Building Chest Muscles

"Exercises That Work the Chest Properly"

One of the best ways for building chest muscles is to use a chest pressing free weight exercise.

Your best bet would be to join a well equipped gym, as they will have many types of machines and free weight equipment.

This will give you the opportunity to change chest exercises easily if you become stagnant with a certain movement.

For example, let's say after a couple of months using the Flat Bench Press that you cannot seem to progress any further.

If you are a member of a gym you will probably have access to many pieces of equipment, such an incline bench press, a decline bench press and dumbbells.

Flat Bench Press

This will enable you to change your chest building exercises to something different than you were currently using when your progress stalled, without being stuck with the same old exercise.

However, you can still progress with basic home equipment but I always recommend a well equipped gym.

If you are one of the lucky ones to have a well stocked home gym, then this will work as well.

So back to your goal of building chest muscles, if you concentrate on using core exercises you will be able build mass at a faster rate.

Always remember that you need to overload the muscle for it to get stronger.

So let's say you are just starting out. You've decided to use the incline bench press as your core chest exercise.

Incline Bench Press

Your first week you manage to press 100 lbs, 10 times (i.e. 100 X 10 reps). You were also able to do this 3 times (i.e. 3 sets).

Now, you've given your chest a week to recover from your incline bench press workout and the next week comes around.

In order for you to keep making progress building chest muscles, you must work a little harder than your previous workout in order for your muscles to get the signal that they must grow.

When I say a little harder, I mean to try making small increases every week. 5 to 10lb increments would be great.

Also, I always recommend having someone "spot" you while doing certain free weight exercises, such as barbell chest presses. Your safety should always come first.

If you do not have a workout partner, many gym trainers, front desk personnel or even those working out around you will usually give you a "spot" if you ask them nicely.

After say 8 weeks of training this way, you may find that you are now pressing 40lbs or more than when you started.

Basically you have told your body that it needed to build bigger muscle in order to tolerate the weekly increasing load you were placing on it.

If you find that you are having a difficult time increasing the amount of weight each week, it may be time to switch to a new chest exercise.

Here are some other exercises for building chest muscles:

Decline bench press

Flat Dumbbell Press
(you could also do incline and decline here with the appropriate bench)

Incline Smythe Machine Chest Press
(adjust bench and perform flat and decline press as well)

Hammer Strength Flat Press
(Try HS incline and decline presses as well)

You can use anyone of the above exercises to target your chest.

Also, keep in mind that in order for your muscles to keep growing, you need to be eating properly, sleeping adequately until you feel rested, and taking a week or so off every 8 to 12 weeks (this is different for everyone, so experiment here).

Building leg muscle

Building arm muscle

Exercises to strengthen back muscles

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