You don't need to isolate small muscles to make them bigger and stronger

Now let's talk about curls. When you write a book about strength training that includes no specific exercises for small muscles like biceps, triceps, and calves, you owe readers an explanation beyond "because we say so." I understand that the idea of biceps curls and triceps extensions makes intuitive sense-if you want to build those muscles, why wouldn't you work them directly? But you are working them directly when you do Alwyn's workouts, and the reason you're working them directly is because you're using them the way they were designed to work. The purpose of your biceps is to bend your elbow while assisting your upper-back muscles in a pulling motion. A pulling motion can come from overhead, as in climbing, or from out in front of you, as in rowing. The purpose of your triceps is to straighten your elbow while assisting your chest and shoulder muscles in a pushing motion. The push can be overhead, such as putting a box up on a shelf, or out from your torso, like pushing a car that's run out of gas. Just for a moment, stop and think of all the things your body is designed to do, and thus all the chores your muscles should be able to accomplish. You have to admit that bending and straightening your elbows, as isolated tasks, rank pretty far down the list. Where, outside the gym, are those motions ever separated from the actions of your bigger upper-torso muscles? And yet the typical woman in the typical gym will spend at least as much time on elbow-bending and elbow-straightening exercises as she does on presses, rows, and pull downs-the pushing and pulling exercises that mimic the most vital movements your upper body is designed to perform. I realize this argument is getting long-winded, but I am building to a climactic point: Since your body is designed to use its big and small muscles together, in coordinated movement, doesn't it stand to reason that your body would want to develop those muscles in some systematic, proportional, and coordinated pattern? If you're doing a chest press, for example, is your body going to treat that as a "chest" exercise, and only develop those muscles just because those are the ones you think you're targeting? Of course not; all the muscles designed to accomplish the movement will develop at the same pace. Thus, a coordinated pushing motion, such as a chest press , will develop your chest, shoulder, and triceps muscles simultaneously and proportionally. A coordinated pulling motion, such as a chinup or pulldown, will develop your upper back, shoulder, and biceps muscles simultaneously and proportionally. There's no need to isolate those muscles with specific movements; your body knows it needs to increase strength and size in all those muscles to keep them working together synchronously. Why wouldn 't it? There's no advantage to developing individual muscles selectively, since strengthening one muscle in isolation creates a proportional weakness in another. Remember, what we 're talking about here is training-specifically, strength training. Every exercise you do is designed to increase strength, and increasing strength is the key to all the results you want when you lift weights.I FIRST LEARNED the power of the midsection when I was at Men 's Fitness magazine in the mid-1990s. We were trying to come up with cover lines for our February ' 94 issue, and realized we had nothing for the "main sell," the big line that draws in readers at the newsstand and sets the tone for the entire issue. Normally, a magazine will use that space to call readers ' attention to its biggest, most important story. Fitness magazines typically employ the main sell to spotlight the issue's most exciting diet or workout piece. But here were the subjects of the features in that month's issue: • snowboarding • eating more fruits and vegetables • jumping rope • understanding health statistics to tell if a health scare is legitimate or overhyped • cave diving • being an involved father We also had a big sex feature, which was pretty good and which won the magazine its first award from our peers in the publishing industry. But we couldn't make that the main sell for several reasons that aren't worth recounting now. My point is, we were desperate, and desperate people do desperate things. We had a two-page column in the back of the magazine called "Spot Training," which highlighted a different muscle group each month and gave readers three exercises to isolate those muscles. (Yes, it hurts to remember that I once did the exact thing I now condemn.) We had never, to the best of my memory, used the column as a main sell. But that month's "Spot Training" just happened to feature the abdominals. So we choked back our professional integrity and went with this cover line: "Awesome Abs: Get a rock-hard stomach in 3 easy steps." That issue sold better than any in our recent history. We were hardly the first magazine in history to profit from the promise of better abs, but I think we showed just how low the bar could be set. I mean, even by the standards of two-page, back-ofthe-magazine, throwaway columns, that month's Spot Training was pathetic. The exercises themselves were mediocre choices. One of the three was performed incorrectly in the photos. And the model had a worse physique than most of the guys on the magazine's staff. (We weren't exactly impressive in that department. If the editors