Chest Building MASTERCLASS: The Best Exercises to Build A PERFECT Chest | Mind Pump 1940

Hello everyone. Welcome back to Mind Pump. I'm very excited to introduce our new series, the Mind Pump Master Class. In this series, we do a deep dive on specific topics and give you the key things that you need to know so that you can have success with your health and fitness goals. Our first master class focuses on how to build a strong and impressive chest. And who doesn't want one of those? Before we begin, a quick reminder that we have another channel, Mind Pump Clips, where we feature short segments from the show that you can watch and share. All right. Enjoy the show. Today, we're going to teach you everything you need to know to build a strong, well-developed chest. That's what we're talking about today in the podcast. Powerful chest. Chest master class. That's right. This will be a master class. So I think- Was this hard for any of you guys? Was this ever considered? This was an area for me that was really challenging. Oh, like an area to develop? Yeah. When I think of weak points and areas that I struggled with developing for a really long time, chest was up there with the- Yeah, it was for me. It was for me, for sure. And a lot of it had to do with, and we'll get to this, what was considered not just the best chest exercise, but the best exercise when we were growing up. Yeah. It was the gold standard. Yeah. It was bragging rights for the bench press. Yeah. And so I got more caught up in the weight I could lift versus how I was developing my body. So I think I developed patterns of compensation that prevented me from really developing the musculature of my chest at its fullest potential. But it's not, I don't know, would you guys say this is a common area of challenge for people? I do. Oh, I absolutely think it is. Really? Oh, when I think back to training clients and teaching- I know it's an area a lot of people want to develop, but is it like a- I would consider it one of the most- It's probably a split. I think it's one of the most challenging muscles to develop for most people because, and we'll get into this, the form and technique. And because we're so anteriorly driven, I think that you're not, your body naturally is not in a optimal position to utilize the chest properly for the best chest exercises that exist. Does that make sense? Yeah, it does. It does. I'm just trying to think back on how many clients I had that really found it challenging in comparison to other muscle groups. I feel like the back was harder because it was harder to connect to for people. But nonetheless- I mean, I don't disagree with that either. Because you just can't see it. You can't see it. And for the same reason, because we're so anterior driven and the rolled shoulders forward. So that's what I noticed is it was hard to get in the right position because they weren't retracted enough. They didn't feel enough in the chest. Yeah. Which is the same issue with the back, right? So I actually think that they go hand in hand. I think somebody who had a hard time also flexing and working their back typically also had a hard time developing the chest. Well, let's talk about it from a, I guess, a trainer anatomy standpoint. This is important to know, by the way, because when you understand the basic, we're not going to get stuck in the weeds here. But if you understand the basic anatomy of a muscle, it's much easier to connect to it when you exercise. Because you can imagine the action and what it's doing while you're trying to do the exercise. And this is something I would teach all my clients, not just, you know, trainers that work for me. It was all my clients. I teach them, here's some of the actions. Here's what the muscle is trying to do. That way you could connect to it better. So the chest is kind of interesting because some muscles have two points where they connect to the, I guess, the bone or ligaments or tendons, I should say, excuse me, in the body. So they're called the insertion and origin. We're not going to get stuck in the weeds here. But for the sake of this particular show, the chest attaches somewhere here in the humerus, in the upper arm, and then it kind of fans out and attaches all along the sternum here. Okay. So it's like this muscle that it attaches at one point, then it spreads out and has all these attachment points here in the sternum. And really the action of the chest is to what they would say is horizontal adduction of the humerus. So to put that in the layman's terms, it's taking your arm and bringing it to the center of your body in this kind of horizontal position. Now what's interesting about the chest is because it has all these different kind of attachment points along the sternum, it's going to bring the arm to the center of the body here. It could also bring it kind of up here and it can also kind of bring it down here. So if you look at the chest muscle itself, as those fibers contract, it can bring that upper arm in this position, this position, or this position. In other words, brings it to the center of the body, but it could bring it up towards the center of the body, down towards the center of the body, or just in the middle. This is why you have like incline presses and flat presses and decline presses and flies from all kinds of different angles. It's because of that, kind of that, all those attachments along the sternum. Would you say because of that, it is one of the few muscles that were angles really make a big difference? Yeah. There's multiple points, yeah, to consider. So that way it actually makes sense. Right. Because you see people manipulate angles, especially in the bodybuilding community, that's a big popular thing, is to manipulate a lot of different angles and positions. And this is the muscle that I think it makes the biggest difference because of the way it's attached. You can really shape, like your biceps, once they develop, they develop. And it's really hard to, it's almost impossible, I would say, to develop one part of the