Successful bodybuilding and any other type of weight training are among the most satisfying activities. Transforming your body is thrilling. But done improperly, training will damage your body. Training-related injuries are universal.
The same basic pool of exercises applies whether you’re a bodybuilder, fitness enthusiast, strength trainee, or powerlifter. But to benefit from training you must be able to work out consistently and progressively. You can’t do this if you repeatedly suffer from injuries. Abuse yourself with incorrect exercise technique for long enough and you’ll be frustrated with one injury after another, and eventually do so much damage that you’ll put an end to your days of hard training.
But don’t be discouraged. Take comfort from knowing that, properly done, weight training is safe and super effective.
Correct exercise technique is needed not just to avoid training injuries. It’s one of the requirements for stimulating the fastest rate of muscular development and strength gains.
This book will teach you the conservative forms of the most productive exercises. Without a conservative approach you’ll be racked with so many injuries that you’ll be unable to train consistently enough to achieve your goals. A few people have unusually tough bodies and are able to get away with incorrect exercise technique. But for each trainee who does get away with incorrect technique there are hundreds who don’t.
Some people’s advice for how to deal with exercises that are irritating is to drop poundage and do much higher reps. While increasing rep count and reducing poundage is sometimes desirable, it’s usually a mere salve because the root of the problem—incorrect exercise technique—has not been corrected. If flawed technique is used, once the poundages are built up and the training becomes intensive, the problem that drove you to using high reps will resurface.
The education needed to write this book came from several sources. My own training experiences over many years make up only a part of the education. The publishing and editing of HARDGAINER magazine for 15 years gave me a deep insight into training. The education was bolstered by feedback from readers of my books, a lot of writing for newsstand bodybuilding magazines, answering countless questions, providing many hours of hands-on coaching, and extensive studying of training in general.
This book can save you years if not decades of wasted training. You can learn a wealth of useful information from just a few days of serious study. You no longer have to learn the hard way what constitutes correct exercise technique and its central importance in your training.
Don’t assume that, because you’ve been performing an exercise for a long time, you know its proper technique. Please study all of this book no matter how experienced you are.
Please don’t treat this book as a one-time read. There’s far more information in it than can be absorbed from a single reading. Repeatedly refer to the book.
This book is your constant reference on exercise technique. But it doesn’t cover program design. That’s covered in my other books.
To your success,
Stuart McRobert
When I wrote BUILD MUSCLE, LOSE FAT, LOOK GREAT, I wanted to produce a complete book on exercise and physique transformation, so it had to include exercise technique. I took most of the text from the second edition of THE INSIDER’S TELL-ALL HANDBOOK ON WEIGHT-TRAINING TECHNIQUE, revised it and added many exercises, and produced Chapter 12 of BUILD MUSCLE. Then I took INSIDER’S out of print.
But then, in response to demand once again for a book on exercise technique alone, I took Chapter 12 from BUILD MUSCLE, LOSE FAT, LOOK GREAT, added some supplementary exercises and other additional material, and produced what you have here—the third edition of INSIDER’S.
But BUILD MUSCLE, LOSE FAT, LOOK GREAT includes about 400 pages on topics other than exercise technique.