BIGGER the movie! HOLLYWOOD ACKNOWLEDGES THE GYM CULTURE

The film will have a theatrical release through Freestyle Releasing starting October 12

LOS ANGELES (August 28, 2018) - Freestyle Releasing has acquired U.S. theatrical distribution rights to Bee Holder Productions inspiring drama BIGGER, directed by George Gallo and starring Tyler Hoechlin, Aneurin Barnard, Julianne Hough, Victoria Justice, Colton Haynes, Max Martini, Tom Arnold, Steve Guttenberg, Calum Von Moger, DJ Qualls, with Kevin Durand, and Robert Forster. It is the first scripted Hollywood film to chronicle the birth of a fitness movement that gave way to the world-changing bodybuilding and the fitness craze as we know it.

BIGGER tells the story of brothers Joe and Ben Weider who against all odds, launched a movement and created an empire. The George Gallo-directed film is scoring major authenticity points in the bodybuilding world with the inclusion of some of their very own. The coveted role of the young Arnold Schwarzenegger is played by bodybuilding champion Calum Von Moger, known for his striking resemblance of the man regarded as his sport's most influential champion. The role of Arnold's-rival, the late Sergio Oliva is played by his own son Sergio Oliva Jr, while Arash Rahbar, a rising star on today's bodybuilding scene, appears as 1970¹s muscle icon Frank Zane.

Longtime bodybuilding publisher and commentator Dan Solomon, a co-executive producer on the project, makes an appearance as the emcee of the 1970 Mr. Olympia contest, the event that first catapulted Schwarzenegger to the top of the bodybuilding world. Veteran bodybuilding hosts Bob Cicherillo and Tim Wilkins appear in the film as commentators, while physique cover model Steve Cook appears with the movie's leading lady Julianne Hough for a beach scene that will not be forgotten.
"There is far more to this film than one would ever expect, it¹s a rich and layered tale that is a true triumph of the spirit. It is also historic as it is the first mainstream scripted Hollywood film about a culture that simply cannot be ignored. Today the gym is as sacred as any temple of worship to its followers and its time that we acknowledge this!" said Jones. Gallo added, "It's the kind of film that shows that one can achieve anything if you believe in yourself enough and never take NO for an answer."

BIGGER will have its world premiere on September 13 in Las Vegas to coincide with the Mr. Olympia competition, a bodybuilding showcase that was created in 1965 by the Weider Brothers. BIGGER will be in theaters on October 12.

Freestyle Releasing is a full-service theatrical motion picture distribution company purchased in 2015 by Entertainment Studios, that specializes in representing independent companies, major studios, and mini-majors for the purpose of exhibiting their films in a first-class theatrical release. The founder and President of Freestyle Releasing, Mark Borde, is a high regarded and experienced motion picture veteran. The digital distribution unit of Freestyle Releasing, Freestyle Digital Media, is a premiere multi-platform distributor with direct partnerships across all major cable, digital and streaming platforms. Capitalizing on a robust infrastructure, proven track record and a veteran sales team, Freestyle Digital Media is a true home for independent films. For more information, visit: www.freestyledigitalmedia.tv. 
 

The Predators have returned to earth, and they’re ready to hunt. The final trailer for The Predator gives fans their longest look at the alien attackers trying to make a sport out of hunting the human race—and it’s a bloody, action-packed spectacle that director Shane Black has put together.

The cast of the film—including Boyd Holbrook (Logan), Olivia Munn (X-Men: Apocalypse), Sterling K. Brown (This Is Us), and Trevante Rhodes (Moonlight)—look like they’re having a blast, and Black looks like he's upped the ante to a 15 on a scale of 1-to-10 for this flick. While it might not be the classic Arnold Schwarzenegger Predator, this film still looks like it will pack a major punch.

Black has given the script a big dose of dark humor, and while that may be a little jarring for classic Predator fans, Black has shown over the years on films like Iron Man 3, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, and The Nice Guys that he can balance comedy and action as well as anyone in Hollywood.

