Top 6 Exercises for Building Muscle, Increasing Strength, and Losing Weight!
Posted: Saturday 19 May 2012 by Strength&Nutrition24/7 in Labels: Conditioning, Strength, Training
The BIG 6 Exercises
If you only had enough time to do a few exercises, these would be the go to exercises.
There are no better exercises then these for building muscle, strength, and losing weight!
As you know, I am a massive advocate for exercises that involve free weights and moving your body through space.
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Deadlifts.
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Beyond this, it is an incredible exercise for developing your muscles and creating wings that you could fly with. It is such an incredible exercise that it is commonly known as the upper body squat. The US military service academies have traditionally used the pull-up to assess the degree of physical fitness. Further, in terms of rehabilitation and the avoidance of injuries, it is so important to balance in push and pull exercises.
The parallel grip (neutral grip) chin/ pull up are the easiest on the shoulders and elbows and the one I recommend most. However, using the variety of grips is important since they place different emphasis. Doing them on rings is safest as it allows for the most natural movement but is also significantly more difficult.
Another way to make chin ups more difficult and simultaneously more elbow friendly is to use Fat Gripz on the bar. This however may reduce the amount of focus on the back and place most of the focus on your grip strength. Having good grip strength is important but the back strength should be your first priority.
Bench Press.
The bench press is an upper body staple. It is probably the most popular exercise in the gym today. It is often a battle to get your turn on the bench press at the local gym. There are several highly effective variations including the flat bench barbell press, flat bench dumbbell bench press, incline bench barbell press and incline dumbbell bench press.
Overhead Press.
This is the best shoulder development exercise. Forget all these shoulder raises. They mean nothing in comparison to the overhead press. On top of developing cannonball shoulders it helps strengthen your core. As with the bench press, there are numerous quality variations of the overhead press that can be used. Nearly all seated and standing dumbbell and barbell overhead presses are solid choices. You may also use single arm dumbbell press to really emphasize your core strength. Too much horizontal pressing and not enough overhead work will lead to beat up shoulders. Trust me, you don’t want that.
Rows.
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Interesting theory about why squats release such large amounts of testosterone
"...due to the crushing force of squats, the body fears it will be crushed and die, thus releasing massive amounts of hormones."