You may not want to look like a pro bodybuilder, with the extreme muscularity and every detail popping through paper-thin skin on the contest stage… but it’s undeniable that those athletes know plenty about transforming your body.
So, for those of us who want to add a little muscle here or there, it stands to reason that we could learn a thing or two from bodybuilders, right? That’s the philosophy behind this workout, designed exclusively for Oxygen by Denise Cervantes, a personal trainer, group health instructor, certified Level 1 USA Weightlifting Coach, and a Sports Performance and Fitness Specialist at Herbalife.
“I can promise you, just taking some key elements from how a bodybuilder trains won’t suddenly make you huge,” Cervantes says. “What it can do is fast-track your results by focusing on individual parts of your muscles that can often get overlooked in standard fitness-oriented workouts, while increasing your overall intensity levels to get the most out of each session.”
In this workout, you’ll split your time evenly between your shoulders, biceps and triceps — hitting them for 10 minutes each. While that may be much less attention than a typical bodybuilder would give a bodypart, what you give up in minutes you’ll more than make up for in good old-fashioned bodybuilding-style intensity.
“For shoulders, you’ll do dumbbell presses, a multi-joint exercise that hits the front and middle heads of your delts pretty hard,” Cervantes explains. “However, instead of doing a typical set-and-rep scheme, you’ll instead do a big descending set, where you’ll perform 10 presses, rest for 30 seconds, then do 9 presses, rest again for 30 seconds, and continue the pattern until you’re down to doing one rep.”
Cervantes suggests choosing a weight where you could finish 10 reps with a slight struggle by the last rep. That way, the difficulty will remain elevated even as you’re dropping the rep count, since your body can’t quite bounce back to full strength in just a 30-second rest period. “This approach will help break down muscle fibers in your shoulders by pushing them to their max,” she adds.
To make sure you’re torching your shoulders from all angles, you’ll follow up presses with a rear-delt–focused exercise, with three sets of 15 reps of standing reverse flyes on a cable crossover apparatus. Because your triceps get their fair share of action during shoulder presses, you’ll give them a break while moving onto biceps next.
“Just like the delts are made up of three muscle heads, the biceps have two distinct heads, and a bodybuilder aims to train both during every arm workout,” Cervantes explains. “Another important part of the overall look of your upper arm is the brachialis muscle, which runs beneath the biceps and helps give it shape.”
The first movement — EZ-bar preacher machine curls — focuses on the biceps short head, which is located on the inner part of your arm. For that exercise, Cervantes introduces another devious twist in the form of drop sets, where you do reps to near failure, then lower the weight by 10 percent to 15 percent and continue repping.
You’ll finish the biceps portion of your workout with cross-body alternating hammer curls, which hit the long head of the biceps and the brachialis. While you could use dumbbells, Cervantes prefers a cable machine, since the cables keep tension on the target muscle throughout the entire rep.
“Use moderate to light weight and be sure to challenge the biceps — you want to feel the blood flow into them,” she says. “That’s the pump!” The blood-flow-induced pump isn’t just for show, either; it helps stretch the muscle, prompting a growth response, and carries nutrients into the tissue that can help kick-start the recovery process.
The final 10 minutes of the session will be dedicated to triceps — which, in fact, are made up of three muscle heads that together form the “horseshoe” shape you see on the back of a well-developed arm. To hit all three heads, Cervantes recommends two bodybuilding staples: Lying skullcrushers and cable rope pushdowns. “Since pushdowns are the last exercise of the day, you’ll want to give everything you got,” she says. “So I include another drop set here, which will bring blood into the area and push your triceps to their limits.”
Now, let’s get to it!
The Old School-Bodybuilding Delts & Arms Workout
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