*Reprinted with the kind courtesy of FLEX Magazine (January 2009)
Article by Julian Schmidt.  Photography by Chris Lund.

Melvin Anthony Jr.’s Chest of Tricks

It’s easy to rest on your laurels, if you have lots of them – like Melvin Anthony Jr.’s rarefied aesthetics, sweeping fullness and standing-O posing routine – but the greatest of champions are those who, like Anthony, cannot rest if there’s one laurel left to grasp.  Those are the overachievers, chased by the demon that tells them they’ve not yet reached their potential.  Time has taught them humility and hardened their will, a combination doomed to frustration but assured of improvement, as Anthony has seen for his chest.

Reflecting back to when he won the NPC USA Championships in 1999, he readily confesses, "My chest sucked.  I always hated it.  I thought I had a bird chest.  I wanted a Sergio Oliva/Arnold Schwarzenegger chest, but I wasn’t born with it."

What Anthony was born with was a stout heart that refused to surrender to fate.  And thus began wattled experiments with chest routines and technique tweaks, in hopes of zeroing in on the magic.

He’s getting close, but it remains, and perhaps always will, an in-progress venture.  "I still do basics," says Anthony, "but I no longer superset.  I do inclines first, a flat movement second, then all of my other exercises."  Oh, yes, he also switches the barbell with dumbbells in successive workouts.

Volume is still an Anthony priority, usually tallying four or five exercises during his chest workouts, four sets each of eight to 15 reps, except on days when he admits, "I like to throw that barbell in there and start benching as much as I can, in which case, the reps come down a bit.  But I still try to keep them high."

Shuffling his training in this manner over the last four years had led him to love the results so much that he has undergone a transvaluation.  "I actually like dumbbells better than the barbell," he admits.  It used to be the other way around, but you only get a certain amount of muscle maturity from doing the bench press.  Dumbbells give you a different feel.  You have to control the weight more, you need better balance of the weight on the way down, and on the way up you’re able to squeeze your pecs further inward, similar to a flye.  Barbell work is just up and down, no closing in, no squeezing together.  A barbell works the entire chest, but dumbbells put more emphasis on your pectoral muscles individually, contracting them as separate entities, yet simultaneously."

Anthony-past was a barbell fiend, going so heavy that he had to bounce the bar off his chest so hard that it made his bones hurt, he says.  "I wasn’t getting anything out of it.  I’d get the squeeze but not on the extension.  I was coming down to my chest, but I had no control of it.  Anybody can drop 500 pounds on his chest, but if you’re going to do that, you might as well wear a powerlifting suit that springs the weight off your chest." 

Older and wiser, Anthony now concentrates on controlling the contraction throughout the repetition, yet still flirts with maximum poundage and still sees the need for barbell work.  "It bounces off my chest a little bit," he says, "but nothing compared with the past.  I’m tighter, and I’ve learned to squeeze from point zero all the way through.  Explosion is good for strength, and its special domain is the flat bench.  In that regard, it’s an incomparable exercise."

Anthony’s tighter squeeze during his reps allows him to implement his unique stretch-and-twist technique, which he feels is necessary for a bodypart as vast and complex as the chest.  He utilizes different angles and performs each repetition in what seems like slow motion.  "To stretch the upper, medial, lateral and lower pecs, inclines and declines are the answer, but performed with such restraint that you feel you’re spending an eternity reining in a wild stallion, he says.  "The entire process of resisting on the way down, getting the stretch at the bottom and exploding up requires 35 seconds for me to complete a set.

Dumbbells are where he twists.  For presses, he supinates his thumbs outward at the top, for a harder contraction in his outer and lower pecs.  For flyes, he holds the dumbbells with palms forward or pronated on the extension, and supinates on the contraction; the former increases stress on his inner and lateral pecs, and the latter produces a peak contraction in the medial and lateral pecs.

As a new pro nearly a decade ago, Anthony assessed his deficient chest and faced his fate as a genetic prisoner, telling himself, "You can’t want what you can’t have."  That’s what he told his mind, but he couldn’t tell it to his heart.  "I decided I’d at least try to make my chest as good as possible.  Now, I’ve been able to look at it and realize, "Wow!  It’s not flat."

David Henry’s Pectoral Principles

He has made a career of diving into the hellmouth of the most feral workouts ever devised, simply because they are beyond the tolerance of any other human being and, ipso facto, because they create granitic mature muscle virtually on the spot.  Every time we talk to him, he’s in the middle of some bizarre new self-flagellation and relishing every minute of it.  If he’s not roaring through power-concussion reps, it’ll be single-set monster lifts, Doggcrapp training, power-building supersets or some other flesh-flaying dementia.  But each time, he emerges thicker, denser, more swollen and hard.

