The Best 7 Tips And Tricks To An Insane Chest Workout

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Therefore, it’s safe to say, that the approach 90% of us take toward chest day is truly insane. If we want our chest workout to be truly insane, in a good way, we have to start doing things differently. Here are the best 7 tips and tricks to an insane chest workout.

1 Start with Your Weaknesses

Starting with your weaknesses is counterintuitive for a lot of us, especially on chest day when our egos want to go straight to showing off how much we can lift on the flat bench. Avoid this temptation. Look in the mirror and see the underdeveloped areas of your chest. These are the areas that we need to pay the most attention to on chest day.

Think about it, if we focus on our weakest areas, then we’ll be emphasizing the areas with the most growth potential. It’s important to try and isolate these areas as much as possible in our workouts so we can catch them up with the rest of our chest. This is going to give us the most growth potential in both size and strength. Many of us have uneven chest mass, typically exhibiting more bulk on the outside of our chest than the top, inner, and bottom areas of our chest. These are the areas we need to focus on.

2 Use Less Weight

Another counterintuitive tip that most people don’t consider will actually help them gain strength and mass. When we load up more weight than the weaker areas of our chest can handle, then we compensate by using the stronger areas of our chest to control the weight. Although we’re lifting more weight, we aren’t exercising the areas that need exercised the most and offer the most growth, strength, and stabilization potential.

Many of us think that if we want bigger and stronger chests then we simply need to do flat bench and add more weight. This will help you gain mass but your progress will eventually plateau if you don’t strengthen the entire muscle group. Focus on the areas of weakness and you’ll feel more balanced and stronger and you’ll gain mass in all the right places.

3 Widen Your Grip

Most people keep their grips in so they can handle more weight and that’s why they end up with lots of mass on the outsides of their chest but the inner parts of their chest, along the breastbone, remain underdeveloped and weak. It’s also counterintuitive for many of us to think that widening our grip is going to work the inside of our chest more. We’d typically think that wider grip means hitting the outside of our chests.

Why does a wider grip exercise the inner areas of our chest? The wider grip stretches out chest out, tearing the muscle fibers along the inside of our chest, since they are strained and torn outward. Take a grip where you can comfortably lower the weight parallel with your chest.

4 Hit All The Angles

We just talked about the need for us to strain the inside of our chests with the wider grip. The other two areas of our chests that typically get neglected and, therefore, have the most growth potential are along the top of our chests, near the collarbone, and the bottom of our chests, along our ribs.

To fill out these areas we have to use several different angles of “presses” throughout our chest workout. To hit the upper areas of our chest, still maintaining that slightly wider grip, we need to press at angles greater than 90-degress from our chest. 90-degrees is also acceptable as long as the weight is being lowered and pressed over our upper chests.

To exercising the lower areas of our chest helps fill out the curvature at the bottom of our pecs. To achieve this growth and to strengthen our lower pectorals, it’s important to use angles less than 90-degrees from our chest and often lowering the weight down across the bottom of our chests.

It’s all really quite simple but the simple things are easiest to overlook. Most chest exercises focus on a perfect 90-degree press, only exercising the middle-outside of our chests and leaving all the surrounding areas underdeveloped and, therefore, it’s important to mix-up our angles.

5 Do More Pushups

Pushups are a great, low-stress, exercise that we can do that really shreds the muscle fibers in our chest. There are so many different variations of pushups that we can do and they are a great exercise to do on days that we aren’t specifically working out our chests. Every day, when I do my core exercises on a mat, I mix in at least 100 pushups. This daily chest exercise will give our chests much greater endurance and lead to quicker recovery, since our body is used to our chest needing to be fed and healed on a daily basis.

Make sure that when you do your pushups, you focus on form and a full range of motion. The full range of motion is going to make sure that your entire chest is exercised. When we do a shorter range of motion, it’s typically so we can stay in the areas of the workout of which we are strongest and have the most muscle mass. A full range of motion makes us pass through our strong points and really exercise the weaker areas of our muscles. This is going to maximize our strength and mass gains.

6 K.I.S.S.

K.I.S.S. stands for “keep it simple, stupid”. It’s easy to fall into the trap of going from one extreme to the other. The opposite of crazy is still crazy, though. So, many of us go from failing to achieve the results we desire by only doing heavy weight on the flat bench to failing to achieve the results we desire by doing all kinds of whacky chest exercises we find on the internet. Every area of our pectoral muscles can be fully torn down and achieve maximum growth potential with easy pressing exercises. By simply varying the degrees of our pressing exercises and really focusing our attention on tearing the muscle fibers in those areas of weakness with a wider grip and a full range of motion, you can have the insane chest workout you want without looking insane in the process.

7 Don’t Get Injured

One of the reasons it’s important not to try a bunch of weird chest exercises we find on the internet and, rather, stick to the natural workouts we know with varying degrees of presses and a full range of motion is because many of those whacky exercises can lead to injury. One of the most common reasons people don’t achieve their exercise goals is because they injure themselves by either trying to lift too much weight, use improper form, or try to do a workout they have never done before. Stick to what you know and focus on those areas of weakness and really tearing down their muscle fibers in smooth, controlled, exercises. You’ll achieve slow and steady growth, injury-free, and you’ll quickly pass everybody else in the gym because you’ve found the key to having an insane chest workout.