Wed Dec 23: Chesters, “Straight Arm Pullups”!
Today was a smaller workout due to time constraints. Chest day.
Incline Hammer press 4x
Straight Hammer press 3x
Both followed by pushups for maxing out.
Hanging legs lifts, knee lifts. 3x
Box crunches 2x
Calf Raises 3x
Seated Calves 3x
Did the abs and calves work in between chest exercises for efficiency. The Hanging Leg Lifts are awesome. Try lifting your legs all the way up to the bar by using your lats as well as your entire core. Your body won’t hang vertical the entire time; only until your legs reach around parallel to the floor, then your lats take over and curl your body the rest of the way up. Keep your arms straight—this aint no pullup! Eventually, you’ll be able to do what I call STRAIGHT-ARM PULLUPS.
Straight Arm Pullups are a super badass version of pullups where you concentrate on ONLY using your lats to lift yourself up, rotating at the shoulders and keeping your body and legs straight. These are fantastic for exploding your lats and giving you that insane V shape on your core. They are also useful for not injuring your biceps by overworking them. They are similar to the “Front Lever” but there seems to be much confusion as to what exactly that is. Web videos have guys holding, while others do what I call “Horizontal Pullups”, and others do some kind of bicep-only horizontal pullup thing. Do them like this guy; straight armed, lats only, straight body, repititions ’til failure. His first example, except, he calls them, “Front Pulls”. Don’t do the second ones he demonstrates; that’s entirely something else.
The gym I go to finally got some better workout music. They used to play classic rock which is NOT the best music for working out. Great music for smoking out, or shooting up or whatever they did in those times, but it pretty much puts me to sleep! Some of it is ok but during my workouts, I want something that’s going to pump me up! So I was using my Sony wireless earplugs listening to music from my Droid phone. Worked great. But it’s still better to not have to get the phone out, go through the menus, select a track, and have to wear the earplugs. With enough sweat, they eventually slip out.
BYTHEWAY,
The Straight Arm Pullups are not to be confused with Hanging Leg Raises which are also awesome.
Straight Arm Pullups are called “Pullups” because they work the Lats just like regular pullups. The difference is that SAPs do not kill your biceps and therefore isolate the lats.
This isn’t saying not to do regular pullups as they are fricken great themselves. You can do SAPs after your back workout when you’re doing abs work.
Remember to do them correctly by keeping your body straight and not only lifting your legs by bending at the waist. Those would be Hanging Leg Lifts.
In fact, you can do a variety of Core/Lat work by doing Hanging Leg Lifts, followed by Straight Arm Pullups, followed by Hanging Knee Raises. Then get on the leg-raise station or elbow sleeves and rest on yer elbows to do more sets of both leg raises and knee raises.
You’ll see them ab muscles virtually explode in a week!
WORD, MOTHA FUGGERS!