Having a solid foundation

Let me begin with a scenario that we've all seen. You walk into a gym and low and behold, there are dozens of dudes gettin their swoll on with bicep curls and bench presses. They're hitting their inner "pecs" with cable crossovers and they're doing drop set cable curls so they can make their "peaks" really pop. Now, here is the other half of the equation. These dudes are usually about 160lbs with no real muscle mass and they're trying to isolate muscles that aren't even there! Look, if my wrists are larger than your biceps, then all the concentration curls in the world aren't going to save your puny ass.

What am I talking about here? A solid foundation. If you don't have a solid foundation of muscle mass to work with, then why the hell are you trying to isolate groups and doing these bullshit muscle mag workouts? The farthest thing from your mind should be how to isolate a bodypart. Do you want to know a secret that these magazines don't want you to know? If you're a beginner, you really only need about 6 core exercises to get jacked and gain a significant amount of muscle. I'm going to go over these exercsises, how to incorporate them, and why they are THE foundation to adding size to not only your frame, but inches to your arms and legs.

First things first though. You need to get your mind away from those fucking muscle magazines and the bullshit they have in there. Pretending to be a pro bodybuilder is a horrible idea if you don't understand the basics. For instance, a couple days ago, I was on a popular forum and I spouted off at the mouth that I could get someone jacked with a program using only 6 exercises. All of the sudden, my inbox was flooded with inquiries and people asking me to write them a program. I obliged the first person who emailed me and gave him a simple out line. What was funny though, was even after I gave him an outline of only 6 exercises to do... HE ASKED ME WHAT ELSE HE SHOULD DO! Apparently he didn't grasp the concept that we were only going to use 6 exercises. Now, you're probably asking yourself as well, "Only 6 exercises? Thats like half of my bicep routine"... forget all those fancy ways to make your guns huge in a month and all sorts of other bullshit claims. If you're a beginner with the iron, regardless of future goals, you need to build some solid muscle before you go tweaking it. You wouldn't build a car without a chasis would you?

Ok, before we get into the exercises, lets go into why they're this shiznit and why we're using these to make you look buffer than Brutus the Beefcake. First off, all of these exercises are going to be "compound movements"... say it with me, COM-POUND MOVE-MENTS. What that means, is that the lift, or "movement" is going to utilize more than one joint in your body. Why are we doing this? Because, whehter you want to believe it or not, your body works as a system, a system of systems actually. When you're lifting weights, your body has no clue that you're trying to get jacked so you can nail that hot chick in your class, the only thing it knows is that there is weight trying to crush it and it needs to adapt so that it can survive. Don't get me wrong, the workouts you use in a magazine will work for a little while, because your body is always open to adapting to new stimuli, but to really pack on the muscle, these movements are your bread and butter. Think about it this way, in order for you to add an inch to the diameter of your upper arm, your body has to gain a certain, and significant, amount of muscle mass ALL OVER! I forget the exact numbers, but they're out there. Again, you might add some size at first when you begin training, but it will, without a doubt, always stagnate unless you add more muscle mass to the rest of your body. By utilizing compound movements, your body works as a whole to add muscle mass all over the place, so that muscles work synergistically.

Are the big words getting you? Ok then, lets move on to the movements. My top 6 movements for adding mass, and some people might disagree with me on specifics, but they'll all agree that compound movements are the best, are the squat, deadlift, press variation, pull up variations, heavy rows and explosive movements (snatch or power cleans). If you did only these movements for the next year, heavily, I 100% gaurentee you that you'll go from a giant pussy "someone shoot that cunt with a bazooka!"... to a stud, or a hot chick.. depending on gender.

Before we go further, lets break those down into lower and upper body movements.

Lower body= squats, dead lifts, explosive movements

Upper body= press variation, pull up variation, heavy rows

Now, I'm going to just give you a basic outline of what I would give to a beginner.

Monday- Lower body movement- 5 sets of 5 reps

Tuesday- Upper body movement- 5 sets of 5 reps

Thursday- Lower body movement- 5 sets of 5 reps

Friday- Upper body movement- 5 sets of 5 reps

Yea, its that simple. I didn't add warm ups in there, because they should be a given, and if they're not, then your a stupid face dumb dumb. Also, you're asking yourself right now "ZACH, WHERE ARE ALL THE BICEP CURLS!"... fuck them, do this set up and watch your arms turn into pythons.. i mean, pythons that will let you rip a yellow wife beater off of you until you're a blonde haired senior citizen. Also, you're probably asking yourself, "where's all the volume?!" Well, if you're doing it correctly, and by correctly, I mean lifting heavy enough that it kicks your ass, you won't need, nor want to do any accessory work. Not at least until you're a little bit more of an advanced lifter.'

Now, I can hear the questions already blairing off in your head, "but shouldn't I be doing a 3-0-1-0 tempo so I can utilize time under tension and elicit an increase in GH and IGF-1 and blah blah blah, Muscle and Fitness, and blah blah blah?" dude, shut the fuck up first of all. second of all, when did you become the next Ronnie Coleman? No, you shouldn't be doing that, you should be lifting heavy ass shit so your body grows, because these heavy exercises utilize more than one joint in the body and if you're doing them heavy enough, will release all those silly hormones to make you grow so that you can learn to handle the weight and the prehistoric part of your brain can tell itself "damn, we won't need to worry about being crushed by that weight again"... and honeslty, we're all laughing at you when you're doing bicep curls with those tiny 13" arms.

One last thing. I know chicks are probably thinking "but I don't want to get huge".... This can not be reiterated enough... you don't possess the hormones to put on a significant amount of muscle mass like a man, so stop crying and lift some god damn weights. All those high volume leg presses you're doing are going to make your legs "over muscular" a lot quicker than a 5x5 squat program. Plus, have you ever seen the ass of a chick that squats and deadlifts? GOD DAMN! Make you wanna marry a (instert explative here).