Building a bigger chest

Exercise

Posted on September 13, 2013 by Jenny Cromack

If you train at a big commercial gym you may have noticed that Monday is national chest day, this is generally followed by four days of bicep and triceps work

Despite this routine been the norm it is almost certainly not the most effective to build a bigger chest. In this post ill walk you through the common mistakes and the best tips to build that chest.

Top 2 chest building mistakes:

  • Lack of compound movements in the program– its very hard to stress the chest using light weight movements, a lack of muscle fibre recruitment means less testosterone and therefore less growth.
  • Eating like a 5 year old girl– Building muscle is a very demanding task for the body and requires a lot of clean calories and nutrients (that’s right cake wont do it) check out our recipes pages for high quality protein meals http://www.m8north.co.uk/community/recipes/

Now if either of those two mistakes above ring any bells follow the steps below to build that bigger chest.

  1. Do heavy compound lifts– free weight exercises like the dead-lift, squat, bench press and pull up release lots of testosterone helping the whole body grow. Every workout should start with a heavy movement.
  1. Control tempo– That’s right bouncing the weight of your chest isn’t going to make anything grow. The longer the muscle is under tension the more it will grow it is that simple. Control the weight, each rep should last around 4-6 seconds to really force the muscle to grow.
  1. Rest– Hitting the chest 2 or 3 times a week is okay providing the volume on each session is low. If you are doing 10 sets 3 times a week you are going to over train, and unfortunately over trained muscle gets smaller and weaker not bigger. Make sure you have at least 48 hours rest between the same muscle group workouts.
  1. Train your legs– No other exercise matches either the squat or deadlift for the amount of growth hormone and testosterone released, if you don’t include lower body training in your current plan you are missing out on some serious upper body gains.