5 Little-Known Ways to Get a Rock Hard Chest
There are better ways to get a nice chest than old-school exercises.
Ben Greenfield
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5 Little-Known Ways to Get a Rock Hard Chest
When it comes to having an impressive figure that looks good in a t-shirt, business suit, tank top, or swimwear, most men and women would rank a rock-hard, nice-looking chest right up there with chiseled abs and symmetrical shoulders. But frankly, there are better ways to build a nice chest than old-school chest workouts that involve excessive shoulder-damaging barbell bench press repetitions or an insane number of regular old push-ups. Here are five little known ways to get a rock hard chest.
1.) Change The Angle
In opens in a new windowHow To Get A Super Defined Chest, you learn that in order for a muscle group to grow, get strong, or stay toned, you need to constantly work that muscle group from a variety of different angles, using a many different exercises. How can you do this for your chest? Here are two quick and dirty tips:
a) If you’re doing a traditional gym workout, then on a weekly basis, include incline, decline, and flat chest pressing so that you attack your chest muscles from all angles. Do exercises like opens in a new windowdecline pushups, opens in a new windowincline bench press, and opens in a new windowdumbbell chest press.
b) Do flyes in addition to pressing. Flyes help develop the inner pec muscles that presses and push-ups simply have a hard time targeting, and there are many variations you can use, including decline fly, lying fly, seated fly, and standing fly.
2.) Push-Ups With Rotation
In the article, opens in a new windowWhy Are Pushups Such A Good Exercise?, you learn that a simple, standard push-up requires contraction of the muscles around the knee joints, hip joints, pelvis, and spine to maintain a straight line from your head to your feet. Combine that with activation of the muscles on the back of your arms, chest, shoulders, biceps, upper back, lower back, and legs, and you get full body workout with one simple exercise.
Push-ups are very versatile, and can be used to not just build muscular strength, but also to improve power (e.g., a “clap” pushup) and increase muscular endurance (e.g., doing X number of push-ups in four minutes). By altering your hand and foot positions, you can change muscle recruitment patterns and joint stresses of the push-ups, making the movement harder, easier, or simply stressing different muscles.
But when it comes to taking full advantage of the push-up for developing a rock hard chest, there are two exercises that I like the best. One you will learn about later in this article. The other is the push-ups with rotation.
I prefer to do this exercise with a set of push-up handles like the PerFirmer handles or the Perfect Push-up handles. Simply get into a standard push-up position, do a pushup, then rotate your entire body to one side while reaching for the sky with one arm. Then rotate back until you’re facing the ground, do another push-up, and rotate in the opposite direction. When you rotate to the side, you can “stack” your feet on top of one another, or you can space them next to each other. opens in a new windowHere’s a video to show you what I mean.
3.) Rowing & Retraction
Slouched shoulders can make your chest look droopy, so when you’re working on getting a rock-hard chest, you must include shoulder posture, rowing and shoulder blade retraction exercises like opens in a new windowpush-up row, lat pull-downs and opens in a new windowpull-ups. As a matter of fact, even if you’re targeting your chest, you should think about a simple rule when you’re at the gym and exercising your upper body, and the rule is this: pull twice as much as you push. We live in a “shoulders forward” pushing dominant culture in which, whether you’re riding a bike or working on a computer, the shoulders tend to be pulled forward. So even when you’re working your chest, remember to teach you shoulders how to be pulled backwards too!
4.) Suspended Push-Ups
A recent study entitled “ opens in a new windowMuscle activation during push-ups performed under stable and unstable conditions,” looked at a variety of push-up variations (wobble board, stability disc, fitness dome, etc.) using electrical equipment to measure muscular contractions. It turns out that to get maximum contraction of your chest muscles, the best exercise you can do is a “suspended push-up,” using something like a TRX or other form of a suspension strap. Here’s what it looks like.
Want even more push-up variations? Check out my article “ opens in a new windowTop 16 Push-Up Variations Two Part Article Series.”
5.) Grease The Groove
If you’re doing a “chest-only” workout at the gym, in which you do a variety of chest exercises for 30, 45, or 60 minutes, which is a “bodybuilder-esque” approach that involves “destroying” a muscle group with one giant workout that targets one body part, you only need to do a chest workout once per week. If you’re simply working chest exercises into a full-body workout that targets other muscle groups, you can hit the chest three times per week, but allow for about 48 hours of recovery between those workouts.
However, my favorite way to work the chest is to “grease the groove” by doing a number of different push-up variations every day, 365 days a year. For example, before I have my cup of coffee in the morning, I do three sets of 10 push-ups on my fist. Later in the day, I’ll drop and do 50 standard pushups. Then, as part of an evening workout, I’ll finish with 5 solid minutes of push-up rotations. In other words, I’m constantly working my chest in “mini-doses” of exercise, rather than having a devoted, structured chest workout. This approach works quite well for my busy schedule, and results in far less pec soreness too.
So, what do you think? Do you plan on trying any of these chest exercises? If you have more questions or comments about how to get a rock hard chest, then head over to opens in a new windowFacebook.com/GetFitGuy and join the conversation there! I’d love to hear what you have to say.
opens in a new windowImage courtesy of Shutterstock.