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Anyway, this was the training philosophy that Arnold, Franko, Lou, and Zane all subscribed to and that Arnold testifies to in his Encyclopedia of Modern Bodybuilding. And it worked for me, so it can't be all bunk.
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Well anything can work, but that doesn't mean it's anywhere close to optimal IMO. If I remember correctly, Arnold S's advanced workout in that infernal book featured working out 6 days per week with only a single day off and a megaton of volume. It also features using a pyramid scheme for just about everything which is also garbage IMO. That's like saying, "I'm going to grab the latest FLEX magazine and do "Ronnie Coleman's Back Routine" and get terrific results! I can't wait to try it!"
The death of modern bodybuilding Quote:
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One of the biggest problems that I have with split routines is that it results in an ‘isolation mentality’. Every effort is made, more often than not, to try to isolate each individual muscle. This practice, by definition, results in a loss of some of the very best drills one could do. The clean-and-press, for instance; should it be trained on back day or shoulder day. But wait, what if you do squat-snatches; is that a leg drill or a back drill; and doesn’t it also involve the shoulders to an extent? The bent press; where do you start with that? Deadlifts; back or legs? High pulls? One-arm dumbbell swings? Dumbbell cleans? Sots presses?
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To me it seems that claiming full muscle development can be had with only one movement (decline bench in this case), is the same sort of claim that would say a smith machine bench press is just as good as a barbell bench press.
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That's a bad analogy. No way you can compare a machine with a fixed path of motion to a free weight compound exercise. Then again, that really doesn't have anything to do with my point either. My point was that you cannot isolate portions of your muscles.
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And that is where I'm hanging up on the idea that I should just rely on one essential movement to take care of all my pectorial development needs.
I understand the postition, I just would like a little more explanation on how only one movement is necessary for total pectorial development...
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I was just giving an example that the flat bench stimulates the entire pectoral muscle. I'm not saying to adopt the flat bench as your ONLY exercise, drop the rest, and go balls to the wall for the next hundred years.
What I AM saying is that you don't need do do a full assault with an arsenal of 8 different exercises from every concievable angle to work the SAME muscle. You can't take a marker, divide your chest up into 6 different pieces and strategically work each little piece!
Instead, you can pick up something like 5x5 flat bench, then 2-3 x 10 incline DB, and move on to another bodypart...Essentially working your pectoral muscle as a whole.
There's a lot of things to take into account such as frequency, set/rep schemes, ect. Something like Bill Starr's 5x5 features flat bench twice a week, once ramping up to a top set of 5, once 5 sets of 5 with the same weight. You could do inclines instead of flat one day as per AM's version. If you got an adequate amount of volume and frequency with 1-2 compound lifts, in this case flat and incline or decline bench, you certainly won't need cable crossovers or incline DB flyes to work your "inner-upper" pecs, especially since there really is no such thing.