HEAVY DUTY DELTS Want wider, thicker shoulders? Try IFBB pro Dennis James’ workout and build YOUR OWN V-TAPER By Dean Brierly You probably figure any guy nicknamed “Dennis the Menace” would have to be an agitator, a trash-talker, the kind of guy who gets under everybody’s skin. But if you’re talking about IFBB pro Dennis James, the moniker doesn’t really fit. More suitable adjectives include humble, friendly and laid-back because, as Dennis says, “In this business, you don’t get awards for talking.” Nope, this is one bodybuilder who lets his physique speak for him, and with increasing eloquence and effectiveness in each contest he enters. In fact, the only havoc he wreaks is on training partners and rival competitors. The 1998 USA winner has placed in the top 10 in three recent Mr. Olympias, with a best-ever fourth place in 2003. DJ is one of the few guys who poses a legitimate threat every time he steps onstage — even without the benefit of a planned posing routine to show off his physique to its best advantage. That’s like buying an Aston Martin DB5 and forgetting to polish it. Dennis has vowed to apply that polish in 2004. “I will be a totally different guy onstage this year,” he says. [Editor’s note: at the time of writing, the Olympia was still more than a month away.] “I never had a rehearsed posing routine before. Last year at the Olympia, Samir Bannout told me he loved my physique but that there were many poses I should be doing to make me look better. This year, I’ll be working with him to choose songs and poses and put them together into a routine that will really make my muscles come alive. You’ll see a much more aggressive and confident Dennis James at the Mr. Olympia.” Ronnie, are you listening? Detail Oriented Besides a new and improved routine, the Menace was planning to add more detail to the monster package he presented last year. His shoulders, arms and chest already rank up there with the best in the sport, and he’s worked hard to bring his back and quads up to speed. Dennis is at the stage of his career where it’s not about putting on more size — at 260 pounds contest weight, he’s beefy enough to slug it out with the biggest brutes in the sport. Working with trainer supreme Charles Glass has helped Dennis to better dial in his conditioning in recent contests. Besides being a hell of a motivator, Glass has a knack for transforming exercises from standard into stellar. “Charles creates different angles with machines,” Dennis explains. “He’ll place an extra pad on a machine at a certain angle, which lets you get to in-between muscles you might normally overlook. He finds a way to get you sore each and every workout.” All this preparation is paying big dividends, since many observers have now added Dennis to the short list of pros (Jay Cutler, Günter Schlierkamp, Dexter Jackson) viewed as viable successors to Ronnie’s crown, and DJ likes his odds.“I think everyone in the top six has a shot. It all depends on who’s in shape that day. Did anybody think Jay had a shot at the Olympia in 2001? No. But he was on when everybody else was off, and he almost won. So I think it’s possible. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be training my ass off.” That’s about as verbally aggro as Dennis gets. Living in Thailand helps keep him grounded; he has lived inPattaya for the past 14 years after leaving his native Germany. It may seem far from the madding bodybuilding crowd, but Dennis can’t imagine living anywhere else. The climate, islands, people and lifestyle suit him. And it’s where he met his wife, Ratikan “Sin” Chuaythong, with whom he has a daughter, Anna. “After competing in the States, I come back here, and I’m a family man,” he says. “I’m not big, bad Dennis James. I stay away from all the rumours and BS. People say things when they’re mad and later regret it. If you really have something to say, let your body do the talking. If you run around and tell people, ‘I’m gonna win this, I’m gonna win that,’ and then you don’t win, you’ve got a problem. That’s why I like to stay here and do my thing, do my training and handle my business. Then when I go to the Olympia, I’ll show people that I did my homework.” Thai-ed Down Bodybuilding didn’t make much of a dent in the Thai national consciousness when Dennis first moved there. But in the past few years, the sport’s popularity has mushroomed, thanks in part to DJ’s high-profile status and frequent guest-posing appearances at local shows. Now Thai bodybuilders more than hold their own at major events like the World Championships and Asian Games. That said, it’s still hard for Dennis to find training partners in Thailand who can keep up with him. “I train so hard, I destroy them,” he says. Dennis stays motivated by watching competition videos of the top guys in the sport and keeping in frequent phone contact with Glass to help fine-tune his preparation. He normally goes to the States two months before the Olympia to train with Glass; this year he arrived even earlier to work on his posing. He planned to devote at least one hour a day to posing to bring out even more muscle detail and to present his physique in the best possible way. At 35, Dennis appears to be hitting his stride as a competitor and has no plans to stop putting on those tiny trunks, oiling up his gargantuan physique and hitting freaky poses in front of rabid fans in pursuit of the sport’s ultimate prize. “As long as I can improve, I will be onstage,” he says. “If I see that I’m going backward, then I know it’ll be time to retire. My goal when I started training was just to compete in a Mr. Olympia. Then my goal was to be a threat, to make sure that everybody who competed against me worried about me. My next goal is to place in the top three. And, of course, my ultimate goal is to win the Mr. Olympia. That is my mission.” M&F Dean Brierly is a regular contributor to m&f and Flex. He’s also written for publications outside the health and fitness industry. BUILDING BOLDER SHOULDERS 1. Never drop the weight on the negative movement; instead, always control the weight on the way down no matter what bodypart you’re training — especially shoulders. 2. It’s always good to incorporate cable exercises into your delt routine. Try supersetting a mass exercise (like overhead presses) with a cable movement (like cable lateral or front raises) to get a lot of blood into the muscles. 3. Keep your rep speed moderate. To stay injury-free, I believe in training slow. It’s not always the weight that leads to injury but rather the speed. When you go slow, you can adjust your form a little bit if you’re not coming up right. If you’re going too fast, by the time you feel it, it’s too late. 4. Rest between sets just long enough to allow your breathing to return to normal. Any longer and your heart rate won’t stay elevated; any shorter and you won’t have ample strength for subsequent sets. 5. Warm up your shoulders properly, because if you injure them, you won’t be able to train chest or any other upper bodyparts. Using a couple of 5-pound plates, swing your arms in a controlled fashion to get your shoulders loose before you start training heavy. If you do overhead presses first, like I do, perform one or two sets without weight as a warm up. 6. Make a conscious effort to pause at the peak of isolation movements, like lateral and front raises, and contract your muscles hard. It’s easy to get into a rut in which you’re just raising and lowering the weight without stopping. 7. Avoid overtraining your shoulders by not going too heavy. And don’t do more than 12 sets per workout. If you choose four exercises, do three sets each; if you do three exercises, do four sets each.