Articles The Kovacian The Kovacian: How Not to Buy Syringes & Unilateral Bodypart Training for Better Gains!
Greetings Kovacians! Before I lumber into this week’s topic, I would like to touch on something intriguing I witnessed a few days ago. In Ontario, we have a drug store chain called Shopper’s Drug Mart. It was a normal Sunday afternoon and I sauntered into the local Shopper’s to take care of some mailings. When lo and behold, there was a larger-than-average fellow standing at the pharmacists counter and he was creating quite the scene. What drew my attention to him, initially, was the screaming and pouting like a little baby. He was shouting 
at this little woman behind the counter about wanting, ‘little needles and the big needles’. Immediately, I thought my girlfriend Caterine had snuck something into my breakfast and I was starting to hallucinate. I was wrong; this guy was just a douche with his chest all puffed out. He was barking orders to the poor little pharmacist like she was working at a McDonald’s drive thru window. This guy was getting belligerent and I could feel my skin turning green and my shirt starting to rip.
At this point, Mr. Puffed-Out-Chest-Douche-Bag-Tiny-Dick had the entirety of the store’s attention. The head pharmacist came over and told him to shove it and he wasn’t going to be getting any syringes. Well, Needles-McGee over there wasn’t going to be having that answer and he flew into another tirade, ‘I have every right to those needles; you’re treating me like a junkie’. This classless hominid went on to defame the poor pharmacists’ ethnicity. Real classy, bro. I won’t get into specifics but I’ll paraphrase the diarrhea that spewed from this asshole. Basically, he said that he shouldn’t be coming into his country and disrespecting white people. The threat of a 9-1-1 call was enough to make Mr. White Supremacist run away. What I found really amusing was that he was holding a carton of milk while all this was going on. You guys all know what Arnold says about drinking milk right? ‘Milk is for babies.’
A piece of advice from a war-torn bodybuilder, if you’re going into a chain store to buy something that is sensitive in nature, be discreet and kind to the people you’re dealing with. If they say no, walk away. Don’t cause a scene because it makes everybody look bad. When Mr General Public runs into a headstrong douchebag in a store or a club or on the road with chest puffed, a bit of muscle, and a few veins, it propagates the ‘roid rage stereotype. It makes the guys that are big and juiced look bad. It makes guys who don’t use juice look bad. It makes all of us in the health and fitness industry look bad. I bet that when this guy goes to pick up his herpes medication, he’s real humble and quiet. Too bad that behavior doesn’t carry over to syringes.
Moving on, I’d like to touch on a training technique that I have found particularly helpful in any training program. Single limb training is a very important training method that can be applied to every body part to ensure proper balance and strength between opposite sides of your body.
An example I think every bodybuilder knows is when Arnold, in Pumping Iron, was doing set after set of dumbbell concentration curls. You could see the focus in his eyes and you could physically see the ungodly pump he got. There’s a reason they call it concentration curls. When you’re doing a single limb exercise, your mind can focus on that one limb instead of dividing its focus split 50/50. For example, Arnold could concentrate more on the single bicep than he could between both his biceps. And there’s absolutely no reason why this approach cannot be used for every body part.
For those of you that need a few new ideas for exercises to use, I’ll give you a couple. For thighs, some good choices would be single leg extensions or single leg presses. For back, I would suggest single arm dumbbell rows, hammer machine rows or even a single pulley row. For shoulders, a single lateral movement with a dumbbell or cable or a dumbbell press one arm at a time would be a good one. Arms are a common body part to train single-limbed. I usually do exercises like single arm dumbbell curls and triceps extensions of various kinds with pulleys or machines.
Chest is one body part where single limbed training is not commonly seen. Some of you may think that just using dumbbells is enough to satisfy single limb training. It’s definitely good, but there’s much better choices. Hammer strength and fly machines done single-armed are very effective. You can do them with one arm at a time and really focus on the pump in each pecseparately.
Sometimes I like to start a body part with a single limb opening exercise to really spark up that mind-muscle connection and bring some extra blood into the muscle. When doing this, I’ve found that when I move onto the more tradition exercises (eg. Bench press, shoulder presses, squats), the contraction is much more pronounced and intense.
Here’s a sample chest workout to try:
If you don’t have one of the machines that I specified, just go swap in something comparable. Give it a shot; I know you’ll like it. Until next week my lovelies..
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