Quote · Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth
2889: 7 Muscle Building Exercises You Have Never Done (But Should Start Immediately)
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7 best muscle building exercises you have never done
At 5:10 · chapter starts 3:08
Sal opens with a deceptively simple premise: the best muscle-building hack is learning an exercise you've never done before. He traces how lifts like the barbell squat fell out of fashion in the '90s not because they stopped working but because influential bodybuilders stopped doing them, pushing gyms toward machines. Studying Bronze Era, Olympic, and powerlifting auxiliary movements, Sal discovered exercises that provided carryover to competition lifts and filled structural gaps conventional training never addressed. Adam adds that for anyone lifting consistently for 3–5 years, the plateau is real — and a phase built around these movements can restart strength and physique progress simultaneously, since the novel stimulus also carries over to the squat, bench, and deadlift.
Most experienced lifters stop making gains because they run out of novel stimulus. These seven forgotten exercises — bent press, circus press, Zottman curls, weighted windmills, overhead carries, trap bar farm walks, and tibialis raises — come from Olympic lifting, strongman, and Bronze Era competition and carry over directly to the squat, bench, and deadlift.
Arthur Saxon, a 200-pound German strongman, set the one-arm bent press world record at 370 pounds — and that record has stood for over 120 years. The bent press looks like a shoulder press but uses whole-body leverage to get massive weight overhead, and it bulletproofs the lower back, core, and glutes far better than any modern isolation exercise.
