As we have commented previously in this blog, the first thing you have to define when you train are your goals. Do I want to develop my upper body? Do I want to increase my strength? I want to lose weight? Etc.

The difference between athletes who practice bodybuilding exercises and weightlifting is visually noticeable since their objectives are different. Anyway, there are many people who doubt about the training that they follow each other to achieve results. In this post we will review the types of training and objectives of each discipline to understand it better.

After an introduction to these disciplines, we also leave you with several bodybuilding exercises in case you want to focus on gaining volume.

Bodybuilding: the focus is on size.

Bodybuilders often lift weights not with the goal of building strength but with the goal of increasing the size of their muscles. Bodybuilders will obviously build strength as they train, but this will be an added effect to their main goal of bulking up.

Bodybuilders who lift weights to increase their size usually work to get the blood to carry as much oxygen and nutrients to the muscles. This gives them a nice feeling and keeps them active while training at the limit. The type of lifting that bodybuilders do has the goal of creating micro-tears in the muscle, forcing the body to repair it and thus increasing storage capacity. The body repairs, causes muscle growth. This training procedure is known as hypertrophy.

As muscles grow they can develop more power, which means they can exert greater force during workouts. However, the energy stored in bulky muscles is not the same as actual strength, and for this reason bodybuilders tend to be weaker than they appear.

The term bodybuilding generally refers to competitive displays, which is why many bodybuilders focus on working their bodies to look their best on stage.

Read until the end to find 5 bodybuilding exercise programs

Strength training: the focus is on muscle power.

When it comes to strength training, there is one main goal with training: to increase the amount of power your muscles can develop to lift loads. The size and shape of the muscles do not matter as long as they can provide maximum force during the lift.

Strength training focuses on exercises with low repetitions and heavy weights, and is focused on teaching your central nervous system how to use your motor units when you lift. Lifting is focused on increasing the strength of your muscles, strengthening your joints, strengthening your bones, and developing stronger tissues.

Unlike bodybuilding exercises, in strength exercises the strength of athletes does not have to be reflected in a perfectly sculpted body. Strength athletes typically have a higher percentage of body fat, and their body shapes tend to be more solid and blocky rather than sleek and lean as is the case for bodybuilders. In any case, when it comes time to use the muscles, strength athletes can develop more strength and last longer than bodybuilders.

Weightlifting

Weightlifting is a particular type of strength training to increase muscular strength and the size of skeletal muscles. In weightlifting, bars, dumbbells and weight discs are used to train concentric and exectric muscle contraction exercises. This discipline also uses a series of specialized equipment to train specific muscle groups.

Weightlifting is also an Olympic discipline in which athletes attempt to lift their maximum weight in a one repetition lift of a barbell loaded with weight plates. The two weightlifting competitions are the snatch and the two-stroke.

The snatch has a wide grip and a single lift while in the two-stroke the bar is raised in two different sequences. In Olympic weightlifting, each athlete receives three attempts for each of the categories: snatch and two times. The sum of the total weight of the two highest lifts will determine the weight lifted to be taken into account in a competition. An athlete who fails to perform a valid snatch and two-stroke lift will receive an incomplete grade for the competition.

Although there are not many globally competitive Olympic lifters, the lifts developed in the sport of weightlifting, and in particular the components of the lifts such as squats, deadlifts, etc. They are frequently used by elite athletes specialized in other disciplines and sports to train explosive and functional strength.

You may have also heard of Chinese Weightlifting. Chinese Weightlifting is the training system for weightlifters from the communist country with which they are achieving great results.

5 bodybuilding exercises to increase volume

If you are interested in gaining muscle mass, one of your highest priorities is to determine which method will work for you. Here we present 5 training programs to increase your volume.

#1. The 5X5 program

The 5X5 program is quite popular among those who are interested in gaining the maximum amount of strength and muscle mass. The objective of this program is to perform three exercises focused on the main muscle groups of the body: the upper body and the lower body, performing series of 5 repetitions for each exercise. At the end of each training you can add series of isolated bodybuilding exercises if you need them, although they are not required by the program itself.

