The most effective exercises continued…
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- Squats
- Leg press
The squat is the single best bodybuilding exercise in existence. It stresses nearly every muscle in your body, even the small muscles in your face if your intensity and lifting load is heavy enough.
The squat increases your metabolic rate and turns your metabolism anabolic. This releases anabolic hormones into your bloodstream, and allows your body to gain muscle in the upper body as well as your legs.
Some people are afraid of squatting because they’ve hurt themselves doing it. But I can assure you that anyone who got injured from doing squats didn’t learn to squat properly. Those who got hurt using proper technique are very few.
Knee pain is a common complaint from doing squats. The most common causes for this are;
- having your feet too close together,
- pointing your feet directly forward,
- not having enough flexibility in your hips or ankles,
- shifting your weight onto the balls of your feet when squatting,
- starting the downward motion with the knees, instead of the hips.
As a result, many people, even personal trainers, wrongly believe that full squats are dangerous, and that you should only do partial squats. But partial squat actually traumatize the knees more than full squats do.
Most people don’t realize that most knee or lower back pain is caused by poor technique from one of the reasons listed above.
Because you’re lifting to failure, you should always squat inside a power rack with safety pins or with a spotter.
When squatting, stand with your feet comfortably apart, toes pointing slightly outward, up to 30 degrees out. Your feet shouldn’t point directly ahead.
The weight should rest on the meaty part of your trapezius muscle, above your shoulder blades. Don’t rest it higher, on your spine. It’ll eventually cause neck problems. And don’t rest it lower on the top of your delts either. That position will cause you to lean forward.
Go through the motion as you read the following instructions. It’ll help you see, and remember the proper technique more easily.
Take a deep breath and start your downward motion with your hips, not with your knees.
It’s natural to lean forward on your way down. The thing to keep in mind is to keep your spine stiff, in its natural curvature during the whole exercise. Don’t lean forward so much, that your balance shifts to the front of your feet.
The easiest way to keep proper balance, is to keep your head back throughout the movement, keep looking straight in front of you, don’t look down.
If you’re overly leaning forward, it’s sometimes a symptom that your hamstrings and glutes aren’t as strong in proportion to your quads. You can correct this imbalance, do stiff-legged deadlifts to strengthen the back of your thighs.
As you go down, focus on keeping your balance in the middle of your feet, between the balls of the feet and your heels. Keep your balance off your toes, it’ll minimize knee strain and injury.
Go down as low as you can. How low you go is limited by the flexibility in your lower back. You should only go as low as you can while keeping the natural curvature in your lower spine.
When you’re coming out of the squat, keep your gaze slightly upward. Don’t let your hips rise faster than your head, making you lean forward. Your head should rise equally with your hips.
Hold your breath to stabilize your back and protect lower spine.
Push from your heels, never shift your weight forward onto your toes.
Also, keep your knees apart, in line with your feet. It’ll keep the stress on your muscles, and off your joints. All too often you see people buckle their knees toward each other on the way up. Doing this puts an enormous amount of sideways strain on the knee, and is a cause of countless knee problems among athletes. You’ll get the most out of your squats, by keeping your knees in line with your feet at all times.
If you’re having difficulty squatting, or need more information, you can find some great videos about squatting on the Internet. Just type “squat rx” in the search box on YouTube, and watch the videos in order starting with Squat Rx #1, and so on.
- Stiff-legged (hamstring) deadlifts
- Leg curls
Stiff-legged deadlifts are one of the best hamstring building exercises. They also put a lot of stress on your glutes and spinal muscles, so use proper technique when doing them.
Many lifters do this exercise wrong by bending their back during the motion. To do it correctly, bend forward at the waist, keeping your back flat, your knees rigid in a slightly bent position.
Lower yourself slowly until your hamstrings are completely extended their full length. You should feel a stretch in your glutes and hamstrings. Look directly forward while you’re going down and coming up. This’ll help keep the natural arch in your lower back.
Some people have a lot of flexibility in the back of their thighs, and need to stand on a block because the Olympic plates on the barbell are so large, that they touch the floor before the full range of motion is finished.
Straighten up by using your glute and hamstring strength until you’re standing upright again.
If you aren’t feeling enough of a workout with this exercise, put small plates under your toes while doing the exercise. Keeping your toes raised this way will put more tension on your hamstrings. That’s because stiff-legged deadlifts put the most tension on you hamstrings when you’re fully bent over. Keeping your toes raised helps put maximum tension on your hamstrings.
