photo credit: mrflip
The dozens of different variations of weight lifting exercises might get you confused as a beginning lifter new to strength training. When you look at most exercises they look effective especially if you’re given exercise illustrations and details on proper execution. They all look useful and effective to helping you achieve your body re-composition, fat loss, or muscle gaining goals. But chances are that you can’t spend a lot of time in the gym doing each of them.
You have to pick out the exercises that give you the most bang for your buck. If you’re wondering what the best exercises are for building strength and muscle, recognize that you have to incorporate the top four must-do movements: barbell squats, deadlifts, dips, and chin-ups.
These 4 movements are all free weight compound lifts that incorporates the major muscle groups of the body for a full body workout.
Let’s take a look at each one and its effectiveness:
1) Barbell Squats – Squats are probably the single most effective exercise for a bodybuilding program as it works over 75% of the body’s muscles alone with just that one single movement targeting the largest muscle groups: quads, buttocks, hamstrings, lower back, traps, abdominal, and calves. You perform the squat movement while standing so the underlying stabilizer muscles are also worked to a greater extent. This results in stronger joints, tendons, ligaments, and all the connective tissues of the musculo-skeletal system.
2) Deadlifts - This is the number one pulling exercise used heavily by powerlifters that works the same muscles as the squat and more. Deadlifts complement squats very well when combined with a push/pull/leg or upper/lower body split. Deadlifts also work well full body workouts. Squats are a quad dominant movement while deadlifts are a hip dominant lift. The former is a pushing exercise and the latter is a pulling movement.
3) Dips – This is the number one pushing movement involving the upper body. It is the upper body equivalent of the squat or deadlift. You can start doing dips with just your body weight or you can strap weight plates onto a weight belt or weight vest for extra resistance allowing for greater progression and progressive overload for attaining upper body pushing strength. If you can dip with lots of weight strapped on your waist, you’ll undoubtedly be strong with a large chest and beefy arms
4) Chin-ups - These complement dips as a vertical pulling exercise. Like dips, you may also attach additional resistance to a belt for greater mass and strength.
These four exercises allow you to move the most amount of weight in a given session. If you focus on progressive overload and improving your strength through these four movements, you’ll gain muscle mass. You’ll pound your muscles much more effectively and efficiently.
Implementing them into your schedule is not hard either. You can form a full body routine around just these four lifts and working them three times a week. Follow a Monday, Wednesday, Friday schedule with a 3×5 (sets x reps) or a 5×5 scheme. If that’s too much, drop it to two sessions per week or three workouts every 9-10 days. You don’t have to go by the week or monthly calendar. Go with a biweekly schedule if the initial 3 full body workouts prove too difficult. Often a beginning lifter might need extra rest, compared with seasoned veteran lifters, to improve and build up the work capacity to handle heavier weights, more sets, more reps, and overall volume.
Another option would be to periodize these four movements with a different volume approach. For example, start with a 3×13 set/rep structure using lighter weights for the first few weeks. Increase the poundage your use gradually and switch to a 5×5 or 6×4 scheme during the fifth or sixth week of your training cycle. The options are numerous. Train with these four exercises.
Train Hard. Train Safely. Train Smart.
If you have any questions or comments, don't hesitate to leave a comment below or email me at ZQH245@gmail.com or ZQH250@gmail.com
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