If you spend 5 minutes talking to a gym rat you will be asked what is your max on bench press, squats, and deadlifts. It seems these 3 lifts are the barometer for strength in the gym. Since this is how most people judge their strength these are the exercises everyone wants to be the strongest at. Doing these 3 exercises over and over and over again can become boring. Thankfully there are other exercises you can incorporate into your workout to help you become stronger with these 3 major lifts.
1. Face Pulls
Face pulls are a great exercise to do at the end of any push routine. These routines would be the ones that include chest, shoulders and triceps. This exercise helps stretch out and build muscle around your shoulder blades. This exercise will greatly impact you bench press. It really helps focus on the smaller muscles that need to be engaged for bench press. These smaller muscles are mostly overlooked and harder to hit with regular routines.
2. Lunges
Lunges are a crucial and most the time overlooked legs exercise. This exercise is a leg burner that will greatly impact your strength to help with your squats. Whether you use dumbbells or a barbell this will have you reaching new maxes with your squats in no time. It will also help build up core strength to help with all 3 of your major lifts.
3. Floor Press
The floor press is basically a bench press but instead you are lying on the floor instead of a bench. This helps bring more control and focus to the press motion itself. It will force you to have more control of the barbell and in turn when you go back to your bench press will help you have more control in the exercise.
4. Kettle bell Swing
This exercise is great for building lower back strength, which is imperative to deadlifts. It will also help engage the legs some as well to help stabilize the swinging motion. You want to make sure you maintain control during this exercise and not let the weight do the exercise for you. If your gym does not have kettle bells a dumbbell can also be used for this exercise.
5. Straight Arm Pull Down
Straight-arm pull down is one of the best exercises to build lat strength, which will help stabilize you in your deadlifts and bench press. This exercise will not necessarily make you stronger in your major lifts but it will help stabilize you during these lifts. This in turn will help you feel safer and be safer when performing the lift, which will help, led to you increasing in strength for these lifts.
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