In this article I’m going to try to please the male readers, female readers, and trainers. If you’re simply looking for a good butt workout then skip down to the bottom of this article. But if you want some substance and you really want to understand the glutes, then you should probably read the entire article.

Ladies

Okay ladies, you say you want a nice butt. You like to talk about how you’re going to get your butt into top shape. You get envious when you see a woman with a perfect butt prancing around. Well here’s your opportunity! I’m going to give you the ultimate program to improve the appearance of your butt. Best of all, it’s free!

The World’s Best or Worst Relationship Advice Ever…

I’ve trained enough women in my time as a personal trainer to know that most of them would do just about anything to get their man to pay more attention to them. I’m far from a relationship expert but here’s one thing that women could stand to learn about men. We are all very shallow. Have you ever witnessed the crap that an attractive woman with a perfect booty can get away with? She can tell stupid jokes and every guy will laugh. She can nag at her boyfriend and he’ll cave in and comply with her every demand. She’ll get job opportunities that she doesn’t deserve. In essence, she can get away with practically murder. Why do guys act like this? Because the mere thought of getting to see her naked turns us into robots!

Want to know the single best thing you can do to get your man’s attention? Work overtime on your booty! I’m not saying it’s right, I’m just saying it’s a fact of life. Even women have a hard time keeping their eyes off of a woman with a perfect booty even if they have no lesbian tendencies! It’s almost hypnotic. As a matter of fact, I bet this article alone would cause most men’s’ testosterone levels to rise 30% just from looking at the pictures. Sexual attraction is biochemical; don’t ever underestimate the role of hormones when dealing with relationships.

I’ve been enthralled by PAP ever since I heard about legendary Canadian Sprinter Ben Johnson squatting 600 lbs for 3 reps ten-minutes prior to his infamous 1988 Olympic 9.79-second world-record performance in the 100-meter sprint. Although Ben’s gold medal was later stripped due to a positive test result for performance enhancing substances (Stanozolol), and despite the fact that Johnson’s coach Charlie Francis stated that the incident was fictitious and never actually occurred, the story still peaked my interest. More stories involving PAP have surfaced from time to time in the Strength & Conditioning industry. For instance, researchers Gillich and Schmidtbliecher reported that a 1995 bobsledding team used MVC’s prior to competition to elicit PAP and subsequently won the world championship. As a final example, strength coach Tony Gentilcore recently utilized PAP to leap onto the stage at an Alicia Keys concert prior to his arrest.

The first time I recall learning about PAP was when Charles Poliquin first started writing about it on T-Nation. Poliquin states that he first heard about PAP’s application to weight training (The 1-6 Principle) at a 1991 NSCA convention in San Diego from U.S. Weightlifting coach Dragomir Cioroslan. However, Poliquin mentions that it was first discussed in strength training circles in the early 1980’s after German strength physiologist Dietmar Schmidtbleicher’s work was translated to English. Other sources state that Yuri Verhkoshansky first introduced PAP to around forty U.S. and Canadian strength coaches in the summer of 1986 at the Moscow Institute of Sport. Regardless of where the principle originated, PAP has some very intriguing applications to sport training.

In this article, I’m going to first shed some light on PAP and then offer some suggestions as to how it can be appropriately programmed into your training.

What is PAP? Is it Different from Complex or Contrast Training?

The barbell is and always will be the most effective training tool for total fitness. Basic barbell training is used by the biggest, strongest, fastest, most powerful, and most conditioned athletes on the planet. It works for them and it will work for you. Barbells have been used in Europe since 1880 and in America since the turn of the 20th century when Milo Barbell Company first started manufacturing them. The barbell is the best overall tool for achieving impressive levels of hypertrophy, strength, speed, power, and conditioning. The barbell is also very useful for producing clean movement patterns during high velocity sports movement. Dumbbells, elastic bands, JC bands, kettlebells, sleds, chains, weighted vests, cable columns, slideboards, Valslides, stability balls, Bosu balls, TRX systems, blast straps, towing chords, sandbags, clubbells, medicine balls, battle ropes, kegs, logs, tires, unique bars, other odd objects, and machines are excellent training tools that all take a back seat to the barbell in terms of total body fitness production.

In the past several months I’ve seen so many bad hip thrust videos on Youtube that it occurred to me that I’ve never filmed a hip thrust instructional video.

In case you didn’t know, in September of last year I started writing about the hip thrust and incorporating the exercise into articles for various strength training websites. The exercise has already become very popular around the world. I receive multiple emails daily from individuals who have begun using hip thrusts and have seen excellent results in terms of better butts, faster sprints, and improved deadlift strength.

We often hear in the industry that one should perform a rep as explosively as possible on each repetition. This methodology has been recommended by authors who write articles for the purposes of both hypertrophy and sport-specific training.

The theory is that by maximizing “explosiveness” one will fully activate the high-threshold motor units (HTMU’s) which will lead to the largest rates of hypertrophy and rate of force development (RFD).

In truth, there’s not much evidence that proves that explosive lifting improves sport performance over controlled lifting. In fact, Bruce-Low and Smith wrote an entire paper on this topic. I highly recommend you check it out so I’ll provide you with a link to the article.

Furthermore, the findings of Hay et al., who measured joint torque in three males while performing biceps curls, also seem to support this view. Hay et al. found that with short duration lifts (< 2 s) very little joint torque was required to move the weight through most of the range of motion (ROM), as after the beginning of the movement the weight continued to move under its own momentum. Therefore, fast movements do not provide as much muscle tension as slow movements through most of the ROM, suggesting that faster repetitions, such as those performed with ‘explo

Most people know that in a previous life I taught high school Mathematics and Science for six years in the Scottsdale Unified School District, so it goes without saying that I’m a huge fan of research and science. However, it often takes researchers around a decade or so to “catch up” to the most brilliant trainers and practitioners.

Case in point: My friend Martin Rooney has been preaching the benefits of barefoot training for ten years now! Ever since the book Born to Run came out last year it incited a barefoot-training supernova. Now researchers are finally beginning to take a closer look at some of Martin’s “theories” about training and running sans shoes. If you had the foresight to implement Martin’s advice years ago and had your athletes or clients perform their warm-ups barefoot, you could have been ten years “ahead of the curve.”