Written by Hidetada Yamagishi
07 August 2015

15NN099-HIDE

Q&A with Hidetada Yamagishi

Getting Huge, Building Forearms & More

 

 

The High Price of Getting Huge

 I am trying to hit a new all-time bodyweight this off-season of 245, which will be 5 pounds more than I have ever weighed. Right now I am getting close to 240, but my lower back is starting to ache a lot for no reason that I can figure out, and I’m also starting to snore really bad. My girl hates it of course, but I hate it too because I keep waking myself up and the quality of my sleep is suffering. I know you got up to your highest weight ever at 250. Did you have problems with back pain and/or snoring? If so, what did you do about it?

 It’s kind of ironic that as bodybuilders, people think we are very healthy— but in some ways it’s really not healthy when we are trying to put on muscle bulk. We can even have some of the same problems that obese people do, like back pain, snoring, and the scariest result of bad snoring, sleep apnea.

 When I got up to 250 pounds, on one hand it was exciting because I had never weighed this much in my life, and it was about twice what my weight was when I started lifting weights 20 years ago. But I found out that it was just too much weight for me to carry. My lower back was very tight much of the time like I had gone through an especially heavy squatting or deadlift workout. There wasn’t really pain, but the tightness was still uncomfortable. I was snoring, and the quality of my sleep was getting worse. Soon I could not ignore that all these things were negatively affecting my workouts.

 To sleep better, I got a CPAP mask. This is a mask you wear while you sleep that forces air into your airway so it doesn’t close up and make you stop breathing (sleep apnea). You have to see a doctor to get one of these. Right away I started sleeping fine again and had more energy. But ultimately I decided I needed to lose weight and not allow my weight to be higher than 240-245. Another reason I made that decision was because after I got up to 250, I had more trouble getting into condition for my first shows in the 2012 season than I ever had before.

 It’s nice to have a bodyweight for a goal, but you need to be careful not to allow yourself to gain fat and trick yourself into thinking it’s all muscle. If you’ve been training for many years, even a pound or two of new muscle a year is really good. I hear some guys talk about how they want to gain 20 or 30 pounds in an off-season, and I know that most of that will probably just be fat.

 

Should You Bother Training Forearms?

 Do you train your forearms or your grip? Do you think these are things bodybuilders should be doing?

 I don’t do any direct training for my forearms, because I don’t see them as a weak point. They are proportionate to my arms. If you have forearms that look skinny compared to your biceps and triceps, then you should definitely be doing wrist curls and reverse wrist curls. Forearms are a lot like calves. The guys I know who have the best forearms, like fellow Gaspari Nutrition athlete Flex Lewis and six-time Mr. Olympia Dorian Yates, have never trained them at all! As for your grip, I don’t see the point in that either—unless you have a very weak grip and it’s affecting your ability to train hard. Even then, you can use wrist straps. They are especially useful on back day. Most guys can handle a lot more weight on exercises like barbell rows and shrugs than they can hold on to. You shouldn’t lose out and be limited by your grip strength when all you need to make it stronger is a pair of straps that you can buy for 10 or 12 dollars!

 

Why Won’t My Legs Shred Up?

 I have competed three times now and I have been happy with the condition of my upper body. My legs, on the other hand, are nowhere near as ripped. Someone told me I just need to keep dieting, but I worry that if I do that, my upper body mass is going to start going away. How do you get your legs so shredded?

 I don’t know how developed your legs are, but one thing everyone needs to understand is that you can’t have deep separations and striations unless you have a certain amount of thickness to your legs in the first place. That being said, legs are tough for a lot of guys to get ripped. Like you have experienced, they sometimes take many more weeks than the upper body to get lean. One thing you can do is try to stay leaner in the off-season and not put on too much fat in the first place.

You should also see your doctor and find out if your estrogen levels are normal. Women have much more estrogen than men, which is partly why they usually hold most of their fat in their lower bodies. If a man has too much estrogen, the same thing can happen. If your problem is severe, then your doctor might be able to prescribe a medication to help you achieve the proper balance. Also, there are supplements available that help you naturally lower your estrogen. But for most men, it’s really just a matter of maintaining a respectable body fat level year-round so you can diet down gradually and have enough time for any problem areas to come in and get ripped.

 

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