How to Increase Your Bench Press and Build Muscle Mass Fast
Everyone knows to build muscle up 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 now 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 definetely help add weit to your bench press.
Experiment with training your triceps completely seperately. More often than not muscle building programs will suggest that you train the triceps along with the chest. Try training them on their own for a change. Doing this allows you to attack them when they are fresh and really concentrate and focus on hammering them to stimulate 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 following the same routine for a number of weeks or months? time to change it up then. 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. Too much training for your chest muscles means it takes longer for them to recover and develop. 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 do not grow on the weight bench! Their growing time is when they are resting. If you don’t allow enough time to rest 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 have hit a chest muscle mass building plateau then have a break. Allow your body to fully recuperate and eradicate all the strains and return a week or so later doubly motivated.
Give your chest muscles a much more intense hit by doing negatives. Negatives are when you get the help from two spotters to intially aid you to press the weight upwards but who then let you take the full weight and lower it by yourself under control. We do this because you can actually lower more weight than you can lift. So if we can get the body used to lowering more weight this will help you get stronger for the lifting/effort phase. The lowering/negative phase also stimulates more muscle growth than the effort phase.
Check your diet. Are you consuming around 6 meals a day with at least 1 gram of protein for each pound of bodyweight that you have? If you are not then it may well be the case that you are limiting your gains by not following a muscle building diet strictly enough. In each meal try to get them divided as follows: 50% carbohydrate, 30% protein and the remainder can be compiled of fats. Take supplements if you can afford to like whey protein, essential fatty acids and multi-vitamins.
Ensure correct technique. Are you pressing correctly. Faulty technique can push the focus away from the chest muscles group and put you at a heightened risk of getting injured. Ensure you are not moving your feet up off the floor and that your grip is not too narrow, these are two mistakes that are easy to make.
By following the guidelines above you will be giving yourself the best chance to build muscle mass on your chest fast. Just do it!