THICKER CHEST: 4 Mistakes Keeping You Small

I'm sure you've heard the advice if you want to grow a big chest and you need to do heavy pressing movements, exercises like the bench press, dumbbell press and push ups. And there is truth to this. Studies that have tracked an individual's strength in these movements have found a strong correlation between their pressing strength and resulting chest growth. But if we take a closer look at the data, we find what are known as outliers. Some individuals, despite gaining significant strength in these movements, failed to increase their chest size much at all. And I'm sure many of you can relate. In fact, this was one of my biggest frustrations when I first started training. No matter how strong I got with my bench press or how many pushups I could do, my chest just would not grow. I'd end up feeling the movements more on my shoulders and triceps, and I blamed it on genetics. But eventually I realized that even though I was doing the right chest exercises, I wasn't doing them in a way that allowed my chest to do most of the work. And although my chest is still nowhere near where I want it to be, it has improved drastically ever since I fixed four things. Regardless of how long you've been training for, fix the four mistakes I'm about to show you. And I guarantee during your next workout, you'll finally feel your chest light up and rapidly grow like it never has before. So many of you watching are probably students or full time professionals who sit most of the day. Back when I first started training, I was a student and sat like this for hours every day without me realizing it. My posture eventually became more hunched over time with my shoulders rounding forward. Why am I telling you this? Well, let's take this lunged posture and apply it to the bench press. If you're locked up in this position, then when you press the bar, you'll naturally be inclined to let your shoulders round forward and chest cave in as you push the weight up. But the more you let this happen, the more tension is shifted away from the chest and onto the shoulders instead of do this over time. And even if you get stronger at bench pressing, it's your front delts that'll end up growing and not your chest. So how do you fix this? Well, there's two steps to this and both are equally as important. The first step is to address the root cause. You need to work on your mobility to help open up your chest so that you'll be able to better utilize your chest in the first place during any pressing movements. I do have a daily posture routine that focuses on the upper body, which I'll link in the description box down below and at the end of this video. But for your next workout, I want you to try these two exercises right before you press to help open up your chest. First, take a band and perform over and backs to open up the tight chest and front delt muscles. If you don't have a band, you can clasp both hands behind your back and extend your arms back and up, squeezing your shoulder blades together to open up your chest. Do two sets of five ten slow and controlled reps here. Next, we want to now activate some of your weakened back muscles to help reinforce this upright posture. Lay on your stomach, squeeze your butt and move your arms into a Y position overhead with your thumbs pointing up. Lift your hands off the ground slightly. Hold that for a second and then move your arms into a W position by squeezing your shoulder blades back. Hold that for a second, then straighten your arms out to the sides to make a T shape before going back to the W and Y once more. Focus on working the muscles in your mid back and repeat that for a total of 6 reps. What you're going to do next will make sure that your chest now stays in this proper position as you press. Now, most people will keep their back completely flat whenever they do any sort of pressing against the bench. This not only puts your shoulders rather than your chest in a more favorable position to do work since they'll be more inclined to run forward, but it also tends to be an uncomfortable and riskier position for your shoulder joint Instead, before you press, bring your shoulders down and away from your ears and then retract your shoulder blades by pinching them together as if you had a pencil between them as as a result of this, your chest will pop up and an arch will be created in your upper back, creating a bit of space between your lower back and the bench. Set this up and maintain it as you press. As you can now see, your shoulders will stay pinned back and chest out, enabling your chest to now do the work. Now you'll want to mainly focus on maintaining this retracted position as you lower the weight down as you press. However, it's perfectly fine if your shoulder blades open up a little bit since since that helps fully contract your chest as long as your chest still remains up and out and you aren't excessively protracting your shoulder blades and letting your shoulders roll forward or shrug up like we talked about earlier. Alright, so applying the previous point will set you up to successfully start using your chest when pressing, but the second mistake can steal tension away from the chest, even if you keep your shoulder blades retracted and chest out. And it has to do with your elbows. So in order to maximally activate your chest when pressing, you want your elbow angle to line up with the majority of your chest fibers. This tends to be at an angle of around 45 to 60 degrees. However, many of you watching will likely have relatively stronger shoulders and a weaker chest. As a result, your body will be inclined to flare your elbows out to the sides as you