The Top Ten Russian Arm Training Secrets

An excerpt from "Beyond Bodybuilding"

Comrade, did you know that Russian wrestler and strongman Ivan Poddubny sported a pair of twenty-one inch guns nearly a century before steroids? Wouldn’t you want to learn the Russian arm training secrets?

The following Top Ten Secrets are guaranteed to put up to two inches on your arms in just a couple of months, provided you back them up with big eating and a solid nine and a half hours of sleep a night.

Biceps

1. Squeeze your bells to pulp when doing biceps work.

   Make a fist. A white-knuckle fist! Do your feel how tension spreads from your forearm into your biceps?

   According to the neurological Law of Irradiation, a contracting muscle spills its excitation over into its neighbors. Just the opposite of the silly and impossible notion of isolation, irradiation is a muscle software that fortifies any effort. Due to an abnormally high number of nerves in your paws, anything that happens with your gripping muscles deeply affects your whole body, especially the nearby biceps and triceps. You can take advantage of this powerful neural program by putting a hard squeeze on your barbells or dumbbells. The tension in the biceps will red point. The result: unbelievable gains.

2. Always contract your abs and glutes when working your biceps.

   This bizarre maneuver also takes advantage of irradiation. In case you think that getting more juice into your arms by clenching your cheeks is preposterous, try this party trick. Give your friend the hardest handshake you can muster. Shake off the tension, rest for a minute, then repeat the test. This time, in addition to trying to demolish your fellow muscle head’s claw, flex your glutes as if you are trying to pinch a coin, and brace your abs for an imaginary punch. Expect an, “Ouch!”

   In addition to powering up your curls, the ab and glute contraction will ensure that you do not lean back during your curls. Power and safety; accept no compromises!

3. Lower the weights actively with your triceps.

   Cramp your biceps on the top of the curl and actively lower the weight with the power of your triceps. You should feel that you are stretching a rubber band inside your biceps.

   Stay tight, do not relax even when you have reached the bottom (and by the bottom I mean the full elbow extension!). Reverse the movement of the tightly wound muscle spring by squeezing your barbell or dumbbell.

   This unusual technique dramatically improves your control of the iron, especially on the bottom of the curl ROM. Finally, you shall be able to blast your muscles instead of the tendons.

4. Perform Loaded Stretches for the biceps between sets.

   In a nutshell, or in a nutcase, as I used to say in my early years in America, stretching the target muscles with weights between your sets of bodybuilding exercise shall make you grow.

   Right after each set of a biceps drill, sit on an incline bench with a pair of moderately heavy dumbbells and let them stretch out your pumped guns. Do not relax your muscles as you are instructed for conventional stretches. Do not contract them in the isometric stretch fashion; just let them be. This is the so-called “loaded stretching technique” from Russia, a remarkable tool for adding muscle and power.

   Stretch for ten seconds right after each set. If you take long rest periods between your sets, stretch once more a minute before the next set.

5. Periodically work both your biceps and your triceps with high sets of low reps, e.g. 10x5, not to failure.

   If you boil the energetic theory of muscle hypertrophy down to gym speak, you shall learn a powerfully simple formula of growth. If you get a pump while training with heavy weights you shall get big.

   Both fatigue and tension need to be present to turn on the cell growth machinery. Fatigue is caused by high volume, or a lot of reps performed in a workout. Tension is a function of the weight. They appear to be mutually exclusive. If you go nuts on the tonnage and crank out a zillion of reps with Malibu Ken and Barbie weights you shall not generate sufficient tension. If you push towards the other extreme and follow a power lifting peaking workout of singles and doubles, near-maximal weights, and plenty of rest in between, the muscular fatigue will be minimal and the pump non-existent. And if you go to failure on all your sets, the amount of weight you can use, and therefore the tension values, will be severely compromised after the very first set.

   The exact arm workout practiced by show units of the Soviet paratroops, the ten sets of five minus muscle failure formula, is your way out of this Catch-22. Relatively low repetitions enable you to handle heavier than usual poundage. And because all sets are terminated a rep or two before you bite the dust, you shall be able to do plenty of sets and get a great pump. Rest for one to two minutes between the sets to maximize the effect. When you have added at least an inch to your guns make sure to drop me a line.

Triceps

1. Rest the weight on the base of your palm and lose the gloves.

   Place the load on your hand from a barbell, a dumbbell, a triceps pushdown bar, or even the floor if you do pushups, on the spot at the very base of your palm, below the little finger. It is the spot karate masters use for crushing their opponents or stacks of bricks.

