Building Lean Muscle Mass: Little Known Exercises That Work
There are hundreds of different exercises you can do with free weights and resistance machines or with just your body weight to build up muscles. You should include mainly multi-joint compound exercises in your workout as they build muscle fastest. The most popular and effective of these are: dead lifts, squats, bench press, pull ups, shoulder presses and rows.
Whilst they are very effective your body needs to be constantly challenged in new and different ways if your goal is building lean muscle mass. Here are a few great exercises for different parts of the body that are often overlooked yet work. Try and include them in your workouts now and again for variety. new reasons for your muscles to grow and the prevention of boredom setting in are achieved by adding variation to your workouts.
why not try using a jump rope and skipping, running on the beach or donkey raises for stimulating muscle growth. making use of ajump rope for skipping and also running on a sandy place bear foot will place great pressure on your calves to grow. Calf muscles tend to respond better to sets in the higher rep ranges as they are used a lot everyday for walking. donkey raises involves placing your feet on the edge of a block of wood, weights disc or step bending over at the waist to 90 degrees and resting your hands on a solid surface for support. A training partner or two then jump on to your back and you raise your body up and down by flexing your calf muscles. stabiliser muscles all around the calve have to be used in order to perform these correctly making them more difficult.
When was the last time you did dips for your chest muscles? The entire chest region and triceps can be hit by doing dips. Many older gyms have installed parallel bars for when this exercise was really popular in the past. Often a v shape is formed which provides scope for different grips. This means that you can effectively target different areas of the chest and trciep muscles effectively.
What about doing stiff legged deadlifts to really punish your hamstrings. This exercise is really effective for the hamstrings yet used very little. The motion is the same as deadlifts but you must maintain straight legs throughout by bending at the waist, keeping a straight back and lifting the barbell upwards. Be warned however these reps can make you extremely sore the next day and also whilst lifting the weight ensure it is close in to your legs to maintain control.
Want big arms, try hammer curls! these are basically the same as normal curls with one significant difference, you must keep the palm of the hand facing towards the body at all times. This places great stress on the inner bicep muscle that gives it thickness and size throughout called the brachialis muscle whilst also still developing the main bicep too. Stand with your back straight and flat against the corner of a wall to prevent yourself from using moment to assist the movement for a real burn.
When was the last time you saw anyone do lunges in the gym? These are awesome for your quads providing both mass and shape. With a dumb bell in either hand take a large stride straight forwards and then bend both knees down to approximately 90 degress, return to the start position and do the same again on the other leg. Am awesome alternative to regular squats.
For creating muscle definition and for a superb aerobic workout why not try boxing padwork it is very effective for the hitting the entire upper body or do uphill sprints to shred your leg muscles or even get on an exercise bike for uphill intervals immediately following a leg workout. That is a real killer of a mass builder!
With those few exercises in mind go ahead and mix your program up a bit for more muscle mass.
