Just how critical are the pectoral exercises that you select for your chest workouts? If your goal is to build bigger chest muscles, then the upper body exercises that you choose are important to the process. If you piece together your pectoral workout with exercises that don’t fit certain criteria, then you’ll ultimately have a hard time building up your pecs. In this article, I’m going to uncover the specific criteria that your pectoral exercises need to meet in order for you to stimulate some serious pec growth, as well as list a few of my favorite chest building exercises.
First things first. In order to stimulate upper body muscle growth, you definitely need to perform muscle building exercises that meet certain conditions. First, the pec exercises that you choose, need to allow you to actually target your chest muscles. If you choose upper body exercises that place most of the emphasis on your shoulders, then your shoulders will be doing most of the work and in turn achieving the benefits of doing that work (you’ll stimulate muscle growth in your shoulders instead of chest growth). So you want to focus on movements that specifically target your pectoral muscles. It’s ok if the chest exercises also incorporate your shoulders or triceps, but the primary muscle group in the movement should for the most part be your pec muscles.
The second piece of criteria that the pectoral exercises that you choose for your pectoral workouts need to meet is that each of the exercise that you choose need to allow you to train with a pretty heavy amount of weight. Lifting heavier weights through out the movement is precisely how you force your muscles to grow, so it only makes sense that if you’re wanting to add size to your chest muscles, then you need to be training with heavy weights. As heavy as you can!
The next piece of criteria is something that most guys completely overlook. You’ve got to actually enjoy performing the upper body exercises that you choose! If you hate the exercises that you put into your upper body workouts, you’re not going to be able to hit your pec as hard as you’d be able to if you really enjoyed performing the pec exercise in the first place, so make sure to stick with a few of the chest exercises that you actually enjoy. Sometimes you’ve got no choice but to perform a few pec exercises that you’re less than thrilled about, but try not to build your upper body workouts around these pectoral exercises, instead find a few that you really like and slip them into the workout.
Listed below are a few of my favorite chest exercises ( in no particular order). Looking over this list of exercises, I can honestly say that approximately 95% of all of my chest workouts are composed of these highly effective pectoral exercises. Every once in a while, I’ll throw in a few sets of cable crossovers to the mix, but that’s about as creative as I get with my pectoral workouts. This simple formula has allowed me to build muscle mass quickly.
The Top Pectoral Exercises
- DB Incline Press
- Push Up
- Bench Press
- Incline Press
- Chest Dips
- Dumbbell Flyes
- Decline Bench Press
- DB Decline Bench Press
If you’re one of the hundreds of guys out there who wants to sculpt out a bigger, more muscular chest, then make sure that your chest workouts are composed of the most effective pectoral exercises! The majority of your pectoral workouts should be designed around the short list of pectoral exercises listed above. If you follow no other advice than to simply make sure that your upper body workouts are designed with exercises that fit the requirements listed in this article, you’ll definitely begin to build a bigger chest fast and gain muscle mass at the same time.