For effective training, it is not enough for athletes to work with heavy weights or take steroids. Exercise technique is no less important, and it is about it that will be discussed in this article. The content of the article:
- Cheating: pros and cons
- Exercise technique
- How to do the bench press correctly
It is necessary to take the maximum possible from each exercise, thus making the entire workout effective. Benjamin Franklin once said that if you don't pay enough attention to the nail on the horseshoe, you can lose your entire army. This is true for athletes as well. The smallest detail that at first glance seems insignificant can help make your workout even more effective.
Experts advise athletes to work a lot with extreme intensity, to lift the maximum possible weights. It is difficult to disagree with this, such hard training sessions will definitely give the desired result. It is also necessary to add to them a sports diet, thanks to which the body will receive all the necessary nutrients, and a vitamin and mineral complex.
You should also remember about rest, monitoring the state of your body. And of course, you need to try to do without injuries, which, however, is quite difficult with such training. By adhering to these rules, you can quickly learn how to do the exercises correctly.
Cheating: pros and cons
However, there are also athletes among athletes who treat their workouts somewhat carelessly, and do not care about the slimness of the figure at all, but at the same time achieve great heights in sports. In this regard, one can immediately recall Bertil Fox and John Brown. They often used cheating in their training sessions, but it worked! Even Arnold Schwarzenegger himself often used cheating at the beginning of his career. But just repeating is not enough, the main thing is to do the exercise correctly.
This brings to mind the story of a young bodybuilder named Vince Taylor. He was once honored to train with John Brown for one week. Very quickly, Vince became disillusioned with a professional athlete's career, backing Taylor during a set of barbell presses weighing 230 kilograms without locks. In the future, he was able to find his own path, and won many different tournaments. However, he recalls training with Taylor with obvious reluctance.
At that time, there were, as it were, two schools of bodybuilding. The adherents of one of them used the pumping style in training, and the latter tried to work as powerful as possible. Among the fans of the pumping school are Frank Zane, Freddie Ortica, Steve Reeves and others. They were impressed to work with moderate weights and a lot of repetitions and sets, the number of which ranged from 20 or more.
Other athletes, Fox or Brown, preferred extreme weights and low reps. There was another group, for example, Marvin Eder, Chuck Says and the same Schwarzenegger, who used both styles in their classes.
Of course, you can give a bunch of other examples of the fact that it is not necessary to adhere to the technique when performing the exercises. However, it is more correct for everyone to conduct an experiment and understand what suits him best: cheating or technique.
Exercise technique
Many people believe that cheating is easy enough. Why do an exercise technically correct when you can add a few pounds? This approach is not able to exert a stimulating effect on the target muscle group, but it gives a feeling of high efficiency, it is not in vain that so much iron was raised! At the same time, people tend to brag about their own layer more than think about the training process itself.
Whether your weight is overweight or acceptable is up to you to decide. Here again, Vince Comerford was interviewed about back training as an example. He admitted that he only began to gain muscle mass when he lost weight and began to pay attention to exercise technique. Try it yourself and see that lifting 105 kilograms according to the rules of technology is much more difficult than casually throwing 145 kilograms. It is also very important that when doing the exercise correctly, the lower back gets less stress.
There are a lot of similar examples. For example, Lee Labrada also noted an increase in the effectiveness of training, only after he began to pay attention to technique, sacrificing weight for this. The same applies to Tony Pearson, who only used 85 kilograms in the leaning deadlift. This person was strong, and could easily cope with a large weight, but this one was optimal for the growth of the target muscles. Pay attention to the word "optimal". That's right, not "maximum". In any case, it is very important to do each exercise correctly.
Of course, you can't do without Arnold Schwarzenegger here. When Arnie arrived in the USA, he was already strong enough, using cheating very often in training. But with all of the above, he clearly lacked symmetry and completeness in the muscles. But as soon as he began to perform the exercises technically competently, his physique began to improve.
He was able to find the strength to defeat his own ego, and find the path that led him to worldwide fame. Already being a famous person, Schwarzenegger used only those weights that were effective. You can recall one case when Arnold in training worked with dumbbells weighing 32 kilograms, while most of the guys used 45 kilograms. They could not understand why, lifting more weight, their hands could not catch up with Arnold's in size. But here everything is simple: with the correct execution of the exercise, Schwarzenegger involved precisely the biceps, and the guys with large weights also used deltoids and trapeziums.
