18 Ways to Dominate Your Goals in 2018

What are you currently doing for your abs? A few finishing sets at the end of your workout? One or two exercises twice a week? The occasional high-rep set? That’s cute. There’s a reason Ryan Terry looks better in boardshorts than you. Part of it is the ruthless, high-volume routine he has adopted to develop the cover-worthy abs you see here.

“I train them twice a week but dedicate my whole hour’s session to my abs,” he says. Let that sink in for a minute. In a world gone Tabata, Ryan Terry spends a full freakin’ hour training his middle…twice a week.

“In the early days, I used to train my abs every single day but quickly learned, with a bit more education, that this was a little excessive and in fact was counteractive, as it meant that I was not giving the muscle tissue enough time to repair between each session,” Terry says.

Get his 6-pack workout here. 

If you’ve had it beat into your brain that you must venture into failure-ville because that’s where the “gainz” are, you’ve been led astray. “Going to failure isn’t necessary and may do more harm than good,” says powerlifter and strength coach Greg Nuckols of strongerbyscience.com.

Science backs up Nuckols’ claim. A recent study in the European Journal of Applied Physiology discovered that it took longer to recover from a training session when going to failure versus staying away from failure but still performing the same training volume. Meanwhile, a study in the Journal of Strength & Conditioning Research found that training all the way to failure wasn’t necessary to maximize muscle growth.

A better bet is to keep absolute muscle failure to the final set of your main mass-building moves in order to avoid overtraining and experience long-term muscle gains. Or gainz.

If you’re not already using kettlebells in your training, you’re missing out. “The kettlebell is one of the most effective tools to help develop a lean, muscular physique,” says strength and speed guru John Cissik, M.S., C.S.C.S. (cissik.com/blog).

There are many reasons to incorporate the kettlebell into your conditioning. First, it uses nearly every muscle in the body while emphasizing the muscles of the core, glutes, and hamstrings. Second, it burns a lot of calories because it’s a total-body exercise, performed rhythmically, with weights. Third, it’ll improve your aerobic fitness.

Cissik’s favorite kettlebell workout? “Jump rope for 60 seconds, then do kettlebell swings for 60 seconds, then do 60 seconds of planks. Repeat the circuit six times.”

You already know that you should be prepping a lot of your food in advance for the week ahead in order to eat clean and save cash. The problem is, consuming the same lunch every day can make you feel as if you’re dining in the Shawshank State Penitentiary. That’s why you’ve got to get creative. “Let’s say you make a week’s worth of barbecue chicken in a slow cooker over the weekend,” says Toby Amidor, M.S., R.D., author of The Healthy Meal Prep Cookbook. “During the week, you can use it over a salad, in a wrap, on a pizza, or to top sweet potatoes.” The same goes for chili, says Amidor: Prep it on Sunday and use it all week—in a quesadilla, over a salad, or with a dollop of Greek yogurt.

Prepping your meals in advance is a smart move. But you should be preportioning them, too. In other words, divide your meals into containers ahead of time so you never face a fridge full of huge portions. “This will help you avoid overeating, which is the biggest obstacle to eating healthy,” Amidor says. Her container of choice? Mason jars. “I especially love them for salads and trail mixes. You can grab them and go, and you don’t have to worry that they’ll spill.”

It’s not just what you eat that’s important to carving a six-pack. It’s also when you eat it. A study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition showed that people who ate a big chunk of their calories closer to bedtime were more likely to be chubby. “It’s becoming clearer that consuming more of your calories earlier in the day promotes a leaner physique,” says Matthew Kadey, M.S., R.D., author of Rocket Fuel: Power-Packed Food for Sports + Adventure. Start following this sound dietary advice: Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper.

We love BCAA pills and powders as much as the next guy, but getting your protein via food may be your best bet for a physique worth gawking at. “More and more research is supporting the idea that food-based sources are more beneficial for muscle recovery and muscle protein synthesis,” says Dana Angelo White, M.S., R.D. (danawhitenutrition.com). “Seek out sources like chicken, cottage cheese, eggs, Greek yogurt, salmon, and beans. Make these foods constant fixtures in pre- and post-workout fueling.”

You already train hard. Now it’s time to put the same effort into your recovery. “Recovery is just as important as training,” says Anthony J. Yeung, C.S.C.S., creator of groombuilder.com. He recommends taking time every day to stretch, meditate, and do breathing exercises to avoid running your body into the ground. Also, you should be doing 30 to 40 minutes of aerobic cardio like running, cycling, indoor rowing, or hiking twice a week. “The better your aerobic conditioning,” Yeung says, “the better your recovery.”

Here’s a resolution for you: “This year I’ll actually foam-roll.” Because you really should be using that damn thing. A recent study in the Journal of Strength & Conditioning Research showed that foam rolling improves joint range of motion and speeds recovery without compromising strength. So make it a habit to spend 10 to 15 minutes foam rolling your muscles after a workout or before bed. It will increase blood flow and turn on your parasympathetic nervous system to help your body unwind and recover. It might even help you fall asleep.