- Barbell preacher curls
- Incline seated curls
- Standing biceps curls
Barbell preacher curls are the most effective biceps exercise. You’ll often see lifters using an E-Z (curved) bar when doing curls. E-Z curl bars are less effective at building large biceps because they partially rotate your grip inward. This decreases the stress on your biceps and activates more of your forearm muscles.
Incline curls are more effective than standing curls because they stretch your biceps more.
Standing barbell curls are effective when you plan on using larger weights, like during the strength workout cycle. Grip the bar with your hands shoulder width apart. If you use a narrower grip, you’re putting more stress on the long, outer head of your biceps. A wider grip will put more stress on the inner, shorter head of the biceps.
By using a shoulder width grip, you’ll work both heads of the biceps. As a result, you’ll be able to build maximum mass and lift more weight.
Stand with the dumbbells hanging at your side, palms facing inwards, toward your legs. (You can also do dumbbell curls seated at the end of flat bench.)
As you lift, rotate the dumbbell so that your palm is facing up, toward your face.
Rotating your wrists as you lift the dumbbells contracts the biceps more than when you’re doing barbell curls. They are a good exercise to do during your growth workout cycle.
- Lying triceps extensions
- Triceps pressdowns
- Dips
- Narrow-grip presses
- Seated triceps extensions
Most people don’t realize that the triceps are a larger muscle group than the biceps, and make up a large portion of your upper arm thickness. It’s amazing how often you see people blast their biceps in the quest for 20 inch guns, but neglect their triceps almost completely.
Unlike your biceps, your triceps make your arms look massive when your arms aren’t flexed. Whenever you hear a person comment on how huge someone’s arm are, you can bet it’s his triceps creating that effect.
The best way to build large triceps is to do exercises that let you use the largest possible weight.
Lying triceps extensions are a great exercise to work your triceps from the elbow all the way to your lats. And it’s easiest to do them with an E-Z curl bar. Use a narrow, less than shoulder width grip.
While keeping your elbows pointing up, lower the weight with control toward your forehead, (hence the nickname ’skull crushers.’) But don’t actually have the bar touch your head. Then, using your triceps push the weight up to a fully extended position. This is the one exercise you want lock out your joints (elbows) to get peak contraction out of the exercise.
A common mistake when you extend to the top, is to end up with the weight directly overhead. This takes the stress off your triceps, and puts a lot of the weight-bearing force on your bones and joints.
Instead, angle your arms so when you lock out no top, the weight is up behind the top of your head, with your arms at an angle. Keeping your elbows at this angle will make sure your triceps don’t rest at the top.
Another variation of triceps extensions is to do them seated or standing. These positions stretch the triceps more, but you also need to be more flexible to do them. Make sure to keep your elbows in when doing them.
Narrow grip presses are done similarly to regular bench presses, but put a large proportion of the stress on your triceps. The narrower your grip on the bar, the more stress you take off the pecs and put on the triceps.
Your grip should be narrower than your shoulders. If you find it hard to balance an Olympic bar during this exercise, use an E-Z curl bar. It’ll let you have a narrower grip without worrying about balancing the weight.
It’s important to keep your elbows close to your sides so you keep the stress as much as possible on your triceps and off your pecs and shoulders. You’ll find that your elbows may want to go out as your triceps get tired. Your pecs are trying to take over. Keep good exercise form, and keep your elbows in.
- Wrist curls
- Hammer curls
- Reverse grip curls
Many exercises depend on the strength of your grip. Some lifters use straps while doing rows or deadlifts to make up for having weak grips. But the best way to handle the problem is to build up your forearms.
The most effective exercise for your forearms are wrist curls. Do them during your strength workout cycle, not during the growth cycle. There are two versions of wrist curls you can do.
This is best done by picking the bar off a rack. You can go really heavy with this exercise since your wrist flexors are in optimum position during this exercise.
Let the bar pull your wrists downward, and roll out of your palm, down to your fingers. Raise it again by rolling it up into your palm. And finish the upward motion with your forearm strength, curling your wrists for peak contraction.
Sit on the end of a flat exercise bench with your forearms resting on your lap. Hold the bar with your palms up, with your wrists and hands hanging over the end of your knees. Hold the bar with your thumbs underneath, with the rest of your fingers.
To build size in the forearms, do hammer curls or reverse grip curls. Do these exercises during your growth workout cycle, not during the strength cycle. The hammer curls are best tone with dumbbells, and the reverse grip curls with an Olympic bar, using a shoulder-width grip.