This film is unleashing some new Predators on Earth, including the “Ultimate Predator,” who seems to also want to hunt his own kind, as well as “Predator Dogs,” which are exactly what you think they are. This movie looks absolutely bonkers—in a good way—and this final trailer shows the bloody action in all its glory.

Take a look:

The Predator will hit theaters on September 14.

Get ready to take a front and center seat at the 2018 Mr. Olympia when you tune in to the LIVE WEBCAST, brought to you by iHerb & MusclePharm, on iHerb.com/Olympia, September 14th & 15th at 10pm ET, 7pm PT, and watch as bodybuilding history is made!

In 1965, Joe Weider created the Mr. Olympia, a competition to determine the world’s best-built man. From that first contest of three competitors in front of a standing-room-only crowd of about 2,500 at New York City’s Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Olympia has grown into a global mega-event.

Today, the Olympia Weekend features the best of the best IFBB pros in bodybuilding, physique, figure, fitness, and bikini, as well as a two-day expo that sees well over 50,000 fans traverse the halls of the Las Vegas Convention Center. With $1.36 million in prizes, the Olympia is the richest and most prestigious event in bodybuilding and fitness.

The Olympia Fitness and Performance weekend is pure excitement from start to finish, but the real magic happens at the Orleans Arena when the top Bodybuilders, Classic Physique, Fitness, Figure, and Bikini athletes take to the stage and battle for the Olympia titles, securing their elite status as the very best in the world! Below, you'll find five reasons why you absolutely have to tune in live. 

SCHEDULE

FRIDAY: Fitness, Figure, and Classic Physique Finals, 212 and Mr. Olympia Judging @ 10pm ET, 7pm PT

SATURDAY: Bikini, 212 & Mr. Olympia Finals @ 10pm ET, 7pm PT    

REASON #1:

PHIL HEATH - Will The Gift earn his 8th consecutive Mr. Olympia title?

Phil Heath has made his intentions very clear: to eventually earn a record-breaking 10 Mr. Olympia titles. Last year, Heath tied Arnold Schwarzenegger and won his 7th consecutive Sandow, and if all things go according to Phil's plan, he'll be leaving Vegas this year with an 8th, tying the records of Lee Haney and Ronnie Coleman. Can he do it again in a stacked lineup of the 19 best bodybuilders in the world?

REASON #2: 

THE PEOPLE'S CHAMP - Fans attending the 2018 Mr. Olympia will help pick the winner!

For the first time in the event’s history, fans will cast one of the votes to select the winner of the 2018 Mr. Olympia. Ticket holders for the judging round on Friday, September 14, and the finals on Saturday, September 15, will receive a special code with which they can evaluate each competitor and cast their vote on their phones. The fan votes will be collectively counted as one vote, joining the votes of the judges on the panel. In the event the athlete earning the fan vote does not win the title, that competitor will be crowned the 2018 People’s Champion. Who will earn the first-ever People’s Champ award?

REASON #3: 

FLEX LEWIS - Will the Welsh Dragon burn the competition and bring home his 7th 212 Olympia title?

Since the first 212 Olympia in 2012 (prior to that it was the 202 Showdown), one man has held the title: James "Flex" Lewis. With six wins under his belt, he'll be going for an impressive 7th title at the 2018 Olympia. At 11 weeks out, Flex Lewis made a major announcement about the biggest decision of his bodybuilding career—the 2018 Olympia will be his last time competing on the 212 Olympia stage! Will Flex Lewis continue his legacy and finish off his 212 bodybuilding career with a 7th and final 212 Olympia win?

REASON #4: 

THE WOMEN OF THE 2018 OLYMPIA - At least one new champion will be crowned!

The Olympia Fitness and Performance Weekend isn't all about the men. The lovely ladies of the Olympia are the very best in the world at bringing a combination of strength, sexiness, beauty, and muscle to the stage. With four-time Fitness Olympia champ Oksana Grishina retired, a new Fitness Olympia athlete will capture the title. Will reigning champs Angelica Teixeira and Cydney Gillon keep their Bikini and Figure titles respectively, or will there be new queens crowned on the 2018 Olympia stage?

