Ronnie Coleman's Worst Bodybuilding Advice

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Here’s everything on tap for today:

• Ronnie Coleman’s best (and worst) bodybuilding tips

• 15 essential exercises for stronger hamstrings

• The top adjustable dumbbells for your home gym

Bodybuilding

The King’s Proclamation

Whether you’re watching Ronnie Coleman pose on stage at an old-school Mr. Olympia show or marveling over his famous 800-pound squat video on YouTube, one thing is clear: The dude knows his stuff when it comes to building muscle.

Coleman has been sought out for advice on bodybuilding for decades now, and in the article below, we’ve rounded up three of his best pointers for anyone looking to get big. (And, well, since nobody is technically perfect, we’ve also included three pieces of advice that mere mortals should ignore).

“The King” lived on the absolute far right of the Bell curve, in a land inhabited by few other humans in the history of our species, but his advice is still valuable if you know how to interpret it. And that’s the key here — you have to accept that Ron was just built differently, so much of his advice doesn’t really connect with the rest of us.

His advice on using correct form and having the largest possible range of motion is always going to be en vogue, even if Coleman’s dietary advice might be best avoided by lifters who aren’t at the absolute pinnacle of human achievement. If these bits of knowledge worked to build one of the most iconic physiques in history, odds are they can help you out as well.

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Exercise Tips

Restring the Hams

Hamstrings aren’t always the sexiest things to train. Harder to visualize in a tight pair of jeans than a thick pair of quads, these muscles are nonetheless the drivers for putting more weight on your squat and deadlift.

The 15 hamstring exercises we're talking about below will help guide you to the path of a rockin’ pair of posterior leg muscles.

In this list, we go deep on the lying hamstring curl, a seemingly innocuous exercise that can stretch and flex your muscles to one of the most intense pumps you’ve ever felt. Moving up in the world, we also included Nordic hamstring curls and glute ham raises, both of which are guaranteed to boost your size and strength.

Embrace your new hamstring overlords and find joy in these sensations; a new world of hammy development is waiting just behind these semi-closed doors.

Home Gym Equipment

Adjust Your DB Attitude

Home gyms are awesome, but not having space for every toy that a large, megalithic commercial gym offers can leave you feeling cramped and inadequate.

Adjustable dumbbells solve part of this problem by taking up a fraction of the floor space of a huge dumbbell rack while providing you with all the modularity and versatility the equipment has to offer. These nine products, as reviewed by BarBend’s resident experts, are the best of the best in the emerging market of adjustable dumbbells. 

As with their static, non-adjustable cousins, the price of each set will vary based on the amount of weight contained in each (there is something very satisfying about buying both produce and fitness equipment based on mass).

If you are in the market for some new dumbbells but are having trouble laying out your workout space while trying to make sure you still have enough room to store your car and several boxes of Christmas ornaments, these adjustable dumbbells offer the perfect solution to your lifting needs.

Everything Else

Deck Builder

• The infamous pec deck isn’t just used for the development of the muscles bearing its name. If you’ve never climbed on the pec fly the wrong way, you’re missing out on one of the best rear delt exercises around.

• The Chinese Olympic Weightlifting team has been an international force to be reckoned with for decades, partly because of their rigorous cultivation of youth athletes (similar to how AAU is for basketball in America). Check out this look behind the curtain at how the nation develops elite weightlifters.

• One of the hardest questions philosophers face is the metaphysical query, “If you do CrossFit and have an adorable pet, which do you post to social media first?” These four-legged friends of elite fitness competitors prove it’s not a case of just one or the other.