Iron Vic,I have pretty average triceps and was wondering what you recom-mend to add some beef to the back of the arms. I came across some old pictures of Bill Pearl at his peak back in the sixties. He was standing relaxed, not flexing, and his triceps looked like they had been infected with elephantitis! Dude - they were huge! That’s what I want! I hit my triceps once or twice a week doing 3-4 sets of rope-handle pushdowns. My Tri’s just won’t grow! Nothing seems to work!

K-Dog, Tampa

First off Dog Boy, don’t call me dude. Second, you have about as much chance of building triceps like Pearl’s as I do of beating Tiger Woods in a golf match. Third, you say you “hit” the triceps “once or twice a week with 3-4 sets of rope handle pushdowns.” In actuality you are not “hitting” the triceps you are sissy-slap fighting the triceps. The triceps you saw are what occurs when a Man with a capitol M spends a decade training the triceps. Bill performed nose breakers with 200-plus pounds; he’d blast away at close grip bench presses, he’d do weighted dips and French presses and push jerks with more weight than you squat with, assuming you squat at all. Here’s the deal Dog Pound, 3-4 sets of anything done once or twice a week is not nearly enough to build a muscle to any significant degree. High School cheerleaders practic-ing basket tosses get more arm work than you do with your rope handle pushdowns. (A nice finishing ex-ercise) No doubt my wheelchair-bound Irish aunt could easily han-dle the pathetic poundage you use. I love your contention that “Noth-ing seems to work” and I suspect your pain tolerance approximates that of a six year old spoiled child. To build big triceps you got to use big weight in barbell and dumbbell exercises. You have to train triceps long, hard and often. I’m talking a minimum of twice weekly for 30 minutes. That’s 30 minutes of tri-ceps work, not 30 minutes for your entire weight workout. Use the clas-sics: barbell French presses done ly-ing or standing, nose breakers and narrow grip bench presses. Then do 3-4 sets of bodyweight dips taken to failure. If you have any gas left, it’s okay to perform tricep pushdowns - with an iron handle - not a rope handle. Pushdowns are the equiva-lent of dessert: never eat dessert be-fore eating your meat and potatoes and if you are full, skip dessert! Here’s a Big Man routine for titanic triceps. If you get frightened by it, feel free to fall down into the fetal position and suck your thumb. Hit triceps after chest.

Day I Nose breakers: 4 sets of 6-8 reps, increase poundage on each subse-quent setSeated overhead dumbbell tricep extensions: 3-4 sets progressivePushdowns: drop sets, 15 reps, re-duce weight go to failure, repeat, three drops

Day II Narrow grip bench press: 4 sets of 6-8 reps, 12-inch grip, lock out completelyDips: 4 sets each set taken to failure - lock-out hard at the topPushups: hands touching to form narrow push space. 3 sets to failure.

Iron Vic,First off - thanks for being you. With so many PC types in the world of fitness, it’s refreshing to read the real truth written by a real man without regard to hurting some politically-correct jerk’s feel-ings. Anyway, keep writing the real deal until they lock you up. Here’s my problem. I sweat a lot during training. I’m talking completely soaked, wringing wet t-shirt, mas-sive sweating by the bucketful. I’m not some super fat guy who breaks into a sweat walking up stairs. I’m a competitive bodybuilder on the local level. I just really kick it in cardio and if I don’t get sopping wet during a workout, I don’t feel as if I’ve done anything. Should I be taking anything additional as far as supplements? I have a 50/50 Plus^TM Smart Bomb shake after every workout. I thought maybe there was something else I should be doing or taking that you might be aware of. Keep firing away with both barrels.

Tim, the Great State of Texas

I feel the same way Texas Tim. You know how you can tell if you’ve had a good cardio workout? When you can’t find a single dry section of your sweat soaked t-shirt to wipe the sweat out of your eyes. I run for an hour in the early morning. I peel off my t-shirt afterwards and twist it. Unless sweaty water falls to the ground like squeezing the water out of a sponge, I feel like a freaking failure. If you ain’t sweating buck-ets during cardio you ain’t doing JACK SQUAT! I periodically have to go into commercial gyms and I see row after row of all these ur-ban types, dressed so pretty, going up and down and back and forth on these fancy-ass machines, some of which are more expensive than my monster truck, I want to find the circuit breaker and trip the switch. I want to announce to the room, “AT-TENTION SISSIES! You people are just going through the motions. None of you are coming close to breaking a sweat; none of you are coming near to accomplishing any-thing of value. So just go home and spend time with your spouses and kids because being here, loafing along, pretending to do cardio is a complete waste of time!”

