Muscle Building Exercises

Here are some of the best muscle-building exercises out there:

Squat: by some this is considered to be the “king” of all exercises, and for good reason. Squats are a whole-body, compound movement that target the biggest muscles in your body: your leg muscles.

Heavy squats can release hefty amounts of testosterone and growth hormone into your body that will obviously help you to build more muscle.

In fact, squats are so good at building muscle that in the old days of bodybuilding, there used to be a bulking program made up of only 20-rep “breathing” squats. The idea here was to perform squats for 20 reps to the breaking point without taking any breaks between the reps; you could only “breathe” in-between each rep to keep going.

Deadlifts: another exercise considered to be the “king” (or queen?) of all exercises. The deadlift, like the squat, is a whole-body movement that forces you to use a lot of muscles in coordination to perform the lift correctly. Deadlifts, however, do not place a huge burden on the quads but rather on the hamstrings, biceps, lats, and specially the lower back.

Kettlebell instructor and exper strength coach Pavel Tsatsouline has said that most people should perform deadlifts instead of squats, because most individuals don’t know how to perform the latter properly, while they do know how to deadlifts properly.

If you want to see the full power of deadlifts, I recommend you search for pictures of Franco Columbu’s back. Franco had some of the biggest lats in bodybuilding. Arnold even called him the “bat” once. According to Franco, he developed his back to such an extreme extent byperforming heavy deadlifts.

So, if you haven’t added deadlifts to your muscle-building arsenal, what are you waiting for?

Pull-ups: for those of you who do not have weights lying around, this will be a great exercise for you. Pull-ups are considered to be the “king” of all upper body exercises; yes, even the “holy” bench press cannot compete with the power of pull-ups.

Why are pull-ups so powerful? Pull-ups force you to contract your entire upper body, specially the lats, which are the biggest muscles in your upper body. Your forearms, biceps, triceps, shoulders, pecs, abs, and your entire back will be tested with this exercise.

Go back to your high school PE class, if you want. I still remember how many of my classmates could do tons of push-ups but when it came to pull-ups, most guys could only perform one or two.

This is because pull-ups are a tough exercise. If you are still doubting their effectiveness, you should check out what gymnasts do on the horizontal bars.

Gymnasts have been performing pull-ups since they were little, and look at their amazing V-shaped backs and strong arms!