What's up guys, Jeff Cavaliere, Athleanx.com. Today, I want to show you how to build a perfect
chest with just dumbbells because you can do-- Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, that's
my cue right, perfect chest. Ahh. Oh boy. I mean improved, yes, perfect, no.
Oh. You know what's equally imperfect?
What? You're facial hair. That's just disturbing.
That's fair. I'll go back behind the camera. That's a good idea. Listen, perfect obviously is
subjective, it's in the eye of the beholder. And I certainly don't have a perfect chest,
maybe only in the eyes of my wife. But the fact is, there's components to a chest that we all
must have, good upper chest development and lower chest development. And even though you
can't directly influence them, the appearance of the inner chest is important as well. I think it
all can be achieved with just dumbbells. As a matter of fact, I'm going to prove that to you.
Eight things, guys, you can start doing right now to get your chest looking better.
All right, first things first. There's one biomechanical advantage that you want to make
sure you're not abandoning just because you're using dumbbells. When you're doing a dumbbell
bench press, you still need to have leg drive in order to move the most weight possible. So,
what that means is when your feet are on the floor, as they should be, you want to be pushing
as if you're sliding your body up the bench. Right. Not just down into the floor, but out as if
you were going to extend your leg. And when you do that and drive the dumbbells up, it gives you that
counter force to push them up and back. This is really natural when we're talking about a barbell
bench press, because you have that target to push it back where you want to rack the bar.
It doesn't mean that you don't want to do it, though, when you're using dumbbells just because
you don't have that target J hook there for you. You still want to drive through the feet and push
up to maximize the amount of weight that you can lift on the exercise and therefore the
amount of gains you'll get from doing it. All right tip number two and building a perfect
chest once again deals with biomechanics, but this time utilizing the dumbbells in your favor. Look,
we know when you're using a bar, but your hands are fixed on that one bar and they don't have
independent function. But what we get with dumbbells is the opportunity to do something
with our hands and more specifically, our wrists. And what you want to do if you want
to get a better chest contraction is figure out a way to get more relative adduction. Right.
One of the main functions is to bring your hands closer to each other at the top of any single
press. We can do that if we do this, and that is just alter the position of the dumbbell in your
hand, lead with your thumbs rather than with your pinkies. When you do that, you get the effect of
bringing your hands closer to each other. You've cleared about three or four more inches at the top
that normally wouldn't be there if the dumbbells were pressed straight up with your knuckles facing
the ceiling. These minor tweaks are enough to give you a better chest contraction and when you
add them up rep after rep, you see the game start to come set after set, workout after workout.
Tip number three is actually particularly useful for those that want to build their upper chest
but feel limited because they don't have access to an incline bench to do it.
That's okay if you have your flat bench and your dumbbells, all you have to do is flip the grip.
Perform the underhand grip, dumbbell bench press. We know that if we follow the fibers, we can get
activation of the area we want. And we know that with the upper chest fibers running down and out,
we want to have a position of low to high with our arms when we press.
When we get our elbows down and underneath, we can see that we get lower and we have an opportunity
to go higher. This will always give you a better activation of the chest. As a matter of fact, only
slightly less than the incline bench itself. But guess what? Some people who are dominant
pressures have more of a problem with the incline bench because as you get higher and higher,
of course, you get more and more delt activation to the point where we have
primary delta activation when we're completely upright. So if you are a delt dominant pressure,
you're going to dominate more with your delts as opposed to your chest. You have the opportunity
here to get that upper chest activation while still keeping the bench flat just by changing
the orientation of the dumbbells in our hands. Tip number four introduces the first of two
techniques that you're going to want to make sure you utilize your training your chest with
dumbbells. And that is the Drop Step. We know that the drop step that with the dumbbell is
much easier to perform than, let's say, stripping plates off of a barbell bench press. As a matter
of fact, by the time you're done stripping place, you probably let thirty seconds go by,
which mitigates the entire benefit of the drop step in the first place. We want going to be
able to take a set to failure with dumbbells, go grab a lighter set with little or no time
wasted at all and get right back into the set again. It's two and through failure approach
and always remember you've got the ace in the hole. Your ability just drop down to the floor,
utilize your own body weight is a resistance and simply perform a set of pushups to failure.
It's one of my favorite techniques. And this one that you want to make sure that
you're including when you're trying to build your chest bigger, stronger and better.
