3 TIPS FOR BUILDING A BETTER CHEST
If you're a seasoned lifter seeking for new techniques you've never thought of to kick-start your chest training, you're in the right place. Check out these 3 important tips:
#1 Front-load your workout with a focus on strength.
To get the most out of your workout, push the heaviest weights for 6-8 reps early on when you're freshest. Sure, you can do 12 rep sets on your first exercise, but that means you'll be using a smaller weight and pushing it to the hypertrophic limit. That's not a wise trade-off for your first exercise, because that's the only time you'll be able to handle your biggest loads during your training session.
Go super hard in the beginning when your energy is at its highest and when you start to fatigue, take your training to failure with other measures besides just using heavy weights.
What is the definition of "heavy"? Start with a weight that is 80-85 percent of your one-rep max—a weight that you can do for 6-8 reps. Mechanical stress, which impacts the integrity of skeletal muscle cells and is known to have a big influence on muscle growth, is more affected by this. Your capacity to lift your heaviest weights will gradually deteriorate after your initial exercise due to cumulative tiredness.
When it comes to chest day, start with a multi joint press. These exercises recruit a greater amount of muscle mass and produce a stronger anabolic stimulation. As a result, the bench-press family is your most diverse set of exercises.
#2 Use Variations To Target Your Pecs In Different Ways
Changing things up is as simple as swapping out that set bench for an adjustable one. Adjustable benches provide a plethora of different exercise options. Adjust your adjustable bench to a level position and then one notch higher. Have you ever tried training at this slightly slanted angle? What if you turn it up a notch, or even slightly more than your typical incline, until it's very steep? Each of these alterations modifies the way the chest musculature is recruited, as well as the delts' involvement.
The steeper the bench, the higher the point of maximal stimulation on your chest becomes—at the cost, of course, of increased delt recruitment. Similarly, if your gym offers an adjustable decline bench, you can use small repositioning to introduce slight differences in how you do declines.
With dumbbell presses and flies, as well as chest exercises on the Smith machine, you may adjust bench angles. You can increase the variety of ways you target your pec fibers by modifying the equipment you use (dumbbells, barbells, machines) and your grip width on barbell exercises. Close-grip benches are better for targeting the inner chest fibers, whilst a broader grip is better for hitting the outer pecs.
#3 On Bench Presses, Focus On Liftoffs And Lockouts For A Few Weeks At A Time
Bodybuilders typically incorporate exercises from various angles to work the pecs more extensively in order to enhance muscle growth. But, for a change, let's take a page from the strength-training book. Determine where your sticking point is in the range of action when executing bench presses. Is it in the push-off, the lockout, or somewhere in the middle? Your training strategy should be determined by the answer. Before I go any farther, here's a word of caution: Consider training in a power rack for both safety and efficacy, regardless of your strategy.
If your stopping point is just off your chest (lowest third of the range of motion), don't believe bouncing the bar off your chest will help; it will merely make the action simpler. Instead, utilize a technique known as "paused bench presses," often known as dead benches, to strengthen it.
When you lower the bar, you usually reverse direction all at once, allowing built-up elastic energy to help. In a power rack, however, allowing the bar to settle on the safeties allows the built-up energy to dissipate. You've now increased the difficulty of the movement, which corresponds to the short-term training plan of increasing your strength in that part of the lift. The safeties should be positioned just above the level of your chest. Before powering out of the hole, take a 2-second pause. Maintain a tight grip throughout.
Building strength towards the lockout: Don't worry if you can't lock out at full arm extension. You can utilize bench-press boards or move the power rack's safeties to train only the top third of the range of motion. For full-range reps, you'll be able to use more weight than you typically would. The bench press has an increasing strength curve, which means that the farther the bar is from your chest, the stronger you are. You'll be able to overload and educate your nervous system to tolerate larger loads than it would typically experience because this type of training is limited to that segment of the exercise.
Increasing your strength throughout your whole range of motion: Serious lifters are likely to use bench-press bands or chains. And you might have been perplexed as to what they were up to. These devices, on the other hand, increase resistance as the bar moves away from your chest. That method more closely resembles the ascending strength curve seen in bench-press exercises. With bands and chains, you can integrate "variable resistance," in which you push less weight where you're weakest and more weight where you're strongest.
