Healthwisery

I don’t think you have any business bench pressing if you can’t properly perform 20 perfect pushups.

If you can’t handle your own bodyweight, how functional is it to lie down on a bench and press additional weight?

Don’t get me wrong, the basic barbell bench press is a great upper body exercise for building muscle, but it’s depended on WAY too much to build a strong chest and shoulders.

Most people consider Pushups and Bench Presses both chest dominant exercises. But there is a big difference between the two…

The bench press is an open chain exercise and the pushup is a closed chain exercise.

The “chain” just refers to the kinetic chain of your body, which simply means that all of your body’s muscles are inter-connected in a “chain” and therefore the movements you make are also part of a that kinetic chain.

Open chain exercises allow your feet or hands to move freely like in a bench press, dumbbell curl or leg curl.

Closed chain exercises keep your feet or hands in a fixed position like on the ground during pushups or squats and even chinups.

Closed chain exercises are safer and more effective for real world functional strength because they allow your bodyweight to move through space in a full range of motion while distributing muscular stress through many muscles instead of isolating and stressing single muscles. Continue reading ‘The Best Upper Body Exercise’ »

Our bodies have an incredible ability to adapt to almost any situation it encounters. Whether it be working more efficiently because of ingesting fewer calories, or becoming stronger and gaining muscle through weightlifting, the body works to adapt to whatever stresses it encounters to allow it to handle the tasks more efficiently each time. Because of this, it can be difficult for someone trying to gain muscle to do so for long periods of time because the body will soon adapt to the program you’re on and it will quit growing altogether. Simply performing the same exercises with the same weights over and over again will not allow for the consistent growth you want to occur as part of the bodybuilding regimen. This means if you want to continue making progress, you’re going to have to make some changes.

When bodybuilders hit a point in their training where their existing routine is no longer effective and they quit seeing results, it is called a plateau. These plateaus are fairly common and can happen from time to time and in every case, change is the thing required in order to continue making progress. Now, the most common form of change in bodybuilding is to add additional weight to whatever exercise you’re performing. Continue reading ‘Adaptation: the enemy of bodybuilders everywhere’ »