The Best Bodybuilding Exercises for the Fastest Results

What bodybuilding exercises produce the quickest results? Does a wide grip pull-down provide the same amount of gains as a wide grip pull-up? Can a leg press substitute the squat and yield the same results? These are common questions that can be answered when one looks at the important subject of neuromuscular stimulation of each exercise.

Neuromuscular stimulation is a term that describes the amount of nervous system involvement as you perform an exercise. The more involved your nervous system is when an exercise is executed, the more results you will get from the exercise. Free weight exercises like the squat, for instance, provide more neuromuscular stimulation than a leg press since you have to balance the bar and move your bodyweight through space. Since on a leg press all you have to do is press the weight without having to balance it, less muscle fibers are recruited by the nervous system to move the weight. Therefore, while the leg press is still a fantastic muscle building exercise, you get less results from it than you do from squats. The same is true when it comes to pull-ups vs pull-downs. Because you need to balance your body and prevent it from swinging, in addition to having to lift it up, your nervous system gets more involved in the movement and recruits as many muscle fibers as are needed to perform the complicated task. In a pull-down, since your body remains static, much less muscle fibers are needed.

In my article Choosing The Right Exercises for Maximum Results, I cover in detail a method that I use to rate the effectiveness of each exercise based on the amount of neuromuscular stimulation that they provide. Once you understand this method, it will no longer be a hidden science to figure out which exercises will provide you with the fastest gains in lean muscle mass.