Weight Training Tips and Articles

Great Weight Training Exercises For Building Overall Strength

  Most weight trainers know the best exercises for building more overall strength. Bench presses, rows, pull-ups, military presses, squats, and deadlifts are all great exercises that force you to utilize many different muscles. However, there are some exercises that you don’t see lifters doing at the gym to often these days that you should try - power cleans and clean and presses.

  To do power cleans you take a barbell and lift it from the floor to in front of your neck. You’ll need to use your legs and lower back to get the barbell off of the floor. when you get weight up you’ll have to quickly squat your legs down and flip your wrists back to get the weight to in front of your neck, then get back into a standing position before putting the weight back on the floor. This great weight training exercises will work your legs, lower and upper back, as well as your shoulders.

The clean and press is the same as a power clean except that you lift the weight overhead. This one is awesome for your shoulders. Use you leg strength to get the weight overhead.

The great thing about both of these exercises is that you’ll use many different muscles and get a nice testosterone boost from performing them. You’ll also raise your metabolism. If you’re not afraid of some hard work, you should give them a try.

Heavy Duty Weight Training

  One of the more unique weight training routines is the Heavy Duty routine. It’s an extremely low set, high intensity routine. 1970s bodybuilder Mike Mentzer created Heavy Duty with the belief that most bodybuilders of the time were training way too much - some were doing 3 or 4 hour workouts. He advocated much shorter workouts with a few very high intensity sets per muscle group with plenty of rest to avoid ever overtraining. In his heyday, former Mr. Olympia Dorian Yates used a variation of Heavy Duty.

  A Heavy Duty routine calls for as little as 1 or 2 sets per exercise and only a few exercises per muscle. Every set must be done to failure and possibly even beyond it with forced rep and other high intensity techniques. With the set count so low, only major compound exercises should be done.

  To do a Heavy Duty weight training routine effectively you really need to know your body and have the ability to get a lot out of each and every set you do. It’s not a good idea for a beginner to try Heavy Duty since they are still trying to learn proper exercise form and how their body reacts to weight training. A good time to try Heavy Duty would be when you feel you’ve been overtraining for a while. If your body feels beat up and you weight train almost every day for hours at a time you could give Heavy Duty a try to get more recovery and allow your body to “catch up” and build more muscle and strength.

Building Upper Back Thickness

  The upper back contains many muscles and if you put them together it makes it the largest muscle group of the body. For many weight trainers it’s a pain to train the upper back since you can’t see the muscles working and all of the exercises for it involv pulling rather than pushing. However, for anyone who wants more overall muscularity and strength building thickness in the upper back must be done. You also don’t want very developed pecs and an average upper back as it may negatively affect your posture.

  The best exercises for building upper back thickness are rows. They can be done many different ways - with barbells, dumbbells, cables, or machines. The good old bent over barbell row is great for thickening the upper back. When you do them you should have your body at around a 45 degree angle to the floor with your lower back arched rather than having your upper body parellel to the floor with your back bent. Focus on contracting the muscles of the upper back for a second or 2 when you pull the barbell to your abdomen area. Another great trick to use on barbell rows is to do them with an underhand grip. This will help you build thicker lats (former Mr. Olympia Dorian Yates used this exercise and he had some of the thickest lat muscles ever seen).

  Another great way to use a barbell for rowing is to do t-bar rows. To do them put a barbell on the floor and load weights on only one end of it, then bend over and put both hands close to the end where the weight is and pull it to your chest/abdomen area. Try it to work the upper back muscles from  different angle.

  Dumbbell rows will allow you to train one side of your upper back at a time. Use a bench to support the side that isn’t lifting and pull the dumbbell from the floor up to the side of your body.

  While free weight rowing is superior for building more upper back thickness, cable rows certainly have their place. You can do them towards the end of an upper back workouts or even use them as your primary rowing exercise if you’ve lifted for a while and have already built up a lot of muscle in your upper back. Rowing on a cable machine will allow you to try different grip ranges to hit the upper back from different angles.