[admin1]

Stretching
“Stretching is one of the most neglected areas of the workout. If you watch a lion as he wakes from a nap and gets to his feet, you will see he immediately stretches his whole body to its full length, readying every muscle, tendon, and ligament for instant and brutal action. The lion knows instinctively that stretching primes his strength. Muscle, tendon, ligament, and joint structures are flexible. They can stiffen, limiting your range of motion, or they can stretch, giving you a longer range of motion and the ability to contract additional muscle fiber. That’s why stretching before you train allows you to train harder. Stretching also makes your training safer. As you extend your muscles fully under the pull of a weight, they can easily be pulled too far if your range of motion is limited. Overextension of a tendon or ligament can result in a strain or sprain and seriously interfere with your workout schedule. But if you stretch the areas involved first, the body will adjust as heavy resistance pulls on the structures involved.”

Mental Concentration
“While you’re doing an exercise, if you concentrate and visualize your muscles growing while commanding and demanding them to grow, the results will come much faster. The mental picture you form of what you want to be and what you want accomplish can greatly aid your progress towards attaining those goals. I focused all of my mental concentration on accomplishing my goal whenever I was at the gym. Every repetition of every set was done with intense concentration. I visualized each exercise, completed each repetition and set as bringing me closer to my goal.”


Volume
“I trained body parts three times per week, and I’d do 25-30 sets for big body parts like the back and 15-20 sets for smaller body parts like triceps. I’m sure there are bodybuilders who do too much work. Remember, I was very advanced then, at the Mr Olympia level, and very genetically gifted, so most people should not do as much work as I did. But I’m also sure there are bodybuilders who don’t do enough work. They quit too soon or they don’t work out enough. You have to find out what works for your body, because there are a lot of different ways to grow.”

Flexing
“On heavy days especially, I always include a great deal of posing and flexing along with heavy weight training. Hitting a lot of side chest shots and most-muscular poses along with intense training is the best way I know to bring out pectoral striations. I’ve seen a lot of bodybuilders try to create these striations by artificial means-dehydrating themselves with diuretics, for example – but it just never looks as good as the results you get from hard training, posing, and flexing.
Learning to pose the chest properly takes a lot of practice. When you do a side chest shot, a front double-biceps, a most-muscular, or a front lat shot, in each shot the chest is posed differently and you need to practice each of these poses separately to get the effect you want. For a front double-biceps, you need to pose with your shoulders forward to create that sweeping line of the chest from sternum to deltoid; in the side chest shot, you need to keep the shoulder down and lift the chest to make it look high and full. Flexing the chest as you train it is the only way to create maximum pectoral definition-and endless hours of posing practice is the only method that will give you total control of your physique for presentation.”