vince_andrich’s BodyBlog

On Your Arms in 15 Workouts!

By Vince Andrich

Quick, what pose would you most likely see if you ask a bodybuilder to flex? Yes, you guessed it, an arm pose. It could be a front double bicep, side tricep or just throwing up one GUN. The fact is, arm development is critical to a great physique, and to your psyche. So how do you train for great arm development?

Gold Standard for Symmetry…Bob Paris

Balance through Specialization
In my opinion, highly developed arms are NOT impressive if the rest of your body is under-developed. Conversely, decent arm development on a balanced physique is very impressive. This is especially true when it comes to sporting a set of arms that get attention, or in a word: attractive.

The Total Package…Rachel McLish
This may seem confusing to comprehend at first, but if you’ve ever studied the various body types that may be on a competition stage, you’ll easily see that your eyes seem to zero in on the athletes €˜flaws’ first. Sure, you will spot impressive body parts, but in the final analysis, he or she who has the least flaws will look the best. This is even truer in real life, and it is simply because the mind likes symmetry. Your mind processes images, but will repeatedly look for the most complete package. A good example is a car with a killer set of dubs (rims). At first you notice the shiny bright chrome, but quickly begin to assess if the car holds up to your initial impression. If the car doesn’t meet your expectation, many times the great looking rims take away from the cars entire look, thus defeating the purpose.

The Mind Loves to Find Flaws…Train Accordingly!

This is why, I have always felt that the goal of any bodybuilder is to eliminate or diminish their flaws…and everyone has them. So if you believe your arms need more development to €˜match’ the rest of your body, here is a 21-day specialization program that will get your GUNS growing again.

The 21-Day Arm Blitz 

1. Focus nearly all of your recuperative power, and energy towards breaking down, and rebuilding your arms
2. Work arms 3 times per week, and limit all other body-parts to 1 workout per week
3. Do six ‘work’ sets of six reps for arm exercises (plus one warm-up set per exercise that is not counted as work set)
4. Perform only one exercise for biceps, and one for triceps each arm workout
5. You are doing low reps for maximum tension, but this does not mean use poor form!
6. A good split is to do arms on M-W-F, but do no upper body work on weekends
7. The best arm exercises are described below. Remember, do only one movement for triceps and one for triceps each arm session
8. You must alternate the exercises below each arm workout for variety

Triceps (specialized exercises to beef up the high/meaty portion of the triceps)

Exercise 1. Triceps Barbell Pullover

This movement looks a bit weird, but it packs slabs of beef on the largest areas of the upper arm. To do the movement properly, lie on a flat bench with the top of your shoulders hanging slightly off the top end (you could look down and see the floor). Now, place a barbell held at arms length over your chest. This is not a pullover position, but a modified lying press position. The reason your shoulders are slightly off the top edge of the bench is to take the power away from them, and fully target the triceps. Your grip should be 12 wide. Keep your elbows in and lower the bar behind and just below your head. Return to the starting position and repeat.

Exercise 2. Barbell Rollover and Press

Lie on the same bench with your body in the same position as described in the previous exercise. From this position pull the bar over, close to your face and rest it on your chest. Now rotate your elbows out to the sides and press the bar to arms length over your chest. Try to press downward toward your feet to get a better contraction. Now lower the bar to the starting position and repeat the movement.

Biceps (specialized exercises to beef up the bottom and the peak portion of the biceps)

Exercise 1. Barbell Preacher Curl
I suggest you perform your preacher curls with the left foot forward under the bench and the right foot back. You can look up the preacher bench on bodybuilding.com for a review of this apparatus. Keep your stomach pressed against the elbow rest and your head and shoulders inclined forward. Your grip should be shoulder width apart and “thumb under fashion. Start the movement by bending your wrists up and curl to the shoulders. Use smooth pumping reps and do not lean back at the top of the movement.

Exercise 2. Alternate Incline Curls

Lie back on an incline bench; keep your chin on your chest and knees slightly bent. Curl your left dumbbell first, keeping your elbows back. As the dumbbell comes up, lean to that side, look at the weight and forcibly contract the bicep when the weight touches the front deltoid. When lowering the left dumbbell, curl the right one using the same techniques.

Conclusion

Stick with this program for three weeks, and then assess your body for other areas that need specialization.

For PART I Refer To;