- Standing calf raises
- Seated calf raises
Calves are one of the hardest worked muscles in our body. If you weigh 200 pounds, each of your calves helps lift that much weight with every step you take.
Bodybuilders often consider their calves to be the hardest muscles to train. But when you consider that they already lift a relatively heavy weight each day, it’s easy to see why. It takes a lot of weight to shock them into growth.
Go heavy when you train your calves. That’ll be your mission during the strength workout cycle. If your bodyweight is 200 pounds, then you’ll have to work up to using at least that much additional weight to shock them into growth. Concentrate on doing the full range of motion when you’re doing calf raises.
Standing calf raises are best for building mass in your upper calves. You can do them holding dumbbells in each hand, with a barbell on your traps (like when you’re doing squats)… or on a squat or calf machine.
Seated calf raises directly target the deeper, soleus muscle responsible for the overall width and thickness of your calves.
If you’re working out at home or don’t have a seated calf machine available to you, do this exercise with a barbell. Simply sit on bench with a barbell resting on your thighs near your knees. Put the balls of your feet on a block (of wood) so you can lower your heels and extend your calves fully.
Lower Abs (easiest to hardest)
- Reverse crunches
- Vertical leg thrusts
- Hanging knee raises
Upper Abs
- Crunches on exercise ball
- Vertical leg crunch
- Cross-knee (twisting) crunches
Full Abs
- Bicycle crunch
- Vacuums
Unlike your other muscles, you don’t want huge abs or a large waist. Instead, you’re looking for a tight six-pack with a narrow waist. So you train your abs differently than you do the rest of your body.
You do ab exercises with your body weight alone, and you do a lot more reps than you would for the other body parts. Keep the rep range 15 – 30 reps. Once you can do 30 reps of an exercise, pick a harder one from the list above.
The secret to building awesome abs is to exhaust the muscle in a progressive manner. And to superset the exercises together so you blast every section of the muscle effectively.
You can’t isolate your lower or upper abs, but you can do exercises that will focus the stress on one of the two areas.
The most effective way to develop your abs muscles is to work them progressively from the bottom up, in a superset.
You start by exhausting your lower abs with the first exercise. Then you work your upper abs with the next exercise. And finally, you do an exercise that targets the whole region at once. You don’t take any breaks between these exercises. They make up one superset.
With abs, you aren’t concerned with time under tension like you are with the other body parts. Remember, you aren’t trying to make your abs huge. So do your ab exercises using regular tempo, the way you normally would.
This is a two part exercise done lying on your back.
- Do a lying leg raise, with your knees slightly bent.
- When your legs are pointing straight up, thrust your hips up, raising your feet higher toward the ceiling.
Lower your legs to the start position and repeat.
Hanging knee raises are one of the toughest ab exercises you can do. If you haven’t done them before, strengthen your abs first with reverse crunches or one of the easier exercises for your lower abs.
You do this exercise by hanging from a chin-up bar. Slowly raise your legs, bending your knees on the way up. Bring your knees up to your chest in a controlled motion.
Lower your legs and repeat. Do this exercise slow enough to keep yourself from swinging your body back and forth.
Cross-knee crunches are done similarly to regular ab crunches, except you have your feet in the air, and you twist on the way up, alternating sides each time.
According to the latest studies, the bicycle crunch is the most effective exercise for targeting your abs.
Lay flat on your back with your lower back pressed to the ground as if you’re doing a crunch.
Put your hands beside your head. Bring knees up to about 45-degree angle and slowly go through a bicycle pedal motion.
Touch your left elbow to your right knee, then your right elbow to your left knee.
The stomach vacuum used to be a popular exercise in the 1970’s and even the early 80’s. It was part of Arnold’s ab repertoire, and contributed greatly to his compact midsection and abs. If you look at any photos of top bodybuilders of that time, and compare them to today’s pros, you’ll see a definite difference in the waistline. Most professionals today simply don’t have the compact abs that were so common a few decades ago.
This is the best exercise to shrink your waist in the shortest amount of time. You can shrink your midsection by as much as 4 inches in a few weeks.
Stomach vacuums are an isometric exercise. That means you tense your abs and hold the position without moving them.
Start in a sitting position, bent slightly forward with your hands on your knees. Exhale all the air out of your lungs, and suck in your abdominals as much as you can. Hold it for 20 to 30 seconds and relax. That is one rep-set.
Do as many of these as the number of reps you are doing for your other exercises that day. But unlike your other exercises, don’t vary the rest period between your vacuum rep-sets. After each one, just relax for a moment, take a few breaths until you’re ready, and repeat.