fat burners to get lean

Diet can only get you so far.

You need to get as lean as you can with diet and when it is time to kick it into high gear, take a high-quality FAT BURNER.

Fat burners are taken by every bodybuilder for the very simple reason that a) they work and b) diet does NOT work well enough to get you shredded.

24) Increase your testosterone, lower your estrogen

All of the hard work in the world will not mean anything if you gave high estrogen or low testosterone.

You have to optimize your own hormones to build muscle.

Today’s environment is poison and everything we eat, drink, and breathe increases estrogen so it’s important to find ways combat estrogen and increase testosterone.

25) Sweat hard at least once every day

You have to sweat every single damn day, this is how you know you are training hard.

If you ain’t sweatin’, you ain’t gettin’ results. Period.

Sweat releases toxins and is very good and healthy for you. If your gym is very cold, wear a sweatshirt and sweatpants.

It is important to sweat so make sure you sweat every time you train.

26) Train often

Training one body part once per day is not enough. You have hundreds of muscles in the body, much more than just pecs, back, legs and arms.

Think of your neck, glutes, calves, lower back, hamstrings etc.

There is a lot of muscles to hit and one body part per day doesn’t cover it. One body part per day is shit training for lazy people.

Your training volume has to be high to accommodate all of the different muscle groups.

I train 6 days per week (sometimes 7) and I often train twice per day. I never get sore and I make crazy gains.

27) Don’t be afraid of training twice per day

There are so many muscle groups that a bodybuilder has to hit, it can become impossible to hit them all without splitting your workouts into two.

You really do not need to spend more than 45 minutes per session training because after about 45 minutes your testosterone starts to plummet and your energy starts to wain.

Rather than power through a workout in which your energy and T is low, it is better to split the workouts into two.

This way you can get 2-3 meals in-between workouts and be fully recovered to give each training session your all. I recover GREAT doing this.

28) Howl like a wolf and get your ass to the gym

Howl like a wolf because it increases your testosterone.

OWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW!!!!

Until next time.

Your man,

-Elijah “The Realist”