- Liittynyt
- 16.4.2002
- Viestejä
- 98 605
Chest
For Beginners chest is really difficult to train. To perform chest exercises in a productive way for stimulating the chest to grow, you need a really strong mind to muscle connection. As soon as you start to not totally focus on the chest itself, many other muscles will immediately take a big part of the training weight and in this moment it gets almost impossible to develop your chest in the same way like the rest of your body.
In order to avoid this, there are many possibilities. First of all you can start every chest workout with an isolation exercise. In this way you pre-exhaust your pecs and when doing bench press afterwards, you won't be tempted that much to use weights, that are probably too heavy for your chest (even if you might be able to bench them, by using the help of shoulders and triceps).
When starting with the bench press, it is really important to always keep the clear movement in your mind. You need to put your mind completely into the muscle and to feel actively how it contracts with every rep. I recommend to let down the barbell in the negative movement almost to your throat and not to the middle of your chest, like most people do it. Again you take away the work from your shoulders by doing this and the focus goes more into your pecs.
Another good attempt for improving this muscle might be to use only the first part of the active movement. When benching on a Smith machine or also Hammer Strengh machines, you can intensify the isolation of your chest by doing these non-finished reps. You still strech to the maximun and then push the weight only a bit more than half of the way. In the end of the complete movement you will realize that normally the chest starts loosing its full contraction and so you can say, that the important part of the repetition is already made before.
Another important hint, that made my chest grow much bigger last year, is to push the weight explosively in the beginning, doing the negative movement really controlled and keeping the weight for half a second in the lowest position.
You will see that you cannot use the same ammount of weights anymore, but as most of us are not trying to break benching records, our chest development will greatly benefit of these strategies. I cannot even call it secrets or "strategies" as I simply try to make others realize again how important the smart usage of weights should be and how necessary it becomes to develop the ability to feel the muscle.
When watching many Pros under this point of view, you will realize how perfect it looks the way they execute their exercises. It all comes from the deep muscle - mind connection we all can develop over the years, if we concentrate on it and allow ourselves to feel our training more than seeing it with our eyes only.
Especially for competitive athletes, I would like to add to put more focus on the upper chest. I recommend to start every workout with the incline exercises.
Moreover incline bench press is a much more secure movement to avoid injuries than flat bench press. With the barbell I started to completely avoid flat bench press and I prefer doing this exercise with dumbbells. Almost everyone I know, who torn his chest, got this injury when doing flat bench presses on a barbell.
One thing I also tried this year for a period of three months was to train one chest exercise (basicly some isolation movement) with extremely light weights on every day. Just 4-5 sets and just to get some blood into the muscle on every day. I am quite convinced about the positive effect and so I might repeat this in my next offseason again.
My normal chest routine looks like this:
I hope I was able to give you some ideas and some motivation to try some new things.
Always remember that the strongest muscle is your mind. Also in Bodybuilding it is like this.
The Bodybuilder with the strongest mind will be the best guy on stage. Not only because he learned how to put all the focus into his muscles but also because of becoming the strongest personality and being able to follow his dreams driven by the inner power, that is inside of everyone of us.
For Beginners chest is really difficult to train. To perform chest exercises in a productive way for stimulating the chest to grow, you need a really strong mind to muscle connection. As soon as you start to not totally focus on the chest itself, many other muscles will immediately take a big part of the training weight and in this moment it gets almost impossible to develop your chest in the same way like the rest of your body.
In order to avoid this, there are many possibilities. First of all you can start every chest workout with an isolation exercise. In this way you pre-exhaust your pecs and when doing bench press afterwards, you won't be tempted that much to use weights, that are probably too heavy for your chest (even if you might be able to bench them, by using the help of shoulders and triceps).
When starting with the bench press, it is really important to always keep the clear movement in your mind. You need to put your mind completely into the muscle and to feel actively how it contracts with every rep. I recommend to let down the barbell in the negative movement almost to your throat and not to the middle of your chest, like most people do it. Again you take away the work from your shoulders by doing this and the focus goes more into your pecs.
Another good attempt for improving this muscle might be to use only the first part of the active movement. When benching on a Smith machine or also Hammer Strengh machines, you can intensify the isolation of your chest by doing these non-finished reps. You still strech to the maximun and then push the weight only a bit more than half of the way. In the end of the complete movement you will realize that normally the chest starts loosing its full contraction and so you can say, that the important part of the repetition is already made before.
Another important hint, that made my chest grow much bigger last year, is to push the weight explosively in the beginning, doing the negative movement really controlled and keeping the weight for half a second in the lowest position.
You will see that you cannot use the same ammount of weights anymore, but as most of us are not trying to break benching records, our chest development will greatly benefit of these strategies. I cannot even call it secrets or "strategies" as I simply try to make others realize again how important the smart usage of weights should be and how necessary it becomes to develop the ability to feel the muscle.
When watching many Pros under this point of view, you will realize how perfect it looks the way they execute their exercises. It all comes from the deep muscle - mind connection we all can develop over the years, if we concentrate on it and allow ourselves to feel our training more than seeing it with our eyes only.
Especially for competitive athletes, I would like to add to put more focus on the upper chest. I recommend to start every workout with the incline exercises.
Moreover incline bench press is a much more secure movement to avoid injuries than flat bench press. With the barbell I started to completely avoid flat bench press and I prefer doing this exercise with dumbbells. Almost everyone I know, who torn his chest, got this injury when doing flat bench presses on a barbell.
One thing I also tried this year for a period of three months was to train one chest exercise (basicly some isolation movement) with extremely light weights on every day. Just 4-5 sets and just to get some blood into the muscle on every day. I am quite convinced about the positive effect and so I might repeat this in my next offseason again.
My normal chest routine looks like this:
- 5 Incline Press Barbell
- 3 Incline Dumbbell Flyers
- 3 Dumbbell Press
- 3 Cable Cross
- 3 Pullovers (Barbell)
I hope I was able to give you some ideas and some motivation to try some new things.
Always remember that the strongest muscle is your mind. Also in Bodybuilding it is like this.
The Bodybuilder with the strongest mind will be the best guy on stage. Not only because he learned how to put all the focus into his muscles but also because of becoming the strongest personality and being able to follow his dreams driven by the inner power, that is inside of everyone of us.