Written by William Rogers
01 April 2010
charles-glass

Trainer of Champions

By Charles Glass

I’ll get right to the point. My glutes need to be bigger! I’m tall and have trouble developing them. Pants literally fall off me if I don’t cinch my belt tight. I just want to know the exercises that will build huge glutes. I’ve tried squats, but as I’m 6’3”, they’ve always felt very awkward. I can’t do lunges as they bother my knees. Also, my inner thigh isn’t developed to potential, though I’m pretty happy with my quads. If you could please suggest a few exercises for building the glutes and what rep range I should be using for them, I would appreciate it.

I think the very best glute-builder you could do is deep squats, below parallel. Most people who squat don’t even go down to parallel, so they never reap the true benefits of the exercise. Usually, when someone as tall as you is having trouble with squats, I have them open up their stance wider. That almost always solves the problem. All of a sudden, they aren’t leaning forward so much, and they can get the proper depth. If you’ve been doing squats with your feet set at shoulder width as a man as tall as you are, I can understand why they’ve felt awkward. If you really want to stress both the glutes and the inner thighs, do plié squats, named after the stance in ballet. Your feet are set very wide and your toes are pointed out (you may want to use a Smith machine for this version). If, for whatever reason, you just can’t get the form down right on squats, you can go ahead and use a leg press, either the standard-angled type, or a vertical leg press. Again, you want to set you feet fairly wide apart, and also put them near the top of the foot platform. This will emphasize hamstrings, glutes and inner thighs. For a little more work on your inner thighs, also known as the adductor longus muscle, use a leg adductor machine. These are usually only used by women to “tone” flabby inner thighs, but if you work hard and challenge yourself to use heavy weight, you can definitely build mass with it. As for your reps, 12-20 should be a productive range for building size in the glutes as well as the inner thighs.

 

There’s a big guy at my gym. He’s not exactly a bodybuilder, but he’s much bigger than me. Anyway, the way he trains is kind of odd, but I wondered if maybe it’s something I should be trying. He seems to only do the bottom part of exercises and the reps are very fast. For example, he’ll pick up a bar at the cable crossover and do curls, but he only does them from the bottom and maybe 3” up, and does about 30 or 40 reps in less than a minute. I never see him do full reps, and he always goes very fast. Is this guy an idiot or is this just another style of weight training that could help me grow?

I don’t want to call anyone an idiot. The man is probably just ignorant, meaning he doesn’t know any better. He probably has either picked up everything he knows about weight training from people in his past, or has just made it all up as he went along. I doubt he’s as astute as you are, reading MD every month for the latest information on training, nutrition and supplementation. I’ve been asked about partial reps many times before. There was even a fairly popular training system about 10 years ago based on doing only the part of the rep near lockout, using much heavier weights than you could handle for full reps. I’ll say the same thing about the big guy at your gym’s method of training as I did about that system. You can’t fully develop a muscle with partial reps, you simply have to move resistance through a muscle’s full range of motion. Otherwise, it never stretches and contracts completely and appreciable growth is impossible. Another factor I would take issue with is the 30-40 reps the man is doing per set. That’s simply too many reps to do anything but improve muscle endurance. An explosive rep speed can stimulate gains, but it sounds like this man is going beyond that, plus he’s getting no stretch on the negative stroke of the rep at that speed. You may wonder if all this is true, then why is this guy so big? He may very well be a naturally large person. The truth is, there are a few guys out there with the type of genetics that they could never even touch a weight, yet still carry more sheer bulk than most hardworking lifters in the gym. I bet you good money that if this man did full-range reps, slowed his rep speed down to a more controlled tempo and did about eight to 12 reps on upper-body movements and 12-20 for the lower body, he would soon start growing much larger.

 

I recently read an article in a mainstream men’s fitness magazine that has me questioning everything we do in the gym as bodybuilders. According to a man named Alwyn Cosgrove, it makes no sense to train individual body parts because all the muscles are interconnected. He claims we would all grow better if we just did a few basic movements three times a week— I think it was wide-grip deadlifts, incline dumbbell presses and some pike exercise on a ball. This way we would be stimulating growth in every muscle group three times a week instead of once, the way most of us bodybuilders do. He claims that a muscle grows 48 hours after training and if you wait a few more days to hit it, you’re missing out. Now, I don’t know of any bodybuilders who train this way, but what do you think? Does his theory make sense to you or not?

