Building Bigger Shoulders - A Warning

Knowing how to build shoulders muscles properly is a skill everyone who does weight lifting should know. I say properly because i have witnessed two people suffer serious injuries to their shoulders from poor form and a bunch of other hurt themselves needlessly as well.

The shoulder is a complex and often delicate joint you see with a huge amount of tendons and muscles intersecting to move your arms in a variety of different motions. However with all things that are complex there comes danger if things go wrong.

If you pull your arms or shoulder in the wrong direction or with too much force or at the wrong angle you can really hurt yourself. Some problems include:

• Frozen shoulders
• Torn rotator cuffs
• Sore shoulder muscles
• Inflamed tendons
• and more!

What this means is that you should adhere to good from during all your exercises and make sure you are prepared to lift weights by stretching and making sure you are fit enough to start with.

This guide is an excellent start.

As long as you are careful though there are a few good exercises you can do with just a set of dumbbells.

This video from Vince Delmonte explains how.



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Building Bigger Chest Muscles - Favorite Exercises

If people ask me what my favorite body part is i always say the chest. Building bigger chest muscles was one of my first main goals when i started bodybuilding and now i feel entitled to be proud of them. How to build chest muscles however was something i did not know when i started and fumbled around for quite a while til i did my research.

While i started just following workout plans I found on the net which did help a little i really did not know what i was doing until i put the effort into finding out how the chest muscles work so I could vary my exercises to target the muscle fibers how i wanted to on the fly.

Basically there are just a few muscles in your chest.

• The Pectoralis Major with has a sternal head and a clavical head. The sternal head is the but that runs across the top of he chest and the clavical head is the fan shaped muscle that covers the rest of the chest.
• The Pectoralis Minor is a muscle that is underneath the pectoralis major which attached from your ribs to the shoulder.

Working out each muscle and targeting the muscle fibers in different ways is the way to achieve chest muscle growth and i hit upon a few favorite exercises to do this.

Start with Push ups. They will not aid you later on but it is a good place to start and aides in building upper body strength and size in other muscles.

Bench Pressing is where you graduate to from push ups as it targets the same muscle groups but you can get a lot more weight and resistances on a barbell. I use dumbbells also if i don't have a spotter.

Dumbbell flyes from prone of about a 60 degree incline give a great workout and target some different fibers.

Lastly i like to spend some time doing Parallel Dips becqause they recruit muscles from all sorts of other places as well as targeting the pectoral major. Try it with a weight between your feet once it become too easy against your own body weight.

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Should You Build Bigger Biceps?

If you want to know how to build bigger biceps there is a question I always ask: "Why are you targeting your biceps for muscle growth?"

Why not! Many would reply. Having huge biceps is awesome isn't it? You can show off your guns to impress the ladies and make the other guys jealous and it means you are stronger and bigger and more confident!

While this may be a persuasive argument and i agree with a lot of it there are a few things about biceps that i think are important to know.

1. The biceps are a show muscle. They aid in a few actions but they are not involved with a lot of things that require your brute strength. Your tricep does a lot of this work and if you also train your tricep you have a knock on effect on the bicep also.
2. Over training a single muscle especially one as small (comparatively) as the bicep is not worth it. You only hurt yourself and you do not get any real extra muscle growth out of a muscle after you lift to your maximum a few times.
3. A disproportionate body is not as attractive as a proportionate one. If you have underdeveloped biceps then by all means focus on them but if you already have large biceps or larger biceps than the rest of your upper body this may make you look ridiculous not strong!

So if you are building bigger biceps for the right reasons then go ahead but be mindful of what you are trying to achieve and how you are achieving them!

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