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 time proven classic mass builders are: bench press, pull ups, dead lifts, squats, 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 awesome exercises that are often overlooked yet work really well. Try and include them in your workouts now and again for variety. Variety provides new stimulus for your muscles to grow and prevents you from getting bored.
why not try using a jump rope and skipping, running on the beach or donkey raises for stimulating muscle growth. You will get a real burn in your calves and get good growth from running on sand and or from skipping using a jump rope. Calf muscles tend to respond better to sets in the higher rep ranges as they are used a lot everyday for walking. Donkey raises are when you place your toes on the edge of a 3-4 inch high block bend over to 90 degrees at the waist and rest your hands on a bard or bench at that height. A training partner or two then jump on to your back and you raise your body up and down by flexing your calf muscles. This exercise makes you use muscles surrounding the calves as stabilisers too making it more difficult than using a machine to train them.
Can you remember the last time you performed dips to hit your chest muscles? A classic mass builder for the chest muscle is dips which are an awesome workout for triceps too. For this exact exercise many older gyms have parallel bars. Different grips can be experimented with as they often form a v shape. This enables you to train a specific part of your chest muscle or tricep muscle really well.
Try performing stiff legged deadlifts to nail your hamstrings. This hamstring exercise is awesome yet seldom seen. 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. Keep control of the weight by ensuring that it is close to your legs whilst raising it and be warned that this exercise can make your hamstrings very sore for the following day.
Make use of bicep hammer curls for upper arm growth! The pal of your hand is kept facing in towards your body at all times, this is the only difference from regular curls. This directs much stress on to an inner bicep muscle giving it both thickness and size throughout and is named the brachialis muscle, the exercise also hits the main bicep muscle 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 noticed anyone hitting their quads with lunges in the weights room? These are great for providing mass and shap for the quad muscles. 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. A great alternative to 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 group of classic exercises in your thoughts change your routine around a bit to build more lean muscle mass.
