FITNESS REVIEWS AND IMAGES: Monster

Showing posts with label Monster. Show all posts

Friday, 3 October 2014

Build Monster Shoulders With This Brutal Giant Set Finisher

New Exercise and Fitness Review

There are two kinds of lifters: those who cannot miss a workout—even if a category 4 hurricane is approaching—and those who spend more days “recovering” than actually training. At one point in my life, I hated skipping workouts, and that included while on vacation. I spent a lot of time searching for gyms, oftentimes hunting them down on street maps in foreign languages.

Looking back, it might not have been the best use of my vacation time, but it did expose me to new training concepts. And so I recount here a trip to Rio de Janeiro—not the details of excursions to the sandy beaches of Ipanema or the Christ the Redeemer statue, but the excruciating pain of a finishing move I did on one particular shoulder day.

Talk about a monster pump!

MONSTER SHOULDER SETUP

Once upon a time in Brazil, I was navigating my way through a small, crowded gym without air conditioning in the middle of summer when a personal trainer introduced himself, which gave me a chance to use my mix of Spanish and Portuguese called “Portunol.” He was selling his personal-training services, for which he charged a whopping $ 35 for an entire month. I know a good offer when I see one, so we struck a deal.

Side Lateral Raise

It was shoulder day, so he suggested the usual assortment of presses and straight-arm raises—nothing I hadn’t done before in my Los Angeles gym. But it’s the finishing movement that I remember—a souvenir of sorts I carried with me for a few days, courtesy of something called delayed-onset muscle soreness (DOMS). It’s what every bodybuilder trains for—except for when it’s really, really bad.

He had me finish that day’s shoulder session with a giant set using a pair of 12.5-kg dumbbells. By the time I’d computed that weight in pounds (nearly 28), it was too late—I’d already committed.

Bent Over Lateral Raise

GIANT SETS FOR GIANT-SIZED PAIN

Here’s the four-exercise giant set, broken into five major components:

Choose a pair of dumbbells that’s about 10 pounds less than what you normally do for a 10-rep max set of standing lateral raises. Your first exercise is exactly that movement.

Even though you’re fatigued at the end of your workout, with the lighter weight you should be able to bang out 10 good reps. With lateral raises, it’s important to raise your elbows up high because that motion best targets the middle delts.

Without changing weight, go right into bent-over lateral raises. Simply bend over, keeping a flat back, and maintain your head in neutral alignment—don’t strain your cervical spine by looking up. Do another set of 10 reps, bringing your hands out wide and as high as you can.

Next, stand up and do a set of dumbbell upright rows. Even though fatigue is starting to set in, this is a multijoint movement that recruits all three deltoid heads, as well as the upper traps. Keep the weights in tight to your body as you push your elbows out to your sides in the top position. Do another set of 10 reps.

Upright Dumbbell Row

Go right into a set of 10 overhead presses. Yes, this is a ridiculously light weight you’re pressing, but when preceded by three other exercises it significantly increases the challenge.

Use a split stance for better balance, completing the presses by bringing the weights close to each other at the top without allowing them to touch.

Take a 90-second rest and complete two more rounds. On your last round, when you drop the weights after you complete your set of overhead presses, raise your arms all the way overhead for a full 60 seconds, and watch the clock.

I guarantee your arms will feel like lead weights at about 30 seconds and you’ll want to cut them off—that’s how intense the burn will be.

Once you make it to 60 seconds, you’re done, but I suggest you prop your arms on something, because even the act of holding them by your sides will hurt for the next few minutes.

Standing Dumbbell Shoulder Press

Giant Set: 3x

Side Lateral Raise
1 set of 10 reps

Bent-Over Rear Lateral Raise
1 set of 10 reps

Standing Dumbbell Upright Row
1 set of 10 reps

Standing Dumbbell Press
1 set of 10 reps

90 sec rest between rounds. On your last round, when you drop the weights after you complete your set of overhead presses, raise your arms all the way overhead for a full 60 seconds.

