High-Intensity Training the Mike Mentzer Way by Mike Mentzer

Author:Mike Mentzer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Education
Published: 2003-03-06T16:00:00+00:00

Dumbbells offer the advantage of being able to train your muscles unilaterally (one arm at a time); this allows for a stronger contractile impulse to reach the muscles from the brain.

FREE WEIGHTS-PROS AND CONS

Before Alan Calvert invented the plate-loading barbell around the turn of the century, the bodybuilder and strength athletes as we know them today didn’t exist. It is obvious that the barbell produced muscular size that was impossible before its appearance. Compared to anything that came before it, the barbell was a miracle implement. The fact that the barbell is a productive tool—when used properly—cannot be denied as the vast majority of today’s champion bodybuilders and strength athletes were literally weaned on it. This does not alter the fact that the barbell still has certain shortcomings.

For a proper understanding of the shortcomings of a barbell we must take a look at the basic underlying effective training methodology. While our various bodyparts move in a rotary fashion about an axis, most conventional free weight equipment provides only straight-line, or unidirectional resistance. This accounts for the fact that in most exercises the weight feels heavier in some positions than in others, and very rarely is there any resistance at all in the peak or fully contracted position, the only position where 100 percent of the individual muscle fibers can be activated.

The curl, for example, a movement that is rotational through a range of some 160 degrees, provides effective resistance only through a very small area of the curl’s entire range of motion. Only at that point in the curl where the forearms are perfectly parallel to the ground, where gravity is pulling the weight straight down and you are pulling it straight up, is the resistance direct. Once the weight passes through that point, the effective resistance falls off and the weight feels light, with little or no resistance in the contracted position.

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