#2. german volume training

The next program to build bulk is the German Bulk Training program. This training is similar to the 5X5 program since it will also ask you to do a good number of exercises, but it differs in that the number of repetitions increases up to 10 repetitions and 10 series for each exercise.

The goal of this program is to focus on two muscle groups a day, alternating between them over the course of three training days a week.

#3. The FST-7 training program.

The third type of volume training program that is currently in vogue is FST-7 training. This program is not specifically based on a series of exercises that you have to perform or a protocol to divide the muscle groups of your body. This program gives you the guidelines for what you should be training in the last bodybuilding exercise for each body part you worked in that session.

The acronym FST comes from the English Fascial Stretch Training, which indicates that one of the main objectives that this program tries to achieve is to stretch the soft connective tissue that is found around your muscles as well as in the rest of your body.

This fabric is primarily responsible for helping to maintain the structural integrity of your body, providing support and protection, and works as a shock absorber when you perform your workouts both in and out of the gym.

When the soft tissue is stretched, you will see increases in muscle growth. There will also be a greater contribution of minerals, amino acids and oxygen to the tissues.

With this workout, perform seven sets of 15 repetitions of the last exercise you did for each muscle group. It is important that you make the rest periods between these sets shorter and shorter – about 30 seconds total.

Keep in mind that you will probably have to use a lower weight than you normally used for each bodybuilding and weightlifting exercise since you are now doing a much higher total number of repetitions.

#4 Split upper and lower body training.

The fourth type of exercise is the upper and lower body. This routine is based on training exchanging muscle groups so that you train each group twice a week.

This system is a good option for beginners and lifters who are looking to gain mass since it allows you to get plenty of rest throughout the week. If you are an advanced athlete you can also increase the number of series and define your selection of exercises and rests to increase your muscle gains at any level.

On the other hand, this system forces you to do four sessions a week. If you have trips or other commitments, following the training calendar can be a problem for you since it is not very flexible.

#5. full body workout

Finally we stop at full body training. The 5 x 5 program could also be considered a full body program since you work virtually all major muscle groups with the three exercises of your choice. In any case, true full body training programs will give you a specific exercise for each muscle group: quads, hamstrings, chest, back and shoulders (arms are worked when you work chest and back).

In addition to these lifts and bodybuilding exercises dedicated to muscle groups, you can also work some isolated exercises to train individual muscles.

In conclusion, remember that workouts aimed at bodybuilders are focused on gaining volume, while exercises used by strength athletes seek to gain muscle power. Weightlifting is a discipline within strength exercises and has two Olympic categories that are the snatch and the two-stroke.

If you want to start doing bulking training, you can follow our recommendations on the training programs most used by athletes. Always remember to ask specialized professionals who know your physical situation when defining your training to obtain the best results in a timely manner.

We are going to start sharing a 3-day routine with all our followers so that everyone who wants to start in the world of weights.

These types of 3-day fullbody training programs are the most recommended for people who are new to the world of weights and for people with little time who cannot go more than three times a week. It is the most efficient way to progress both in strength and hypertrophy since every day we touch all muscle groups emphasizing compound movements and with a high volume of training since we have a rest day between training days.

There are many variables to progress in hypertrophy or strength: volume, intensity, density, rest, so let’s not make the mistake of thinking that this 3-day routine falls short because you only train three times a week. It’s the best way to lay a solid foundation to then opt for other training options that are more suited to our goals.

Guidelines:

1. Weekly Division of the Routine:

Monday: Routine A
Tuesday: Active Rest
Wednesday: Routine B
Thursday: Active Rest
Friday: Workout C

We must leave a rest day between days of training for proper recovery and avoid injuries.

What is active rest? It consists of resting from our usual 3-day routine, but continuing to be active by doing some moderate activity with a moderate pace and duration. Examples of active rest: yoga or stretching session, 45-60 minute walk, foam roller routine, riding a bike… there are options for all tastes.

