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by
Paul Wade
Remember, plate-loading barbells and dumbbells weren’t even invented until the twentieth century. Before this innovation, the vast majority of the world’s most muscular upper bodies were developed by hand-balancing and work on the horizontal bar.
I love the world of strength and fitness. But when I take a look at the direction training and athletics are headed in the outside world, it almost makes me want to head to San Quentin and bang on the main gate to go straight back inside.
It’s difficult to think of anything more futile, depressing and tedious than the cardio machine section of a modern gym.
Strongly agree
And as for the weights work? There tend to be two types of approaches to this. Firstly, there’s the generalized, feminine “toning” attitude—get into a machine on its lowest setting or pick up the teeniest dumbbells you can, and begin the monotonous counting. This charade might look good in a chrome-clad gym if you are covered in spandex but trust me, it does zero for your health and absolutely nothing for your fitness and conditioning levels.
When the body has to lift itself, in a pullup or squat, for example, the skeleto-muscular structure naturally aligns to the most efficient and natural output ratio. When lifting weights, this natural shift does not occur—in fact the bodybuilder has to learn to move as unnaturally as possible to force maximum emphasis onto the muscles.
For indisputable proof that bodyweight training can develop a massive, muscular physique, take a look at the men’s gymnastics next time it comes on TV. Those guys have massive biceps, shoulders like coconuts and lats that look like wings—all built simply by moving their own bodies against gravity. The way men used to train.
A couple of fast sets every few workouts will be good for athleticism and variety. But despite this fact, the majority of your pushups should be done relatively slowly; for a count of two seconds down to the bottom position, a one second pause, and two seconds back up to the top position before immediately descending again.
Firstly, smooth technique develops higher levels of pure strength. When you move explosively, you inevitably rely on momentum during some portion of the movement. If momentum is doing the work, it means your muscles aren’t.
Incidentally, the kiss-the-baby technique can be applied to weight-training exercises, like the bench press or shoulder press. If you cannot very gently “kiss” your body with the bar in the bottom position—if you have to either bounce it or stop short—the weight you’re using is too heavy.
In all strength training, progression is the name of the game. In terms of muscle heft and power, if you do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you always got—no matter how many reps you mindlessly add.
Although the development of endurance is an interesting and satisfying sideline, I’m a big believer that bodyweight training should be first and foremost a strength discipline. Increasing your reps will improve endurance, but after you hit double figures it won’t do very much for strength. If you want to increase your muscle and might, you’ll have to find ways of making the one-arm pushup harder.
the Gold’s Gym in Venice Beach (a.k.a. “Muscle Beach”), California. The Venice Beach Gold’s Gym can probably count more serious bodybuilders and elite strength athletes as members than any other gym in the world. He told me once that the squat racks were right at the back of the gym. Despite visiting the place frequently over years, he said that he never, ever saw a queue for those squat racks.
In fact, this attitude is totally backwards. The real strength of an athlete lies in his hips and legs, not his upper body and arms. Unless we are in mid-air, or seated with the legs raised off the ground, all movements of the upper limbs rely on forces transmitted through the legs.
Take the classic Olympic lift, the clean and jerk as an example. This is probably the ultimate example of total body power. But despite the fact that the lifter holds the weight above his head, most of the force generated to achieve this lift comes from the thighs—the weight is never pressed up by the arms. It’s far too heavy for that.
Many of them isolate individual muscles within the thighs; leg extensions and sissy squats isolate the quadriceps, leg curls isolate the leg biceps, hyperextensions focus on the glutes.
Because of its deep significance to physical culture the world over, this exercise goes by many names. In English-speaking countries it is called the squat, or deep knee-bend. In India—where physical culture is practically built on bodyweight squatting—it is called the baithak.
The squat also works the semitendinosus, semimembranosus and biceps femoris muscles—the complex at the rear of the thigh, most commonly known as the hamstrings. The fact that squats work the back of the thigh is not well known nowadays, and as a result most athletes train their hamstrings on specially constructed leg curl machines.
Many bodybuilders don’t even train their calves directly—squatting keeps them thick and strong.
It can also cause the knees to track inwards, which increases shear force to the knee joint. All these problems are compounded for taller athletes, because long leg bones place the lifter at a significant biomechanical disadvantage. The taller you are, the more the above problems will apply to you. It’s not by coincidence that all the truly great barbell squatters are short.
What is a full range of motion for the squat? It means squatting down until your hamstrings are pressing on your calves and you cannot descend any further, before pushing up with thigh and knee power until your legs are fully straight. Anything less is not a full squat.
Some people find that they have to lift their heels off the ground when they squat, so they put a board or block under the heels to help them. This is a bad habit. Needing to elevate the heels has nothing to do with balance or body structure, and everything to do with lack of ankle mobility and inflexibility of
Many guys are afraid of the squat, because they think it will aggravate old knee injuries. In fact, the opposite is usually true. The increased blood flow and range of motion in full squats removes waste build-up and stretches old scar tissue, alleviating pain. The knees and surrounding muscles and tendons become stronger and more flexible, and the likelihood of future injuries is lessened.
