When you first enter the gym, you may be overwhelmed by the number of gleaming, super-advanced looking muscle building machines, the racks, the pulleys - just learning what everything’s for and a few of the exercises you can do with them may take you a couple of months of training.

A few months down the line, if you haven’t received any tips or guidance from more experienced lifters on how to direct your weight training, you’ll likely feel a bit confused. You came into this thing thinking that bicep curls were a no-brainer, but now every time you do them you have to choose between cable curls with a rope attachment, bar or [], preacher curls or curls on the Curlex machine. You’d like to train legs today, but you can’t decide which to max out on - the barbell squat, the squat-assist machine, the flat press, the decline press or the incline leg press machine.

What you need is a gauge of your progress, a frame to hang all of your efforts around. Often notions of how much you’d like your muscles to grow are useless unless you know which of the exercises you’re doing are likely to accomplish serious growth. This is a problem that all elite weightlifters or bodybuilders have grappled with at some point. They either came out of their confusion having spent half their life in a gym, or knowing what you’re about to read below.

The most useful weight training tip you could possibly internalize is that dynamic exercises that recruit large numbers of muscles at once are superior for building mass and strength. They tire out more muscle fibers, while also leaving you less susceptible to injury, as you’re not placing all of the strain into one measly little muscle. Isolation exercises can target and grow one muscle, but often not as much as dynamic exercises, and let’s face it, there aren’t enough hours in the day to do isolation exercises for all 600 plus muscles in your body, nor indeed are there specific isolation exercises for all of them.

So what dynamic exercises, pray tell, are top of the pops for mass development? Again, opinions vary, but there’s general agreement on a few of them. The bench press is one tried, tested and proven exercise that had pretty much best make an appearance in your workout schedule every week until you decide you’re ready to retire from the gym. Remember to do it in its incline and decline variants, as these hit the lower chest (pecoralis minor) and upper chest (pectoralis major) to different degrees, but keep your focus on the flat press. A big bench press will make you the envy of every guy in the gym, and since it works your triceps, delts, chest, abs and forearms, will give you a muscular form that’s a match for the functional power it’ll give you.

Next up, pretty much the toughest exercise in the gym, and one of the most poorly understood, is the barbell squat. Properly performed, the squat will grow your glutes (the muscles in your butt, which are the biggest in your body no matter who you are), quadriceps and hamstrings more than any ten other exercises combined. The thing is, a lot of guys don’t really lust after big legs or butts. There are two facts they’ve failed to account for. The first is that women (that’s right, the hotties most of us are training to impress) don’t care about your biceps or your ripped abs nearly as much as they do about a tight, well formed butt. There’s nothing they find less attractive than a flat ass. Secondly, your glutes are the biggest muscles in your body. Hard, toned muscle eats calories constantly. Ergo, if you tighten and tone your butt, it’s going to act as a caloric furnace that will consume all the extra fat in your body, leaving you with the shredded, lean physique you’ve always wanted.

The barbell deadlift is the ultimate strongman exercise. It’s the exercise in which you can lift the most weight, meaning that it’s also the one in which you can subject your body to the most tension. It works your hips, hamstrings, butt, lower back, grip and forearms more than any other exercise, which is why it’s a core lift for anyone serious about weightlifting.

These three are the primary strength tests in the gym, and strength gained equals muscle gained and hardened. Come back to them every time you feel your training becoming too scattered. Other exercises regarded as essential to any lifter’s schedule include the military press (which will mould your shoulders into the v-shape every lifter’s after) and the lat pulldown, which works the second biggest muscles in your body, the latissimus dorsii (or lats for short) as well as the biceps, forearms and rear deltoids.

© Vince Delmonte www.VinceDelMonteReviews.com 2009. All rights reserved.