Author: RWChampion

3 Good Reasons to Eliminate Dips from your Chest Workout

Posted on by RWChampion

3 Good Reasons to Eliminate Dips from your Chest Workout

Eliminate Dips from your Chest Workout

Dips are a very effective exercise for building the lower chest and the triceps in chest workout. Frankly, there’s no denying it. It is for this reason that so many people are absolutely shocked when I tell them they should never do dips when they exercise.

These people usually ask me the question “Why not?” 

They should begin by asking the question “Why?” 

Why is it that so many people are determined to include dips as a regular part of their chest and triceps workouts? If the answer has to do with dips being the best exercise for building the lower chest, I would tell the person that they’re wrong, and I would also provide them with the same response if they told me dips are the best exercise for building the triceps.

So, with that out of the way, now I can address why people shouldn’t include dips in their workouts. There are three simple answers to this question, and once you’re aware of them, hopefully you will do the wise thing and remove dips from your training routines completely.

Dips are Very Dangerous for your Shoulders

When you train, it is important that you put yourself in the safest possible environment to cause the muscles being trained to grow into their strongest, most ideal form. In terms of the way they position the shoulder joint, dips are actually an incredibly dangerous exercise.

During the dip movement, the shoulders start to roll forward at the bottom of each repetition, which forces the shoulder joint out of its socket during each repetition. Certainly, the movement has strength-building benefits for the lower chest and the triceps, but in the process of generating this stress, the movement is absolutely wrecking the shoulder joint over and over again by keeping it in a very dangerous position.

This danger is compounded by the fact that people often perform dips after they’ve done other compound movements, and the muscle groups around the shoulder joint are already fatigued. This results in the joint being even more susceptible to injury than it would normally be by the time dips are executed during training.

Even under normal circumstances, when you’re doing dips, you’re performing a movement that’s very unsafe.  That’s why I can’t encourage anyone to do them with a clear conscience. Even though you might get some positive results from dips, the side effects and the negative consequences simply aren’t worth it.

 

There is a Much Safer way to Build your Lower Chest

Now that I have dealt with the primary reason why dips shouldn’t be done, we can tackle the question of whether or not there is a better way to achieve the same muscle-building results as dips. Without reservation, I can tell you there are far better ways to build your lower chest.

I always talk about muscles being made in an arc formation, and that includes the chest muscles. So, whatever movement you do, you want it to be a movement you can control, and a movement that works your muscles within the arc formation they were designed in. Chest exercises are commonly thought of in terms of pushing and pressing movements, but the rotational motion of the shoulder is the primary force that results in the chest contractions that truly build the pectoral muscles. 

When the shoulders go back and then push forward and down, it works a lot more of the lower pectorals. The most effective way to achieve this motion is with cables as opposed to dips. When you do a cable crossover, you can focus specifically on the lower pectorals. When the shoulders go back, it forces the entire pectoral region to get involved, and when you finish the rep by pushing low and down, it forces the lower pecs to do the majority of the work.

Remember to bring your shoulders back and then forward and down. The backward movement opens and stretches the pectorals, and then you should squeeze forward and contract downward to finish each repetition.

There are Much Better Ways to Train your Triceps

Training the triceps is fundamentally about straightening the arm by contracting the tricep muscles and extending the forearm out or down. No matter what method is being used to train the triceps, this way to build muscle in them is to extend the forearm and straighten the arm through a contraction.

When you keep this in mind and then analyze the dip, you see that the tricep isn’t placed in an optimal position to contract before the arm is extended. And since the chest assumes so much of the burden involved in stabilizing the body and pressing the weight, the benefit to the tricep comes primarily from flexing the tricep muscles at the top of the movement while it is holding up the bulk of the body’s weight. 

The other problem with dips is that they make it impossible to mentally focus on the work being done by the triceps, because the triceps aren’t the primary driver of the movement, and you can’t really think about them until the movement is 75% complete. In practice, most people are so focused on simply manipulating their body positioning while they’re doing dips that they aren’t thinking at all about what the targeted muscles are doing.

If you want to train your triceps in a safe manner that allows you to give them your full attention, and in a fashion that allows you to maximize the focus on the triceps by contracting the muscles and keeping them squeezed throughout the movement, almost any form of tricep extension is more effective and efficient than dips. This includes cable tricep extensions, seated tricep extensions with the machine, tricep kickbacks, and any other tricep movement that enables the shoulder joint to remain in its socket while the triceps are being trained.

