How to Increase Your Bench Press and Build Muscle Mass Fast

Everyone knows to build muscle mass one of the best exercises for the upper body is the bench press. One of the first questions you are likely to be asked by another bodybuilder 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 fast 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 may well be that under-developed triceps 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. Less effective are isolation type exercises such as tricep press downs. They should definitely help notch up your bench press.

Why not try training your triceps individually by themselves. Commonly, hitting the chest muscles is advised to be done in the same workout as tricep training. Try training them on their own for a change. Doing this allows you to attack them when they are fresh and really concentrate and focus on hammering them to stimulate growth. Do this for a number of weeks and see how much more poundage you can press.

Variety. have you been doing the same training session over and over again? time to switch things around a bit. 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. Overtraining 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.

Quality rest. Your muscles do not grow on the weight bench! They grow when they are resting. If you don’t allow then enough time to recover they ain’t going to get bigger. 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 workout for each muscle group, any more and you may be at risk overtraining.

Take a rest 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.

Give your chest a more intense workout by doing negatives. Negatives are when you find two spotters to intially aid you to press the weight but who then let you take the full weight and lower it by yourself under slow complete control. This is done because people are able to lower more than they can lift. Therefore if we can get the body lowering more weight it is probable that this will aid us for the effort phase also. The lowering/negative phase also stimulates more muscle growth than the effort phase.

Review your diet. Are you taking on board a minumum of 5 meals a day whilst consuming at least 1 gram of protein per each lb of bodymass? If you are not then it may well be the case that you are limiting your gains by not following a muscle building diet strictly enough. In each meal try to get them divided as follows: 50% carbohydrate, 30% protein and the remainder can be compiled of fats. Take supplements if you have the money to, things like: whey protein, essential fatty acids and multi-vitamins.

Ensure correct technique. Are you pressing correctly. Bad technique can move the focus away from the chest muscles and put you at a greater risk of getting injured. Ensure you are not moving your feet up off the floor and that your hands are not grasping the bar too closely together, these are two easy and often made errors.

By following the guidelines above you will be giving yourself the best chance to build muscle mass on your chest fast. Just do it!