There are reasons both sublime and ridiculous to build one’s glutes.
On one hand, they’re your largest muscles and therefore deserve some pretty close attention. As I’ve said repeatedly in the past, many, many people suffer from glute inaction, or an inability to literally get their butts moving: their hip flexors are short, tight and overactive from sitting all the time, and as a result, the muscles on the opposite side of the hip joint – the glutes -- become inhibited and weak. The hamstrings step up to fill in, you get a condition called “synergistic dominance,” where the second-stringers are trying to do the work of the starters, and you eventually get injured. Keep the glutes in shape, and you’ll help stave off knee joint problems, back pain, and postural imbalances. So having a nicely-toned set of glutes is good for you, like your proverbial apple a day.
On the other hand, there’s something about a well-shaped set of hip extensors that just screams youth, health, fitness, and, shall we say, fertility. I read a story recently that said that Tour-de-France cyclists are able to evaluate the fitness of their opponents simply by the shape and tone of their rumps. No surprise there: cycling is essentially a series of thousands of single-leg hip-and-knee extensions, so it’s pretty much impossible to be a decent cyclist without walnut-cracking glutes.
My theory about why we’re attracted to the rumps of the opposite sex is that good glutes tend to be the mark of genuine athleticism, not just health-club muscularity. Back when we were spearing mammoths for food, being able to run fast and jump high meant you were a good provider, not just that guy on the office basketball team with the decent jump shot. So Elga the cavewoman was attracted to Oog the caveman because his firm butt made her think he’d be able to climb mountain passes with buckets of water on his back or carry their five children across the rushing river in springtime. Show me someone with a muscular bum and I’ll show you someone who most likely can actually DO athletic things, not just someone whose mirror muscles make them look like they might be able to. There’s a big difference.
So, below is a quick but effective trio of exercises that, taken together, are unbeatable as glute-builders. If you’re putting together a lower-body routine with an emphasis on the rear kinetic chain—that is to say, your glutes and hamstrings, as well as your lower and mid-back musculature—I contend that your time is best spent on the following three movements:
1) The Deadlift
2) The Bulgarian Split Squat
3) The single-leg Romanian Deadlift.
Your quads, hip flexors, adductors and abductors will also get pretty fried by these three moves, so if you have a lower-body “day” in your workout schedule, you won’t need to do much more to make it a complete waist-down torture-fest. I am, however, also a big fan of traditional barbell squats, and so I’d make sure to cycle those in at least once a week in lieu of the deadlifts.
Right away I hear keyboards firing up. People will say, “what, no hyperextensions or reverse hyperextensions? No “butt-blaster-machine extensions”? No donkey cable-kicks? Didn’t you just write about the value of isolation exercises? We thought you were on OUR side!”
Well, yes, I do think isolation moves have their place. But when it comes to butt-building I don’t think they’re much good. If you have REALLY tight hip flexors and just don’t know how to get your glutes to contract at all (and some professional athletes have this condition!), you MIGHT consider using some isolation moves until you feel like those muscles are “wired in” and your brain knows how to make them fire without having to think about it too hard (I sometimes forget how easy it is to get so caught up in the heady world of sedentary brainwork that you actually forget how your body works!)
But as soon as you can, you need to step up and attack these compound moves.
The glutes seem happiest when they are working in conjunction with other muscles, not just contracting on their own. Sprinters, gymnasts, Olympic weightlifters, and the aforementioned pro cyclists all spend the bulk of their training time on movements that require them to extend the knee and the hip simultaneously, and all of them have glutes of steel. So even if you’re far more concerned with filling out a pair of jeans than you are with running 48-second 400 meters, it’s real athletic movement that makes the body look and feel athletic—especially when it comes to lower-body training, and glute-training in particular. You’re got to train like an athlete in order to look like one.
A couple of finer point before you rush off to the gym to attack the those deads, Bulgarians and Romanians (with exercise names like these, I should rename it the “Dracula” workout):
1) DEADLIFTING. The best two pieces of advice I’ve ever received about deadlifting are a) that you should feel like as if you were “falling back onto your heels” when you lift and b) that you should visualize the bar as freshly glued to the floor with so that you have to “peel it” off the floor, gradually ramping your efforts up to the full force required to hoist the weight rather than jerking abruptly it off the floor (I’m pretty sure that’s a Chad Waterbury tip, just giving credit where it’s due). The chest should be high and the gaze should be straight ahead or a tad above for good focus and alignment. To ensure that the bar is really “dead” at the beginning of the movement—and to give my gripping muscles a break—I ‘reset’ between each rep, setting the bar fully down and relaxing my hold each time the bar hits the floor.
