Pavel's Weekly Strength and Flexibility Training Tip

The Best and the Worst Biceps Exercises

The Worst Biceps Exercise: the Zottman Curl

The Z curl calls for curling a dumbbell with a regular palm up grip, then pronating the wrist and doing a reverse curl negative. Unless you are very in tune with your body your smaller flexors on the top of the forearm will be a hurting units for weeks; those negatives creep up without warning.

The Best Biceps Exercise: the One-Arm Dumbell Curl

It is hard to beat this classic provided you curl strict and slow and employ every high-tension technique in the book.

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The Best and the Worst Shoulders Exercises

The Worst Shoulders Exercise: the Seated Barbell Military Press

Do this one long enough and heavy enough and you can kiss your back goodbye. Get off your butt, you big sissy!

The Best Shoulders Exercise: the Arnold Press

Let’s face it, the big guy knew what he was doing. Even though there are other shoulder drills at least as effective as this one, say the clean-and-press, the Arnold press is a lot more user friendly.

Press two dumbbells from your chest starting with a curl grip. Not straight up though, but back and to the sides in an arc. It helps to bring your elbows as low as possible between reps; you will get a greater deltoid stretch and your shoulder joints will appreciate it.

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The Best and the Worst Chest Exercises

The Worst Chest Exercise: the Cable Cross-Over

The pec was designed for power and teasing it with this silly move is a waste of your time. If you want to bring out the ‘cuts’ you will be much better off etching them in with some old-fashioned iron bending. Go to IronMind.com for nails and instructions. Take a seminar with Senior RKC Brett Jones of BreakingStrength.com. Brett is the eleventh person to bend Iron Mind’s famous Red Nail TM, the second fellow under two hundred pounds.

The Best Chest Exercise: the Legal Powerlifting Bench Press

No need to reinvent the wheel here. You will not find a better chest builder than the barbell bench press. However, to get the most out, of it you had better lose some of your bad bodybuilding habits – such as putting your feet up on the bench and bouncing the bar off your chest. Drive your feet into the floor and pause on your chest for a second without relaxing, as you would in a power meet.

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The Best and the Worst Traps Exercises

The Worst Traps Exercise: the Smith Machine Shrug

I have never seen a set of big traps inside a Smith machine. You cannot pull your shoulders back at the top of the movement and your traps will miss all the good stuff. Besides, the machine locks your shoulder girdle in a set track and that could lead to joint problems.

The Best Traps Exercise: the Barbell Shrug with a Hip Thrust

The traps of Soviet weightlifting legend David Rigert stood out like a foreign object, an alien parasite. You can bet that the champion did not get there with uncertain shrugs with little weights. The traps best respond to explosive barbell shrugs assisted by a hip thrust: violently contract your glutes and throw your hips forward as you shrug up and back. Do not bend your arms; it helps to keep your triceps flexed, at least on the bottom of the movement. You may hold the contraction on the last rep for a few seconds followed up by a slow negative. Do not relax under the weight! Breathe shallow.

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The Best and the Worst Lats Exercises

The Worst Lats Exercise: the Pulldown Behind the Neck

If you have exceptional active flexibility of the shoulder girdle, can keep your elbows way back and can pull the bar to the nape of your neck without leaning forward and sticking your head out like a chicken about to be beheaded– go ahead and pull behind the neck. Since I do not know anyone except for Olympic weightlifters and gymnasts who can do that, you might as well forget it! The chicken style pulldown behind the neck does little but screw up necks and shoulders.

The Best Lats Exercise: the Pullup/Chinup on Gymnastic Rings

The debate regarding the ‘best’ pullup grip is as hot as it was half a century ago. Is wide better than narrow? Is the supinated grip better than the pronated one? I have good news for you: you can have it all, just do your pullups or chinups on gymnastic rings. What a stretch! What a contraction! If you do not have the luxury of living next door to the old Santa Monica Muscle Beach go to ringtraining.com and get a set.

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The Best and the Worst Calves Exercises

The Worst Calves Exercise: the Standing Machine Calf Raise

When young Arnold trained with Reg Park, the latter used 1,000 pounds for his calf raises, twice Schwarzenegger's training weight. Park explained to the future legend of bodybuilding that the 500 pounds he was toying with “were not making an impression” on his calves at all, because these are very strong muscles (or at least ones with good leverage). Arnold proceeded to work up to a grand. The rest is history.

