Chintan Desai
I recently went through a good
book on muscle building, ‘New rules for lifting’ by authors Lou Schuler, Alwyn
Cosgrove and Cassandra Forsythe. The book explains in brief about the six key
moments for body building. Here, I am sharing some common yet useful stuff from
the book, the six key moments one should keep in mind while muscle building.
Squat
WHAT IT IS: In the gym, the most common version you’ll see is the
one with the barbell across a guy’s shoulders. You can also do the exercise
with dumbbells held down at arm’s length, although that version’s a bit
awkward, since you have to hold the dumbbells slightly out to your sides to
keep them from bumping into your knees. If you’re using challenging weights,
you end up using your upper-body muscles a bit more than you want.
MUSCLES USED: The great thing about the squat is that it uses
virtually all the muscles in your lower body in one movement. The biggest
challenge is to your quadriceps, the muscles on the fronts of your thighs.
These muscles are responsible for straightening your knees when they’re bent.
But the exercise also works the
big, powerful muscles surrounding your hip joints. These include your gluteal
(buttocks) and hamstrings (rear thighs). The lower you go on the squat, the
more these muscles engage.
Your lower-back muscles also play
a role, mostly to keep your torso upright while you’re squatting down and
straightening back up. Many muscles help keep your body stabilized, from your
feet to your calves to those in your inner and outer thighs, on up to your
abdominals and middle back.
REAL-LIFE USES: Strength coaches know that if they want to increase
an athlete’s jumping ability, the squat is the most important exercise. It’s
not the only exercise, of course, but the fact that it’s been shown in many
studies to increase vertical-jump height shows how important the squat is to a
very basic human movement.
So how important is jumping?
After all, most of us don’t jump at all once we get past our jockstrap days in
high school and college.
Imagine a 90-year-old you. It’s
2065, and you’re sitting in a chair in front of the TV. It’s a comfy chair, and
you think you could spend the rest of your days sitting there, watching television.
Suddenly, nature calls. You try
to get up. Nature calls again, louder this time. You try again to get up, but
your atrophied lower-body muscles just can’t summon the strength and power to
get you out of that chair. Nature gets tired of calling, and just shows up. (In
your lap :-p)
I know you aren’t going to hit
the gym today to avoid soaking your favorite chair sixty years from now, just
as I know you don’t go through life worrying about lion attacks. But you don’t
just wake up one morning without the ability to get up from a comfy chair.
There’s a slope—with age, you gradually lose strength and power until you have
trouble walking up stairs, playing with your grandkids on the floor, and, yes,
getting out of bed or a chair.
Deadlift
WHAT IT IS: You bend over a barbell or pair of dumbbells and lift
it or them off the floor by straightening your body at the hips.
MUSCLES USED: Like the squat, the deadlift and its many variations
use just about all your lower-body muscles, but this time the emphasis is on
the powerful gluteal and hamstring muscles that straighten your hips.
Your lower back has an important
role in stabilizing your body while bending and straightening, along with your
deep abdominal muscles. Your trapezius—the big, diamond-shaped muscle that runs
from your neck to your shoulder blades to your middle back—also has a big role
in this exercise, since your shoulder blades have to pull together in your back
to finish the movement. Finally, the gripping muscles in your hands and
forearms get a workout, since without a strong grip that barbell is going to
slip from your hands and hit the floor (if you manage to lift it off the floor
at all).
REAL-LIFE USES: It’s hard to go through life without picking heavy
stuff up off the ground, which makes the deadlift perhaps the most useful
exercise you can do with weights.
Imagine a life in which you
couldn’t lift a sleeping child off the floor, or move a sofa, or pick up a box
of books without one of your spinal discs turning into sushi. (A friend of mine
who had back surgery tells me the stuff that spills out of a ruptured disc
looks like crab meat. Just FYI.) You wouldn’t want that life. The deadlift and
its many variations keep your back and hips strong.
Lunge
WHAT IT IS: You hold weights at your sides or across your shoulders
(or do it without weights), take a long step forward, and descend until your
rear knee nearly touches the ground. Then you push off with your front leg and
step back to the starting position.