   When the mechanoreceptors at that site get stimulated by pressure, they send a command to the triceps to contract more intensely, as so-called positive support reaction.

   The poundage on all your triceps exercises shall jump upward in the very first session. You do not need to be a Ph.D. to realize that a heavier weight lifted for the same number of repetitions shall stimulate greater strength and size gains. It is obvious that you should not wear workout gloves in order to take advantage of this phenomenon.

2. Do close grip bench press lockouts for the medial head

   A power lifting favorite, a four-inch close grip bench press lockout in a power rack builds thick and ripped horseshoes without delayed gratification.

   If your gym does not have a free-standing bench that you could park inside a power cage, you may lie down on the floor. Keep the tension on the tris: squeeze the bar off the pins, do not throw it or jerk it. Push your chest out and press your shoulders into the bench or floor if they are dear to you. It helps to visualize that you are pushing yourself away from the bar into the bench rather than pressing the bar up, a winning imagery from power lifting.

3. Build the long and medial heads at once with triceps extensions/pullovers.

   This unusual combo enables you to handle heavy weights safely and sparks awesome growth.

   Lie on the edge of a bench with a barbell, preferably an EZ bar, in your hands. A close grip is in order. Press the weight off your chest and lock out the elbows to get in the starting position.

   Inhale and bend your elbows to a ninety-degree angle, as if you are about to do skull crushers. Maintaining the square elbow angle carry on the drill as a pullover. Lower the bar behind your head as deep as you can go safely. The key to preventing injuries is to keep your upper arms and forearms parallel throughout the drill. Whenever your elbows flare out your shoulders might get hurt!

   Lift the bar in the opposite order. Do not relax on the bottom, and keep your lats and abs tight.

4. Rip the lateral head to shreds with the curl grip bench press.

   This unusual press is the numero uno exercise for the lateral head of your triceps, or the outside of your arm. It also happens to be very easy on the shoulder joint because the arms are tightly screwed into their sockets. If you have a shoulder injury, for example torn rotator cuffs, you shall appreciate this drill as an alternative to regular benches.

   Grip the bar at the width that you find comfortable for the straight bar curl. Do not hang any plates on the bar until you find the right position. You will notice that your arms naturally go out to the sides instead of coming straight down. Turn your fingers out slightly and let the bar lie in the grooves of your hands to hit the power spot on the fleshy base of the palm and to avoid stressing out the wrists.

   The reverse grip press requires more control than the regular bench press and has a different sticking point. Beware that the bar jumps off your pecs, as spry as if you were wearing a bench press shirt, and dies halfway up. The solution is not to gun the weight off your chest in the attempt to outrun the sticking spot with momentum but to start slowly and squeeze the barbell through the hard point with unhurried confidence.

   Be certain to have a spotter who shall unrack and rack the barbell for you and save you in case you lose it. Or you could do the drill alone by pressing off the pins set in a power rack right off your chest.

   Once you have done this exercise for a month you shall never go back to the weenie triceps kickbacks!

5. Train your triceps heavy.

   Eugene Sandow, George Hackenschmidt, and other old time Russian greats rarely if ever did high-rep triceps work, yet they sported symmetrical and well cut up horseshoes. These early bodybuilders instinctively knew that the triceps needed very heavy stimulation. In the second half of the twentieth century, science caught up with their intuitive discovery. A study by Travill found that the brunt of the triceps work, regardless of the exercise and the loading angle, is performed by the medial head. Only when the resistance gets very heavy do the surfer dudes lateral and long heads kick in. Which explains why many bodybuilders, especially ladies, find it so hard to define their triceps: they favor light weights and high reps in their training “for the burn”. The only road to a symmetrically developed triceps is through heavy weights, period. Do multiple sets of five on all your triceps drills and the DEA might knock on your door looking for juice, Comrade!

   A time yellowed Russian poster shows a wide-eyed boy feeling the flexed biceps of an athlete with the letters C.C.C.P. and the U.S.S.R. proudly stenciled on his tightly stretched tank top. The blond giant Slav with Mr. Olympia pipes could have been a twin of the Russian boxer in Rocky IV had he not been born half a century before Dolph Lundgren. “Do you want to be just like him?”, demands the poster with Stalin’s directness, “Then train!”. Train, do not aimlessly “work out”. Go for the bull’s eye with vengeance and knowledge. I provide the knowledge, you the vengeance.