FITNESS REVIEWS AND IMAGES: Blueprint

Showing posts with label Blueprint. Show all posts

Thursday, 30 October 2014

ARNOLD'S BLUEPRINT FOR MAMMOTH SHOULDERS AND ARMS

New Exercise and Fitness Review

Few bodybuilders are made in the mold of Arnold Schwarzenegger anymore. Sure, everyone wants to be the next Arnold, but who could conceivably duplicate the mind-numbing training volume and frequency he achieved? He didn’t just train shoulders and arms for 60-plus sets—he did it three times a week with incredible intensity!

That’s one reason “The Oak” stood out among his peers. Where others would call it quits, Arnold took pleasure in his own pain. The barometer of a good workout was quite simply how much it hurt. The more, the better.

Arnold didn’t just train shoulders and arms for 60-plus sets—he did it three times a week with incredible intensity!

While this kind of volume can’t be sustained long-term, it certainly can flip your personal anabolic switch—provided you can learn to love a bone-crushing delt-and-arms workout.

Here’s a blueprint of how Arnold trained these body parts!

ARNOLD’S SHOULDER WORKOUT

Arnold trained shoulders with the same high-volume approach he employed with other body parts, ensuring that each deltoid head was targeted from different angles. Because multijoint presses from the front of the neck recruited the anterior (front) delts to a greater degree than behind-neck presses, he typically included both in his shoulder workout for maximal development.

“There’s no one exercise that will work all three areas of the deltoids,” Arnold once said. “Therefore, when you’re planning your shoulder routine, you have to include the right variety of movements, so that you get full shoulder development.”

Arnold trained shoulders with the same high-volume approach he employed with other body parts, ensuring that each deltoid head was targeted from different angles.

His full-throttle approach occasionally meant that he did 50 or more sets in a single workout! Remember, too, that Arnold trained shoulders with arms three times per week—an impossibly challenging combination of volume and frequency that helped build the biggest delts the world had ever seen at the time.

In addition to the multijoint presses, he added single-joint moves to better isolate the front, middle and rear delts.

Here are some of the basic principles Arnold followed when training shoulders:

Arnold went heavy with presses and upright rows, especially early in his workouts when his energy levels were highest. Multijoint movements like these are the best mass builders, as they engage the greatest degree of musculature in the deltoid region.

He sought out alternative exercises that worked the target area from different angles. When doing dumbbells rather than the barbell on overhead presses, for example, he lowered the weights several inches below the bottom position of the barbell movement, and he brought them together at the top to elongate the range of motion.

His focus on introducing variation into his training was instrumental in popularizing the Arnold press. The Arnold press is an overhead press that begins with your hands facing your body in the bottom position.

You turn your wrists as you raise the weights, a movement that puts more emphasis on the front delts than the standard overhead dumbbell press does.

Arnold used single-joint movements to complement overhead presses and isolate each delt head. Here, too, he sought subtle differences that would build better overall size. For example, the cable lateral raise in front of the body has a different feel than when the cable runs behind you.

For upper traps, Arnold included a number of movements, including power pulls, cleans, upright rows, and shrugs. He favored shrugs for building meaty upper traps, but was keen to back off the weight in favor of being able to fully shrug his shoulders as high as possible.

Arnold’s basic approach followed a pyramid format: He’d add weight on successive sets for fewer reps. He still kept the weight in the muscle-building zone, rarely doing fewer than eight reps.

ARNOLD’S ARM WORKOUT

Arnold’s guns were his calling cards, and his mental visualization of his biceps as mountain peaks reflected his larger-than-life approach. Arnold frequently did up to 20 sets for biceps, split evenly between mass-builders and those he did for definition.

He commonly supersetted biceps and triceps movements, which served to flush his arms with blood. Combined with his high-volume approach, his shirt-sleeve-busting routine included movements that sought to isolate the three triceps heads, which he achieved by manipulating arm position.

Arnold’s guns were his calling cards, and his mental visualization of his biceps as mountain peaks reflected his larger-than-life approach.

Here are some of Arnold’s best arm-training tips, culled from the many articles he wrote and interviews he gave over the years.

Arnold ranked the standing barbell curl as the top mass builder, but often did the incline bench dumbbell curl as well, which emphasizes the long head a bit better. For Arnold, a mass-building movement meant three things: He could push heavy weights; he’d ensure the movement was taken from full extension to full contraction; and he’d use a weight at which he could barely do 6-8 good reps.