bicep over the other. And to my point, no matter where you position your elbow to do a bicep curl, it's relatively the same. Yes. As if you were to do that. Yes, you can change where the tension is placed. Which is valuable. Right. Which has got value in varying the exercise. But you're not actually going to develop the muscle differently based off that. You're not target developing it. Like with the chest, I could literally target develop my upper chest or the mid chest or the lower chest. More so than most other muscles because of these attachments. Which makes it very unique. Very unique, right? What's up, everybody? All right, today's episode is all about developing the chest. So here's the giveaway. We're going to give away the Chest Building Mod. This is a maps program just for developing the chest. You can win it for free. Here's how you win. Leave a comment below in the first 24 hours that we drop this episode. Subscribe to this channel and leave a great comment. Do all those things. If we like your comment, we'll notify you in the comment section that you won the chest mod for free. Now, everybody else, if you want that program, you can get it for 50% off. So it's just the chest workout. So literally, take your whole body workout, whatever you do, take out what you're normally doing with your chest and just plug this in and you'll get great results and it's all mapped out for you. It's pretty awesome. So it's 50% off because of this episode. You can find the chest mod at mapsfitnessproducts.com and then use the code chest for the 50% off discount. All right, here comes a show. And I think of it this way. It's like if your muscle fibers run like this, so they're straight across. When they squeeze and contract, they pull both ends together. So if they run diagonally, when they pull together, they pull in this direction. If they're diagonal in another direction, that's the direction they're pulling. So always think of the muscle fibers as these lines. Imagine like strings. And when they squeeze, they pull both ends of the strings together. That'll help you understand the function of the chest when you do exercises like presses and flies. What is the chest doing in this exercise versus shoulders and triceps or even biceps? What is the chest doing in this movement? And then can I focus on that part of the movement to feel the chest more? And the answer is yes. This makes a huge difference. I think that really helps because then people can connect to that action a lot more. Plus, even just that mind-muscle connection helps to enhance the recruitment process as well. So to slow down and really focus on what the work is and what it's responsible for will enhance the development of the muscle. Absolutely. So, go ahead. No, I was just... I mean, what we're talking about too highlights the opening point to developing this chest, and that's the form and technique is so important. And why I think that it's one of the more difficult ones for people to develop is because it requires that you're in an ideal situation as far as where the shoulder girdle needs to be placed in order to activate the chest. Because it's this big muscle and the best movements for it tend to be these big compound lifts that recruit other muscles. It's very easy for the other muscles to take over the movement. And what I remember training clients is it was super common to get somebody under a bench press and have them start pressing and then feeling it all in their arms and their shoulders more than chest. Or maybe they feel a tiny bit in the chest, but then primarily feeling it in the shoulders and the triceps. And that's because the position that they were in, they weren't activating the chest that much. And then because of that, I think this is another one of those exercises where form matters in everything that we do. But back to your point, like with the bicep curl, it's pretty easy to contract the bicep and not **** it up. I mean, you could never have lifted before and get somebody to kind of understand how to flex the bicep. The chest is not like that. The chest is not like something you could say to someone, flex your chest, and anybody could just flex their chest. Most people wouldn't be able to do that. And you know what's interesting too about this is when you understand the function of the chest, you also understand, or I should say, you can sift through muscle building myth and truth. So what I mean by that is, again, I don't want to get stuck in the weeds because the main action of the chest is that bringing the arm, the upper arm closer to the center line of the body, right? What they would call horizontal adduction of the humerus. But it also is slightly involved in pronating the humerus. In other words, it's this part of the upper arm. It actually, there's some action of the chest and rotating it down. It's a minor action, but why is this important? You'll see people doing things like cable flies and they'll say, oh, if you bring your pinkies together, you squeeze the chest better. Well, that's the opposite. It's the opposite. That's not true. What they're feeling is that they're pushing their arms into their chest and kind of squeezing it together manually. Not that the action of the chest is actually increased. The reality is if you were to rotate your hands at all, which doesn't really make that big of a difference, but if you were, it would be pronating them where you bring them down, not where the pinkies are facing in, and that'll increase the activation of the chest. If you didn't know the action of the chest though, you wouldn't know any better. I actually think that that actually is pretty valuable just because how valuable it is to really learn to connect to a muscle at the end ranges of motion, both at the full contraction and the fully stretched position. I do find that when you're doing a cable fly, that ability to rotate in helps you get that full squeeze there. I would like to teach someone that squeeze and then hold there for a few seconds to really connect to the chest