It’s a fairly simple concept, going back to the Pumping Iron days and even earlier: To increase your muscle’s time under tension (and improve muscle growth), slow down the lowering portion of your lifts. “Decrease the load and focus on slow eccentric phases to increase time under tension, improve your control, and make muscles work harder,” says Lee Boyce, C.P.T. (leeboycetraining.com). As a general rule of thumb, Boyce recommends the following plan for movements like the bench press, squat, leg press, and pushup: three to four seconds down, a second pause at the bottom, then explode up

Instead of rifling through Tinder profiles till the wee hours, hit your pillow and get some much-needed shut-eye. For optimum results, aim for seven to nine hours of sleep per night. Anything less impedes your ability to grow muscle and burn fat. This is because bad sleep patterns wreak havoc on two crucial hormones: growth hormone and testosterone. But that’s not all.

“Less sleep leads to low leptin, which leads to eating more food,” says trainer Walter Norton Jr. (ipfitness.com), who helped Ben Affeck pack on his Batman muscle. “Also, sleep deprivation leads to high levels of ghrelin, which increases hunger and unplanned food choices.” Bottom line: The less you sleep, the more you eat. And the worse you eat.

In the kitchen, a balanced meal is important. In the gym, a balanced workout is vital, too. As Chris Gray, C.S.C.S., a performance specialist at Ignition APG (ignitionapg.com), points out, the six main movements that humans use on a daily basis are push, pull, squat, hinge, carry, and rotate. Aim to incorporate all these motions in your training week to unlock your best body. Gray recommends this workout, which covers all your movement bases: overhead press (push), bentover row (pull), front squat (squat), Romanian deadlift (hinge), farmer’s carry (carry), and medicine ball twist (rotate).

This year, don’t be afraid to question the norms. Like the norm that says you should do three sets of 12 of every exercise. For movements like the bench, squat, and deadlift, Matt Pudvah, C.S.C.S., head strength coach at the Manchester Athletic Club in Massachusetts (@mattpudvahcscs), recommends doing low-volume, high-intensity work. “By incorporating more set and rep schemes like 8x2s and reducing sets to failure, you will recover more quickly, gain strength much faster, and be in a better place hormonally for any hypertrophy work that follows.”

Similarly, Josh Bryant, M.S., C.S.C.S. (joshstrength.com), recommends this biceps blast: “Take the same weight you’d use for 12 reps. Curl it for three reps, rest 15 seconds, curl it for another three reps, rest another 15 seconds, and repeat this for five straight minutes. You’ll get way more done in less time.”

If you don’t enjoy doing your cardio work, you will look for any reason to skip it. So unless jogging for 45 minutes is your idea of a party, make this the year you add some spice to your cardio sessions, says Pudvah. Ditch the boring treadmill in favor of implements that are a heck of a lot more fun, like sleds, slide boards, medicine balls, and jump rope. Hell, you could even swim or play Ultimate Frisbee. Says Pudvah: “They all work your cardio- vascular system very differently than a treadmill.”

Want a wide back like Terry? Make sure you’re using the wide-grip pulldown. After all, some guy named Arnold once famously said, “Wide grip, wide back.” To take it a step further and really target those upper, outer lats, try this technique recommended by celebrity trainer Alec Penix (@alecthetrainer): Pull the bar forcefully down to your chest, then let it back up and pause for two to three seconds at the midway point before returning the bar to the start position. Do this for four sets, starting at 12 reps and working your way up in weight to eight reps on the last set. Finish things off with a dropset.

Even if you want to be more ripped than Ryan Reynolds in Deadpool, it’s detrimental to go balls-out every day of the week, let alone the year. And Ryan Reynolds’ trainer agrees.

“I’m a believer that we need to scale back a little on intensity, especially when someone is trying to stay lean and hard all year long,” says Don Saladino (donsaladino.com), owner of Drive Health Clubs and fitness whisperer to actors like Reynolds, Scarlett Johansson, and Liev Schreiber. Saladino says constantly pushing the limits of intensity can eventually impede progress and lead to overtraining or injury. “Scaled-down intensity will allow you to recover better and increase the number of times per week you train each body part,” he says. In other words, slow and steady wins the race. Even for Deadpool.

Another tip from Saladino: Embrace probiotics like Greek yogurt, sauerkraut, pickles, tempeh, and kombucha. The reason being: We need our guts working properly in order to fully process and metabolize our food. “Imagine eating six ounces of chicken and only using three ounces because the body can’t absorb it properly,” Saladino says. 

“This is what could happen without probiotics.” The bonus: Probiotics also reduce inflammation, cut down on bloating, and boost your immune system—which means your 2018 gym schedule won’t be impeded by frequent colds and flus.

Don’t have a ton of time on a particular day? Embrace the simple circuit for a fast, effective workout. Here are two favorites of Andy Petranek’s, co-founder of the Whole Life Challenge (wholelifechallenge.com):

• 1) Run 200 yards, then squat 25 times. Complete eight rounds.
• 2) Run for a minute, then do squats for 30 seconds. Complete six rounds.

“It’s the simplest thing, and you can do it anywhere,” Petranek says. “And the options are truly limitless.”