Find out why bodybuilders, like weightlifters, strive to gain muscle mass through heavy, basic exercises. What is the secret to multi-joint exercises? In many articles devoted to strength exercises, basic ones are constantly mentioned. They are essential for building muscle. Many athletes understand the concept of "basic movement" primarily as deadlifts, bench presses and squats.
These movements are competitive in powerlifting and it is understandable that powerlifters put a lot of emphasis on their performance. But many people have a question - why these movements are considered basic in other strength sports disciplines. Let's see if this opinion is true.
The essence of basic exercises in weightlifting and bodybuilding
To make everything clear, we will have to go back in time and remember the moment of the birth of world bodybuilding. This sport in the world began to develop in isolation from other disciplines as a self-sufficient culture. For a long period of time, athletes have experimented to find the most effective methods to achieve their goals. As a result, many of them are still quite effective today.
On the territory of the Soviet Union, the formation of bodybuilding did not happen in the same way as in other countries. Bodybuilding was not originally an independent sports discipline and is one of the areas of weightlifting. This fact turned out to be decisive for the domestic bodybuilding.
Almost all first-generation coaches who worked with bodybuilders came from weightlifting. For obvious reasons, they used the same training methods that were used by weightlifters during their training. Unlike powerlifting, weightlifting has only two competitive movements - snatch and clean and jerk.
But there is a fairly wide range of movements that can improve athletic performance in basic movements. They were the exercises that are called basic in modern bodybuilding. They were used to train more than one generation of weightlifters and very quickly became the basis in bodybuilding. There is nothing wrong with this, since their use brought good results.
Now we need to understand the essence of strength sports. For powerlifting and weightlifting, the challenge is to lift as much weight as possible. To do this, during preparation for the competition, it is necessary to develop a large number of muscles, which allows basic movements. This is the main difference between these sports and bodybuilding. It is important for the bodybuilder to isolate the target muscles as much as possible, excluding the synergistic muscles from the work. As a result, we have two completely opposite concepts, but at the same time the exercises remain the same. Of course, all basic movements can be adjusted to the essence of bodybuilding by changing the technique of their execution, full control of movements. However, from all of the above, it follows that the basic movements in bodybuilding will differ from those used in powerlifting and weightlifting.
This is due to the fact that it is important for a bodybuilder to harmoniously develop all the muscles of the body, while in other strength sports disciplines the emphasis is only on the muscles involved in performing competitive exercises. Thus, we can say that for bodybuilding, the basic movements can be considered those that contribute to the uniform development of all muscles.
In addition, basic exercises also imply multi-joint or, more simply, the work of several joints and muscles. At the same time, the base should mean the base. The main or main exercise aimed at achieving the goals set for the athlete. In this regard, we should again recall the main concept of bodybuilding - the maximum isolation of the target muscle.
It is best to perform an exercise that can maximize muscle mass gain for the target muscles while eliminating all accessory muscles from work. In this case, multi-joint exercises do not always fit this definition.
During training, you can perform a fairly large number of such movements. The basic ones include the T-bar row, dumbbell press, leg press, etc. Probably a more correct decision is to classify the barbell biceps as basic for bodybuilding. This movement is considered single-joint, but at the same time, it is great for gaining mass.
At this point, we should again return to the concept of basic movements in bodybuilding, namely the isolation of the load. Everyone will agree that this is much easier to achieve with a stable trajectory of the sports equipment, when the athlete does not have to worry about stabilizing the weight, connecting non-target muscles to work for this. For this, athletes use the Hammer family of simulators in general, and the Smith simulator in particular.
Thanks to their special design, they allow you to get a fixed trajectory of the projectiles and focus the entire load on the target muscle group. If you look closely at the training programs for Western athletes, then the main work in the gym is performed by them on hummers or blocks. For work with free weights, dumbbells are almost always used, and the barbell is used very rarely.
But domestic bodybuilders are often deprived of such opportunities. Many halls simply do not have special equipment. If there are no such simulators in your gym, then it will be somewhat more difficult to achieve the result. However, you should always keep in mind the basic concept of bodybuilding - complete control over movement and isolation of the target muscles.
Your job is not to lift maximum weight, but to concentrate on muscle contraction. If this is not done, then the body will always try to make it as easy as possible for itself by including additional muscles in the work. In addition, there are quite serious differences in the pace of performance of all movements, if we take bodybuilding and powerlifting for comparison.
For more on the connection between weightlifting and bodybuilding, see this video:
