What Are The Best Exercises To Strengthen A Weak Upper Body?

July 1, 2009— -- Question: What are the best exercises to strengthen a weak upper body?

Answer: The two best exercises to strengthen a weak upper body are simply push-ups and pull-ups. Now these are exercises that have been around for a long time; we've been doing them since we've been in grade school. However, we've gotten away from them in favor of different kinds of weight machines and weight stacks. I think it's important that all of us get back to those basic exercises because a push-up is a great exercise for upper body strength.

There are so many varieties you can use with a push-up -- adding weight to it, adding resistance to it, changing the angle of the push. I think we need to get back to doing push-ups as an upper body exercise. Many of our athletes work on doing push-ups for a long time prior to getting into any kind of bench press or machine exercise.

On the pull-up side, I see a lot of athletes who can't do pull-ups and I think it's very important that we're able to pull our body weight just as we should be able to push our body weight. And there are a variety of weights we can do pull-ups to help assist athletes who can't do a full pull-up to get to the point where they can start pulling their body. So, if you were to choose two exercises I would choose push-ups and pull-ups because they work the entire upper body muscle groups that you're trying to train but yet they're getting them in a way that is necessary for our body to function.