To build bigger pecs is a primary goal for any bodybuilder. The fact is most bodybuilders don’t follow the most productive efficient chest training routine, thus, never get bigger chest muscles.
Just like any other muscle building technique, there is a smart way to build chest muscles, and an inefficient, unproductive way. The sad thing is most bodybuilders incorporate the wrong way, and only receive a small portion of the muscle building benefit they really could enjoy.
Strength training exercises for the chest to build massive muscle is not that complicated. All that is needed is the proper stimulus coupled with enough muscle building rest, and recovery to adequately develop. This is the main secret to building any body part. Progressive overload through progressive exercise intensity followed by the precise amount of rest is the secret to build chest muscles.
So what exactly is the easy way to build bigger pecs?
First off, you must fully understand intensity of exercise. Intensity is the degree of load, or resistance place upon a particular muscle. The more muscle fibers called upon to contract, the greater the intensity. In order to build chest muscles, intensity needs to be progressive in nature. An example is attempting to beat the number of reps with each subsequent chest training workout. A couple of other ways to increase the intensity is by increasing the workout weight, or decreasing the rest between sets.
Your main objective, as a bodybuilder, is to overload your desired muscle group. It is the overload, and rest that brings about bigger pecs. The quicker you understand this concept, the sooner you will understand how to build pecs.
One of my favorite techniques to build bigger pecs is the use of the pre-exhaustion principle. The objective of the pre-exhaustion chest building method is to first isolate, and train the target muscle to fatigue, and immediately perform a multi-jointed exercise immediately after. Thus, the targeted muscle is already pre-fatigued before we introduce the multi-jointed exercise. This prevents the secondary muscles from tiring out before the main target muscle is completely stimulated.
An example would be when weight training chest to do flyes to fatigue first followed by bench press, or dips. This technique will guarantee your pecs are absolutely stimulated to the max prior to the failure of the secondary movers (shoulders, and triceps).
The other side of the equation to getting bigger pecs, the easy way, is to get the optimal amount of rest between chest training workouts to facilitate pectoralis muscle growth.
To do this make sure you carefully track your weights, and reps for each workout. When your strength plateaus or decreases you will need to take more days off between chest training sessions. If your strength continues to increase with each pec building workout, you have hit the sweat spot on rest between chest training sessions. Keep it the same.
A general rule of thumb is most bodybuilders attempting to train the chest grossly over-train. Focus on more rest days between workouts. It is not uncommon to train chest once every 8-9 days depending upon your numbers.
Building bigger pecs doesn’t have to be difficult, or take a long time if you understand the principles shared in this article.