The PERFECT Chest Workout (Sets and Reps Included)

The perfect chest workout should consist of exercises for your upper chest, middle chest and lower chest. That said, even that doesn’t make the chest workout complete. In order to round out your pecs with a well rounded workout you need to fill in the gaps of what is lacking on those popular chest exercises. That is what we do in this video.

If you look at the four main exercises that people do in their chest workouts you will see incline bench press, barbell bench press, dips and pushups. Take a close look into each of these classic movements and you will see one thing in common. That is, each of these exercises is lacking a full adduction of the shoulder within the exercise.

This is a problem when it comes to developing a complete chest. Just because you are going through a full range of motion on the exercises that you are doing it does not mean that you are taking a muscle through its full range of motion. For instance, all chest exercises are performed by changing the angle of the arm at the shoulder. Because the shoulder is a three dimensional ball and socket joint, you have a great deal of motion available to you on your chest exercises.

That said, with the hands being fixed on a barbell, dip station or the floor through most of the common chest exercises you are not able to take your shoulder through the full horizontal adduction that it is capable of going through. Due to this, there is limited activation of the pecs since they are built to take the arm fully across the body, over midline into a more complete adduction.

The solution to this problem is to not forego the popular mass building chest exercises but add to them, in drop set fashion. Here is how to construct the perfect chest workout with that in mind.

Barbell Bench Press – 4 sets of 6,8,10,12 reps
Immediately into a horizontal chest cable or band crossover for 15 reps

Incline DB Bench Press – 4 sets of 6,8,10,12 reps
Immediately into a low to high cable or band crossover for 15 reps

Weighted Dips – 4 sets of 6,8,10,12 reps
Immediately into a high to low cable or band crossover for 15 reps

Weighted Pushups – 3 sets to Failure
Immediately into a banded crossover pushup for 15 reps with band on each arm

When you put this together in drop set format as I’m suggesting here, you not only now hit the chest through it’s full range of motion but you hit every area of the chest as well. The drop down allows for the lesser intense exercise to be more taxing since it was just preceded by a more difficult compound lift.

This is just one example of how to apply science to your chest workouts. If you want to train like an athlete you want to put science back in every workout you do. You can do that with the ATHLEAN-X Training Programs available at http://athleanx.com and get started right away on building a ripped, muscular, athletic body.