🏋️‍♂️ 10 best bulking exercises to try right now

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Here’s everything fit to print in this edition:

• Dr. Mike Israetel’s 10 favorite exercises for building muscle

• All the best Presidents’ Day sales

• Can North Korea compete at the Paris Olympics?

Muscle Growth

Bulking’s Best

With a PhD in sports physiology and a popular channel on YouTube, Dr. Mike Israetel is one of the go-to sources for muscle-building facts. Recently, he chronicled the 10 most necessary exercises for building muscle — and for anyone looking to put on some mass (a.k.a. everyone on our newsletter list), this is required reading.

In a land of complexity, a basic foundation is king. Included in Dr. Israetel’s 10 exercises are meat-and-potatoes lifts, ranging from high-bar squats and stiff-legged deadlifts to overhead presses and pull-ups. These sorts of exercises slab mass over the whole body to build a muscular base that fancy-pants machines can’t provide.

If you've struggled with exercise selection or just never really know what to do in the gym, read this article.

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Shopping

Hail to the Sales

Even the best budget home gym equipment can get pretty pricey. But that doesn’t mean your workout goals need to fall by the wayside.

Right now, you can shop some of the best Presidents’ Day fitness equipment sales of 2024. We’ve gathered the best deals from some of our favorite fitness brands like REP Fitness, Sole, and Onnit. We’re talking steep discounts on equipment, supplements, saunas, and everything in between. Browse some of our top picks and keep your fitness goals on track (while saving some money, of course).

Olympics

The Latest on North Korean Weightlifting

“This is the first time that all of our athletes have won gold,” says Song Nam Jang, head coach of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s (DPRK or PRK) weightlifting team in an interview provided to BarBend. “We trained more and harder, and we made many world records.” 

Jang is referring to the DPRK’s performance at the recent 2024 Asian Weightlifting Championships, which ran in Tashkent, Uzbekistan from Feb. 3 to 10. The country sent 11 athletes to Asians this year, and 11 of them left as champions.

In the four months since the DPRK returned to international weightlifting competitions (following a hiatus that began in 2019), its women athletes alone have set 12 new world records, and more could come at the upcoming International Weightlifting Federation (IWF) World Cup in April. But the DPRK weightlifting team will not make any appearance at all at the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris. Why? In short, they were given a chance and failed to take it.

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Everything Else

Platform Dominance

• The recent 2024 Sheffield Powerlifting Championships was one of the strongest raw meets in history, and it was dominated by the 69kg women’s division. Check out our full breakdown of these athletes’ epic performances. 

• If you’re tired of having a subpar beach physique, learn to love the StairMaster with one of these workouts designed for all levels.

• Stress management is the most unheralded metric when it comes to hitting your fitness goals. If you're diligently journaling your workouts, nutrition, and sleep but do not monitor your stress, you are missing out on serious gains. Here's how to fix that.