Arnie knows his stuff!

I recently watched Arnie's body building documentary: Pumping Iron.
One thing particularly struck a chord with me. He says that he sees himself a little like an artist, sculpting from marble. If he wants to improve the look or size of his shoulders, he has only to work on his shoulders. If he wants to Improve the size and shape of his abs, he has only to work on his abs.

It's such an obvious concept...

Only I have been doing the same thing for months and I haven't seen much change.

I vary my workouts, sure. I try to mix things up to keep my muscles guessing and I'm regularly upping my weights but I've been wondering why my abs just weren't popping and why my deltoids weren't looking like Sarah Connor after so much training.

Then I saw the documentary.

Since then, I have been working out in a similar way to usual but have made some key changes.

As my weeks tend to vary, I'm never entirely sure when I'll be able to get to the gym so I always do a full body workout because I'm scared of missing muscle groups if I miss a workout. So I'm still doing full body workouts but I'm upping my shoulder workouts; rather than doing one or two exercises, I'm doing four or five. Front and lateral shoulder raises with shoulder press, Dragan presses, upright rows, etc. and I'm varying my techniques.

Instead of doing one set of an ab circuit at the end of my workout, I've moved my ab section to the middle of my workout to give it more prominence in my head and I do three sets of everything. Butterfly kicks, hanging knee and leg raises, TRX and stability ball jack knives and hip raises, planks, Russian twists, etc.

The results? After a week or two of this I already notice a positive change in my abs and my shoulders!
Arnie knows his stuff!

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