of Shape, our sister magazine, had challenged us to a tug-of-war, the smart money might've been on them.) Still, when I look back at that episode, the greatest shame I feel is over an aspect of the story that was completely uncontroversial at the time. Each exercise was described as working specific regions of the abdominals-"upper abs," "lower abs," "obliques." I now know that "upper" and "lower" abs simply don't exist, as functional units, even though many people back then believed they did. And the notion that any of the abdominal muscles can or should be worked in isolation from the others is pure fiction. There's certainly an argument for doing specialized exercises that target the midbody muscles as a group. Alwyn includes several of them in the programs described in Chapter 10. So, while I'm skeptical about the value of exercises that target other small muscles, like the biceps and deltoids and calves, I have to modify that argument for the muscles in your midsection. Of course, I have my reasons. TWISTED FATE The rectus abdominis, the "six-pack" muscle, is responsible for flexing your torso forward against resistance. (Without a weight to push against, gravity does the trick.) And the obliques, the sets of muscles on the sides of your waist, are designed to twist your upper body and to help you straighten your torso when it's bent to the side. Stop and think for a moment about when in real life you'd need to perform those actions. Bending forward against some kind of resistance? Outside of the gym, it's hardly ever done. Bending to the side? Again, it's something you see in gyms and dance studios, but in real life it's hardly ever done without also twisting. Twisting, though, is an important action. Just about everything you do in the office or around the house or yard involves combinations of bends and twists. And every sport, including chess , involves rotation by the middle of your body. Often, those actions are done at top speed in order to generate maximum power. Think of Maria Sharapova serving a tennis ball 100 mph, or the teenage Michelle Wie driving a golf ball 270 yards off the tee. (I outweigh Wie by 30 pounds, and the only way 1 could hit a golf ball that far would be downhill. And even then, I'd need a lucky bounce.) Both women are more than six feet tall, with long arms and legs. Add a tennis racquet or golf club and you have extremely long levers whipping the torso around at terrifying speeds. It takes otherworldly talent combined with superb conditioning to twist a human body that hard and that fast without creating some kind of injury to the spine. Now, having brought up the subject of the spine, 1 should mention that when 1 use the word "twist" I'm talking in general about the body's rotational actions. The lumbar spine-the part below your rib cage-doesn't actually twist. Your shoulders turn and your hips rotate, but the bones in your lower back, the vertebrae, aren 't supposed to turn independently. They're designed to flex forward and extend backward. So in a ballistic twisting motion, those bones have to have strong muscles and connective tissues holding everything in its designated place. That's where the rectus abdominis performs what may be its most important role, according to Stuart McGill, Ph.D., professor of spine biomechanics at the University of Waterloo, in Ontario. In his studies and his books, McGill has argued that the rectus abdominis helps hold your torso together during powerful twists. While the obliques are designed to facilitate twisting-that's why the fibers in those muscles run diagonally and horizontally-the rectus seems to prevent too much twisting. Its fibers run vertically, up and down. That's the same direction of the fibers on your most prominent lower-back muscles, which we call "spinal erectors" so we don't have to learn any more Latin words than is absolutely necessary. (The Latin name of the muscle is erector spinae.) Both sets of muscles, rectus abdominis and spinal erectors, seem to act as brakes to prevent the most extreme twisting motions from pulling your midsection apart. Which contradicts what we 've been told about the muscles in our midsections: • The crunch is the perfect "ab" exercise, since it builds a visible sixpack. • A visible six-pack is the ultimate goal of any workout program. • A bulked-up six-pack will reduce or even prevent lower-back pain. The reality is different. The basic crunch is, at best, a useless exercise. There are plenty of ways to strengthen your midsection as a unit, including a crunch variation that Alwyn includes in his workouts, without trying to isolate muscles that aren't designed to be isolated. And when it comes to back pain, McGill's research has shown that there's really no connection to midsection strength. I think there 's a better way to look at the goal of abdominal training. It's not to develop the size of the muscles. (I'm sure you're with me on that; I've never met a woman whose goal in the gym was to develop a thicker waistline.) Nor is it to protect your spine directly. It's to perform better in everyday activities and specific exercises, and to bolster the integrity of your spine and its connective tissues during the performance of those activities and exercises. Conversely, putting too much emphasis on abdominal exercises, and using the wrong ones, could actually have a negative effect on your health and posture. Hang with me here as I explain why.