2) BULGARIAN SPLIT SQUATS. Bulgarians are typically seen as a quad-builder, and they work beautifully as such, but I’ve found that in conjunction with the other two movements they also work well as a glute exercise provided—and this is a crucial point—you go low enough. If you’re weak in this movement, and can’t descend till the back knee grazes the floor, you won’t really nail the glutes. If that’s the case with you, work up to it carefully. It’s okay if your knee goes past the much-feared 90-degree point as long as your front knee doesn’t wobble to either side as you ascend. If you do have a case of wobbly-knee syndrome, lighten your load, shorten your range of motion, or both until you can manage the full motion without the extraneous movement. Otherwise, go deep in your Bulgarians, find a real tightness in the glute of the front leg at the bottom of the movement, and push off quickly from the “down” position.
3) SINGLE-LEG ROMANIAN DEADLIFTS. Every list of “favorites” has to include at least one unexpected element—sort of like including an album by “Weird Al” Yankovic on your list of desert island CD’s just so you can feel fresh and unpredictable--and this is it in my list of top three moves for the glutes (for the record, ALL of my desert island CD’s would be by “Weird Al” Yankovic, perhaps with an extra copy of WEIRD AL IN 3-D just in case one gets scratched). Most trainers would put the two-leg version above this one, but for many reasons, I disagree. Single-Leg Romanians are more functional (in that we are almost always on one foot when we are in motion); they’re safer (because you can use half the weight and still get the benefit of the two-leg version); and they’re a more complete hip-extensor workout (because you have to both stabilize AND contract during the movement). Finally, the single-leg Romanian deadlift is the closest thing to a direct glute move among these exercises, and even still, the hamstrings, quads, calves, core, and gripping muscles all contribute significantly to its successful execution. I like holding a dumbbell in each hand, though some trainers prefer their clients use just one in the hand opposite the foot they’re standing on. Stand, hold the weights, bend forward one one foot, allowing your other leg to extend back behind you, as if picking up a piece of loose change off the floor. Touch the dumbbells lightly to the floor—they should touch the floor at the same instant--and return to the starting position. Alternate legs for sets of 8-12 reps.
The angle of the knee of the supporting leg is key! Keep a 10-20 degree knee bend in order to optimize glute activation. Any straighter and the move will be almost pure hamstring and lower back. The move requires a fair amount of concentration to get right and to maximize the hip extension movement, but once you find the right groove of stability, bend in the supporting leg, and core activation, it becomes one of the most effective glute-builders out there.
Perform the workout twice a week, and vary your rep and set configurations from more standard parameters of 3x 8-12 and 5 x 5 to 2 x 25 or 6 x 4, always working with impeccable form.
Good luck, and, as ever, feel free to write me with questions or comments.
Showing posts with label compound exercises. Show all posts
Showing posts with label compound exercises. Show all posts
Saturday, September 29, 2007
Thursday, September 20, 2007
Are Single-Joint Moves a Waste of Time?
Are leg extensions, leg curls, all manner of direct bicep-and-tricep movements, any form of shoulder raises, and calf raises pretty much useless?
There's a fairly assertive and well-credentialed group out there that argues that yes, in fact, that's true: all your weight training needs should be covered by deadlifts, squats, rows, overhead presses, supine presses, and chin-ups, and that further complicating the issue by throwing in dozens of isolation moves is pointless.
The argument--and it's a convincing one--goes something like this: a 200-pound man performing three sets of 10 underhand-grip chin-ups will tax his biceps significantly more than he would doing three sets of 10 curls with 70-pound dumbbells. The chin-up--a compound movement that works the back as well as the biceps-- requires him to move 6000 pounds (3 x 10 x 200), whereas the curl workout would add up to just 4200 pounds (3 x 10 x [2 x 70]). More effort means a more intense workout, which translates into bigger gains in strength and muscle size.
Moreover, the compound-only school argues that the body is "designed" (a term that always chafes me) to move and work as a single unit, so multi-joint moves, which roughly mimic sports-and-real-life athletic movements, are going to make the practitioner a more efficient athlete whose body functions as a whole rather than as a series of disparate pieces.
Like I said, convincing arguments all around, and they've very much shaped my training philosophy over the last few years.
I've had occasion, however, to give this some serious reconsideration of late. After many years away from training for size, I've come back to it in the last few months, partly so I can look and feel the part of a broadsword-wielding Scottish warrior, and partly because I wondered whether, after all these years of performance-based, athletic-enhancing training, I could apply some of the principles I'd learned and return to a hypertrophy-based program both more prudently and effectively than I had in my salad days of max-effort squats in a 20 degree basement at 5:30 AM with no warm-up.
The other reason I was interested in testing the size-building capacity of my now 36-year-old body is that I occasionally--very occasionally--get male clients who say "money and training frequency is no object. I just want to get as big as I can as fast as I can and I'm willing to do whatever it takes."