and then open back up in the stretch position. Yeah. I know it's not as popular in the bodybuilding setting, but I'm always looking for those little elements of rotation just from a functional perspective of being able to keep the shoulder healthy and its ability to do those types of movements that you're going to experience more in your day-to-day life. I think that, and it sounds silly to sometimes consider rotating, but adding tension and load to that, if we're just super stationary all the time, what are we training our body to do only, exclusively? We're getting really strong in that movement, but we're not adding rotation with it, that becomes a problem. Informal technique is always important, but with the chest, it's exceptionally important because of the main exercises that people like to do and their risk of injury when there's, for lack of a better term, imbalances. This may be controversial in some spaces, but I think most coaches and trainers would agree that in order to have a well-developed, healthy, strong chest, so what I mean by that is it looks good, but also performs well, and you're free of common injuries that come from heavy chest training, you need to have a strong back. You have to have a strong back to stabilize your upper body, especially the shoulder girdle when you're doing heavy presses, because when you're pressing, you're involving lots of different moving parts, including the shoulder blade, including the upper arm and the humerus. People can shrug when they press, or they can drop one shoulder, bring the other one, or they can roll the shoulders forward, which is very common. You need to have a strong anchor to stabilize your upper back so that you can get stronger, because the bench press is one of those exercises that you can get pretty strong. You can add a significant amount of load. It's also simultaneously probably responsible for, I'd say, a good portion of the injuries that you see in the gym, mainly because it's popular, people want to get strong at it, and they don't understand the relationship between shoulder mobility, strong back, and a well-developed chest. I don't think it's just having a strong back, upper back, but also a balanced strong upper back, because one of the things that challenged me for many years, and for the YouTube channel, they'll be able to visually see this, I actually had one side more developed than the other, and I had this kind of a rolled forward shoulder, just slightly on one side more than the other, and it was that inability in my upper back to retract and stay squeezed and depressed the entire time through the movement, and so what would naturally happen is I would press, and that weaker side would naturally kind of roll and come forward, and just that little bit of action every time I did a bench press was enough to take it out of the chest, shift it over into the shoulders and the arms, yet the other side was working, like it was supposed to, and so I'd have this asymmetry, I'd have this imbalance that was happening visually, and I can remember seeing it, I remember being so frustrated, not being able to figure it out for so many years, and so it's so important to your point, Sal, is not only to have this developed strong back, but then an imbalanced strong back, to where you have the ability to retract and depress those shoulders. Very common to see that when somebody's not particularly anchoring themselves, and you'll see one arm kind of coming up before the other, and then they're trying to catch up, and you see this sort of seesaw action, very, very common, and to be able to get that corrected and really focus on anchoring properly and getting your back nice and stabilized is going to be massively beneficial. This is one of my favorite parts of when we develop MAPS Prime, because there's a lot of exercises that I can kind of just get right into and start moving, and my body feels pretty good. To this day, I have to prime before I do chest. I always have to prime that upper back to get a little bit of a pump back there, so I will get in that anchored position that you're talking about, Justin. Otherwise, I naturally will kind of roll around, and I'll feel a little instability in the shoulder. So, if you've ever done a press, or maybe you don't like bench press because you always feel this little bit of kind of like pain in your shoulder or hear clicking or whatever like that, a lot of times it's that shoulder kind of floating around, and it's not stable. It's not activated. So, priming the shoulders and priming the upper back before you go into these movements, I think you're so crucial to developing a really big chest, because if you're constantly battling the rolling of the shoulders forward or this clicking in your shoulder, and that's bothering you all the time, it's really tough to develop a chest. You're limited by stacking weight to how anchored you are, and that's just like once you start learning that concept with a lot of these compound lifts, which we'll get into like the most beneficial exercises. Obviously, bench is one of the most beneficial exercises for chest, and to be able to keep stacking weight, you're limited by the ability to be able to keep your body completely rigid. So, any kind of movement is going to shift the weight, and then you're going to leak performance immediately. Well, yeah, and also, there are small muscles that are considered stabilizers of the upper arm or the shoulder that if you get really strong at upper body, like big compound lifts, and you neglect strengthening these stabilizers, you start to develop this imbalance between stabilization and what's known as prime movers. So, I can develop like super strong shoulders and triceps and chest, but then I have these muscles like the infraspinatus and the supraspinatus and the serratus to some extent and other muscles that help stabilize the shoulder blade and the shoulder that because those prime movers get so strong, those stabilizers, they fall behind. And now, I've got these really powerful prime movers