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
Muscle Exercises
Muscle-exercises to Burn Fat for People That are Busy
Muscle Exercise
When I work out I usually make sure that I do exercises that are low impact since I usually have to go to work the next day because I do not want to be so sore when I go to work that I can not concentrate on what I am supposed to do for work. For the working man there are a few low impact exercises that you can do and not be stiff all day at work. These exercises are jumping rope, walking, and side to sides.
The first exercise that is good for a working man to do during the day and that he will not be sore the next day is jump roping because this is a very good low impact exercise that will really get your blood pumping. When you jump rope it works out tons of muscles in your body from your arms biceps and triceps down toward your abs and your calves and quadriceps.
The good thing about jumping rope is that you do not have to do it for very long in order to get a good workout. If you do it for around fifteen minutes a day then you are going to see big changes in the way your body looks.
Another exercise that is good for the everyday working man is walking because you pretty much fit this into your everyday routine. It is not hard when you are getting to work or going to the store to park further away from the office or store that way you are getting a little bit of a walk while you are walking up.
Then if you just make sure that you try to walk some more through the day then if you walk enough throughout the day then you would not have to go for your walks at the end of the day unless you wanted to.
The last exercise that is good for the everyday working man to do is side to sides because these you can pretty much do whenever you want because they do not take anything to get them done. You can simply stand and watch TV while doing side to sides and get a great workout plus not miss your favorite TV show. Side to sides really workout your abs and will help you get rid of the love handles that everyone hates and wants to get rid of. Read more
