With the snatch, you're only catching it in the overhead position. You don't have to press it up. I'm definitely not an expert in this, but looking at how they catch it, it looks very dissimilar to how you'd hold it for pressing up. Compare the lockout for the clean and press, for example.

Yeah, I'm just gonna keep with the grip I've developed and totally ignore that trainer. Today I watched this skinny guy load up 80kg on the bench, this is a bench with no safety pins on the sides mind you, and start doing "reps" where he was only lowering it until his arms were at about 90 degree angles (so about 1/3 of the way down between lockout and the bar touching his chest) and he was doing this with a suicide grip and had this look of utter agony on his face the whole time, with no spotter, and this same trainer girl is just watching him do this from behind the desk. Totally clueless.

hahaha yeah. That's dreadful.

After coming across so much contradictory information about things -- such as squatting in particular -- I think the most important thing is just making sure that you're distributing the weight across the appropriate muscles. With squatting, I got into a lot of trouble because I was just never engaging my glutes at all. Now my quads are enormous, inflamed, tight, and fucking up my posture by pulling my hips forward. I was doing things in ways that I felt were "by the book", but I wasn't entirely mindful while lifting. Now, I try to avoid music as much as possible. Really weird, subtle things can make a lot of difference in where the weight gets carried. Of course, it can take a lot of work to get the mind-muscle connection necessary to even get the kind of immediate feedback needed for this... and with that problem, I just don't know. Maybe one should strictly do very targeted exercises until they can flex the individual muscles on command. I've been doing that with my glutes anyway -- nothing fun, just goofy bridges and stuff.

I don't know. I'm no expert by any stretch, and have no strong opinions about the particulars of doing things, and I suspect it varies a lot with different skeletal structures. But I've learned you can get all fucked up in the long term, even with no acute injuries at all. Mindfulness, and mindful lifting, can't be a bad idea. (No research on this, but I bet that even if initially one loses some energy by giving up their music -- I loved Nile and Shining in particular -- you can perform similarly with mindfulness, after practice, but without the same spikes in adrenaline, cortisol, etc.)

I never lift with music. Well, other than the gym music. I totally hate earbuds and big headphones would just get in the way. It was annoying in my previous gym because their music was awful in bizarre and unimaginable ways (techno remixes of "Mambo #5"?) but my new gym mostly just plays the greatest hits of late 90's/early 00's rap, which is fine by me as workout music.

I do try to pay really close attention to form and whatnot during all of my lifts and actually really hate when I get distracted by anything as I feel like my form immediately gets slightly worse if I'm not fully focused.

Different body types require different grips/form. I used to bench, shoulder press and bent over row wide all the time with my pinkies on the outer ring of the barbell, but I am not a tall guy with super long arms so that was most likely too wide for me. Dumbbells mostly eliminate this problem, but when I do use barbells I generally go with a medium shoulder width or a little wider grip now.

I think for shoulder press you really just want your elbows to be forming a 90 degree angle at the bottom of the lift so your forearms are straight up and down, perpendicular to the floor and parallel to your body. There's a series of videos on youtube by "Buff Dudes" that explain common mistakes and how to correct them for all of the popular lifts and they are pretty spot on. Here is their OHP video, if you haven't seen it I think it's really helpful even if you are an advanced lifter. Sometimes I will watch videos like this before a workout just to get myself more focused and make these concepts really stick in my head.

Yeah, that's about the same grip width I use.

Sounds like you're good to go then also I cannot not listen to music while I workout, I do miss the old school basement workouts with my friend where we would just blast metal on the stereo, but obviously have to use headphones at the gym. Sometimes having earbuds in for an hour or 2 gets exhausting though, but I just cant handle the horrible radio station that seems to always be on at any gym I go to, the music literally makes me feel weak and uninterested. I've always found metal to really help me feel stronger and get out a few extra reps sometimes, I do a majority of my listening while driving and working out.

I don't know how to lift without music. Whenever the song dies or there just isn't music on I feel distracted by everything else. Music helps me keep a singular focus up until the moment I'm performing the lift. Once I'm lifting I do a good job of tuning everything else out (usually). Squats in particular I seem to need my music the most. During other lifts I can listen to whatever anyone else wants it seems.

All I can think is the guy was doing the suicide grip intentionally, because it's natural to grip things with the thumb curved around. But yeah in my experience I never trust the trainers in the gym, they'll only get up off their seat if you're screaming. In my beginning years I dropped around 130kg on my jaw while doing decline bench press. Nobody came and helped me. I had to edge the weight slowly off my face and and throw it off. Only at the sound of the weight plates hitting the floor did the trainer check to see if I was ok. These days though thankfully there are pegs to prevent accidents by failure because spotters are never a sure or convenient thing.