The key takeaway here is that dips are extremely bad for your shoulder joint. You may really love dips, you may have done them for a long time, and you may feel that you have extremely strong triceps because of them. You might even be able to do dips with the weight belt that hangs down and allows you to add a lot of extra weight, which is an impressive way to show off your strength to anyone who might be watching.

I understand these things are hard to give up if you love them. In the long run, they’re just not good for you, and there are better ways to get the results you want in both your chest and triceps. For more great fitness tips, feel free to check out the rest of the blog at RonWilliamsFitness.com, and also the Ron Williams channel on YouTube!

 
 

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3 Reasons you Won’t Keep your New Year’s Fitness Resolutions (and 3 Ways to make sure you do)

Posted on by RWChampion

3 Reasons you Won’t Keep your New Year’s Fitness Resolutions (and 3 Ways to make sure you do)

Did you know that 50 percent of Americans set a New Year’s resolution? It’s great that so many millions of people are embracing the challenge of trying to better themselves in a tangible way. However, despite approaching the upcoming year with the best of intentions, only eight percent of New-Year’s-resolution makers truly see their resolutions through to fruition on an annual basis.

Because so many New Year’s resolutions involve fitness, I pay special attention to the factors that influence people’s decisions to maintain or deviate from their plans for physical self improvement. 

The way I see it, there are three killers to every New Year’s fitness resolution. These may seem like minor factors, but each of these seemingly minor influences can permanently sidetrack you from accomplishing your goals if it is left unchecked, and allowed to take control of your life for even an instant. Stay alert, and be prepared with strategies to combat these three resolution-killing adversaries.

Lack of Motivation

In my opinion, motivation is the number one killer of all New Year’s fitness resolutions. Oftentimes, when we begin to follow through with our New Year’s fitness resolutions, we feel a strong initial motivation. This is a good thing, but real motivation comes from achieving results. When you see some initial success, and you begin to achieve your goals over and over again, that establishes a deep inner motivation for you to continue the actions that are causing you to achieve the results you have been craving. In this way, success definitely breeds even more success.

Setting Unrealistic Goals

The second major reason people get derailed from following through on their New Year’s fitness resolutions is because they set unrealistic goals. Saying that I want to lose 100 pounds is an admirable goal, but if I establish no realistic timeline for myself within which I intend to accomplish that goal, three weeks will pass, and I certainly will not have lost 100 pounds. At that point, it’s very easy to get discouraged, forget about my goal, and quit doing anything to reach it. As we mentioned earlier, success breeds success. Make sure you set small, achievable goals that you can build upon rather than setting an unrealistic goal that is going to leave you feeling hopeless and unfulfilled.

Procrastination

To me, procrastination is highest on the scale of issues that cause people to get sidetracked from achieving their New Year’s fitness resolutions. If you’ve set a goal, you need to act now, or you’ll move into the perilous realm of procrastination. Procrastination is a killer for any goal, because procrastination allows you to feel good about the dream of accomplishing something that you’re never going to accomplish. 

If you tell yourself you’re going to get into tremendous shape tomorrow, then you’ll feel good about yourself. And then when tomorrow comes, you tell yourself again that you’re going to lose a lot of weight and get into tremendous shape… tomorrow. Once again, you feel good about yourself, and you get excited, but once you start to procrastinate, accomplishing your goal never happens. This is why you have to act right now.

In order to help you to avoid these three major culprits that have caused many New Year’s resolutions to go unfulfilled, I’m going to give you three strategies to achieve a successful, happy, healthy New Year’s fitness resolution that actually comes to pass.

These three strategies are very powerful.

 

Strategic Nutrition

The first strategy is to focus on nutrition. Nutrition is so utterly important because it’s what nurtures and nourishes our bodies so that we can perform. Simply put, never eat a carbohydrate alone, and always make sure you eat your proteins and your essential fatty acids along with your carbohydrates. 

What this accomplishes is it takes the carbohydrates that you just ate and it lowers them on the glycemic scale, which makes it nearly impossible to convert those carbohydrate calories into fat. This way, you could actually eat three times the calories while still maintaining your weight, and you can possibly get even leaner.

