Do you want more size, strength and muscle in your chest? Here's how to get it

Do you want more size, strength and muscle in your chest? Here's how to get it

Adding shape and musculature to your chest means developing your pecs to show well-defined muscle quality. If you have read some of my other articles on muscle definition, you know that there is a big difference between undefined muscle quality and well-defined muscle quality. If you don't understand this difference, first imagine the thick but shapeless "chest" that results from doing nothing other than barbell bench presses to build your chest. Then imagine dense, powerful and chiseled pecs with sharp separation from the abdomen, arms and shoulders. This second image shows the well-defined muscle quality you should work on developing in your chest.

To achieve this goal, you need to balance your chest training with workouts that develop chest mass and muscle. In other words, your chest workout should initially include low-repetition, high-intensity exercises with heavy dumbbell bench presses, incline dumbbell presses, and weighted push-ups or parallel bar dips. To start, these exercises should form the foundation of your size and strength training program. As you become more advanced, consider adding heavier dumbbell pullovers and fewer dumbbell bench presses to your program. The pullovers thicken the upper middle portion of your chest, while the downward bench press adds mass and strength to your lower pecs.

To build visible contour or shape in your chest, you also need to perform high-rep workouts with relatively low weight (i.e. weight that allows you to perform 12-15 reps per set). You should do these high-rep workouts with flat bench dumbbell flies, incline dumbbell flies, and cable crossovers or pec deck flys. To improve the visible separation of your lower pecs from your abs, try doing high-rep pushups. You should also combine your high-rep workouts with your basic chest builders, i.e. your basic and incline bench presses, dips, and standard push-ups. While these high-rep workouts are essential for sculpting your pecs and burning the calories needed to improve muscle definition, it takes more than strength training to build a truly "muscular" chest.

High-intensity interval training, which includes short, high-energy aerobic activities, is important for burning the subcutaneous and intramuscular fat that creates a smooth or "barrel-chested" appearance. Unlike boring, slow-paced cardio, which is usually limited to a single activity over an extended period of time, high-intensity interval training consists of multiple quick exercises during a single aerobic workout.

For example, in a cardio session, you might alternate between jogging and sprinting on a treadmill, walking on a treadmill, jumping rope, and stationary cycling or rowing. You can do all of this aerobic exercise in a 20-30 minute workout by simply 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 assume that you can only do one type of cardio exercise, like running. You can still do interval training by simply mixing short sprints, longer sprints, and moderate distances in a single 20-30 minute workout. When it comes to 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, strength and muscle to your chest – and that point is periodization! While your body may initially respond to a new chest workout with muscle growth, this response will not last because your nervous system quickly adapts to a particular workout routine. When this happens, your progress slows as your nervous system activates fewer and fewer muscle fibers with each successive session of the same workout. At this point muscle growth eventually stops and boredom or frustration is the end result. The only way to avoid this problem is to vary your chest workouts.

Changing your workouts to avoid stagnation and ensure continued progress is called “periodization.” At its core, periodization describes the planned and continuous variation of your training over a specific training period. As applied to your chest training, if you repeatedly do the same workout with the same exercise mix and sequence, you will quickly become bored and frustrated with your lack of progress. But when you periodize your training, you'll constantly challenge yourself with fresh workouts that force your chest to respond with more size, better shape, and more strength.

As with interval cardio training, you should never become bored with your chest workouts or fail to make progress due to training monotony. Periodization of training is essential for the mental focus you need to make consistent progress in your breast building efforts. So train hard with balance and variety and you are sure to add impressive size, strength and muscle to your pecs.

Inspired by Mark G. Winston