Buff Dudes are excellent for form and interesting exercises and they have a good sense of humour which is a huge RARITY in bodybuilding videos. Their diet snacks/recipes leave a lot to be desired but I guess it's healthier than eating cheezy poofs.

Well, no pegs on the benches at my gym. The squat rack has them, though.

I'm sure he was using that grip intentionally. The thing is that Korean culture is pretty well insulated from the outside world, so they don't have access to decades of form guides or watch videos of Olympic athletes training or competing or have tons of different guys with competing philosophies and form guides and varying programs. In Korea there's basically only one way to do any given thing. I've never seen anyone do a deadlift without double overhand grip with lifting straps. I've never seen anyone do a front squat. Never seen a farmer's walk. Never seen incline bench with a barbell, only dumbbells. Never seen anyone do heavy barbell rows fully bent over from the floor (they all do Pendlay rows with an EZ-curl bar exclusively). Everyone does these semi-bent over rows with the EZ curl bar where you just slide the bar up and down your thighs with high rep counts, so I've never seen a single person do an actual bent-over row.

So yeah, while we've probably got an overabundance of guides and advice, here there's just one way to do things, and those half-rep suicide grip flat bench sets (with your feet up on the end of the bench, never on the floor!) are the only way to bench.

I actually can't stand those Buff Dudes videos. Their advice is all sound I guess but for some reason their humor/personalities don't work for me. I mostly just watch Alan Thrall and Omar Isuf. Omar's a bit too cheerful for me but he just seems like such a nice guy I don't mind much. Plus he likes classic 80's metal.

Re:Korea
When Henry Rollins was a tank he went to some Japanese gym, they made him cover up his tattoos with a long sleeve sweater, and when he did some simple warm-up shrugs everyone looked at him like he was a monster, haha.
Their later videos are trying too hard in the comedy department, I'll give you that. There's a bunch of ad-libbing/awkward pauses they've done this year which just suck. Still they sure do beat Mike Chang, LOL.

Korea has some similar rules/attitudes about tattoos. Most public pools and bathhouses won't let you in with visible tattoos. Some sorta gang thing I guess? Maybe it'd be the same thing in the gym, I dunno.

Getting your info from Youtube "fitness celebrities" is about the worst decision you can make in that regard.

but metal forums? you betcha!

What's the fundamental difference between trainers who own gyms, participate in competitions regularly, train other athletes, publish books and other materials, and who also create and upload YouTube videos compared to trainers who own gyms, participate in competitions regularly, train other athletes, publish books and other materials, who don't create or upload YouTube videos?

Just because you've got some grudge against certain "fitness celebrities" who mostly just post talking head videos doesn't suddenly de-legitimize an entire method of documenting and spreading information.

I wouldn't say I have a grudge against them, but I don't particularly value such people... especially on YouTube. I enjoy YouTube and what it has to offer, but I also know that (much like what Myspace was to music) its ease of use, the over-saturation of YouTube "celebrities" and the monetary upside of getting clicks mean that the quality of the material you're getting should always be taken with a huge grain of salt and is undoubtedly dubious. This is so incredibly important for fitness-related topics! There's so few standards and so little common ground as to what qualifies as "quality advice" on fitness that the vast majority of content you get on YouTube (or even more generally on fitness) is contradictory. Like a Chinese pharmacy, you are more likely to find placebo solutions to cure your fitness woes than genuine, certified, medically-informed advice. And, just like "alternative medicine" you can find all sorts of folks peddling awful techniques and unregulated supplements because they get paid to do so and people are desperate to look like the person peddling that shit, or to "be as strong" as they might appear to be.

This is sadly so, so, so common. For instance, let's look at what it takes to be a "fitness trainer." There's absolutely no harmonization anywhere with what a trainer should and shouldn't know. Some countries and states/provinces have programs to certify individuals as personal trainers, but there's no consistency between programs. CANFITPRO, as one of Canada's most widely popular certification programs, only requires you to pay money and take a written exam. Others in Canada, like CSEP, are more comprehensive but also limited in medical understanding and scope. But, these are notable for being genuine programs; it's entirely possible for a person to claim they are a "certified" fitness trainer and to not be certified at all, or to have fake certification. I've seen it time and time again where guys who juice up, or who simply found a routine that worked for them and made them look big suddenly open gyms and start "training" others for pay. They may call themselves certified experts, because frankly, who is going to know or argue with them on that point? Most people who want to get training simply judge their expectations based upon the looks of the trainer, without realizing what actions might have caused them to get to that point or that each person responds differently to different training techniques. This can lead to dangerous situations where poor technique and the use of unhealthy substances are perpetuated through bad teaching.