Try this finisher for a monster pump on your next shoulder day and let me know how it goes in the comments below!

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About The Author

Bill Geiger, MA comes to Bodybuilding.com after six years as Group Editorial Director with MuscleMag and Reps magazines in Toronto.

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Build Monster Shoulders With This Brutal Giant Set Finisher

Sunday, 17 August 2014

8 Techniques To Build Monster Quads

New Exercise and Fitness Review

Leg day is as brutal as it gets. If you can walk up the stairs after your workout, you’re probably not doing it right. But what if you are doing it right and the only thing that seems to be growing is, well, your butt? Sure, thick glutes come with a well-developed lower body, but sometimes you want to minimize your gluteus and maximize your quads.

If you want to build monster quads, you’ve come to the right place. These eight strategies will help you craft a leg workout to supersize your quad development. They include specific ways to bring up your quads while minimizing the emphasis placed on your posterior, though we can’t go so far as rewiring your DNA.

One obvious strategy is to add quad-specific exercises, but variations of common exercises in terms of foot placement and depth of squatting can also play a role in muscle recruitment. We’ll also give you a few intensity-boosting techniques to help push your leg training into the new growth zone. Let’s add some air to your tires!

1 Start With Squats

Most leg workouts start with free-weight squats—and rightly so—since the squat is the single-best overall thigh builder known to man. Despite the fact that you can’t specifically isolate the quads with a squat, the movement is essential if you want to build big legs, and there are ways to increase quad involvement.

“The squat is the single-best overall thigh builder known to man.”

Though it’s not always a good idea to squat on a heel board, because it shifts your center of gravity slightly forward, which means the quads take on a greater portion of the workload. Instead of getting fancy with foot position, a shoulder-width stance with your feet turned slightly outward will generate the most power. If you like to experiment, you can position your feet in or out just a few inches to slightly alter the muscle-recruitment pattern.

Don’t be afraid to use challenging weights here. Pyramiding up in weight to a few low-rep sets (as low as 6) will help you increase your strength. On those heavy sets, a spotter is useful to help you push past previous personal bests with your weight or reps.

2 Compound Your Quads

Some compound exercises are better than others at recruiting the quads, and the machine hack squat is just such a movement—especially if you place your feet fairly low on the machine’s platform. Low foot placement will target the quads to a greater extent than high foot placement by increasing the degree of knee flexion/extension.

Higher foot placement reduces knee flexion/extension, and thereby takes some muscular stress off the quads, so get your feet low and be sure to keep your heels down during your hack squats. However, if you have any kind of knee pain, you may want to avoid this technique because of the increased stress on the knee and connective tissues.

If you did your first exercise for sets of 6-8, knock out sets of 8-10 reps on the hack squat. The multiple relative intensities are great for increasing overall muscular development.

3 Partial Reps, Full Gains

“When combined with full-range reps, partial squats can actually be a solid component of your quad-building strategy.”

Ever see a guy load up a heavy weight on a squat or hack squat and descend just a few inches? That guy is doing partial reps, and he’s probably doing them just to impress himself. However, when combined with full-range reps, partial squats can actually be a solid component of your quad-building strategy.

Keep in mind that partial squats are counterproductive if you’re trying to build your glutes and hamstrings, because those muscle groups work harder the deeper you go. Consequently, if you don’t bring your thighs to a point at which they’re parallel with the floor, your posterior muscles won’t activate. Shallow squats predominantly target the quads, which are more active over the top half of the move.

But by selectively doing partial squats—or machine hack squats—with heavy weight, in conjunction with full-range moves, you can emphasize your quads and build massive size. With partials, you limit your training to a range of motion over which you’re particularly strong—above the so-called squat “sticking point”—so you can overload the weight. Pile on a weight that’s about 30 percent more than you can do for the full range of motion and do these partial hacks for sets of just 6 reps.

