Best Bodybuilding Exercises

The chest is one of the most popular muscle groups to train for bodybuilding enthusiasts. Thick and powerful pecs top off any muscular physique nicely and they are an enjoyable muscle group to train.

The best bodybuiding exercise for the chest is the bench press. It's also the most popular weight training exercise of all. Most weight trainers will start their chest workouts with flat bench presses. However, for bodybuilding purposes you may want to start with incline bench presses, especially if you overdeveloped your lower pecs in comparison to your upper pecs. Besides the flat and incline versions, you can also do decline bench presses.

After you do barbell bench presses during your chest workouts, you can do sets of dips and dumbbell bench presses. Dips are a great alternative to decline bench presses. Dumbbell bench presses will allow you to get a deeper stretch in your pecs than the barbell versions.

The best chest exercises to finish off a workout with are dumbbell flyes and cable crossovers. Performing a couple of drop sets wth one of these exercises will allow you to end your workout with a pump.

The muscles of the upper back make up the largest muscle group of the body when you put them all together. They include the lats and the muscles in the middle of the upper back. You'll want to gain thickness in the middle upper back muscles and width and thickness in the lats for a muscular back.

The best bodybuilding exercises to build upper back width are pull-ups and cable pulldowns. It's better to do pull-ups than pulldowns since you are moving your body through space when you do them. However, it can be difficult to do very many pull-ups for many people. If you have this problem, you can have somebody assist you while doing pull-ups, use an assisted pull-up machine, or do cable pulldowns. Whether you do pull-ups or pulldowns, there are various ways you can grip the bar. Do sets of close underhand grip and wide overhand grip pull-ups and pulldowns for the best results.

To build more thickness in your upper back muscles, you must perform various row exercises. You can do barbell rows, dumbbell rows, and t-bar rows with free weights. Cable rows are also excellent, and you can do them with various grips to get the most out of your upper back workouts.

Building your shoulder, or deltoid, muscles is essential if you want your upper body to look wider. Of course, this will require you to perform the the best bodybuilding exercises for them. These include exercises that will help build overall muscularity in the shoulders and exercises for each individual head of the deltoids.

The best bodybuilding exercises to build overall size in the deltoids are overhead presses. You can do standing overhead presses with a barbell, seated military presses, or seated dumbbell presses.

To isolate each individual head of the deltoid muscles you need to do laterals with a dumbbells or cables. Do front laterals for the front deltoids, side laterals for the side delts, and rear laterals for the rear delts.

A lot of bodybuilders will train their trapezius muscle during their shoulder workouts. The best exercises for the traps are barbell or dumbbell shrugs and upright rows.

Most bodybuilders love training their biceps. They are an easy muscle to show off and training them can give you a nice pumped feeling in your upper arms.

All of the best bodybuilding exercises for the biceps involve curling a weight. You can use a barbell, EZ curl bar, or pair of dumbbells when you do curls. You should also do some sets of hammer curls to target the brachialis muscle.

Some excellent biceps exercises to do later in your workouts include preacher curls and incline dumbbell curls. Concentration curls and cable curls make for great finishers to a biceps workout.

The muscles on the back of the upper arms are the triceps. While they aren't as popular to train as the biceps, they actually make up more of the overall muscle size of the upper arms. You may not be able to see them as well as the biceps when you train them, but make no mistake - it's essential to build the triceps if you want bigger arms.

Some of the best bodybuilding exercises for the triceps involve bench pressing. Performing bench presses with a close grip or reverse grip will put more of the resistance on the triceps. You have to be careful not to hurt your wrists when doing either of these exercises.

There are various forms of triceps extensions you can do with a barbell, EZ curl bar, or dumbbells that will help you build the triceps. The most popular of these is probably the lying triceps extension, which are also known as skullcrushers. Another great way to do triceps extensions is while seated with both hands under one side of a dumbbell.

You should finish off your triceps with cable exercises. Cable pushdowns with a straight bar, curved bar, or rope are the best to do. A drop set or two of these exercises will finish off your triceps nicely.

Even though it's a relatively small muscle group, the lower back is one of the most important ones to train. A strong lower back is needed when you do exercises for other muscles, especially major exercises such as squats. Nothing will keep you from working out faster than a lower back injury.

The best weight training exercise for the lower back is the deadlift. It's a great exercise for building overall strength throughout the entire body as well. Always start your lower back workouts with them.

Another great exercise for the lower back muscles is the hyperextension. You should do them with no, or very light, extra weight.

If you want to build bigger leg muscles, you need to train your quadriceps. They are the group of muscles on the front of your thighs and contribute the most to your leg size.

The best bodybuilding exercise for the quadriceps muscles is the squat. It not only works your quads, but many other muscles such as the hamstrings and lower back. Of course free weight squats are the best to do, but if you have knee or lower back issues you can do other forms of it. You can do Smith machine squats, hack squats, and leg presses as alternatives to free weight squats.

Lunges are excellent for the middle of a quadriceps workout. You can do them with a barbell or dumbbells.

Leg extensions are a great finisher to a quadriceps workout. You can perform some drop sets of them to pump the quads at the end of a workout.

The muscles on the backs of the thighs are the hamstrings. While they aren't a very large muscle group, they still need to be trained so you have a balance between them and the quadriceps.

The top bodybuilding exercises for the hamstrings are straight legged deadlifts and leg curls. Straight legged deadlifts will allow you to get a nice stretch in the hamstrings. You can do leg curls while standing, seated, or lying, depending on what kind of machine you do them on. A drop set of leg curls is a great way to finish off a workout for the hamstrings.

The calves are the muscles on the backs of the lower legs. Their size depends a lot on genetics, but if you work hard, you can build your calves.

The best muscle building exercises for the calves are standing and seated calf raises. You need to do both of them for complete calf development. Both exercises are best done for high reps.

No weight training workout routine would be complete without training the abdominal muscles. The abs are among the most coveted muscles to develop because they are located in the center of the body and tend to catch the eye first.

The best abdominal bodybuilding exercises are crunches and leg raises. The crunches will target your upper abdominal muscles and the leg raises will target the lower abs. Other great ab exercises include decline sit-ups and ab roller exercises.

You should also do some training for your obliques when you do ab workouts. To do this you can twist when you perform ab exercises and do sets of side bends with dumbbells or cables.