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5 great workout tips from the Godfather of Bodybuilding
Summary
Charles Glass is called the Godfather of Bodybuilding after a lifetime of training the greatest bodybuilders in the world. Here are five key tips that will help your training
Charles Glass, also known as the “Godfather of Bodybuilding", operates on the principles of muscle confusion. The now 72-year-old has trained multiple world famous bodybuilders like Shawn Rhoden, Flex Wheeler, Dexter Jackson and even Dwayne (The Rock) Johnson and has earned his legendary status in the fitness world due to his unique training methods which involve variations to most conventional exercises.
Glass has a significant online presence with his 1.7 million Instagram followers, nearly a million YouTube followers and his GOB (Godfather of Bodybuilding) brand. This also includes multiple online courses and exclusive guidance videos that seek to change your gym routine to a more effective one.
Thankfully, a lot of these get posted on his pages as well, and some of them are incredibly useful. Glass’s expertise seems to be the ability to know what change to a particular exercise will recruit more muscle fibres. This challenges the muscles and stops the body from plateauing.
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Champagne chest raises: While the exercise has been around for a while, Glass is the one to have made it popular by believing in it. Done with the bench in an inclined position, this move needs dumbbells which you hold in a close-grip position with the palms facing each other. The key is to then raise both the dumbbells as if you’re raising a glass while making a toast.
“Press the weight using your chest muscles upward and back, bringing the dumbbells parallel to your chest. Squeeze your chest at the top of the movement and press your thumbs towards the ceiling to activate maximum upper chest muscle fibres. This isn’t a dumbbell pullover where you push it straight back, you push it up at a forty-five degree angle towards the top of your head," states a bodybuilding-wizard.com how-to on the move.
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Hamstring deadlift by reaching for the toes: There is a technical difference between a deadlift for the lower back and one for the hamstrings. This is very well explained by Glass in a video which shows the smallest change of angle and how it can affect the two useful exercises. I just tried this last week on leg day and the hamstrings felt a deeper and better stretch when the toes were elevated on two small plates and the movement downwards was away from the knees and towards the toes, almost as if you were reaching for them.
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Leg press with stops: This is a tough one and makes you think twice before overracking the leg press machine with too many plates. Glass likes to break his sets of 12 reps down to seven regular ones and five variations. For anyone who has tried the leg press machine, it isn’t difficult to understand how a particular weight can seem easy after a while because the reps become a rhythm. In this variation, you break that rhythm down.
After seven regular reps with full range of motion, he asks his clients to break the reps down as if you were making three stops on the way to the top of the exercise. Think of it as a fast train with just three stops to the destination. What this does is recruit more muscle fibres in a stop-start motion, making the reps harder to do on the same weight because the muscles are forced to stop and then restart their push. Quite fantastic, and an excellent finisher.
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Lean forward during the front raise: The heavier weight you pull up during a front raise, the quicker the body tries to lean back in a bid to balance the weight in front of it. According to Glass, what this does is recruit a lot more muscles in the back to raise the weight, meaning the exercise isn’t hitting the muscle it is supposed to, which is the front delt.
His trick to stop this from happening is leaning forward while using one dumbbell and raising it up using both the arms. The leaning forward is what stops the body from recruiting the back muscles, keeping the focus on the front delts. This might be difficult to do standing, because now you’re also doing a quarter squat for the lean, so he suggests sitting on your knees on a bench to make it easier on the legs.
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Chest flys on machine: Here’s another leaning and angular change on a machine that most gyms have. Chest flys are one of the most common exercises, and especially fun if you have healthy shoulders. Glass says that one should purposely lean the body forward during the motion of returning back to the start of the exercise, and pushing back into the seat when bringing the weights forward. The lean forward gives the chest a longer stretch, making sure the muscles are working to give you the growth you want.
Pulasta Dhar is a football commentator, podcaster and writer.
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