The Body Sculpting Bible for Women (49 page)

TECHNIQUE AND FORM

Lower your toes until they are at a comfortable position with your heels solidly on the calf block.

Now exhale, and raise your toes towards you. Point them up as high as possible.

Hold one second in the contracted position.

Inhale while lowering your toes back to the original position.

Pause for a moment at the bottom of the movement, then repeat for the recommended number of repetitions.

Chapter 7

Back

The back is composed of several different muscles. We will focus on the very best exercises for development of the back region. A toned and firm back makes your waist seem smaller and helps to keep your postural alignment nice and straight. Do not worry about that V-Taper look that some men are obsessed with achieving. These exercises and the outlined program will not put slabs of muscle on your body, unless of course your objective is to attain that look. By the end of the program, what you will see is your body, the way you expected to see it, beautiful! Pay attention to the proper alignment, technique and form principles as this will help to ensure your success.

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EXERCISES THAT UTILIZE VARIOUS HAND POSITIONS AND HOW EACH VARIATION CAN AFFECT DIFFERENT MUSCLE GROUPS

Most people do not realize just how powerful a slight variation in your handgrip and hand position on the exercise bar can be. Even in virtually identical exercises, variation of your hand placement can stimulate completely different areas of muscle concentration.

Whether you choose a wide-grip or a narrow-grip, an overhand-grip or an underhand-grip, the area of muscle concentration will in some way be different. The enormous variety of exercise bar attachments available to us further enables us to attach many diversely shaped attachment bars to a pulley cable system. (If you are unaware of the large assortments of attachment bars available to you and how each works, refer to the web site resource page in the back of this book for further information).

You can perform exercise movements that are almost identical to one another, but a difference in exercise bars, hand placement, grip position and the mechanics of the body, can result in the stimulation of many different muscle groups.

Let’s take pull-ups as an example. If you look at the differences between the wide-grip pull-up and the narrow-grip pull-up, you will notice that the wide-grip pull-up utilizes a wide and overhand grip placement. The narrow-grip pull-up utilizes a narrow and underhand grip placement. Now take a moment and think about what muscles are primarily working when you perform a wide-grip pull-up or a wide-grip pull-down. Because of the overhand-grip you take with these particular exercises, muscles such as the forearm muscles (extensor muscles), shoulder muscles (deltoids), and the back muscles (latissimus dorsi and erector spinae) will take a majority of the work efforts necessary to carry out these movements.

During the underhand narrow-grip pull-up, because of your underhand grip placement, the biceps muscles take the role of prime muscles involved during exercise execution. Although your focus should be to keep the biceps from becoming involved too much during this exercise and to instead concentrate on stimulation of the back muscles, it can be extremely difficult, if not impossible to completely avoid the participation of the biceps muscles.

In order to further increase your focus on specific muscle groups, you should practice the mind/muscle connection and muscle control techniques found within the Zone-Tone method.

Bent-Over Barbell Row

The bent-over barbell row is an excellent exercise for the muscles of the mid back. It places primary emphasis on the mid back muscles and the outer back muscles (latissimus dorsi) with a secondary emphasis on the on the lower back, rear deltoids and biceps muscles. Please don’t rush into using weights that are too heavy, which minimizes results and can give you a serious lower back injury. If you use proper form with lighter weights, your results will be terrific and you’ll be lifting more weight in no time!

PROPER ALIGNMENT

Place a bar in front of you on the ground, or on a rack level with your hips. Placing the bar any higher will just make it harder for you to lift it when the weights are increased.