Bodybuilding Anatomy, 2nd Edition

Walk into any gym these days and it’s like Disneyland for bodybuilders. You’ll discover endless rows of exercise machines and free weights for every muscle in your body. Your challenge is to navigate through the maze of machines and weights, select the exercises you need, and pump your way across the gym to the finish line. Upside: The winner walks away with a custom-built body. Downside: No instructions, no clues, no map, and no rules. With no guidance, surely you’re doomed to circulate around the gym, stuck in a holding pattern. Then one lucky day, in a moment of clarity, you realize a piece of the puzzle is missing.

Today is your lucky day! You’ve found the missing piece: Bodybuilding Anatomy, a book of instructions for every exercise in the gym. Check it out for yourself. Flip open the book and pick a page—any page you want. Now, let’s see what you get. Each exercise is illustrated in amazing detail with a picture that’s worth a thousand words, revealing the anatomy under your skin: the main muscles at work and those muscles that assist during the exercise. Alongside the illustrations are step-by-step instructions on how to perfect your exercise technique. What’s more, you’ll find a list of advanced technical tricks that will help you modify the exercise for maximum effect. You’ll learn how to adjust your grip, where to position your feet, and how to position your body. You’ll discover how to manipulate exercise trajectory and range of motion in order to emphasize different sections of the targeted muscle. Whatever choice you face at the gym—barbells or dumbbells, free weights or machine, wide grip or narrow grip, incline or decline, sitting or standing—you’ll get all the help you need. No weight plate is left unturned.

You can review any exercise in this book in less than five minutes. During that short time, you’ll discover and learn everything you need to know to make your workouts more precise. This book will shift your training up a gear and then some.

It’s no secret what you want from your workouts: a custom-built body. But in order to change the way you look, you must modify your anatomy. You should skillfully use weights to sculpt your body, not just to indiscriminately pack on pounds of flesh. The real secret is that to change anatomy, you must first know anatomy.

Bodybuilding Anatomy is the ultimate reference, loaded with detailed technical discussions and illustrated with anatomical precision. The book is systematically organized into muscle groups, so finding the exercises you need in order to build any muscle is easy. What’s more, each muscle group is subdivided even further into target zones, allowing you to select the specific exercises you need to target hard-to-hit spots in your physique.

Chapter 1 serves up shoulders—boulder-like shoulders that form the cornerstones of a great physique. You’ll discover the muscular anatomy and develop a strategy for detonating your deltoids. Simply packing the plates on a shoulder press is not enough. When you know shoulder anatomy, you’ll realize that each of the three sections of the deltoid muscle demand a different exercise. This chapter also reveals the secrets to a strong, injury-resistant rotator cuff.

In chapter 2, you will discover how to hammer and chisel the chest. You will analyze the anatomy and evaluate the exercises that you need to plump up your pectorals. You’ll work all the angles, change your grip, and manipulate your movements to carve up your chest. With these technically precise exercises in your chest workout, you’ll build a breastplate of armor that would make any gladiator proud!

Chapter 3 takes you around the back. Three slabs of muscle cover your back. If you train only the lats, your back workout is incomplete. To add thickness across your upper back, you need to target the trapezius. To create a foundation of strength in your lower back, you must work the erector spinae muscles. And when it comes to the latissimus dorsi, this chapter shows you how to perfect your pull-down and revamp your row to create that athletic V-shape taper.

In chapter 4, get ready to arm yourself with a pair of big guns. The triceps make up two-thirds of the muscle mass in your upper arm. This chapter provides all the growth-forging techniques you need to hammer more size into your triceps and beef up your biceps. You’ll also get a grip on the 10 ropelike muscles in your forearms that are on display when you wear a short-sleeved shirt.

Chapter 5 is all about legs. Whatever your pleasure—a quadriceps teardrop, an outer-thigh sweep, thicker hamstrings, bigger calves, or a tighter butt—this chapter teaches you how to adapt any leg exercise to meet your own needs.

Chapter 6 is devoted to the development of phenomenal abdominals. It provides the anatomic treasure map to the three zones of your midsection: the upper abs, the lower abs, and the obliques. Each muscle zone requires a different set of exercises. This chapter delivers all the crunches, raises, twists, and turns you need in order to sculpt a sizzling six-pack.

At the beginning of every chapter you get a guided tour of each muscle group. Anatomic descriptions and full-color diagrams introduce you to the muscles and their attachments to the bony skeleton. Throughout the book, the main illustrations are color coded to identify the primary and secondary muscles being worked in each exercise. You’ll also see how the muscles are displayed in several of the poses used in bodybuilding competitions.