what's up guys jeff cavaliere athleanx.com today i'm going to show you
a chest workout that's going to maximize your chest development and we're going
to put the science behind the decisions to include the exercises that we do and
I'm also going to throw in the muscle marker and this band to help us get the
job done let's start with the band actually the muscle marker as well I've
actually been practicing here as you can see the idea here is if we take the band
and we activate the chest by going into this position here we see that there's a
lot of things going on in terms of the fibers and the orientation of the fibers
they're not all running in the same direction
matter of fact they don't even all have the same attachments the fibers that
originate from the upper chest here coming off with the clavicle and they're
running down towards the humerus right but the most important thing is they're
going from a high to low position whereas the fibers that come off of the
sternum again a different bone than the clavicle are actually coming in more of
a horizontal direction going almost straight across the chest out towards
the arm and then we have the ones that come off with a bottom portion here of
the sternum and they head up so these are not going completely horizontal
these are actually traveling from a low to a high position so we shouldn't know
if you've been watching this channel that in order to fully hit the chest
you're going to want to choose exercises that follow those fibers meaning you're
going to want to take your arm through different ranges of motion to better hit
and align it with those fibers so let's see what those would be
well we know we got to choose the staple exercises we know we got to choose the
exercises that allow us to load them the most of the PEC gets the most capacity
to be overloaded and that starts right here at the bench press so as I move my
arm out and a bench press the alignment of the arm is moving here almost
parallel to these mid fibers coming off of the middle portion here of the
sternum and that's what happens here as you see on the exercise itself to hit
the middle portion of the chest it's a good developer of that portion of the
chest okay good so the flat bench press obviously we know there's a reason for
doing it but there's also a reason for doing the incline bench press in doing
it as well because that's going to take the
through a different position it's gonna take it from a low to a high position
right we go here we push up what is that doing you can see that now it's taking
this upper arm and aligning it more in parallel with the fibers going here and
this high-to-low arrangement you can see that once again play out as I do the
exercise so so far we're two for two we've got two of the bigger exercises
we're able to load them up and now we've got to hit the lower portion of the
chest and the lower chest we've probably heard is best hit with a
dip why is that again it's not by accident it's by Anatomy you take your
arm through this position of an extended arm behind your body and it comes and it
travels down and as it travels down you go from this high to low position better
allowing you to hit the lower fibers of the chest versus the ones that run
parallel and versus the ones that run from low to high so this is really
what's important here is that you understand that the exercise selection
is not random it's done for a reason to try to take the muscle through its
entire range of motion but there's a very key differentiator of what I just
said there you want to not just take those exercises through their full range
of motion you want to take the muscle through its full range of motion and
that is where we need to differentiate and that is where we need to jump off
from because all of these exercises see if you can tell the limitation on all of
them from the flat bench press to the incline bench press to the dip they're
not crossing midline and we know that the action of the PEC at the shoulder
has capability to take this arm not just through adduction but across and
horizontal adduction across midline and all those exercises are limited by the
fact that they don't take you even to midline let alone across it so how would
you construct a better chest workout what you'd want to do is you'd want to
take those exercises and follow them immediately with a drop set of an
exercise that's going to do that so let's go back to the flat bench press we
go immediately from our flat bench press here to a horizontal cable cross over
now that again people might even say - there's a lot of fans in the cable
crossover saying that it's a better chest activator from EMG studies then
what a flat bench press is doing but guys if you rely on energy studies and
you wind up saying things like that and don't understand that though it may have
a better percentage of activation it's still not capable of being loaded to the
extent that a barbell bench press is therefore limiting its ability to be
effective it's if it's the only thing you do but if you do it in addition to
the bench press you're getting the benefits of everything so now we take
that we drop right into this horizontal cable crossover and we can see that
we're actually now taking our arm all the way through and crossing midline and
getting that complete activation of the chest in that plane of motion so we
don't have to stop there though because we can do different planes of motion
because this shoulder is a three-dimensional joint we can hit any
angle we want so if we go back now we do our incline bench press and when we're
done with that we don't rest we immediately go back over to the
crossover and we change the orientation so that our arms can go through this low
to high arc and again we're not we're not going to stop where we would stop on
a bench press on the incline bench press what we're going to do is we're actually
going to take the arm to midline and through midline and you can see again
the degree of contraction and complete contraction we're getting up the chest
by doing so it's a difference maker guys when you actually implement it and we're
go to the dip the same thing our hands are actually fixed on a dip as well we
can't get our hands to come towards mid line because the dip station just allows
them to stay in one position but we can take the dip we can load it up we can
use weights we can do whatever we want to create overload with that exercise as
soon as we're done we come back over here and now we change the orientation
of the cables once again to go from high to low and once again it's not just
getting the midline but it's crossing through midline to get
a complete contraction of the chest an essential element for a complete chest
workout and again one extra exercise here I'll push up one that we do a lot
I'm sure you don't have to stop with just the push shell because we're being
limited once again by the fact that our hands are in contact with the ground and
cannot get across our body so we use the push-up into this banded push-up where
Ashley can come up and drive one hand across the body to create an abduction
across midline right one arm staying down in contact with the ground the RL
arm goes across of course we want to switch sides and work both sides here
but this is how you complete the development of your chest
by including exercises that can be loaded by including exercises that take
the muscle through its full range of motion and of course applying full range
of motion to all of the exercises even if they are limited in how much complete
range of motion they can apply to the muscle itself that is how you do it guys
if you're looking for a complete workout that puts this all together puts the
science back in strength head to athleanx.com as a matter of fact we
don't just train chest we train like athletes we try to figure out ways we
can incorporate chest training into a more total body explosive application of
it so that we move like athletes function like athletes and look like
athletes those are all over at athleanx.com if you found the video
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talk to you again soon see ya
you