Credit to www.sandbagtraining.com Planks, reverse crunches, woodchoppers - all great exercises for improving the strength of one’s abdominals. Except, do these drills really answer our needs of core strength? Sure, at a fundamental level these are great movements, however, people often miss two key aspects of proper core conditioning:

Credit goes to www.mikemahler.comWhile there are literally hundreds of strength training exercises to choose from, very few are actually worth doing. The few exercises that are worth doing are the exercises that provide the most bang for your buck. In other words, the few exercises that are worth doing are your ticket to massive increases in strength, size, and or muscular conditioning depending on what your goals are and how the exercises are implemented.. I like to refer to these exercises as the "20% Club."

                                                                                                                                                                                                         Credit goes to www.higher-faster-sports.com  Stimulate, Supply, and Signal.

Credit goes to www.elitefts.com Aside from the Atlas Stones, the tire flip could be one of the most recognizable strongman events in the sport. However, it is probably the one event most incorrectly performed by athletes and most improperly used by strength coaches.

Reprinted from www.elitefts.comMuscles are just plain dumb. Despite their ability at some level to perform amazing Cirque De Soleil type feats, muscles only ‘know’ two things—tension and stretch. They can’t differentiate between tension or stretches (whether the stretch is coming from yoga or from Tae kwon do kicking).

  Reprinted with permission from www.sportspecific.comThe following 24 workouts are designed to increase your athletes absolute strength and power. This protocol can be utilized as a strength/power program for any sport that is multi-directional.

 Credit goes to www.t-nation.com It's often the little things that end up making the biggest difference. They separate those who "look like they work out" from those who "look like animals." The little things also separate those who lift weights from those who can lift a house!

Republished from www.mikemahler.comI will get right to the point. If you do not have a high sex drive then you are not healthy and you are not maximizing the benefits of training. If you do not feel strong and powerful after workout then you probably did more damage than good with regard to your health. Instead of optimizing your anabolic hormones (also known as sex hormones) you have depleted them. Depleting your anabolic hormones places you in an aging state which is counter productive to recovery. Fail to recover several times and you will get weaker and weaker at each workout. While getting blood work is very important and I will cover what tests you should have done in this article, there are a few free ways to determine whether your training is optimizing anabolic hormones. 

Republished with permission from www.Bodybuilding.com

The purpose of this article is to emphasize the lack of hip flexor strength training amongst today’s athletes and coaches. Through my experience working with athletes in a variety of sports I have come to the belief that athletes and coaches do not train the hip flexors for strength gains nearly enough as they should. I feel as though many coaches make a consistent effort to increase their athlete’s hip flexibility, but sometimes fail to adequately strengthen this muscle group.