I do train in Los Angeles, after all, the land of fairies, leprechauns, and the occasional guy with a major studio behind him willing to foot the bill for whatever it takes to get him to look good shirtless. These people do exist. Curse them.
So it's in my interest to have at my disposal training techniques that will do the job.
And here's what I've come up with, circling back around to the question of single-joint exercises. In my opinion, if you want a Men's Health/Women's Health model LOOK, that is, if you want to look both maximally defined AND muscular, you've got to include some single-joint moves.
I am NOT talking about maximal performance here. I'm not talking about getting faster or more resiliant on the playing field. I'm not even talking about health per se, certain aspects of which may actually be compromised by single-joint work. I'm talking about straight-up, good-old fashioned, flex-in-the-mirror, get-stares-of-approbation-at-the-beach VANITY. In my opinion, to achieve that LOOK, you've gotta throw in some moves exclusively for vanity's sake, to wit, some single-joint moves.
Some words of qualification: I don't think single-joint moves are of much use to someone who only has three hours a week to train. It's certainly possible to make some excellent gains on such a program, and for the vast majority of the population, with stressful jobs, families, limited sleep, and sometimes erratic eating habits, such a program may very well be near-optimal. There's enough recovery time built in to ensure good gains, and on a well-designed, three-day-a-week, full-body program, the sky can pretty much be the limit. So I still put most clients who have three, or even just two days a week to train, on a program consisting almost entirely of the tried-and-true compound movements.
But again, if I were talking about a program for maximal size, I'd put the client on a split system, up the training frequency, up the volume, and increase the protein and caloric intake significantly. Compound moves would still form the backbone of the program, but I'd definitely include up to 40% isolation moves as well, including moves for the biceps, triceps, and calves.
This sounds very much like a Weider-style bodybuilding program, and indeed that's pretty much what it is: if you're talking sheer size--or, in the case of women, sheer lean, defined muscularity, there's got to be some isolation thrown in to support and enhance the effectiveness of the compound moves. Aesthetically, and I repeat that I am talking ONLY aesthetically, isolation moves create a more complete physique.
I feel funny saying all this, in a way, because most casual exercisers go into the gym and do ONLY single-joint moves, and that's the huge mistake that most of the multi-joint advocates are trying to warn against. Such exercisers don't squat or dead-lift at all, they use only machines, they use tiny weights on isolation moves that they shouldn't TOUCH unless they're in the gym five days a week and have already done all the pressing, rowing, lunging and/or squatting they can manage for the day. Such people are lost souls with little hope of improving in the near future, and they need to be schooled on the undeniable benefits of the basics and banned from using anything with a cam or a pulley or a Velcro strap until they’ve built themselves a good foundation.
As a final note, I would also say that I would NEVER put a client on an intense bodybuilding-based program for more than a few weeks at a stretch without cycling in periods of less intense, less concentrated workouts. As I suggest above, training only for looks, and doing lots of single-joint work on top of your basics, can actually be a recipe for injury. Bicep curling, for instance, can be very tough on your front shoulders; leg curling can make your hamstrings more injury-prone. Do such a program long enough, and things will start to pop and crack in unpleasant ways.
So, to sum up: for the casual trainee looking to look and feel good, or for people looking to improve sports performance or just to feel strong and healthy doing everyday activities, a three-day-a-week weight training program consisting pretty much exclusively of compound moves is most assuredly the way to go. Don't even think about spending a lot of time curling, tricep-extending, or calf-raising, much less pec-decking or cable-crossovering. But if you're looking for the extra 20% edge in your appearance, you're putting in the time on the compound moves already, and you've got the time, dedication, and energy outside the gym to support your efforts with optimal diet and rest, in this trainer’s opinion, single-joint moves are indispensable.
Incredulous protests, rude comments, and anecdotes from personal experience are very much welcome.
There's a fairly assertive and well-credentialed group out there that argues that yes, in fact, that's true: all your weight training needs should be covered by deadlifts, squats, rows, overhead presses, supine presses, and chin-ups, and that further complicating the issue by throwing in dozens of isolation moves is pointless.
The argument--and it's a convincing one--goes something like this: a 200-pound man performing three sets of 10 underhand-grip chin-ups will tax his biceps significantly more than he would doing three sets of 10 curls with 70-pound dumbbells. The chin-up--a compound movement that works the back as well as the biceps-- requires him to move 6000 pounds (3 x 10 x 200), whereas the curl workout would add up to just 4200 pounds (3 x 10 x [2 x 70]). More effort means a more intense workout, which translates into bigger gains in strength and muscle size.
