What's up, guys? Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX.COM.
Today let's talk about something I call the Middle Chest Myth.
Can you influence or have an impact on preferentially, the inner portion of the pec when you're training
your pecs?
Right. The big myth here is guys that you can't. See, I'm an actual believer that you
can. If you don't believe me, let's try a quick demo together.
Grab some sort of a band or even use your own arm against your own resistance and what
we're going to do is, we're going to take our arm through the function of the pec.
We're going to get it out in front of us, as if at the end of a press, and then we're
going to horizontally abduct and bring it across our body.
Now, what accounts for the fact that I can be in a contracted position, so, for those
that say, it's all or none contraction, I am in a contracted pec position here, k.
But as I continue and continue and continue, you can see there's more and more fibers literally
you can feel the wave if you do this yourself.
I'm out here in front, I'm across, in abduction, you can see the arm is in front of my body,
but yet as I continue and continue and continue,
you can literally see the wave of contraction increase here across my chest. So, what accounts
for that?
Well, let's take a look at the anatomy. As we take a look inside, again, the function
there guys is we know that the pectoralis major is going to take our upper arm, our
humerus,
and drag it and bring it across our body because of the orientation of the fibers. You can
see here as I demonstrate on Raymond.
But now let's come back out and see what's really going on, and it's all about the fibers
and more importantly, the fiber type.
So, you'll see as we showed on Raymond there, you've got your fibers that go from the sternum
here, this would be our inner chest that we're mostly concerned about.
Our sternum attaching to the area up here on our humerus, k. So, all will run in this
direction. What you don't see is that not every single muscle fiber, this is the key
point,
connects from an attachment, an origin attachment, ok. It doesn't have a tendon, a belly, and
a tendon attachment.
There's something called non spanning muscle fibers, and they don't just exist here in
the pecs,
but this is a great example of why we need to look a little bit deeper sometimes to understand
why things actually occur, or more so,
why things occur that we already know occur because if you tried that demonstration already,
you know that you can feel an increased contraction on the inside portion of your pec
but some people would just swear to you that there's no such thing, that you can only look
at the upper and lower, but you can't have an influence on the inner.
That's not right because these non spanning fibers, guys, actually sit in and reside inside
again, the muscle belly, and they taper off and they actually dive into the belly here.
So, you got a lot that actually stay right there. Well, guess what? If it's not attached
to another tendon on the other side,
how the hell are these actually contracting and contributing to the force? The way that
happens, guys, is the fact that
these fibers get pulled along for the ride as the motion occurs at the joint here, in
the shoulder joint,
as the motion occurs and brings the arm across the chest because what happens is,
each one of these non spanning fibers is surrounded, ok, surrounded by a muscle sheath that is
very sticky on its surface, ok.
There's different proteins on the surface that actually make it somewhat sticky so that
when these long spanning fibers contract and pull down and come through,
they actually grab hold of these non spanning fibers which then can contribute to the force.
See, a lot of people are under the misunderstanding that all force is generated through a mild
tendinous element, like the myo is the muscle portion and the tendon is origin/insertion.
That's not true. We have a lot of connective tissue from our myofascial that's around the
muscles to then these inner sheaths,
this endomysium here that's around these smaller muscle fibers themselves. They will contribute
to the force as well.
So, again, you're pulling them along for the ride. Let me show you another demonstration
of exactly how this works.
Alright guys, so let's do a quick demonstration. What I have here is a piece of tape, ok. This
tape is going to be our spanning fibers,
the ones that go from our arm over here all the way to our sternum on the inside of the
chest, ok.
So, what you're looking at now is the non spanning fibers that sort of just sit around
on the inside of the muscle belly itself.
As this thing contracts, so we're going to contract it, we're going to take it from the
outside of the arm and as we cross here,
across the body, and pull ourselves into that abduction across our chest, you'll see that
it's contracting, contracting, contracting, and it's picking up these muscle fibers as
we go, ok.
You're seeing that it's grabbing these fibers as it goes, and it's involving them now in
the contraction.
They can contribute to the overall force. In the beginning, they weren't doing anything.
They were just sort of sitting around here until the contraction became large enough
to pick them up and bring them along for the ride.
So, it's another added support for actually taking your exercises through a full range
of motion, but on top of that,
it's actually adding a lot more force and overall a lot more strength to every exercise
that you do.
So, you see, it's this added effect that allows these non spanning fibers to actually start
contributing.
The further and further into contraction that you go, the more and more of them that become
involved and sort of dragged into the action.
And that's what's going to allow us to increase the contractile force and increase our ability
to influence fibers that we never thought we had influence on before.
Matter of fact, these fibers contribute so much to the overall strength and development
that when they do things like fasciotomies and they actually take the fascia off of a
muscle,
even that alone on the outer level dramatically decreases the strength that can be produced
by the muscle itself. So, we know in science that this happens.
We just have to make sure that we're not listening to all the 'Bro' Science out there that says,
'Guys, you can't target your inner chest. The only thing you can do is upper and lower.'
It's the same reason why in other exercises I've shown you guys, you can see, you can
feel the difference as you actually execute the moves.
Here, I'm showing you what we've got what you guys have named the Cavaliere Crossover.
Right. This is where we drag the arm up into a shrug but also an abduction at the same
time where you can clearly see the innervation, the activation of the upper and inner chest.
The same thing with our 3D Crossover here. You guys have seen this plenty of times now.
Again, as I get across the body and then further into rotation, I can actually elicit a stronger
and stronger contraction and yet again,
you can see the influence that is has on these inner chest fibers as I'm able to activate
them even more.
Alright, and an old classic one, our X-Crossover, again, one more time, showing that added activation
of the inner chest
as we continue to bring the arm through a greater range of motion because we're picking
up more and more of these non spanning fibers.
So you guys see, we have our t-shirts, right? It's PhysX, Bitch. We talk about it all the
time. In this case, 'It's Anatomy, Bitch.'
We know that if you apply the sciences, whether it be anatomy, whether it be physics, k, whatever
if you start putting the science back in strength, you're going to see that a lot of that Bro
Science will go away.
And I think it's time that we start to do that especially if you want to take your training
to the next level, guys.
We talk about it all the time. If you want to look like an athlete, you've got to train
like an athlete.
But more importantly, you've got to put the same thought and intention behind what you
do that an athlete would because this is what they do for a living.
I'm not saying you have to spend all the time that an athlete does in preparing to play
a sport.
But you have to start approaching your training with the same level of seriousness if you
want to start to see those next-level results.
Guys, you can do that if you head over to ATHLEANX.COM. We've put together a training
program already.
A 90-Day system, the ATHLEANX Training System, putting the science back in strength, of course,
but training you like an athlete along the way so you can get the most out of each and
every one of your workouts.
If you haven't already, guys, head to ATHLEANX.COM and grab that training program, and in the
meantime
if you found this video helpful guys, make sure you leave a thumb's up below and a comment.
Let me know if you'd like to see some of these more in-depth videos from time to time
as we look inside to see what's actually going on so we understand better what's going on
in the gym on the outside.
I'll see you guys back here in just a few days.