and these stabilizers that can't keep up, and this is why people start to notice rotator cuff pain, shoulder pain. The common areas are in the back of the shoulder here, up here at the attachment of the collarbone, you know, where the collarbone kind of meets the shoulder, and in the front of the shoulder, which is, believe it or not, bicep tendon inflammation. So, a lot of times people feel pain in the front of their shoulder, it's actually inflammation of the bicep tendon, and it has to do with just not being able to press with balance, not being able to press with good stability. So, it's really important to have really healthy, strong stabilizers when you're building and developing your chest, because again, what could happen is you can get a really strong bench press, and when your technique is off by a half a degree, those stabilizers can't support the weight that you're moving, and then you're like, oh, my shoulder hurts, and what's going on? I can't bench anymore. And how many people, have you guys known that are like, yeah, I don't bench anymore, because it hurts my shoulder. It hurts my shoulder. Hurts my shoulder. And Justin's point, I mean, this was a big epiphany for me, was putting the effort and time into really priming the upper back and the shoulders, because I saw my bench press rapidly jump up. I did not realize how much performance was leaking, because I wasn't stable. I wasn't anchored down. And again, I come from, again, the bodybuilding type of training, and I'm not thinking like a powerlifter originally. I'm not thinking like, oh, I need to anchor down and get that good arch and really get all. That's not how I bench press. I mean, I would bench press sometimes. It was terrible. I was in this relaxed position where I'm just trying to feel the chest, and because of that, it really limited how much I could stack weight on it. When I started to really prime the shoulders, prime the upper back, learn to anchor down, then I quickly saw my bench press start to jump up. Yeah, so think of it this way, right? Because we're talking about the bench press, and we'll get to the best exercises, but obviously, the bench press comes up as one of the top chest exercises. Think of the motion of the bench press. I'm pushing the bar up. Okay, yes, that's exactly what you're doing. However, think of the action of like we talked about earlier in that movement. It's bringing my upper arm closer to the center of my body, so that's the action of the chest as I'm pressing. Now, along with the chest, you have the shoulders that are stabilizing, also helping bring the arm to center of body, but also helping bring the arm up in this direction, so the closer your elbows are to your body, the more shoulders are somewhat involved, and then you have the triceps that extend the arm, so all of them are working in unison. Now, imagine when you're pressing, can I just focus on the motion or the action of the chest to feel the chest more versus can I make it more of a tricep movement, more of a shoulder movement, all while being very stable and secure in my pressing? When you can do this, you can make the bench press a chest exercise. If you can't, you're basically rolling the dice, and what'll end up happening is whatever your body feels is the strongest combination of muscles and activation is what will happen, and then you'll develop that. Which by proxy, you might get the systemic effect if you're just continuously loading weight and your whole body's involved, but to be more specific and really hone in on developing the chest to be able to get to that point where you can get that kind of activity and response out of your chest while you're going through that movement, it's going to send you even further. That's such a good point, Justin, because I think for years, I actually got obviously some of the benefits from bench pressing and doing these chest exercises. Yeah, you can't take it out completely. Right, it's involved in it, but I didn't see the rapid growth until I really learned to connect and control the weight with my chest, and that includes even, and I don't know if we even put this in the bullet points, but another part of really developing, I think it falls in the form technique conversation, was learning to control the weight on the way down with the chest. So it's one of those exercises that a lot of people will just let fall down, or you see guys bounce it off their chest and use momentum, is learning how to lower the weight slow and controlled and resist the weight with your chest on the way down was massive for me. That's the key to connecting to any muscle. You want to focus on squeezing the muscle to feel it, but when you really have connected to a muscle is when you can feel it on the negative portion of a rep. Can I feel my lats as I lower in a pull-up? Can I feel my glutes as I lower into a squat, right? Can I feel my chest as I lower the bar in a bench press? When you can get to that point, now you can connect to all the other motions of the chest, because that's the most hard, that's kind of the hardest. Now you have real control. That's right. Let's talk about rep ranges, right? What are the best rep ranges for chest? Well, here's a deal with rep ranges for pretty much every muscle, and this includes the chest. They all build muscle, and I say all, but I mean all within reason. So within reason being anything under 25 or 30 reps is going to build muscle. Now, why do I say under 25 or 30 reps? At some point, it becomes a stamina and endurance exercise and less of a muscle building type exercise. If the reps get way too high, it starts to become cardio with weights, and the studies will show that it's around, you know, 30 to 25 reps is probably the upper limit of where you're going to get these muscle building benefits. Now, what this means is all the rep ranges under that build muscle. Now, you will find studies that show that in head-to-head comparison in a eight-week study that the 8 to 12 rep range is going to build the most muscle, and now most is a