Definition-building movements, on the other hand, were done with lighter weights for sets of 8-12 reps. Here the focus was on squeezing and contracting the muscle, and holding the peak contraction for a long count. Concentration curls, preacher curls, and alternating dumbbell curls were among his favorites here.

Arnold wrote that he always included at least one dumbbell movement in his routine. Supinating his hand (turning it upward as he curled) created a greater peaking effect because the brachialis was recruited into the motion.

While “The Oak” took his curls to failure, he didn’t stop there. Once he reached a sticking point, he’d use just enough momentum to keep the set going. Such cheat curls allowed him to complete an extra couple of reps.

Arnold’s approach to triceps was a bit different. Because his chest was always a strong point, his triceps were already at an advantage. More often than with biceps, he allowed his rep range to drift up to 20 per set in an effort to hyperpump the muscle.

Arnold once suggested a tip he learned from legendary trainer Vince Gironda: To determine which area a particular exercise targets, do 20 sets of that movement—and nothing else for that body part. See where the soreness is the following day. “It’s silly doing a triceps movement and not knowing which part of the triceps you’re hitting,” he wrote.

With triceps, Arnold’s advanced technique of choice was partial reps. After doing a set of full-range push-downs, for example, he’d extend the set with 5-6 partials, over either the top or bottom half of the movement.

Arnold frequently supersetted biceps and triceps movements, which meant that an enormous amount of blood was flooding the muscle. Blood carries oxygen and nutrients critical for growth, and enabled him to achieve his ultimate training goal: the pump. And you’ve no doubt heard about Arnold’s insatiable thirst for a good training pump.

Superset

Barbell Curl
4 sets of 10-12 reps

Lying Triceps Press
4 sets of 10-12 reps

Superset

Dumbbell Alternate Bicep Curl
4 sets of 10-12 reps

Triceps Pushdown
4 sets of 10-12 reps

Superset

Incline Dumbbell Curl
4 sets of 10-12 reps

Cable Rope Overhead Triceps Extension
4 sets of 10-12 reps

Superset

Concentration Curls
4 sets of 10-12 reps

Dumbbell One-Arm Triceps Extension
4 sets of 10-12 reps

Bench Dips
1 dropset of 10 reps

Note: Arnold began with three 45-lb. plates across his lap. Each time he hit muscle failure, a plate was lifted off until he was using just his body weight.

References

Schwarzenegger, A. (1997, July 1). Arnold Talks Training. Muscle and Fitness.

Schwarzenegger, A. & Dobbins, B. (1999). The New Encyclopedia of Modern Bodybuilding. Simon and Shuster: USA.

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About The Author

As an active martial artist, bodybuilder and accredited personal trainer, David employs the latest cutting edge research to enhance his own progress.

Bodybuilding.com Articles

ARNOLD"S BLUEPRINT FOR MAMMOTH SHOULDERS AND ARMS

Monday, 23 June 2014

Blueprint Your Gains For Long-Term Growth

New Exercise and Fitness Review

One of the inalienable quirks of being human is that you always want more. From the moment you fill your lungs for the very first time as a newborn, being “more” is all you think about. You get damn good at it, too, because there’s an unquenchable worldwide thirst for more horsepower, more information, more sex, more calories, more money, more strength, and more size.

Sadly, as most lifters and athletes will tell you, these gains don’t last, and your eternal quest for more eventually hits a non-scalable wall—unless you adapt. It’s the same with your love life—dating the same partner, eating at the same restaurants, and always doing the same things can’t fulfill your emotional needs—unless you do these things with the one whose finger you end up putting a ring on, of course.

It turns out that variety is the spice of life, love, and muscle growth. You need to be flexible with fitness to ensure long-term growth and adaptation. I’ll show you how.

Building Muscle Is A GAS

You want to pack on more muscle or improve performance, and the reason you can get your gains at the gym is because your body is the most adaptable thing on the planet—even more so than your iPhone. Unfortunately, you don’t keep adapting endlessly.

A well-established study in the “British Medical Journal” calculated the exact speed and amount of adaptation your body is capable of—it’s a formula called General Adaptive Syndrome (GAS), and it explains why you need variety to undergo continued adaptation.

The trick to long-term growth and performance is to treat your muscles like a player. Seduce them with a new workout every 4-8 weeks and their progress will keep you satisfied for as long as you’re willing to make them sweat. Keep reading to find out how and why it works.

A Love Affair Of Muscle

The GAS graph shows that your body grows and performs in peaks, troughs, and plateaus that have a start and end point. Let’s say you’ve just begun a new training cycle that you plan to stick with for as long as possible. It’s time to walk through each phase of the GAS graph so you can see how it applies.

GAS Key

1 New stimulus

2 The alarm phase

3-5 The adaptation phase

6-10 Plateau

11 The exhaustion phase

Week 1

A training cycle starts the moment your muscles are confronted with a new stimulus. Let’s say you usually do 4 sets of 8 reps on all your exercises. The new stimulus would be to do 3 sets of 15 reps on a totally new set of exercises or even on all the same group of exercises.

During the first week of this new training cycle, your body will adapt and might actually make gains. It’ll be a refreshing change so you’ll be motivated to see how far this new technique can take your physique and performance.

Week 2

This is when your exercise performance might decline. You might not be able to push the same size weights you did the previous week or squeeze out as many reps. A set of 15 reps may feel long, arduous, and painful.

Frustration can fester as you wonder if this technique is the right one for you. You’ll think about quitting, but may get a glimmer of hope in the final workouts of this week that will seem slightly easier and yield some strength increases.

“This is when your exercise performance might decline. You might not be able to push the same size weights you did the previous week or squeeze out as many reps.”

Weeks 3-5

During these weeks, your body and brain reap the benefits of your hard work. Your nervous system becomes more efficient at instructing your muscles. This helps you use larger weights, which inflict micro-tears to your muscle fibers. They’ll repair and grow back thicker and stronger, making you add muscle.

If you’re training for sport, this is the time when you’ll become fitter and improve upon your overall performance. Each week sees an improvement and you’ll soon sport arms so powerful you could throw a lamb chop past a starving wolf.

The key to long-term progress is to stay in this phase for as long as possible. As soon as your gains taper off and begin to plateau (usually somewhere after week 5 or 6), you should take a break, then switch programs.

Weeks 6-10

This is when you reach a point where your rate of adaptation slows down and you hit a muscle-building or performance plateau. The stimulus isn’t different enough to cause your muscles to develop and they become stale. You won’t necessarily lose strength or size, but you’ll lift the same sized weights. It’s a bit like gym purgatory.

Weeks 11 and Beyond

Your training has now become detrimental to your goals. Every rep you do is a cancer on your muscles; it bores them with the same tired stimulus. You’ll get weaker, lose energy, and may even get ill. Your physique will deteriorate as you lose muscle and gain fat while your performance is in a slump.

You need to take at least two weeks rest or do a totally new type of training that is the antithesis of what you were doing.

The Moral Of The Story

For the best results, you should be flexible with your fitness. Let your muscles play the field of training techniques to keep growing and improving their performance.

Bear in mind that athletes usually adopt new techniques every 4 weeks while novices can keep making gains for up to 8-12 weeks using the same technique.

With that said, progress isn’t always linear or constant. Sometimes it comes in batches when you least expect it. You might train hard for weeks with no results then, all of a sudden, progress slaps you in the face and your best lifts jump up by 44 pounds or you stack on 4 pounds of muscle.

“The results can seem instant and almost seem effortless, but they are actually the reward of months of consistent and persistent effort.”

The results can seem instant and almost seem effortless, but they are actually the reward of months of consistent and persistent effort. But the moment you feel the relationship with a training technique going sour because of a lack of gains, you have a few options: use a new training technique (way of exercising), take one or two weeks to rest from all training, or dramatically reduce your workout load by at least 60 percent.

Rest is never a bad thing, and it’s recommended that you take a break whenever you hit a plateau or switch routines. But if you’re motivated and keen on getting fast results, then feel free to jump straight into a new technique.

Should you choose to do this, make sure the new technique is vastly different from the last one you did or builds directly on your previous routines. Starting a new routine that’s not different enough from the previous one means there won’t be enough variation to trigger growth and progress.

This will keep you in a perpetual state of exhaustion which can lead to overtraining and burnout. For constant progress, decide on your goals and take your muscles out on the town by gathering information on several different types of training that are specific to your end goal.

Once you have all that information, then you can put it together in a long-term training plan that corrects failures and builds on success.

Always remember to mix things up to challenge your body and mind, because variety is the spice of a muscular life.

Crafting A Year-Long Plan

The following is a progressive plan to help a beginner progress to an intermediate lifter in less than a year.

