Advanced Bodybuilding
After about a year of weight training, you’ll be ready for Advanced Bodybuilding. Typically, you will have made a HUGE improvement in your body over the course of your first year of training, after following the Beginning and Intermediate bodybuilding phases.
Now, you’re a veteran weight trainer. You most likely have experienced some plateaus in your progress; it’s in this phase where you learn a WHOLE lot about getting out of training ruts, sticking points, and leveled-off progress.
You have learned how to listen to your body’s own bio-feedback and you know how your body best adapts to weight training, diet, and rest. By now, you should know EXACTLY what your body needs in terms of caloric intake, rest and sleep, and supplementation.
Advanced bodybuilders can continue on the 4-day split routine you started with in the Intermediate phase, or you can go to a 6-day split, where you split your body into thirds. It’s up to you and your body.
You should also add in more isolation movements and do more sets. Typically, you can do 2-3 exercises per bodypart for 3-5 sets per exercise. Stick to 6-10 reps for building mass, 10-15 reps for building endurance and cutting up (reps should be higher for the legs — 10-15 for mass, 15-20 for definition).
At this point, too, your body has become accustomed to just about anything you’ve thrown at it, so you’ll need to change things up quite a bit to “keep it guessing.” For instance, when training the pecs, one day you can train for 5 sets of 10, the next chest workout you can train for 2 sets of 6, 1 set of 8, 1 set of 10, and one set of 15.
Variety is indeed the spice of the advanced bodybuilding life. It will allow you to keep growing and your muscle “quality” will get better and better the more you change your workouts.
If you ever get to the point where you can’t make gains NO MATTER WHAT, try the Hard Gainers Workout, switching to a 3 times per week regimen that’s heavy on calories, supplementation, and High Intensity Training (HIT).
Image credit: License for re-use – https://i.ytimg.com/vi/zEK3_igC95k/hqdefault.jpg
Arnold Schwarzenegger
Arnold Schwarzenegger is simply the best bodybuilder of all time! He completely DOMINATED his peers, winning the Mr. Olympia title an unprecedented (then) six consecutive times! He retired and came back in 1980 to win it again (albeit in a controversial way).
Schwarzenegger then went on to become one of the most successful Hollywood action heroes, elevating the visibility of the sport of bodybuilding, benefiting all the champions that have followed him.
Of course, never satisfied, Arnold then entered politics, and the rest, as they say, is history. Not sure where he can go from here, but I’m sure he’s already got it all planned out!
Arnold not only was the best of his time, but he has done more for the sport of bodybuilding than any other champion. For that, he holds the esteemed #1 position on my list.
You can find out more about Arnold here.
Tom Platz
Tom Platz was bigger than life – especially those quads!
Tom Platz, aka “The Golden Eagle,” was a very popular bodybuilder in the 1980s. He was a top ten Mr. Olympia several times, finishing as high as 3rd in 1981 (Franco Columbu finished first, Chris Dickerson finished second).
Best known for his outlandish leg development, Platz was legendary when it came to training legs – he could squat 500+ pounds for over 20 reps.
Watch how easy he makes it look here:
Building an Impressive V-Shape
Building a classic V-shape like that embodied by Steve Reeves, Frank Zane, and Arnold Schwarzenegger is easy to do if you follow the guidelines I’m about to lay out below. Much of bodybuilding is about making small changes to your physique here and there. Add a quarter inch here, lose an inch there. Bodybuilders are real-life sculptors with real-world clay in the form of muscle.
Building a V-shape is about creating an illusion of broader shoulders, wider lats and pecs, and a narrower waist and hips. The way to do this is to work on building up the lateral head of the delts, the deepening the ribcage, buffing up the lower pecs and widening the lats. You also have to shape the waistline such that it seems like it’s getting smaller (reduce fat, increase muscle separation). Finally, you need reduce the apparent size of the hips.
I’ll tackle each of these in turn.
Broadening the shoulders has the effect of making the tips of that classical V-shape. And it’s easy to do if you focus on the lateral head. This means working the side delts with lots of side laterals and behind-the-neck presses. Try using the Pre-Exhaust method: Do a set of side laterals followed immediately by the presses. This engages the lateral head, fatigues it, such that as many muscle fibers of the side delt are utilized as possible in the presses.
To develop the wide latissimus dorsi muscle, or the “lats,” you must do wide grip chins, lat pull-downs, and barbell rows (mostly builds thickness, but also builds width).
To build the lower pecs, parallel bar dips are the best exercise around. You’ll develop that lower line that is so well-recognized in the top champions.
Bent-arm pullovers are key to developing the larger ribcage that is necessary to support the increased musculature of the chest, lats, and shoulders. They not only enlarge the ribcage, they also build the lats and supporting muscles of the upper body.
Reducing the size of the waist is mostly dependent on reducing body fat. As you may know, there is no such thing as spot reduction. You can’t just cut the fat off the stomach. No, you’ll have to cut fat everywhere. So, diet and aerobics come into play. Losing fat is a numbers game: Burn more calories than you consume and you’ll lose body fat.
However, you’ll still want to do some ab work to develop the muscles there so that they’ll really pop when you lose the belly fat.
Finally, you’ll have to build the thighs to give the illusion of smaller hips. Of course, building the thighs is worthwhile, even if doing so didn’t make your hips appear smaller. Squat and leg presses are key exercises to develop the sweeping quads that are necessary to enhance the classic V-shape.
Following these guidelines will enable you to build the body you want with that coveted v-shape every man and woman wants.
Vince Gironda Was A Legend In His Own Time
In the annals of bodybuilding trainers, Vince Gironda has gone down as one of the most innovative pioneers the sport has ever known. He has trained numerous professional bodybuilders, Arnold, Frank Zane, and Mohammed Makkawi, who made his greatest gains under Gironda (whose moniker was “The Iron Guru”).
Among many of the controversial, yet effective, training methods Gironda used were the following:
- He thought bodybuilding was 85 percent nutrition.
- He thought too many bodybuilders placed too great an emphasis on heavy back squats, making their hips and butts too wide.
- He thought the bench press was overrated, preferring instead that his pupils do dips with a V-bar.
He co-wrote a book back in the 80s called “Unleashing the Wild Physique” which, to this day, is still one of the best books on how to train right in bodybuilding. Surely, supplementation has come a long way in the 20 or so years since the book was published, but he was spot on the money for suggesting that you eat in the same way you train: For specific effect.
He often put his pupils on “weird” diets, where they might eat dozens of fertile eggs, raw milk, and dessicated liver tablets in a day. These were “anabolic” diets intended to force the body to grow. He said that these diets were as effective as steroids in adding mass and in helping the body to recover from hard training.
He also had a lot of ideas that differed from the mainstream bodybuilding community with respect to exercise, and the way exercises ought to be performed. Take a look at Vince Gironda’s site and you’ll see what I mean.
As an example, while he thought bench presses were good (though not as good as dips), he trained his students to bring the bar down to the neck rather than to the nipple line. Try these! They’re very difficult if you’re used to regular bench presses, but they’re highly effective!
He was truly innovative and rarely thought “inside the box.” For more information about this man who transformed bodybuilding training, take a look at the Wiki on Vince Gironda.
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