Knowing What I Know Now
Download the full Draper here newsletter
in printable, live-link, pdf format, here.
When I’m not frivolously occupied racing my NASCAR, traversing a tightrope over the Niagara or performing piano concerts abroad, you’ll find me in the gym attending the development of my biceps, pectorals and latisimus. We all need a serious physical activity through which we can express ourselves, and what is 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.
Here’s the big bonus: The art of musclebuilding enables me to pursue my less significant aforementioned hobbies with ease. And having dutifully applied myself to my designated life’s work, I’m guilt-free in my trivial pursuits. Cool!
I dreamed that one up on the way to the gym in my 15-year-old pickup from which was pinched the only length of rope I’ve ever owned and in which I have difficulty tuning the radio. Hang on, bombers, heaps of iron in a variety of handy configurations ahead.
No cradle, the gym today, nor is it a battleground. A comfy place of recreation is out; I have no interest in conversation or socializing. And I am not here to hide from the rest of the world -- a refuge amid the chase -- though I shall welcome the gym’s distance from the crowd this early afternoon. Today is a day of pure appreciation of the honest relationship between metal and man.
The two entities are emphatically different, yet combine like seed and soil. 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.
Today, knowing what I know today, I choose the best to produce the most -- one exercise from each muscle group to take me most directly from the edge to the center of things. I 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, I say. Be here now, I vow (tsk... just another one of my sensitive contributions to the literary arts).
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; 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 cable tucks (AKA rope tucks), and aerobics mutter incoherently about supersets and walking, jogging and biking. You know what they say about aerobics, “*&^@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 vary 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. I say that cuz some unbent wise guy out there has no doubt 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.
An exercise is nothing more than motion this way and that, unless it is owned, possessed and dominated, was to be my point. I then realized the enormity of the undertaking and the dullness of my 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 curls with the capital C are much more engaging. Why work the relatively small biceps muscle only, 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, I 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 you 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.
Speaking of which, I’m delivering this message laptop keyboard to screen to you in Doctor Warren’s clinic in Santa Cruz. The sun has fallen with the temperature and the volume of EDTA solution being delivered to my system intravenously. This has been the 40th of 40 three-hour chelation treatments to resolve arterial problems and improve my health.
Ask me if I’m thrilled the twice-a-week procedure is completed. I don’t care if it’s worked; I’m done, I’m free, I’m loose, I’m unhooked, unleashed.
More on EDTA chelation results later. I’m an un-tethered man and my B-29 is idling on the runway ready for takeoff. See ya.
Free-falling Dave Draper... Bombs away
Soak yourself in a taste of bodybuilding’s Golden Era with Dick Tyler’s on-the-scene record, written in his easy-going, one-of-a-kind style, West Coast Bodybuilding Scene.
Take a trip over to our
New Musclebuilding Q&A Blog
... where Dave allows us a peek into his email outbox.
Did
you sign up for Dave's expanded
email yet?
It's
free, motivating and priceless!
We'll also send you a link to Dave's free Body Revival
Tips and Hints booklet with your confirmation notice.
BILL PEARL/DAVE DRAPER LIVE SEMINAR DVD
The Package includes a one-hour-and-fifteen-minute tape of the July seminar, two muscular slide shows, plus a 32-page booklet outlining the subsequent interview between the mighty one, Bill Pearl, and me in which we discuss some favorite subjects untouched by the seminar. ~Dave
Cut through the confusion! Grab your copy Brother Iron Sister Steel to make your training path clear.
Readers agree: Dave new book, Iron On My Mind, is non-stop inspirational reading.
Our IronOnline Forum will answer your training and nutriton questions right here, right now.
Golden Era fans will rejoice in this excerpt from West Coast Bodybuilding Scene.
Are your shoulders tight? Do your shoulders hurt when you squat? It's practically a miracle! Dave's Top Squat assists squatters with shoulder problems.