Upper Body Weight Lifting Exercises
Upper body exercises are best divided into a couple of categories – isolation and multi-joint. The isolation exercises are what bodybuilders and "weight lifting" in general is most known for – the bicep curl, the cable crossover, the chest flyes. However, there's a whole world of upper body exercises beyond these fairly specialised (and some may say, ineffective!) few.
If your goal is size, then isolation exercises will have their place – particularly once you're at an advanced stage of muscular development – but for pure bang for your buck, the big, multi-joint compound movements are what will lead to the majority of your muscle growth. Nobody ever got big with cable curls and tricep kickbacks. Anyone with high levels of natural muscular development almost always got there by putting in their time on the "Big Ones". The Pulls, Rows and Presses that get your body saying "OK – this is intense - time to GROW".
For strength training, upper body exercises are important. It's true that the bulk of your strength gain is going to come from full-body exercises like the squat, deadlift or power clean. If there were one or two exercises a budding sports player or strength athlete should do to enhance their sporting performance, it would likely be the squat or the deadlift, or some variation of one of those. However, there are many benefits to be gained from training the upper body. Many sports in fact directly require it – such as grappling, throwing or rockclimbing. And it is possible to build phenomenal levels of upper body strength with the right exercises and perseverance.
The best best upper body exercises for raw strength are usually the large, multi-joint compound movements. We're talking chinups, rows, overhead presses and horizontal presses like the bench press or planche pushup. They're also often the most functional movements that transfer strength best over to your chosen activity, be it rock climbing, martial arts or powerlifting. You'll find all these exercises accessible from the navigation on the left.
You'll also find discussion of some unconventional exercises that are really, really effective. Such as the planche pushup, a bodyweight alternative to the bench press that takes months or years to master, has the potential to develop large amounts of size and strength, and is actually much safer for your shoulders than the bench press.
Or the close-grip towel pullup, that hits your biceps harder than nearly every other pullup variation, due to its unique angles of pull which limit how much work the back muscles can do.
Explore our content and see for yourself. Strength, size and health await you!