Osmotic Anabolic Signaling

Nutrition and Supplement Strategies that Go BEYOND the €˜Perpetual PUMP’ for

True Muscle Growth and Cellular Recovery
PART II

By Vince Andrich

The Mirror-Key to Monitoring Low-Carb Diet Success

Using changes in the appearance of your muscles to gauge your nutritional status and/or needs is extremely useful on a carbohydrate-controlled diet, because they are very time sensitive. What I mean is, once you understand what nutrients alter the volume of your muscles, you can make adjustments literally day-by-day. These visible signs are more significant than ever when you understand that as a rule High Protein-Low Carb (HP-LC) Diets cause an overall loss of cell volume making the scale an unreliable measuring tool. Your visual goal will be to keep your muscles looking FIT not flat, which we will cover in detail later. If you desire muscles that are super pumped, fuller, rounder and gorging with vascularity then forget using a HP-LC Diet exclusively. To attain fat loss, and still be able to muster up a pump in the gym, takes some insight. In short, the goal is to “threaten your glycogen stores to a point where your muscles begin to lose fullness, making it difficult to get a great pump, however we must avoid allowing our muscle to go entirely “flat. The €˜trick of the trade’ is to utilize a cyclical carbohydrate cycling approach, where you eat about 100 grams of carbohydrates per day for up to three days, and then jump to about 5 times that number for day four. This would mean you would consume 100 grams of carbs for three days, and then on day four, consume 500 grams to replenish depleted energy stores. Beyond this “carbohydrate-balancing act, there are several recent discoveries that have revealed numerous non-carbohydrate substrates that induce cell swelling so that you can attain maximum muscularity and avoid looking flat and stringy. Since most athletes don’t have much experience assessing their nutritional status as it relates to muscle cell energy, here is a quick guide.

Assessment Tools

Monitoring the “appearance of your muscles is an art form that has been practiced for years by trial and error. Hey, it’s no accident that when you look around any commercial gym all you see is a wall of mirrors. However, beauty is more than skin deep. Today science has uncovered tons of the reasons why gauging muscularity by the mirror is essential to success.
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So What Do I Look For? 
The main storage compound in skeletal muscle is glycogen, which is measured in millimoles per kilogram of muscle (mmol/kg). Luckily, several researchers have found some relevant data regarding glycogen stores to help athletes gauge their cell volume. Here is what we know:

An individual following a normal mixed diet will maintain glycogen levels around 80-100 mmol/kg. Athletes following a mixed diet have higher levels, around 110-130 mmol/kg,  which would represent a fuller looking muscle. As a rule weight trainers and active individuals classify a normal mixed diet as 40% protein, 40% carbs, and 20% fat. So then an active individual on a HP-LC Diet should aim for “fit looking muscles which is represented by glycogen levels around 70 mmol/kg. If you are using other cell swelling techniques in this article, your muscles should look a much fuller than non-exercising individuals on a normal mixed diet or about 85 mmol/kg. At these levels of glycogen, fat oxidation increases both at rest and during exercise . Monitoring the “appearance of your muscles is a very non-scientific measuring tool so it is necessary to use visualization. Picture “fit muscles on a HP-LC Diet to look about 35 % smaller in overall cell volume than when you are not dieting (see fig.1).

If you’re still unclear remember how you looked when you were eating more carbs and compare that to these warning signs that tell you’re spiraling out of control:

• A flat or stringy looking muscle would represent about a 70% decrease in your overall cell volume (glycogen at 40 mmol/kg). At this level, workout performance is largely impaired and protein can become an important fuel source during exercise.
• Total exhaustion during exercise occurs when your muscles are about 85% under volumized (glycogen at 15-25 mmol/kg), which is not an environment conducive to favorable changes in body composition.

The Chemical Soup that Determines Muscle Cell Volume
It should come as no surprise that getting nutrients in and out of your muscles is under close scrutiny. The €˜gatekeeper’ that guards working muscles is called a cell membrane, or more specifically the sarcolemma. Covering the entire muscle fiber, the sarcolemma (muscle membrane) is an extremely thin, flexible and elastic substance. The first and most important job of the membrane is to maintain the integrity of the cell and keep the vital contents inside. If this protective cover gets damaged severely then the contents will escape and the cell will die. Further, the sarcolemma acts as a gateway through which substances (i.e. amino acids) can enter and leave, making it selectively permeable. Briefly, here are the main functions of the cell membrane:

• To hold vital energy components inside the muscle cell, such as glycogen and Adenosine triphosphate (ATP), the key energy €˜currency’ of your cells
• To transport the waste build up from muscle fiber contraction out of the cell
• To accept nutrients that are critical to the health, maintenance, repair and building of muscle cells. These nutrients are amino acids, carbohydrate molecules (glycogen stores), hormones, oxygen etc

One surefire way to manipulate the permeability of a cell membrane is to workout. Training damages the sarcolemma in a positive way and appears to “unlock the door making it more permeable. This effect has likely been programmed into our genes for survival. The likely scenario is this: after a brutal workout, your body senses that the nutrients and fibers inside the muscle cell have been “torched and damaged, then it allows what is effectively your muscle cell recovery team inside to “reconstruct the crime scene. It appears that feedback provided by a number of mechanisms including amino acid monitoring and Osmotic Anabolic Signaling work in concert to maintain proper cell volume as a consequence of exercise.

The Cytosol €” Key to Muscle Cell Volume
Once past the muscle cell gateway, what exactly do you find inside? You find the cell’s cytoplasm, which in regards to a muscle cell is called the sarcoplasm. This is literally everything inside of the plasma membrane. The muscle fibers are surrounded by a thick fluid or gel, which is called the Cytosol. This is center of the universe when it comes to bodybuilding. I say this because the nutrients that go in and out of the cytosol determine how the muscle cell is remodeled, or basically, rebuilt.
The cytosol is the intracellular fluid inside of the muscle fiber. The outer structure is a virtual superhighway, which takes raw materials from the outside of the cell (passed through the cell membrane), then stores or converts those materials into useable energy. In other words this transparent gel contains such foods as amino acids for maintenance and repair and glycogen (carbohydrates stored in muscle) for energy. You see a muscle fiber must have a fuel source in order to contract. This is why the cytosol also has tiny specialized structures called organelles, or microscopic organs. Perhaps the most significant of these €” at least in terms of energy production €” are mitochondria, because they convert carbohydrates (see chart above) and fats into ATP, which is our muscle cell’s main energy currency or fuel.