2. Rest between sets:

This routine has a great weight of multi-joint exercises to lower repetitions, so in order to maintain performance you have to have long rests between series. The rests are variable according to our sensations or you are afraid to rest 4 minutes if you feel fatigued before your last series of Deadlift, but if you feel fresh go for the next concentrated series.

3. Effort:

Given the predominance of multi-joint exercises, we do not recommend training near failure if we want to maintain performance and technique throughout our sets. As a general rule in compound exercises we recommend training with a weight that allows us to do 2 or 3 more repetitions. In the more analytical exercises we recommend training with a weight that allows us to do 1 or 2 more repetitions.

If we are beginners we can apply a linear weight progression and almost every week we will be able to lift more weight than the previous one, but if we are already intermediate we recommend other types of more complex progressions that we will talk about later.

4. Warm up and stretch:

The warm-up will be the same every day, it is VERY IMPORTANT never to skip the warm-up and stretching if we want to continue progressing without injuries.

5. Substitutions:

We highly recommend doing our 3-day routine with the scheduled exercises, but if for whatever reason you can’t do any of the exercises, you can substitute them as follows.

• Squat: Press + 15 reps of lower back extension (i.e. if you have 3×8 of Squat, replace it with 3×8 of press and 3×15 of lower back extension).
• Deadlift: Hip Thrust `+ 15 repetitions of lumbar extension.
• Romanian Deadlift: Nordic Curl.
• Stride: Unilateral Hip Thrust with Dumbbell.
• Hip Thrust: Hip Thrust on a quadriceps extension machine.
• Calf Raise standing machine: Calf Raise with dumbbell.
• Femoral Curl: Femoral Curl with Dumbbell (between the feet).
• Quadriceps Extension: You can eliminate them.
• Barbell Bench Press: Dumbbell Bench Press.
• Incline Dumbbell Press: Incline Barbell Press.
• Military Press: Standing Military Press with Dumbbells.
• Pulley Openings: Dumbbell Openings or Pec Deck.
• Funds: Bench Press Declined Dumbbells.
• Supine Pulley Pulldown: Biceps Pull Ups.
• T-Bar Row: Dumbbell Bench Row.

6. Change of routine

Many people wonder how long we can do this 3-day routine and still get results, the answer is simple until you get tired! If you like training this way, it fits your lifestyle and you keep making progress, there is no reason to change this routine for another. If our objectives change or we want another distribution of days, we can opt for another type of routine such as torso-leg (4 days), pull-push (4 days), divided routine (5 days) or push-legs (6 days).

Our recommendation is that if you are a beginner, stick with this 3-day routine for at least 12 weeks.

7. And the diet?

To make truly significant progress in the gym, diet is just as important as training if not more. Avoid processed foods, eat a reasonable amount of protein for your weight and training level, and calculate a caloric deficit/surplus based on your goals. Read our article if you want to have a Perfect Body

The 3 day routine

Day A:

Day B:

Day C:

With our 3-day routine and the complementary information, you can now go to the gym and start hitting the irons. Don’t forget to record your progress and upload it to Fitenium!

If you don’t already know Fitenium is a free, mobile, video-based social network for athletes who train strength or bodyweight exercises. At Fitenium users can follow their performance, compete and get discounts in nutrition and sports equipment stores. Download it here.

Hello Fiteniers! This week we return with our analysis of the ranking of fitness influencers in Spain with the analysis of one of the fastest growing influencers in recent years, not in vain has he gone from being relatively unknown to accumulating almost 300,000 followers in a relatively short space of time. . In this article we will talk about how he knew how to find his niche between fitness and entertainment and how he has expanded his sources of income so as not to depend exclusively on YouTube, welcome!

Juan Pedro all his life was a very thin young man who wanted to have a muscular body, quite “emo” and who believed that swimming could improve his physique, however, although there was some improvement, he was not getting where he wanted to go. When he arrived at the university and began to practice triathlon, so you can imagine that apart from worsening aesthetically his physique began to suffer injuries since it is a very demanding sport for the joints. Despite the fact that she liked to compete, it was not worth spending four hours on top of not liking herself in front of the mirror. For this reason, after suffering constant discomfort, he stopped resistance and began to focus on muscle hypertrophy.

