Just how vital are the pectoral exercises that you select for your upper body workouts? If your goal is to build a more eye catching chest, then the pec 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 chest exercises need to meet in order for you to stimulate some serious pectoral growth, as well as list a few of my favorite chest building exercises.
Lets get on to one of the first things that I like to teach people about building their chest muscles up. In order to stimulate chest muscle growth, you absolutely need to perform muscle building exercises that meet a few conditions. First, the upper body exercises that you choose, need to allow you to actually target your chest muscles. If you choose chest 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 chest muscles. It's ok if the upper body exercises also incorporate your shoulders or triceps, but the primary muscle group in the movement should definitely be your chest muscles.
The next piece of criteria that the pectoral exercises that you choose for your pec workouts need to meet is that each of the exercise that you select need to allow you to move a fairly heavy amount of weight. Lifting incrementally heavier weights over a full range of motion is precisely how you stimulate muscle growth, 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 third piece of criteria is something that most gym rats completely overlook. You've got to actually enjoy performing the pectoral exercises that you choose! If you hate the exercises that you put into your chest workouts, you're not going to be able to hit your chest as hard as you'd be able to if you really enjoyed performing the pectoral exercise in the first place, so make sure to stick with a few of the chest exercises that you actually like. Sometimes you've got no choice but to perform a few chest exercises that you're less than thrilled about, but try not to construct your pec workouts around these pectoral exercises, instead find a few that you really enjoy and slip them into the workout.
Below are a few of my favorite pectoral exercises. After looking over this list of exercises, I can honestly say that over 95% of all of my upper body workouts are composed of these highly effective pectoral exercises. Sometime I'll experiment with a new chest exercises, but not very often.
A Few of My Favorite Pectoral Exercises
DB Bench Press
Dumbbell Flyes
Decline Bench Press
Bench Press
Incline Press
DB Incline Press
Push Up
Chest Dips
DB Decline Bench Press
If you're one of the millions of guys out there who wants to build a bigger, more muscular chest, then make sure that your pectoral workouts are composed of the most effective pectoral exercises! The majority of your chest workouts should be designed around the short list of pec exercises listed above. If you follow no other advice than to simply make sure that your pec workouts are composed of exercises that fit the criteria listed in this article, you will definitely begin to build a bigger chest quickly.
