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Gain More in Training with Radars and Ratios

One of the ongoing debates in physique training and competition is the question of symmetry. Tom Platz’s freakish legs made him a celebrity, but it’s been debated that he might have had more success on the posing dais if his legs had been smaller to match his upper body.

Contrast Platz’s training with that of Arnold, who, when he moved to the US, realized that his skinny calves could prevent him from winning the Olympia. His solution? Cut off his pants at knee level to call public attention to his weakness and to motivate him to bring his calf development up to par with his tremendous upper body.

The Right Formula

Although physique competition is ultimately subjective, there are mathematical formulas designed to help guide bodybuilders toward ideal proportions. One formula promoted by early physical culturists was to train so that the neck, calves and flexed upper arms had equal measurements. For a look at this approach, visit www.sandowmuseum.com.

On this site, you can access a “Grecian Ideal Calculator” that enables you to determine your ideal measurements based upon Greek and Roman statues. Using your wrist size, the calculator will tell you that if you have a 7" wrist, your ideal measurements would be as follows: 45" chest, 32" waist, 39" hips, 16" biceps, 13" forearms, 24" thighs, 16" calves and 17" neck.

In any case, symmetry and structural balance are not limited to bodybuilding goals. In fact, they are applicable to all sports training. Olympic lifters often use formulas to determine their key areas of focus. For example, athletes who want to clean and jerk 200 pounds probably should be able to back squat between 255 and 280 pounds.

These formulas can apply in determining such ratios as back squat to front squat, snatch to power snatch, and clean to power clean. Such ratios can yield valuable information regarding training modification. If your back squat greatly exceeds your snatch, you probably need to work on relatively lighter weights to improve your speed and technique.

Looking for Weakness

Power-lifting pioneer Louie Simmons has pointed out in many of his articles that if a given lift does not improve, the explanation can often be traced to a specific muscle that is limiting that lift. Perhaps your inability to bench press 400 pounds is due to relative weakness in your pectorals, which would call for special exercises to get that muscle group up to par. With the recent improvement in bench shirts that improve the drive off the chest, the limiting factor is often the triceps. In this case, you may see an increased emphasis in many elite power-lifters on exercises such as board presses and additional triceps work.

If you’re trying to improve your performance in the bench press, the weakness may not just be in the pressing muscles but also in the strength of the agonists and the synergists. If the antagonists are too weak, they tell the brain to shut down the agonists. If your upper back is not as strong as your pecs and your triceps, your potential to improve in the bench press is compromised. It may seem odd to improve your bench press with rows and even chin-ups, but having worked with many elite athletes, I can tell you this is a possible solution.

Achieving the proper complexity

One reason many athletes don’t achieve their goals is that their approach to training is too simplistic. The fact is, the higher your strength levels, the more complex your program should be.

Having heard that rotator cuff training is important to bench pressing, an athlete may include a set or two of rotator cuff work once a week at the end of the workout. Our research demonstrates that rotator cuff strength should be about 9.8% of what you can do in the bench press. That ratio is probably not going to be achieved with a lazy approach to programming. You will not be able to lift those big weights that you desire. One of my pro hockey players, Jim McKenzie, improved his 14-inch, close-grip bench by 51 pounds in 12 weeks, from 280 to 331 pounds, by focusing on rotator cuff strength. In this case, we did no benching at all during this training program! I then switched McKenzie to a bench press specialization program, and six weeks later he did 380 pounds in this exercise.

To design a program to achieve structural balance, one tool that I’ve found useful and that has been used by European weightlifting coaches is radar graphs, such as the simple one shown below.

Radar graphs, which are so-named because they resemble a radar screen, display values that revolve around a central point. The central point is zero. Increasing values are represented farther out from the center. Unlike popular bar graphs or pie charts, radar graphs enable you to display values that are on different scales and therefore can easily illustrate symmetry.

Let’s use the example of the close-grip bench press, which I believe could be considered a core exercise for a hockey player. I could use my ratio formulas to determine how much weight the athlete should be able to use in many other exercises relevant to achieving structural balance. These exercises are plotted in the following graph.

As you can see, the points around the graph are perfectly symmetrical, meaning this athlete has achieved structural balance in the close-grip bench press. The graph provides precise information on the lifts I would need in each of these seven exercises to achieve a 360- and a 400-pound close-grip bench press.

If you want to experiment with radar graphs, Microsoft Excel software has this graphing feature available. With the assortment of “Dummies” books on the market, it won’t take long to become a master of this software feature.

Remember - symmetry is key to success in competitive sports, bodybuilding competition and in helping to achieve your personal fitness goals. Applying structural balance ratios and producing radar graphs might seem like extra work, but you can’t argue with the results. Besides, a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, right? If ratios and radar graphs are what it takes to identify your weak link, then use these tools to your advantage. You have everything to gain!