press, in an attempt to use your stronger shoulders to lift the weight rather than your weaker pecs. It's very subtle and it's not something many of you will be able to notice, let alone feel. To minimize the odds of this happening though, here's what you can do. First, you want to avoid using a crazy wide grip, since that will tend to cause your elbows to flare out regardless. Instead, try using a grip that's about 1.5 times shoulder width. And then as you bring the bar down, tuck your elbows to roughly a 4560 degree angle. As a result of this, the bar should actually move down and back as you lower it, landing around the level of your nipples. Then, as you press, try to consciously avoid letting your elbows flare out. Keep them tucked in and drive your biceps in towards your chest. The bar should then end up back over your chin at the top position. And the same applies for dumbbell presses and even pushups. Maximally activate the chest by keeping those elbows tucked on the way down and avoid letting them flare on the way up. But trust me, your elbows will want to naturally flare out, so. So if you can't keep that from happening as you press up, then that's a sign that you need to lower the weight. Unfortunately, your chest just isn't ready to take on that heavy load. So by applying the previous two points, you'll be setting up your form to maximally activate your chest. But to boost activation even further, you want to apply something called the mind to muscle connection. Doing so has been shown to boost even well trained subjects chest activation by 22% and seems to result in faster growth over time. To do so, we need to first change the way you think about pressing. Although throughout the video I've been using terms like pressing and pushing the weight up, that's not actually what the chest does. The chest is mainly responsible for a movement called horizontal adduction, which is the act of bringing your arms together. So to properly activate your chest while you bench, do push ups or any pressing motion, you need to Shift your thinking from pull pushing and instead to pulling your arms together, which as a result is what moves the weight up. To reinforce this, I want you to try this exercise right now as you're watching, and then do it right before the next time you press. Stand with one arm out to the side and the other holding your chest. Bring your shoulder blades down and pinch together like we talked about earlier. Now think about the following two points. Point A at your biceps and point B at your inner pec. Use that pec to bring point A to point B while feeling that chest contract with your other hand. Avoid letting your shoulder take over by keeping your shoulder blades back. Once you start feeling that, try bending your arm as if you were pressing. And again, just think about bringing point A to point B or squeezing your biceps into the side of your chest. Try this with both arms and try it with a band as well for some resistance. Once you start feeling that, you can try it out with push ups again, don't think about pushing your body up. Think about bringing your arms together as if you're trying to slide your hands in together. Then when you get to the gym, try this out on an empty bar. And again, just think about pulling your arms together every rep by using your chest rather than just pushing the weight up. Or for a dumbbell press, think about trying to create a big arch with your arms and again squeezing the arms together on the way up, rather than just pumping the weights up and down. Once this clicks for you, you'll feel the difference right away. And this mind to muscle connection you establish with your chest will only grow stronger over time, especially especially as the size of your chest increases. Alright, so we've already covered quite a bit, but there is still one more mistake that has the power to sabotage everything you've just learned. This is ultimately what caused me to have a really strong bench press, but no chest to show for it. What is it? Ego. If you properly apply the tips that we went through, you're going to start actually using your chest when you press. But since your chest is relatively weak compared to your other stronger muscles that usually take over, you're not going to be able to lift as heavy of a weight as you're used to. When this happens, don't let your ego take over and fall back into bad habits. Realize that now tension is being placed where it should be. As a result, you'll finally be able to feel and visually see massive chest growth despite using lighter weight. And it won't take long for you to return to what you were lifting before, but this time it'll be because your chest is getting bigger and stronger. So lighten the weight, take it slow and trust the process. I cannot stress how important this is, so I hope you're able to see the importance of not just doing the right exercises, but performing them in a way that maximizes your efforts. Working smarter and focusing on quality work rather than wasting time in the gym is what we preach at Built with Science. It's why within our science based programs we provide in depth tutorials for each and every exercise as well as muscle activation drills gift just like we did with the chest, but for all your muscle groups to gain access and start transforming your body. Today, just head over to builtwithscience.com and take my analysis quiz to discover what program is best for you and your specific body. Thanks so much for watching. You can check out this video to help grow your shoulders or check this posture routine out to help open up your chest like we talked about. Don't forget to subscribe and I'll see you next time.