Cardiovascular Exercise

The second strategy involves doing regular cardiovascular exercise. We call it “aerobics” because it’s “with air.” Literally, it’s “air-robics.” So, when you move oxygen through your system, it automatically burns body fat. In fact, doing this will send your body a signal causing it to burn body fat for up to 24 continuous hours. In this way, cardiovascular exercise permits you to burn fat constantly, and allows you to fight body fat on the front end through implementing proper nutrition practices, and on the back end by directly burning body fat.

Resistance Training

The third strategy, which you might have already guessed, is resistance training. This form of training shapes and builds your muscles, and the more muscle you have, the more body fat you can potentially burn. As human beings, we’re naturally motivated by results that we can see in the mirror. This means that if we have a goal of losing body fat, and the results of our resistance training allow us to burn more body fat than we otherwise would if we weren’t doing any resistance training, we’re going to be further motivated by our results and more likely maintain our ongoing fat-burning strategies.

Keep these strategies in mind; they will go a long way toward helping you maintain your New Year’s fitness resolutions. For more great fitness tips, feel free to check out the rest of the blog at RonWilliamsFitness.com, and also the Ron Williams channel on YouTube!

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4 Reasons why your Muscles are not Growing

Posted on by RWChampion

4 Reasons why your Muscles are not Growing

In most cases, it won’t be the big things that are limiting your muscle growth and holding you back; it will be the small things.

You probably know many people who claim to work out every single day, for hours at a time, but there is very little about the appearance of these particular people that would lead you to believe that they work out frequently, if at all. By the same token, there are other people who exercise only a few days each week, for short stretches, and their bodies look far more impressive than those of the people that claim to exercise for far longer.

This doesn’t mean the people who exercise for long periods of time are lying. It means there are different things happening before, during and after their workouts that are contributing to the effectiveness of those workouts, and also to the results of those workouts on those people’s bodies.

If you’re not achieving the results you desire from your workouts, there’s no need to panic. You probably just need to tweak small things in one to four areas of your training in order to see major changes in the quality of your physique, along with other measurable results.

To help you out, and to help you get the most out of every single strength-training session you participate in, here are four reasons why your muscles are not growing the way you would like them to.

Your Workouts Lack Intensity

Your muscles respond to intensity. Hypertrophy, or the growth of muscle, comes as a direct result of the intensity you perform your exercises with. There are plenty of people who arrive at the gym and go through the motions of performing exercises, and they may even perform all of the correct exercises with proper form, and support their workouts on the back end with proper nutrition. However, their inability to make any recognizable gains is caused by the simple fact that they don’t perform their exercises with any intensity. As a result, all of the proper forethought they give toward performing the right exercises in the proper distribution of sets and reps is all for naught.

A muscle only grows after it has been worn down through intense training. From there, the muscles rebuild themselves in a stronger configuration, which allows them to lift even more weight the next time they are trained. This is the only way that sustained, meaningful muscle growth occurs, and none of this happens if you don’t lift with the intensity required to break your muscles down so that they can be rebuilt to be large and powerful.

You don’t measure progress by how sore you are, or by how much time you physically spent at the gym working out. Instead, you measure progress in ways that are measurable and visible. The ability to perform more controlled reps with the same weight, or the ability to lift heavier weight with good form, is an example of progress. Another example of progress is an obvious improvement in the way your body looks. Remember that you need to maximize every single rep during every single workout, and intensity is a huge factor in stimulating muscle growth.

You’re Not Taking Adequate Time to Recover

The big problem with recovery is there are so many people who are so eager to grow that they don’t think about recovery time or recognize its importance. On top of that, there are many people that don’t fully understand when their muscles are actively in the process of growing. 

Your muscles don’t grow at all from the initial pump of training; they grow larger and stronger while you’re resting. After the muscle recovers, you’ll be able to lift heavier weights, and you’ll be able to increase the number of reps you can do.

Instead of choosing to rest, a lot of people overtrain their muscles. When overtaining occurs, these people’s bodies never get the opportunity to repair the muscle tissues that were torn while they were working out. When that happens, the muscles begin to atrophy, and they become stagnant in their growth. 

Give you muscles between two to three day to recover after you’ve worked them strenuously. While they’re recovering, make sure you fuel them properly, and make sure you’re getting plenty of rest and sleep. If you can do that without overtraining your muscles, you’ll be providing yourself with a vastly improved chance of maximizing your growth potential.

