WB Weekend Challenge: Attack Your Weakness
Week one of Toxic Masculinity is almost in the books. Hope you guys are enjoying it and locked in for 7 months of grueling work. In other good news, the start of a new season also means a return to the WB Weekend Challenges and this year they are going to not let you down.
For our first WB Weekend challenge we are going to focus on our weakness. We all have weaknesses. Mine is chest development. J.Nyx is traps. There is not a soul on this earth who just naturally hits everything perfectly.
A very big case of this is Arnold. Arnold had two major weaknesses, calves and delts. Being a slow grower in delts is why we now have an Arnold Press. He didn’t let him hold it back, but rather he used his mind, his motivation and a fuck lot of hard work to prioritize that weakness until he became world renowned for it. However, the weakness we will talk about today is his calves.
In the early 1960’s when Arnold first started competing he had
Chet didn’t ignore calves and for that reason Arnold lost his first competition.
pretty much no calves at all. Coming from Europe where there was no real attention paid to the calves, he never developed them. At 19, when he was in his first Mr. Universe he got a real big wake up call when Chet Yorton beat him.
Yorton was one of the early ground breakers in full body development. Until then there were prioritized and de-prioritized body parts (which is why Arnold, from old school European training, was focusing on arms and chest to the exclusion of things like calves).
Yorton’s calves, which we now call diamond shaped calves, gave the rest of his leg the winning definition which then set the upper body up for a full body, symmetrical look that would eventually become the gold standard in bodybuilding (and, despite my being impressed with the enormous guys around today, to me is still the gold standard).
The thing you need to know about Arnold is that he did not handle losing well. Not that he would sulk about it, but his hypercompetitive nature made it so he couldn’t stop obsessing. He knew that it was his lack of development in his calves that was at the root of his loss to Yorton and he became obsessively focused not just on developing his calves but on having the best calves that bodybuilding had ever seen.
One of the guys Arnold asked for advice…worth knowing about
With this in mind, Arnold consulted Reg Park. Park told him what Park told everyone, go heavy and go hard. Most people just do calves as an afterthought as the last lift on a leg day. But that isn’t how you create the best calves in the world. You have to treat them like every other part and blast the fucking shit out of thme if you want them to grow. Schwarzenegger heard the message and
Doing this until you can’t walk WILL make your calves grow, genetics be damned.
hit it doing hundreds of calf raises (at 500 pounds), donkey raises, seated calf raises. Calf muscles are stubborn with regard to growing. A lot of people take this to mean that your calves are pegged to genetics and you are limited. For Arnold, stubborn to grow only meant it was just like every other muscle except you needed to put a lot of extra work into it.
When the 1973 Mr. Olypia came around, Arnold won and his calves came in at 20″. 20″ calves. Even at modern Olympia contests where size is king and guys like Phil Heath look like mountains of muscles, 20″ inch
Hard work, massive volume…why do people still question?
calves are something that would absolutely get noticed. As it turns out, Arnold’s secret was very simple and is the base of what Team WB Fitness’s philosophy is all about. He hit his weakness 6 days a week, with massive volume. 4 sets of 10, 15, even 20 to failure in various lifts for calves every single day. Hundreds of reps and it worked.
So this weekend, in the spirit of Arnold and his hyperfocus on his weaknesses not just compensating for them, but making them his strengths, i am challenging you to blast out your weakness. At this point, you all know which body part is your weakness. Mine, as I’ve often bemoaned, is my chest. The challenge is to pick 4 workouts that target your weakest area and hit them hard with 5×20.
The only thing that it being your weakness means is that you have to work it harder….don’t give up
I will be doing chest. This is what I will be doing.
Incline Dumbbell Bench Press 5×20
Cable Cross 5×20
Flat Bench Barbell Bench Press 5×20
Dumbbell Flyes 5×20
Each of these should be done to an RPE of 9.5 Whichever part you are working should be totally fucking useless after.
Welcome back to the grind fellas!
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