Superheavy calf training is a must. But great weghts on your shoulders combined with high volume translate into some serious spinal compression, especially if you are not skilled in protecting your back with diaphragmatic pressure against your viscera and your midsection is weak. Regardless of the standing calf raise’s effectiveness, you had better ditch it once you work up to big poundages.

The Best Calves Exercise: the Negative Accentuated Foot Extension in a Leg Press Machine

Your calves get worked daily and it takes some unusual stress to spur them into growth. This is where the leg press machine comes in (the only thing it is good for). The sled will enable you to blast your calves with monster weights without back stress – as long as you do not let your butt curl up – and easily lends itself to intense negative accentuated training. Lift the load with two feet, lower it with one. Feel the pain.

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The Best and Worst Hamstrings Exercises

The Worst Hamstrings Exercise: the Leg Curl

The most likely 'gain' that you are going to report from this exercise impostor is back pain from trying too hard and getting your hip flexors in the action.

Working the hammies as knee flexors just is not productive (unless you are using Dr. Yessis’ GHG machine). Treat them as hip extensors and you might eventually come to the gym wearing shorts.

The Best Hamstrings Exercise: the Good Morning

My friend Marty Gallagher, a former coach of the Powerlifting Team USA, laments, “Why does such a manly drill have such a ‘hearts and flowers’ name?”

I have no idea. But I know that your hamstrings will fill out like a pair of footballs once you put good mornings in your regimen.

Make sure to keep your back arched and do not go any deeper than parallel. Do not think of leaning forward, rather keep sticking your butt out while looking straight ahead until you reach the right depth.

As a bonus, good mornings will boost your squats into orbit, which is why they are a favorite with most top Russian powerlifters.

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The Best and the Worst Quads Exercises

The Worst Quads Exercise: Any Machine Exercise

Just say no to machines when it comes to leg training! If you cannot, get help.

Leg extensions are worthless and can be tough on the knees – as the latter are vulnerable without the backup of contracting hamstrings. Ditto for the Hack squat machine, not to mention additional problems from knee hyperflexion.

And the leg press is nothing but an ego lift. Sure, you can impress someone who has never touched a weight with a 1,000 pound leg press. People in the know would be more impressed with a squat with one third of that poundage.

The Best Quads Exercise: the Squat

Nobody does it better. You may opt for any reasonable variation of the squat – the Olympic squat, the powerlifting squat, the front squat, the one-legged squat, the duck style deadlift or the trap bar deadlift – as long as you squat.

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The Best and the Worst Lower Back Exercises

The Worst Lower Back Exercise: the Sissy Deadlift

You have heard of a sissy squat but not a sissy deadlift? -- You have seen it, Comrade, trust me.

This grotesque deadlift mutation calls for a weight lighter than your top curl and demands that you lock your knees and twist your neck to check out your butt in the mirror.

This exercise in vanity will get you nothing but back, neck, and knee problems; your spinal erectors will remain flatter than a road kill.

The Best Lower Back Exercise: the Deadlift Lockout

Be generous with plates and pull a barbell from your knee level or slightly above. Use a staggered powerlifting grip or straps. Keep your whole body, especially your stomach and butt, tight.

Frank Zane digs the partial deadlift for a reason. What reason? -– Do the drill and you will not have to ask.

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The Best and the Worst Glutes Exercises

Worst Glutes Exercise: the Fire Hydrant and Anything Else that Happens in a 'Muscle Sculpting' Class

What a pathetic, demeaning exercise. Get off your knees, you are not a dog. Besides, the glutes are very powerful. It takes a lot more than repetitive butt squeezes to get them to shape up.

Best Glutes Exercise: the Hip Pull-through

Facing away from a cable machine, stick your arms between your legs and grab a triceps pushdown rope attached to the low cable. Keeping your arms straight take a step forward to load your muscles. Now squeeze your glutes and drive your hips forward while locking out your knees. If your knees stay bent, the drill will not work.

In addition to a hard butt you will get your deadlift moving, both the start and the lockout. Louie Simmons’ famous powerlifting club swears by this exercise.

