Back At Temple Gym With Dorian Yates

Where do I start with this one?

Let’s fast forward to arriving at Temple Gym…

We got to Temple Gym at roughly half twelve today (11/09/2013) where we would wait for Gal Yates to arrive so that the wife could have her very first gym experience training with her. Andrew Coulson turned up before Gal and he introduced us too a very lovely lady named Emma who is working for him at present. We all had a little chat and then Dorian and Andrew asked me to train with them. Nervously, but eager, I went ahead and trained with them.

As they were training back and Wednesday is the day I prefer to train back, I was happy to join in. We started off (Hold on, I need to note this here)

Ok, the lats are a much stronger muscle than what is required to make them work. What I mean by that is everything you train your lats with has to be worked through your arms. Your lats will be much stronger than your grip and therefore this is the idea…

Isolate your lats and work them to fatigue as much as possible. We did this by doing some reverse grip (palms out, slightly wider than shoulder width) pull downs to warm up. Then we moved on to three sets of pullovers using the Nautilus machine. This machine really isolates the lats and therefore pre exhausting the lats.

We then went onto hammer strength pull downs and really concentrated on the negative rep as well as perfect form. After pre- exhausting the lats on the Nautilus machine, we can then use our biceps and other muscles to fully fatigue the lats. The reason for this is due to the biceps naturally being weaker than the lats, meaning the biceps will give up before the lats. This is not what we want to happen and so we should isolate the lat muscles and hit them as directly as possible.

Straight from that we went onto one arm dumbbell rows, again everything we did was form related. The difference between concentrating on the movement with mind to muscle connection is (in my opinion) 90% more effective than swinging the weight on the positive and dropping the weight on the negative.

We then went onto seated cable rows. Medium size bar, just wider than shoulder with grip. (Unless you are Dorian or Andrew, then it’s just narrow of shoulder width apart)

We finished the back off with some isolated posterior delt contractions. The machine is similar to the ones you have in your local gym, this was just more hardcore. Imagine sitting down with your arms both held straight in front of you and then pull both arms apart. I will use bent over dumbbell raises to mimic this machine (I was going to link my video here of bent over raise, but I need to redo it as it’s not good form) A good example of my blog and recording myself here as I can see my faults and correct them!

After training we went for a meal in Birmingham city centre. It was a serious honour to be eating with the DY gang and listening to some very funny stories being passed around the table, as well as some really educating talks about general bodybuilding.

This was a truly special experience that we will NEVER forget and I urge anyone that has a passion for bodybuilding or wants to train with Dorian to not worry or feel intimidated by him. The whole team are absolutely superb and if you don’t go ahead and do it, you will most certainly regret not taking that moment!

The DY family are the most humble and kindest people you will ever meet. Trust me, behind those big muscles and clever mind of Dorian Yates and also beautiful perfect Gal there is a heart of gold in every one of them. I can’t thank them all enough for what they’ve done.

I will miss a large portion from what happened due to that fact that I want to keep some memories between me, the wife and the DY team.

Dorian and Gal, such a great couple!