Spring is approaching and the multiple layers of clothing are falling off, leaving you exposed in just a shirt. If you have had one too many mince pies over Christmas and chocolate eggs over Easter, you might be far off your ideal body shape. Despair not, you can fix it by doing some exercises to get fitter. If you have read our previous exercises on getting fit and are making no progress, here are a few hardcore moves to wake up your dormant muscles and pump them up.
Squats
To look good in a shirt, you need to work your legs. That’s because the quads are a large muscle group and burn a lot of energy when exercised and also after! By working large muscle groups, you also inject more growth hormones into your bloodstream which then flush other muscles.
The squat targets stabiliser muscles as well as the quads but because the quads are very powerful muscles, they get exhausted last. By ‘killing’ your quads first in an isolation exercise such as the leg extension machine, they will work harder during squats. This is the principle of pre-exhaustion.
After squatting for a few sets, perform lunges. Instead of the conventional lunges, place your leading leg over a Bosu ball (the one that looks like a Swiss ball cut in two). If lunges are easy, doing them on unstable ground after squats and leg extensions will bring you close to tears.
The back
No amount of 6 pack will do you any good under a shirt if you do not have the shape over which to wrap a shirt. The back muscles, in particular the latissimus dorsi, when developed give you a V-shaped torso that makes you appear slim. Don’t end up looking like Daniel Craig in James Bond – well-developed muscles at the front but with a flat straight back.
Perform the one-arm dumbbell row, a very good exercise to effectively target the muscle. Add in some T-bar rows which you could superset with pull-overs. The pullover is a very effective exercise to place emphasis on the lats to make them ‘pop out’. To minimise assistance from the biceps, imagine the weight to be directly attached to your elbows, so that you are pulling with them instead of your hands.
Chest
Pre-exhaust your pecs with an isolation exercise then do a few sets of dumbbell presses on a Swiss ball, with only one foot on the floor. Half of the work your muscles will be doing will be to keep your torso and the weights above it balanced.
Arms
Try partial-reps. No, it’s not for the lazy. At the end of your set after you can no longer do a single full-motion rep in good form, lower the weight half-way down before contracting your muscle to complete the rep. That way you are able to go beyond what you normally do.
Remember: what cannot be fixed can always be hidden away, find a shirt that fits you well!