REASON #5:

A FRONT AND CENTER SEAT TO THE GREATEST BODYBUILDING SHOW IN THE WORLD

The image above is all the reason you need to get pumped and tune in to the LIVE WEBCAST of the 2018 Olympia on iHerb.com/Olympia. The muscle mass, striations, routines, and posedowns; the victories, defeats, rivalries, and camaraderie...it's the greatest bodybuilding show in the world, and we're giving you a front row seat to watch it all go down on the LIVE WEBCAST on iHerb.com/Olympia, September 14th & 15th at 10pm ET, 7pm PT.

iHerb is a leading online retailer of nutritional supplement, fitness and wellness products, and more. iHerb carries over 1,000 brands and ships to more than 150 countries.

Save 30% on select MusclePharm products at iHerb!

In this special collector’s edition of FLEX magazine, presented by Midway Labs, we're celebrating the 2018 Joe Weider's Olympia Fitness & Performance Weekend by taking a look at the storied history of the iconic bodybuilding competition. This limited edition "History of the Olympia" issue will be available, on a first come-first served basis, to the attendees of the 2018 Olympia Expo at the Midway Labs booth (#500).

In addition to vintage photographs and biographies of the 13 men that have been crowned Mr. O since 1965, this issue also stirs up some debate with a complete ranking of the first 53 competitions as well as a countdown of the 10 greatest moments in the show’s history.

What's not up for debate is the proud history of the female game-changers that have competed at the Olympia over the decades. This issue tells their story, from the first Ms. O in 1980 through today’s diverse field of competitions.

And since the 2018 Mr. Olympia will see the debut of the People's Champion initiative, we take a look back at some fan-favorite competitors from years past that took the top spot with audiences, if not the judges.

If all of this Olympia talk has you in the mood to hit the gym, you’ll also find plenty of workouts and tips from past winners like Ronnie Coleman and Lee Haney within these pages.

The 2018 Mr. Olympia weekend takes place September 13-16 in Las Vegas, Nevada. Tickets are still available; click here.

That prickly sensation on the top of my skull? It’s just a couple of milliamps of positive electric current, roughly the same amount used to power your average household smoke alarm, flowing directly into my brain’s motor cortex. Suffice it to say: I’m a little uneasy about it.

I’m sitting in a windowless lab, quietly gazing at stark white walls as my head continuously absorbs the tiny electric pulses. No matter how hard I try, I can’t shake the image of a young Jack Nicholson thrashing his way through electroshock therapy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. But unlike his electric current, mine is actually deemed safe, and the man administering my treatment is no Nurse Ratched. His name is Aaron Wayne. A former captain of Stanford’s swim team, Wayne works as a research engineer for San Francisco–based Halo Neuroscience. I’m testing out the Halo Sport: a set of earphones—lined with rubbery spikes—that, the company says, supercharges your brain for the sake of fitness.

I’m also exercising. With the headset firmly on, I’m seated at a specializedcurl machine with a few electrodes attached to my arm to measure my power output. Every time I do a curl, a blue line on a computer screen across from me jags up to a peak when I lift and drops off when I finish. 

Wayne performs tests like this one all day on subjects, trying to understand how Halo’s technology affects different kinds of exercise. In the five years since Halo launched, the company has run more than 125,000 test sessions. Those test sessions, the company says, have produced clear, positive results. The Halo Sport may already be on sale to the public ($749; haloneuro.com), but its first users haven’t been your average gymgoers. So far, Olympians, NFL and MLB players, top trainers, and even members of the U.S. military’s special forces have adopted it.

The Future of Training

Created by a Stanford-trained M.D. named Daniel Chao, Halo uses a process called transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS)—neuroscience-speak for sending a low electric current into a targeted part of the brain and exciting the neurons, thus making them more likely to fire and create new neural pathways. This, in turn, makes the brain temporarily better at hard-coding what you’re doing. So when you stimulate the motor cortex—the part of the brain that controls movement— and pair that stimulation with a workout, you get better at the exercises in that workout, and more quickly than you would otherwise.

