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Posts Tagged ‘bench press’

Everyone knows to build muscle up one of the best exercises for the upper body is the bench press. One of the first questions you are likely to be asked by another bodybuilder is ‘how much can you bench press?’. Of course i ti probably not the best measure of total body strength it does naturally have a very macho feel to it and of course is very impressive. So lets cut to the chase and find out how to build muscle now and get a bigger bench press:

Grow your triceps. As musch as two thirds of the entire muscle mass on your arms comes from the tricep muscle. It may well be that under-developed triceps are restricting your bench press progress. The best exercises to build muscle mass on your triceps are using barbells and dumbells: close grip bench-presses and skull crushers. Isolation exercises are not as good as they isolate the muscle completely. They will certainly help improve your bench press.

Try training your triceps separately. Usually bodybuilding programs recommend that you train the chest in the same session as the triceps. Try training them on their own for a change. Doing so means you can hit them when they are completely fresh and really rip them to pieces and trigger muscle growth. Do this over a period of a few weeks and then go back and see how many more weight discs you can press.

Variety. have you been following the same routine for a number of weeks or months? time to vary it up. After the same workout has been gone through several times it will be difficult to keep stimulating growth with it as your muscles grow used to it. Keep changing things, they can be subtle changes like altering the grip width or reversing the order of your routine or they can be larger changes like doing super sets, compound sets and so on, these will give you a real pump by the way.

Make sure you are not doing too much! While with most things in life more is better, in muscle building this is not quite true. If you overtrain your chest muscles then it can find it hard to recover and grow more. Instead of focussing on quantity, focus on technique and intensity. A short intense workout is much more effective than a long drawn out one.

Quality rest. Your muscles don’t grow in the fitnes centre! Their growing time is when they are resting. If you don’t allow enough time to rest then you simply won’t grow. Of course do not workout again when your muscles are still, a fair rule of thumb is to limit yourself to 6-9 sets each workout for each muscle group, any more and you may be at risk overtraining.

Take a break from training. If you hit a training plateau then consider taking a complete break. let your body fully recover, get rid of all the niggles aches and pains and then comeback fresh a week or two later with renewed energy and motivation.

Push your chest muscle harder by doing negatives on the weight bench. Negatives are when you get the help from two spotters to intially help you press the weight up but who the allow you to take the weight completely to lower it. We do this because you can actually lower more weight than you can lift. So if we can get the body used to lowering more weight this will help you get stronger for the lifting/effort phase. The lowering/negative phase also stimulates more muscle growth than the effort phase.

Do a diet review. Are you consuming around 6 meals a day with at least 1 gram of protein for each pound of bodyweight that you have? If you are not then it is quite possible that you are restricting your gains by not adopting fully a muscle building diet. Each meal should be roughly 50% carbohydrate, 30% protein and the rest made-up of fats. Take supplements if you have the money to, things like: whey protein, essential fatty acids and multi-vitamins.

Focus on your technique. Are you pressing correctly. Bad technique can move the focus away from the chest muscles and put you at a greater risk of getting injured. Ensure you are not moving your feet up off the floor and that your hands are not grasping the bar too closely together, these are two easy and often made errors.

By following the guidelines above you will be giving yourself the best chance to build muscle mass on your chest fast. Just do it!

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