It’s in The Delivery and The Deliverer
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When I’m not frivolously occupied racing my NASCAR, traversing a tightrope over the Niagara or performing piano concerts abroad, you might find me attending the development of my biceps, pectorals and latisimus. We all need a serious physical activity through which we can express ourselves, and what’s more expressive than weightlifting and building muscle? Thank goodness for the silent and still steel, poetically arranged and creatively accessible on the soul-saving gym floor.
The iron is cold and lifeless and dumb, and, though there are people we know matching the same description, mankind is warm and alive and intelligent. Put the two together and, meeting the essential criteria, they become one: one pushes, the other pulls; one hoists, the other yields; one acts, the other reacts. Simpatico. Apart, neither is.
We want to savor the qualities of efficient barbell and dumbbell movements, taste the muscle’s action, pump and burn and revel in the finesse of iron-muscle engagement.
A workout is not something to grab and drag like a rag doll or go through like a turnstile or endure like the passing of a kidney stone. It’s another once-in-a-lifetime experience to be strong, grow, learn and become. Think, focus and don’t look away. Be here now.
A succinct summary: Chest, back and shoulders followed by biceps and triceps has always been the most efficacious sequence of exercise for this lifter of barbells and dumbbells. Legs and midsection join aerobic exercise on another day.
One step further, chest calls for low-incline dumbbell presses; back demands one-arm dumbbell rows; shoulders require press behind necks (not for everyone, but they work for me); biceps scream for standing barbell curls and triceps insist on either overhead or lying triceps extensions.
On the other end, legs, the rascals, will have nothing other than squats; the core and midsection settle for rope tucks, and cardio mutter incoherently about supersets and walking, jogging and biking. You know what they say about cardio: “*&^@v%$#*.” I’m teasing; aerobic exercise, like fertilizer to flower beds, is important for health and vitality.
Listing the movements for clarity, we have:
Low-incline dumbbell press
One-arm dumbbell row
Front press
Standing barbell curl
Lying triceps extension
Squats
Rope tucks
Walking, jogging
Two sets of each prime movement serve as a reminder; three sets will arouse the muscles, four will pump you up and five sets will produce maximum development if you have serious bones in a well-equipped body seeking victory. Typically, I suggest varying the reps from a meaningful warm-up set to 12, 10, 8 and 6 reps.
The prize package, neatly wrapped and presented with a ribbon and bow, is not exactly a surprise package. It’s like getting a set of tires for Christmas (how personal), just what you always wanted. Somehow, somewhere, someway, you’ve seen and heard it all before.
Remember, these are my choices of the best of the best, a decision that comes from decades of training trial and error, hits and misses, aches and pains, imitating and copying and rejoicing. You can do the same thing with whatever level of experience, progress and understanding you have. Make your own choices and compare.
Now, if I were a young fella, I might consider cleans and presses and deadlifts as raw contributors. Some unbent wise guy has no doubt already observed their conspicuous absence and is about to shoot blood from his eyeballs. Alas, I’m another day older and deeper in debt. What’s that you say, sonny? Pass me my bifocals, I can’t hear ya.... there... that’s better.
Scoff not, kids, time goes by as we speak, according to the eternal plan, or somethin’ like that. My best response to consistent temporal encroachment is spluttering and waving my fists in the air... icing, heat, rest, Ibuprophen, wraps, massage, release of trigger points and morphine.
The ultimate goal of the execution of these un-extraordinary exercises, besides building muscle mass, density and power, is to joyously scrutinize, absorb, penetrate and devour each rep of every amazing set. Let’s call it the satisfaction of maximizing muscle engagement with the purest of barbell and dumbbell movements known to man.
“Wow... deep,” you’re saying, “there’s so much more to lifting weights than I thought.”
I was intending to shift gears -- throw it into overdrive -- at this interval and call upon dramatics and vividness of imagination to convey the depth to which one must enter an exercise to extract its riches and apportion them to the body, mind and soul.
My point was to be that an exercise is nothing more than motion this way and that, unless it is owned, possessed and dominated. I then realized the enormity of the undertaking and the dullness of that point.
For example, referencing a dissertation on biceps and the curl: Biceps know no better exercise than the standing barbell curl -- let’s face it. And when we’re talking barbells, it’s best when the bar is an Olympic bar. There’s magic in the long and hulking Oly bar, as it goes up and down in its unwieldy fashion. Me curl bar, me make biceps.
Of course, there’s a way to curl, and there’s a way to CURL. I prefer to CURL, when I curl. Strict concentration curls are nifty in the early stages of development and exercise discovery, but capital CURLS are much more engaging. Why only work the relatively small biceps muscle, when we can recruit a system of related muscles in the ever-loving process? Besides, biceps love companions when they’re hungry and blasting away.
Thus, let’s perform the exercise with a full range of motion from fully hanging to fully up and toward the shoulders and with a tad of well-timed body thrust. Thrust, not to be confused with cheating, is a fulfilling and gratifying action, which enables us to handle a slightly heftier weight to affect a significantly heftier muscle overload.
And what principle, besides gravity, is more important than muscle overload?
Get my drift, bombers? And I barely touched upon the subject matter. I’m in a frenzy by the fourth set and I haven’t begun to elaborate on the pulsing of blood in the mitochondria, the exhilaration of glycogen being transformed into energy, or the euphoria of a muscle cell’s sudden development. Maybe next time. Maybe not.
Maybe now. You see, bombers, it’s not in the exercise; it’s in the delivery and the deliverer.
Free-falling Draper... Bombs away
*****
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