David Henry’s latest iteration is no different, as evidenced by his eruptive chest growth, and he owes it all, he says, to a fresh assault of triset-superset shock workouts at surprise moments in the off season and for a final, dust-cloud, win-or-die charge through the last two weeks of combat – uh, sorry – contest training.

Here’s how it goes:  first, he picks three exercises, each intended to hit a different portion of his chest and combines them in trisets, going from one to the other nonstop, 10 reps at a time three times through the series.

In order, the exercises are decline dumbbell flyes, incline dumbbell flyes and flat dumbbell presses.  Each exercise, however, pyramids upward in weight, from 35-pounders for the declines, 45s for the inclines and 70s for the flat presses.  Between each triset, he takes a three-minute rest.

So, why the variations in poundage?  "I use a weight that won’t hurt me and that’s appropriate for the exercise," Henry explains.  The important point is to get those 10 reps all done in a very special way, the key being two different pauses and contractions in every rep.  My arms are straightened more than normal to get a very deep stretch, and the movement is very slow: one second down and three seconds up, with the upward movement interrupted at its halfway point for an additional one-second pause-and-squeeze, before continuing on the top, where I get another one-second peak contraction squeeze."

Incline flyes are performed in the same manner: one second down with control, then, three seconds up with a one-second pause/squeeze in the middle, before finishing with another peak-contraction squeeze at the top.

"Likewise, for the flat dumbbell presses," says Henry.  "It’s one second down, dropping the dumbbells all the way into my armpits, and they come up through a count of three, with an additional one-second pause/squeeze at the midpoint and a squeeze at the top.  It’s a workout designed for peak contractions and as much muscle involvement as I can possibly get."

There’s more.  After three trips through this giant set come three trips through a superset, the first exercise being standing cables, pulling from a high, outstretched reach through what Henry describes as, "a semi flye/press kind of motion, starting with my fists facing each other.

As I drive the handles down, I’m pronating my hand, so that I touch my thumbs together at the front.  The other half of the superset is the standard, get-on-the-dirty-gym-floor-and-go pushups, however many reps I can do to failure, hands shoulder width, heels together, and that’s it.

"If you’ve done the giant sets correctly and you’ve picked the right weight on the cable movement, you won’t be able to get more than 10 reps on the floor," he promises.  "Typically, you’ll get seven or eight before your body completely fails and you collapse on your face.  It’s happened to me many times, and it’s happened to others I’ve shown how to do this.  You go through this superset three times and that’ll about smoke it for chest."

Offseason, Henry still uses Doggcrapp training – "Nothing has changed there," he says – except that this tri-superset workout lurks, ready to pounce without warning, if his body dares take the dog days of summer literally.  "Offseason, it will be with heavier weight, of course," Henry adds.  "Because I’m not so depleted from contest dieting, I have more water in my system and more bodyfat, and I feel 100%.  If I throw it in then for a couple of weeks, with all-out heavy weight, I can get a little muscle growth going in a different direction."

The 2008 Olympia 202 Showdown champion, Henry used this approach for every bodypart in prep for the 2008 New York Pro Show (he was fourth) and the Tampa Pro Bodybuilding Weekly Championships (third).  "It got me really grainy hard," he says.  "I have to do something.  There are these young guys out there, like Flex Lewis, looking to beat me – that was his goal, coming over here from Wales.  He said, ‘One has to be the best to beat the best,’ and he was talking about me.  With these guys gunning for me, that’s a compliment and a real motivation, so I’d be crazy if I didn’t put something in my arsenal that would help me.

"This program does the job.  It’s painful and it’s not easy, but nothing we do in this sport is," he adds.  "But it helps a lot in my offseason training, and it forces me to push harder than I ever have during the precontest.  I’m ready to rock and roll for next year."

Darrem Charles: Classic Chest Tactics

"I’ve been competing for so long that I have an even greater understanding of what works and what doesn’t, and I’ve used that knowledge to avoid injuries and maximize my chest workouts," says Darrem Charles, who has more than two decades of bodybuilding under his lifting belt.

With continuous cognizance of his gradual strength gains, Charles was able to let his training intensity lead his poundage increases, rather than vice versa, thereby accelerating his ability to get more out of the combination of those two factors.  "Being able to handle 120-pound dumbbells with high intensity for incline flyes is not a bad achievement," he rightfully admits, illustrating that the smart bodybuilder acknowledges the necessity of the heaviest weight possible, provided they are properly employed.

