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?’. Of course i ti probably not the best measure of total body strength it does naturally have a very macho feel to it and of course is 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 more than likely that weak tris are restricting your bench press progress. 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 should definitely help notch up your bench press.
Try training your triceps separately. Mostly weight training programs sughgest that you hit the chest in the same session as the tricep muscles. Try training them on their own for a change. Doing this means that you can train them very inensely and trigger muscle growth in the process. 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 repeating the same old workout for months? time to mix it up then. Your muscle won’. 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. If you do too much and overtrain your chest then it can struggle to recover and find it hard to grow more. Do not focus on quantity rather go for intensity and quality instead. A short intense workout is much more effective than a long drawn out one.
Quality rest. Muscles are not about to grow whilst you are working out! They grow when they are resting. If you don’t give enough time for growing 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. Why not take a break if you hit a training plateau. Allow your body to fully recuperate and eradicate all the strains and return a week or so later doubly motivated.
Push your chest muscle harder by doing negatives on the weight bench. Negatives are when you get the help from two spotters to intially help you press the weight up but who the allow you to take the weight completely to lower it. 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 portion of the lift is know to trigger more muscle growth than the positive effort phase.
Double 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 is quite possible that you are restricting your gains by not adopting fully a muscle building diet. In each meal try to get the proportions of them to be 50% carbohydrate, 30% protein and the rest can be made up of fats. Take supplements if you have the money to, things like: essential fatty acids, whey protein and multi-vitamins are great starting points.
Focus on your technique. Are you pressing correctly. Poor technique can shift the focus away from the chest muscles and can also put you at increased risk of injury. Make sure you are not lifting your feet off the ground and that your hands are not too close together, these are two very common errors.
By following the guidelines above you will be giving yourself the best chance to build muscle mass on your chest fast. Go do it!
