Great Chest Exercises
First of all when you’re looking to build your chest, you want to make sure that you target your body’s type-one muscle fibers, because they have the most potential to grow.
How do you do that? By diversifying your workout and emphasizing low-reps and heavier-weight in each of your sets. You can also do an explosive, fast movement on the concentric part of the movement. For instance, off the bottom of the pushup you can push hard and fast so that your hands come off the floor and you clap your hands together, then return to the down position slowly for a 2 or 3 count, then repeat.
Some people will disagree with me on this one, but it works for me. The Best Chest Exercise is the WEIGHTED DIP… no contest! Why? It’s very simple, doing dips (and pushups) is the only chest exercise in which you move your body through space, instead of moving the weight through space. .
Moving your body through space uses more brain to muscle connections than just moving iron through space because it taxes your central nervous system more. The result, more muscle recruitment.
Dips work a lot of triceps and shoulders along with the chest. To hang a weight on you you’ll need a dipping belt or a strap or jump rope and you’ll need to be able to perform bodyweight dips. Start out light and do full range movements, keep them smooth and controlled. You can pick up your knees and lean your body forward to emphasize the chest even more.
Next up is the PUSH-UP, yes, that exercise that you’ve done or seen done all your life, but in reality it’s one of the few chest exercises that really demands a lot of strength and agility, because you must execute this with perfect form to get the most out of it. And it works out your abs and back (that’s where you first begin to sag and lose form).
Also, there are so many variants of the PUSHUP that are even more explosive. One of those is the MEDICINE-BALL ARCHBISHOP PUSH-UP; a long name, but this exercise works.
What you do is put 3 to 5 medicine balls in a semicircle, then get in the push-up position and put both hands on the ball to the far right; your chest should be over the ball and your feet must stay anchored throughout this exercise.
Now, move your left hand to the ball at the left and do a push-up, then bring your right hand to that ball. You want to continue moving left, doing push ups until you get to the last ball on the left. Then work your way back across the balls. That’s one rep.
The reason why you want to use the medicine ball is, when you put your hands on a ball, the inherent instability forces your core to work 20% harder than when you do a regular push-up, so this exercise trains your abs and hips to remain stable longer.
Try doing supersets of weighted push-ups with lying cable flies. Have your training partner place a weight on your back for the push-ups. When you do the flies, try holding the peak contraction for 3 seconds, and then do a 5 second eccentric contraction or lowering phase.
As with every exercise, perfect form is more important than lots of weight, because you don’t want to cheat and use other muscles to stabilize you or help you move the weight.
Resistance bands will also work very well for both weighted push-ups and dips. They don’t require a partner, travel easily and won’t ding the floor. For pushups, just put the band behind your back. you can put it on your lower back to work your core more or up around your shoulder blades. Now put your hands into the band loop and pin it to the floor and go to town. If it’s to loose at the bottom of the stroke, just put a loose overhand knot in the center of the band and you’re set.
For dips, drape the band around the back of your neck so it comes down the front of your shoulders and then place your hands in the band and grab on to the dip bar and have a field day.
The band can also be used to assist both of these exercises should you not have the strength, initially , to do them.
We only put the bench press last on this list because it is the first you normally think of and we wanted to give you some other ideas. And it is not as functional as the others because you are not moving your body through space. Keep variety in your workouts to keep your body growing and to keep from getting board.
However, you can forge a chiseled chest by doing the INCLINE BENCH PRESS with dumbbells as well, instead of the traditional flat bench.
