Everyone knows to build muscle up one of the best exercises for the upper body is the bench press. As always certainly one of the questions most bodybuilders want to know the answer to 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 much as two thirds of the complete muscle mass on your arms is made up of the tricep muscle. it is more than possible that under developed tris are stopping your bench press from increasing. The best exercises to build muscle mass on your triceps are using barbells and dumbells: close grip bench-presses and skull crushers. Less effective are isolation type exercises such as tricep press downs. They can certainly aid in increasing your benchpress.
Why not experiment by doing a seperate session for your triceps alone. More often than not muscle building programs will suggest that you train the triceps along with the chest. Try training them on their own for a change. Doing so enables you to really shred them intensely and stimulate that muscle to grow. 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 repeating the same old workout for months? time to vary it up. After your muscles have done the same workout a few times, they have already adapted to it and therefore the need to grow has been removed. 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 do too much and overtrain your chest then it can struggle to recover and find it hard to grow more. Focus on intensity and technique as opposed to quantity. A short intense workout is much more effective than a long drawn out one.
Quality rest. Your muscles do not grow on the weight bench! They grow when they are at rest. If you don't allow enough time to rest then you simply won't grow. Of course do not return to the gym when your muscles are still sore and a fair guideline is to limit yourself to 6-9 sets each session for each muscle group, any more and you risk overtraining.
Take some time-off. If you hit a training plateau then consider taking a complete break. Allow your body to fully recuperate and eradicate all the strains and return a week or so later doubly motivated.
Give your chest muscles a much more intense hit by doing negatives. Negatives are when two spotters (gym partners) help you press the weight up but then let you lower it under full control. This is done because people are able to lower more than they can lift. Therefore if we can get the body lowering more weight it is probable that this will aid us for the effort phase also. The negative portion of the lift is proven to develop more muscle growth than the effort phase.
Review your diet. Are you taking on board a minumum of 5 meals a day whilst consuming at least 1 gram of protein per each lb of bodymass? If you are not then it is possible that you are limiting your gains by not following a muscle building diet strictly enough. In each meal try to get them divided as follows: 50% carbohydrate, 30% protein and the remainder can be compiled of fats. Take supplements if you can afford to 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. Check that you are not constantly moving your feet up off the floor and that your grip is not too narrow or too broad, these are two mistakes that are easy to make.
By following the guidelines above you will be giving yourself the best chance to build muscle mass on your chest fast. Go get em!
[affmage source="amazon" results="10"]How To Increase Your Bench Press And Build Muscle Mass Fast[/affmage]
[affmage source="clickbank" results="10"]How To Increase Your Bench Press And Build Muscle Mass Fast[/affmage]
Filed under Build muscle by on Sep 14th, 2009.