Nothing impresses like a big, thick chest. Don’t know how to get one? You need these chest workouts!
Everybody notices a big, thick muscular chest. It doesn’t matter whether the guy is walking down the street or at the gym, when he goes by, everyone looks. Let me give a few tips to developing the chest you always wanted.
The biggest mistakes I see in the gym, are wrong shoulder placement and people doing endless sets of cable flies.
Proper Shoulder Position
- Shoulder placement – Before you start your first rep, you must make sure to de-shrug and pull your shoulders down and back. By doing this you now will be pressing with your chest and not your front deltoids.
- Fly movements – Second, everyone seems to be doing to many fly movements. Worrying about the details of their chest, before developing muscle mass.
Keep it simple
Heavy compound (multi-joint) movements are the best way to develop a thick muscular chest. No matter if you’re hitting incline bench press or flat bench press, you have to put extreme stress on the chest muscles.
Generally, this happens best in the six-rep range. I know most bodybuilding books you read say to do 8-12 reps, but in my experience that number isn’t enough to stimulate the proper motor units and fast-twitch muscle fibers.
You need to do heavier sets with good form. Teaching the central nervous system to fire more motor units at the same time, and muscles can contract faster.
But that’s not all! Now that we have taught more chest muscle fibers to fire effectively, we need to cause hypertrophy to get that muscle to grow.
The most effective way to do this, is by increasing training volume. Train your chest twice per week, every week. No exceptions!!!
The big chest breakdown
Your chest routine split should comprise two days.
- Day one of your chest workout routine will be low-volume, high- intensity training. You want to pick a weight that should be heavy enough that you reach failure on that sixth repetition. You’ll do 10 total sets in the 6-rep range over three different movements. Then, give your chest at least 72 hours of rest before you hit it again.
- Day two of your chest workouts will consist of higher-volume, lower-intensity work. I didn’t say “low intensity”—I said “lower.” In this workout, you use 12-20 rep range 16 total sets with four different movements.
