You’ve tried everything to grow a big, ripped muscular chest but nothing seems to be working?
In the following video, Jeff from Athlean-X YouTube channel show you how to fix a chest that doesn’t seem to respond to your training and won’t grow no matter what you do to it.
It starts with the start of the exercise of course. There are two things you want to do before you even perform your first rep to ensure that the chest muscles and not the shoulders are doing the brunt of the work during the lift. Because of the proximity of these muscles to each other, it is very normal for the shoulders to dominate the movement. You can stop this by first sticking your chest out and making sure it is more prominent than your shoulders. The second is that you can unshrug your shoulders by depressing your shoulder blades. Both of these things will help the chest to be in a better position to initiate the move and ultimately produce a stronger contraction.
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Next, it is important to concentrate on how you finish each of your chest exercises if you want to get more out of them. What I’m talking about here is literally changing the way you think of a rep. Remove the word press or push from the name of the exercise and replace it with the word squeeze. This will have the effect of changing your mindset about how the movement is performed. For instance, don’t think of it as a bench press but rather a bench squeeze. Really work to squeeze and contract the chest as you move the bar up to the ceiling.
The Same thing can be said for a pushup as well. Don’t just push your body away from the floor, squeeze your body off of the floor. The slight difference can make a huge difference in the activation of the chest over the course of many reps and many workouts.
It continues from here however since you don’t want to just squeeze the reps but you ultimately want to figure out a way to take the chest through its full contraction. The only way this can occur is if you find a way to adduct your arms across your chest in the exercise. Now, a lot of people will point to these horizontal adduction exercises for chest and say that they are isolation exercises or muscle sculptors. They claim they are not as effective for building a bigger chest.
I disagree. Any chest exercise that you can load up and deliver peak tension to the muscles of the chest and take them through their full range of motion and functions is an exercise that is capable of building more muscle. Keep including these and perhaps a few of the ones that are new to you from this video and I promise you will see better chest gains because of it.
Finally, you must not forget to drop set when doing your chest workouts. Perhaps here more than anywhere else it is important to do this. If you followed my directions from earlier and made the chest do the majority of the work you will see that you, at that point, could rely on the assistance of the shoulders and triceps to get you through failure and into even more of a growth-producing zone. Bench presses to failure into pushups to failure are still one of the easiest and most effective ways to grow your chest.
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