Buffing Up

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.

I get disagreements on this one, but it works for me. The Best Chest Exercise is the WEIGHTED DIP… hands down! Why? When you do dips and pushups, you move your body through space rather than iron.

This is a important concept to understand, because, moving your body through space (instead of moving a weight through space) is more taxing to your central nervous system, which amplifies your brain-to-muscle connections and this causes you to recruit more muscle in every exercise.

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.

Push-ups are next on the agenda, and because you need to hold a plank while you’re doing them, they also work your core stability.

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.

Because of the inherent instability of the medicine balls, your hips and core will have to work much harder to neutralize that unstable surface, so you turn your chest workout into an ab workout also.

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.

You can also use resistance bands to do weighted pushups or 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.

The last exercise that we suggest is the BENCH PRESS. And this isn’t because the bench press is a weak chest exercise, far from it. This exercise is essentially irreplaceable when it comes to chest exercises, and no man should completely eliminate the bench press from his workout routine.

Keep in mind that you can do the bench either, flat, incline or decline and you can use barbells or dumbbells.