Strength and deconditioning 5: Epic chest

Normally, I really cannot stand upper body training. Squats are my best workout. My legs and posterior chain are incredibly powerful, allowing me to pick up a massive, ego boosting amount on that lift. As long as I have gloves on or my hands wrapped, dead-lifts are the same way. The hand protection keeps me from ripping the calluses on my hands open and I can drag a fairly enormous amount of weight off the ground. This keeps me big, tight and fit, and makes me fairly popular with friends and family who need furniture moved! You can't just do lower body exercises, though, even if the squat is the most important movement in the world and the dead lift a close second. One must, at some point, work the upper body. I do not like working the upper body nearly as much as I do my legs and back. For one thing, my shoulders are a federally declared disaster area. I had to have my left one repaired and rebuilt after a disastrous wrestling match when I was sixteen (I was a fairly good light heavyweight... but my opponent was, unfortunately, a fairly good super heavyweight) and am constantly afraid that it's going to just fall apart of its own volition. The closest it has come, interestingly enough, didn't come from lifting some of the enormous weights that I pick up but from picking up a box of plastic containers when I did bakery work. Go figure. I also have, I'm almost certain, some undiagnosed football damage in the right shoulder, and so I am as careful as I can be with any pressing movements.

I do, however, work my upper body at least twice a weak, sticking to big, compound movements. Avoiding isolation exercises forces my muscles to work in concert with each other, engages my central nervous system and keeps me from putting too much pressure on any single joint that might be weak. The first exercise that I like to do is the bench press. Although I cover it in much more detail in "Strength and Deconditioning 1: Bench pressing in theory and practice," I can summarize here by saying that the golden rules for benching effectively are to maintain a tight arch in the back, squeeze the traps together and hold the bar like you'll die if you let go... after all, you might! Pull the bar to your chest in a controlled descent, hold it for a second at the bottom of your ribcage and then, with a jolt coming from the legs, drive it back up hard. Here is a very large man doing an even larger bench press.

The second exercise I do at every upper body session is the incline bench press. I set the bench at about a sixty degree angle and do sets of 6 with 205, 225, 245, 265 and 285. I lower the bar in a slow, controlled manner--this is especially important on incline bench since the bar is lowered so close to the throat, and you really don't want to drop it on your throat--pause for a second on my chest and then drive it up hard, fast and smooth. Always come from a dead stop. Bouncing the weight off your chest in any pressing movement scrambles the central nervous system and can actually make you weaker, but coming from a dead stop forces the muscles to work hard and grow. Ken Fantano, the legendary power lifter and owner of the Muscle Factory, did six sets of six dumbbell incline presses with a 220 pound dumbbell in either hand, which is ridiculously enormous. Here is the same man incline pressing 405 strictly and very impressively.

Although there are many exercises which can work the upper body--including the fly and the decline press--I always find myself coming back to these two and have had excellent success with both of them.

Strength and Deconditioning 3: Back up

What's the major problem with most young men in the gym today? Well, other than the fact that most of them are unrepentant douche-bags. And the fact that they have a love affair with Nautilus machines matched in passion only by the Brownings. And the fact that they do biceps curls in the squat rack. And the fact that they pick up girls by leaning (usually against a squat rack I want to use or a tree with weights on it that I need) into them and murmuring, deeply and soulfully I assume, "Yeah, brah, doo, yah, I'm, like, a cage fighter, brah, do, yah, brah..." The girl usually eats it up and they sleep together that afternoon, touching off a torrid two year affair which ends with her crying and him still saying, "Yeah, brah, doo, yah, brah, doo, fun, just fun, no strings, yah, doo..."

Actually, come to think of it, there are a lot of problems with young men in the gym today. Is it any wonder that I built my own gym to work out in? Anyway, the thing that I'm thinking, the major problem, is that young men don't pay any attention to the development of their backs! The level of attention which these guys pay to their chests, and especially their abdominal muscles, leads to a dreadfully unbalanced physique. No one wants to see a six pack on a cadaver (well, with the advent of Twilight who knows...), after all. The men who have been most dominant at Mr. Olympia in the past thirty years have been men like Sergio Olivia, Lee Haney, Ronnie Coleman and--most of all--the great Dorian Yates have all dominated the field with their broad, overpowering backs. Power lifters and Olympic lifters build their entire base of strength, for clean and jerk, snatch, dead lift, squat and even bench press off of enormous traps and lats. Although most "fitness professionals," who usually look like someone grafted the Miz's head onto Edward Cullen's body, advocate isolation exercises for the back, the fact that they look like they have the Miz's head grafted onto Edward Cullen's body should suggest, perhaps, that their advice probably won't make you a whole lot stronger. Disregard it and stick to big, sweeping, compound exercises that work the back as a whole. The body's muscles are all interrelated anyway, and so torturing them one at a time doesn't really do anything other than waste a lot of time. With compound exercises, you can torture all these muscles together, save a lot of time and actually get some results!

I work my back once or twice a week, depending on what else I'm doing, and use one of two protocols. Sets are always done with heavy weights and low reps, either three sets of three reps or five sets of two reps, and each rep is done with a strict pull and full muscular contraction at the top.

One protocol that I use is made up of dead lifts and power cleans. The dead lift is an excellent full body exercise, and develops the lower back, lats, glutes and thighs like nothing other than the squat. The proper dead lift is done with the bar close to the shins--you will get scuffs on your shins doing this right, it's the mark of a power lifter!--and the thrust should come from your thighs and posterior chain forcing your back to straighten, driving your heels through the floor. Observe this video, cribbed off of youtube, of Andy Bolton's world record 1008 pound dead lift: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5groVHlMkRE Do not pull with your arms. If the weight is at all an honest weight for your dead lift, pulling with the arms will result in failure at best and a torn biceps at worst. A torn biceps isn't pretty... it leaps off the bone and rolls up your arm like a slug wincing away from salt. You do not want to experience it!

The second exercise on this protocol is the power clean. This lift, popular with football teams all over the country and closely related to the Olympic full clean, is a pulling movement that works the upper and lower trapezius and medial and anterior deltoids. The bar is pulled from the floor the the waist, and then scooped under the the thighs with a double knee bend. At this point, pull explosively from the traps and shoulders--keeping the arms straight to avoid injury--and flex the quadriceps. This movement should be follow by a jump off the floor. As counter intuitive as it sounds to jump while holding a barbell in your hands, this allows you to fling the weight high enough for you to pull your body under it and catch it, in a quarter squat position (as opposed to the Olympic clean's full squat) in a rack across your collarbones. Recover, stand straight, and replace the weight on the floor. For an example, watch this video of a gigantic, 400 pound power clean from youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LyV7fwr7ik.

Although there are many other exercises to work your back--including the Romanian dead lift, row, high pull and--my favorite of these--the Kroc row, the above exercises helped me to reach a 500 pound dead lift. I hope that they help anyone else who comes across them just as much.