Bodybuilding Exercises
Hit Your Muscles From All Angles
Remember geometry class in high school? All those theorems about angles and rhomboids and trapezoids and all that other good stuff?
Even if geometry wasn’t your best subject, you can still take advantage of the tines and angles when it comes to developing and shaping muscle. All you need is a basic, Cliffs Notes style version of body geometry.
Basics
You have more than 430 skeletal muscles to move your 206 bones. Each muscle begins on one bone and ends on another. It’s also known as the point of origin and point of Insertion. The direction in which your muscle fibers run between these two points (called pennation) determines the direction of muscle contraction.
Sometimes the point of origin can differ greatly in size from the point of insertion. That’s why doing different exercises from various angles makes a profound effect in your muscular development.
Also, certain muscles cross over multiple joints, like your biceps and triceps, while other complex muscle groups, like your back, are actually made up of a large number of individual muscles whose fibers run in different directions.
Knowing and understanding POO, POI, pennation, fibers, and such would go a long way toward optimizing your development. However, learning all that would take years of schooling.
But you don’t need that,
You see, anatomy is exact science. Training Is not. The bottom line is you need to change your strength training routine by changing the exercises and using different angles to finely sculpt your body, like an artist.
We’ll use the chest, back, and arms as examples.
The Chest
Think of a triangle lying on either side of your chest. The line down the center lathe point of origin and the point of insertion is at the top of your humerus (the bone of your upper arm).
Draw some lines from the origin to the insertion and you’ll see how the fibers run. Moving your arms over and across your chest at different angles stimulates these fibers in a different fashion.
For best chest development, stick with these exercises: db flat bench press, db incline bench press, barbell flat bench press, bb incline bench press, bar dips.
The Back
This is where muscle fibers get a little bit complicated.
Your back is made up of all kinds of smaller muscles that originate and insert in different places. So in order to develop your back the way you want it, you must perform different exercises that vary in the angle of pull. Even these small variations can promote greater effects.
For example, by altering your grip on a 1st pulldown from wide to reverse, you work not only the lats, teres major, and rhomboids (don’t worry about remembering these) that are normally stressed with the standard pulldown, but also the middle trapezius (middle of your upper back).
Point is, the bigger and more complex the muscle group, the more angles you need in your strength training attack. The more angles you use, the better developed your muscle will be.
Exercises: chin ups, pull ups, seated rows, barbell bent over rows, db onearm rows, pulldowns (front – close, medium, and wide grip), reverse grip pulldown, close grip pulldown.
The Arms
Even though most of your muscles have larger points of ongin than insertion, the muscles in your biceps and triceps do not. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t work them from different angles.
These particular muscles cross over more than one joint, so they too are affected by working them at different angles. Read more