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The Best and the Worst Abs Exercises

Worst Abs Exercise: the Crunch

I have no clue how such a pathetic exercise has come to dominate the scene. I guess some simple mind came up with a bright idea that not coming up all the way would isolate the abs from the psoas. It does not. But if you have not read my book Bullet-Proof Abs you will never know why.

Best Abs Exercise: the Janda Situp

The crunch brigade is stuck in the industrial age. They treat the body as a simplistic mechanism of pulleys and levers and fail to recognize the vital role of the nervous system in protecting the back – and in making rock hard abs happen.. The Janda situp, a state of the art exercise developed by a top Eastern European back rehab specialist, drags abs fitness into the information age. It ‘hacks’ into your ‘muscle software’ to dramatically amplify the intensity of the abdominal contraction while shutting off the potentially back damaging hip flexor muscles.

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What lost bodybuilding secrets can we use today?

There are many - but one stands out: do not train to failure and have patience.

Famous Russian strongman Pyotr 'the Kettlebell King' Kryloff said, "The training of amateurs I have been meeting… is driven by records. It is a wrong system and an unhealthy one to top it off… Thanks to my extremely careful and restrained system of training I have kept my strength and muscles, even though, being an old school circus athlete, I had to perform very difficult stunts and sometimes perform shows with very heavy weights a few times a day."

As the ancient wisdom goes, “He who understands life does not rush.”

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Old timer secrets for cardio and a super-lean look

Dig into your family album or go to the library and look up photos of people who lived in the first half of the twentieth century or earlier. I dare you to find an obese person. The lost secret of leanness is simple: hard physical labor every day. Here is some grandfatherly advice: get off your stern and go to work.

Real man or woman work, not fifteen minutes on an elliptical trainer every other day. Get a part time job as a mover. Sell your John Deere and get an old-fashioned push mower. Volunteer to clean up a highway. Andrey Dolgov, a Latvian boxing and kickboxing coach extraordinaire, raised a school of fearsome champions whose S&C is old-fashioned labor. These hard and ripped to the bone fighters volunteer to cut and stack firewood for old ladies.

Even an occasional day or two of hard physical work or exercise will do wonders for your body comp. My students always leave a weekend kettlebell course leaner and more muscular. Martial arts seminars are great; recently I took an excellent two and a half day course from Tim Larkin of tftgroup.com and walked away noticeably leaner.

My wife once observed, if you work out for an hour a day and spend twenty-three hours sitting or lying down, do you think your looks will reflect the one hour or the twenty three hours?

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Combine both flexibility and strength training with the Bent Press

This drill is not really a press but a unique flexibility and support feat. Get a weight to your shoulder: a barbell, dumbell, or kettlebell. Set up so your elbow is resting on your pelvic bone, on the side and even slightly behind you. This calls for some serious shoulder flexibility; chances are it will take you months of partial reps to work into a full bent press.

Slowly lean to the side away from the weight and slightly forward – never back! Keep your eye on the bell at all times and be ready to drop it. Your elbow must rest against your side at all times and your forearm must remain vertical, absolute necessities with heavy weights. The all time record is Arthur Saxon’s 370 pounds!

Eventually you will end up in a semi-squat, your arm finally locked out. Slowly stand up with your arm straight overhead.

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Practicing: an old-timer strength secret for harder, stronger muscles

Our great-grandfathers treated their iron time as a practice rather than a workout. They lifted heavy and often but never to failure or exhaustion. According to The Strong Men of Old by Bob Hoffman, Arthur Saxon “would do each stunt only a few times and alternate with brief periods of rest so as to prevent himself from tiring.” That explains how Saxon could train daily.

Although frequent, heavy, and non-exhaustive training builds unreal strength, it is not a good full time method for a bodybuilder. Saxon was a strong man but not a muscle man. In 1879 William Blaikie explained in How to Get Strong and How to Stay So that “…occasional heavy lifting tends rather to harden the muscle than to rapidly increase its size, protracted effort at lighter but good-sized weights doing the latter to better advantage.” An occasional six to eight week gig of daily pure power training will do you a world of good though. Greater strength later applied to high volume bodybuilding will deliver tremendous mass gains.

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