In this post, I will explain how to train your chest in the gym properly.

Anatomy

To know how to train the muscle, you need to have a basic understanding of the anatomy of the tissue. Your chest, also called your pectoralis muscles (‘pecs’), is divided into two big muscles; the pectoralis major and the pectoralis minor. See the two pictures below. The pec minor is underneath the pec major, so you cannot see it. The Pectoralis minor adds a lot of definition to the thickness of your chest muscle. So it is essential to train it. You cannot train the two big pec muscles separately. However, some exercises train the one more than the other.

Exercises

How I look at training your chest, divide your exercises into two groups: Press exercises, and Fly exercises. The press exercises can be ordered in three subsections: Decline, flat, and incline.

• Decline press exercises: The decline bench position for any chest exercise focuses mostly on the lower part of your chest.
• Flat press exercises: The flat bench position for any chest exercise focuses mostly on the middle part/center of your chest.
• Incline press exercises: The incline bench position for any chest exercise focuses mostly on the upper part of your chest, going more upward, the higher the incline angle. A good tip is to vary in this incline angle, to get the most definition in your chest muscles.
• Fly exercises: Fly exercises actually train a lot of different muscles. However, what distinguishes them from the above is that they are really successful in training the pecs from a different angle. No chest workout is complete without having at least one fly exercise in there. Again, you can do fly exercises also in three stances; decline, flat, and incline.

Training methods

Chest exercises can be divided into four methods of training them or varying them.

1. Dumbbells
2. Barbells
3. Cables
4. Bodyweight

Variation

The most important thing, with any muscle group, is that you vary in the exercises you use. So if you do a chest press with the barbell one day, make sure that the other chest day you change it with a dumbbell chest press. Same for all the angles. Make sure you hit every angle of your chest and that you vary in the method/weights you use. Cables can be used to train the chest as well. Think of Chest Cable Fly’s. You can even put a bench under a cable machine and do seated cable fly’s. For bodyweight exercises, think of push-ups, dips, chest-dips (the same as a normal dip, but then you lean more forward, to activate more pec muscles, one of which is the pectoralis minor).

Conclusion

I hope this article helped you with understanding how you should train your ‘pecs’ properly. It is one of the muscle groups that is trained most readily, but you can overlook some important things quickly. After reading this, I hope you can adjust/start your training schedule with a more informed look, and get better results!

Good luck!