A Basic Set Of Chest Workouts To Get You Started

There are a variety of ways to go about chest workouts, and there is no lack of different exercises you can use to strengthen and/or increase the size of your chest muscles. Several of the more popular and effective exercises are described below, but before we get into that, there are several important points worth noting.

Don't Forget You Have Other Muscles Too - Even if chest workouts are your primary focus at the moment, whether you exercise at home or go to a gym, don't lose sight of the fact that you should always try to be doing a total body workout. You can focus on chest workouts for part of the total workout, or just do chest exercises on a day where time is short, but don't neglect the other parts of your body. Also, if you spread your chest exercises out over the total workout period, and work other muscles in between, you'll increase the recovery time available for each muscle group after each exercise, and won't fatigue quite so quickly.

When you are working with a particular muscle group, you want to be spending an equal amount of time working the opposing muscle group. If you're spending 10 minutes working your biceps, take another 10 to work the triceps. It's a similar situation for the quads and hamstrings, and for the lower back and the abs. As far as chest workouts are concerned, spend an equal time working the back muscles. You don't have to count the time spent down to the last second, but you get the general idea. If you're going to spend some time pushing, spend some time pulling.

Most of the typical chest workouts exercise the triceps and shoulders as well, so for a complete upper body workout you want to complement the chest exercises with upper arm, shoulder, and back exercises. Having said that, we can focus on the chest exercises themselves, the primary muscle group being the Pectoralis Major, and the Pectoralis Minor which lies beneath it, "pecs" for short. The exercises discussed here involve free weights for the most part, a barbell and dumbbells. You can to virtually the same exercises on machines if you have access to them, but these exercises can either be done at home or in the gym. A cautionary note. If you haven't worked out with free weights much before, go very easy on the weights at first, and don't try to work with more weight than you can easily handle. When you work on a machine, your movements are constrained, whereas they are not with free weights, and you stand a greater chance of injuring yourself if you use weights heavier than you can manage. Remember - you will get fatigued, and fatigue coupled with a heavy weight can conceivably spell trouble. On most of these exercises, it's good to have a spotter, or at least someone nearby that can either help you do that one more rep, or get you out of the jam you got into on the previous rep.

Variation Adds Quality To Your Chest Workouts -Whether using a barbell or dumbbells, be aware of possible variations in your routine, wide grip versus narrow grip, normal grip versus reverse grip. Variations in how you grip a barbell or how you use your wrists (supinating) when working with the dumbbells, enable you to work your chest muscle in different ways. Quality chest workouts involve a lot more than lying flat on a bench and doing barbell bench presses and nothing else. The chest workouts briefly described below are quite complete as chest workouts go. You need not do all of them each day, give yourself a little variation day to day in your routine. You might want to focus on the upper chest one day, middle and lower chest the next two, or do a half-dozen exercises that will work all three parts of the chest in one workout. Also plan your routines to give your muscles as much recovery time as you can between sets.

Barbell Bench Presses - As is the case with most of these sets of chest workouts, you will be doing the exercises on three benches, an incline bench, a flat bench, and a decline bench. To work your upper chest, you'll be doing the barbell presses on an incline bench. Lying on your back, lift the barbell off of the rack and lower it slowly towards your chest. It's important when working the upper chest that you not allow the barbell to touch your chest. That defeats part of the purpose of the exercise. When you press the barbell up, do it quickly, and when you lower it, do so in a slow and controlled manner. Do this with light, very manageable weights at first, and as you get the hang of it you can increase both weights and reps. To work your middle chest muscles, repeat the exercise on a flat bench, and then repeat again on a decline bench to work the lower chest muscles. On the flat bench, as on the incline bench, you do not want the barbell to come into contact with your chest. It's OK to do so when doing presses on the decline bench. Just remember to lower the weight slowly.

When you think about the three benches used, in the above and the following exercises, you'll recognize that as you are pressing the weights, the angle your arm makes with your chest differs depending upon which bench you are using. It is this difference in angle which determines which part of the chest muscle is getting the maximum benefit. One variation you can use, especially to give your lower chest an extra workout, is to use a wide grip, as wide as possible on the barbell. You'll definitely notice the difference! (continued...)