Written by Ron Harris
30 April 2018

15MASS-TRAINING-SECRETS-OLYMPIANS-PART-1

Mass Training Secrets of the Olympians

Part 1

 

Four Olympians (Dexter Jackson, Cedric McMillan, Dennis Wolf and Victor Martinez top pros offer an inside look at how they made specific bodyparts grow. In part two, five more Olympians reveal their training secrets.

 

CHEST – Dexter Jackson

One of Dexter’s greatest physique assets is that he is so balanced and proportionate that nothing really stands out. Once you start to focus on individual body parts, you quickly see that some are at the elite level, even among his peers on the Mr. Olympia stage. One is most certainly his chest, which is thick from clavicle to sternum, and splintered with inch-thick striations. When he pops up those pecs full and high in a side chest shot, or crunches them together in his lights-out, crab most-muscular pose, it’s an astounding display of chest development few today can come close to.

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How He Built It

The old-school stars like Arnold, Franco, Robby and Lou all had superb, thick chests. They built them the old-fashioned way, years of grinding away on free-weight basics like the flat and incline barbell bench press, flat and incline dumbbell presses, dips and flyes. Long before the advent of the wide variety of machines to train chest we have today, bodybuilders took pride not only on having big chests, but also in demonstrating an abundance of raw power on them. Dexter shared that mentality, and for many years would work up to good sets of 10 reps with 405 on the barbell bench press.

“When I started out back at the very end of the ‘80s and as the ‘90s were just beginning, guys in the gyms still had that old-school mentality that heavy barbell pressing was fundamental to building a good chest,” Dexter tells us. “On chest day, pretty much everybody would do flat barbell presses, incline barbell and declines. I don’t even recall too many guys using dumbbells. One phrase that really sunk in when I heard the older guys say it back then was ‘barbells build muscle.’”

Many bodybuilders today, even some of the best in the world, shun barbells on chest day— to their detriment— out of fear of injury. Dexter has never suffered an injury, thanks to diligent warm-ups and always listening to his body when it sends subtle danger signals.

 

Unique Exercises or Techniques

Dexter’s chest wasn’t built with any bizarre exercises or techniques. One thing he has always done that he credits much of his success with is finding the optimal rep range for his chest exercises. “Ten reps is heavy enough to stimulate growth and give you that muscle density, but not so heavy that you’re inviting injury,” he tells us. “I’ve never gone lower than eight reps on a set for chest, because there’s no point. And I never go higher than 12, because that’s when it’s starting to be too light to hit the muscle fibers the way you want to.”

Remaining injury-free has allowed Dexter to enjoy a level of longevity and competitive success that makes him unique in the industry, and he advises all of us to follow his example to stay safe. “Any time I ever felt something that didn’t feel right, I stopped the workout,” Dexter reveals. “Not only that, I wouldn’t train that area again until everything felt fine again, even if that took a couple of weeks of leaving it alone. People would tell me I was missing valuable training time, but my response was that if I tore a pec or my rotator cuff, I’d lose a heck of a lot more time in the gym.”

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Chest Routine

Smith Machine Incline Press   5 x 10

Smith Machine Flat Press       4 x 10

Dumbbell or Machine Flyes    4 x 10

 

Training Split

Monday:            Quads

Tuesday:           Chest and calves

Wednesday:      Back

Thursday:          Delts and hams

Friday:               Arms

 

BACK – Cedric McMillan

Back and legs are two areas that aren’t usually easy for taller men to build, and Big Mac happens to be 6’2”. When he turned pro at the 2009 NPC Nationals, his back was pretty good, but not quite great. Since then, he’s improved it to the point where it’s a true “wow factor” on his physique. With bulging traps and full lats that both sweep dramatically outward and insert nice and low into his narrow waist, Cedric’s various back poses are a thing of beauty.

