The shin is a body part you don’t think about much except when you’re running through the living room, take the corner too tight, and smack it on the edge of the coffee table. Oucheroo! That hurts.

The reason it hurts is there isn’t much between the table and bone but a thin covering of skin and nerve endings. Ah ha! At least that’s what we’ve been led to believe. There actually is a muscle sheath covering the bone as you can tell by the handy dandy diagram.

So…if it’s a muscle, we can develop it, right? That is indeed true, my friend.

Next question – how the heck DO you develop a muscle in that weird location? Obviously, you’re going to have to do some kind of weird little movement to reach that area of the body and here it is; dumbbell shin curls. This exercise is going to require focus, discipline, and split second timing on your part to avoid hospitalization.

Just kidding. It’s not hard, you only need a single small dumbbell and barely move your toes six inches.

Goes like this.

1. Sit on the edge of a free standing bench with legs stretched in front of you. Have a light dumbbell sitting on one end on the floor within reach of your toes.
2. While holding the bench beneath your rear end with both hands, clench the dumbbell between your feet and raise it off the floor.
3. You’re ready to start the exercise. Keeping legs straight and dumbbell from touching the floor, engage your shin muscles to curl your toes up as far as they will go, then stretch them away from you down as far as they will go.

That’s it. You’re lifting weights with your feet! The movement is the same as if you were doing traditional calf raises, only we’ve switched things around to focus the workout on your long-neglected shin muscles.

So the next time you come running through the living room – watch out coffee table!

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Want to slow the signs of aging and live longer? This question is posed to us by Science Daily. Why, oh why, must they always ask rhetorical questions? Nope, I prefer to age quickly and die sooner.

If that last sentence happens to be your answer, well, there’s probably no real point in reading any further on the topic. But, if you’re like several billion people on planet earth, you just might want to learn if it’s possible to slow aging and live longer.

New research from Saint Louis University says maybe you can if you cut your calories 300-500 per day. Calorie restriction has long been acknowledged to slow the aging process in mice and rats. Of course, scientists aren’t sure exactly WHY this happens but the leading hypothesis goes like this: less food causes a decrease in the thyroid hormone triiodothyronine (T3), which then slows metabolism and tissue aging.

In case you were wondering, T3 is not the same thing as Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, a movie where Arnold gets his rear end handed to him by a slinky new female terminator.

This new study, lifted from the June 2008 issue of Rejuvenation Research, found that calorie cutting has a similar biological effect in humans too, therefore, MIGHT also slow the aging process.

Take that, Ponce de Leon.

The lead author of the study said a longer term study would be needed to confirm whether or not they had actually found the fountain of youth. A junior researcher who wished to remain anonymous summarized it all with this cogent statement, “Stop eating so damn much and you’ll live longer.”

That last statement was a complete fabrication, but if you would like to learn more about the reality of living longer through calorie restriction, check out the article which discusses this topic in more depth.

Until then, keep in mind this startling new and completely made up statistic – every Whopper with Cheese you eat reduces your life by five minutes. Think about it. Or don’t.

The regular old bench press is an incredible chest exercise, there’s no doubt about that, and it should be a pillar of your upper body routine. But did you know there’s something you can do that will add fullness and define the lower part of your pectorals to an extent you might not have thought possible. Check out Arnold’s 1975 Mr. Olympia competition to see what I’m talking about.

Gives a whole new meaning to fullness and definition, huh?

Whether you want Arnold pecs or simply to improve your own, this is a good place to start. The pectoral muscles are big muscles and, ideally, you should train them from various angles for complete development. That’s what we’re talking about today with the decline dumbbell press.

Let’s get right to pumping you up! You’ll need a free standing decline bench and…er…dumbbells, of course.

1. Position yourself on the bench flat on your back.
2. Have your spotter hand you each dumbbell. Once you have control, slowly press them together and upward until the weights touch. Lower them in a slow, controlled fashion or risk ripping your shoulders out of the sockets. Make the upstroke an explosive movement.
3. The movement is similar to the bench press but, since the angle of your arms is now changed in relation to your torso, you work the chest from a different angle

Voila! More complete muscle development.

