How to grow your chest
Nikola Man
Last week we looked at back training and in that post I recommended that you go through the entire series on training program design in order to be able to understand and follow these muscle group specific articles.
Today we take a look at a legendary muscle group that even has a day devoted to it – international chest Monday. But first, some anatomy:
We will not be focusing on the pectoralis minor muscle, instead we will direct our attention to the pectoralis major muscle. More specifically, we will take a look at the direction the fibers of this muscle run and how to stimulate them best for growth.
Pectoralis major is composed of two heads, the sternal head and the clavicular head. You can see an illustration of this below:
You’re probably familiar with the old adage that you should be training your chest from all angles, you know, flat press, incline press and decline press in order to hit the all parts of your chest. While you cannot isolate particular portions of the muscle, you can stimulate (activate) some fibers preferentially. In other words, a flat press will activate the whole chest but it will target the middle part of it the best. An incline press will activate your whole chest but it will target the upper portion of it the best. This is due to the fact that the fibers of the chest don’t run the same way across the whole muscle. The lower fibers run upward, the middle fibers run across and the upper fibers run downward. To understand this better, take a look at the last anatomy image below:
As you can see, fibers run in different directions
Time to talk some volume:
Minimum volume (MV)
As established many times before, this is the number of hard sets you need to maintain the size of your muscle and for chest that would be somewhere around 8 sets per week. Again, you might be slightly lower or higher than this depending on a multitude of factors.
Why would anyone choose to do maintenance volume? Well, you might want to prioritize a different body part or you want to let your chest re-sensitize to growth. Executing MV in practice would look something like this:
4 sets of flat barbell bench press on Monday
4 sets of incline dumbbell bench press on Thursday
Minimum-effective volume (MEV)
For most people this will be around 10 sets a week. If your program has you doing less than 10 sets of chest work per week you’re probably not going to grow much if at all. 10 sets per week is a good starting point and then you can keep increasing the number of sets each week or from mesocycle to mesocycle or any other way which will be determined by your goal, lifting experience, genetics and many other factors. Setting this up is easy:
5 sets of flat barbell bench press on Monday
5 sets of incline dumbbell bench press on Thursday
Maximum recoverable volume (MRV)
Most individuals will not be able to recover from more than 20 hard sets of chest work per week. If your coach or your program has you doing more than 20 sets per week you’re most likely going to run into serious recovery issues unless you are working really sub-optimally.
In my view, it’s a good option to start around your MEV and build slowly towards your MRV. Granted there are many ways to do this, I will outline only one possibility later on.
Intensity and frequency
Chest size is very tightly correlated with strength. Usually, people who have a big one-repetition maximum have big pecs. In other words, big bench = big chest. In terms of repetition ranges, unlike back, you do not need as much variety for chest. You essentially need 3 main types of exercises and you need a fairly narrow rep range. Studies and experience suggest that you should be training your chest somewhere in the 5-12 rep range taken relatively close to failure per RIR scale. This is mostly because the pectoralis major is mostly comprised of fast-twitch muscle fibers which respond best to heavier loads. It is acceptable to occasionally go above 12 reps but the bulk of your chest work should be in the 5-12 zone.
In terms of frequency, most successful programs I know have you doing chest twice a week and my recommendation is also exactly that. You can go to 3 times per week, but that is hard to manage, especially because you need to be doing some heavy lifting. One minor caveat is for people who already have a massive chest, for them, it is okay to hit the chest 1.5 times per week. You might be wondering what in the hell is 0.5 of chest work. Basically, you would do one heavy overloading session early in the week, say on Monday, and then on Thursday you would do an easier session. To illustrate:
Monday (the heavy session)
Flat pressing movement for 5 sets of 5 reps
Incline pressing movement 4 sets of 8 reps
Cable fly movement for 3 sets of 12
Dips (or weighted dips) 3 sets of 10
Thursday (the light session)
Any pressing movement for 3-4 sets of 8-10 reps
The rest of the workout can be shoulder and triceps focused
This way you really stimulate the chest once and the second session serves the purpose of aiding recovery and maybe adding some minor growth stimulus. If you’re wondering why people with massive chest would need something like this, it’s because they need a huge overloading stimulus to get their chest to grow and splitting the work into two sessions doesn’t get it done for them optimally.
Exercise selection
I recommend including at least one flat movement, one incline movement and one isolation movement to your routine. You don’t have to do them evenly. If you’re just starting out, focusing on technique and flat pressing will serve you just fine. If you need to focus on bringing up your upper chest, you might want to do more incline work while you do some isolation work and some flat pressing. Here are some of the best exercises:
Flat pressing
Incline pressing
Isolation
Tips for making a program
Similarly to the structure I recommended for back, I also suggest starting your first week of your first mesocycle at around the MEV work for some easy gains and then continue adding sets and trying to increase the weight with each week.
So let’s say in the first week you do 3 sets of flat barbell bench press and 2 sets of incline dumbbell bench press on Monday and on Thursday you do 3 sets of some machine press and 2 sets of the cable fly movement. That is 10 sets in total.
Week two you add 1 set to incline dumbbell press on Monday and 1 set to cable flies on Thursday. You also try to increase weight on the other two exercises.
Week three you add 2 sets of flat barbell bench press on Monday and 1 set to the machine press on Thursday.
Week 4 you try to add either weight or a rep where possible.
Week 5 you add 1 set to incline dumbbell press on Monday and 1 set to both exercises on Thursday. This is 18 total sets of chest work.
You deload in week 6 and start with 12 sets in the first week of the next block and go on from there.
Rather obviously, this is only one option among countless other viable training program designs. You could be doing 10-12 sets for 5-6 weeks straight then deload and increase the number of sets to 16-18 sets for the next 5-6 weeks. You could be doing one or a couple of strength-focused mesocycles then move on to do one or a couple of hypertrophy-focused mesocycles. The list goes on and on and on.
Other important comments
The article on back training had a long section here but that is because people screw up many things with back training and they screw it up often. Chest, on the other hand, can be screwed up in only one way – poor technique. It is a problem because it causes two detrimental effects: limited range of motion meaning that your chest muscles aren’t stretched properly and inadequate chest activation meaning that your shoulders and/or triceps do more work than they should.
I hope the exercise tutorial videos linked above solve this problem for you.