Best upper body exercises

Hi Dave

A mate asked me what the best exercises were for building upperbody strength... he's a relatively newbie to any sort of exercise so I doubt he'll want to shelll out for weights or join a gym.

So far I've got pressups, pullups, I was thinking skipping as well as it certainly seems to tax the upper body but I don't know if it builds strength as such, perhaps dips? Any others you can think of?

Thanks in advance...

Good link Jamie .. ta

Hi Danny.. first apologies.. I thought I HAD answered you..

anyway.. without weights.. chins and dips are pretty good, but progressive resistance and variety are the hard bits..

for the lats and back try towel pulls with a partner.. these are great..

All types of dips should be performed, especially parallel bar type dips..

if you train together theres dozens of partner exercises that work the upper body very well..

but skipping isnt classed as a DEVELOPER, more a cardio exercise.

If you can make a couple of sand bags about 10kgs, these are useful as well.. doing various 'throws' to each other work well..

BUT after all the above, if you want cheap and bloody good.. get a decent set of expander strands... I am a massive fan of this type of work.. in some ways vastly superior to the weights, although in a few ways, they are not as good..

towels, sandbags and expanders.. if you cant get some decent upper body stuff out of THEM.. you never will mate

Thanks a lot Dave

I'll think I'll stick a post up in the general section asking about where to get some expanders - something I've been thinking about for a while but I just haven't been able to turn up the right thing. None of the ones I've found indicate that you can vary the resistance. Thanks a lot for the tips.


Cheers

Danny

TERRY's make the best training expanders.. you can alter resistance from 5kg to 100kgs

Nice one Dave! Thanks

BTW I found this article which is quite interesting - and the author mentions a strandpulling discussion group.

http://www.angelfire.com/wrestling2/jujutsu101/strandpulling.htm