BIGGER
BETTER
WIDER
HOW DID JEREMY BUENDIA LOCK DOWN HIS
FOURTH MEN’S PHYSIQUE OLYMPIA TITLE IN 2017?
BY TURNING UP THE VOLUME ON HIS WORKOUTS—
AND GETTING SERIOUS ABOUT SHOULDERS.
/// BY MICHAEL BERG /// PHOTOGRAPHS BY PER BERNAL
Jeremy Buendia’s physique
is the standard-bearer
in the IFBB Pro League
men’s physique division. The 27-
year-old California native has earned
the nascent sport’s top prize—the Men’s
Physique Olympia crown—four years
running.
Even more surprising is what he admits
about his first three titles. “For a long time,
I was training my shoulders all wrong,” Buendia
confesses. “My technique was awful on a lot of
my delt exercises.”
Consider it a matter of degrees, but his delts,
while certainly not a detriment to his overall
physique, weren’t all they could be. “That was
a lagging body part for the first few years I did
the Olympia—especially the middle delts,” he
explains. “And it’s just so important for the
taper in men’s physique, that wide-shoulder-
to-small-waist ratio.”
His solution? He went to work with his
long-time trainer, Hany Rambod, tweaking
Rambod’s FST-7 training protocol to blow up his
shoulders. “We prioritised lateral raise exercises,
putting them earlier in the workouts, did more
overall sets, and I put more energy into those
workouts than I ever had before,” Buendia says.
MARCH 2018 | FLEX
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