Ok first off, welcome to adarq.org! This site's purpose, is to create a motivated "gym-like" experience for people interested in improving their athletic performance. We all support each other on this site, and each member's progress fuels the site & it's members. No matter the sport or goal (fat loss, basketball, tennis, fight sports, vertical jump, sprinting, football, futbol, bodybuilding, track & field, oly weightlifting, volleyball, etc), this site WILL help you.

Ok, so where do you start? First off, register an account, then tell us a little about you in the introduce yourself thread. With an account, you can now post questions, achievements, your training, and all types of other info on the forum.

Before going on, I want to briefly discuss a few topics related to this site, so you get an idea of where adarq.org is coming from. This site has plenty of members, many of which have different goals. Achieving goals takes dedication, consistency, intensity, passion, and intelligent training. Short term progress (quick gains) can happen rather quickly, but this does not happen forever, in fact, achieving long term peak performance is a long - slow process. Becoming more powerful (jumping higher, sprinting faster) requires that you jump & sprint, get stronger in the weight room (squat, lunge, calf raise, ghr, pullups, dips, core), become stronger in reactive movements, maintain/improve fitness levels, improving body composition (more lean mass, less fat), and pay attention to fatigue levels (knowing how training is effecting you in the short term, positively and negatively). Improving sport skill simply requires that you spend time actually practicing various aspects of your sport, working on skills submaximally to improve technique and then maximally (game-like intensity) to improve technique specific to competition situations. Reducing fat requires a overall negative weekly caloric intake, clean diet, moderate to high protein intake, maintenance weightlifting to maintain muscle mass, and daily activity such as various forms of cardio or sport. Gaining muscle requires a high protein intake, overall positive weekly caloric intake, and progress in the weight room using considerable volume. Improving flexibility requires consistency before & after training sessions; utilizing dynamic warmups to improve flexibility for the training session, and utilizing static stretching (2-3 sets of ~30s holds, using relaxed breathing, not forcing range of motion) after the training sessions. Staying healthy requires that you know your limits, listen to your body, perform proper warmups and cooldowns, perform PREHAB for problem/at risk muscles/joints/etc, proper nutrition, progress safely with exercises, and make sure form is correct on every exercise. Bottom line, if you stick to the basics, and approach these basic concepts with dedication, consistency, intensity, passion, and intelligence, you will get to where you want to be; it's a long hard process, overcomplicating it is just a way to muddy the waters - making it hard to see whether you're really progressing or not (overcomplication usually leads to failure).

Ok, so what's the first step? All successful transformations have one very important thing in common: their is a detailed training journal, detailing the entire process. Maintaining a journal will allow you to get help from others, but more importantly, it will give you better insight into your own training; showing you when and how progress (or lack there of) occurred. So, to get started, create a journal in the progress journals section. If you need help understanding how to create a journal, check this blog post: making progress: keeping a journal. If you don't need help creating a journal, at least fill out this small questionnaire so that everyone can have a better idea of where you are at athletically, nutritionally, training history, injury history, etc. If you start a journal and don't maintain it for a month or so, it'll end up in the journal graveyard, this is our way of saying, come back when motivated & dedicated

For more in-house training information regarding concepts used on this site, check out the performance blog. Specifically, some of the exercises mentioned on this site have names you may be unfamiliar with, so please check out the exercise index.

If you would like to chat live with us, then use this application: live chat. Beware, it can get pretty hectic on IRC!

Finally, here's some information about myself, so you can get an example of what I do, why I train, how I train, and what I'm about.

A special thanks to all of the members already on this site who are training very hard.

There will be many new features, projects, & footage coming to this site, so sign up, stay tuned, and participate! Enjoy the site.

- Andrew Darqui