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 is probably not the best measurement of total all round 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 possible that under developed triceps are limiting your bench press total. 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 will certainly help improve your bench press.
Why not experiment by doing a seperate session for your triceps alone. Commonly, hitting the chest muscles is advised to be done in the same workout as tricep training. 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 number of weeks and see how much more weight you can press.
Variety. have you been repeating the same old workout for months? time to mix it up then. 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.
Good rest periods. Your muscles don’t grow in the fitnes centre! At rest is when they grow. You won’t grow if you don’t allow enough time to 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 a break from training. Try taking a break if you reach a training plateau. 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.
Use negatives as a form of pushing your chest muscle harder during a bench press workout. Negatives are when you find two spotters to intially aid you to press the weight but who then let you take the full weight and lower it by yourself under slow complete 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 lowering portion of the lift is know to trigger more muscle growth than the positive effort phase.
Review your diet. 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 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.
Ensure correct 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 do it!
