Hitting Your Muscles From Different Angles

Attack the Angles
One little twist of your wrist and you can drastically change the results in an exercise. Or the slight tilt of a bench. Angles matter, more than most people realize. It doesn't take much of a change in an angle to change the effect on the muscles. Some angle changes even shift the work load to entirely different muscle groups.
One example of a change in angle - instead of the traditional 45 degree angle employed for incline bench press, lower the angle down to 20 to 30 degrees. By lowering the angle of the bench, you will target the upper chest area better. The standard 45 degree incline pulls in a lot of work from the front deltoid muscles - and that is fine if that is your target. However, if you are trying to work the upper chest, a lower angle does a much better job. Try it the next time you perform the incline bench and watch how well it fires up your upper chest region.
The front dumbbell lateral raise works the front deltoids. By turning your wrist up into a hammer position, you can work both the front and side deltoids at the same time. A simple twist of the wrist and you have a new exercise. If you have never performed your lateral raises with your wrists in the hammer position, give it a try. And don't stop there - you can turn your wrist even further outward at the top, putting even more emphasis on the side deltoid.
You don't have to use a fixed position when you work the angles. Arnold, for instance, would employ a palms in position when performing the dumbbell press, and by the time the weight was all the way up, his palms would be facing outward. In other words, he rotated his wrists as the weights were pushed upward, and with this shifting angle, worked all the shoulder muscles instead of just the front deltoids.
Angles can also be used on the lower body as well. You can keep tension on the muscle in the standing leg curl by leaning forward slightly. Virtually any exercise you can do can be altered by the angles you employ. Experimenting is key here as it can lead you to exercise variations are effective - some more so than others. But the only way you will discover something new and productive is to work with various angles instead of just one.