The Best Muscle Building Exercise

What's the best muscle building exercise?  If you ask 5 different personal trainers, you may get 5 different answers! Surprised?  Don't be. While there are principles of a solid muscle building workout program that are for the most part universally accepted, there's still a lot of debate about the best way to go about building lean and ripped muscle mass. In order to clear the air and give you my two cents, I've listed a few arguments for what I believe to be the best muscle building exercise around.

The Best Muscle Building Exercises...Hands Down!

If your goal is to stimulate as many raw muscle fibers as possible, while still maintaining your sanity and spending minimal time in the gym, then the best muscle building exercises for you are definitely free weight compound exercises.  While there are certainly a lot of differing opinions out there, this is pretty much accepted as a muscle building fact.  Sure isolation exercises have some muscle building value, they just aren't as effective a muscle building exercise as heavy compound movements.

Compound Exercises are multi-joint movements that cause you to move weight through the range of motion of more than 1 joint.

Examples of Compound Exercises...

• Military Press
• Close-Grip Chin-Up (w/palms facing toward your face)
• Dips
• Close-Grip Pushup
• Twisting Dumbbell Curl
• Barbell Squat
• Dead lift
• Lunges
• Chin-Up
• Pull-Down
• Dead lift
• Row
• Push-Up
• Dips
• Bench Press

Isolation Exercises are single joint exercises that only cause you to move weight through the range of motion of 1 joint.

Examples of Isolation Exercises...

• bicep curls
• triceps kickbacks
• lateral raises
• front raises
• rope pull-downs
• leg extensions
• hamstring curls
• calf raises

The main reason that compound exercises as a whole are the best exercises for building muscle, is that they allow you to lift heavier weights across multiple joints and muscle groups.  This stimulates more muscle fiber than single joint isolation exercises.

The #1 Best Muscle Building Exercise...The Barbell Squat

The hands down winner here as the best muscle building exercise is the basic, unglamorous and frequently dreaded barbell squat.  The squat is an exercise that allows you to lift a very large amount of weight through a complete range of motion.  When you perform a barbell squat, you stimulate and strengthen muscles from your trapezius (shoulders and neck) all the way down to your calves. Not to mention the hundreds of stabilizer muscles utilized to help you hold your position during this exercise.

Studies have shown that a properly performed barbell squat stimulates many different muscle groups. And the fact that you can use a very heavy weight causes your body's endocrine system to produce a large quantity of muscle building hormones and circulate them throughout your body.

To get the biggest benefit form this muscle building exercise, you need to make sure and train with a weight that allows you to stimulate muscle growth.  This means heavy enough to make it a serious challenge to complete more than 8 repetitions and virtually impossible to perform 12 or more.

In order to incorporate this muscle building exercise into a full blown muscle building workout program most effectively squat one time each week.  If your training intensely enough you really won't want to squat a whole lot more than this, trust me here!

If your not achieving the muscle building results you'd hoped for from your muscle building program, focus your efforts on performing the best muscle building exercises - mulit-joint compound exercises. Add heavy barbell squats into your regular workout routine and watch as the muscle mass starts packing on!

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