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

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!

Tag: Body Care