June 20, 2010
The Right Pectoral Exercises Can Make The Difference
By choosing the right pectoral exercises, you can throw together some extremely effective pectoral workouts that will ultimately force your chest to explode. If your goal is to build a big muscular chest, then the upper body exercises that you choose are vital to the process. If you piece together your chest workout with exercises that don’t fit certain criteria, then you really won’t be able to build your chest up quickly. In this article, I’m going to uncover the specific criteria that your chest exercises need to meet in order for you to stimulate some serious upper body growth, as well as list a few of my favorite pectoral building exercises.
Lets get on to one of the first things that I like to teach people about building their chest muscles up. In order to stimulate upper body muscle growth, you absolutely need to perform muscle building exercises that meet certain conditions. First, the chest exercises that you choose, need to allow you to actually target your pectoral muscles. If you choose upper body exercises that place most of the emphasis on your shoulders, then your shoulders will be doing most of the work and in turn achieving the benefits of doing that work (you’ll stimulate muscle growth in your shoulders instead of chest growth). So you want to focus on movements that specifically target your chest muscles. It’s ok if the chest exercises also incorporate your shoulders or triceps, but the main muscle group in the movement should definitely be your pectoral muscles.
The next piece of criteria that the pectoral exercises that you choose for your upper body workouts need to meet is that each of the exercise that you select need to allow you to move a fairly heavy amount of weight. Lifting incrementally heavier weights over a full range of motion is precisely how you stimulate muscle growth, so it only makes sense that if you’re wanting to add size to your upper body muscles, then you need to be training with heavy weights.
The next piece of criteria is something that most people completely overlook. You’ve got to actually enjoy performing the pec exercises that you pick! If you hate the exercises that you put into your upper body workouts, you’re not going to be able to hit your upper body as hard as you’d be able to if you really enjoyed performing the upper body exercise in the first place, so make sure to stick with a few of the chest exercises that you actually enjoy. Sometimes you’ve got no choice but to perform a few chest exercises that you don’t really like, but try not to build your pectoral workouts around these pectoral exercises, instead find a few that you really like and slip them into the workout.
Listed below are a few of my favorite upper body exercises ( in no particular order). After looking over this list of exercises, I can honestly say that approximately 95% of all of my pectoral workouts are composed of these highly effective pectoral exercises. Once in a long while, I’ll work in a few sets of cable crossovers, but that really about it.
The Best Pectoral Exercises
- DB Bench Press
- Bench Press
- Incline Press
- DB Incline Press
- Push Up
- Chest Dips
- Dumbbell Flyes
- Decline Bench Press
- DB Decline Bench Press
If you’re one of the hundreds of guys out there who really wants to build a bigger, more muscular chest, then make sure that your pec workouts are composed of the most effective pectoral exercises! The majority of your chest workouts should be created around the short list of chest exercises listed above. If you follow no other advice than to simply make sure that your upper body workouts are designed with exercises that fit the criteria outlined in this article, you’ll begin to build a bigger chest in no time at all.
Filed under E21 Fitness News, muscle building exercises, Pectoral Exercises by Nick Andrade

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