You’re Lifting With Improper Form

One of the most common sights in gyms across the world involves people who are willing to sacrifice life and limb to lift a weight, no matter how heavy it is, or no matter how awful their lifting form is. These people are usually lifting with their egos because they want to impress people around them with the size and quantity of the weights they’re lifting, or because they want to be able to brag to their friends about how much weight they were strong enough to move. 

The reality is that hardly any of the weightlifting they performed with incorrect form will translate into meaningful muscle growth. They sacrificed the opportunity to have a productive workout for the sake of impressing a few people around them. It’s also possible that they’ve injured themselves in the process of training with far more weight than they ever should have dared to lift.

People sacrifice form in a few ways. One way involves using momentum to float the weights through the section when the muscles are supposed to be working their hardest, which is very common during several shoulder exercises. Another way to sacrifice proper form involves shortening the distance that the weight travels, or by failing to retain the ideal body posture throughout a lift.

All of these failures to maintain proper form are common ways that people injure themselves while training. Remember, when you sacrifice proper form to complete a rep, that rep doesn’t count the way you’d like it to, and the results won’t materialize the way you’d like them to either.

You should never sacrifice the form of your lifts for the sake of being able to move heavier weights. Instead, make sure you concentrate on maintaining impeccable form, because maintaining good form is going to keep you from getting injured, and it’s going to get you the results you’re looking for.

You’re Not Breaking Your Training Into The Proper Sets

A lot of times you hear people say to do three or four sets of an exercise, and you may be wondering why this is necessary. 

The reason why you’d want to do three or four sets is simple to explain. The first set is supposed to break down 50-to-60 percent of the muscle group being trained so that it can repair itself and recover according to the stress being applied to it. Then, the second set is supposed to break the muscle group down from 50-to-70 percent, and the third set is supposed to break down the muscle group down by up to 80 percent.

You don’t want to break the muscle group down any more than 80 percent because that muscle becomes substantially more vulnerable to a real injury. Remember, you’re micro tearing the muscle as you’re training it, so you’re creating small tears that are having small repairs made to them during your recovery stage. You don’t want to get a serious tear from overworking the muscle.

In light of this, you should select the number of sets you’re going to train based on how thoroughly you intend to tear the muscle group down. Also, if you’re concentrating on building the muscle, you want to make sure you’re using every muscle fiber, and not simply concentrating on manipulating the weight and getting the weight up. Make sure you have every muscle fiber firing so you can achieve full development. If you’re doing fewer than eight repetitions, you’re really only concentrating on completing the repetitions rather than maximizing the number of muscle fibers that are firing. Stay within the eight-to-12 rep range to achieve the best results.

I hope this explanation of why your muscles may not be growing will help you to improve your workouts and kickstart a fresh round of muscle growth for you.

For more great fitness tips, feel free to check out the rest of the blog at RonWilliamsFitness.com, and also the Ron Williams channel on YouTube!

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3 reasons you should add Arc Movement principles to your strength training

Posted on by RWChampion

3 reasons you should add Arc Movement principles to your strength training

Over the course of my many years of training, I developed a set of principles around a concept that I call “Arc Movement.” I have mentioned the concept of Arc Movement in countless interviews, video clips, articles and blog posts. In all honesty, my rise in the world of natural bodybuilding never would have been as meteoric as it became if it hadn’t been for my use of Arc Movement. 

Thanks to the use of Arc Movement principles, I was able to win 21 natural bodybuilding world championships. Not only was I able to craft and develop better-looking muscles than any of my competitors, but I was also able to stay injury free over the course of countless hours of training in the gym.

If you’re wondering what Arc Movement is, or why I feel it is the most valuable principle you can apply to guide your training activities, here are three reasons why Arc Movement can make a marked improvement in your workouts that is just as meaningful and consequential as the benefits it has made in mine.

All of your muscles are made in an arc formation

All of the muscles in the body are made in an arc formation. This includes the chest, the deltoids, the biceps, the glutes, the hamstrings, quadriceps, and every other muscle group. To me, it only made logical sense for me to train my body in a manner that took advantage of the way it is designed. 

Not only are the muscles in our bodies made in arc formations, but they are designed to be trained in arc-shaped patterns. If you consider the natural path of a bicep curl, the weight travels through an obvious arc-shaped path as it moves from its starting point to its ending point. However, even when you take a less obvious example like a chest press or a lat pulldown, you can see how your hands and arms travel in a natural arc as they move from your sides to above your head, or from your sides to above your chest. 