The “fitness experts” have all the housewives, country club women and business types convinced that they shouldn’t go too fast doing car-dio or they’ll exceed the “fat burn-ing zone” - since the fat burning zone is about 60% of the age-relat-ed heart rate maximum, that is one hell-of-a convenient theory for those who don’t want to work hard. If I fall below 80% of my age-related max I feel like I’m loafing. Health Club personal trainers have their mind-numbed robot clients con-vinced that if they ever hit 80% of ARHR max they’ll keel over from a heart attack! If I don’t hit 115% on my sprints up the mountain trails wearing my weighted back pack, I make myself do it again. And I feel like a sissy compared to my buddy Mark “The Hammer” Coleman who tells me, “Vic if I don’t puke during cardio, I’m dis-appointed and feel as if I haven’t trained hard enough.” Sweat tells us that we’re working hard, sweat purges the body of toxins, sweat is a beautiful thing and if a workout doesn’t generate sweat that workout ain’t worth a damn! God Bless you for sweating Texas Tim! You need to start taking 3-6 Parrillo Max Endurance^TM capsules thirty min-utes before your sweat-drenched cardio sessions. You need to take 1 or 2 Parrillo Mineral Electrolyte^TM pills and an Essential Vitamin^TM pill immediately after cardio. While you sweat out toxins and poisons, you also sweat out some good stuff that needs to be replaced. Taking Max Endurance^TM ahead of time will improve cardio performance. Parrillo has me taking a handful of Muscle Amino

Iron Vic,My wife has a personal trainer who has her taking soy protein and drinking soy milk. She’s tired all the time. This guy teaches Pi-lates at the spa. He looks like a skinny girl in a blond wig - and yes he has a pony tail. He’s big into this vegan thing. My wife thinks this bozo walks on water and she keeps telling me I should give up chicken and beef. Meanwhile I’ve got 18 inch guns, a 400 bench press, I run five miles a day at an 8 minute pace and have 9% body fat. Meanwhile she’s tired all the time and getting fatter. I think the soy diet is the culprit - it sure ain’t the Pilates because they don’t do nothing that could possibly trig-ger hypertrophy. I know because I have watched the class. I am ready to jack this guy up in the parking lot on his way to his Volvo station wagon.

Ron, San Fran

Living in Frisco, if you so much as yelled at the guy you’d be doing time in San Quentin, so forget the violence. I’d bet the farm your wife is suffering from excessive estrogen and iron deficiency anemia. Excess estrogen is an epidemic among mod-ern women and is one of the most undiagnosed maladies in our mod-ern society. Women are poisoned by foods loaded with estrogen and excessive amounts create all kinds of problems. Nearly all prepackaged foods today are doused in chemi-cals and preservatives that contrib-ute to creating estrogen. Certain foods are highly estrogenic and at the top of that list are soy products. If you are a woman with naturally high estrogen and start eating soy food and drinking soy products, you make a bad situation worse. What is sad is that soy is popular in the Pilates/yoga community and their gurus promote soy as a healthy al-ternative to meat. They even try and convince the ignorant that soy is a great protein substitute! Meanwhile the already overweight, estrogen-poisoned followers start eating soy burgers and drinking soy milk and they swell up like the Hindenburg Blimp.

They can’t figure out what in the heck is wrong and their lead-ers blame it on polluted tap water or some such lunacy. Excessive estro-gen is evil stuff in women and can lead to cancer and a whole host of other health related problems. Soy is a leading producer of estrogen. See if you can wean her off soy. Iron deficiency anemia is another real problem for women, particularly as they get close to 40. The sad part is that by engaging in a bit of nu-tritional supplementation the effects of iron deficiency can be corrected. What’s the best way to combat iron deficiency? Take supplemental iron. What’s a great source of supple-mental iron? Parrillo Liver Amino Formula^TM! Women who subscribe to the Parrillo approach and supple-ment with Liver Amino Formula^TM uniformly report that the dragged out feeling brought on by anemia is eliminated with conscientious liver supplementation. Too many women are repulsed by the idea of taking a liver supplement. (”Uggh! Liver! Gross!”) They need to get over that: it’s not as if we’re making them eat a plate of raw liver. Liver is a fabulous blood builder. Liver contains heme iron which helps red blood cells car-ry oxygen throughout the body. Op-timally consume four Liver Amino^TM tabs every 2-3 waking hours and a handful before bed. If you were able to convince the missus to drop the soy consumption and somehow con-vince her to take 24 to 30 liver tabs a day, I’d bet she’d feel 100% better within a week. Here’s an idea, make a bet with her. Tell her that if she’ll toss all the soy and do the liver tab supplementation protocol for one week - if by the end of that week she’s not feeling 100% better you’ll do all the housework for a week.

Parrillo Performance
(800) 344-3404 

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