You said it all— no bodybuilders train this way and there’s a reason. It’s not enough work to stimulate the type of growth and ultimately, extreme development of the muscles bodybuilders are after. To me, this sounds like a gimmick; something a person would come up with to sell something like a book or an exercise video. I don’t know Mr. Cosgrove so I can’t speculate as to what he might stand to gain with such statements, but I do feel he’s in error. All the muscles are not interconnected. If that were true, you could move your finger and feel a contraction all the way down to your toes. It’s true that there’s a good amount of overlap in many exercises. For instance, we all know that when you train chest, your triceps and front deltoids are also involved. And, to a much lesser degree, pretty much any muscle in the upper body is involved when any of the other parts are trained, and you often use seemingly unrelated muscle groups to stabilize your body in various compound movements. A good example is with deadlifts. Deadlifts are often referred to as a “total body” exercise. That’s because not only are you working your entire back, rear delts, biceps, quads, glutes and hamstrings, but many other muscles must be kept tight to help you remain stable and in control of the lift, such as your chest and abdominals. This is why deadlifts are such a demanding exercise and take so much out of you. People have been promoting total-body workouts for decades as the best way to train. For a beginner, that’s a smart way to build a good base. But as you progress and get bigger and stronger, you start taking more of a toll on your body’s recovery ability, and that’s when it makes more sense to split the body up into different groupings to train on different days. This way, you can focus on one area at a time with several different exercises that work the muscles from various angles. If you tried to do that with every body part in one workout, it would take you several hours, and you would be exhausted long before you gave the proper stimulation to everything. So don’t worry, you aren’t doing everything wrong at all! If you were, and if all bodybuilders were, none of us would look the way we do. Obviously, the way we train must work, because the proof is in the pudding.

 

Yesterday, I did the barbell bench for the first time in a while, and I was very disappointed with my performance. I’ve been trying to bring up my lower chest so I’ve been focusing on declines and weighted dips. But since I also know the flat bench works lower chest as well, I did it just because I hadn’t in a while and wanted to make sure I was covering all my bases. I only got 195 for six reps the first set, 185 for about five or six on my second set, and then I repped out with like 150 for only eight. I was able to get 205 for three sets of six back in May and can’t understand why I would be weaker now. Do you think it’s just a matter of me not doing it for a while? I do feel like my chest has been responding better. It looks bigger to me, but I’m disappointed that it’s not any stronger— in fact it seems to be weaker on the bench press!

The bench press, squat and deadlift all involve a lot of technique and unless you perform them consistently, you’ll lose your balance and coordination on them. For instance, say you work your way up to squatting 405 for 10 reps. Then, for whatever reason, you get away from squats for a while and instead do leg presses and hack squats for a few months. You might get stronger on those exercises and build size in your thighs, but I guarantee you, if you come back to squats one day five or six months later and try 405, you won’t even get it once— and I do NOT suggest you even try this! As for the flat bench working the lower chest, it’s not really a good choice. It hits the middle section of the pecs much better. If your lower chest is a problem area, declines and weighted dips are your best bet for improving it. Another technique you can try is pause presses on a Smith machine. Set up a decline bench under the bar and then rack the rubber stoppers into position so the bar can come close to your chest, but no lower. This is for safety purposes. Take a weight that’s about 60 percent to 70 percent of what you can normally handle and do a set of eight to 10 reps with a full one-second pause at the bottom. Count one-Mississippi in your head. Many trainers get in the bad habit of bouncing the bar off their chests and miss out on what could be a very effective exercise. By coming to a full stop, or pause, all momentum is eliminated and you’re forced to fire every muscle fiber in your pecs to get that bar moving again. Get back to me in a couple of months and let me know how that works out for you!

 

I mix whey protein in the blender with milk, a banana for carbs and a little honey. I have this shake three times a day between my three solid meals. Does putting these other ingredients into whey protein turn it into a weight-gain shake (which is my goal) instead of just a protein shake?

It’s now a complete meal, because you have protein, carbs and even some fat in there (assuming you’re using 1 percent or 2 percent milk, not skim). If you’re using this shake for a meal replacement, there’s no need to use whey protein powder. You can use a blended protein of whey and casein, or even straight casein. These will take longer to digest and give your body a longer, steadier stream of protein to nourish the muscles.