6 Pack Abdominals

Posts Tagged ‘bench press’

  

So, how much can you bench? It is one of the most frequently asked questions around the country by gym enthusiasts. In fact the amount you can bench is a great yardstick for over all strength and is probably the best way to gain muscle mass on your upper body and therefore the exercise has reached almost mythical status. So in this article we will provide the outline of three time proven tips for increasing your bench press.

1) Perform Drop Sets. These are great for providing your chest muscle with new and unique stimulus to grow. To do these simply perform your bench-press exercise as you normally would and when you can not do any more simply take off a weight disc and do as many more as you can. Then reduce the weight once more and pump out as many more as you possibly can. Keep stripping the bar in this manner until there is very little weight left or until your muscles are not able to perform any more. This is a highly intense method that will in all likelihood leave you sore for a good few days. Make sure your protein intake is high to help build the muscles back stronger for the next few days.

2) Stop training your chest. Instead train your triceps on their own. You can really focus on increasing the strength of your triceps by working out like this. Once you have done this for 3-4 weeks return to your regular bench-pressing workout and you will are highly likely to top your previous best bench-press. This is due to the fact that your chest will have had a really good rest period to completely recover from all of your previous workouts and also your triceps will now possess greater strength. Because you triceps take a great deal of the work load during benchpressing it is obvious that you will be able to press more if you strengthen your tricep muscles.

3) Ten Sets of Ten. This is one more intense and tough technique, indeed Arnold Schwarzenegger was a big fan of this technique. Basically you benchpress as much weight as you can handle for ten reps and then complete another ten repetitions. Proceed once more until you have finally completed ten sets of ten repetitions each. You should be lowering the weight gradually from one set to the next and you’ll probably be needing 2-3 minute breaks in between each set. The idea of this is to really give your chest muscles some new stimulus to grow. Once more expect to be particularly sore for maybe a week or so following this workout but also expect increase your maximum bench-press on your return to the gym. This is perhaps the fastest way to gain muscle on your chest if done correctly nd is great no no nonsense muscle building.

OK, I hope you found that useful so why not go ahead and give those tips a try in your next pecs workout.

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Everyone knows to build muscle mass one of the best exercises for the upper body is the bench press. Definetely one of the questions most bodybuilders want to know the answer to is: how much can you bench press?’. Whilst it may not be the best measure of overall strength it does have a certain macho feel to it and a big bench press is certainly very impressive. So lets cut to the chase and find out how to build muscle fast 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 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. Isolation exercises like tricep press-downs are less effective. They will certainly help improve your bench press.

Why not try training your triceps individually by themselves. 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 repeating the same old workout for months? time to switch things around a bit. 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 are not going to grow in the gym! They grow when they are resting. If you don’t allow then enough time to recover they ain’t going to get bigger. 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 rest from training. if you have hit a chest muscle mass building plateau then have a 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 two spotters (gym partners) help you press the weight up but then let you lower it under full control. We do this because you can actually lower more weight than you can lift. Therefore if we are able to make the body lower more weight it is probable that this will aid us for the lifting phase too. The lowering/negative phase also stimulates more muscle growth than the effort phase.

Review your diet. Are you eating 5-7 meals a day with approximately 1 gram of protein per pound of body weight? 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 the proportions of them to be 50% carbohydrate, 30% protein and the rest can be made up of fats. Take supplements if you have the money to, things like: essential fatty acids, whey protein and multi-vitamins are great starting points.

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. Make sure you are not lifting your feet off the ground and that your hands are not too close together, these are two very common 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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