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 much as two thirds of the complete muscle mass on your arms is made up of the tricep muscle. it is more than possible that under developed tris are stopping your bench press from increasing. The best exercises to build muscle mass on your triceps are using barbells and dumbells: close grip bench-presses and skull crushers. Less effective are isolation type exercises such as tricep press downs. They will certainly help improve your bench press.

Try training your triceps separately. Usually bodybuilding programs recommend that you train the chest in the same session as the triceps. Try training them on their own for a change. Doing so enables you to really shred them intensely and stimulate that muscle to grow. 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 doing the same old routine for months on end? 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. Too much training for your chest muscles means it takes longer for them to recover and develop. 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.

Decent rest. Your muscles don’t grow in the fitnes centre! At rest is when they grow. You won’t grow if you don’t allow enough time to grow. Of course do not return to the gym when your muscles are still sore and a fair guideline 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 hit a training plateau then consider taking a complete break. Allow your body to fully recuperate and eradicate all the strains and return a week or so later doubly motivated.

Give your chest a more intense workout 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 portion of the lift is know to trigger more muscle growth than the positive effort phase.

Do a diet review. Are you eating 5-7 meals a day with approximately 1 gram of protein per pound of body weight? If you are not then it is quite possible that you are restricting your gains by not adopting fully a muscle building diet. Each meal should be roughly 50% carbohydrate, 30% protein and the rest made-up of fats. Use supplements if you can such as whey protein, essential fatty acids and multi-vitamins.

Focus on your 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. Check that you are not constantly moving your feet up off the floor and that your grip is not too narrow or too broad, these are two mistakes that are easy to make.

By following the guidelines above you should be able to answer the question of how to get a big chest and you will be giving yourself the best chance to build up muscle on your chest fast. Go do it!

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