Hopefully it’s common knowledge by now that exercise is not only beneficial but essential for your health. There are many places you can learn about the benefits of this kind of exercise or that kind, but to my mind something that’s rarely well explained is why we actually need to exercise at all.
Orbit Simulator is a two-dimensional physics sandbox. It uses a high physics framerate (decoupled from the slower rendering framerate) to compute the orbits of moons, planets and stars using real-world figures at high time accelerations.
Ping is an homage to the classic arcade game Pong, with some liberties taken on physics. It appears similar to the original, with two white rectangles for paddles and a white square for a ball.
Agricultural Capitalism Simulator (ACS) is a tongue-in-cheek command-line farming business simulator. The player is given some money and a field, and told to make the greatest amount of profit possible in the allotted number of years.
The Lifter’s Manual is a Kindle book I wrote to summarize everything I had learned about lifting weights from my degree, years of coaching clients, and (at the time) ten years of training myself. It is essentially what I wish I could give my 15 year old self.
People can get very particular about things that are important to them. I am no exception. But it seems as if nobody gets quite so particular about insignificant details as when it comes to building muscle, being strong and getting leaner.
For most people, when they feel like they’re getting too soft (or heavy), they’ll instinctively cut food out of their diet. The most common culprits are carbs – especially sugary foods – and fats – often in chocolate or pizza. If you regularly overeat these foods, it’s hard to make the case that you wouldn’t benefit by removing them. But if you don’t tend to binge on “bad” foods, there is a more effective way: eat more.
How much protein should you eat? This is one of the oldest and most-contested questions in fitness. Classical bodybuilding advice suggests we should eat at least a gram of protein per pound of bodyweight a day. This makes sense at first, seeing as you need protein to build muscle, but the reality is a little more complicated.
In my opinion, the best way for most people to gain muscle size is to train mainly for strength. Note that I say most people – for people who are already fairly strong, it’s very useful to incorporate more bodybuilding-style exercises to provide extra stimulus to the right muscles. However even for them, the majority of what makes them grow bigger is lifting heavy weights for large volumes.
We all know warming up before exercise is important. A good warm up will reduce risk of injury and improve performance. However, it is easy to get carried away doing too much mobility and activation work before loading a barbell. We want to get the maximum benefit with minimal time spent.
Some people will always be better at some movements than others, even when training histories are taken into account. Your body’s proportions can predict which movements you will be better at: here’s why.