Muscles grow in response to shock, the shock that an exercise provides the muscles as well as your entire body. Growth Hormone and testosterone elevate and as you eat plenty of healthy food to keep the muscle fueled you will grow larger and more muscular.
There are many reasons people fail at growing muscle, and a bad training routine is one of the top reasons. Going to too hard or not hard enough is a major problem, with people not lifting heavy enough or simply training too frequently. Another major mistake is overlooking the statistically proven exercises that yield the best results and are heavily responsible for the massive physiques we see that make us want to train harder.
The exercises I am talking about are compound movements, movements that don’t over isolate any particular muscle group but place tremendous stress on your entire body, making them the most effective way to shock both your muscles and your body into growth.
Even more specifically I refer to ‘The Big Three’ – the 3 exercises sworn upon by most massive fitness professionals like Jason Ferruggia with proven results and huge muscles that are a testament to ‘The Big Three’.
The Big Three:
Squats
I once read the quote “squats are to legs what legs are to fitness”, often referred to as the king of all muscle building exercises. Too many people overlook leg training completely, and the squat is overlooked as just a leg building exercise. First of all, you can’t have a massive muscular upper body and twigs for legs – that’s just ridiculous.
The muscles in the legs need to be trained not only to avoid looking ridiculously skinny, but because training the legs produces more growth hormone and testosterone to give the body that extra push to grow solid muscle mass. Aside from just training the legs, squats also strengthen the hips and lower back, which helps prevent injuries. The entire upper body is at work to stabilise the weight up top, the arms, shoulders, chest and your core are hard at work just hold the weight in place. Why settle for working an isolated muscle growth when with the squat you can shock your entire system into growth!
Deadlift
Probably the oldest weightlifitng exercise around - there’s a bar on the ground, you pick it up.
It’s not quite as easy as it sounds though. Especially when you’re lifting huge amounts of weight much heavier than yourself. Like the squat, the deadlift is another exercise that hits the entire body, sending Testosterone and Growth Hormone through the roof! The deadlift is the only exercise that so effectively works your entire back and core, aswell as giving the legs and glutes a workout.
Although I highly recommend the deadlift, I wouldn’t recommend doing an extremely heavy session of 6 or less reps more than once a week.
Bench Press
“What d’ya bench?” This is one exercise I would say is rarely overlooked, and is usually the first exercise the novice lifter runs to in order to get bigger and stronger. The bench press works the chest, whilst also placing stress on the triceps and other stabilizing muscles. As the only exercise that directly targets the upper body, growing the chest and arms, bringing balance to “The Big Three”, it is imperative the bench press is performed in order maintain a proportional body (one without massive legs and a smaller upper body). The main mistake made is that the bench press is over emphasized and to get the results you want from it you should try to utilize it with the 2 above exercises in your weekly plan to get the best progress.
Utilizing all the above exercises in a reasonably short workout (keeping your session short can mean huge gains – read more here) is the key to shocking the entire body and boost testosterone levels for more effective muscle growth, especially when combined with plenty of healthy muscle building foods and adequate sleep.
For more information ob building muscle, check out our dedicated muscle building section here.
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