UrbanUpdate

With beach season around the corner, variety is your best friend. So, if your weight room sessions these days consist of you plodding through the exact same regimen that consists of the exact same sequence of exercises that you cooked up way back in high school, here is your chance to incorporate some badly-needed diversity into your routine. Today: BENCH PRESS.

Idalis Velazquez: Incline single-arm dumbbell bench press. This unilateral move works your chest and trains your core, but it also requires your stabilizer muscles to work harder in order to help you stay balanced on the bench. Single arm presses—yes, that's one arm at a time—also help to correct any muscle imbalances between the right and left side that you may have developed.

Ben Booker: Experiment with angles. Use a slightly different angle each time—even if just ten degrees—and try switching to dumbbells. Alternating between dumbbells and the barbell engages different stabilizing muscles and promotes growth a bit differently. The same is true for tweaking the angle of the bench. Even small adjustments can lead to significantly harder workouts.

Robin Arzon: Weighted dips. You'll engage your arms, chest, shoulders, and abs with just one movement. Strap on a weight belt and do three sets of ten repetitions, then remove the belt and go to failure. Make sure your hands are under your shoulders just outside your hips.

Jay Cardiello: Partner press-offs. Find a buddy and begin in a fighting position, like a boxer. Then, have your partner lean into you, placing their chest and shoulder on your palms. Descend to a quarter-squat position. In one explosive movement, extend at the hips and knees, pushing your partner off of you as hard as possible. Perform for 30 seconds, then switch stances. Check out Kevin Love giving this exercise a try at the 3:00-mark here.

Gideon Akande: Offset push-ups. Use a BoSU ball for this exercise. With your left hand on the BoSU and your right hand off, perform a push up, and then walk your left hand off of the BoSU and your right hand onto it. Continue to alternate between your two hands on either side of the BoSU ball, as shown here. This exercise trains the bottom of the push phase of your bench press, making the drive off of your chest more powerful when you return to the bench.

Alexia Clark: Blast-off. Start in a push-up position, perform a regular push-up, and at the top of the motion lean back into child's pose, keeping your core tight (like so). Return back to push-up position and repeat. Blast-offs work your chest from all angles, engage your core, and improve hip and shoulder mobility.

Jay Willis is a staff writer at GQ covering news, law, and politics. Previously, he was an associate at law firms in Washington, D.C. and Seattle, where his practice focused on consumer financial services and environmental cleanup litigation. He studied social welfare at Berkeley and graduated from Harvard Law School... Read more