small margin, by the way. It's not like it's double the muscle or whatever, but a tiny bit more. The problem with that study or those studies is that people take it to heart, and then they avoid training out of that rep range. It's like, well, 8 to 12 always builds the most muscle, so I'm always going to train in the 8 to 12, and what happens is the body gets pretty good at adapting to whatever you're doing, and then it stops responding. So then 8 to 12 goes from being this great rep range to now not really working well for you, and one of the best things you could do is go into the 4 to 5 rep range or the 15 to 20 rep range. So the best rep range for building chest really are all of them. They all work very well. I think the key is to stay in a rep range for, I don't know, three to six weeks and then move out of it. I don't know how you guys feel about it. Well, now, that being said, do you feel that there are certain muscles, though, that lend themselves better to singles, doubles, and triples? I feel like the bench press is one of the exercises that I can get under there and do a single, double, or triple and still reap major benefits versus a bicep curl. I'm not going to get a lot of benefits from doing a super heavy single or double bicep curl. Agreed, and I don't think it's muscle as much as it's exercises. There's just some exercises that are really beneficial in the low rep ranges more so than other exercises. Compound lifts tend to be those. So if you're going to mess with the low rep ranges, you probably shouldn't mess with them with cable flys. Cable flys for three reps, I mean, yeah, you could hit your chest, but you're not going to get tremendous bend. Cable flys are better with the higher rep ranges. Bench presses, incline presses, heavy dips, those can be pretty awesome in those low rep ranges. So that's a good point that you made. Right, and because of that, when you guys are cycling through reps, do you tend to come back to those heavy one to five rep ranges more often than you would, say, for other muscles in the body? Yeah, well, other exercises, for sure. Like I almost never, I don't know, have you guys ever done low reps for flys? No. Yeah, I mean, I think the lowest I've ever gone is like five or six. Well, I think chest, back, and legs, I think are three. Because they're huge muscles. Yeah, they're big muscles, and there's great compound lifts for each of those. And so those are the ones I find I will revisit or I'll ever even train a single, double, or a triple, and I feel like I reap good benefits from it. So also that being said, I also see tremendous benefits in pushing the 20 reps, which I don't do a lot with a lot of other muscle groups or exercises. So I really like varying that. Like if I find myself that I've been doing a lot of heavy lifting on chest in the one to five rep range, and it's like, oh man, when was the last time I put some real lightweight on and did 20 reps? And I see huge benefits from going all the way up there. But of course, the same rules apply that I think we always talk about on the show, which is no matter what rep range you are currently doing, moving out of that rep range is the most ideal for you for continuing to build muscle. Because the body will eventually adapt to whatever rep range that you tend to gravitate towards. Well, and to kind of add on to the rep range thing and kind of shoe in the tempo to your earlier point about focusing on the negative, I would say that in the 10 to 12 rep range would be more ideal for doing a slower tempo and really controlling that down versus like the real benefit of those one to five rep is to just really power and generate as much force as possible and not be quite as concerned with the negative. Yeah, there's a different feel. So if we were going to be prescriptive, since this is like a masterclass, if we're going to be prescriptive for somebody and we are going to utilize everything from one to say 20 reps, how would you guys kind of phase that over the course of let's say three months or so? I would say the lower reps under six tend to be better with the presses and compound lifts. And the isolation exercises, and we'll get to those things like flies on all the variations, tend to be better in the higher rep ranges. And just like our MAPS programs, I would go three, four, five weeks in a particular rep range and then move into a different rep range. And I'd go from as low as doing one or two reps to going as high as 20 to 25 reps. But I wouldn't do one or two reps with like flies, for example, because those exercises, they don't work really well. Okay, so I'm going to break down what you just said then. So in the sets, we're going to work in the say one to five set range for a period of three to five weeks, you would say. So three on low end is the, I would stay in that phase of training, okay, for three to five weeks. So three weeks on the low end, five weeks on the top, and then I would move out of that rep range. So let's say the first rep range, I'm going to work one to five rep range, that's going to be three to five weeks. After those three to five weeks are up, now I'm going to move into say what, six to 10? Or eight to 12. Yeah, six to 10, eight to 12, somewhere in that rep range. Again, I'm going to hang around there for three to five weeks. And then after that, I'm going to move into like 15 to 20 rep range for same thing, three to five weeks. A little more muscle endurance. And now, during that entire time, are there certain movements that are going to stay a staple through the entire thing? And are there certain ones that you're going to interchange in and out? I mean, honestly, yes. But you could break down chest exercises to two general categories, presses and flies, okay? So pretty much every chest exercise could be somewhat shoehorned into one of those two categories, presses and flies. I think some kind of a horizontal press, whether it's an incline or a flat bench, probably should be present in most of your chest training pretty much for the rest of your