Blood Volume €” The Red River That Feeds Cell Volume
The topic of blood volume is somewhat related to the subject we just discussed. That€˜s because extracellular fluid levels that make up your blood volume also make a huge impact on the water content inside your muscle cells. Most bodybuilders don’t realize that even their performance is directly related to the level of hydration (or dehydration) when they step into the gym. Dehydration is defined as a >1% loss of body weight as a result of fluid loss. This is not usually a problem for a weight trainee during exercise, but if you start your training low on fluids it will become a factor. Consider this, if you are normally a 200-lb athlete and your lack of hydration brings your weight down to 196-lbs (2% of your body weight) there is a measurable decrease in muscle cell contraction times, and when fluid losses reach 4% of body weight, there is a 5 to 10% drop in overall performance which can persist for up to 4 hours even after rehydration takes place. When hydration levels plummet it slows recovery. Reparatory processes are so reliant on fluid for transporting anabolic substrates like amino acids and glucose to muscle cells as well as removing waste products from those cells.

So unless you are depleting water for a photo shoot or contest (which require arguably less performance), it is essential to anticipate and regularly replace fluid losses. For the record, thirst is not a reliable indicator of dehydration as it takes a fluid loss of 0.8 - 2% of body weight to trigger thirst. Now you know why many serious athletes carry water around with them in the gym!

There is no doubt that maintaining blood plasma volume is an important strategy to optimize your physical performance, and reaching a mind blowing pump IS a performance feat in it of itself.

Osmotic Anabolic Signaling In Action
I didn’t want to turn this into a piece on water and hydration, but now that we’ve covered the basic determinants of cell volume, though hydration and carbohydrate intake, here is a quick summary of OAS in action.

• For the athlete, nutritional status and training frequency cause extracellular (blood plasma) and intracellular (cytosol) conditions to vary considerably with respect to each other.
• Proteins and other substrates lie at the interface between these two compartments and relay signals relating extracellular conditions to the cell interior
• Nutrient sensors act to regulate cellular contents, and therefore nutrient sensing may culminate in the altered activity of a multitude of cellular intermediates such as hormones, glucose, amino acids and other nutrients.
• Osmotic Anabolic Signaling is triggered by specific nutrients (or their metabolites), or the detection of physiological signals generated as a result of changes in cell volume or cell membrane potential

STAY TUNED FOR PART III

By Vince Andrich

I have a true love of bodybuilding. That said, the goals I have for my own body are usually shunned by the “bigger is better” fans of bodybuilding and many devoted trainees. Moreover, the majority of people new to weight training do not believe they can re-shape their body and therefore do not understand my concepts.

Then again, it’s not my place to pass judgment on what your fitness goals should or should not be as this is most definitely a personal thing. You see I believe that the ultimate goal for putting in endless hours of training and avoiding junk food is to gain ownership of a body that does not automatically insinuate drug use or turn off the majority of the population. In simple terms my physique goals are to create a body that is pleasing to the eye, while at the same time inspires others to ask “what type of workouts do you do to look like that” versus “how much weight can you bench press”.

In my mind a bodybuilder has tools, which are dumbbells, barbells or weights and in the hands of a sculptor the objective becomes where to put more muscle for a fluid, symmetrical body shape. I call this concept Cosmetic Bodybuilding (admittedly a term coined years ago by the original Iron Guru Vince Gironda) and if your’e interested in working out to get a better body, and not a bigger or skinnier one then this blogg is for you.

The concept of “Cosmetic Bodybuilding” is defined as a fusion of postmodern bodybuilding techniques and purposely thought out strategies that allow you to re-design the gifts nature has given you.

Beyond Nip/Tuck

One of my favorite shows these days is about cosmetic surgery: Nip/Tuck. Fittingly, the most compelling line in the show each week is when the main doctors ask “what don’t you like about yourself”. In essence, that line is what this Cosmetic Bodybuilding is all about. Assessing what you don’t like about your body and finally having the means to alter it.

If you think you have to live with a bone structure flaw such as a wide waist or small and narrow shoulders, and want to make serious aesthetic changes, you will need to forget your pre conceived limitations and adhere to the revolutionary skill and technique of creating an illusion. The concept of illusion as it relates to your body structure is actually very simple and easy to see, once your eyes are trained to see the difference.

What Don’t You Like About Yourself?
Ask yourself, what is your ideal physique, and shoot me a note, because I’d like to know. In any case, stay tuned, in future bloggs we’ll discuss training methods that allow you to hide and improve on your muscular shape and structural weaknesses to attain the body you really want.