Broadly speaking, there's two kinds of muscle in the world.
Real muscle and fake muscle.
There's only one kind of real muscle. There's two kinds of fake
muscles. We'll talk about both of them. One today, and one
tomorrow.
Virtually all of the guys and gals in the muscle comics have
fake muscles. In fact, the entire muscle business is built on fake
muscles. It's a great big pile of lies piled as high as the sky.
And it gets higher and higher every day.
Real muscles are muscles that can do things. Push, pull, lift.
They're the type of muscles you see in athletes. Boxers have
real muscles. Wrestlers have 'em. Martial artists have them.
Football players have them. Guys in the military and in law
enforcement have them.
Fake muscles are the kind that look good, but have little or
nothing to back them up.
There's an old line that football coaches used to use. Maybe
they still do. I first heard it from legendary Hall of Fame coach
Paul Brown.
"Looks like Tarzan, plays like Jane."
That's the difference between real muscles and fake muscles.
The difference between Jane (and face it, she looked great) and
Tarzan.
Fake muscles are the result of muscle pumping. Bodybuilding.
Or as I call it, and as it deserves to be called, boobybuilding.
Also known as bunny pumping.
Isolation exercises build fake muscles. Exercises like lateral
raises, triceps kickbacks, triceps extensions, concentration
curls, bent over lateral raises, pec dec squeezes, pulley
exercises, leg extensions, leg curls, and on and on. Machine
exercises. Virtually all of the stuff they teach you in the muscle
comics.
I was lucky. When I was a kid, I trained to be a better wrestler.
Not to look pretty, but to be strong, powerful, explosive and
athletic. And somewhere along the way I hooked up with some
good training advice (something that is amazingly rare), and I
built muscles that could actually do things. Things like
grabbing my opponent on a wrestling mat, taking him down
with a hard throw and pinning him before he knew what was
happening. In some cases, knocking him flat unconscious.
I did that to two different wrestlers in one day. Both of them
were older than me, very tough, very experienced, with good
records and good skills. Guys who were supposed to whip me
pretty easily. In fact, each of them was beating me on points
before I caught him with my best throw. When I did, I knocked
each of them out cold. Which you don't se very often in high
school wrestling matches. And I ended up winning the state
championship in Greco Roman wrestling.
I did it because I had built real muscles. If I'd spent my time
doing the boobybuilding stuff you read about in the muscle
magazines, I might have looked pretty, but those guys would
have eaten me alive on the wrestling mat.
It's become sort of a crusade for me. I want to help you build
real muscles. And I want to stomp on the guys who continue to
teach the pseudo stuff. They don't deserve to be hailed as
experts. And you don't deserve their goon babble. Not for a
minute.