life because it's such a fundamental- It's hard not to include it. I mean, that's really like the biggest bang for your buck. Yeah. And it's also just a fundamental movement. Like that pressing away from your body is something, it's a skill you don't want to lose. So let's break that down. So incline, flat bench, dip are your three big press compound movements. Yep. And that's going to be barbell, dumbbell, machine, but general movements. Right, right. Okay. And then of those three, would they be present in all three of those phases that we talked about? So in those three phases, those three movements are going to stay consistent. I might manipulate phase one, it's all barbell complexes. And then the second phase, maybe we go all dumbbell. I would 100% agree with that. At the very least, two of them. At the very least, at least two of them always be present. You could take one out, but I think definitely two of them should probably always be present. Yeah. And I think volume kind of makes more sense as you go along and you're adding more reps to then add more accessory work in combination with that for phase three. Now flies, I think are great. I think they're more valuable with somebody who has a tough time connecting to the chest. I can get somebody to feel their chest working easier with a cable fly than I can with a bench press. And so I like to use flies as a way to kind of prime or teach someone, well, this is what it feels like to work your chest. Now, when you become advanced, flies are a great way to add volume without just beating yourself up. Three sets of a heavy press is going to just hammer your body more than three sets of flies. So towards the end of a workout, when you can add more volume, but you've already done your four sets of presses, well now you can add some flies and you'll hit the right amount of volume. And there's also common, not to get stuck in the weeds, but there's also muscle combinations with chest. Flies connects the biceps to the chest, whereas presses connect the triceps to the chest. Both are somewhat important in real life. You're going to use the chest to push things away. And sometimes you use the chest to grab things and hold things. And so you need those combinations to work well as well. So I don't think you should ever avoid either one. Do you guys think that based off the level of experience of a client, do you decide differently like what exercise maybe you would start? For example, I think I did this video a long time ago on YouTube. So maybe Andrew could throw it up there where again, clients that had struggled with connecting to their chest. If you really struggle with connecting to the chest, I've done a good job of priming you really quick. I may not move you right into a bench press right away where I would do that. Say I'm training one of you guys. I'm training one of you guys. We're primed. We're ready to go. I'm going to the big lift right away where I can load it the most and get after it. Now, if I'm training someone that is a beginner who really struggles to fill that chest, we've primed to help them out. I might do something like that foam roll exercise where you lay the foam roll down your spine. I hope I have this YouTube video. I'm pretty sure I do where I have that client. Now, why I like that is the shoulder blades drop over the foam roll and so gravity puts them in a more optimal position. Then we know that in a chest fly, it's easier to force the stress in the chest versus in a compound lift. So opening them up in that and then doing a chest fly is like their first exercise to really get them. To feel the chest. As soon as you can feel a lot. Right. Yeah. And also, you know, like varying degrees of, you know, push-ups, modified push-ups like, you know, being, you know, where you're kind of leaning over rather than being flat on the ground. That's when I would use a Smith machine quite a bit actually is I'd use the bar as a grip. Yeah. Same. Well, yeah. And then taking them from that position like doing that fly to then, you know, you know, prepare them for more of a press. We go to like the incline before we go to the flat and that's just for that same reason of using gravity to come. I love that tip, Justin. I was like, one of those presses more technical. It's a harder exercise to actually do. It is. And I, and I don't think that's a natural thing for anyone to do. In fact, I didn't piece that together as a coach and trainer till like probably a decade later. That's only because we put so much value on the bench press that we think that that's the one that you start with. But I think the incline is, it's way less technical. It's easier for people to do right. Yeah. So, so people understand the, what we're trying to explain is when you teach somebody how to activate and work the chest, we, we talked earlier about form and technique that it's important that we learn to take our shoulders and they retracted and depressed position. So if you think about when you're laying flat on a bench, that doesn't naturally kind of happen where you roll back and down. Whereas if you're on an incline bench, the gravity is kind of is dropping those shoulders back into that perfect position. And again, that was something I just pieced together over trial and error with clients teaching them. I started to realize, oh wow, that naturally puts them in that position when I put them on incline. So I have a better time teaching them how to activate chest. So if you are a relatively new lifter or you're somebody listening and you have a hard time feeling in your chest, great thing, way to start your workout would be that foam roll fly to kind of activate it real light, just getting the control and getting the position. Then going to like an incline press, I think is, I'll say something controversial here. I think the incline press is superior for many different reasons. It's superior for bodybuilding reasons because it develops a more aesthetic quote unquote aesthetic chest because it develops the upper chest. So you develop this