The PERFECT Chest Workout

a chest workout that's going to maximize your chest development and we're going

to put the science behind the decisions to include the exercises that we do and

I'm also going to throw in the muscle marker and this band to help us get the

job done let's start with the band actually the muscle marker as well I've

actually been practicing here as you can see the idea here is if we take the band

and we activate the chest by going into this position here we see that there's a

lot of things going on in terms of the fibers and the orientation of the fibers

they're not all running in the same direction

matter of fact they don't even all have the same attachments the fibers that

originate from the upper chest here coming off with the clavicle and they're

running down towards the humerus right but the most important thing is they're

going from a high to low position whereas the fibers that come off of the

sternum again a different bone than the clavicle are actually coming in more of

a horizontal direction going almost straight across the chest out towards

the arm and then we have the ones that come off with a bottom portion here of

the sternum and they head up so these are not going completely horizontal

these are actually traveling from a low to a high position so we shouldn't know

if you've been watching this channel that in order to fully hit the chest

you're going to want to choose exercises that follow those fibers meaning you're

going to want to take your arm through different ranges of motion to better hit

and align it with those fibers so let's see what those would be

well we know we got to choose the staple exercises we know we got to choose the

exercises that allow us to load them the most of the PEC gets the most capacity

to be overloaded and that starts right here at the bench press so as I move my

arm out and a bench press the alignment of the arm is moving here almost

parallel to these mid fibers coming off of the middle portion here of the

sternum and that's what happens here as you see on the exercise itself to hit

the middle portion of the chest it's a good developer of that portion of the

chest okay good so the flat bench press obviously we know there's a reason for

doing it but there's also a reason for doing the incline bench press in doing

it as well because that's going to take the

through a different position it's gonna take it from a low to a high position

right we go here we push up what is that doing you can see that now it's taking

this upper arm and aligning it more in parallel with the fibers going here and

this high-to-low arrangement you can see that once again play out as I do the

exercise so so far we're two for two we've got two of the bigger exercises

we're able to load them up and now we've got to hit the lower portion of the

chest and the lower chest we've probably heard is best hit with a

dip why is that again it's not by accident it's by Anatomy you take your

arm through this position of an extended arm behind your body and it comes and it

travels down and as it travels down you go from this high to low position better

allowing you to hit the lower fibers of the chest versus the ones that run

parallel and versus the ones that run from low to high so this is really

what's important here is that you understand that the exercise selection

is not random it's done for a reason to try to take the muscle through its

entire range of motion but there's a very key differentiator of what I just

said there you want to not just take those exercises through their full range

of motion you want to take the muscle through its full range of motion and

that is where we need to differentiate and that is where we need to jump off

from because all of these exercises see if you can tell the limitation on all of

them from the flat bench press to the incline bench press to the dip they're

not crossing midline and we know that the action of the PEC at the shoulder

has capability to take this arm not just through adduction but across and

horizontal adduction across midline and all those exercises are limited by the

fact that they don't take you even to midline let alone across it so how would

you construct a better chest workout what you'd want to do is you'd want to

take those exercises and follow them immediately with a drop set of an

exercise that's going to do that so let's go back to the flat bench press we

go immediately from our flat bench press here to a horizontal cable cross over

now that again people might even say - there's a lot of fans in the cable

crossover saying that it's a better chest activator from EMG studies then

what a flat bench press is doing but guys if you rely on energy studies and

you wind up saying things like that and don't understand that though it may have

a better percentage of activation it's still not capable of being loaded to the

extent that a barbell bench press is therefore limiting its ability to be

effective it's if it's the only thing you do but if you do it in addition to

the bench press you're getting the benefits of everything so now we take

that we drop right into this horizontal cable crossover and we can see that

we're actually now taking our arm all the way through and crossing midline and

getting that complete activation of the chest in that plane of motion so we

don't have to stop there though because we can do different planes of motion

because this shoulder is a three-dimensional joint we can hit any

angle we want so if we go back now we do our incline bench press and when we're

done with that we don't rest we immediately go back over to the

crossover and we change the orientation so that our arms can go through this low

to high arc and again we're not we're not going to stop where we would stop on

a bench press on the incline bench press what we're going to do is we're actually

going to take the arm to midline and through midline and you can see again

the degree of contraction and complete contraction we're getting up the chest

by doing so it's a difference maker guys when you actually implement it and we're

go to the dip the same thing our hands are actually fixed on a dip as well we

can't get our hands to come towards mid line because the dip station just allows

them to stay in one position but we can take the dip we can load it up we can

use weights we can do whatever we want to create overload with that exercise as

soon as we're done we come back over here and now we change the orientation

of the cables once again to go from high to low and once again it's not just

getting the midline but it's crossing through midline to get

a complete contraction of the chest an essential element for a complete chest

workout and again one extra exercise here I'll push up one that we do a lot

I'm sure you don't have to stop with just the push shell because we're being

cannot get across our body so we use the push-up into this banded push-up where

Ashley can come up and drive one hand across the body to create an abduction

across midline right one arm staying down in contact with the ground the RL

arm goes across of course we want to switch sides and work both sides here

but this is how you complete the development of your chest

by including exercises that can be loaded by including exercises that take

the muscle through its full range of motion and of course applying full range

of motion to all of the exercises even if they are limited in how much complete

range of motion they can apply to the muscle itself that is how you do it guys

if you're looking for a complete workout that puts this all together puts the

can incorporate chest training into a more total body explosive

helpful make sure you let me know below if you haven't already done so guys

talk to you again soon see ya

you