It is far to easy to use your shoulders and triceps during the bench to help you lift more weight, but your chest growth will suffer, so perfect form is essential.
Mind-Muscle Connection
A great way to ensure you use your chest in the bench press and other chest exercises is to concentrate fully on lifting the weight with your target muscle group. Really try to focus entirely on your pecs pushing and squeezing rather than the actual movement itself. If you focus entirely on your pecs during the chest exercises you should see and feel the difference in your muscle growth.
Change Your Rep Range
It is also important to change the amount of reps you perform per exercise and workout periodically. if you train your muscles with the same amount of reps and sets every week they will not be forced to grow new mass as they will become accustomed to the same stimulus. However if you change the amount of reps and sets you perform every 4 or 5 weeks your muscles will be forced to grow new mass to accommodate different amount of stress. An example follows:
Weeks 1-4 12 total sets of 10 reps
Weeks 5-8 7 total sets of 6 reps
Weeks 9-12 15 total sets of 15 reps
As you can see the amount of sets and reps varies in order to keep your muscle growth from stagnating.
Don’t Over-train
Another important aspect to muscle growth is making sure you don’t over-train. Over-training is the easiest way to make no muscle gains at all, so be sure to keep your chest training to just once per week. It is important to remember that your muscle grows outside the gym and once a week is all it takes to grow new mass.
Eat, Rest, Sleep
Apart from training your chest hard in the gym you must also remember to rest properly. This leads on from not over-training your muscles, because they need to recover fully in order to grow. If you want huge pecs you need to eat a surplus of calories every day and also make sure you are getting at least 8 hours sleep every night.
Sample Chest Routine
Now you have to power to build a big chest outside and inside the gym, the last thing we need is a killer chest workout plan.
Incline barbell bench press 3 x 8-10
Flat dumbbell press 2 x 6-8
Dips 3 x 8-10
Cable flyes 3 x 10-12
Conclusion
Next time you train your chest use these tips to get the most out of your workout, but also remember that muscle is built outside of the gym so be sure to give yourself the best chance of muscle growth with your nutrition and lifestyle.
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