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6 Best Exercises You Must Do For Best Results

Jan 022010

Many beginner bodybuilders engage in bodybuilding exercises meant to isolate the muscles. It’s no wonder why they take this path, isolation exercises appear to be the most beneficial, however, compound exercises are simply the best for building larger and more prominent muscles. These compound exercises are not for beginners, they require perfect technique and plenty of rest in between workouts to ensure muscle growth. You want to achieve a balance between exercise and recovery as well as diet, three interdependent components of a good bodybuilding program.

Squats

Known as the king of bodybuilding exercises, squats primarily emphasize the glutes and quadriceps while secondarily benefiting the calves, hamstrings and lower back, thus, building up on strength. A beauty of doing squats is that you can pack on many pounds of soldid muscle at a much faster rate than any other workout. Always perform the squat with an experienced spotter or inside the power cage to ensure your safety.

Leg Presses

By Far, The best bodybuilding exercises to build lean muscle in your legs are leg presses. Leg presses can be used to determine your overall leg strength including your knee joint and ankle extensions. To ensure you do leg presses properly you must use the appropriate machine that allows you to push the weight away from your body, either in a sitting or laying down platform.

Deadlifts

If you want to build up you overall body mass, the deadlift is the most beneficial workout you can do. A word of caution though, this workout must be performed with correct technique as you can damage you back and even your spine. The deadlift is a relatively simple exercise, grasp a weighted barbell from the ground starting from a bent over position and then simply lifting the barbell straight up to a standing position, whilst keeping the back straight the entire time.

Bench Press

The Benchpress is by far the best exercise you could possibly do for your chest It is one of the most effective bodybuilding exercises for the chest as well as the shoulders – deltoids and pectorals – and the triceps. Basically, you lower a loaded barbell to your chest and push it back up.

Dips

The dip is also one of the best compound bodybuilding exercises because it develops many muscles in your chest area as well as in the shoulders and arms in one single repetition. Due to the simplicity of this exercise no fancy machines are required. If you wish to target mainly the triceps, try to keep you body as straight as possible throughout the movement.

Chin Ups

To get the most out of chin ups it’s best to use a wide grip. You will discover that these are excellent exercises for a wide back with excellent muscle definition. Your lats, biceps and forearms will also benefit.

Keep in mind that the above mentioned bodybuilding exercises are only effective if and when you exert sufficient effort to perform them. Remember for maximum results ensure you have adequate rest between working out the same muscle groups again.

Starting off as a Body Builder

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Dec 292009

The key to body building for beginners is to perform Compound Exercises with perfect form and get your diet right. I can’t stress this enough, and to work up in weight incrementally.

You can probably lift more than the weight you should begin with, but the key is to do the exercises consistently.

When starting out, beginners are dispirited because of the lack of immediate results, however note that to get improvement while starting out, you need to be patient and self-controlled.

Compound exercises are just the start, wherein you will develop and reinforce the muscles, afterward comes the isolation exercises which you will perform after acquiring substantial strength.

Compound exercises are ones in which at least two joints are used to do the exercise movement, so for chest & triceps, you’ll want to do DIPS or BENCH PRESS, for lats and biceps you’ll want to do PULLUPS or LAT BAR PULL DOWN, for legs… it’s SQUATS and then DEADLIFT (which also hits your lower back).

For your shoulder & triceps, you’ll wan to do MILITARY PRESS, CLEAN & JERKS or SQUAT PRESSES.

CALF WORK, because of the unique nature of that muscle group, requires the intensity of CALF RAISES & DONKEY PRESSES which only work one joint, so they tend to be an isolation exercise.

After determining the scheme of your workouts, you would then need to plan how many repetitions and sets are required for the whole program.

It’s suggested that beginning bodybuilders, for the first two weeks do light weights and high reps to get your muscles primed for the growth phase, so you want to start with 1 or 2 sets and work your way up to 4 or 5 sets of 12 to 15 reps (this includes your warm-up sets).

Then you’ll want to swap out exercises, so if you’ve been doing WEIGHTED DIPS it’s time for BENCH PRESS, and you’ll want to raise the weight maybe 15 or 20% and do less sets and less reps (say 2 or 3 sets of 6 to 8 reps), stay on this course for two weeks, then it’s it time to bring the weight back down and do 4 or 5 sets of 10 to 12 reps for one week, then you can jump up in weight from the heavy phase, but do less reps and sets.

The key element here is to a) switch up the routine so your body has to constantly adapt b) build strength and mass by alternating what intensity of weights you pump. Basically, this means that you should perform a heavy set once a week and keep the remaining ones light but with more repetitions to shed off more calories, develop strength and stamina.
Once you’ve been on the compound exercise cycle for about 6 weeks, you can start to slowly work in isolation exercises, these are exercises that use one joint to move the weight.

For example, do the barbell or PREACHER CURL, instead DUMBBELL CURLS. You want to do the FRENCH PRESS instead of ONE-ARM TRICEP PRESSES, LEG EXTENSIONS instead of LEG PRESSES, and so on. If you want to move on to more interesting workouts, then you can do so right after acquiring the physique you were aiming for. Although it’s nearly impossible to do “spot work,” you can eke out specific gains by alternating your routine and the reps/sets combinations.

For instance, when doing EZ-BAR BICEP CURLS, instead of doing 4 or 5 sets of 12 to 15 reps, do two sets of 21s; 21s for BICEP CURLS are when you do 7 reps of vertical to 90 degrees, then 7 reps of 90 degrees to the full contraction, and then finally 7 reps of the full motion… all without a break. That’s a burn that you won’t forget, and it’s a great way to shock you muscles if you’ve reach a plateau.

Your perseverance to stay on the program would be the most important key to achieve the body improvements that you want regardless of how hard it may be at the start.

Also, getting more than enough rest and eating right, actually eating more than ever have before.

Your diet is the most important thing whether you’re first starting out or a seasoned pro. Eating the right foods will help speed up the positive results the same way a wrong diet will only ruin the total effect of the program.

Let me leave you with one more thought. According to some of the best trainers, lifting weight should only be done after mastering bodyweight exercises.

For that reason, you may want to start out doing bodyweight exercises.

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