An alternative is the “split
squat,” in which you start the exercise with one leg already out in front, and
then lower yourself and rise again without stepping out and back.
A third variation is the
“step-up,” in which you step forward and up onto a platform.
MUSCLES USED: This exercise uses the same muscles as the squat and
deadlift, but in a crucially different way. On the front of your pelvis are
muscles called “hip flexors,” which lift your thighs up in front of your torso.
(The opposite muscles are the “hip extensors,” the gluteals and hamstrings,
which straighten your torso when it’s bent forward.)
Most people have tight hip
flexors—a lifetime of sitting will do that—and in some they’re so tight as to
be locked up, practically. The tighter your hip flexors, the harder it is to
jump, much less take those long steps forward or diagonally to get over a
puddle or avoid a snoozing drunk on the sidewalk.
The lunge forces those muscles to
stretch and then contract quickly. That makes it one of those exercises that’s
as much about increasing the suppleness and flexibility of your muscles as it
is about keeping them strong.
REAL-LIFE USES: Almost all sports, excluding chess, feature lunges
to the front or side. Imagine a baseball infielder who couldn’t lunge to stop a
grounder up the middle, or a beach volleyball player who couldn’t lunge to dig
an opponent’s shot out of the sand.
The lunge also figures into those
powerful strides a sprinter takes to get up to full speed, and the move a
wrestler uses to take down an opponent, and the step you take before throwing a
ball. And what is soccer but a series of lunges in every direction?
I understand you probably aren’t
playing any of these sports right now. But the lunge is still crucial to your
everyday physical well-being. The shorter your strides, the less mobile and
agile you become. And when mobility and agility go, you’re just one slip or
tumble away from the assisted-living community, where you sit back in that
comfy chair to watch TV.
Push
WHAT IT IS: It can take many forms in the weight room, such as a
push-up, bench press, shoulder press, or dip. In a push-up, obviously, you push
your torso up from the floor. In a bench press, you lie on a bench, lower
weights to your chest, then push them back to arm’s length. An overhead press
involves pushing the weights straight up from your shoulders. A dip starts with
your bent arms behind you (your body is “dipped” down below them), and is
completed by straightening your arms and pushing your body up even with them.
MUSCLES USED: Even though the push-up and bench press are generally
thought of as “chest” exercises, and the overhead press is a “shoulder”
exercise, and the dip is a “triceps” exercise, they all start with action in
your shoulder joints. The dip, push-up, and bench press mostly activate the
front parts of your shoulder muscles, while the overhead press uses the front
and middle parts.
The push-up, bench press, and dip
use your chest muscles in conjunction with your front shoulders. The overhead
press bypasses the chest muscles and instead uses more of the shoulder muscles.
All four exercises use your
triceps to straighten your arms at the elbow joint.
REAL-LIFE USES: Many in the gym would consider the two major
pushing exercises—overhead press and bench press—to be physiologically
distinct. Certainly, you wouldn’t do one and expect to get all the benefits of
the other. But outside the gym, the line blurs. You’re rarely pushing straight
off your chest (a chest pass in basketball is one of the few exceptions I can
think of) or straight overhead. Most movements are at an angle in between the
two extremes.
Imagine this: Your neighbor’s car
has slipped off the road on a snowy day. You get behind the car to push it back
onto the road. How’s your body positioned? Chances are, your torso is at a
45-degree angle to the ground. So, although most of your power is going to come
from your legs, you’re still going to use your chest, shoulders, and triceps to
push. That’s not a pure analog of any gym exercise. In fact, while it might start
off resembling an incline bench press, it quickly morphs into more of a
shoulder press as you push the car farther from your torso, and as your torso
lowers to a position that’s almost parallel to the ground.
Pull
WHAT IT IS: As with pushing movements, pulls can come from many
angles. The lat pull down—one of the most popular gym exercises—involves
pulling a weight straight down to your shoulders from overhead. In a pull-up or
chin-up, you pull your body up to a stationary bar.