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How He Built It

As a soldier in the United States Army, Cedric did plenty of pull-ups. Once he began bodybuilding, he added the usual assortment of movements like pulldowns and rows to form a back routine. But like most bodybuilders, it wasn’t what he was doing for back that was limiting its growth, but how he was doing it.

“Back in the day, it was hard for me to train my back effectively because my arms and rear delts did all the work,” he begins. “My back was hardly doing anything. I used to try to muscle the weight without understanding how to pull from my lats. I read this article once that said, ‘Imagine your arms and hands together are hooks that connect to your lats, and pull the weight down through the arms, not with the arms.’ That same article talked about the ‘mind-muscle connection,’ which was the first time I ever heard of it. Until that day, I had just been lifting weights. I was not truly a bodybuilder.

“That article made me start experimenting with ways of feeling the muscle work as I performed each exercise. What I came up with is this: when I tried to control the weight too much, I was using too much arms and rear delts because I had no mind-muscle connection yet with my back. I started thinking about snatching or exploding with the weight from the start position, and only using a little bit of control on the negative portion, just enough control to not look like an idiot as the weight kicks your ass. There was barely any control at all during the negative. It was almost but not quite dropping the weight, and then I would explode again on the positive. Once I kept that in mind as I went through my reps, I could start to feel my lats working instead of my biceps.”

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Unique Exercises or Techniques

Cedric has adapted his form on some exercises to “feel” his lats working better. For example, on lat pulldowns, he remains perfectly vertical with no backward lean, and also does the reverse of what most do with their arms and shoulders. In other words, he maintains a slight bend in his arms at the top of the rep, but allows his shoulder girdle to stretch upward instead of staying rolled back and down. For barbell rows, he often uses both a Smith machine and a barbell to do the movement in the same workout. Many of his sets will feature two distinct rep tempos: slow and focused for six reps, then pulling explosively for the final six. McMillan does do deadlifts, but prefers to perform them in a power rack where he pulls not from the floor, but from the mid-shins up, to focus more on his back and less on his legs.

A final technique Cedric has used quite a bit is one he picked up from Dante Trudel and his DC Training, rest-pause. Cedric explains how these are done. “The rest-pause set may go something like this: I go to failure around for 12 reps, rack the weight and rest for 15 seconds, and go to failure again, maybe only getting four or five reps on the second part. I rest again for 15 seconds, and then on my last attempt I may only get two reps before I reach failure again, for a total of 19-20 reps.”

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Cedric’s Back Routine

Barbell Rows                4-5 x 8-12

Seated Cable Rows     3-4 x 8-10

Wide-grip Pulldowns    3-4 x 10-12

Close-grip Pulldowns   3-4 x 10-12

Rack Deadlifts             3-4 x 10-12

 

Training Split

Day 1:      Shoulders

Day 2:      Back

Day 3:     Chest

Day 4:     Legs (quads and hams)

Day 5:     Arms

Calves are done every three or four days.

 

DELTS – Dennis Wolf

Twenty years from now, I am confident that Dennis Wolf’s shoulders will be among those argued about as being the best of all time, including past greats like Larry Scott, Kevin Levrone and Nasser El Sonbaty. While plenty of others have certainly built massive delts, it’s all the more impressive on a taller man with a wider clavicle span. At six foot, Wolf is able to stand next to men like even Phil Heath and make them look narrow in comparison. If shoulders make the man, then Dennis is The Man!

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How He Built Them

By his own admission, his shoulders responded rapidly and without any more effort than he applied to his other muscle groups. They grew rounder and thicker from a steady diet of barbell military presses, dumbbell lateral raises, rear laterals and upright rows. Watching him train, you will see he is always in control of the weights and focusing on engaging the target muscle. Even if his form gets explosive at times, it’s never sloppy.

 

Unique Exercises or Techniques

Dennis has done plenty of your standard standing dumbbell lateral raises, but he has also incorporated a great deal of seated laterals. “This is a much stricter movement, where you can’t cheat and heave the dumbbells up,” he points out. “You don’t have to go as heavy, and you feel the side deltoids working better.”