Women can rarely match men in terms of upper body strength, but they can be capable of huge leg strength because their hips and thighs are naturally well developed for childbirth.
The idea that you need to perform multiple exercises to properly train your abdomen is another modern myth. You may have been told that in exercises where you raise the torso, the “upper” abs get worked, and that in exercises where you raise the legs or hips the “lower” abs get worked. Any trained anatomist will tell you that this is crap.
Sit-ups and leg raises work the midsection in similar ways, but from opposite directions; in sit-ups, the abdomen contracts to lift the torso; in leg raises, the abdomen contracts to lift the lower limbs. Remember, you really don’t need to do both—as I said earlier, there are no “upper” or “lower” abs. Either the abdomen contracts or it doesn’t. So which of these two classics is best?
The truth is, the hanging leg raise done slowly and with perfectly straight legs is beyond the ability of most people, even very agile athletes like martial artists and wrestlers.
No matter how powerful or healthy the brain is, if the spinal cord is damaged, it cannot communicate with the body and is effectively useless. Everybody remembers the tragic paralysis of Superman star Christopher Reeve following his horse riding accident in the mid nineteen-nineties. Reeve suffered no brain damage—the helmet he was wearing prevented it. But his brain was unable to influence his body because his spinal cord was horribly damaged.
Christopher Reeve shattered the first and second vertebrae in his spine, in the neck, and as a result his functioning below the neck virtually disappeared. It took him many months of daily therapy before he was even able to breathe for short periods without a respirator.
Human beings are at a spinal disadvantage to begin with; standing on two feet was the worst move our species ever made. Animals on all-fours rarely suffer spinal problems
exercises like deadlifts and good mornings, where bar is placed on the shoulders and the athlete bows down. These techniques both work the erector spinae, but they load the spinal column at a fixed point, meaning that the deep muscles are worked unevenly.
The mighty Bruce Lee was performing barbell good mornings when he blew his back out badly in 1970. Doctors told him he would never perform kung fu again, but he trained himself back to full fitness—using calisthenics.
But perhaps no country has devoted so much time to understanding the bridge as India, where it is called chakrasana—the wheel posture.
Tragically, shoulder pain and strength training methods seem destined to go together like ham and eggs. Abbott and Costello. Love and marriage. It doesn’t matter what form of training you favor—bodybuilding, powerlifting, Olympic weightlifting, machine training, dinosaur training, whatever. Shoulder injuries are everywhere in strength training.
The bench presses and military presses get heavier and heavier, and the chronic damage to the shoulders adds up. The athlete learns to use his shoulders less when he’s not in the gym, because they are constantly inflamed; they’re sore to move. They crack and pop.
Many have also noticed that their shoulder pain improves when they switch from barbells to dumbbells—even if they continue using heavy weights.
Let’s start with strength. In effect, performing handstand pushups is the equivalent of shoulder pressing your bodyweight. It may take years (and many injuries) to get to this level of strength with a barbell—in fact, many athletes just never get there. But the average person can learn to do handstand pushups in a matter of months.
Beginners are advised to master close pushups, Step 6 of the regular pushup series (see chapter 5) before even beginning Step 1 of the handstand pushup series.
If you have developed your own technique, that’s fine; calisthenics isn’t gymnastics—it’s the muscle-building portion of the exercise that’s of importance, not how you get there.
You really don’t need all this. The most efficient way to warm up is with two to four progressively harder higher rep sets of the movement you are going to be performing for your work sets. Do two warm up sets if you are young with no joint problems, three or even four if you are older, in poor shape or in a cold climate.
Some trainers also recommend a warm down/cool down. Historically, the idea of a cool down comes from Victorian exercise ideologists. They believed that if the heartbeat slowed too rapidly it would cause the body internal damage. We now know that this isn’t true at all.
All a cool down involves is more work for the muscles—how can more work possibly reduce damage? For this reason, I don’t do systematic cool downs.
You don’t need to be totally shattered after a bodyweight workout. If you want to get strong doing calisthenics, think like a sprinter—not a marathon runner. Warm up, then BOOM! Give it your all over a small number of sets.
you are training for strength and muscle, you must rest as long as it takes for you to get ready to tackle the next set and give it your all. No guidelines can be given for this—it entirely depends on how fit you are.
Perhaps goals play the biggest role in deciding how long and often you train. Prolonged training sessions with lots of exercise volume will build stamina and endurance, but they won’t build muscle and strength.
Once you’ve really given your all, doing any more just eats into your recovery ability and makes you sorer for longer—meaning you have to wait longer until you train on that particular technique again.
