Q&A with Dorian Yates | The Shadow Casts Light on Your Training Problems
Q&A with Dorian Yates
The Shadow Casts Light on Your Training Problems
Decline Press?
Dorian, I know early in your bodybuilding career your chest was a lagging body part. I heard you say that the decline bench is the best movement to add mass to your chest. My gym does not have a decline bench, so I do flat instead and then the incline bench for my pressing movements. I am building my foundation. Do you think this is the right way to go? If not, please explain. Thank you for your time.
How about finding a gym with a decline bench, for starters? When I was starting out in bodybuilding, I read a lot of books. One writer who had a lasting influence on me was Nautilus inventor Arthur Jones, because he came at training from a scientific point of view rather than just passing on anecdotal evidence about what was and wasn’t effective. The function of the pectoral muscles is to bring the arm away from the body and across the body. The decline press allows for a greater range of motion, thus activating more of the muscle fibers. The reason decline presses have never been overly popular is that a misconception exists that they specifically target the lower region of the pecs. Since most people have fair to good development there and tend to have weaker development in the upper pecs, it was surmised that decline presses were a waste of time and effort. I found this to be patently false. Decline presses in fact work the entire chest. Personally, I found that flat bench presses put too much stress on the front delts and the tendons connecting the chest to the front delts. Ponder for one moment that any time you have ever heard of a bodybuilder tearing his pec, it was while doing the flat bench press. I can honestly say that the majority of the size and thickness of my chest was achieved through heavy decline presses.
Now if you can’t get to a gym with a decline press, your next best option is weighted dips with your torso leaning forward and your elbows flared out. This position is important, because the more upright your torso and the less of an angle your elbows have, you’ll work more triceps and less chest.
Lingering Injuries?
I would like to ask you if any injury you had is still “haunting” you today. I ask this because I got tendinitis in both wrists in 2010, and I have already done pretty much all therapies such as acupuncture and shockwave therapy while taking chondroitin sulfate and glucosamine, and so on. I stopped training for months, of course. But this never goes away completely, and from time to time the pain comes again and I have to stop training. It’s an endless and depressing cycle. I would like to hear an opinion from you, if possible.
The only injury I have that still affects me is one to my shoulder that I sustained several years after I’d retired. I was doing some grappling with a friend and tore my supraspinatus muscle in my shoulder. Granted, it was probably weakened and damaged from my many years of heavy training. It was surgically repaired and I tore it again, and at this point it can’t be repaired again. That shoulder is weak in some positions. Mainly, I can’t do any pressing for chest or shoulders, so I work around it by doing the pec deck and various lateral raises. Since I’m not trying to get bigger or stronger anymore, it’s not really a big deal. All my other injuries such as the biceps and triceps tear have healed and don’t bother me at all.
As for your wrist pain, I don’t know why it’s persisted as long as it has. I can recommend a therapy technique called shortwave diathermy, in which shortwave electromagnetic waves are used to penetrate deep into the tissue to treat all types of chronic inflammation. I know many people who have had success with it even when all other types of treatments have failed and I’ve also had it done, so look into it.
Partial Reps?
Yo Diesel, a couple of questions. What do you think of today’s training style of using partial reps? For example, coming halfway down on shoulder presses or incline. And in your opinion, who is hardest trainer among pros today? When is the much-awaited release of your training DVD with Cormier and others?
I always believed and still believe in taking a muscle through its full range of motion. The exception would be for someone like a powerlifter having difficulty with a certain point of the lift they get stuck in, where they would want to focus on that. That’s not to say that I don’t agree that many bodybuilders have successfully used partial reps. If you watch Arnold and Franco doing bench presses in the movie “Pumping Iron,” they certainly didn’t utilize a complete range of motion— yet they both had arguably the best chest development of their era. Keep in mind that they also included full-range reps on other chest exercises like flyes and cable crossovers. The key when doing partial reps is to make sure the muscle is always kept under tension.
Who’s the hardest training bodybuilder today? I can’t really say with certainty because I haven’t trained with all of them. From what I’ve seen on video and from what most people seem to agree on, it’s probably Branch Warren. He’s an animal in the gym who relishes the challenge of attacking the weights like a warrior. In that respect he reminds me a lot of myself. Whenever I trained, it was a question of how hard I could push myself and how far I could take my physique. It was more of a mental battle than a physical one.
As for my DVD, it’s titled “Dorian Yates: Shadow Warrior” and it’s actually going to be quite comprehensive. It features early photos and video footage of me, seminar and contest clips, as well as footage of me training Chris Cormier, Evan Centopani, Kai Greene and others. It will be out by the end of April and you can get yours at www.DorianYates.net. You can watch a trailer at www.theshadow-warrior.com.