Since he started training in the gym, he had been thinking about opening a YouTube channel where he could share his knowledge and show his lifestyle. It is no coincidence that its greatest references in the Fitness community are Powerexplosive and The Fitness Boy, possibly the biggest references in the Hispanic fitness and entertainment community.

His channel initially started with a quite common mix in which he shared training, diet, recipes, vlogs and similar content, so it was difficult for him to take off and it was not until he took advantage of the challenge of 100 push-ups TheGrefg, uploading a video in which he very intelligently used the name and image of this well-known Youtuber (he had more than five million followers at that time), managed to position him well in the YouTube algorithm, putting a Hit of more than 150,000 views of that video and an incredible improvement in his subsequent videos.

Once the tailwind pushed his channel, The Titan was improving his editing skills and in front of the camera and together with a good strategy of interesting content and good collaborations, his channel went up like a rocket and he began to enjoy sponsorships, events and other benefits of the Youtuber life. As an anecdote, he shared his experience in a clinic where he had a hair transplant, the truth is that nothing was wrong!

The next turning point for his channel was when he started su relación con otra de las youtubers con más solera del panorama fitness de España, The Saiyan Kiwi, por lo que además de su contenido habitual también empezó a subir vídeos más personales de ellos como pareja, y todos sabemos que el cotilleo tiene muchas visitas

Finally, if Juan Pedro has stood out for something, it is to diversify his sources of income and therefore apart from YouTube has created an online advisory service and Canone Clothing, a formal clothing store designed for people with a fitness physique. Would you like to have discounts on Canone Clothing within Fitenium? Let’s make Fitenium grow and we will surely reach an agreement. He also has a sportswear brand, Only Titans, so his three businesses, along with his contract with Prozis, complement each other quite well.

Finally, it’s reasonable to comment on the turn your content has taken recently. Perhaps because of detecting that the fitness niche is increasingly overloaded or out of pure personal interest, it is noticeable that he is making more and more pure and hard entertainment content and leaving aside his more fitness facet. What’s more, it recently reported that it is not going to compete anymore after having done so at a national and international level and not finding much incentive in that industry.

I hope you found this review of Titan Fit interesting, next week we will be back with another chapter.

See you at Fitenium!

If you don’t already know Fitenium is a free, mobile, video-based social network for athletes who train strength or bodyweight exercises. At Fitenium users can follow their performance, compete and get discounts in nutrition and sports equipment stores. Download it here.

For many people, when they started going to the gym, their goal was to gain muscle and get strong. Although they are two objectives that may seem to go hand in hand, and to a certain extent they do, there comes a time when you stagnate and stop making progress. Normally you respond to that stagnation by being more specific, you choose what you want to work on and you work for it. It is very rare to see strategies that seek to improve aesthetics and strength, but there is one and it is called Powerbuilding.

In Powerbuilding we seek to improve performance in the basics of Powerlifting: bench press, squat and deadlift while we do not lose sight of aesthetics and try to stay with a low percentage of fat and an aesthetic physique from the point of view of bodybuilding.

In general, in bodybuilding, the Bench Press and Squats are common exercises, but they are not performed in ranges that prioritize the development of strength, but instead seek to optimize muscle development. On the other hand, the Deadlift is even contraindicated for people who are looking for aesthetics, since some people think that it creates too wide a waist. However, when we train Powerbuilding we will do all these exercises with high frequency and in ranges of force.

On the other hand, in Powerlifting isolation exercises are not usually performed since all the training is focused on strength and it is not usual to look for strength in isolation exercises (it is even unsafe). In Powerbuilding we will also do isolation exercises to complete our training.

In general, a Powerbuilding routine will be divided into two blocks. The first will be the basic exercise focused on strength, and later we will do isolated exercises that complement the basic of the day.

There are plenty of reasons to try this approach to training. Historically it has always been said that high and low repetition training cannot coexist, but the reality is that heavy squats create a very advantageous environment for hypertrophy.

