Kris Gethin is a professional bodybuilder who knows how to bring about amazing transformations. He utilizes some of the most intensive training routines you’ve probably seen in order to bring about dynamic transformations and to build massive strength as quickly as possible.
Perhaps though he is best known for his DTP workouts. DTP stands for ‘dramatic transformation principle’, and it’s an approach to training that is elegantly simply but devastatingly effective. Let’s see what it can do for the triceps and biceps…
The Dramatic Transformation Principle
The dramatic transformation principle involves doing supersets of two simple workouts that will target complementary muscle groups. For instance, this might mean training the pecs and lats or the quads and hamstrings. In our case it involves the biceps and triceps.
Once the two exercises are selected, you will then superset between them with no rest. You’re going to do ten sets of each and you’re going to use a pyramid set of 50,40,30,20,10,10,20,30,40,50 repetitions. This type of training is wonderful because of its simplicity. Using just two simple exercises means you don’t get stuck thinking about what exercise to use next and it means you can be in and out of the gym with minimal time and minimal confusion – there’s no excuse them not to put in 100% effort. At the same time though, this structure of sets and reps makes the routine incredibly taxing. The high number of reps right at the start are perfect for warming up your muscles and flooding them with muscle and this then gets followed with heavier weights and fewer reps to target the fast twitch muscle fibers. Finally, you will then be ‘flushing’ your muscles at the end with high reps and low weights.
Superset
EZ Bar Curls
Head Smackers
The two exercises that Kris chose for his biceps and triceps day were EZ bar curls and head smackers. Right away this is a smart choice as both exercises use the same single piece of equipment keeping everything easy. The EZ bar is the bar that has the slight ‘Z’ shaped indent in it. This changes the angle of your wrists when you hold it putting your hands in a position closer to a neutral grip and taking some of the strain off of your wrists.
Head smackers are a little like the regular skull crusher but with a slight difference. Normally a skull crusher involves lying flat on a bench with arms extended in full ‘bench press’ position. You then lower the bar towards your head pivoting at your elbows. With head smackers however, your arms start off in bent position and you then push the bar away from the top of your head and pull it back in towards you again.
This keeps you under constant tension (great for hypertrophy) and it alters the angle of the tricep getting targeted. It also hits the top of the bicep which is great following the curls. Kris likes to mix things up too by switching the head smackers for regular skull crushers some of the time.