Moreover, the compound-only school argues that the body is "designed" (a term that always chafes me) to move and work as a single unit, so multi-joint moves, which roughly mimic sports-and-real-life athletic movements, are going to make the practitioner a more efficient athlete whose body functions as a whole rather than as a series of disparate pieces.
Like I said, convincing arguments all around, and they've very much shaped my training philosophy over the last few years.
I've had occasion, however, to give this some serious reconsideration of late. After many years away from training for size, I've come back to it in the last few months, partly so I can look and feel the part of a broadsword-wielding Scottish warrior, and partly because I wondered whether, after all these years of performance-based, athletic-enhancing training, I could apply some of the principles I'd learned and return to a hypertrophy-based program both more prudently and effectively than I had in my salad days of max-effort squats in a 20 degree basement at 5:30 AM with no warm-up.
The other reason I was interested in testing the size-building capacity of my now 36-year-old body is that I occasionally--very occasionally--get male clients who say "money and training frequency is no object. I just want to get as big as I can as fast as I can and I'm willing to do whatever it takes."
I do train in Los Angeles, after all, the land of fairies, leprechauns, and the occasional guy with a major studio behind him willing to foot the bill for whatever it takes to get him to look good shirtless. These people do exist. Curse them.
So it's in my interest to have at my disposal training techniques that will do the job.
And here's what I've come up with, circling back around to the question of single-joint exercises. In my opinion, if you want a Men's Health/Women's Health model LOOK, that is, if you want to look both maximally defined AND muscular, you've got to include some single-joint moves.
I am NOT talking about maximal performance here. I'm not talking about getting faster or more resiliant on the playing field. I'm not even talking about health per se, certain aspects of which may actually be compromised by single-joint work. I'm talking about straight-up, good-old fashioned, flex-in-the-mirror, get-stares-of-approbation-at-the-beach VANITY. In my opinion, to achieve that LOOK, you've gotta throw in some moves exclusively for vanity's sake, to wit, some single-joint moves.
Some words of qualification: I don't think single-joint moves are of much use to someone who only has three hours a week to train. It's certainly possible to make some excellent gains on such a program, and for the vast majority of the population, with stressful jobs, families, limited sleep, and sometimes erratic eating habits, such a program may very well be near-optimal. There's enough recovery time built in to ensure good gains, and on a well-designed, three-day-a-week, full-body program, the sky can pretty much be the limit. So I still put most clients who have three, or even just two days a week to train, on a program consisting almost entirely of the tried-and-true compound movements.
But again, if I were talking about a program for maximal size, I'd put the client on a split system, up the training frequency, up the volume, and increase the protein and caloric intake significantly. Compound moves would still form the backbone of the program, but I'd definitely include up to 40% isolation moves as well, including moves for the biceps, triceps, and calves.
This sounds very much like a Weider-style bodybuilding program, and indeed that's pretty much what it is: if you're talking sheer size--or, in the case of women, sheer lean, defined muscularity, there's got to be some isolation thrown in to support and enhance the effectiveness of the compound moves. Aesthetically, and I repeat that I am talking ONLY aesthetically, isolation moves create a more complete physique.
I feel funny saying all this, in a way, because most casual exercisers go into the gym and do ONLY single-joint moves, and that's the huge mistake that most of the multi-joint advocates are trying to warn against. Such exercisers don't squat or dead-lift at all, they use only machines, they use tiny weights on isolation moves that they shouldn't TOUCH unless they're in the gym five days a week and have already done all the pressing, rowing, lunging and/or squatting they can manage for the day. Such people are lost souls with little hope of improving in the near future, and they need to be schooled on the undeniable benefits of the basics and banned from using anything with a cam or a pulley or a Velcro strap until they’ve built themselves a good foundation.
As a final note, I would also say that I would NEVER put a client on an intense bodybuilding-based program for more than a few weeks at a stretch without cycling in periods of less intense, less concentrated workouts. As I suggest above, training only for looks, and doing lots of single-joint work on top of your basics, can actually be a recipe for injury. Bicep curling, for instance, can be very tough on your front shoulders; leg curling can make your hamstrings more injury-prone. Do such a program long enough, and things will start to pop and crack in unpleasant ways.
So, to sum up: for the casual trainee looking to look and feel good, or for people looking to improve sports performance or just to feel strong and healthy doing everyday activities, a three-day-a-week weight training program consisting pretty much exclusively of compound moves is most assuredly the way to go. Don't even think about spending a lot of time curling, tricep-extending, or calf-raising, much less pec-decking or cable-crossovering. But if you're looking for the extra 20% edge in your appearance, you're putting in the time on the compound moves already, and you've got the time, dedication, and energy outside the gym to support your efforts with optimal diet and rest, in this trainer’s opinion, single-joint moves are indispensable.
Incredulous protests, rude comments, and anecdotes from personal experience are very much welcome.
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