TWO Workouts

Inverted rows and its variations are a great way to increase your pulling strength. At best they are also safe if you limit the range of motion by adjusting your setup in a way that your back slightly touches the floor in the bottom position. My preferred equipment for inverted rows is my homemade suspension trainer or rings. With these you can set the difficulty linearly. If you don’t have access to rings or suspension trainers that's fine. I’ll add some variants you can do at home with basic equipment. For example table row is a great variant when you don’t have access to other equipment and it's one of my go to rows when travelling. Using a door anchor with a suspension trainer also works fine when travelling. If the two arm row is too easy you can do one arm incline rows. Tucked front lever rows are fun! 1. Easy incline row https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8wWFlr2gQU Actual load ≈ 0.3x Bodyweight For this variation you can use a post, towel attached to a door handle or ring...

Since dips are a great and fun exercise for chest and triceps I made a list that collects places where you can perform dips at home. When looking for a place to do your dips you should look for the following requirements. Height of the dip platform should be from 70cm to 90cm (28” to 35”) in order to do dips with bent knees depending on your height. Surface has to be stable. You don't want the dip stand to fall over or slide sideways. In order to be able to perform dips without the need to tuck your body excessively, a suitable height of the dip platform should be at least 80 cm depending on your height. This is the distance measured from your knees to about 10cm (4 inches) below your chest line. For a 170cm person this distance is about 70cm and for 190cm this measure is about 90cm. This way you are able to perform dips with proper range of motion with legs slightly bent. If you can find a higher platform you are in luck since you don’t have to bend your legs that much. Also when ...

Chinups and pullups are great exercises to build your back but for most beginners they are way too difficult. This is because you are lifting most of your bodyweight which is quite a lot if you are new to strength training. Most of the progressions models out there have you do pull ups with resistance bands, negative repetitions etc. But there are some major issues with these approaches.  The problem with negative repetitions is that you don’t get to train the pulling part (concentric part) of the pullup and it's hard to accumulate enough training volume to make progress. Think about it this way: Would you bench press negatives with weight above your 1 rep max? Most certainly not since you would be literally crushed by this exercise. So i don’t see the point of risking your joint health by doing negative repetition. If you are starting out and you damage your bicep or joints doing negatives you won’t be able to train at all. So in my opinion the negative repetitions are not a good ...

Ever wondered how much following a meal plan or calorie tracking would affect your physique and overall strength performance? Just to put it in one picture: Quite a bit. In the right picture I was following a regular diet without calculating anything and I was “eating big to get big” you know. Bulking was fairly easy since I was just eating a lot without paying attention to what I actually ate. But the fat gain was fast and muscle gain was minimal. And when I was dieting for fat loss I usually ended up only in a slight deficit which made progress too slow or I was losing weight too fast which led to strength and muscle loss in the process. So after dieting down I had pretty much lost some muscle and not enough fat. But in the left picture I had a structured approach using meal planning and flexible dieting as combined. This is what gets you the results but it's not much talked about. Most gurus and companies out there just want to sell you their shortcuts and supplements but our bo...

Push-ups are a great tool to gain strength and size to the chest if you do the right exercises in the proper rep range. But when talking about push-up workouts you mostly see high rep work done with submaximal load leading to disappointing results. It almost seems that no one actually understands the basic loading parameters of the push-ups. What you should do instead is to work in a moderate rep range 6-12 progressing to more challenging exercises when you reach the top of that rep range. And keep the number of working sets somewhere between 8-12 sets per week. This ensures progressive overload, proper training stimulus and strength gains over time. Here I’m going to introduce a push-up progression model based on the actual load of the push-ups and calculated 1 rep max. For those who have not read the push-ups compared to bench press post check it out here: https://twoworkouts.blogspot.com/2020/09/push-ups-compared-to-bench-press-with.html There is a calculator included that lets you ...

  Push-ups compared to bench press Have you ever wondered how you would compare the different types of push-ups to a barbell press? Well I did but couldn’t find a good push-up to bench press calculator. So I did some research online, made my own calculator based on the actual load and verified the results. Of course direct comparison is not possible because the two exercises are completely different but we can compare the loading parameters between barbell press and push-ups. So a fair warning if you can bench press 1.5x bodyweight you are not able to do one arm push-ups or the other way around. It just doesn’t work that way. But if you currently can do one arm push-ups with good form you could probably reach the 1.5x bodyweight bench 1RM relatively fast by practising the actual lift. In the following we will look at: Strength standards - how much you should actually press to be intermediate or advanced 1RM vs 6-10RM for bodyweight exercises Push-up variations and actual load Top a...