| Focus October 1, 2005
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When figure champion
Christy Wolfe trains, she thinks about "shape" to create the look she wants with
her body.
(photo July 2005 by D. Dave Paul) |
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Your Own Custom-made Body
People often dream of a custom-made home, since you can
make it exactly the way you want it, and oftentimes there is nothing better than
custom-made clothes, because you can have them made just the way you want them to fit. But
few people think of creating a custom-made body; instead, they just think about working
out. With a little knowledge and planning, though, you can customize your body and change
the way you look to an astonishing degree, if you understand how. Most people, however, do
not.
Day in and day out, I watch people who work out to improve
their appearance doing exercises that have, frankly, little benefit for them, sometimes
because they’re doing them the wrong way, but oftentimes because they are exercises
that aren’t particularly effective for what they’re trying to achieve. Yet they
slave away day after day, seeing few results and hoping, I guess, that one day a miracle
will happen and their bodies will be transformed. Usually, that never happens, yet this
affliction affects about eight out of ten people that I see training in the gym.
Imagine my surprise, then, when a young woman walked up to
me with a magazine in her hand, flipped it open to a specific page and pointed to a
picture of a well-known fitness competitor and said, "I want my body to look just
like that, and I want you to help me get it!" I took the magazine from her hand,
stepped back and looked at this woman’s overall shape and structure. I said,
"Actually, you can look a whole lot like her, since your build is similar to
hers; however, you must understand that in order to achieve this you can’t just look
at a picture and expect it to happen – you have to understand how to work out to make
it happen. Building a body like this means shaping it in a certain way, using free
weights and machines, and most people don’t really understand how it is done."
The woman didn’t flinch, and her reply was startlingly simple, "I know that, and
I want you to show me how."
This woman understood that you don’t just go to the
gym and haphazardly start working out – she knew that she needed a plan and she knew
that she needed to understand how to use the machines and free weights to build her body, carefully,
using exercises to add muscle in certain places and decrease muscle in other places, to
give her the overall shape she desired. From that point on, we’ve been working on
customizing her body with proper training by careful exercise selection and a good diet.
She may not end up looking exactly like the woman in the magazine, but she’ll
be close, and may even be better!
Now, that doesn’t mean that you can create a tall,
lanky Daryl Hannah look-alike from someone who is short and compact, and it doesn’t
mean that everyone can look like Monica Brant just because they see her picture in a
magazine. Genetics, obviously, play a role – in fact, they play a huge role. But it
does mean that you can significantly alter your look, and "shape" yourself to a
considerable degree, by thinking of yourself more as a sculptress than, say, someone who
just lifts weights. Unfortunately, this concept of body-shaping, or better yet,
body-sculpting, has largely been lost in this era of fad diets and foolish training
routines.
My point with this article isn’t to try and start a
revolution, or inspire a new way of thinking. Instead, it’s to bring to light what
many people, particularly topnotch bodybuilders, have known for decades: that you can use
weights haphazardly and hope for the best, or you can think of them as tools that allow
you to create your own custom-made body. Think about that next time you go to the gym and
see if you really have a plan, or if you’re just hoping for a miracle.
...Doug Schneider
das@seriousaboutfitness.com |
