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Increase Your Upper Body Strength With These 2 Exercises

Categories: Exercise

Have you ever wanted to improve your upper body strength?

If your an OCR runner you'll know the importance of having a strong upper body so you can pull yourself over obstacles or hang tough on the rigs.

But this is just as important if you're a road and trail runner. You need to develop all areas of your body so you're stronger and can endure more during events.

I like training split routines and I recommend this a lot to my clients, this means they can concentrate on a set area of the body and allows the area they have trained to recover. This is even more important if you want to get running into your training as well.

A good tip for any upper body work is to make sure you're engaging and working the right muscles when you start the exercise movement. Otherwise you'll find your arms and grip start to give way much sooner than you’d expect. You’ll find it’s because these are much smaller muscle groups compared to those on your chest and back which can do all the hard work for you.

When you work your chest for example in a chest press or a chest fly, think about squeezing your pecs together as you push the weights to the top of the action. When you work your back you want to engage your traps and lats. A good way of thinking about this is trying to pinch and hold a pen between your shoulder blades.

Working your muscles as a superset means you don't have any rest between the two exercises. You’ll go straight from one to the other and only rest once you have performed the pair of exercises. This programme works the same muscles, and to make it even more challenging you are performing the actions for the biggest muscle groups first so you really have to work hard on the second exercise. It’s great for muscle growth and development.

Here are two exercises to try work your upper body.

Aim for 10-12 of each of the exercises and have your rest once you've completed the two.

Let me know how you get on.

Gemma

PS. If you want my Pull Up Guide and Videos to continue to work your upper body strength, reply to this email and i'll send it over to you.