1 Starting Off Easy

The high reps of endurance training will gradually accustom your muscles to being resistance training without any risk of injury. If you keep the rest periods low, it will also help you burn fat.

Strength Endurance Training

Strength Endurance 1 (E1):
2 sets of 15-20 reps per exercise. Rest 30 seconds between sets

Strength Endurance 2 (E2):
3 sets of 12-15 reps per exercise. Rest 30 seconds between sets

Strength Endurance 3 (E3):
4 sets of 12-15 reps per exercise. Rest 30 seconds between sets

2 Picking Up Your Game

By this stage your muscles and nervous system will be attuned to getting put through its paces. You can now start gunning for size by decreasing the repetitions, increasing the size of the weights you use, and setting personal bests.

Try Bodybuilding Hypertrophy Training

Hypertrophy 1 (H1):
4-6 sets of 8-10 reps per exercise. Rest 2 minutes between sets

Hypertrophy 2 (H2):
5-7 sets of 6-8 reps per exercise. Rest 2 minutes between sets

3 Playing In The Big Leagues

You will have now mastered the form of the basic exercises and can dramatically add weight to build strength and power with lower repetitions.

Try Pure Strength And Power Training

Power (S1):
5-10 sets of 4-7 reps per exercise. Rest 3-5 minutes between sets

Pure Strength (S2):
3-4 sets of 1-4 reps per exercise. Rest 3-5 minutes between sets

“Even if you’re a total beginner, you don’t need a personal trainer to tell you how to schedule your long-term training strategy.”

How To Use It

The difference between exercise and training is that exercise is movement without purpose, while training has vision and a clear goal.

As such, you must always think long term. There’s no point thrashing it out for two months, stacking on muscle, shedding fat, and bolstering your performance only to quit and watch it waste away.

Even if you’re a total beginner, you don’t need a personal trainer to tell you how to schedule your long-term training strategy. Lay the foundations by doing strength endurance training (or any other technique suited to beginners) for 2-3 months.

Pay attention to your progress and, when your performance starts to decline, take a week off and start training for growth using the hypertrophy training guidelines.

When the scale tells you that you aren’t adding muscle, start a power or strength training program. You’ll notice that, after this, you’ll revert back to endurance training to shock your muscles into growing further. This seems counterintuitive, but your muscles won’t be used to doing such high repetitions, which will shock and spark the growth process again because you will have started a completely new cycle. And, when you do hypertrophy training again, you’ll stack on size faster than you’ve ever dreamed.

Now that you know the rules of the game, you can tailor your plan to your goals and play smarter than your competitor.

References

British Medical Journal: 1950;1:1383-1392 (17 June), doi:10.1136/bmj.1.4667.1383 LINK: http://www.bmj.com/cgi/pdf_extract/1/4667/1383

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Blueprint Your Gains For Long-Term Growth

Monday, 7 April 2014

Arnold Schwarzenegger Blueprint Trainer Day 41

New Exercise and Fitness Review

by Bodybuilding.com Apr 04, 2014

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Today, it can seem like strength training and endurance training are two opposite ends of the fitness spectrum—almost like dueling political parties. Endurance athletes too often treat the weight room like it’s full of hot lava, and weightlifters can view cardio work as a necessary evil at best. But Arnold recognized that the elite bodybuilder trains in a unique middle ground between strength and endurance, and he used this knowledge to his advantage on leg day in particular. He writes in “The Encyclopedia”:

“It isn’t enough just to subject the legs to heavy overload. You have to use heavy weights and sufficient volume of training that you stress the fibers involved and exhaust the endurance capacity of the leg muscles. Doing 5 sets of barbell curls for the biceps can be demanding, but doing 5 sets of heavy squats with 400 or 500 pounds on your shoulders is more like running a mini-marathon, with that kind of total exhaustion squeezed in 8 or 9 minutes of concentrated efforts…

“For many years, I only did 5 sets of squats when I really should have been doing 8 sets. I did not include enough front squats and, I now realize, I did not put enough weight on the leg press machine. Once I realized my mistakes and corrected them, my thighs began to grow thick and massive. I accepted the fact that leg workouts simply have to be brutal to be effective. This involves a mental effort almost as much as a physical one.”

Six weeks into this trainer, you should know the type of brutality he’s talking about. If not, you’ve got 8 sets of front squats on the lineup to remind you.