Flick's Fitness Tips

Making the commitment to start going to the gym can be exciting, but it can also be very intimidating. On one hand, you're excited to make a positive change in your life, but on the other, you aren't sure what to expect. I know that when I first started out, I thought people would judge me for my lack of knowledge of where things were and how scrawny I was at the time. Eventually, I got over that fear, and I'm here to tell you how to do it too.  1. Shower Before the Gym This might be an odd concept, but one thing that really helps me feel good at the gym is feeling clean. This includes showering, doing your hair and doing makeup if applicable. People probably won't notice the effort you put in, but you'll feel much better walking in and not immediately feeling gross. I like to think "We look good, we feel good, we lift good." 2. Wear What Makes You Feel Good When going to a gym, you'll notice there isn't a standard dress code. Lots of people will w

In part one of my leg day series, we talked about quads and calves. We mentioned that it was a good idea to split up leg day into at least two different days. This was because the quads consist of a group of muscles, and that groups of muscles working together at the same time will fatigue the body much faster due to the amount of oxygen it needs. Today, we'll talk about the other side of the leg day coin - glutes and hamstrings.  Anatomy of the Hamstrings The hamstrings consist of three muscles: the biceps femoris, the semimembranosus, and the semitendinosus. These muscles form a muscle group and it is very hard to isolate each muscle during a workout. Similar to the quads, since these muscles work together during a lift, they require much more oxygen and will thus lead to fatigue much faster than other muscles. There are two ways you can work your hamstrings: in a lengthened position and a shorted position. The Lengthened Position Targeting the hamstrings in a lengthened position

There's a pretty big stereotype around "gym bros" not wanting to work out their legs. Once upon a time, I was one of those people. I began my weightlifting career around people who didn't work out their legs, and it was something I was never educated on. During my freshman year of college, I had trouble finding time to work out, so I would often not work my legs out for weeks at a time. Well, I'm here to tell you: DON'T DO THAT. Leg day is the most rewarding workout you can have, if you put in the proper effort.  Before I discuss my favorite leg day workouts, I'd like to mention how I split up my leg days, and how this two-part series will work. On one day, I target my quads and calves, and the next leg day I target my glutes and hamstrings. There are days where I only do two workouts, because some exercises are so intense that either a) I can't put forth enough effort on the following exercises or b) I tap out. The leg muscles often don't work ind

The first two years of my weightlifting career, I neglected to do much shoulder work. I was hyper-fixated on achieving a 225lb bench press at the time and didn't care about much else. However, I had the physique where I could bench a lot of weight, but it didn't look like I could bench a lot of weight. I didn't think I had a well-rounded physique, so I decided to incorporate a workout dedicated to shoulders each week. Today, I feel more confident in my shoulders than any other muscle group, and this is how I went about it: Anatomy of the Shoulder The shoulder is a complex group of muscles that attach to various portions of both the pectoral and spinal regions (Jones 2023). When you work out your chest, you're usually using a shoulder muscle, and when you're working out your back, you're also usually working out a shoulder muscle. To make it as simple as possible, let's only consider the deltoid. The deltoid is comprised of three muscles: the front deltoid, t

Before I started going to a gym, I used my dad's weight set in our basement. Like any typical boy, I would grab the dumbbells and start curling them. When I was done curling them, I would do sit ups. When I was done with sit ups, I would do more curls. As a teenager, I had assumed that's all you needed to do in order to get ripped -- have big arms and rock-hard abs. Strangely enough, though, my arms never grew. After five years of lifting, I have some tips that have helped me grow them. The Biceps The bicep is the smaller of the two main muscles that comprises your upper arm. Within the biceps are two "heads", the long head and the short head. Underneath the biceps is the brachialis. Thus, when we are working out, we need to target all three: the long head, the short head, and the brachialis.  The Long Head The long head of the bicep is on the OUTER part of the bicep. In order to work this out, it helps to have a WIDE grip on something.  Incline Dumbbell Curl. I lik

I first began weightlifting because it was required to do Track & Field at my high school. We would alternate every other day between Upper Body and Lower Body days. Upper Body mainly consisted of chest and shoulder workouts, and Lower Body days were spent doing squats and deadlifts. I got much stronger doing these lifts daily, and I became much more confident in myself due to the muscle I was putting on. However, over time I began to develop a hunch when I walked. I had been working out my chest and shoulders so much that my back wasn't able to carry myself around! Working out your back is incredibly important for your long-term health, but it can be difficult to know where to start. This blog post will detail my thought process for training my back.  Anatomy of the Back The back can be an incredibly complex muscle group to look at, and to be honest, it IS an incredibly complex muscle group to look at. However, the back is an amazing muscle group for two reasons: it heals incr