This is the natural path and movement of your hands and arms because your body was designed to move them in this way. Therefore, training methods that take the natural shape and motion of your body into account are going to be the safest and most effective movements that you can do.

Arc Movement will help you build muscles faster

If you look at a bird, you’ll notice that the largest, leanest and most developed muscle group is the chest, and the flying motion is performed in an arc. Because your chest is formed in a similar arc, your arms need to travel in a full arc to develop the chest across the entire configuration that it’s made in. That gives you a peak contraction at the height of the movement.

When you perform any exercise, you should pinpoint your focus on the muscle being trained and work to develop a peak contraction in that muscle. Really, that’s the entire point of performing resistance training; you should be attempting to develop a peak contraction in your muscles. However, certain exercises only give you a maximum contraction without giving you the ability to develop a peak contraction. 

The barbell bench press is a perfect example of this. When I’m doing the bench press, I can press the bar straight up to give myself a maximum contraction in my chest, but the exercise won’t allow me to develop a peak contraction in the pectorals because I’m restricted by my hand positioning on the bar. Because of this restriction, my hand can’t complete their movement along their natural path, and I can’t achieve a peak contraction in my chest. 

This is one of the reasons why dumbbell bench press is a far more effective exercise; the hands and arms move along a natural path, which is an arc. As a result, the muscles are strengthened and built across their full range of motion.

Arc Movement is better for your joints

When we’re training with weights or other forms of resistance, our usual focus is on simply trying to build our muscles to be as big and strong as we can possibly make them. While we’re lifting those weights, we seldom consider how our workout is affecting the joints that are attached to the muscles that are being trained. 

If you don’t understand that your muscle groups are made in an arc, or that the natural path of your training movements should be performed in an arc-shaped pattern, you are going to run a high risk of simultaneously destroying your joints while you’re attempting to build your muscles. 

If you think about a doll, when you raise the arm past a certain point, the ball comes out of the socket. Your shoulder joint is actually no different. Unlike other joints like the elbow, which is a hinge joint, the shoulder is a ball-and-socket joint. That means if I’m working my chest, shoulders or traps, I’m working with a ball-and-socket joint. Because of that fact, I have to be very conscious of the safety of the movements I’m doing, and also which movements are unsafe for me. 

Overhead presses and dips – two very popular exercises – are both movements that essentially take your shoulders out of their joints and place an immense amount of stress on them. For this reason it is almost impossible to do these exercises without damaging your joints. This is also one of the reasons why I never do them at all. Besides, Arc Movement is always better at building the muscles anyway.

Always remember, Arc Movement’s principles keep you safely within the structure of the muscle you’re training. This allows you to build the strongest possible muscles in the safest way imaginable. For more great fitness tips, feel free to check out the rest of the blog at RonWilliamsFitness.com, and also the Ron Williams channel on YouTube!

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Three ways to get the most out of any chest workout

Posted on by RWChampion

Three ways to get the most out of any chest workout

Chest training is a favorite for many people, and particularly for men. The chest is one of the first places people look when judging male physiques. A sizable chest is an attractive physical feature, and is a pretty good indicator of a person’s general strength level. In fact, more often than not, men will gauge one another’s overall strength level solely on the basis of how much weight they can bench press. If you’re a male who has been involved in weight training, my guess is that you’ve asked people – and been asked by people – “How much can you bench?” far more than you’ve been asked how much weight you can squat, or how many pull-ups you can do.

Unfortunately, that’s where one of the problems with chest training comes into play. Because bench press is often the be-all-end-all exercise for many men – as opposed to deadlifts, pullups or t-bar rows – we often become desperate to showcase impressive feats of strength and brag about how much weight we are able to bench. As a result of this, men will often sacrifice form, efficiency, and opportunities for significant muscle growth simply for the sake of being able to brag about how much weight we can press from a flat-back position.  

Obviously, the ultimate goal of resistance training for the chest is to build strength in that region while simultaneously crafting a good-looking set of pectoral muscles. Therefore, here are three important tips that can help you maximize your time while also minimizing your opportunities for injury, as long as you exercise intelligently and don’t let your ego get in the way.

Know what is supposed to be happening

When you train your chest, the one thing you should be concentrating on above all others is filling your chest cavity with blood so that the muscle pumps to the utmost degree. The amount of weight you use is important, but if your goal is to maximize muscle growth, the quantity of weight you’re lifting isn’t nearly as significant as achieving a proper pump in your muscles.