Rowing exercises have many forms.
In a gym, you can sit at a machine and pull a weight toward you. You can also
sit or stand in front of a cable pulley and pull a weight toward you from many
different angles, using one arm or two.
Free-weight rowing exercises are
usually done with you bent over at the hips so your torso is nearly parallel to
the floor. Then you pull dumbbells up to your sides or a barbell up to your
abdomen.
Finally, there’s the pullover, in
which you take a weight that’s overhead or behind you (if you’re lying down)
and pull it in an arcing motion until it’s in front of or over your torso.
MUSCLES USED: The two major upper-back muscle groups are the
latissimus dorsi—“lats” to you—and the trapezius, or “traps.” The lats are
shoulder-joint muscles; they pull your upper arms back to your torso when
they’re extended overhead or in front of you. The traps are shoulder-blade
muscles, meaning they pull your shoulder blades together in back (as in a row),
or down (as in a pull down or pull-up), or up (as in a shrugging motion).
Your biceps and some of the
muscles in your forearms aid your lats (and, indirectly, your traps) in these
pulling exercises. That’s one of the most important points we’ll make in this
book: Your biceps will get all the work they need from rows, chin-ups, and
other pulling exercises. They don’t really need any special attention to grow
in proportion to the rest of your muscles. And, as I’ve already said in this
chapter, they won’t grow out of proportion to those muscles no matter how many
curls you do, and no matter how you do them.
REAL-LIFE USES: If I could design any exercise machine, it would be
one that mimics a tug-of-war. I don’t think there’s another exercise or game
that so thoroughly works your biceps and upper-back muscles in their natural,
harmonious relationship to each other. (With the possible exception of sailing
in a heavy wind; I’m not the nautical type, so I have to take the sailors’ word
for it.)
If you’re winning the tug-of-war,
you’re starting the pull with your upper-back muscles, and then finishing with
your biceps and, to a lesser extent, your forearm and hand muscles. (Don’t
underestimate the importance of grip strength—it’s one of the few aspects of
muscular fitness that’s been linked to a longer life.)
In fact, if you put together all
the components of a successful tug, you’d start with a straightening at the
hips that resembles part of the deadlift motion, then a pull with the upper
back, then a biceps curl, with a twist thrown in for good measure. In other
words, in one picnic game, you’d employ three of the six most important
muscle-building movements.
Tug-of-war isn’t all that
different from a rowing movement, and of course rowing is called “rowing”
because it mimics the very useful act of (ready for this?) rowing a boat.
The other important use of the
pulling muscles is in climbing, an ability that was so important to our
primitive ancestors that it literally meant life or death. If you couldn’t pull
yourself up into that tree or scramble up that cliff faster than whatever
drooling predator was in pursuit, you were that day’s low-carb lunch special. And
there goes your genetic legacy—a tangle of bones and a few steaming piles of
saber-tooth-tiger dung in the Pleistocene forest.
In climbing, you start to pull
yourself up using your upper-back muscles, then finish with your biceps. And,
of course, you can’t get around the importance of gripping strength. You slip,
you die.
One more point about pulling
movements: They mirror pushing movements precisely. For example, if you were
tugging on a rope with one arm, it would be the mirror opposite of a pushing motion.
In the gym, the shoulder press and pull-up are opposites, as are rowing and
bench-press movements. You could even do the opposite of a pullover, if you
wanted to do an exercise called a “front raise,” in which you lift a weight in
an arcing movement from the front of your torso to overhead.
Twist
WHAT IT IS: Some exercises are specifically designed to isolate the
twisting motion. You can do this lying flat on your back and then twisting at
the waist to lower your legs to the floor. Or you can anchor your lower body,
and turn your shoulders from side to side, as in the Russian twist.
But you can also add twists to
other gym exercises. For example, a standing row can include a twist, as can a
shoulder press.
Finally, an exercise doesn’t have
to involve an actual twist to work the twisting muscles. If you do an exercise
that requires coordination and balance, and you’re actively preventing your
torso from twisting, you’re still using those muscles. That’s why, when you get
to the workout section, you won’t see a twisting movement in every single
program.
