CHEST CHANGING

CHEST CHANGING

Eight pec-shocking tactics Eight pec-shocking tactics The old standards — such as the music of Frank Sinatra, Bob Marley and Ray Charles — never really go out of style. They’re timeless and, thus, they keep getting rediscovered by new generations. Likewise, when it comes to chest training, most of today’s bodybuilders rely on the same old standards as their iron forefathers: flat and incline presses, dips, flat and incline flyes, three or four exercises per workout, typically eight to 10 reps per set. The classics still hold up, but your chest can grow accustomed to variations on the same routine. When it grows accustomed, it stops growing. The following eight approaches are riffs off the standards, but come up with completely new mixes designed to break you out of routine routines and pump up your pecs.

When utilizing the Weider Pre-Exhaustion Training Principle, an isolation exercise (which directly stresses one muscle) is performed before a compound exercise (which directly stresses more than one muscle), so that the muscle targeted with the isolation lift gives out first during the compound exercise. That means the muscle giving out has been trained to exhaustion, which in turn triggers optimum growth. Front deltoids and triceps usually do much of the work in a chest press, but if you do flyes before presses, your pecs will give out before your delts or triceps. “Re-exhausting” is most effective if you superset the exercises, immediately following each set of flyes with a set of presses.

Supersetting bench presses and dumbbell pullovers was one of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s favorite techniques. The combination of a constricting movement (bench presses) and a stretching

movement (pullovers) creates a tremendous upper-body pump. In addition, it’s a very convenient superset, because after finishing a set of bench presses, you can quickly rotate 90 degrees and begin pullovers on the same be