get bigger arms with no weights (poor mans arm blast)

A year ago, I tried an 8 hour arm workout I got from a video I saw on youtube. The whole video looked like a supplement ad, but I was sick of having 16 inch arms and wanted to get out of the plateau. I looked up reviews online and everyone said that it was rubbish and would not work. I now realize that these keyboard twerps had never tried it before because I gave it a go and added half an inch on my arms!! in one day! obviously I measured them after a couple of days of healing, crying and therapy sessions. One reason why you have to try something before you make a decision on whether it works or not. Our knowledge on hypertrophy and strength is a lot more limited than people think, we know nothing really.

This is all good if you have ~50kg of plates to be using, but what if you do not have a gym set up at home? or don't want to spend 8 hours in the gym? I am going to give you a few ideas on how to have this effect at home with little or no equipment.

Resistance bands

This is an obvious choice, resistance bands are cheap, cheaper than plates and can be used inside if needs be, or you can bring them out to a field somewhere and be one with nature while you blast your arms. I bought the bodylastics strongman set, which set me back £75. But that's only because I have issues saving up money. Before I bought them, I owned a cheaper set I got from eBay, and they worked fine. I would buy a couple of sets, so the total tension of all the bands is about 200 lbs, just so you can set up the triceps and biceps exercise and do not have to fiddle around with bands. You will have to adjust the exercises to make it work. I would recommend a standing band curl and tricep pushdown for both work out 1 and 2.

Body-weight variations
There are 2 body-weight arm exercises that I would recommend using for this workout. They are both illustrated below, to make the variation harder, for both exercises, just raise the feet up on something. It may take some experimentation to work out what heights are your 10 and 12 rep max before hand.

Tricep blaster:

From this position, push up a bit like a pushup, but keep the upper arm around the same angle as the starting position, it should feel like a reverse skull crusher.

Body-weight curl

 It should look a little bit like this, but you should be directly under the rings, so that the webbing is vertical, if you do not have a pair of rings or a TRX (don't get one, their a waste of money) just use a hanging rope or karate belt and do a hammer curl.

This work out is brutal, give it a go, and you will be rewarded.

Enjoy the gains,
Alex

 

progress from the advanced tuck planche to the half lay straddle planche

Progressing from the advanced tuck planche to the straddle seems like an impossible task for anyone, especially if you are built a little heavier than the rest. I was stuck in the adv. tuck planche for what felt like a lifetime, and there were no articles on how to progress between these two progressions that differ so much in difficulty and load on the muscles and joints.

This article will show you the progression that I used to get to the half lay straddle, once I got that for ~5 seconds, I got a full planche (a low/banana planche), so I actually skipped the straddle when using this progression.

Once you can do each of these holds for 5-10 seconds, start doing push ups, when you can do 5 push ups, go onto the next progression. Don't do these progressions until you can do an adv. tuck planche with your knees behind your elbows for at least 5 seconds

1: start doing your tuck planche like this:

If you can't see the image very well, basically, do the tuck planche with your legs straddled, but your thighs still vertical, Make sure not to rest your knees on your arms.

2: Frog planche:

As you can see in the image, lean forward a little more, and push your thighs back, so the are at a 45 degree angle. Almost there.

2:half lay/crooked planche:

Lean forward even more, and push your legs back until they are in line with your torso. It will feel like you almost lock into place. You will find that you will be a lot lower and your back will be a bit arched, this is fine, I actually think it looks cool this way. But as you get stronger try spreading your lats and get into that hollow back position.

Hope this helps.
Enjoy the gains,
Alex (Don't forget to stretch your glutes) Heath

Farmers physique myth (increasing work capacity)

You'll hear a lot of people saying "you don't need to go to the gym, you want a 'natural physique' like people that do manual labour or farmers" or something along those lines. For some reason, people think that if you farm or work on a construction site, you're going to get huge pecs and ripped abs. Unfortunately this is not true, if you look at the majority of people that work in manual labour are not in shape, not knocking that. But what I have seen from my experience from working with manual labour occasionally is that the people that have been doing it for a while have thick forearms and rough, wide hands. You will also find that they can be lifting and moving things around consistently for up to 8 hours without it killing them, when a lot of gym rats will not. Their job has built up their work capacity.

