6 Best Barbell Exercises for Men to Look Jacked

If you want to build a Hercules-like physique, it’s important to do barbell exercises. These workouts enable you to work on each muscle group using compound movements, which help activate the bigger and smaller muscles of each muscle group.

Ideally, it’s best to do a combination of compound and isolation exercises for optimum effect. Barbell exercises are mostly compound exercises, except for a few that focus on smaller muscle groups, such as biceps. Nevertheless, the core muscles remain engaged in such exercises for balance and stability.

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Best Barbell Exercises for Men to Get Jacked

When discussing the best barbell exercises, you must note that every workout has a dumbbell alternative and others for the same muscle group.

The following list of six exercises focuses on each muscle group, such as chest, back, arms, and legs. Let's get started:

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1) Barbell Back Squat

Squats are the king of leg exercises. If you can choose only one barbell exercise, this should be it.

When you’re doing barbell squats, you’re not only working your quadriceps but also your hamstrings and calves. The entire lower body engages in this exercise, while the upper body helps maintain stability.

Additionally, barbell squats open the gate to variations, such as hack squats or front squats, which help in working the leg muscles from various angles.

You can find a guide for doing squats here.

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2) Barbell Bench Press

The barbell bench press is a compound exercise that focuses on the chest, triceps, and shoulders (anterior and lateral delts). It’s one of the top chest exercises to grow the pecs and force the pectoral muscles to become stronger.

One point to note during bench press is that you shouldn’t flare your elbows too much. The idea is to constantly have the chest engaged rather than allowing the triceps or shoulders to take over.

Close grip barbell bench press variation is what you want to do if you want to shift the focus from the chest to the triceps. You can find the guide for barbell bench press here and close grip bench press here.

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3) Barbell Bent-over Row

After your chest and triceps, the next exercise using barbells should focus on your lat muscles. The most common barbell exercise for lat muscles is the bent-over row.

As it’s a compound exercise, the bent-over row engages the biceps and rear delts as well, but most of the focus remains on the lats. Interestingly, you can use various grips, such as underhand, overhand, wide, and narrow for this exercise to focus on the lats from various angles and enable activating the smaller muscles in the group too.

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4) Barbell Deadlift

While you’re focused on your back, you mustn’t ignore the lower back. Deadlifts are an excellent exercise to engage the lower back and legs. However, there are variations of deadlifts that focus on one group.

For example, conventional deadlifts focus on the lower back more, while stiff-legged deadlifts focus more on the hamstrings. Eventually, all variations engage the entire lower body.

You can find the guide for doing barbell deadlifts here.

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5) Barbell Overhead Press

When you’re trying to become lean and jacked, your arms play a huge role in your overall appearance. So, you must work on the shoulders, triceps, and biceps to achieve big, strong arms. As mentioned above, a close-grip barbell bench press works on the triceps.

Coming to your shoulders, the overhead press is a common yet effective barbell exercise. The overhead press engages the triceps as a secondary muscle group and engages the core for balance and stability.

You can find the guide for doing a barbell overhead press here.

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6) Barbell Curl

Barbell curls are a top barbell exercise for men. A shoulder-width or slightly wider grip can help with the short head of the biceps, while a short grip helps with the long head.

The short head helps make the arm appear fuller and thicker, while the long head helps with the bicep peak. You can find the guide for doing barbell curls here.

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Bottom Line

The best barbell exercises for men to get jacked only help if you take care of many aspects.

You need to focus on resistance training, nutrition, and rest at the same time to get jacked with lean muscles. If you skip any of them, progress will stall, and you will end up struggling to reach your goals.