Bodybuilding gets a bad rap these days. Most people associate the term "bodybuilding" with steroids, baby oil, and posing trunks. And if you asked the average guy or Men's Health reader what type of fitness content they'd be interested in, bodybuilding would be pretty low on the list.
But these same guys want to lose fat, gain muscle, get stronger, and sculpt their abs, arms, and chest. I hate to break it to them, but that's pretty much bodybuilding in its purest form.
If you take away all of the drugs, the swollen bellies, and the semantics, bodybuilding is the natural pursuit of maximizing your body composition, or the ratio of lean body mass to fat mass. If you want more muscle and less fat and you want the best chance of maintaining those results over time, nothing comes close to the effectiveness of classic bodybuilding training.
That's we why asked natural bodybuilder Julian "The Quad Guy" Smith for his 10 favorite old-school bodybuilding moves so you can start plugging them back into your routine to stimulate new gains:
1. Feet-elevated barbell bent-over row
2. Dumbbell overhead triceps extension
3. Toes-elevated stiff-legged deadlift
4. Single-arm dumbbell concentration curl
5. Bodyweight sissy squat
6. Nordic curl
7. Single-arm dumbbell lateral raise
8. Bodyweight chest dip
9. Donkey calf raise
10. Pullup
What makes these "old school" moves?
"These exercises played a pivotal role during the golden era of bodybuilding, roughly from the late 1960's to early 1980's," says Smith. "The top bodybuilders of that time really just stuck to the basics, using mainly dumbbell, barbell, and bodyweight exercises. Machines were a luxury that most guys just didn't have access to."
Smith's favorite move on the list is arguable the hardest and has played a crucial role in developing his signature body part, the quads.
"My favorite old-school move is the bodyweight sissy squat, hands down," Smith says. "I know they get a bad stigma about them because they can hurt your knees if you're not ready for them, but the second I saw legendary bodybuilder Tom 'The Quadfather' Platz do them, I immediately started incorporating them into each leg day. It truly seemed like my legs grew instantly!"
(Learn more about the sissy squat and Julian's other favorite quad exercises here)
Over the next couple of weeks, try to plug any combination of these exercises into your current routine and see how you like them.
For the bodyweight moves, try doing sets of max reps with a controlled 3- to 4-second negative to bulletproof your joints and make your muscles work harder than normal.
For the loaded moves, stick in the classic 8 to 15 rep range for most sets. But don't be afraid to dip into lower or higher rep ranges, too. In fact, the latest research shows that when it comes to maximizing gains, using a mix of low, medium, and high reps is the best approach.