Some one i know, told me that when he was a child, he had to move hay bales. He told me that him and his friends worked out that they walked the equivalent of going from England to Scotland and back carrying hay bales throughout the summer.

To put this in other words, if you get a farmer, who works 8 hours a day carrying things into a gym, he will be able to lift harder, at higher % for a longer period of time than the average person.

Why is this important for the average gym rat? If you can workout with relatively heavier weights for a higher volume, it means that you will be able to practice the move more often, get stronger, and therefore get bigger. Louis Simmons explains why GPP is important for athletes in a much better way i ever could in his barbell shrugged podcast.

Sergio Oliva would do 10 sets of 20 pull ups before every workout. What does this mean? His lats where supercharged and could do pretty much anything he could throw at it, he could train harder, and not be as affected by it.
Sergio Oliva

How can you improve your work capacity in an ordinary gym? One idea is to have a pre-workout routine. For an example, before every work out, do 100 push ups and 100 pull ups in 10 minutes. For a while your work out will not improve, while your body adapts to the pre-workout routine. But as you adapt, you will have up to 1400 reps on your upper body per week. That has to make a difference, doesn't it?

Currently I am trying to increase the work capacity in my arms by doing an arm routine in the morning and the evening, to make sure that they don't burn out when going into the higher rep ranges of my one arm chins and planche push ups. It is simply 1 set of 25 tricep blasters and curls with bands, I will increase the intensity and reps as my training cycles progress.

When Jay 'ursus' Pateman was a child, he would do 500 push ups in the morning and the evening, and says that it is probably a contributor to why he is such a good bencher today. 

Guys out in New York, who work out in parks, do 40+ sets of 10 on the pull ups, push ups and dips, and seen DOC of Wingate warriors do pull ups with an extra 100lbs!!! I have also heard of Lord Vital, a monster in the calisthenics game being able to bench 400 lbs without ever benching. 

DOC (right)


Lord Vital (right)


To conclude Improve your work capacity and you'll get bigger.

Enjoy the gains
Alex

You want a 500 lb bench what??

Here I am going to be laying out my long term upper body strength goals (aim to get this aged 25, so 7 years), for my lower body I have not chosen to have any serious long term goals, I wouldn’t mind being able to dunk within a year, but apart from that I am just going to have fun and see how much I can squat. All of these targets will seem pretty far fetched, but you can’t hit anything without aiming at something. So here they are:
500 lb bench press: I don’t know how much I have to weigh to get this as a natural athlete, or if it has even been done before, for now, my main pushing strength I will be working planche and handstand push ups. But I will incorporate partial bench presses working up to 500lbs and slowly increasing the ROM over the 7 years. But I will be very careful of elbow pain and will progress at a very slow pace, it will not be my primary focus for now.
100 one arm pull ups (50 each side) ok, this one is straight out crazy, Jasper Benincasa could do 25 on each side, alternating arms each rep, so I thought, what the hell, I’ll go for twice that,  I am planning on doing this through steady state cycles, slowly increasing the number of reps as the cycles progress. Once I get 10 each side, I may have to get more creative, maybe do some west-side style training, I don’t know, I will think about it closer to the time.

100 Full planche push ups: This is going to be a challenge, I am currently doing crooked planche push ups (below), or about 10 reps, so I will aim to get 100 of those and work from there, to try and get my work capacity up before i do it in harder movements such as the full planche.

120kg strict curl: I am a torso dominant athlete, and so my arms have always lagged behind, After seeing Denis Cyplenkov do it, I thought I had to at least give it a go, I will go over how I plan on doing this in the near future

Enjoy the gains
Alex