With that condition, Charles still uses a lot of free weights, but with an eclectic mix of machines and cables.  The result: alternated workouts of four exercises of three sets each, one workout being heavy basics (10, eight, six reps) and the other oriented toward cables and shaping movements (12, 10, eight reps).

On the heavy duty day, it’s flat dumbbell presses, incline barbell presses, incline flyes and rocking-chair dips.  For the "shaping" day, it’s incline dumbbell presses, incline hammer presses, flat-bench hammer presses, and cable crossovers or dumbbell pullovers.

A natural assumption is that the second workout provides a respite from the heavy workout, but Charles sees it differently: "Ten years ago," he explains, "I was trying to go all-out heavy on every single exercise in every single week, but I wasn’t getting enough blood into a specific muscle to shape it.  I needed more control, a lot more precision in the movement – stimulate, not annihilate – if I expected to build more shape and detail into my physique, instead of mere undefined size.  The surprising result was that I was able to increase my weight for both workouts: I had more strength for heavier power workouts, as well as for heavier shaping workouts."

Experience has yielded valuable performance techniques for each exercise.  With his flat-bench dumbbell press, for example, Charles makes a point of keeping his fingers wrapped all the way around the handle for a secure grip, and his elbows are splayed at right angles to his body, aligned with the dumbbells.  A full range of motion is essential, he says.  "I come all the way down, until they touch the outside of my upper pecs.  At this point, it’s absolutely essential to stay as tight as possible, so I can safely apply full power when I push the dumbbells up.  At the top, I do not lock out, but I touch them together and squeeze for a peak contraction."

For the incline barbell press, he uses a false grip, thumbs on the outside, and gets a full range of motion, bringing the bar down high on his chest, just under his chine.  "When I press it upward," he explains, "I keep it over my face and not too far forward, so there’s no question that I’m working my upper pecs.  Many people these days no longer lower the bar all the way down to their chest.  They’re probably afraid of it, so they et so tight that the bar simply won’t come all the way down."

Preeminent in the performance of incline dumbbell flyes, insists Charles, is to make sure it is a flye movement, no a press.  Excess weight, he warns, forces the dumbbells to be moved almost straight up and down, instead of through a wide, circular arc.  To minimize that effect, Charles keeps his elbows fixed in a slightly bent position.  Once he reaches the halfway point of the lift, he feeds in the explosiveness, and form then upward he supinates his hands, touching the lower parts of the dumbbells together at the top for what he calls a "better contraction" of his pecs.

Rocking-chair dips is Charles’ description of his final, heavy-day exercise.  "When I go down, I keep an arch in my back, lean forward a bit and get a good stretch at the bottom,’ he says.  "When I come up from the dip, I push myself backward, as if I’m in a rocking chair, and I don’t lock out at the top.  Off the bottom, I get lots of explosion, or drive – but that requires me to be very tight throughout."

As for his shaping-day exercises, he begins with incline dumbbell presses.  Charles keeps his elbows pointed outward, in line with the dumbbells, to neutralize the tendency of his body to make things easier by pulling his elbows into his body.  "If that happened," he says, "I would be much stronger, because my triceps would help, but it would also negate the effect of the exercise."  Likewise for his incline and flat hammer presses – although these are machine movements, it’s easier to ride herd on his elbow, since they’re not required to stabilize and support as much as they do with free weights.

A constant pull backward is what Charles wants from his cable crossovers, so he step slightly ahead of the pulleys.  As he brings the handles together, his arms are not straight out to the front but downward, close to his body, about five inches in front of his torso.  Describing it in detail, he says, "As I pull down, my palms are facing each other.  As I come in closer to my body, I cross my arms and turn my hands so my palms are facing me."  At maximum contraction, he tries to straighten his arms as much as he can, by flexing his pecs and holding for a couple of seconds.  He also alternates one hand over the other; left over right for one rep, right over left the next and so forth.

When he substitutes his dumbbell pullovers for cable crossovers, his range of motion is very short.  "The dumbbell is not even over my face," he says.  "It’s just a little behind, about the same position as for lying triceps extensions."

Charles likes the look pullovers have helped develop.  "That’s why, back in the day, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Lou Ferrigno and all those guys had big chests.  They looked a certain way – when they hit a chest pose, it was very different."  His advice is to fix just a slight bend in your elbows throughout the set.  Lots of people he notes, lose that bend in their arms as they bring the dumbbell forward, thus making it more of a triceps extension exercise.  Charles says he does these every two or three weeks.  He then utters the tautology, "Obviously, they help."

 

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009 at 2:47 pm and is filed under Training.