8 Most Effective Exercises for Gaining Muscle

Are you doing the right exercises to actually build muscle?

new set design here or are we arm wrestling? What is this? I’m always thinking, but if you want to arm wrestle, I’m down. I’ll arm wrestle you. All right, let’s go.

Let’s go. Ready? One, two, three, go. Oh, Jesus, Jesse. All right, I’m not going to embarrass myself.

I’m getting there. That actually brings us right to the topic of the video. So, Jesse’s obviously put on some size and strength. What if you wanted to do that? What if you wanted to get bigger?

What are the best exercises, right? the ones with the most bang for your buck that you could possibly do. Follow in the footsteps of young Jesse here to actually pack in some size. Well, we’re going to cover those today. And I’m not just going to show you what those selections are, but I’m going to take you through them with Jesse so you can see the finest points exactly how to do them to maximize the effectiveness of each of those that you’re doing.

Sound good? Sounds great to me. Let’s get it going. So, first up, we start where everybody wants to start if they admit it or they don’t, and that’s is they just want to build bigger biceps, like the guns, like Jesse did. Okay.

So, for me, there’s nothing more effective at building big biceps than a barbell curl. It was a staple exercise for me when I first started out. It should be a staple exercise for everybody out there who wants to build bigger biceps. Because even though we know that there are compound exercises, pulling exercises like a row, some people will swear that they’re the so great for building your biceps, that’s not true. They’re not going to build bigger biceps more effectively than an actual straight barbell curl.

But how do you do them to get the best and bang for your buck out of it? You got to do them right. Jesse, pick up the barbell. Here’s what I want you guys to focus on. Two things to do this really, really, really, really well.

The first thing is instead of think of curling this bar up, I want to think you to think about lifting it up straight to the sky. So what does that mean? My focus is on my wrists and my hands. So if I think about the flat part of my hand going up towards the ceiling like a waiter would hold the tray. Yep.

Then what happens is you take a little bit of the forearms out of it because they’re bent back a little bit. Not to overly stress the wrist joint, but just to allow the forearm to be a little bit out of it and you’re lifting straight up to the sky. Do you feel that? Yes, sir. All right.

Now, that’s the first thing you can do, right? So, if you’re just lifting, you’re thinking about lifting straight up in the air. It’s going to take care of that arc. Turn one side to the side for one repetition if you can. Just about there.

So, I can still see with the plate. Now, go ahead and do one more. As you’re lifting, it’s going straight up towards there, but you can see what stress it puts on the biceps. All right, for rest for one second. The next thing that would be really, really important when you’re doing the curl is to focus on how you’re moving the weight through space.

Not just on the way up, but also on the way down. So for me, number one, the eccentric lowering of the weight is critical. Okay, pick it up. Follow this pace if you want to build bigger arms faster. So lift it up.

On the way down, go to my count. One, two, three. Right about there. Four. At least 3 seconds.

Okay, you can get it up there. Down. One, two. All the time. Focusing all the way down till it gets down in front of your thighs because there’s still tension on the biceps as it elongates.

Come down. Two. Three. So, a minimum of three. Somewhere in that three to four range.

Now, let’s say you start to get tired. You want to cheat a rep up. Go ahead and cheat. You still got to go down slow. I don’t care how it got up.

As long as you’re not over cheating, but you still got to go down slow. Up there and down. Now, you do this and I promise you your biceps will blow up. And again, it’s just focusing on a the right exercise and b how to do it because that’s what matters most. The second exercise that must find its way into your program if you want to build effectively your chest, your triceps, your shoulders has got to be a dip.

And the thing about the dip is it’s sort of an alternative in this case to a bench press, but I think a more effective one if we’re talking about building muscle on those areas. The bench press is by far a staple strength exercise that we all should do, but I think the dip has a more natural ability to start piling on muscle on your chest because it follows that sort of natural direction that the arms want to travel in if you’re trying to create a chest contraction. At the same time, it gives you the overload on those front delts and also the triceps, too. Not only that, but Mike Mensler also said that this is his favorite exercise for the triceps, shoulders, and chest. You’re right.

You’re right. I actually made a whole video on that. So, what’s the way to do the dip though to do this right? First of all, if you can weight it. So, put a little extra weight around.

I’m not interested in you doing, you know, 15, 20, 25 different, you know, reps for this. Instead, I’d rather see you put some weight around your waist and then do some more reps like Jesse’s doing here. How would you do it though most effectively? It starts with how you set up in the in the station. So, what a lot of people will do, especially if they’re in between sets, they’ll be kind of tired, they’re resting, they’re letting themselves kind of fold over into the dip machine.

And then when they go into their next set, okay, I’m up. Everything is folded up. You have this hunch back position here. You have the shoulders up shrugged up near your ears. You’ve got your shoulders most importantly rounded forward.

When you start to go up and down from here, I understand where there’s a lot of hate directed at the exercise. There doesn’t have to be so much hate directed at the exercise if you do it the way I’m showing you. So set your posture beforehand by instead of being rounded here, conscientiously try to lift your sternum as high as you can and then pull your shoulders down. Look at the difference in that posture. And from there, all you have to do is then release and push through the elbows.

And now maintain that throughout and you’ve got a much healthier shoulder position just by doing that. And when you get to the bottom of the rep, again, this is where we know we can get that good chest stretch, right? That’s another benefit of this that we get beyond the um the the the bench press. We get a deeper stretch here. But more importantly, watch what we can do.

Rest for a sec. How we contract our way back up to the top matters, too. So, I mentioned the more natural chest contraction position being down here. If I were to ask you to contract your chest, you wouldn’t go like this, right? No one’s naturally doing that.

No one’s even really naturally doing this. they would go like this or they do like the most muscular pose down here because that’s a more natural plane of motion for us to operate in. So this high to low position, the dip does that. So instead of giving that away when you’re pushing yourself back up to the top, try to imagine your hands squeezing towards each other even though they won’t move because of the fixed placement on these handles. All right?

So do that same thing. Come up to the top, get in that good position. On the way down, get that good stretch. Now on the way up, think about squeezing up. You feel that?

Oh yeah. It like lifts it from underneath. People that complain about having a saggy chest or most of the time they’re just lacking lower chest development or that side chest development because they haven’t built big enough lower pecs. This direction here allows you to target those lower ches