You might see people performing the dumbbell decline press without the assistance of spotters and that’s fine if you have good control over the amount of weight you’re moving. But if you get into trouble and have to drop them, it’s hard on the floor, hard on the dumbbells, hard on your shoulders, and could splatter an innocent bystander’s toes all over the floor.

The lesson here – use a spotter. There’s always someone around who would be happy to do it.

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Peter Gabriel had a little hit back in 1982 called “Shock the Monkey”. I don’t know about you, but I’m not particularly into electrocuting primates for fun.

But I would like to help you shock yourself from the workout doldrums. It’s a fact of life every exercise routine gets stale after a while. You may find yourself going through the motions. Not concentrating on every rep. You have to shake things up, rearrange, pick different exercises, hire someone to spring from the shadows and attack you without warning to keep your reflexes fast.

There’s a little exercise I like to call the crossover lunge. It’s a different movement that works the quads, as any lunge will do, but more specifically targets the hamstrings and glutes too. And helps develop a higher level of balance and coordination.

Best of all, it’s just weird enough that it might force you to focus on your workout again rather than that foot-long club sandwich growing mold back in your locker.

Let’s get to it! Who’s with me? No one? Okay, I’ll show you how to do it anyway.

1. Starting position is with fingers locked behind the head or arms at sides, feet shoulder width apart.
2. Take a big step out and over, crossing your left leg over your right as you lunge as far as you can to your right side, landing on your heel with your foot at a 45 degree angle to reduce strain on the knee.
3. Shove yourself back upright to the starting position.
4. Repeat the move, this time lunging to the other side. That counts as one rep.

Do 3 sets of 12 reps on each side, resting 90 seconds in between sets. This would be a good exercise to incorporate at the beginning of your leg workout. The balance and coordination you gain will be especially helpful in avoiding injury if you plan on becoming a freelance daredevil when you grow up.

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Don’t let your forearms hang there like pipe-cleaners, especially if the rest of you is buff and toned. Forearms are an often neglected body part. If I were to take a guess as to why – it’s probably because most of the exercises to work them have you hunched over your knees doing reps that involve a ten-inch range of motion at best.

Sorry, that’s just the way it is. I bet Mario Lopez does his wrist curls without fail.

Let’s accept that working your forearms properly is both slightly tedious and necessary. Yes, they will get secondary training from almost any other exercise that requires you to hold weights – but it’s not the same. Come on, don’t make them feel inadequate. They deserve their own exercises too. Okay. Enough with the pep talk. Let’s get on with the show and learn how to do cable wrist curls.

To be clear, when I say forearms, I’m talking about the muscle that runs beneath your lower arm. You can work the topside also but that’s even more tedious and probably best left for a different day.

Let’s go!

1. Drag a bench over to the pulley machine and set it directly in front of one of the low cable stations.
2. Sit on the bench and grab the short bar attached to the pulley with both hands in an underhanded grip.
3. Lay your forearms on your thighs with the bar extending past your knees, palms up.
4. Moving only your hands and wrists, curl the bar up towards the ceiling as high as possible, but keeping forearms flat on your thighs.
5. When returning to the starting position, allow the bar to roll to the end of your fingertips as far as possible. This will really build a stretch in there and make the muscles work harder.

The short range of motion may feel awkward and unproductive at first but keep at it and you will be rewarded by a nice set of forearms that show off the fact that you really do know your way around the gym. You ain’t just fakin’ it.

Remember, forearm muscle tissue is dense similar to calf muscle tissue. It needs a pounding to force it to grow – but grow it will. Start at 3 sets of 10 reps and build toward 5 sets of 15 reps. That ought to blast them. Do this exercise at the end of your workout because you might not be able to grip anything for a few minutes after.

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