Stage plays are all about repetition. The lead actor has to nail his performance over and over again. And so it is with Flex Lewis and the Olympia 212 Showdown. Having won it the past three years, he goes for No. 4 in September. But the real repetition occurs when no fans are watching. In effect, his workouts are his dress rehearsals, because these lonely “plays” determine how he’ll perform on the Orleans Arena stage. So we’re going to watch.
Take your seat front and center. The curtain rises to reveal Flex Lewis and his trainer Neil Hill, both of whom hail from the isle of Shakespeare. The latter is going to drive the former through a back workout in a show sure to include dramatic tension, keen insights, and act after act of utter brutality.
ACT 1
Our play opens with the Welsh Dragon and the Dragon Master in a lair. The dragon’s wrist straps are wrapped around the ends of a pulldown bar. He takes a thumbless overhand grip.
DRAGON MASTER: “Come on, no f—in’ about. Pull and squeeze.” On each rep, the Welsh Dragon gets a full range of motion from a maximum arms-straight stretch to a strong contraction with the bar at chin-level. He leans back just a little as he pulls the bar down. And, as the Dragon Master commands, he squeezes hard at contraction before releasing and then controlling the bar’s ascent.
“Squeeze now! Squeeze!” When the Dragon completes the 12th rep of his third set, the master removes the long bar and replaces it with a V-handle. This parallel-grip handle allows for a longer stretch at the bottom and works more of the inner back. The dragon straps onto the V-handle, and he pulls it down to his lower chest. His colossal biceps contract, as do his inner traps and the smaller cookie cutter muscles on either side of his traps—the infraspinatus, the rhomboids, the teres major, and minor.
“Squeeze!” He pulls again and again and again, grimacing, grunting. Eight reps, nine, 10…
“That’s it, hold it and squeeze! Feel that now!” Eleven, 12.
ACT 2
You came to this play to see something unique. So now things get interesting. The next exercise is relatively rare, but it’s favored by two of bodybuilding’s master trainers, one in Venice, CA, and the other more than 5,000 miles away in Tenby, Wales. Both American Yoda Charles Glass and Welsh Yoda Neil Hill (aka the Dragon Master) are advocates of two-arm dumbbell rows facedown on an incline bench. The bench is set at approximately a 45-degree angle. The dragon plants his feet on the floor and positions himself so his midchest is touching the top of the bench. He wraps his straps around two dumbbells. As he rows the dumbbells simultaneously, his elbows are neither tucked close to his sides nor flaring out at 90-degree angles from his torso. Instead, they’re about halfway in between those two positions, so at contraction his upper arms are pointed backward at about 45-degree angles from his sides.
DRAGON MASTER:“Come on, squeeze. Keep your head up. Pull with the elbows. All you, Flex, all you.”
Between sets after gulping down some of his BSN intraworkout drink, the greatest 212 champ of all-time explains a variation of this exercise.
WELSH DRAGON: “I will sometimes do these where I stand on the other side of the incline bench and then rest my head on the top of the bench and row. Your back is more parallel to the floor, and you can go a little heavier.”
ACT 3
The Hammer Strength iso-lateral high row is like a combination of a pulldown and row. The Welsh Dragon tugs the machine’s independent arms from out in front and overhead at the start of each rep to his chest at each contraction. He lets his elbows fair out to his sides as he pulls, maximizing the movement that his elbows travel and thus enhancing the squeeze in his upper back. At least that’s how he does the first 10 reps. But at that point he’s only 40% of the way through his set.
DRAGON MASTER: “Come on now, fast reps. Feel these working.” The next 10 reps are fast and short, focused more on the midrange. Afterward, though spent, he’s still only 80% of the way through.
“Let’s go. Five more. Hold these, Flex. Hold these f—ers.” The last five reps go through a full range of motion again, but he holds each contraction for two seconds.
“Hold it! Hold it!”
WELSH DRAGON:
“Aaahhh!” This play is now so tense it seems on the verge of turning to tragedy. The star delivers a soliloquy between torturous 25-rep sets.