nicer looking chest. So that's number one, it's easier to do right for the reasons that you said. In fact, there are oftentimes you'd have clients that you would not lay flat on their back because they couldn't get in the position or they had high blood pressure or they didn't have the shoulder stability. So I would never put them on the back, but I would put them on an incline all day long. And then I'd even make the argument for functionality. When you're pushing things away from yourself in real life, it's almost always in that incline kind of position because you're pushing forward. So I would argue it's somewhat of a superior exercise. Now I'm not going to say that the bench press isn't great. The value of the bench press, you can load the hell out of it. You can add way more weight to a bench press than you could on an incline, but it's way more technical. You'd be surprised though, obviously if you listened to this podcast long enough, you've heard me talk about this before, but I think one of the biggest moments or periods of time in my lifting career as far as developing my physique was my chest and was from the effort towards the incline bench press. And a lot of that, at least my experience was, most people neglected it because it's harder, because I can't lift as much weight. And I fall in that category of skinny guys that wanted to muscle, wanted to feel strong in the gym. And I could throw on an extra 50 plus pounds on a flat bench than I could on incline. Therefore, they were similar enough to me as a kid. I'm just going to keep doing this flat bench. And all I did was continue to develop that to where there was this massive discrepancy. I mean, I remember vividly, there was a time when I could flat bench 275 and like 135 incline was like hard. I mean, there was that much discrepancy between my incline and my flat because I neglected it so much. And then I went on this kick where I was like, okay, I'm going to try and catch my incline bench up to my flat bench. And I actually did, I got to a point when I could do 315 on incline, 315 on flat bench. And that was the best I had ever felt as far as the development of my chest. And so I do think there's some secret sauce there for the average listener. Now, if you're somebody who does an equal amount of incline as you do flat, which there's not too many people I know like that, but if you are, then maybe this tip isn't for you. And if you're a powerlifter and you compete in a specific, you know, in the bench press, you got to do a lot of bench press. But everybody else, general pop, I agree with you, Sal. I did more incline when my clients needed a bench, a hundred percent. The bench is just so technical. It's a very technical movement in comparison to the incline and the incline gives you lots and lots of phenomenal benefits. So if I had to pick one over the other for the average person, it was always incline. So let's talk about a total set, Sal, in a week. What does the research say for optimal? Because this was an area too, that I didn't understand. There's a huge range. I actually, I think early, early on, I made the mistake of not enough. And then middle career, I made the mistake of overdoing it. And there really is a sweet spot. Studies, studies, it's a range. They go from nine to like 18 sets per week for a muscle group. So that's a huge range. So what is it? What are we saying here? Well, it could be too extreme in either direction. And there's also a huge dose dependent. Yeah. And a huge individual variance, depending on your recovery ability, your experience, how much weight you're lifting. Like if you're really strong, lifting more weight, then you probably need less sets than if you're not as strong just because the total load. So it really depends. But I think what's more important than that is kind of figuring out how often you should work the chest. And, you know, studies will show anywhere between two to four times a week. I like being right in the middle, about three. I think it's the perfect amount for splitting up your total sets for the week. So you're not like so fatigued at the end of your workout that now becomes an endurance workout. I also think it's the perfect amount of time to practice this technique of certain exercises. Like if you want to get good at the bench press, we just talked about that. You'll get good at it faster practicing three sets, three days a week than you will doing nine sets on one day a week. So even though it's a total same amount of sets, practicing three times a week at three sets, you'll get better at it faster. I'm telling your body it's a priority by, you know, repeating it constantly throughout the week. Yep. And just getting better at the technique of exercises gives you better results. It just does. So if you want to get good at exercises, you're better off practicing them frequently. So you could take your volume and break it up through multiple workouts. I like three times. I like that too. And I made the mistake of when I increased my frequency, I was also keeping my, my total chest volume the same as per workout. In other words, you didn't control for, yeah, I was always, so I knew that the 12 to 15 sets was kind of ideal per muscle group. And I'm back when I used to do body part splits, I would hammer my chest at least 15, 15 sets, sometimes as high as 20. And then I remember understanding the importance of frequency and practice. And so I did the same thing I did. So, so then all I did was go from, you know, 12 to 15 sets in one workout for the week to doing that twice. And then doing that eventually three times. And I think I just, I stalled a lot of my progress because my body was constantly just trying to recover. It was constantly hammered. And I really wasn't, I wasn't scaling up and getting better at these lifts. Not to mention, I would say half of those sets were garbage sets, meaning I'd already fatigued the muscle so much in the front half of the workout that the back half were all these bullshit, you know, you're balancing exercises