Tip number five is actually the second of those techniques is this one here, and it's called the
Static Dumbbell Press. And this is something that actually covered Casey Mitchell the last time he
was in here and we were doing our video on how to increase your bench press. What this does is
it exposes any unilateral weaknesses that you might have that might get traditionally hidden
by a fixed hand placement on a barbell. And we know that if you're looking for that perfect
chest development, you've got to make sure that you're correcting any of those right and left
side and imbalances. So, by lifting one dumbbell at a time. We're going to be able to do that.
So, what I do here is I grab my dumbbells and I'm laying back and I start with one up over my head.
And the point is, I leave it there while I press just the opposite dumbbell down. Now, yes, it does
need some core strength to stabilize as that one dumbbell tends to want to twist you off the bench.
But more importantly, it's looking for the equal strength between the right and left sides.
At the end, I hold that static press for even just five to six seconds at the bottom,
just in that bottom isometric position, come up out of it, as I always try to do, utilize
that one drop step that opportunity by getting down on the floor and hitting some pushups.
Now, one alternative here makes it even more difficult? It's just simply holding that position
at the bottom rather than the top. And as you can see here, the chest is working even harder. And
that bottom position that would be at the top. And it makes this whole sequence that much more
difficult. But the fact is, you still do the same thing, you do as many presses as you can hold the
isometric and drop into your drops. That I tip number six actually ushers
in the first of three chest exercises that I want you to make sure that you're looking at
again. Maybe you never tried them or maybe you forgot about them. But the point is,
these are going to provide you some better gains utilizing just dumbbells. And the first is one
that a lot of people don't even look at as a chest exercise is the dumbbell pull over. And
you wouldn't look at it as a chest exercise if you performed it traditionally with your elbows flared
out as you drove the movement with your lats. I'm not asking to do that. What I want you to do
is get your elbows closer to each other and drive it with your upper chest. In other words, try to
turn your hands down and in even though they're not moving on the fixed dumbbell. But visualize
that as you pull forward to take the lats out and to drive it with that adduction of the upper
chest. It's a move that requires a little bit of practice, but as soon as you get it and you feel
it, you'll realize just how powerful it is for getting that upper chest carved out, even just
a little bit more on your way to perfection. The second exercise in this trio is what I want
you to try, and it's called the UCV Raise. And what it does is it lighten the load, but it allows
you to get a better contraction into adduction, which again, we've talked about how important it
is when you want overall chest development. So, what you do is you set up your incline bench here
or anything that you can slightly lean your body against, and you raise the dumbbells up and across
your body. This should look familiar to you. Remember what we talked about with the other hand
bench press that you want that low to high position and you're not just getting low to high,
but low to high and across your body, which gives you that great upper chest contraction.
Again, not what you're going to load up here. You're looking for the quality contraction,
but it's not always about loading up when you're looking for a better test
development. It's about getting good quality contractions. Rep after rep and again,
accumulating them workout after workout. Let's say we don't always have to go with light
when we're looking for better gains just because we're looking for better contractions, we still
know the benefits of loading up. And an exercise I think people don't load up often enough on is
actually the Chest Fly. And for those that think I would advocate loading up on a Chest Fly and that
being dangerous, I do because I prefer to do it down here on the floor safely as a floor Fly.
You see, when we get in this position here, we had the built in safety net of the floor to protect
our shoulders as our arms get down to the sides. We don't have the same luxury when we perform the
exercise on a bench which forces us to have to use light dumbbells in order to perform it. But when
we're down on the floor here, we could actually use those heavier dumbbells, take advantage of the
eccentric contraction on the chest as we lower the dumbbells to our side. And even there, remember,
we talked about taking two and through failure, we had the mechanical advantage of being able to
bring our elbows into our sides, press up to put ourselves in position for the next eccentric fly.
So, once we've reached that positive failure, we can go through that failure to better games. Guys,
remember, don't always look at the fly as an exercise that has to be done light,
you have the opportunity to do it with heavier weights and better gains await you when you do.
And so there you see, guys, you're not limited to your chest development with dumbbells. As
matter of fact, you can get close to perfect. We utilize the right techniques and the right--
Speaking of perfect-- Oh my God.
Listen I know that my chest isn't perfect, I'm working on it. But, you know, it is perfect,
this glorious mustache. Oh, my God.
Will you get back behind the camera, please? Oh, yeah. That's my job.
Yeah. Some one's supposed to be running it. Guys, look, if you're looking for
as perfect as you can get, all of our programs are designed to help you get there because we overlook
nothing in our training. Head over to Athleanx.com and find the program that matches up to your goals
right now. In the meantime, if you found the video helpful, leave your comments and thumbs
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