WELSH DRAGON: “With this you almost get three exercises in one. You start with the full reps at a regular pace. Then you do short, fast reps. Then you end with full reps but with that hard squeeze at the end of every rep. I could toss a bunch of plates on this and use a lot more weight, but it’d get sloppy. And I’d miss stimulating the muscles the way I want to. Go lighter and feel those muscles working. Here’s the thing. As a bodybuilder, it’s never about the weight. It’s all about that mind-to-muscle connection. If you want to be a powerlifter, train like one. If you want to be a bodybuilder, train like one.”
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ACT 4
Bodybuilding
at its best is a creative art. And this isn’t merely a reference to superb posing routines. With imagination, workouts can be as innovative as painting or writing. The Welsh Dragon and the Dragon Master have long devised new exercises and new ways of doing old exercises—sometimes to impart variety when gym equipment was limited. In the past, the Dragon has done rows with chest press machines by standing on the “wrong side” and pulling the handles instead of pushing.
In today’s creative performance, the Dragon Master has the Welsh Dragon go even further. The latter does a row with a Cybex chest flye machine, pulling the handles both back and toward each other in a limited movement that targets his middle back.
DRAGON MASTER: “We’re always trying to find ways to hit specific areas of body parts. This one really works the contraction in the inner traps. You don’t want to bring the arms together too far, because then it’ll become a chest exercise. Just focus on that range where you’ve got all the tension on the back.” Leaning forward toward the contraption, the Welsh Dragon groans as he holds a rep.
DRAGON MASTER: “That’s it, Flex. Squeeze! Feel that burn!”
ACT 5
The final act for upper back consists of three sets of rope pulls. The dragon stands five feet from a cable station holding the ends of a rope attached to an overhead cable. As the master instructs, the dragon pulls the rope down and back toward his face, stretching apart the rope ends. At contractions, the Welsh Dragon’s hands are just in front his front delts. This is yet another exercise that emphasizes contractions. It’s all about feeling the scapulae crunch toward each other and the muscles of the upper back bunch up.
DRAGON MASTER: “The contraction is crucial in back training. A lot of guys do heavy barbell rows and T-bar rows and one-arm dumbbell rows and never feel their backs working. Then they wonder why their backs don’t grow. You need to find those exercises that allow you to really feel your muscles working.” Between sets, the Welsh Dragon barely has time to catch his breath and gulp some of his amino mix before it’s time to go again.
WELSH DRAGON: “I almost always have a training partner when Neil isn’t here. And I keep my training pretty fast. With the partner, it’s an I-go-you-go sort of thing, back and forth.”
DRAGON MASTER: “Come on. Let’s go. No more f —in’ about.” And the Welsh Dragon grabs the rope and goes again.
ACT 6
If you watched
a Flex Lewis back workout at any time during his seven-year pro career, you already know how this play ends. There’s a reason why he has arguably the best spinal erectors in bodybuilding. He actually trains them, and not merely as part of heavy compound exercises like rack deadlifts (which are sometimes in his routine). With back extensions, he hits them directly.
DRAGON MASTER: “I have my own way of doing these that I’ve always done. At the bottom I don’t go that far down and I reach my arms out in front of me, so it’s like Superman flying. Then as I rise all the way up and back, I pull my elbows back, like rowing through the air. So it hits my lower back like normal extensions but it also hits my upper back too.”
Once again, the Welsh Dragon has found a way to maximize contractions. Clearly, that is the theme of this play. He does 10 reps “Superman-style” and then 10 reps traditional style— longer range-of-motion, hands behind his head.
WELSH DRAGON: “This is the secret that brings out my Christmas tree. So don’t tell anyone.”
CURTAIN CALL
On that comedic note, the curtain falls on another performance. But there will be more such “plays” before Flex Lewis steps onstage again in Las Vegas at the ultimate 212 show. Rep after rep, set after set, with intensity, resolve, and creativity, he has turned his back from a weakness to a strength. From performances like the one witnessed here, his rear double biceps pose is now a collection of density and details worthy of the ultimate show biz compliment. It’s a showstopper. FLEX