He also isn’t afraid to do more than one side lateral motion in a given workout. “If I feel I didn’t do a good enough job with the dumbbell laterals and want more of a pump and burn, I go over and do two or three sets for each arm with the cable,” he says. “I probably only have to do that every third or fourth shoulder workout. But I would never only do the cable version because dumbbells still give me the best results.”

Finally, he has subscribed to the sentiment echoed over the years in our sport that shoulders can never be too big, unless they make surrounding muscle groups look weak by comparison. Dennis knows the gift he was given to build monster delts must not be cast aside, so he has never let up on their training. “The top guys all look incredible, so you need something that sets you apart from the others,” he tells us. “I have worked very hard to get my back and hamstrings up to match my shoulders, but I always knew my shoulders were a huge advantage in competition.”

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Shoulder Routine

Seated Dumbbell Press                                        4 x 10-12

Seated or Standing Dumbbell Lateral Raises       4 x 12

Seated Dumbbell Rear Lateral Raises                  4 x 12

Barbell Upright Rows                                             4 x 12

Rear Delt Machine                                                4 x 12

 

Training Split*

Monday:          Chest

Tuesday:         Quads

Wednesday:    Arms

Thursday:        Hams

Friday:             Delts

Saturday:         Back

*Calves are done every other day.

 

BICEPS – Victor Martinez

There has never been a shortage of men with huge arms in the sport of bodybuilding. Arms are what almost all of us wanted most when we picked up our first weight, and the biceps is what everyone automatically start to flex whenever they are asked to “make a muscle.” When it comes to biceps, several men have stood out as elite: Arnold, Robby, Boyer Coe, Ronnie and of course, Victor Martinez. His biceps have that elusive combination of peak and fullness that makes jaws drop. Whether he has placed first in any given contest or further down the pack, those jagged biceps never fail to impress.

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How He Built Them

Victor learned from older bodybuilders in his native New York City, so it’s no surprise that he has always relied on the basics: barbell curls, preacher curls, dumbbell curls (both alternating and concentration style) and hammer curls. What’s surprising is that earlier in his career, Martinez actually had rather mediocre arms. The culprit turned out to be overtraining. “I was training arms twice a week, and they didn’t budge for many months,” he says. “Finally I realized that wasn’t working, and went back to hitting them once a week, but they still didn’t grow. Finally I got frustrated and pissed off, and only worked arms once every other week. That’s when they finally grew. They were just overtrained that whole time.”

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Unique Exercises or Techniques

Victor has been training many years, and he’s very analytical when it comes to dreaming up variations to work specific areas better, not unlike Charles Glass. “I do a variation of a concentration curl where I lie facedown on an incline bench to make sure I can’t cheat at all … it’s all biceps,” he tells us. “A few years back when I wanted more peak in my biceps in my rear double biceps, I was doing a lot of close-grip barbell curls to build the outer head of the muscle.” He also likes drop sets, and will do supersets from time to time as well. The ironic thing is that as great as Victor’s biceps are, he has never particularly enjoyed training them. “The pump used to be so painful I would have to stop the workout,” he recalls. “Now it’s just annoying.”

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Victor’s Biceps Routine

Barbell Curls                         3 x 10

Dumbbell Preacher Curls      3 x 10

Concentration Curls              3 x 10

Hammer Curls                       3 x 10

 

Training Split

Day 1:Chest and biceps

Day 2:Quads and calves

Day 3:Shoulders and triceps

Day 4:OFF

Day 5:Back and hams

Day 6:Chest and biceps

Day 7:Quads and hams

*The order of body parts trained remains the same, but because there are four different “training days,” the rest day constantly shifts in terms of where it falls in the rotation.

 

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WATCH ONE OF DENNIS WOLF'S SHOULDER WORKOUTS

WATCH ONE OF DEXTER JACKSON'S CHEST WORKOUTS

WATCH ONE OF VICTOR MARTINEZ' BICEPS WORKOUTS