What's up, guys?
Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX.com.
It's a bodyweight Wednesday and because of that I'm going to show you how to start hitting
the different areas of your chest with a home exercise.
Now you don’t have to hit the gym all the time and do incline bench presses to hit your
upper chest, or flat bench presses for your middle chest, or dips for your lower chest.
If you understand the basic biomechanical principles of those exercises you can translate
them to the home environment.
I'm going to show you how to do that here.
The two most important things you have to understand is the direction of the fibers
from the different areas of the chest.
Number one – we've talked about it before – the upper chest has the funicular fibers
that run in this direction.
The middle chest – or sternal fibers – are going this way.
Then the abdominal head runs down in this direction.
We can hit that like I've shown you in previous videos right here.
The important thing is to understand what is happening with the upper arm in relation
to the rest of your torso.
That tells you the whole story.
Even though the exercise may look completely different it won't look different if you understand
the positioning of the arms.
Let's start with the upper chest.
Look here on an incline bench press.
You can see that my arms are not directly in front of my chest.
No 90 degrees to my torso.
They're actually a little higher than that.
So 0 degrees would be down here at my side, then 90 degrees would be straight out here.
On an incline bench press my arms are angled even greater than that; like 120 degrees up.
If we want to translate that to a bodyweight movement we can do that with a decline pushup.
See, when I position myself here against the wall with my feet on the wall you can see
that, yes, even though my body is facing down where it used to face up in an inclined bench
press, just focus on that positioning of the arms.
You're going to see it's the exact same thing as it was on the inclined bench press.
So you can target more of the upper chest by doing a decline push up.
Now, we all know that doing a straight, classical pushup is going to do the same thing that
a flat bench press would do.
That is to target more of the middle area of your chest.
That we've already got covered.
Now you want to flip it over one more time and you now want to start targeting those
lower portions of the chest.
You can do that – and I know it sounds a little backward – but the inclined pushup.
Once again, look at how this all ties back together.
If you look at a decline bench press you can see that the arms are now in relation to the
rest of the body forward, or below that 90 degree angle.
They're down a little bit lower and you're creating that line of push which is down and
across.
Down and across.
The same thing happens where when we do this inclined push up because our body is positioned
a little bit ahead of our arms, those arms are angle in position to our torso down and
across.
So I know it looks different and completely opposite of what it is, but if you understand
that, then you can piece it all together.
Of course, at ATHLEANX, we piece things together because we want to help you to get the most
out of everything.
We've kind of got the ultimate home chest exercise if you want to hit all these areas
together.
So what you do is you set a bench up here, as you can see in front of you, about 5ft
or 6ft in front of a wall depending on how tall you are.
Now you position your feet up on the wall to be able to perform a decline pushup.
Remember, decline pushup: upper chest.
You do three reps here.
Then you walk yourself down the wall until your feet are flat on the ground and then
you do three reps of a regular, old pushup and get yourself immediately into an incline
pushup position, which will work the bottom portion of your chest.
You do three reps there.
All you keep doing now is go back and forth, up and down, up and down, up and down until
you fatigue.
Remember, creating muscle growth is going to require that you push yourself to the point
of fatigue.
If you're training at home and you have a weight vest that you can use; even better.
You'll be able to create that overload faster.
The idea is understanding the different orientations of the fibers inside our chest and how it
is commanded by the position of your arm.
That will unlock everything you need to know to target those different areas despite the
fact that you don’t have access to the equipment that you thought you might have needed to
do that.
Guys, if you're looking for a complete training program – home workout program – that
requires nothing, no equipment at all – this even uses a bench.
I'm talking about nothing at all.
Head to ATHLEANX.com and get our ATHLEAN0 program.
In the meantime, if you've found this video helpful let me know in the comments below
and let me know what else you want to see here on a future bodyweight Wednesday video.
I'm happy to bring those ideas and topics to you.
All right, I'll be back here again in just a couple of days.