Remaking
Mentzer.

A neutral grip (palms facing inward) distributes the load cleanly across the chest. It mimics the deep stretch of a fly press but lets you lock out tight at the centre like a wide-grip bench press. You get the best of both worlds for hypertrophy while protecting your wrists from shearing forces that plague a standard barbell setup.

The fixed, unyielding track of the Smith Machine eliminates the instability of a free-bar incline press — where a failed rep means getting pinned or making an ugly, dangerous escape. On the Smith, you can push safely to absolute failure, which is exactly where the upper pecs and triceps earn their growth.

Keeping your elbows tucked naturally recruits the lower lats without the exaggerated lean-back seen in standard pulldowns. The supinated grip also gives your biceps a heavy structural stimulus alongside the lat work. We want to build a back as wide as a stingray. This is the exercise that starts that process.

Set an adjustable bench to an incline and rest your torso against it facing downward — a chest-supported decline angle. Keep your external leg straight and put a slight bend in your resting leg. This creates an incredibly stable pad that removes all lower-back involvement and lets you execute a deep thoracic twist, pulling from the absolute bottom of the stretch to the peak of the row.

The ultimate system shock to close Day 1. Use a mixed grip — just as Mentzer did — to lock the bar in place and prevent it from rolling out. Lower back flat, tight hip hinge, pull flush from the floor to lockout. Keep your working sets within a strict 1-to-10 rep range to completely fry the central nervous system for real, structural growth. This is not a conditioning movement. Treat it like one and you'll get nothing from it.

Decades of sports science and real-world lifting confirm: curling before squatting warms up the joint and protects the knees. Intermediates treat leg curls as an afterthought at the end of a session. Here, it opens the workout as a fluid primer — preparing the connective tissue and hamstring for the squatting that follows.

Training one leg at a time immediately exposes structural imbalances between left and right. If your dominant leg is pulling double duty on bilateral movements, you'll never know until you isolate. Single-leg extensions serve as the secondary pre-exhaust tool that ensures your quad development is genuinely symmetrical before loading the front squat.

The most underrated squat variation in existence. People dodge the front squat because they lack the wrist and shoulder mobility to hold the rack position, or they hate the raw discomfort of staying perfectly upright under a loaded bar. It takes deep patience to master this form. Don't cheat yourself by jumping onto a heavily padded hack squat machine where people use resistance bands to fake their strength. Do the hard work.

Calves walk all day — they are hyper-adapted to low-intensity endurance. To force growth in a muscle that evolved to never stop working, you must meet it with heavy progressive overload. Use high-intensity protocols: Myo-reps, drop-sets, and rest-pause sets in a brutal 12-to-15 rep range. Anything less and the gastrocnemius simply absorbs the stimulus and ignores you.

Setting the cable pulleys to knee height aligns the resistance profile with the strength curve of the lateral delt. Pro tip: swap the D-handles for wrist cuffs. Eliminating the handle stops your wrists from rotating and prevents your forearms from stealing tension from the shoulder. The lateral delt works in isolation. The cap develops exactly where you want it.

A precision movement. Keep the weight light and focus entirely on the hinge path — feel the posterior delt doing the work, not the traps. If the bent-over position is too much for your lower back, substitute with a Reverse Pec Deck machine. Same stimulus, zero lower-back compromise.

If your gym runs a premium Panatta selectorized preacher curl, use it. Bury your arms into the heavy padding, lock your shoulders back, and curl toward your chin. The leverage curve on these machines lets you load the pins heavy while maintaining a flawless mechanical line. The short head of the bicep responds to this stimulus like almost nothing else.

Turn your body completely away from the cable stack and press your back flat against the vertical frame. Set the pulley to the very top. This fully locked-in position removes all momentum from the movement, forcing the triceps to work in total isolation until they hit absolute failure. No swinging. No hip drive. No escape route.

Calisthenics at its finest. Bodyweight dips are highly effective for grounding overall pushing strength after the isolation work above. Advanced lifter executing perfect, deep reps? Clip on a dip belt. Scaling up? Use the assisted dip machine set to 50% of your bodyweight to master the activation before moving to the free-standing bars. Don't skip the depth. Half-reps build half-strength.