When I'm not frivolously occupied racing my NASCAR, traversing a
tightrope over the Niagara or performing piano concerts abroad, you'll
find me in the gym attending the development of my biceps, pectorals
and latisimus. We all need a serious physical activity through which
we can express ourselves, and what is more expressive than
weightlifting and building muscle? Thank goodness for the silent and
still steel, poetically arranged and creatively accessible on the
soul-saving gym floor.

Here's the big bonus: The art of musclebuilding enables me to pursue
my less significant aforementioned hobbies with ease. And having
dutifully applied myself to my designated life's work, I'm guilt-free
in my trivial pursuits. Cool!

I dreamed that one up on the way to the gym in my 15-year-old pickup
from which was pinched the only length of rope I've ever owned and in
which I have difficulty tuning the radio. Hang on, bombers, heaps of
iron in a variety of handy configurations ahead.

No cradle, the gym today, nor is it a battleground. A comfy place of
recreation is out; I have no interest in conversation or socializing.
And I am not here to hide from the rest of the world -- a refuge amid
the chase -- though I shall welcome the gym's distance from the crowd
this early afternoon. Today is a day of pure appreciation of the
honest relationship between metal and man.

The two entities are emphatically different, yet combine like seed and
soil. The iron is cold and lifeless and dumb, and, though there are
people we know matching the same description, mankind is warm and
alive and intelligent. Put the two together and, meeting the essential
criteria, they become one: one pushes, the other pulls; one hoists,
the other yields; one acts, the other reacts. Simpatico. Apart,
neither is.

Today, knowing what I know today, I choose the best to produce the
most -- one exercise from each muscle group to take me most directly
from the edge to the center of things. I want to savor the qualities
of efficient barbell and dumbbell movements, taste the muscle's
action, pump and burn and revel in the finesse of iron-muscle
engagement.

A workout is not something to grab and drag like a rag doll, or go
through like a turnstile or endure like the passing of a kidney stone.
It's another once-in-a-lifetime experience to be strong, grow, learn
and become. Think, focus and don't look away, I say. Be here now, I
vow (tsk... just another one of my sensitive contributions to the
literary arts).

A succinct summary: Chest, back and shoulders followed by biceps and
triceps has always been the most efficacious sequence of exercise for
this lifter of barbells and dumbbells. Legs and midsection join
aerobic exercise on another day.

One step further, chest calls for low-incline dumbbell presses; back
demands one-arm dumbbell rows; shoulders require press behind necks;
biceps scream for standing barbell curls, and triceps insist on either
overhead or lying triceps extensions.

On the other end, legs, the rascals, will have nothing other than
squats; the core and midsection settle for cable tucks (AKA rope
tucks), and aerobics mutter incoherently about supersets and walking,
jogging and biking. You know what they say about aerobics,
"*&^@v%$#*." I'm teasing; aerobic exercise, like fertilizer to flower
beds, is important for health and vitality.

Listing the movements for clarity, we have:

Low-incline dumbbell press
One-arm dumbbell row
Front press
Standing barbell curl
Lying triceps extension

Squats
Rope tucks
Walking, jogging

Two sets of each prime movement serve as a reminder, three sets will
arouse the muscles, four will pump you up and five sets will produce
maximum development, if you have serious bones in a well-equipped body
seeking victory. Typically, I vary the reps from a meaningful warm-up
set to 12, 10, 8 and 6 reps.

The 'prize package,' neatly wrapped and presented with a ribbon and
bow, is not exactly a 'surprise package.' It's like getting a set of
tires for Christmas... how personal... just what you always wanted.
Somehow, somewhere, someway, you've seen and heard it all before.

Remember, these are my choices of the best of the best, a decision
that comes from decades of training trial and error, hits and misses,
aches and pains, imitating and copying and rejoicing. You can do the
same thing with whatever level of experience, progress and
understanding you have. Make your own choices and compare.

Now, if I were a young fella, I might consider cleans and presses and
deadlifts as raw contributors. I say that cuz some unbent wise guy out
there has no doubt observed their conspicuous absence and is about to
shoot blood from his eyeballs. Alas, I'm another day older and deeper
in debt. What's that you say, sonny? Pass me my bifocals, I can't hear
ya.... there... that's better.

Scoff not, kids, time goes by as we speak, according to the eternal
plan... or somethin' like that. My best response to consistent
temporal encroachment is spluttering and waving my fists in the air...
icing, heat, rest, Ibuprophen, wraps, massage, release of trigger
points and morphine.

The ultimate goal of the execution of these un-extraordinary
exercises, besides building muscle mass, density and power, is to
joyously scrutinize, absorb, penetrate and devour each rep of every
amazing set. Let's call it the satisfaction of maximizing muscle
engagement with the purest of barbell and dumbbell movements known to
man.

"Wow... deep," you're saying, "there's so much more to lifting weights
than I thought."

I was intending to shift gears -- throw it into overdrive -- at this
interval and call upon dramatics and vividness of imagination to
convey the depth to which one must enter an exercise to extract its
riches, and apportion them to the body, mind and soul.

An exercise is nothing more than motion this way and that, unless it
is owned, possessed and dominated, was to be my point. I then realized
the enormity of the undertaking and the dullness of my point.

For example, referencing a dissertation on biceps and the curl: Biceps
know no better exercise than the standing barbell curl, let's face it.
And when we're talking barbells, it's best when the bar is an Olympic
bar. There's magic in the long and hulking Oly bar, as it goes up and
down in its unwieldy fashion. Me curl bar, me make biceps.

Of course, there's a way to curl, and there's a way to Curl. I prefer
to Curl, when I curl. Strict concentration curls are nifty in the
early stages of development and exercise discovery, but curls with the
capital C are much more engaging. Why work the relatively small biceps
muscle only, when we can recruit a system of related muscles in the
ever-loving process? Besides, biceps love companions when they're
hungry and blasting away.

Thus, I perform the exercise with a full range of motion from fully
hanging to fully up and toward the shoulders and with a tad of
well-timed body thrust. Thrust, not to be confused with cheating, is a
fulfilling and gratifying action, which enables you to handle a
slightly heftier weight to affect a significantly heftier muscle
overload. And what principle, besides gravity, is more important than
muscle-overload?

Get my drift, bombers? And I barely touched upon the subject matter.
I'm in a frenzy by the fourth set and I haven't begun to elaborate on
the pulsing of blood in the mitochondria, the exhilaration of glycogen
being transformed into energy, or the euphoria of a muscle cell's
sudden development. Maybe next time. Maybe not.

Maybe now. You see, bombers, it's not in the exercise; it's in the
delivery and the deliverer.

Speaking of which, I'm delivering this message laptop keyboard to
screen to you in Doctor Warren's clinic in Santa Cruz. The sun has
fallen with the temperature and the volume of EDTA solution being
delivered to my system intravenously. This has been the 40th of 40
three-hour chelation treatments to resolve arterial problems and
improve my health.

Ask me if I'm thrilled the twice-a-week procedure is completed. I
don't care if it's worked; I'm done, I'm free, I'm loose, I'm
unhooked, unleashed.

More on EDTA chelation results later. I'm an un-tethered man and my
B-29 is idling on the runway ready for takeoff. See ya.

Free-falling Dave Draper... Bombs away

Source: davedraper.com