Pumping Iron

Many bodybuilders believe that to emphasise the chest when bench pressing one should flare the elbows out to the side, stick your chest out and have a slight arch in your back that is in accordance to the natural curvature of your spine.

For bodybuilding purposes you should not tuck your elbows into your torso or have a big arch in your back. This is a powerlifting technique designed to spread the load across chest, shoulders and triceps. The purpose of the exaggerated arch is to reduce the distance you need to lower and lift the barbell. Both of these techniques enable you to lift more weight but do not necessarily do favours for your physique.

Grip width affects where on the chest the emphasis will be placed. A grip where the hands are over the elbows when the upper arm is parallel to the ground puts most of the emphasis on the mid and outer pectoral strands of muscle.

A grip wider than this will put the primary emphasis on the outer chest fibers.

A close grip stimulates the inner chest. The trick here is to push your hands towards one another continously throughout each rep positive and negative without actually moving your hands. The tension will cause your inner pectoral fibers to contract. Try to lift the barbell on the strength of this contraction rather than pushing the bar up with your triceps strength.

The bench angle also has an affect on where on the chest the muscle-building stress is placed. A decline angle puts stress on the lower chest, flat on the middle and incline on the upper chest. Many benches can be angled at more than just three settings. The pectorals are a fan shaped muscles with a multitude of fibers stretched across your upper torso.  The advantage of using a variety of angles is that you can stimulate all the fibers.

Some say that where on your chest you lower the bar also has a bearing on where the stimulation is aimed. This is most noticeable when the bench is in the neutral or flat position. Lowering the bar to the lower area of the chest will tend to stress those parts of the chest whereas if you lower the bar to your neck or upper chest the stress will go there.

A wide stance emphasises buttocks, hamstrings and inner thighs development. This style of squatting is common in powerlifting circles as it allows you to lift more weight than other styles of squatting.

A narrow stance (hip width to heels touching) and keeping the torso as upright as possible focuses growth stimulation on the middle and outer quads.

This style is also favoured by Olympic weightlifters for strengthening their legs.

Some people have trouble maintaining balance on narrow stance squats. Common remedies include:

Putting a weight plate or a one inch thin block of wood under your heels

 Use Olympic weightlifting shoes which have heels

 Or squat in a Smith machine

Some people object to elevating the heels by using wood claiming it increases knee stress. You should do your own research and make up your own mind. I believe that if this were true, Olympic weightlifters, who routinely use heeled shoes with much heavier weights than bodybuilders use and with more knee jarring, would have a high occurance of knee injuries compared to other sports. However, the statistics I’ve seen suggest otherwise.

Chin ups and pull ups are my favourite back exercises. However, sometimes a change is a good thing. I’ve found a common complaint is that people say they don’t feel their backs working with chin ups and pull ups for a number of reasons. There are some really great pieces of advice on how to increase your mind-muscle connection on the forum. Here are Defiant1’s tips in response to a trainee who says he feel his biceps and forearms more than his lats when doing chin ups: http://forum.bodybuilding.com/showpost.php?p=34362871&postcount=3

While pull ups, chin ups, pulldowns and rows are staples in my training, for a change of pace I like to include the following exercises.

Lat Shrugs

Hang under a pull up bar or pulldown machine (bar/grip of your choice to hit different areas of the lats) and “shrug up”. Imagine pulling the bar down without bending your arms or performing a reverse shrug. Your shoulder blades will go downwards.

This exercise can also be done from dip bars. Put extra padding on the dip bars with towels. Balance yourself over the bars by putting your upper forearms on the bars. Sink your body down with your forearms in front of you then pull yourself back up purely by lat contraction. DiamondDelts demonstrates in the photos below.

Rearward Shrugs

This is a trap/rhomboid exercise where you lay face down on a raised bench with a barbell or pair of dumbbells beneath you. You shrug back the weight without bending your arms. You can also perform this on a row machine. You need to raise the bench if you use freeweights otherwise you won’t be able to straighten your arms. You can use step aerobic steps, blocks of wood or 45lb plates.

Pulldowns with arm straps

Get a pair of arm straps that are commonly used for hanging leg raises / knee ups like these on sale on this website: http://www.bodybuilding.com/store/pgrip/hang.html. Attach them to a pull up bar or pulldown machine and perform pulldowns by pushing down with your elbows/back of your arms and NOT by pulling with your hands. Keep your palms open and not grasping the straps.

Rows with arm straps

Same as above but attach the arm straps to a low cable for rows or a barbell for bent over rows.  Again, very important not to grasp the straps with your hands. The range of motion will be less than regular rows otherwise the straps will slip off your arms.

Here are some related discussions from the forum:

Here are some discussions on them from the forum:
http://forum.bodybuilding.com/search.php?searchid=95856241&pp=20
http://forum.bodybuilding.com/search.php?searchid=95855811

Note that not everyone uses uniform terminology. Where I have called each exercise a different name some people in the linked forum posts call all of the above exercises lat shrugs. Don’t let it confuse you!

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