Everyone knows to build muscle up one of the best exercises for the upper body is the bench press. One of the first questions you are likely to be asked by another bodybuilder is ‘how much can you bench press?’. Whilst it may not be the best measure of overall strength it does have a certain macho feel to it and a big bench press is certainly very impressive. So lets cut to the chase and find out how to build muscle now and get a bigger bench press:

Grow your triceps. As much as two thirds of the complete muscle mass on your arms is made up of the tricep muscle. it is more than possible that under developed tris are stopping your bench press from increasing. The best exercises to build muscle mass on your triceps are using barbells and dumbells: close grip bench-presses and skull crushers. Isolation exercises like tricep press-downs are less effective. They can certainly aid in increasing your benchpress.

Try training your triceps separately. Commonly, hitting the chest muscles is advised to be done in the same workout as tricep training. Try training them on their own for a change. Doing so means you can hit them when they are completely fresh and really rip them to pieces and trigger muscle growth. Do this for a number of weeks and see how much more poundage you can press.

Variety. have you been following the same routine for a number of weeks or months? time to mix it up then. After your muscles have done the same workout a few times, they have already adapted to it and therefore the need to grow has been removed. Keep changing things, they can be subtle changes like altering the grip width or reversing the order of your routine or they can be larger changes like doing super sets, compound sets and so on, these will give you a real pump by the way.

Make sure you are not doing too much! While with most things in life more is better, in muscle building this is not quite true. Overtraining your chest muscles means it takes longer for them to recover and develop. Instead of focussing on quantity, focus on technique and intensity. A short intense workout is much more effective than a long drawn out one.

Quality rest. Muscles are not about to grow whilst you are working out! They grow when they are at rest. If you don’t give enough time for growing then you simply won’t grow. Of course do not workout again when your muscles are still, a fair rule of thumb is to limit yourself to 6-9 sets each session for each muscle group, any more and you risk overtraining.

Take a rest from training. Try taking a break if you reach a training plateau. let your body fully recover, get rid of all the niggles aches and pains and then comeback fresh a week or two later with renewed energy and motivation.

Use negatives as a form of pushing your chest muscle harder during a bench press workout. Negatives are when you find two spotters to intially aid you to press the weight but who then let you take the full weight and lower it by yourself under slow complete control. This is done because people are able to lower more than they can lift. Therefore if we can manage to get the body lowering more weight it is likely that this will help us on the effort phase also. The lowering phase is proven to trigger more muscle growth than the lifting phase.

Review your diet. Are you eating 5-7 meals a day with approximately 1 gram of protein per pound of body weight? If you are not then it is quite possible that you are restricting your gains by not adopting fully a muscle building diet. In each meal try to get the proportions of them to be 50% carbohydrate, 30% protein and the rest can be made up of fats. Take supplements if you can afford to like whey protein, essential fatty acids and multi-vitamins.

Focus on your technique. Are you pressing correctly. Faulty technique can push the focus away from the pectoral muscle group and place you at a heightened risk of getting injured. Ensure you are not moving your feet up off the floor and that your hands are not grasping the bar too closely together, these are two easy and often made errors.

By following the guidelines above you should be able to answer the question of how to get a big chest and you will be giving yourself the best chance to build up muscle on your chest fast. Just do it!