I think the way I judge "YouTube personalities" or "fitness experts" in general would be different if there was some level of consistency across the board as to what a "fitness expert" actually requires in order to be an expert and also if YouTube wasn't so damn impersonal. I'm a certified trainer, genuinely, and I think I can give good advice, but you'll never see me give it out online without the caveat that I'm not an expert and I have no intention of profiting from peddling my advice to you. I'll let you know what I think, and what works best for myself and the people I do train, but I also know that the best advice I can give you is to look at as many sources of information as possible and find out what works best for your body type. Experiment, but do so wisely. Relying too much on a single source and taking a single source as gospel is the worst thing you could do. I get the feeling people tend to look at too many "fitness experts" and "YouTube personalities" this way. I'm not saying or claiming this about you, batman, it's just my general feelings on the topic generally.

^Exactly that last thing you said, look at many sources and your own body type. I watch people in the gym or videos all the time who I think have good form, or who look like they've been working out their entire life, or people who have no idea what they are doing and I think all of that helps me figure out what is right and wrong.

Alright, sure, all of that is valid, but I don't buy anything from these guys and don't bother with any channels that get into supplements. Neither Alan Thrall nor Omar Isuf do much at all with supplements I don't think, and in any case never talk about them. They seem pretty humble, never really claiming to be experts, always reminding viewers about how things differ from person to person and such, the value of in-person training. Mostly they just try to offer form guides, show their own training sessions, offer advice about the psychological part of lifting and how they approach it, etc.

I *have* seen some other channels (can't even really remember the names of these people at the moment) that seemed much more...dubious. Basically big looking dudes doing mostly talking head videos and very little in the way of showing their own training, or form guide videos, or whatever. Mostly just showing food-related stuff, talking about supplements, either discussing juicing or else kind of overly obsessed with pointing out that they're "natty" while this other guy is not and generally getting really caught up in that debate...I dunno, that kind of content is not really for me.

I don't really obsessively watch this stuff, either, but do keep up with a couple of channels and seek out various form guides (not remotely limiting myself to just those two guys, either) whenever I'm worried about form or performance on any particular lift. So, I like to think I'm a fairly good judge of how I consume this kind of content, even if I am pretty new to lifting weights. But I reckon not everyone is.

Most of the bigger Youtube channels care more about clicks, and you are right to avoid those certain dubious characters. Derigin kind of got the point, and I mentioned this in the thread ages ago: in the world of fitness, you can find a proponent/opponent to just about every approach out there, with all manner of gradation in between. Because of this it is an endless sea of scams of all color: supplement scams (most are, stick to the basics), scamming in the way of a walking pharmacy trying to teach you protocol that will not work for you because you aren't on his drug stack (this applies to most YT fitness peeps), some of these larger training protocols that have become so popular lately being broad to a fault, it's just a whole big fucking mess, amplified by the insecure nature of those who partake in this hobby at any serious level. I help kids out on the Bodybuilding.com forums, and it's just the same questions every day, people saying they tried Stronglifts for example, but only got fat, not realizing that an aesthetic physique is not the point of that protocol, only strength gains. I know it sounds cliche, but you really have to do what works best for you, and not get tugged in every direction all at once. This is why I try to steer people away from the drama-ridden, clickbait realm of Youtube. Now, I don't expect everybody to listen to me, hell very few here actually seem to in the first place, but I promise that my advice comes from experience, something derigin and a handful of others here share. So comments like this: can fuck right off.

Yep, that's about the long and short of it. Silly decry.

I got into lifting in the first place from Mike Chang home workout videos so...

Yeah, I'll spare you all my oft-overbearing passion on the subject from now on. Clearly most of it isn't getting through.

I have to be honest with you guys, I kind of suck at squats. I can deadlift 375lbs for a 4x4 no problem, but on a good day I'd struggle with 275 on squats for the same rep scheme. I've been doing a lot of front squats and maybe I just need to be more patient, but I've just been getting better at front squats and haven't seen it translate to my normal squats yet. Any suggestions?

I dunno much about front squats since I never do them, but just from watching other people do them it just seems like such a different concept even though they're both squats. Just how the weight sits over your body has to have a huge impact on which of your muscles are dominant in the lift, I'd wager. So maybe doing front squats is beneficial, but not as beneficial as actually doing lots of back squats?

