Exercise plan: Chest Workouts

Please use these chest workout exercises to pump up that chest. When training a certain muscle group, you don’t want to repeat the same muscle contraction twice with two different exercises, you won’t get any gains from this but rather have a negative effect as the muscle is being overworked.

One example of how many people exercise their chest is by doing a bench press exercise and then press ups. All you are doing here is ultimately wasting time, you are essentially working the same muscle groups twice, but your not going to get the gains twice, you’ll get up with muscle breakdown.

You need to concentrate on a number of different exercises, focusing on different parts of the muscles your looking to exercise to failure. For example your chest, has middle, upper and lower fibres along with more shaping exercises, that’s what you concentrate on. Furthermore each and every workout you do will use primary and secondary muscle groups, in my opinion the best way to train is with free weights, as the machines are doing a lot of the stabilising for you.  For example when you are training your chest, your chest in the primary muscle group, other muscles that help stabilise that movement and help lift the load are called secondary muscles. If we take chest exercises as the example, secondary muscle groups are triceps (top, back if the arm), shoulders and core muscles.

When doing pushing exercises, you are using your chest and triceps, hence why many people train their muscles in pairs by doing a chest and ‘tris’ day. If you are doing exercises designed to use the triceps then your triceps will be the primary muscle and furthermore your chest will become the secondary muscle group.

All training sessions should be intensive, short and quick paced for muscle tone, lasting for a maximum of around 45 mins after warm up.

People that spend hours in the gym, are actually having a negative effect on their body with muscle breakdown and wastage as your muscles start to actually break down and feed your body to use as energy.

Example of a chest workout

8-14 repetitions on all exercises, 4 sets 45 seconds rest In between each set. Pick a weight that on your last set you can complete a minimum of 8 repetitions.

(Image Attribution: Everkinetic at English Wikipedia)

• Barbell Flat bench press
• Dumbbell Incline press
• Decline press ups
•  Incline bench flye
• Press up sequence  narrow press, wide press, diagonal press and opposite diagonal press.

To see how I can take your fitness and condition to the next level please click here  or alternatively speak to me directly on 0161 399 00 77.