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I recently published an article called “9 Tips to build muscle fast”. Some if not all of the nine tips needed expanding on to give more useful information, but this wasn’t possible due to lack of space. In this series of articles I’m going to go a bit more in depth. Let’s look at exercise selection. You need to focus on compound movements, as these stress the maximum amount of muscle in the shortest time. One of the main reasons that unsuccessful bodybuilders spend huge amount of time in the gym, with precious little to show for their efforts is through doing the wrong movements too often. You only need choose the exercises you do from a very small selection. Let me elaborate on that, because it’s crucial to your understanding of the thinking behind successful weight training. We need major lower and upper body compound exercises. You need one or better still two major compound lower body movements - ideally you‘d perform these exercises once a week, for two work sets after warm up sets. Assuming that you have no physical restrictions, I’d recommend either the squat or the dead lift, plus the leg press - so to be clear on this, squat and leg press or dead lift and leg press. The squat and the dead lift are universally recognised as the two best and most productive weight training exercises you can possibly do - those two movements have added more muscle to any top bodybuilder who ever lived than any other exercise. So why not the squat and the dead lift? The simple answer is that as you get up towards your very top weights, it’s just too demanding to recover from doing both in one cycle. If you’re one of the lucky ones who can train both exercises really hard, then my advice is to do both, but for most of us, it’s too much. Certainly at the beginning of a cycle you can squat and dead lift, but eventually it will just wipe you out. Find out which suits your body best, and concentrate on that exercise. The leg press is a terrific exercise that you can use to really hammer your quads, but it’s not a total body movement like the dead lift or squat. I reckon it’s possible to do the leg press and one of the total body movements throughout the length of a cycle, to really add some beef to your body, without the danger of overtraining that can lead to getting sick, and even worse picking an injury up. So squat or dead lift, and leg press should be the core of your lower body training. Throw in the calf raise and that’s the lower body sorted. Upper body - choose from bench press, overhead press, chin, dip, shrug and the one arm dumbbell row. These are the best upper body mass builders. I’d pick one of the presses, the chin and the shrug, and the row, but that’s my preference. Here’s the logic; These are all major muscle builders, and it’s not possible to do them all to the max in a routine, because recovery is compromised. Now think of exercises as pushing and pulling movements. The presses and the dip are all pushing movements, the shrug and chin (or pull up) are pulling exercises. It’s generally easier to go push/pull than push/push or pull/pull. For example, bench press then overhead press is push/push. As they both stress very similar muscle groups, if you follow one with the other then the performance of the second exercise will suffer, and maybe the first exercise as well, because you might be keeping something back for the second exercise. By contrast, bench press then chin is push/pull, and you should be able to train both movements harder, because the exercises stress the muscles in different ways. The shrug departs a little bit from the other movements - first, it’s much more short range, as the bar only moves a few inches once you’re in position at the start, and it works the back harder than either of the two presses. Ideally do it in a power rack with the bar set on pins at the start position - failing that, you’ll have to dead lift the bar up to the start position. So one of the presses, the chin and shrug should be possible, or the dip, chin and shrug would work too. I’d never leave the l-fly out, as it keeps the shoulders healthy. This arrangement works for me, what really matters is what works for you. As a general rule, if your gifted at an exercise, do that. You may be really good at the pressing movements, if so, do that - ignore any fool who tells you that you might become muscle bound. Have the courage of your convictions. Add some form of crunch or leg raise for the stomach muscles and you won’t need much else. You could split the exercises into two workouts - either lower body/upper body, or whatever works well for you. Good luck. Ged McCabe has put together a complimentary 21 page report, “The 15 things you must know about designing your bodybuilding routine” plus a complimentary 2 hour MP3 recording. NEW! - Now available as a video presentation! To download instantly, visit; This is a link to my site
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