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Tuesday, September 29, 2009

A Guide to Building Muscle Quickly to Increase Your Bench Press

By Ricardo d Argence

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? 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. 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 definitely help add weight to your bench press.

Work your triceps separately. The majority of bodybuilding regimens advise that you workout the chest in the same session as the triceps. If you train the triceps separately, you can concentrate on them and get the muscle growing very quickly. Try this over a few weeks and then have a look at how many more kilograms you can bench press.

Variety. Have you been repeating the same old workout for months? 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.

Solid rest. Your muscles are not going to grow in the gym! At rest is when they grow. If you don?t give enough time for growing 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 session for each muscle group, any more and you risk overtraining.

Take a break from training. 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.

Examine your diet. Are you eating 6 meals per day with a minimum of 1 gram of protein for every pound of bodyweight you have? If you are not following this sort of diet, then it is probable that you are limiting your gains by not following a muscle building diet. In every meal try to eat 50% carbohydrates, 30% proteins, and the remainder can be fats.

Pay attention to your technique. Are you bench-pressing the proper way? It is imperative to pay close attention to your technique and to use proper form when doing your exercises. If you practice bad technique it can take away focus from the chest muscles and can put you in great risk of injury as well. Make sure you are not lifting your feet up off the floor and that your hands are not grabbing the bar too close together. These are the two most general mistakes people make when bench pressing.

By following this guide, you will be giving yourself a good advantage to building muscle mass on your chest rapidly, and showing off to other bodybuilders on how much you can bench press!

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