Branch Warren Answers Questions on Mass-Building Exercises & More
Branch Warren Answers Questions on Mass-Building Exercises & More
I know you have had your share of injuries due to super-intense training. Have you ever had a shoulder injury/tendon tear and how did you deal with it?
I've never had a shoulder injury, thank goodness. As I've said many times, the only injuries I've suffered have been three separate tendon tears: one biceps and both triceps. I spend a lot of time warming up my shoulders before every workout, because I've talked to guys with bad shoulders and it messes up your training for just about everything.
Hey Branch, you have some massive quads! If you had to pick two mass-building exercises for someone to beef their quads up, what would they be and why?
Squats and leg presses. Both are compound movements that let you use the greatest amount of resistance, and that heavy overload is what forces the quads to grow. You could probably get maximum mass in your quads just from working hard on those two exercises. Your quads wouldn't have the same shape and separation as they would if you also did leg extensions, hacks, and lunges, but you could definitely get plenty of raw size.
Your chest is huge! I just wanted to know if you include decline presses in your chest workout?
No, I've done them a few times over the years, but I never felt they were necessary. Declines emphasize the lower pecs, and I've never had a lack of thickness there. I can't even think of any bodybuilders who had weak lower pecs— it might even be impossible if you have any mass in the chest at all. Weak upper chests are as common as crabgrass, though.
I always make sure to work hard on incline barbell presses and incline dumbbell presses to hit my upper pecs. I do weighted dips (you know, with the chains) as part of my chest workout, and that pretty much simulates the angle of a decline press. But overall, I don't care much for declines. The range of motion is really short, and again, they focus on a part of the chest practically nobody needs to worry about. The lower chest gets worked more than enough on any flat press, and if you add in dips, your bases are covered and then some.
Why don't I ever see you doing bent-over barbell rows of any kind and instead always see you on the T-bar with a supporting pad? Do you have some kind of lower back injury? I saw you doing deadlifts just fine, so what is the deal?
I do bent rows. I will go for a long time doing mostly dumbbell rows, then switch to the barbell row for a while, and so on back and forth. It just so happens that whenever MD comes out to shoot training videos with me, I'm in the phase where I'm using dumbbells and the supported T-bar for my rows. My lower back is fine, thank God.
Hey bro— you ever consider working body parts twice a week? Seems like hitting a body part four times a month is nothing.
I guess that depends on how hard you train during that one workout a week, doesn't it? But yeah, I did train body parts twice every week back when I was younger. That's what Ronnie was doing in my gym, and he was the top dog there. But once I cut back to hitting everything once a week because I was in college and didn't have as much time to train, I got bigger and stronger in just a few weeks and kept growing. That told me I was much better off giving the body parts a little more time to rest and recover. Not many people can recover from hitting everything twice a week— unless you're not too intense in the gym.