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By choosing the right pectoral exercises, you can throw together some extremely effective pectoral workouts that will ultimately force your chest to explode.  If your goal is to build a big muscular chest, then the upper body exercises that you choose are vital to the process.  If you piece together your chest workout with exercises that don’t fit certain criteria, then you really won't be able to build your chest up quickly. In this article, I’m going to uncover the specific criteria that your chest exercises need to meet in order for you to stimulate some serious upper body growth, as well as list a few of my favorite pectoral building exercises.

Lets get on to one of the first things that I like to teach people about building their chest muscles up.  In order to stimulate upper body muscle growth, you absolutely need to perform muscle building exercises that meet certain conditions. First, the chest exercises that you choose, need to allow you to actually target your pectoral muscles. If you choose upper body exercises that place most of the emphasis on your shoulders, then your shoulders will be doing most of the work and in turn achieving the benefits of doing that work (you’ll stimulate muscle growth in your shoulders instead of chest growth). So you want to focus on movements that specifically target your chest muscles.  It’s ok if the chest exercises also incorporate your shoulders or triceps, but the main muscle group in the movement should definitely be your pectoral muscles.

The next piece of criteria that the pectoral exercises that you choose for your upper body workouts need to meet is that each of the exercise that you select need to allow you to move a fairly heavy amount of weight.  Lifting incrementally heavier weights over a full range of motion is precisely how you stimulate muscle growth, so it only makes sense that if you’re wanting to add size to your upper body muscles,  then you need to be training with heavy weights.

The next piece of criteria is something that most people completely overlook.  You’ve got to actually enjoy performing the pec exercises that you pick!  If you hate the exercises that you put into your upper body workouts, you’re not going to be able to hit your upper body as hard as you’d be able to if you really enjoyed performing the upper body exercise in the first place, so make sure to stick with  a few of the chest exercises that you actually enjoy. Sometimes you’ve got no choice but to perform a few chest exercises that you don't really like, but try not to build your pectoral workouts around these pectoral exercises, instead find a few that you really like and slip them into the workout.

Listed below are a few of my favorite upper body exercises ( in no particular order). After looking over this list of exercises, I can honestly say that approximately 95% of all of my pectoral workouts are composed of these highly effective pectoral exercises. Once in a long while, I’ll work in a few sets of cable crossovers, but that really about it.

The Best Pectoral Exercises

1. DB Bench Press
2. Bench Press
3. Incline Press
4. DB Incline Press
5. Push Up
6. Chest Dips
7. Dumbbell Flyes
8. Decline Bench Press
9. DB Decline Bench Press

If you’re one of the hundreds of guys out there who really wants to build a bigger, more muscular chest, then make sure that your pec workouts are composed of the most effective pectoral exercises!  The majority of your chest  workouts should be created around the short list of chest exercises listed above.  If you follow no other advice than to simply make sure that your upper body  workouts are designed with exercises that fit the criteria outlined in this article, you'll begin to build a bigger chest in no time at all.

If your goal is to select the best muscle building exercises from the hundreds of different weight training exercises that are popular, it can be a difficult task to narrow the list down to a reasonable number of only the best exercises. What you find with most of the exercises that are making the rounds in the gyms these days, is that each exercise is either a derivative of one of the basic bodybuilding exercises or a unique movement designed to target a individual body part. If your goal is to build muscle mass fast, then it's important that you put together a short and manageable list of the free weights exercises that have been proven to work.

Sure it's true that almost any body building exercise will stimulate muscle growth up to a certain point; there is one type of weight training that has managed to stick around for a long time, compound exercises. While certainly not too exciting compound exercises are the most basic free weight exercises around and are very effective at helping you gain muscle mass and increase your strength levels simultaneously.

The beauty of free weight compound exercises lies in the fact that they allow you to train with heavy weights through a complete range of motion that typically includes multiple body parts and multiple joints.  This allows you to stimulate muscle growth in more than one muscle by performing only one exercise. If you stick with these types of free weights exercises you're all but guaranteed to get the most out of your time in the gym.

That said, there are a ton of free weight compound exercises and variations of those exercises, so which ones are the best for inducing muscle growth?  As with anything in the bodybuilding and fitness realm, the specific exercises that you decide to incorporate into your workouts will be based completely upon your preferences and goals.  What works well for you may not work at all for me, so take the time to select the best muscle building exercises for you!

Listed below is my go-to list of the most effective body building exercises. These are the exercises that make up about 98% of all of my bodybuilding workouts. While basic, focusing on these muscle building exercises most of the time allows me to continue to enjoy increases in my strength and muscle growth in a very reasonable amount of time.

The Best Bodybuilding Exercises

• Barbell Squat
• Lunges (Barbell or Dumbbell)
• Weighted Step Ups
• Dead lift
• Stiff Legged Dead lift
• Barbell Rows
• Dumbbell Rows
• Pull-ups
• Lying Triceps Press
• Overhead Triceps Extensions
• Barbell Curls
• Alternating Dumbbell Curls
• Bench Press (Barbell or Dumbbell)
• Incline Press (Barbell or Dumbbell)
• Standing Barbell Shoulder Press
• Seated DB Shoulder Press
• Barbell Shrugs

You probably noticed that a few of these exercises are not really compound movements.  In order to target certain muscle groups (like your biceps and triceps), you will need to mix in some isolation movements.  Whenever I need to work any isolation exercises into my workouts, I always try to choose the ones that allow me to train with the heaviest possible weight. Any exercise that restricts my range of motion too much will not allow me to train heavy enough.

Stop overloading your workouts with less effective isolation exercises and start getting the most out of your time in the gym. If you mix in these basic yet effective muscle building exercises into your training sessions and put a lot of effort into training as intensely as possible, you'll begin to build muscle mass and increase your strength quicker than you ever thought possible.