Great Chest Workouts

When you do chest workouts, you need to do the right exercises to build muscle mass and strength. Bench presses, incline presses, decline presses, dips, flyes, cable crossovers, and push-ups are all excellent exercises for gaining chest muscle size. You should stick with lifting free weights for the most part, keeping machine exercises for the end of your chest workouts or using them as a change of pace every now and then. Using free weights will force you to work smaller muscles that help stabilize and balance the weight. Most machines force you to lift in one plane of motion and the stabilizing muscles don't need to work as much.

When you first start doing weight training workouts for the chest, or pectoral, muscles you need to learn the proper lifting form for the major chest exercises. Trying to lift too much weight before your muscles can handle it will lead to bad habits that will be hard to break and you could even end up hurting yourself. As long as you use proper form you'll eventually get the gains you want without having to cheat.

Another thing you need to do for a great chest workout is to start them off with the major compound exercises like the bench press or incline press. If you're a newbie weight trainer, your chest workouts should mostly be made up of the various bench press exercises with barbells or dumbbells, along with dips focused on the chest muscles. You shouldn't do too many isolation exercises if you haven't built up a solid amount of muscle mass. Whether you're new to weight training or not, you should save the flyes and cable crossovers for the end of your workouts.

Being the staple exercise of any great chest workout routine, it's very important that you learn proper form for the bench press, whether it's on a flat, incline, or decline bench. If you've been to the gym, you've likely seen some poor lifting form on the bench press. Some lifters will lift their pelvis off of the bench so that their upper back is the only part of their body actually touching the bench, which will decrease the distance they have to lower and lift the weight. You'll also likely see some weight trainers who basically drop the weight onto their chests to get a little "bounce" off of it. Both of these a big no-nos when it comes to proper bench press form.

When you bench press during your chest workouts, it's fine to have a natural arch in your lower back. You just have to keep your behind on the bench. Having to raise your butt off of the bench to get a rep means that you're using too much weight.

Another tip for proper bench press form is to contract your upper back muscles to "pop" the pecs forward a bit. This will allow the resistence to be more focused on the chest. If you keep your upper back too flat, you may end up working your front deltoids more than your chest.

You should always lower the weight to your chest in a controlled fashion when you bench press during a chest workout. There's nothing worse than dropping and bouncing a weight up that's 50 pounds more than you should be using. You'll just be asking for a pulled or torn muscle, or even injuring your sternum in some way. This doesn't necessarily mean that you need to lower the weight extremely slowly. Feel the weight as you lower it, and once it touches your chest try to explode the weight upward. This doesn't necessarily mean it'll go up very fast either.

Once you have good bench press form down, you won't have too worry as much about injuring yourself when you do workouts for the chest. You'll also build real strength in the chest muscles, which will result in more size.

Being a very popular muscle to exercise, the chest is consequently very easy to overtrain. You've likely seen someone do set after set of flat and incline benches all of the time during their chest workouts and never get any bigger or stronger. They constantly toil away and don't have any real results to show for it.

One problem is that many weight trainers, particularly beginners, will try to follow the chest workout routine of a professional bodybuilder that they read in a magazine. These workouts may call for a lot of different exercises and 25 to 35 or more sets. Face it, the vast majority of professional bodybuilders take steroids and other drugs that give them incredible recovery ability. For the natural trainer, doing this many sets during a pectoral workout is ridiculous.

You really don't have to do a lot of all-out working sets of chest exercises for your pecs to grow. While many weight trainers like to pyramid their weights up on every chest exercise, this isn't really necessary. Do some warm up sets and follow them up with 2 or 3 all out sets for 2 or 3 exercises and 1 or 2 sets for a couple of other exercises.

If you've trained for a while and really know your body you'll be able to train with enough intensity to not need to do very many sets to get a response. If you're doing a "light" workout with high reps for every set, do a lower amount of sets. If you're going heavy, do some more sets. For a great chest workout, you should experiment with how much you do to see what works best for you.

You may see some chest workout routines that call for you to do a bunch of all out sets for each exercise, starting out with lighter weight and higher reps and working up to heavy weights and lower reps. The problem is that if you do high rep sets with all out intensity to start out with you won't have much left in the tank by the time you get to the heavy, low rep sets.

One way to do chest exercises with the various rep ranges is to separate your workouts into light, medium and heavy days. Do a "light" chest workout with all of your all out sets done for 12-15 or 15-20 reps. For "medium" chest workouts do either 8-12 or 10-15 reps per set. Do either 3-8 or 5-10 reps for "heavy" workouts. The all out sets done on the light workout day will take a lot more out of you than the other workouts, so you should do less total sets. You'll be able to do a few more sets during the medium day, and a few more than that on the heavy day.

The bench press is easily the most popular chest exercise, and likely the most popular weight training exercise there is. If people know you work out, they don't ask you how much you can squat or deadlift. They ask "How much can ya bench?". Anybody who does chest workouts wants to be able to bench press more weight.

One way to increase your bench press max strength is to decrease the distance you have to lower and lift the weight, without cheating (raising your pelvis, dropping the weight on your chest). To do this you can increase the arch in your lower back a little bit - again without raising your butt off of the bench. You can also contract your upper back muscles and expand your chest by sucking in your belly.

To increase bench press max you can do some negatives with a weight too heavy for you to do a full rep with during your chest workout. To do this you'll need a spotter on each side of the barbell. You take the weight and lower it slowly to your chest and have the spotters help you get the weight back up. This will get your chest used to handling a heavier weight. Don't overdo this technique or you'll end up overtraining.

Another great way to increase bench press strength is to identify the part of the lift where you are weakest at. For most weight trainers this will be at the point where you are first lifting the weight off of your chest. set a bench inside a rack and set the bars you would normally use to set weight on to a point where they will stop the barbell a few inches off of your chest when you're bench pressing. Take the weight and push it up to the point where the stoppers are and hold it there for a few seconds before lowering it for another rep. Don't use too much weight while doing this. If you are weak on the lock out part of a bench press rep you can do the opposite, and have the weight set on top the stoppers at a point where you would be a few inches short of locking out.

Using these techniques during your chest workouts should certainly help you break through a bench press plateau. You can also check out Blast Your Bench - a program that will show you how to increase your bench press max by up to 51 pounds in only 3 weeks.