Maximizing chest growth requires a clear strategy. I have four crazy tips for a crazy big chest. Follow these tips and you will see your chest begin to respond.
Use Many Different Angles
When training your chest it is important to hit the muscle from different angles. The best advice is to focus on incline angles. You must change the angles from time to time. You can make it an extreme angle or a less extreme angle. It will continue to stimulate growth in your chest if you do this.
Proper Range of Motion
When doing chest exercises it might surprise you to hear that you should not use 100% ROM. This tends to take the focus off the pecs and that's not what you want. As an example, locking out turns the exercise into a triceps dominant exercise. Going too deep with dumbbells turns it into an anterior deltoid exercise. You want to work within the ROM where you can actually feel your pecs working. Keep an eye on range of motion and it will impact the growth you achieve.
Rep Ranges
When training the chest, modify your rep ranges. You are able to use low, medium and high rep ranges with your pecs. Studies show the pecs respond the best to moderate and high rep ranges. When using high rep ranges you can really focus on the muscle contraction. This will help you isolate the pecs more efficiently which helps them grow.
Iso-metric Contractions
We return to the topic of actual muscle recruitment and isolation. The pecs respond well to focusing on iso-metric contractions. This really helps you improve that connection between the CNS and actual muscle fibers, which over time leads to improved muscle fiber recruitment within the area. I personally do some hammer press movements one arm at a time, but I really squeeze hard at the top of the movement to recruit the maximum number of fibers. It is quite effective.
Conclusion
The attack plan for the pecs should include many different angles, the proper ROM, changing up the rep ranges and getting a good strong contraction of the muscle. Focus on this as you train your pecs and you will begin to see immediate improvement.