“Most people think the brain’s role in exercise has to do with the mechanics of precise skill, like shooting a free throw or putting a golf ball,” Chao says. “That’s true—skill is neurologically governed. But what about how strong we are? When people do strength training by lifting weights, they think it’s all about the muscles. But with repetition, you’re also training the brain to master those movements.” In other words, strength isn’t just about how big your muscles are but how well you control them. The Halo Sport, Chao says, sharpens that process and essentially makes your workouts better and more efficient. As a result, you’ll get stronger and bigger a whole lot faster. 

It sounds crazy, I know. But thousands of independent studies have examined tDCS in the past 15 years and shown positive effects on everything from memory to mood disorders, depending on what part of the brain you zap. “It’s not just about getting stronger faster. It’s about learning faster,” Chao says. “Theoretically,” says Vince Clark, director of the University of New Mexico’s Psychology Clinical Neurosciences Center, “[the Halo Sport] should work.” Which raises a question: What can it do for you?

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Upgrade Your Brain

Hours before my headset test, I’m chasing Chao up a San Francisco hill on a road bike. A passionate cyclist, he appointed himself one of Halo’s first test subjects when he started developing it.

With the Halo Sport, he started doing interval training on a stationary bike and pounding out laps at the cycling oval in Golden Gate Park. Just north of the Golden Gate Bridge is Hawk Hill, which Chao had long failed to climb in less than eight minutes. “So one day I decided to give Hawk Hill a go again, and my time was 7:45. To make sure it wasn’t a fluke, I did it again—I wanted to cement that puppy.”

Chao grew up in Anaheim, CA, studied biochemistry at UC Berkeley, and earned a master’s and an M.D. at Stanford, where he also caught the Silicon Valley start-up bug. “When I think about my entrepreneurial friends, many of us can identify a kind of fuck-you moment, when something led us to say, ‘Why is it like this? We should be doing it entirely differently.’ ”

For Chao, that moment came during pharmacology class, when he was learning about drugs for the brain. “They all suck,” he says. “You have to put up with a bunch of side effects to get the benefit.” Unlike other organs, the brain is protected by a so-called blood-brain barrier, which makes it difficult for drugs to get through. So Chao thought to himself: “The brain is an electrical organ; why not speak its language and use electricity to affect it?” He landed a job at a biotech start-up called NeuroPace, which made an implantable device to treat epilepsy with deep-brain electrical stimulation. After years of pursuing the “long, arduous journey of working with the FDA,” NeuroPace got approved, but by then Chao and a co-worker, Brett Wingeier (now co-founder of Halo), felt another fuck-you moment coming on.

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They’d been paying attention to a growing body of research showing that electrical stimulation from outside the head—tDCS—could affect the brain’s performance in other ways, and with big results. So they started testing potential tDCS products by targeting different brain functions. Eventually, they created a set of headphones that buzzes that area. And for the record, you wear the Halo Sport before a workout, not during. “A typical use would be to wear it for 20 minutes while warming up,” Chao says, “then take it off and feed the brain as many quality reps as possible over the next hour.”

To test the device, the founders turned to 10 top college athletes who trained at Michael Johnson Performance (MJP) in Texas. The athletes used the Halo Sport while doing a five-week lower-body strength program and saw a 12% gain in explosiveness, compared with a mere 1.7% for a control group.

Halo will “rewrite the way we think about training the body by focusing on what we can do above the neck,” says Lance Walker, MJP’s global director of performance. As for the safety? “We simply don’t know,” says Clark, the UNM neuroscientist. “There are studies that have to be done about the long term.”

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WHAT IT IS: 

A four-station bodyweight circuit designed by L.A.-based trainer Andy McDermott. You start with two stabilized exercises performed under control: hanging leg raises and walking lunges. Then finish with a pair of explosive moves: clapping pushups and squat jumps. Set a manageable pace. 

HOW TO USE IT: 

The stabilized exercises serve as active recovery from the explosive work. Since you're using a different leg-raise variation on each set, you'll hit your abs and obliques from many angles. This is total-body HIIT that'll have you sweating and leave your core sore the next day. 

“The goal isn’t speed—it’s control,” McDermott says. “If you swing your legs, you remove core activation from the equation.”

Andy McDermott is a fitness coach in Hollywood and owner of McDermott Family Fitness (mcdermottfamilyfitness.com).