Bodybuilding and fitness blog

Pumping the lats – bent rows with support

What is the difference between the lucky and the loser? He just does the things that the loser would never have done. It looks like said about bodybuilders. Unusual ways always lead to something unusual. To become more than anyone, you cannot train like everybody else. Isn’t it so? In short, do something that others would never do. For example, pulls for the lats on an inclined bench. It would seem there are enough exercises for the back. Why invent something new? However, none of them provides lockdown. But tugging with support provides! You rest your chest against the back and that’s all – no “nodding” by your corpus. Plus the full stabilization of the feet – they will no longer play along. Carefully read the description of the tugging. Everything is not so simple as it seems.

START

Place the back of the bench at an angle of 45 degrees.

Take the position with your chest against the back near the top. Conveniently apart your legs. Your feet are flat on the floor with the entire surface. (But do not rest on the floor by toes!) Straighten your back.

In order not to look up, point your look at the floor at an angle of 45 degrees. The neck should remain “in line” with the spine. Ask to give you the dumbbells and lift them a little upward that your straight arms formed with the body a nearly right angle. Try to relax your shoulder girdle, to bring the shoulders forward and thus achieve the stretch of the lats.

SCHEME

Holding the dumbbells neutrally (with your palms facing each other), powerfully pull them in the direction of the belt. Some do not pull, but simply raise the dumbbells by bending the elbow – with the power of the biceps. No, the exercise is reduced to the motion of the elbows upwards. Imagine your hands as lifeless hooks, taken the dumbbells. Relax your biceps and think only about the elbows. Here you raise your elbows up very high, as if the cranes arms, pause, and then once again lower the “arms” (and cargo) to the floor. During the pause, contract the shoulder blades to the limit. “Lower the dumbbells to the floor at an angle so that in the starting position the straightened arms were at 90 degrees to your body.

NOTES

Learn some exercises with light weight. Choose the most comfortable posture. Remember the statement of the feet. When would bring your movements to automatism, take heavy dumbbells.

Ate you use gym belts, after the set the assistant should immediately unwind them and free your hands.

In this exercise, there is no need for a heavy athletics belt. Since the body is stabilized, press and loins are exempt from this responsibility and they need no help from them belt.

Pumping calf muscles – Tips from Arnold

There is a lot of confusion around training the calves. Not less than around press. How many repetitions to do? Many? Few? How often to train? At what rate? And etc. As for me, there are no white spots in this point. The truth was installed on my own experiences. And do not argue with me!

Weight load.

When I started to compete, many pointed the finger at my calves: they said, quite weak. I saw it and thought that I had no luck with calves and that it is my genetic deficiency. And somehow I went to the very south of Africa to get mind from my idol, the famous Reg Park. We have begun to exercise together and I complained about the weakness of my calves. In those days, I weighed somewhere 115 kg, and Park said that I had no hope to pump my calves on conventional simulators. They supposedly give quite the wrong load. I was surprised, because the maximum weight of a traditional stimulator is about 250 kg. Is not that enough? Park has explained that the stimulating load on any leg muscles, including calves, must exceed a minimum of three times your body weight. He led me to “enhance” stimulator in his home gym. There the load was twice as high and was 500 kg! And what do you think? In a month of training my calves increased by 2.5 cm! So here’s my advice: multiply your body weight by 3 and you get the best load for the calves. This recommendation is hardly suitable for beginners but for advanced and elite it is just right!

The frequency of training.

The foundation of league achievements is the regularity of training. Many of those pumping the calves do not have enough patience. But if you have it in abundance, it remains to find out how many times a week you should be trained. To this question I can answer with apothecary precision. The fact is that during my competitive career, I had rigorous training diaries. Now I just open a diary, then another, and add some figures. If we assume a starting point the very first training session in the status of the pros, then for the creation of bulk calves it took me 500 hours of training. It is 660 workouts with the duration of 45 minutes.

Since I’ve had four such trainings a week, it is easy to see the total length of the way: more than 3 years! Not even hope to cut the corner! I consider myself a genetically gifted athlete. Most of you, my readers, need much more time!

Amplitude. The longer, the better. Whatever exercise you do! There is only one exception: a technique of partial repetitions. At every fourth calf workout I did every repeat only for half or even for a quarter of the amplitude. The weight, of course, I greatly increased. Such a “hit” on the calves responded with strong stimulation of growth of their masses!

How many repetitions?

I usually did 5 sets of an exercise and changed the number of repetitions for each workout. Let’s say today I did 10 reps per set. At the next workout the number of repetitions increased to 12-15. There were days when I did only 3-4 repeats, and sometimes Tom Platz visited me during my workout. He always trained the same way: doing a set of 30, 40 and 50 repeats. To prove that I was no less tough, I had to repeat all his freaks. It turned out that I have always trained differently. But this is the key to success. Monotony is the enemy of the muscle growth! If you’re, like I used to be, not satisfied with your calves, take my experience. It involves a long and very difficult road, but in the final you will get the same calves, as I have. However, the same people do not exist. You’ll be better!

Here it is the sad poetry of endurance sports. By 40 years no less than half of all bodybuilders suffer from heart diseases. No, heavy lifting by itself is not harmful. It’s just different. In the conventional technique of weight training. Nobody thinks about proper breathing! Usually an athlete makes a powerful breath, holds this breath and takes some weight. Holding of breath increases strength, but at the same time, it affects the heart muscle. If you 1-2 repetitions per set, this negative impact is of short-term and does not lead to the development of cardiovascular diseases. However, multi repeated set has quite different implications. There is a possibility of the development of the coronary artery disease, arrhythmias and many other complex disorders of heart.

Worst of all is that breath holding leads to an immediate rise in blood pressure. Over time, hypertension becomes a persistent feature, transforms into hypertension and leads to strokes and heart attacks.

Holding the breath leads to deterioration of brain blood supply and even provokes vomiting. The typical habit of the fans to do squats to vomit just means that the effect of the exercise on heart is critical.

Sports physicians recommend bodybuilder not to hold the breath and offer a simple and safe technique, intending partial holding of breath. The basis of this technique is to bring breathing to a certain rhythm, which coincides with the rate of repetitions. Moreover, sports medicine believes that rhythmic breathing is a basic prerequisite for muscle growth.

Holding the breath leads to a weakening of the blood flow in the working muscle, but this cannot be helpful. In addition, oxygen is an important agent for muscle growth. The more oxygen in blood, the better. Frequent breath holding during the bodybuilding exercises reduces the oxygen level in blood, notably, to its lowest level when it comes to vertigo.

BREATHE PROPER!

Here is a description of the principles of “bodybuilding” breathing designed by the sports medicine at the example of bench press. Remove the barbell from the stops.

Hold the barbell in the straight arms, inhale deeper than usual.

Hold your breath and lower the barbell to your chest.

Force the barbell upward, still holding your breath.

When you pass the hardest point of lift, exhale. When the rod barbell returns to the starting position, inhale again.