You have been prepping for this show for months now. Your upcoming bodybuilding show looms. You’re excited and scared at the same time, but you cannot be sure because the diet and cardio have left your brain working at less than peak efficiency. You’ve been taking weekly photographs, and the progress is coming along slowly but surely. Your abdominals are cutting through. Leg separation is arriving. Veins are coming out of the arms, and the back slightly resembles a road map.

If you’re a smart bodybuilder, you are also keeping tabs on your competitors by following their Twitter, Myspace, Facebook, or website pages. You can see who placed at that show last year, and get a pretty good idea who will be competing again. After all, most people compete near where they live. As you see their pictures, you may feel a little nervous, or a little confident, depending upon what kind of shape they are in. One aspect of your own physique which you may never have noticed, which you may notice upon the other competitors, is the serratus. This small sheath of muscle connecting the abdominals, back, and chest is often overlooked by bodybuilders in the gym, but in a close competition can become the deciding factor when judges have a show that is too close to call. When all else is equal, the man with a highly visible and developed serratus will win the show.

Developing the serratus isn’t all that hard, and it can be done in just 4 to 6 weeks with focused effort. Begin by immediately adding broomstick twists to your training regimen. Four sets of 50 to 100 repetitions, completed three times per week with slow and deliberate precision, will help tremendously. Side crunches and leg raises, if not already part of your weekly abdominal training protocol, need to be added. Dumbbell and machine pullovers are very useful as well. Essentially, any abdominal, chest, or back movement which pulls the serratus into action is considered useful, and should be used in the final weeks before a show to bring out the serratus.

Some bodybuilders are able to work the serratus outside of the gym – when they are working on their posing. You should be spending 30 to 45 minutes per evening working on your posing. The full or half abdominal-thigh pose is excellent for flexing the serratus and helping to etch out some detail in this muscle group. Remember that diet is equally as important as exercise and posing if you want the serratus to shine through onstage. It may only be very late in the dieting process that you are finally able to see them, when you drop the water and get your body fat percentage as low as possible. As you peak for each successive show, you will develop a better idea what it takes to help bring out the serratus. The important thing to remember is that the muscle group is there, and that using time in the gym, posing room, and kitchen to focus upon it will help it to shine on show day!

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