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.

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.

Lower Back Workouts

  Any serious weight trainer needs to perform lower back workouts regularly to avoid injuries and lift more on weight training exercises for other muscles. A weak lower back will negatively affect you on many major exercises, deadlifts and squats in particular. If you don’t have a strong lower back you will also be way more likely to hurt yourself lifting, even if you aren’t using much weight.

  The best weight training exercise to strengthen the lower back muscles is the deadlift. You should always start a lower back workout with them. Good mornings are a rarely used exercise for the lower back but is a good one to do after deadlifting. Hyperextensions should be done for high reps with no or little weight and are a great finisher to a lower back workout.

  Try a workout like this to build muscle and strength in your lower back:

Deadlifts (1 or 2 sets of 12-15 reps on light day, 2 or 3 sets of 8-12 reps on medium day, 3 or 4 sets of 3-8 reps on heavy day)

Good mornings (1 or 2 sets of 15-20 reps on light day, 2 sets of 10-15 reps on medium day, 2 or 3 sets of 5-10 reps on heavy day)

Hyperextensions (1 or 2 sets of 20-30 reps during each lower back workout to finish off with).

  This workout should allow you to strengthen your lower back without overtraining as long as you get enough rest between workouts. You may want to try your deadlift one rep max every now and then on your heavy day to test your strength.