Written by Ron Harris
08 August 2019

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Kai Greene's Top 10 Fundamentals of Bodybuilding Part 2

  

Kai Greene is one of a kind. The three-time Arnold Classic champion may or may not ever win the Mr. Olympia title, but regardless, he will go down as a man with a unique physique, a unique outlook on life and also his own special outlook on training. As such, much of his thoughts and opinions on the subject veer far from the standard types of replies you have heard and read from his peers in the IFBB. Here is Part Two of the 10 pearls of training wisdom direct from The Predator, for you to contemplate and integrate into your own workouts. 

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6. Barbell Squats Are the King of Leg Movements

 While Kai doesn’t believe there are any worthless exercises, he has often sung the praises of the barbell squat. “You cannot find a more basic, more demanding or more productive exercise for the lower body,” he begins. “You would also be very hard-pressed to find a bodybuilder with anything beyond average leg development who did not build his thighs with plenty of squats over a period of years.

 “There are those who avoid squats for various reasons. A frequent complaint is that the movement is awkward and difficult to master. Others get discouraged because they see how much weight they can load on a leg press, and look at the relatively lighter weight they can handle on squats as a failure. The only legitimate reason not to squat would be for those who are suffering from a severely debilitating injury to the spine or the disks between the vertebrae. In a case like this, heavy loads bearing down on the spine would not be advised. For all others, squats are the absolute best option to increase size and strength in the thighs.

 “Don’t be discouraged because you can’t use as much weight as someone else or as much as you think you should be able to. And don’t worry if perfect form doesn’t come easily to you. There is nothing to be ashamed of! Know that once you do master the form on squats, you can easily begin to gradually increase the weights you use over time. And you should know that squatting even 225 pounds for deep reps with excellent form will yield much better gains than half-reps with 500 pounds, hunched over as if you’re performing a good morning. Never for a minute worry about what anyone else is doing. Focus on your own performance, your own technique and stimulating growth in your thighs.”

 Yes, Kai has even more to say about squats, with three keys to successful gains from them. Rule one: forget low reps. He rarely does sets of fewer than 12 reps, and more often stays in the 15-20 rep range. Number two: full squats are the only path to full results. “Luckily, that’s the way I learned to squat from the get-go, so I never wasted my time with that half-rep nonsense, dipping down a few inches,” he comments. Third and finally, do the reps on your own. “I never saw the point in having someone hugging you and making every rep an assisted rep,” he notes. “If you can’t do the weight on your own, take some freaking weight off the bar!”

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7. A Great Back Isn’t Just a Genetic Gift

 The vast majority of bodybuilders, and even a good percentage of pros, do not have great back development. In particular, what is often seen is very decent thickness in the upper back muscles such as the traps and rhomboids, as well as some nice width to the upper lats. Very few have the type of low-hanging lats that have distinguished not only Kai, but also legends like Franco Columbu, Lee Haney, Dorian Yates and Ronnie Coleman. Certainly, genetics will dictate how low any man’s lats insert, and the aforementioned men all had insertions at or just above the hips. Yet just as with weak body parts, Kai asks us to look beyond the limitations of our own individual DNA.

 “Muscle insertions are a factor of your genetics,” he confirms. “But regardless of what your genetics dictate, it takes years of consistent training to bring any gift into its fullest realization. Think about someone with amazing biceps peaks, like Arnold, Robby Robinson or Ronnie. Their biceps always had that distinct peak shape to them, but I can assure you that it was far less obvious and impressive when each man started training. My lats have always inserted low, but it’s taken many years of training to create the back that people talk about today. I will admit that I also had one advantage over many other bodybuilders, in that proper back training was not very hard for me to wrap my mind around in the beginning.

 “As a teenager, I used to watch Lee Haney’s workout show and I hardly needed any more tutelage or explanation for effective back training than that. I vividly recall Totalee Awesome demonstrating bent barbell rows, and explaining the importance of maintaining the torso parallel to the floor, to ensure that the lats did the work rather than the shoulders or traps. His instructions resonated well with me, and I followed them with success.

