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The best muscle-building exercises should be compound workouts. While it’s good to have a mixture of compound and isolation exercises to boost muscle growth, compound exercises can alone get the job done.
Compound exercises enable you to engage more than one muscle group. As a result, more muscles get worked on, making progressive overload (steadily increasing the weight you lift) easier.
The best muscle-building exercises make it easier for the muscles to do isolation exercises by preparing them with heavy compound lifts.
Best Muscle-building Exercises
When you focus on a handful of exercises, they must comprise movements, such as pulling or pushing a weight away, leg exercise, and one full body workout. The following are five best muscle-building exercises for men to trigger growth:
1) Squat
It’s well-known that squats are the king of leg exercises. They allow you to focus primarily on the quads but are impactful for the hamstrings and calves too/
Moreover, squats are beneficial for posture, as you have to maintain a strong back and core when you’re doing leg exercises. The more you focus on your overall posture and form, the better it is for the muscle group.
You can find a guide for doing squats here.
2) Bench Press
Bench press works on the chest, triceps, and shoulders, where the chest is the primary muscle group, and shoulders andtriceps are the secondary one.
You must develop a strong muscle-mind connection for this exercise, as it’s easy for the triceps to engage more than the pectoral muscles. Ideally, you should push with your chest, and allow the triceps to help the movement. To work only the triceps, do a close-grip bench press.
Find a guide to doing bench press here.
3) Pull-up
Pull-ups focus on the lats, rear delts, and biceps. However, the lat muscles are the primary focus, for which you need to do wide grip pull-ups.
Close-grip pull-ups engage the biceps more, while the rear delts get activated in both cases.
Here is a guide for doing pull-ups.
4) Deadlift
Deadlifts are a full-body muscle-building exercises. Its variations focus on specific primary muscle groups.
For example, conventional deadlifts focus more on the lower back and glutes. The stiff-legged deadlift focuses on the hamstrings, while sumo works primarily on the quads.
Deadlifts can have an impact on the forearms, as you require a strong grip on the barbell. The traps and core muscles engage during deadlifts to provide the body proper balance and stability.
You can find a guide for deadlifts here.
5) Shoulder Press
The biceps and triceps get worked during compound movements, but you need to work your shoulders as well.
One of the top muscle-building exercises, the shoulder press primarily activates and works the anterior and lateral delts, but the rear delts engage too. Additionally, you should engage your core muscles during this exercise for stability.
Bottom Line
It’s good to know the best muscle-building exercises, but none of them will work if you don't have a proper diet plan in place.
It’s imperative to be in a calorie surplus to add muscle mass, and you must have one gram of protein per lean bodyweight. Meanwhile, if you’re in a calorie deficit, you must consume enough protein for the muscle fibers to grow back thicker.
Finally, give your muscles enough rest and hydration for the building cells to enlarge the fibers.