and machines and like just silly stuff. You're not even sending a muscle building signal, you're just sending more damage. Or just pumping fluid. Really what I was doing was just pumping blood into the muscle. And I think it was messing with my head thinking that, oh, because it feels all pumped up that I'm doing a lot of work when in reality, most of the work was done in the first five sets doing the big compound lift and then the rest of the stuff was just kind of like whatever. Now with exercises, there's really, if you want to break it, because we can go through all the different chest exercises and there's a million and then, you know, there's five variations of each one, but really you could break it down into kind of the following. And this will make it easy for people to understand. You could break it down by angle. Am I, am I working in this upper angle, this mid angle or this lower angle? So upper, mid, lower chest. So that's one category. And then there's another category of tension. Where's the greatest amount of tension with this exercise? Is it out here where I'm stretching the chest or is it in here where I'm squeezing the chest? That's more important for your fly variations. So now that you know all this, what you could do is you could piece together an exercise, a workout, I should say for the week, you know, all your three workouts or whatever, where you're kind of hitting all of them. So, okay, Monday I'm doing chest and I heard on mind pump that I could go in this upper angle, mid angle, lower angle. So let me pick an upper angle exercise to start with. And then I heard on mind pump tension with flies. And I know that with a dumbbell fly, cause it's freeway, most of the weight, the tension is at the bottom, right? That's where gravity is the strongest. So it's going to be a stretch tension exercise. So that's Monday pushing upward tension at the stretch. Okay. Now Wednesday comes along. Well, I already did pushing upward tension at the stretch. Why don't I do something where I'm pressing in the mid part of my chest? So now it's maybe a flat bench and oh, I already did tension in the stretch position with a dumbbell fly. What if I did a tension where I can really focus on the squeeze? Well, now I can pick bands or cables, right? Because both of those give me the most tension in that squeeze part. And then you get to Friday and now you can see what I'm doing. So this is, and what I'm giving you guys right now, uh, who are watching, listening to this are some like value. These are some of the most valuable nuggets when it comes to workout programming. Now, workout programming can be very complex, but what I'm giving you are the most important things to consider when you're putting together your chest workout. Am I pressing or flying upward towards the middle or down? And then where's most of the tension at the stretch or at the squeeze? And once you balance all that out and your workout, you've developed a really nice, well-developed chest workout. These are all the things that we consider when we write programs and we get asked more, right? Oh, there's a ton more, but that's why it's a, this is one of many things that we take into consideration. It's not like we're just throwing exercises in a day. It's like thinking about all these, all these different movements and how, and what you're trying to develop. Totally. Totally. So these are things to consider. And once you, when you, when you throw these different elements into your workout, along with understanding the action of the chest, now it's not a mystery because one of the big challenges with developing any muscle, especially a chest is watching yourself get stronger at exercises, but yet not develop the, what you think is the, is the muscle that you're targeting. That was very frustrating for me to watch my bench press numbers go up and my chest isn't really developing. I added 30 pounds to my bench press. I didn't see that much more development in my chest. What's going on? Well, I was lacking understanding of some of these particular components. And once you get this, now when you do your presses, now when you do your flies, imagine the action of the chest. Now you can make the exercise much more chest focused and also look at your entire workout. Where's the tension? What direction am I, am I pressing? Boom, piece it together. Now you've got yourself a phenomenal chest workout. So look, for those of you that, um, are like, okay, this all makes sense. Great information. But, uh, you know, having it all planned out, written out, that's going to be kind of challenging for me. Here's what we did. We put together a chest building mod. It's a maps chest program. Literally it's just for chest. So it's a maps program with all the stuff we talked about, reps, sets, the right exercises, the right feel, the tempo, like all that stuff is in the mod, all written out for you, all planned out for you. You don't have to worry about doing anything other than just following what we put in this mod. So you can literally take your chest workout out of your total workout and plug in this mod and you'll get great results. Now this mod is normally $47, but because we're doing this episode, you can get it for 50% off. So we've got full chest workout, all phase and everything for 50% off the normal price. If you're interested, go to mapsfitnessproducts.com, find the chest mod, and then use the code chest. So C-H-E-S-T for 50% off. This one's really important and that is to phase your training. If somebody trains for a full year doing a bench press and they're always aiming for five reps, if you compared that person to a person who did bench press where they did three or four weeks of five reps, but then they did three or four weeks of 12 reps, and then three or four weeks of, let's say, 15 to 20 reps, and then they'll throw on some supersets. At the end of that year, you're going to see more consistent progress from the person who's moving in and out, and less injury. That's another thing. You'll see less injury as well.