 “A lot of young guys are only able to mentally connect with the muscles they can see in the mirror over their bathroom sink, but for some reason I had a natural sense of what it should feel like as each respective muscle group contracted and stretched. Later on, I did my best to truly master movements like the chin-up. I would challenge myself to get closer and closer to the perfect rep, with everything aligned optimally to recruit the target area, and to achieve the exact feeling in the lats and smaller muscle groups of the upper back that I was after. Many years of dedication brought about the development you see now, which is why I don’t know whether to laugh or shake my head in wonder at the ignorance when someone makes the comment, ‘Oh, Kai’s back? That's all just genetics!’”

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8. Measurements Don’t Really Matter

 Just as we bodybuilders tend to get much too caught up in how much weight we can lift (which is irrelevant in a sport where you are judged on how you look), we also have the nasty habit of putting far too much emphasis on numbers on the scale and the tape measure. At his heaviest, Kai’s arms are probably somewhere between 22 and 23 inches. Yet he couldn’t tell you for sure, as he doesn’t know. “I know they have grown over the years, and that’s all that counts. It’s a visual sport and if I have created the illusion of much bigger arms than I had before, I have succeeded,” he says. “You’ve probably heard this before, but bodybuilding is a sport judged entirely by visual perception,” he continues. “It’s been called a sport of illusion, because the actual size of the muscles is far less significant than what they appear to be. With excellent shape, separation and detail, an 18-inch arm will appear to be much larger than a 21-inch arm lacking in shape and definition. Further, if measurements were actually important, they would be part of the criteria we are judged by, and judges would be onstage with tape measures recording those numbers.”

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9. Do as Much Cardio as You Need To

 Now more than ever, bodybuilders want to be told exactly what to eat and in what quantities, and exactly how much cardio to do at what intensity, to get in shape. That’s why “prep coaches” are in a business boom. But while such exact prescriptions take the guesswork out of it, they will never be as effective as listening to and watching your own body. Kai makes this point well in a discussion we had shortly after his first Arnold Classic win in 2009, when I tried to find out how much cardio he had done in preparation for that show.

 “I did as much cardio as I had to,” he replied. “That’s not a flippant response. I say it because I don’t want to simply throw out a few numbers and have someone out there go out and blindly copy ‘Kai’s cardio regimen for the Arnold.’ That would do them no good, because what I did was tailored to my physique, my energy levels, essentially my own unique needs. Now that you’ve been warned, I can tell that toward the end of my prep I was typically doing four or five hours of cardio a day, split into as many distinct sessions as my energy levels would allow for. If I could do an hour, I would do an hour. If I could keep pushing on for 90 minutes or two hours, I did that on many occasions, too. That would very likely be excessive for most bodybuilders, which is why I am making the point of telling you that this is what I did and had to do, not necessarily what anyone else needs to or should do. I used the StepMill many times, but I also used a treadmill or stationary bike. Any piece of equipment that can raise your heart rate into the fat-burning zone is fine.”

 Other champions have gotten in shape with as little as 20-30 minutes of cardio a day, and for many years, Dexter Jackson did none at all! The lesson to be learned from Kai here is, do as much as you need to, no more and no less.

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10. Harnessing Your Mind and Emotions to Generate Training Intensity

 The top bodybuilding champions— all the way from Arnold, to Dorian, Ronnie and Kai— have built their incredible physiques by taking their training intensity to a level the vast majority of gym rats, and even their fellow competitors, were never willing or able to venture. Arnold used to say that his sets only truly began at the point where most men would have quit. Commanding the body to perform at this higher degree requires the summoning of an inner power that isn’t always easy to tap into. Some have an overly simplified belief that it’s all about rage, yet Kai explains that this is a narrow view of how to generate extraordinary training intensity. “I know it’s not about anger or pain for everybody,” he states. “Buddhist monks harness an inner power they call the Chi, and Indian yogis have their own methods, and so on. I just know that for me, visiting a place of hate, pain and rage resonates more easily. In understanding that about myself, I know that I must have begun training as a form of therapeutic release for all the issues that had built up over the course of my young life. The wonderful thing was that now those emotions could be turned into something positive, and affect a positive effect in my body.”

Those are the top 10 training lessons to be learned from Kai Greene, a thinking man’s bodybuilder if there ever was one. Ponder them, take what you find useful, and put it into practice to better hone your own masterpiece of muscle.

 

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