Powerbuilding routine

A simple example of a Powerbuilding routine would be the following, there are more advanced versions in which the priority between strength and hypertrophy undulates over time, but what we propose here is an initial approach to powerbuilding.

This is a routine in which compound movements are trained in strength ranges and accessories in strength-hypertrophy ranges. We must bear in mind that not only the number of repetitions determines if you train for strength or hypertrophy. Tempo, technique, rest and intensity are very important variables to differentiate between the two.

Factors in Strength and Aesthetics training

Repetition Range: Different ranges have different effects on our body and can be summarized in the following table in a very general way.

Tempo: The speed of the lift changes dramatically between Powerlifters and Bodybuilders. Powerlifters may choose to train at a slower tempo to improve weak points in their lifts, but the goal and most efficient way is to lift fast and explosively.

However, for a bodybuilder there is not much reason to move irons explosively, as it increases the chance of injury while reducing the effectiveness of each repetition and it only serves your ego since you can get a few extra repetitions out of it. Muscles respond more to time under tension than to the number of repetitions performed, so slow tempo and even pausing at our weakest part of the stroke is how hypertrophy is maximized in our body.

Technique: There is no debate here, technique is extremely important for both bodybuilding and powerlifting. However, it is curious how the technique changes depending on the discipline we practice, let’s take the squat as an example.

When a bodybuilder squats, what he takes into account is the muscle division of the legs. They are likely to choose a narrow foot stance to target the quads and use a high bar to keep their spine as upright as possible. However a Powerlifter focuses on how easy it is to move the load. To do this, many Powerlifters will opt for a wider foot position since this way the glutes are involved more and also place the bar lower, resting on the scapulae, so that the lower back participates in the movement.

There are other similar examples such as the Bench Press in which Powerlifting athletes perform a lumbar arch to reduce the range as much as possible while bodybuilders seek a wide range so that the pectoral muscle works as much as possible.

Rest: this is another of the factors in which there are very wide differences between training for aesthetics and strength training.

In the strength block it is key to get enough rest between sets to recover the muscles. You usually rest between 3 and 5 minutes when we train strength, depending on sensations and the general advice is to rest until you feel ready to go for the next series.

However in bodybuilding, it is very important not to rest too much. Generally between 60 and 90 seconds is enough to maintain the tension and that each series breaks down your muscles more since we are not fully recovered from the previous series. It is very interesting to put our ego aside and move light weights with short rests, your muscles will grow more than moving heavier weights with longer rests.

Intensity – This is probably the most important factor, as it is vital for both Powerlifting and Bodybuilding routines. We must know how to play with it to improve with a Powerbuilding approach.

To put a mathematical variable to intensity use the RPE “Rate of Perceived Exertion,” which ranges from 1 to 10 based on the effort required to perform a lift.

This concept underpins all Powerlifting routines as if you were to go for RPE 10 in all your workouts you would not be optimizing your strength gains as you would exhaust yourself very quickly and not be able to do an entire routine. On the other hand the possibility of injury increases dramatically. In normal training, we recommend maintaining an RPE between 7.5 and 9, reaching 10 in a timely manner and knowing that training will have to be shortened if we do.

On the other hand, when you train for bodybuilding, the effort must be maximum or near maximum in each of your series. While going to complete failure on every set can be dangerous, having an RPE of 9 or 10 depending on the exercise is what will make your muscles grow. For this, techniques such as Rest-Pause, Drop Sets or descending series are very efficient.

Conclusions:

Although in the United States Powerbuilding is already relatively well known, in Spain it has not been until recently when Youtubers and Influencers such as Brainbuilder or The Titan have begun to popularize this type of training.

It is clear that with this approach you will not be the best powerlifter or win bodybuilding competitions, but it is not unreasonable to think of Powerbuilding federations where both factors are valued and a competition is created for itself.

From Fitenium we encourage our readers to start in this discipline that combines the best of Powerlifting and Bodybuilding and that develops strong and aesthetic athletes since it is not mandatory to give up either of the two things.

Greetings and see you in Fitenium!