MUSCLES USED: Your waist has two sets of muscles charged with
bending and twisting: the external and internal obliques. The internals lie
beneath the externals, and the two sets of muscles have fibers that run
diagonally in opposite directions. If you were to bend to your left, then
straighten, the internal and external obliques on the right side of your torso
would stretch as you bent and then contract to lift you back up. If you were to
twist to your left, you’d use the external obliques on your right side and the
internal obliques on your left side.
Some small lower-back muscles
also play roles in bending and twisting. Main lower-back muscle group, the
spinal erectors, is mostly involved in straightening your back when it’s bent
forward.)
And, of course, the muscle you
probably care most about, the rectus abdominis or six-pack muscle, is also
involved in twisting.
REAL-LIFE USES: You can’t play a sport without twisting. The most
obvious example is the baseball swing. A right-handed hitter will swing using
the external obliques on the right side of his body, and the internal obliques
on his left, to drive the ball, although most of his power will come from his
hips as he turns them. (Many youngsters mistakenly believe that the forearms
are the key to the swing, but the hands and lower arms are just the end of the
whip. The hip turn is the key.)
Many trainers and gurus, such as
the aforementioned Paul Chek, write and speak extensively about the importance
of the midsection muscles as the communications link between your upper- and
lower-body muscles. And Alwyn and I certainly don’t disagree in general
(although we might quibble with some particulars of each trainer’s approach—we
fitness geeks are good at quibbling).
But the importance of abdominal strength, flexibility, and
overall integrity goes far beyond sports. Your day starts with a twist, when
you throw your legs over the side of the bed to walk to the bathroom.
From there, nearly everything you
do involves a series of bends and twists, separately and together. You twist
getting in and out of your car. You twist in your chair at work to get a file.
You bend and twist to pick up your kids, or pick up after them.
Walking and Running
WHAT THEY ARE: You rarely need to train these movements in the gym.
In fact, the idea of running with weights in a gym seems like a major injury or
accident begging to happen. You may as well pull out your cell phone and dial
“9” and “1” before you even start.
However, you can build good
exercises around walking. One is called the farmer’s walk, a staple of the
Strongman competitions you see on ESPN. You hold heavy weights in your hands
and walk a specified distance, sometimes with steps to climb up and down.
Another, promoted by trainer Chad Waterbury, is a figure-eight movement, in
which you hold a barbell overhead with straight arms while walking in
intersecting loops.
MUSCLES USED: Your entire lower body gets involved in walking and
running— in fact, walking and running are pretty much the main reasons you have
a lower body. Your hip flexors (muscles on the front of your pelvis) lift one
leg up and out in front of you, while your hip extensors (gluteals and
hamstrings) and calves on your trailing leg push against the ground to propel
your body forward. The muscle on the front of your shin, the tibialis anterior,
lifts your toes up on your front leg so they don’t drag on the ground.
Meanwhile, your postural muscles,
such as your internal obliques and some of the small, strut-like muscles in
your lower back and hips, keep your body upright and stable while you move.
You’ll notice that I haven’t
mentioned the quadriceps, the big muscles on the fronts of your thighs. Their
main job is to straighten your knees when they’re bent, and that’s not hard to
do while walking or running. Runners are notorious for having tight hips and
hamstrings and relatively weak quadriceps, while lifters sometimes are the
opposite—they do so many leg presses and leg extensions for their quadriceps
(the muscles they can see in a mirror) that they end up with relatively weak
hamstrings. Either combination is bad for your posture and the health of your
knees and spine.
REAL-LIFE USES: I don’t need to belabor the importance of walking
or running, since they’re part of everything. I will, though, mention that
running fast is one of the great neglected exercises in our world, even among
those who are fit.
As with jumping, few of us have a
need to approximate a sprint as we get older. And when we try it, it tends to
be at a company picnic or some other occasion in which we go from zero—no
warm-up, no momentum—to full speed in an instant.
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