One of the reasons people frequently train their chests incorrectly by using too much weight and improper form is because they have a flawed understanding of when and how muscle growth takes place within the chest. Always remember, your muscles do not grow while you’re working them; they actually grow while they’re resting and you’re feeding them following a workout.

Whenever you develop a muscle, what you’re doing is microtearing it. In principle, this functions the same way it would if you tore your ankle. A torn ankle swells and fills with blood because the body is sending blood to the ankle in order to heal it. When we microtear our muscles, the blood rushes to that area to heal it, thereby creating the pump we’re all familiar with. The feeling of soreness you experience the day after a hard chest workout is because of the microtears in your pectoral muscles. The process of resting the muscle and getting the proper nutrients repairs the muscles and allows them to rebuild themselves even stronger so that they can better handle the stress you just placed on them.

In short, the way you create a large chest is to safely put as much stress on your entire chest as you possibly can, and then give your body a chance to recover from that exertion, because that’s how the muscles grow.

 

Get a full range of motion

To thoroughly train your chest, you should start by using a chest press machine with a design that allows for a natural arc in the lifting motion. Because the chest muscles are built in an arc formation, following an arc-shaped lifting path is the key to achieving a full stretch in the chest throughout a full range of motion. While you’re doing the exercise, your shoulders should never come forward. Instead of allowing your shoulders to drift forward, make sure you completely open your chest first by sticking it out. This creates a full stretch in the pectoral region, and it guarantees that you’ll get the most out of the movement when you then contract your chest muscles and press the weight forward. 

As you concentrate on your form and on moving through a full range of motion, you should be sure to engage your pec-delt tie ins, which are the muscles that link your chest and shoulders together. Engaging the muscles in this area and being sure to pull and press the weight from this part of your anatomy feels different from simply moving the weight using your arms, and the overall difference it makes in your physique is substantial. 

When I perform chest flys on a machine, I go so far as to place a barrier between myself and the machine to make sure I can get a full range of motion. This ensures that I can maximize the muscle size, capacity and density. It also ensures that I build the muscle at the very start of the repetition and all the way along the pectorals as the movement reaches its completion.

Stay in sync with what your body is doing

Just because the weight is moving doesn’t mean the right body part is doing the work. This is especially true when it comes to training your chest, so make sure you stay completely locked in mentally, and in sync with your body, in order to get the most out of your chest training.

For example, whenever you use the pec deck, you don’t want to think about pushing against the weight from your hands or forearms. Instead, you should concentrate on pushing your elbow into the pad. If the forearm does the pushing, then the pressure goes directly into the elbow joint, which is the weakest point. In addition, by pressing from the forearm instead of from the elbow, you’ll minimize the amount of work the chest is doing, and transfer some of the workload into the shoulders. Remember, the goal is to efficiently train the chest by maximizing the activation level of every single muscle fiber, not to move the maximum amount of weight by any means necessary. 

You also want to be careful not to use repetitions that are too quick. If you’re relying on momentum to float the weight through the full range of motion, you are not getting all of the chest-building benefits out of performing the exercise.

Remember, the pectoral muscles always need to be doing the work, and when you are lifting a weight that is clearly too heavy for you, you start trying to recruit muscles from other parts of the body. If you find that you need to recruit other muscle groups to get the weight up, this is a sign that you actually need to reduce the weight and maintain your form. Otherwise, injury is inevitable, whether it happens immediately or later on in the training process.

I hope this explanation of chest-training efficiency has been beneficial to you. For more great fitness tips, feel free to check out the rest of the blog at RonWilliamsFitness.com, and also the Ron Williams channel on YouTube!

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Why You Need A Pushup Machine To Train Your Inner Chest

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Why You Need A Pushup Machine To Train Your Inner Chest

It may seem to you that it is harder to build the inner chest as opposed to the outer chest.  There are three basic reasons why:

  • Not having proper equipment
  • Not using proper form and technique
  • Not understanding arc movements.

The truth is this: In order to most effectively build the inner chest, you must remember that it’s not about the extension of the arms, but it’s about the rotation of the shoulder.  For you to acquire a peak contraction in the chest, it requires the shoulder to completely rotate forward as you are contracting with resistance. Unfortunately, because of the inherent constraints of most chest exercises, building a great chest becomes more difficult. 

