What Exercises Do You Use to Bulk Up on P90X?

The resistance exercises in the P90X home-workout program can help you to build muscle. Also known as muscle hypertrophy, you can bulk up by using more weight and fewer repetitions in workouts involving dumbbells. You typically want to use enough weight so that you max out at eight to 10 reps for all dumbbell exercises. If you use resistance bands for pullups and chinups, you should aim for the same rep count.

  1. Triceps and General Arm Exercises

    • The shoulders and arms routine features several weighted exercises that help to bulk up your biceps, triceps and forearms. These include in-and-out biceps curls, two-arm triceps kickbacks, deep swimmer's presses, full supination concentration curls, static arm curls, flip-grip twist triceps kickbacks, crouching Cohen curls and Congdon curls. The chest, shoulders and triceps routine also includes front-to-back triceps extensions, fly-row-presses, throw the bomb, slow-mo throw, side-leaning triceps extensions, lying triceps extensions and overhead triceps extensions.

    Biceps and Forearms

    • The back and biceps routine primarily targets your biceps, but the workout ends with a series of hammer exercises to add bulk to your forearms. Exercises that use dumbbells and can help to boost muscle growth are twenty-ones, one-arm cross-body curls, elbows-out lawnmowers, standing biceps curls, one-arm concentration curls, open arm curls, static arm curls, the Congdon locomotive, crouching Cohen curls, one-arm corkscrew curls, curl up/hammer downs, hammer curls, in-out hammer curls and strip-set curls.

    Back

    • The chest and back routine includes three exercises involving dumbbells: heavy pants, lawnmowers and back flys. The back and biceps routine adds seated bent-over back flys, reverse grip bent-over rows and elbows-out lawnmowers. The legs and back routine has no dumbbell exercises that target your back. However, if you use bands instead of a pullup bar, you can bulk up your back in all of these routines by increasing the resistance so that your maximum reps falls into the eight to 12 range.

    Chest and Shoulders

    • The shoulders and arms routine features several moves to add bulk to the shoulders. These include in-and-out straight-arm shoulder flys, seated two-angle shoulder flys, upright rows, deep swimmer's presses and alternating shoulder presses. The chest, shoulders and triceps routine helps to bulk up your chest and shoulders with in-and-out shoulder flys, scarecrows, Y-presses, pour flys, weighted circles, slow-mo throws, fly-row-presses and dumbbell cross-body blows. Aside from increasing the resistance if you use bands for pullups, the only move in the chest and back routine that helps to add bulk to your chest is the lawnmower.

    Legs

    • You can add weights to many of the moves in the legs and back routine to help increase the size of your legs. These include calf raises, toe-roll iso lunges, deadlift squats, alternating side lunges, step back lunges, calf-raise squats and balance lunges. The plyometrics routine uses only body-weight exercises, but also provides a great lower-body workout. To avoid injury, don't add weight to the high-impact exercises in this routine. However, you can always push yourself to jump higher, leap further and squat deeper throughout the routine to help bulk up your legs.