I noticed in one of your pre-Olympia videos at FLEXonline that you stop your dumbbell side laterals halfway up. Why do you do that?
ANSWER
I do side laterals the conventional way, too, getting full reps. But the half reps are a favorite of my trainer, Neil Hill. There are only so many ways to work the medial delts, so the half reps are a method of doing something difFerent with side laterals and working just the bottom sections of reps. You can go a little heavier with these. Focus on bringing the dumbbells out as far as possible with your arms perfectly straight, stop at about the halfway point, and keep your delts tense the whole time. The key is to make sure your arms don’t relax at your sides at the beginning of reps. You want to keep constant tension on the medial delts.
QUESTION
When you first started getting press, all anyone talked about were your legs. How were you able to get your upper body in balance with your lower body?
ANSWER
I never wanted to be known for just my legs. Having a balanced physique has always been really important to me. As with anything else, you have to work at it. My legs, especially my calves, grow easily when compared with my chest or back. So there was a time when I barely trained legs at all, and I focused instead almost entirely on my upper body. Rarely training a body part over an extended period does two things. First, that area isn’t going to grow. Depending on how much you train it and with how much intensity, it may even shrink. Second, it allows you to mentally and physically focus more on the other areas. If you don’t have to go through a hard leg workout on Monday, you’re going to be able to give more to your chest workout on Tuesday.
Depending on your own strengths and weaknesses, you may want to train your strongest areas less and your weakest areas more. Maybe your legs are weak and your back is strong. So you might try hitting legs twice a week and back only once every other week. You need to be really honest about your strengths and weaknesses to keep everything in balance. Unfortunately, people tend to train their strongest areas the hardest and neglect their weaker areas, and that only makes things worse. So sometimes the best way to change this is to just not train your strengths for a while until things get back in balance. – FLEX
