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Build Bigger Chest Muscles

How To Build A Bigger Chest

By James Hart

The chest is undoubtedly the body-part that gets the most attention from beginners and experienced lifters alike. Although we all want to build a huge chest you need to train intelligently and not let your ego take over. With this in mind, you can use these great chest-building tips to build impressive pecs in no time.

Compound Exercises
You need to train your chest with the big, compound lifts if you are going to force massive growth. The isolation exercises have their place in a varied regime, but if you use these as the basis of your workout you will never get the huge chest you desire.

The big lifts like the classic barbell bench press, incline bench press, dips, dumbbell bench and press ups should be used as the cornerstone of your ‘big chest’ routine. These heavy exercises will force the biggest anabolic response from your body, giving you the best chance of building slabs of dense muscle.

Train With Full Intensity
In order to push your body past its previous limits and force new muscle growth you need to train with absolute full intensity every time you hit your chest. This means that you should push your muscle to positive failure in every set you perform. There is no point doing 10 reps for an exercise if you can push for 3 or 4 more as you will not spark a muscle building response and your gains will be hampered.

Train With Proper Form
Although you should train to your limits with full intensity, it must not interfere with proper form during your exercises. One of the biggest mistakes that beginners make is to put too much weight on the bar and train with improper form. This is where you need to leave your ego at the door of the gym and make sure you train with perfect form.

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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