But even with the technique, it is very difficult to achieve complete isolation and muscle stimulation without knowing how to shift the focus to the desired muscle group. Most athletes understand that it is not enough to simply move up and down to get the effect of training. Although we must admit, this opinion is very common among bodybuilders. Any exercise aimed at stimulating the target muscles has its own pattern and trajectory. Only by adhering to this, you can achieve the result.
Most likely, few people thought about it. But as practice shows, adherence to the necessary trajectories in any exercise is very important. Moreover, such sports stars as Gunnar Sikka, John Parillo, Scott Able and others agree with this.
How to do the bench press correctly
By the way, it was Parillo who first drew attention to the need to follow the trajectory and angle diagrams in order to correctly perform this exercise. Here it should be said right away that all, even the simplest movements, in bodybuilding are complex. It is very difficult to perform them completely technically correct, since you have to pay attention to all the little things. For example, take the bench press. Among bodybuilders, this is considered the easiest exercise. But this is a wrong opinion. When used as an exercise to develop the muscles of the chest, it becomes one of the most difficult.
Parillo advises that when doing the bench press, imagine that you are pulling your shoulders down towards the buttocks. This allows you to engage the posterior bundles of deltoids and provides the necessary position of the chest muscles, gradually shifting the load on them, and freeing the deltoids. John says that in order to properly isolate the muscles in the pectoral region, it is necessary to first get into the correct position.
The shoulders and chest should be positioned so that the load falls on the target muscles, and not on the deltoids. Otherwise, it is the deltoids and triceps that will undergo stimulation. As a result, it turns out that there will be no progress in the growth of the pectoral muscles. Very often, seeing the futility of their efforts, athletes begin to cheat. But you just need to correctly perform the exercise.
And now a recommendation on how to properly perform the bench press. Remove the bar and bring your shoulders down and back under the body. After that, you can start the set. When the bar is at the top of the trajectory, you should connect the elbows to work, while lifting the sternum up. Try to tighten your shoulder blades at this point. Doing so can work your upper chest by stimulating the muscles.
Make sure that the bar does not move in a straight line up and down, being in a plane perpendicular to the body. But most athletes think so. Parello is confident that the trajectory should be similar to the deformed "S". He also recommends touching your lower chest with the bar to activate your lower muscles.
At the moment the bar begins to move upward from the chest, it must be slightly displaced to the legs, by 5 centimeters. But it is important that the shoulders are pulled down and back at this moment, and the chest is raised and deployed. When the bar has passed half the way, it must be brought back closer to the head again. The moment the chest muscles contract, the bar should be at eye level, and just before turning off the elbows, move the bar back to your feet. It should go down in the nipple area.
Such a technique will seem quite complicated at first, but the effect can be seen soon enough. In order to understand whether the bench press was performed correctly, you need to feel it. To do this, you should sit with your back against the wall and take your shoulders back and down, while simultaneously expanding and raising your chest. At this point, imagine that you are going to reach the ceiling with your chest. All these movements should be performed at the same time. If everything is done correctly, you will immediately feel the tension in the muscles of the chest, and the deltoids will practically not work at the same time.
When it becomes clear that the target muscles are ready for stimulation, raise your arms as if you would be squeezing a barbell in a prone position and simulate the movements performed during the bench press. In this case, it is important to follow the trajectories of the natural movement of the hands. So you work out the necessary trajectory, after which you can go to the hall. You should not immediately use large weights, but the best option would be to press an empty bar. When you do several sets in this way, you can start at 80% of the optimal load.
It will be just great if the gym that you visit has a bench with a curved surface. These benches are manufactured by Parillo Genetic Equalizer specifically for training chest muscles. Such a bench makes it possible to take the correct position to isolate the muscles of the pectoral group, so that it is practically impossible to make the wrong bench press. You should also remember the importance of all repetitions. The first two should not be inferior in their difficulty to the latter. You do not need to quickly complete the set and do other things, but qualitatively load the muscles.
In conclusion, it should be said that high intensity is quite important, however, even the most powerful training will not be able to stimulate muscles effectively enough without the correct exercise technique. It is necessary to combine technique and high intensity - this is the only way to achieve great success.
Video on how to do the exercises correctly:
