If you are an athlete, it is only a matter of time until you experience some type of foot pain.  Every year at the Arnold, out of the over 20,000 competitors, the number one injury we attend to is related to the foot and ankle.  Most of these are chronic problems that exacerbate during competition and training.  There are some simple steps that any athlete can take to remove foot pain.  I encourage you to stop walking or limping around on the problem, stop taking drugs to just mask the pain, make an attempt to learn about the foot and what you can do to fix it.

(more…)

Anybody who has been bodybuilding for a while knows the importance that joints have in ones ability to keep training hard. If joints are not operating at their peak, the ability to lift heavy weights and perform certain bodybuilding exercises becomes limited. For instance, for an exercise like the bench press you need healthy shoulders, elbows and wrists. If any of these becomes badly damaged, then there goes your ability to bench press and the quality of your upper body workouts suffers as well. 

Why Do Joint Injuries Occur?

(more…)

I began my serious weight training and education at R&J Health Studio in Brooklyn.  R&J was made famous by all the incredible bodybuilders who called R&J home, including my good friends Dennis Tinerino, Jerry Brainum and Lou Ferrigno.  Scenes from the movie Pumping Iron were filmed there documenting Lou’s preparations for his clash with Arnold in Pretoria South Africa.  This was the golden age of bodybuilding and what attracted me to this hard core dungeon of a gym.  Several years after joining, I ended up buying R&J.

Gyms like R&J were the laboratories for our current fitness revolution.  Even though many don’t realize it, the bodybuilding community has been leading the pack with regards to developments in the wellness, weight loss, and fitness arenas since the beginning.  If you want to know what the next diet frenzy will be, just look at what the bodybuilders are doing today.  If you are an avid reader of the Labrada Nutrition site you know all this! (more…)

Eat raw and get better results with recovery?

Trainers and Athletes ask me all the time how to get an edge on training.  The majority of current clinical research is mainly geared towards recovery.  They are all are millions of ways to exercise, but fewer and fewer ways to correctly recover.  There is only so much time in a day and only so many meals to allow your body to recover from the physical stress of training.  Millions of supplements are marketed (most incorrectly) with their single directive being geared at producing a quicker recovery.  There is something that you can do that is much more productive and simple.  Learn to eat foods and are most raw and natural state. (more…)

Soreness is a normal part of the recovery process that starts once you finish your bodybuilding workouts.

There are several degrees of soreness that we need to be aware of:

(more…)

You don’t grow in the gym!  Have you ever heard that?  It is very true and you need to change your entire thinking process about fitness if you did not know that fact.  Not being able to get to bed and sleep is a major problem that many athletes have to learn to overcome.  Most of you reading this are thinking that there is some secret special workout that you need to help you recover and grow big.  The truth is, the biggest athletes are the ones who recover the fastest.  Learning to get the best night and sleep you can is the premiere thing that you can do to help you get fit faster.  Missing sleep is worse than missing training. (more…)