I pretty much only do low bar, and while you're still ahead of me a little I've comfortably gotten to pretty similar numbers just by doing low bar squats 3x week adding 2.5kg each session. Still haven't missed a squat rep.

I only squat once per week, maybe I need to up the frequency (I also do lowbar). Also, maybe I should back off a bit and work my way back up since I've hit a wall pretty hard. It seems whenever I try to add weight my squats turn into good mornings. It's really frustrating, I can see that my legs have gotten more muscular but my squats still won't budge. If it keeps going this way, soon my bench will catch up with my squat .

Do legs twice a week, but only squat on one of the days. Do Bulgarian split squats as your main/first lift on non barbell squat day. Those Bulgarian squats don't look that difficult, but they are a killer. Maybe do some RDLs, leg press/extension/curls too. Mixing things up and taking a break from the same lifts every time always seems to help me.

Yeah, our typical routine for legs is back squats, front squats, bulgarian split squats (not today, but we should do them more regularly), quad extensions, leg curls, hip/ad extensions and calf raises.

We leave deadlifts and RDLs for another day.

Next time we squat, dude, I think I'll lend you my squat shoes. See if they make any difference in the way you squat.

Squat...... shoes......... NERD!

Oh yeah I used to think squat shoes were horseshit until I watched a couple of really good videos showing profiles of people with and without them. I don't think I need them but we'll see once the weight starts going up. I don't think everyone needs them, not by a long shot, but for certain body geometries I think they can make a big difference with your form.

I'm not buying special shoes even if it would help my squat, I'm almost happy with my body now and all I really go to the gym for is maintenence. My squat and deadlift is abysmal compared to, well anybody. But I don't really care.

Heh, I don't think you really need them. I've just bothered buying a pair, and I've been lifting for over a decade. I still need to get a good pair of knee sleeves. Squat shoes are great for helping, but they don't compensate for learning proper form without them. Same with the use of a belt, knee sleeves, wrist guards, and other gear that is used to provide supplementary support during resistance exercises.

^I was just about to post this, but saw your post about using a belt, wrist guards and knee sleeves. I don't use any of that, but I think I probably should. I have tweaked my wrists a few times and it can linger for months, never lifted with a belt but I'm sure it's a lot safer for your lower back. Do you feel they are essential?



Sound pretty good, I need to start doing front squats as well, but I'm not a huge fan of the position it puts your wrists and elbows in... Need to get some straps.

Own it bro! haha, I don't push it too hard either, I've been squatting comfortably around 250 for months. I've been taking more rest days this past month and toning down my volume and I've gotten way stronger and noticeably bigger... by not working out as hard/much.

Arnold and various other bodybuilders just squatted without shoes.

Sure, but Arnold also squatted with his heels raised on a piece of wood, which is the same effect.

I got to 330lbs squats or so without a belt or shoes (barefoot). This was in December. I squat 3 times a week (every lift workout). At the time I'd only been lifting again for 3 months and in this cycle destroyed my 1 rep max of 290lbs. However, I got to a point where my hips were hurting every workout, even after deloading at weights where I didn't have pain before, and it got so bad I had to do something about it. Until today I hadn't regular squatted in 3ish weeks. I've been doing box squats in the 60-70% range for weights, with an emphasis on form, stretching out the hips, widening my stance, and I got some proper shoes for lifting with a raised heel (via risto sports). So I hadn't even done squatting above 200lbs in almost a whole month and today I did 300lbs easy. My routine is 5x5, nothing crazy or complex. Real basic stuff. To me form is crucial, a raised heel helps me, and box squats are pivotal. From everything that I can tell front squats are great and have athletic carry over, but the best squatters in the world don't do them. They do box squats and that really piqued my interest and from what I can see, I've gotten an immediate impact. I don't think I need a belt yet, as I don't feel like I'm lifting anything heavy yet. That being said, I'd probably use them if they weren't $100 or more lol

Been having alot of fun with squats+behind the neck presses lately. Since I do legs and shoulders on the same day, I've been ending each workout with 30min to an hour of 3 rep sets with around 75% of my OHP 1RM.

Don't bench press a lot of weight when you're by yourself and don't have a spotter. If you are tired from bench and by yourself use a chest press machine or smith machine. Pretty simple.

I'm finally getting back to lifting weights after breaking my wrist. I got the cast off Monday, my wrist is still a bit sore, so I'm wearing a brace while lifting and taking it easily weight wise. I haven't lost any mass, hopefully it's the same as far as strength goes.

So I resumed working out a month ago. Mostly lots of cardio and HIIT. I'm also trying to control my diet but also have a good protein intake. What's your take on grilled chicken? How often do you have it? I read that it's good for weight loss.