We obtain various upper bounds for the numerical radius w(T) of a bounded linear operator T defined on a complex Hilbert space \(\mathcal {H}\) , by developing the upper bounds for the \(\alpha \) -norm of T, which is defined as \(\Vert T\Vert _{\alpha }= \sup \left\{ \sqrt{\alpha |\langle Tx,x \rangle |^2+ (1-\alpha )\Vert Tx\Vert ^2 }: x\in \mathcal {H}, \Vert x\Vert =1 \right\} \) for \( 0\le \alpha \le 1 \) . Further, we prove that \(\begin{aligned} w(T)\le & \sqrt{\Big ( \left\| \alpha |T|+(1-\alpha )|T^*| \right\| \Big ) \Vert T\Vert } \,\,\,\, \le \,\, \,\, \Vert T\Vert , \,\, \forall \alpha \in [0,1]. \end{aligned}\) For \(0\le \alpha \le 1 \le \beta ,\) the operator T is called \((\alpha ,\beta )\) -normal if \(\alpha ^2 T^*T\le TT^*\le \beta ^2 T^*T\) holds. Note that every invertible operator is an \((\alpha ,\beta )\) -normal operator for suitable values of \(\alpha \) and \(\beta \) . Among other lower bounds for the numerical radius of an \((\alpha ,\beta )\) -normal operator T, we show that \(\begin{aligned} w(T)\ge & \sqrt{\max \left\{ 1+\alpha ^2, 1+\frac{1}{\beta ^2}\right\} \frac{\Vert T\Vert ^2}{4}+ \frac{\left| \Vert \Re (T)\Vert ^2-\Vert \Im (T)\Vert ^2 \right| }{2}} \\\ge & \max \left\{ \sqrt{1+\alpha ^2}, \sqrt{1+\frac{1}{\beta ^2}} \right\} \frac{\Vert T\Vert }{2} > \frac{\Vert T\Vert }{2}, \end{aligned}\) where \(\Re (T)\) and \(\Im (T)\) are the real part and imaginary part of T, respectively.