4 Love the Leg Press

Leg presses can also emphasize the quads, but you’ll want to follow the same rationale about keeping your feet low on the sled. Sure, it’s harder than using a higher foot position, but if you’re looking to zero-in on the quads, keep it low.

You can use a closer foot position to target the outer quads to a greater degree. Use a wider stance to work the inner thigh and more thoroughly exhaust all areas of your quads.

“Keep your feet low on the sled. It’s harder than using a higher foot position, but if you’re looking to zero-in on the quads, keep it low.”

5 Isolate to Annihilate

Single-joint exercises like leg extensions should never be confused with major mass-builders for the quads, but at the end of a demanding thigh workout extensions can isolate the quads to exhaust every last muscle fiber. Because extensions are single-joint movements, there’s no added contribution from the hamstrings or glutes here.

Use a slightly higher rep range (10-12) than what you’d do for multi-joint movements. Like other isolation moves for other body parts, these are best done at the end of your leg workout. To boost the intensity of this final exercise, consider combining it with an advanced technique to ensure you’ve exhausted every last muscle fiber (see point 8).

6 Pre-Exhaust Your Quads

It’s common to start leg day with a few warm-up sets on the leg extension, but those sets are never done to muscle failure. But what if you did a few heavy sets to muscle failure?

That’s called a pre-exhaust, and it entails doing a single-joint movement like the leg extension before your multi-joint squats and leg presses. Reversing the order means that, while your quads are fairly pumped before even attempting your first set of squats, your glutes and hamstrings are still rather fresh because they haven’t had to do any work yet.

Essentially, these other two muscle groups are now far stronger—relatively speaking—at this point compared to your quads because you isolated the quads right off the bat. That means that neither your hamstrings nor your glutes are likely to fatigue first during a given set—which would necessitate ending your set—because they’re much fresher relative to your quads.

Leg Extension

This ensures that you can push your quads to their physical limit, rather than be limited by another muscle group that might fatigue first. When you rack the weight, it’s because your quad fibers can no longer contract, not because your hams or glutes reached muscle failure first. Reversing the order of your single-joint and multi-joint exercises therefore ensures you take your quad fibers to complete muscle failure. It can also make squatting with a light weight feel heavier, which is especially useful to bodybuilders with sore backs or knees.

7 Train Legs After a Rest Day

This strategy works for any lagging body part because you’re typically more energized and your muscle glycogen stores are fully stocked after a day of rest and good nutrition. You’ll have a lot more energy to push heavy weights when you come off a rest day than when you’ve been hitting the gym on consecutive days.

8 Go Beyond Failure

Training to failure is difficult enough on leg day, so it’s critical that you take your heaviest sets right to the point at which you can’t do any more reps with good form. For many people, that’s hard to do, so a good training partner is particularly helpful.

Still, training past failure can pay big growth dividends. While we’ve looked at how partial reps and pre-exhaust can help bring up your quads, there are other techniques that can bring on even more burn. Here are a few:

Forced Reps: Your workout partner helps you lift the weight after you reach muscle failure so that you can do a few more reps with his or her help.

Dropsets: Once you reach muscle failure, immediately reduce the poundage by roughly 20-30 percent and continue repping to failure. This is especially effective with machine movements such as leg extensions late in your workout.

Supersets: Do two exercises back-to-back with no rest between movements. Rest only after you complete both exercises.

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About The Author

Bill Geiger, MA comes to Bodybuilding.com after six years as Group Editorial Director with MuscleMag and Reps magazines in Toronto.

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8 Techniques To Build Monster Quads

Sunday, 20 July 2014

How To Build Monster Arms

New Exercise and Fitness Review

Guys want big arms. That’s never more apparent than when you see lines forming at the preacher bench and press-down stations. Most lifters don’t come prepared with a plan of attack other than doing as many sets as possible and repeating it again a few days later.

