Training Problems Solved - by 4x Mr. Olympia Jay Cutler
Training Problems Solved by 4x Mr. Olympia Jay Cutler
I would like your advice on my routine. I’m trying to gain more mass. My current routine is:
Monday Chest (incline only)
Tuesday Back
Wednesday OFF
Thursday Chest (flat only)
Friday Legs
Saturday Arms
Sunday OFF
Please let me know how I can change it up, if at all.
I don’t see shoulders in there at all. Did you forget to write them down, or do you not train them? If so, I suggest you drop one of those two chest days and do shoulders then. For best results in gaining overall mass, I don’t think you should be training anything twice a week. Stick to a basic routine that emphasizes compound movements like bench presses, squats, deadlifts, barbell rows, weighted dips, chins, and military presses. Keep your reps in the 6-8 range most of the time, and limit your total sets to 12 for larger body parts like legs, chest and arms, and no more than 9 each for shoulders, biceps and triceps. Work each body part every five to seven days. And be sure that you are feeding your muscles outside the gym by eating a good meal with quality proteins and complex carbs every two to three hours. Get eight hours of sleep a night as a minimum, and take naps when you can. That all sounds simple, but it’s exactly what you need at your stage of training.
I am 17 years old, and was just curious what you looked like at 17? What age did you start training? Also, what was your diet and workout routine at that age?
I didn’t start training until my 18th birthday, when I was 185 pounds and had a good base from years of hard manual labor in my brother’s concrete business. In my first year of training, I put on 50 pounds. My workouts weren’t too different from what I do now. I usually trained five days a week, with a lot of basic free-weight exercises and fairly high volume. I ate six times a day. Breakfast was eggs and oatmeal. The next three meals were chicken and pasta. My fifth meal was steak and a big baked potato, and my last meal was egg whites. It sounds very simple, and it was— but it worked perfectly.
To get my lats to flare out as much as possible underneath my armpits, do you think wide-grip chin-ups are the best exercise? I’m also doing barbell rows— would that be a good choice to bring out the lower portion of my lats ?
Wide-grip chin-ups are definitely the best exercise to flare out your upper lats. They’re better than lat pulldowns, because you’re hanging in the air from a bar and not locked under a pad. That makes it much tougher to cheat, so your lats— and to an extent, also your biceps— have to do the work. Barbell rows are an excellent choice for lat thickness. I prefer to do mine with an underhand grip like Dorian made famous. I find I can pull the bar closer into the body with a reverse grip, and I feel it targeting the lower lats more, which is where I need it most. Always keep your back slightly arched and your head up when you do barbell rows, and focus on getting a deep contraction in your lats.
Another exercise I like to do all the time for back is the pullover, either with a dumbbell or a machine. Speaking of Dorian again, you might know from his videos or his articles that the Nautilus pullover machine was a staple in his back routine, and he had one of the best-developed backs our sport has ever seen. The pullover gives you a great stretch at the start of every rep, and it’s also a way to work the back hard without having to worry about your biceps being “weak links” and failing before the bigger, more powerful lats do. The back can be a tough area to develop, because it’s not so easy to feel it working as it is some other muscle groups. You also need to work it from a few different angle to stimulate all the different areas. So in addition to your chins, barbell rows, and pullovers, you also need your low cable rows, dumbbell rows, and T-bar rows. Keep your reps in the 8-12 range and most importantly, make a conscious effort to feel your lats contracting on every rep.
My shoulder has been bothering me for about five months. I took two months completely off from training and got physical therapy that whole time. After I started back in the gym, the pain came right back. I’m trying deep-tissue massage now. I have a contest I am committed to doing, so I can’t take any more time off. I was thinking about taking another long break after the show and getting deep tissue, and maybe Active Release Treatment (ART). Do you have any other recommendations for me?
ART might be your best bet. It sounds like you have tendonitis in your shoulder joint, but to know for sure you should have an MRI done to make sure you don’t have something torn in there. Hopefully you have medical insurance, because MRIs can be expensive.
Typically, whenever you experience any kind of shoulder pain, the most effective therapy is going to be one that involves rotation or movement. Deep-tissue may not be enough. Anybody can massage your shoulder while you’re standing still. But as bodybuilders, we do functional training. Often we don’t even have pain in the shoulder unless we’re moving it, and usually when we move it in a specific way or ways. That’s why the best forms of therapy will involve you moving your shoulder as it’s massaged or treated. This also helps the therapist pinpoint the source of the pain. It may be a muscular pain on the surface, or much deeper down inside the actual joint.
The shoulder joint is one of the most delicate and injury-prone joints in the body, so your problem is pretty common. You’re on the right track by keeping an open mind and being willing to look for alternative treatment options, so keep it up.
Do you use any intensity techniques in your training? I’ve seen you do drop sets before in your DVDs, but do you use rest-pause, pre-exhaust, supersets or giant sets? Or do you mainly do straight sets with reps around 8-12, high volume with short rest periods?
I don’t do drop sets very often, and I can’t remember the last time I ever did supersets or giant sets. Pre-exhaust is one technique I use all the time. I’ll start chest off with flye movements, or quads with leg extensions very often. I find that helps me get a lot of blood into the area, and opens up the muscle so the compound movements I do afterward will be more effective at reaching as many deep muscle fibers as possible.
Rest-pause is another technique I do quite a bit. For example, on the leg press I might do 10-12 reps, rack the weight and rest for 10 seconds then get another 10-12 reps. I’ll do it on incline dumbbell presses too, but I never let go of the weight. It’s a killer for boosting intensity, hitting the deep fibers, and going to total failure, but don’t overdo it. I don’t usually do more than one or two sets like that in any given workout. You would burn out pretty fast, and get overtrained doing it all the time.