Build Muscle with 3 Exercises

Are you skinny? Do you want bigger muscles? Then put down the Men’s Fitness routines and do some real exercises. Mainstream media has been the major downfall of successful weight training routines for years. They try to blind you with fancy exercises, and gibberish masked as scientific data, but in the long run you are still left with 13 inch arms and chicken legs. If you want real muscle you need to go back to the basics of weightlifting. All you need are three core exercises and you will be well on your way to building more muscle. If you were stranded on a desert island and all you had were three exercises to build muscle this is what they would be — Squat, Bench Press, and Deadlift.

The Squat is a top contender for the king of all exercises. During heavy squat workouts, testosterone release in the body has been shown to be dramatically increased over other leg exercises. What does this mean for you? Well, the more testosterone you can release throughout the body the more potential you have for muscle growth. Many people report that when they incorporate squats into their normal lifting routine, strength increases, also, occur for other exercises. The squat, when properly performed, is a total leg developer and not just a quadriceps builder. How many times have you heard that you should never squat past parallel? This is a myth that continues to be spread. The deeper you can squat, past parallel, the more you activate the hamstrings and glutes during the lift. If you are ever pressed for time during a leg workout, and can only do one exercise, squats should be what you choose.

If there was a squat for the upper body, it would be the Bench Press. If you want a bigger, more defined chest drop the dumbbell flies and cable crossovers with 10 pounds for 25 reps. Do a real upper body exercise. Bench press workouts effectively involve the pectorals, triceps, and anterior deltoids. The one downfall is most people perform this exercise wrong, and do not know how to target the chest. Instead, they receive more stimulation in the triceps and delts. These people are called “Front Delt Pushers”. To get the most out of the bench press, spend time on technique and contracting the pecs to lift the weight instead of the triceps and shoulders. You may have to lower the weight, and your ego, in order to improve your technique, but the overall improvement will be worth it.

Adding the Deadlift could be the best choice in improving your weight training routine. This is an exercise that has lost favor in mainstream gyms because, gasp, you have to pick weight up off the ground and set it back down. This sometimes causes a loud noise, so you may lose your gym membership. All joking aside, you need this exercise. Remember the contender for king of all exercises I mentioned earlier? Well, this is the other one. The deadlift, when performed correctly, targets the whole posterior chain of the body. With this exercise you can stimulate muscle growth from the traps all the way through the hamstrings. How many people do you know that does shrug after shrug, but still wonders why their traps don’t grow? Show me a guy that deadlifts over 400 pounds, and I’ll show you a guy that has no problem developing his traps. Heavy deadlifts add slabs of muscle to the backside that shrugs and hamstrings could only hope too. This is another exercise where technique comes first. Your best bet would be to record yourself performing the exercise, so you can better analyze your form. Once you have the form down, you will see your strength in the lift skyrocket.

There you have it; three exercises that can add meat to any skinny frame. You can effectively target 85% of the body’s musculature with the Squat, Bench Press, and Deadlift. Let’s rundown all the muscles you can hit with these — quadriceps, hamstrings, glutes, lower back, lats, rear delts, traps, anterior delts, pectorals, triceps, and more. I could continue the list, but you get the point. Three heavy compound movements can give you more growth than you ever imagined.