Do you want more mass, power and muscle in your chest? That’s how you get it
Adding shape and muscle to your chest means that you develop your pecs to display a well-defined muscular quality. If you have read some of my other articles on muscle definition, you know that there is a big difference between indefinite muscle quality and well defined muscle quality. If you don’t understand this difference, first visualize the thick but shapeless “barrel chest” that comes from doing nothing more than bench presses to build your chest. Then envision a dense, powerful, chiseled pec with a sharp separation to your abs, arms, and shoulders. This second image shows the well-defined muscle quality you need to work on developing in your chest.
To achieve this goal, you need to balance chest training with exercises that build the mass and musculature of the pecs. In other words, your chest workout should first include high-intensity, low-rep exercises with heavy dumbbell bench presses, incline dumbbell presses, and weighted pushups or parallel bar dips. When you’re starting out, these exercises should be the foundation of your mass and strength building program. As you progress, you should add heavy dumbbell pullovers and decline the dumbbell bench press to your program. The pullovers will plump up your upper mid chest while the decline bench press adds mass and power to your lower pecs.
To build a visible contour or shape in your chest, you should also do high-rep workouts with relatively light weights (ie, a load that allows you to do 12-15 reps per set). You should do these high-rep workouts with flat bench dumbbell flyes, incline dumbbell flyes, and cable crossover flyes or pec-platform flyes. To improve the visible separation of your lower pecs from your abs, try doing high reps of incline pushups. You should also mix high-rep training with the core chest-building exercises, namely the basic and incline dumbbell bench press, dips, and standard pushups. While these high-rep workouts are essential for shaping your pecs and burning the calories needed to improve muscle definition, it takes more than weight training to develop a truly “muscular” pec.
High-intensity interval training, which involves short bursts of high-energy aerobic activity, is essential for burning the subcutaneous and intramuscular fat that produces a smooth or “barrel chest” appearance. Unlike slow, boring cardio that is typically limited to a single activity for an extended period of time, high-intensity interval training consists of multiple fast-paced exercises during a single aerobic workout.
For example, in a cardio session, you might alternate jogging and running on a treadmill, walking on a stair climber, jumping rope, and stationary cycling or rowing. You can do all of this aerobic training in a 20-30 minute workout simply by limiting your time in each activity to short but intense intervals of about 5-10 minutes each. You can also vary the pace or intensity of each individual activity to create intervals for each exercise. To illustrate this point, let’s say you can only do one type of cardiovascular exercise like running. You can still do interval training by simply mixing sprints, longer runs, and moderate-distance runs into a single 20-30 minute workout. With interval cardio training, the possibilities for variety are endless. The only downside is that you can never use “boredom” as an excuse to skip your cardio work.
The topic of “boredom” leads to one final but important point when it comes to adding mass, power, and muscle to your chest, and that point is periodization! While your body may initially respond with muscle growth to a new chest workout, this reaction will not continue as your nervous system quickly adapts to a particular training routine. When this happens, your progress slows because your nervous system fires fewer and fewer muscle fibers with each successive training session involving the same workout. At this point, muscle growth finally stops, and the end result is boredom or frustration. The only way to avoid this problem is by varying your chest workouts.
Changing your workouts to avoid plateauing and ensure continued progress is called “periodization.” In essence, periodization describes the planned and continuous variation of your workouts over the course of a specific training period. Applied to your chest training, if you repeatedly do the same workout with the same combination and sequence of exercises, you will soon become bored and frustrated with your lack of progress. But if you periodize your training, you’ll continually challenge yourself with new workouts that force your chest to react with bigger, better shape, and more power.
As with interval cardio training, you should never get bored with chest workouts or stop making progress due to the monotony of the workout. Periodization of training is essential for the mental focus you need to enjoy continued progress in your chest-building efforts. So, train hard with balance and variety and you’re sure to add impressive mass, power, and musculature to your pecs.