These four common mistakes create a mile-wide gap between people wanting big biceps and triceps and people actually stretching out shirtsleeves. Let’s fix them and put together a routine that’ll deliver monster results and an even more ferocious pump!

MISTAKE 1

Not sure where to start your arm-day workout? Anyone leading off with concentration curls or triceps press-downs as their preferred mass-building move makes a big mistake.

The Fix

Choose mass-building exercises early in your workout when your energy levels are highest. What are the best mass-building moves? Good question. They’re typically the ones in which you can push the most weight. Multi-joint exercises which recruit secondary muscle groups fall into this category (one reason you start your chest workouts with presses and thigh workouts with squats). For triceps, there are a number of multi-joint moves to choose from, but not so for biceps. Basic standing curls allow the biceps to move the most weight.

“Basic standing curls allow the biceps to move the most weight.”

MISTAKE 2

When training arms, “angles” refers to your arm position relative to your torso as well as your grip. If you always do your curls or triceps extensions with your arms locked by your sides, you limit your gains.

The Fix

For biceps, with your arms in front of your torso (think preacher curls), you target more on the biceps’ short head; when your arms are behind your torso (think incline bench dumbbell curls), you better focus on the long head. Likewise, using a neutral grip (hammer curls) and taking a closer or wider grip on the barbell during standing curls each recruits the arm flexors in slightly different ways.

For triceps, when your arms are overhead you better target the long head, while going from an overhand to an underhand grip (as when doing press-downs) shifts the emphasis from the lateral to medial head.

In sum, using a variety of grips and arm positions better emphasizes the various heads of your bis and tris for more complete development.

MISTAKE 3

Many trainees choose a weight, usually one in which they can do for a set of 10, rest and repeat. That’s another mistake.

The Fix

“Pick challenging weights to reach muscle failure at the lower end.”

Recall that heavier weights for low reps (fewer than six) promote optimal increases in strength, and moderate weights for moderate reps (8-12)—as long as they’re done to failure—are best for muscle growth.

The target musculature quickly becomes accustomed to doing the same rep sequence, such as when you do all your sets to 10 reps. Since you’re stronger earlier in your workout, that’s the time to challenge your muscles with heavier weights on the best mass-building moves you already selected.

Pick challenging weights to reach muscle failure at the lower end (as few as six reps). Over the course of your workout, select slightly lighter weights so you fail at 8, 10 or even 12 reps; this allows you to work the muscle with different relative intensities. Hence, you progress from very heavy weights on the mass-building moves to lighter weights to pump the muscle on the isolation exercises.

MISTAKE 4

Do you do the same workout over and over again and expect different results? That’s a common mistake some would call insane.

The Fix

Your body eventually adapts to a particular routine—even if it worked great in the beginning. Most people need to make changes in their workouts at least every 6-8 weeks to help progress through a training plateau.

One way to push past a plateau is to include advanced-training techniques that require you to work past muscle failure on 1-2 sets per exercise. Among the techniques you can try are forced reps, dropsets, rest-pause and negatives.

Supersets—the technique presented below—require that you do two exercises back-to-back with no rest in between; you rest only after you finish both exercises. While you might not consider supersets a mass-building technique, in this workout you do them joining antagonist muscle groups—while one is flexed, the other is stretched—which forces even more blood into the target region.

Close-Grip Bench Press

And research even backs up that when you precede a move by one for its antagonist, the second one is actually stronger! So doing a set of press-downs before a set of curls actually makes you stronger on the curls. Just make sure you reverse the pattern of which exercise comes first in your next workout.

Another advantage of supersets is that they’re a great time saver, substantially reducing rest times. Rather than having you run all over the gym, the superset combinations in this arm routine utilize the same pieces of equipment for each of the two exercises.

The Monster Arm Workout fixes the four most common mistakes on arm day, combining the best mass-building moves with a progressive rep sequence while combining the mass-building benefits of supersets. Faster workout, best mass moves, intensity-boosting techniques … this could be the one workout that finally splits those shirtsleeves!