Quite frankly, most exercise equipment is inadequate when it comes to maximizing the development of the chest. In fact, I had to design my own piece of exercise equipment – the Iron Chest Master – in order to find an adequate remedy for this problem. Prior to understanding arc movements, my chest was the weakest part of my physique, and I had to discover a solution through work, research, testing and study so that I could balance my entire body.

Ultimately, at the conclusion of this process, what I discovered was simply this: Every muscle group in the body is made in an arc formation, and in order to build and maximize the muscle size and shape we must stay within that arc that the muscle was created in.  This not only builds the muscle, but it protects the joint. 

Let us use the bird as an example. I studied the anatomy and the movement of a bird in flight. The largest and leanest muscle group on a bird is the chest. I also noticed that the structure of a bird’s upper body is similar to a human when it comes to the chest and the shoulder joint.  The bird flies using an arc, which develops the chest as it protects the joint. As the bird flies, he receives resistance from gravity, but he also produces lateral resistance as he pushes against the air. This maximizes the development of his chest. I duplicated this movement in the Iron Chest Master.  

The Iron Chest Master allows its user to move in the same arc formation as a bird in flight, mimicking the arc movement and developing the chest in the same manner using the downward pressure of gravity during the pushup phase, along with lateral resistance from resistance bands, creating a peak contraction and complete development of the inner chest.  

Let me explain some of the limitations of a few of the most popular chest builders.

Push-Ups

The pushup is a convenient exercise that can be done just about anywhere without a person ever having to go to the gym. There is a right way and a wrong way to do a pushup, and neither of these ways will adequately train your inner chest.

The most effective way to work your chest while doing a pushup is to make sure you assume a power position, meaning that your hands are far enough apart that your triceps and your forearms reach a 90-degree angle, and your wrists, elbows and shoulders are on the same plane as your chest proceeds down toward the ground.  

The objective is to open your chest and force your shoulders back. If you don’t think carefully about what you are trying to accomplish, you will almost automatically place your elbows close to your body, bringing your hands closer together.  As a result, the movement will no longer focus on the chest. Instead, the resistance and the pressure moves to the triceps and places your shoulder joints in a compromised position.  

Even when the pushup is done correctly it has no lateral movement or lateral resistance. The pushup does not allow for a full range of motion, which is what is required to isolate the inner chest. 

Dumbbell Press and Bench Press

The dumbbell press is better than the barbell bench press because the movement can be adapted to the body, and the hands and arms can move independently from one another. However, dumbbells still can’t create any lateral resistance that directly affects the inside of the chest because the resistance always comes in the form of gravity, from the floor to the ceiling. 

Both pushups and bench presses will never allow you to achieve a peak contraction, because they lack a full range of motion and lateral resistance

Chest Flys

One of the fundamental problems with a chest fly is that the motion involves the use of the bicep. The further your hands slide away from your body, the more the biceps are involved in stabilizing the weight. The bicep is a much smaller and weaker muscle group than the chest, so the bicep limits the amount of weight you can use.  Also, there is no direct lateral resistance. This is yet another case where resistance in the motion is delivered by gravity, and it is generated vertically from the floor to the ceiling. At no point does the manipulation of the hands compensate for this.

Cable Crossovers

Cable crossovers allow you to build the middle of your chest, but once again, there’s an obvious limitation when it comes to training the inner part of the chest: All of the resistance comes from behind you, and there is no way to change its direction. Cable crossovers will permit you to stretch the shoulders back to open your chest wide, and then you can drive both the shoulders and arms forward, squeezing in the center. This gives you one of the best center-chest contractions available through normal means, but it still doesn’t provide you with any focused, lateral resistance. Moreover, this movement completely lacks the power position, which is your body’s strongest position. 

Many people attempt to replicate the basic motion of chest flys and crossovers at home by sliding their hands together from wide to narrow positions using paper plates. Not only can it be very dangerous to slide your hands along an unguided path while all of your bodyweight is hovering over your shoulders, but it ultimately isn’t accomplishing what you want. At no point is any lateral resistance being applied to your chest during the movement, nor are you obtaining the power position. Therefore, when you do this exercise, you are training your chest in an inefficient and unsafe fashion and achieving few benefits, if any.

I hope this explanation of chest exercises has been beneficial to you. For more great fitness tips, feel free to check out the rest of the blog at RonWilliamsFitness.com, and also the Ron Williams channel on YouTube!

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