HEALTH: Think Big to Grow Big

Friday, June 26, 2009

Posted by Yaqub Khan

My final revision of the weight-lifting playbook makes it dramatically shorter and lighter: I've eliminated almost all the exercises that work only small muscles or single muscle groups in isolation. Instead, my workouts begin and end with the exercises that work your biggest muscles, with the goal of working as many of them as possible every time you lift.

Each workout is built around one lower-body exercise—squats, deadlifts, lunges, or stepups—and two upper-body exercises, one for pushing and one for pulling. Gone are the leg extensions and biceps curls.

If you're wondering how you're supposed to build big arms without curls, I have a simple assignment for you: Grab a chinup bar and try to pull yourself up without using your biceps. Impossible, right? So if you work your biceps with chinups or lat pulldowns, using an underhand grip, or any type of rowing exercise, why would you need to do curls? What benefit does a curl offer that you can't achieve with a chinup or row? As a bonus, you burn a lot more calories when you train your biggest muscles.

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