A midsummer day's workout: Jay Cutler's biceps and forearms workout takes center stage

Flex, Dec, 2003 by Greg Merritt

CAST OF PLAYERS

         Jay Cutler    Pro bodybuilder
     Rick Belcastro    Cutler's occasional training partner
       Tony Pearson    Personal trainer, pro bodybuilder
   Frank Hillebrand    Personal trainer, pro bodybuilder
       Diana Dennis    Personal trainer, pro bodybuilder
Hillebrand's Client    Himself
         Diaper Man    Himself

SETTING

Gold's Gym; Las Vegas, Nevada. July 2003

ACT 1, SCENE 1

Heavy metal music. Clanging weights. The curtain rises. Jay Cutler and Rick Belcastro enter, greeting gym members. They pump out two warm-up sets of cambered-bar curls. Cutler calls these "feel sets," because he is feeling how his body responds to the weight today. As A C/DC's "For Those About to Rock" plays, he begins his first working set with 115 pounds.

CUTLER: I go by feel. I don't really pay attention to how much weight I use or to doing specific increments. It all depends on how I feel on a particular day. I do generally stick to eight to 10 reps for all working sets. The key to biceps training is to make the weight feel heavier than it really is by contracting your biceps throughout each set. I used to curl 225 and my shoulders were doing all the work. I think a cambered bar is better than a straight bar because it allows the movements to be a little more fluid and true.

Cutler keeps up a rapid pace, Resting for little longer than it takes Belcastro to do his set.

CUTLER: I try to start with a full contraction. Then, when I bring it up to the top, I try not to bring it up too far, to where I'll lose the contraction. With muscles, the real stress of a lift is the in-between, basically about halfway up during a biceps movement. People who tend to throw the weight up miss that target area.

Using strict form, Cutler reps Through his fifth set of cambered-bars curls.

BELCASTRO: More, more. No pain, bro, no pain.

His last set complete, Cutler returns Te bar to the rack and grins.

CUTLER: Look, my arms Have blown up from 15 to 16. Rick's are 12.

ACT 1 SCENE 2

Cutler and Belcastro move to a Bench for seated alternate dumbbell Curls. After a feel set, Cutler uses 60-pounds dumbbells, supinating his wrist and leaning back slightly throughout.

CUTLER: I thin leaning back focuses more on my biceps, sort of like an inkling curl. Sometimes, when I do them standing, I tend to lean into them too much and bring my shoulders into play.

With each rep, Cutler turns his head toward the arm that is curling.

CUTLER: A lot of it is mind over muscle, just focusing more on the side I'm working. I've learned that certain body motions work better for me. Sometimes the biggest mistake is to think that there's a right way and a wrong way. With little motions like that, it often down to what feels best.

Cutler grinds out his third and final set of alternate dumbbell curls.

BELCASTRO: Let's go, Garfield. He's Garfield the cat. Eat, sleep and train, and get his feet rubbed by his wife a couple of times a day. That's all he does.

ACT 1, SCENE 3

Cutler is laughing as he makes his way across the gym floor Between gulps of water, he exchanges greetings with Tony Pearson and Diana Dennis, who are both training clients. Then he reps out his feel set on a Strive preacher curl machine. On another day, he might perform preachers using a cambered bar or two dumbbells.

CUTLER: I rest less and less between sets the closer I get to a show. Right now, the longest is a minute, but today I'm doing a set about every 50 seconds. After my feel set, I usually try to do two or three working sets and go to failure or near failure each time. When I get to the gym, I just keep moving forward. This workout was thought out yesterday, and when I leave the gym today, I'll start thinking about tomorrow's workout. This is the most important part of each day for me. This is it. I'm winning my next contest right now.

While Ozzy Osbourne's "No More Tears" wails on the sound system. Cutler performs his working sets with 70 pounds. For the final set, Belcastro moves the pin down to 50 pounds because Cutler can't get another full rep with 70, and Cutler reps out the remainder of the drop set. He returns the favor for Belcastro--with lighter weights.

CUTLER: You peel, so I peel. Go get 'em, Rick.

ACT 1, SCENE 4

They move to a Flex machine, in which each side is curled independently and a trainer's arms are locked into angled positions with his elbows in front of his shoulders. Cutler uses 135 pounds for his working sets.

CUTLER: This machine stabilizes my elbows, which I think is important to get a true contraction of the biceps. Sometimes my training looks somewhat sloppy, but that's how I feel it the most. What I try to do in almost every lift is contract throughout, go slow and pause briefly at the top and bottom. I've seen [Ronnie] Coleman train, and he does very quick repetitions without much pause. I'm the opposite. I like the full repetition with a pause at the top position and at the bottom, too, sometimes.

Cutler guzzles water.

CUTLER: Look, there's Rick's brother over there, wearing a diaper. Diaper Man hovers around the squat racks, decked out in Huggies-style flag shorts. Viva Las Vegas.