MY TOTAL APPROACH TO CHEST TRAINING BY SHAWN RAY, IFBB pro bodybuilder, with BILL DOBBINS Develop a great pair of pecs by attacking them from all possible angles with all possible equipment At just about every seminar I do, beginning bodybuilders ask me how I train this or that bodypart. In response, I like to point out that the question they should be asking is what kind of training they ought to be doing, because most of them won’t get any benefit fr0m trying to follow my programme exactly. I’ve been training a long time, I already have a fully developed physique and my workout goals are not the same as somebody just starting out or at an intermediate stage of their development. You have to have a turkey before you can carve it. You have to have mass before you can shape it. You can’t develop muscle quality until you’ve developed muscle. Technique is always important in training, but when you’re a beginner, or even intermediate, the idea is to do the basic exercises, work hard, learn to train with maximum intensity and give your body a chance to respond and grow. On the other hand, I don’t much believe in “beginner training”. I’m very much an advocate of simple, basic training no matter who you are. You want to develop legs, you do squats; for back, some kind of row; for chest, presses and flyes. It takes time to develop the strength to handle heavy weights, but you only grow by using the heaviest weights you’re capable of for the kind of sets you’re doing. I use machines as well, and they certainly have value, but you’ll never develop basic muscle structure relying heavily on machines. Pumping those old fashioned free weights are what forces the body to grow. So whatever you read in this article or another, don’t let your mind get in the way of your muscles. Train smart, sure, and use good technique, but don’t forget that muscle grows when it’s trained hard and heavy, and nothing less is going to get the job done. ON THE BENCH I guess having an impressive chest and big arms are the two priorities for most beginning bodybuilders. These are what you could call the “T-shirt” muscles, the ones that really show when you go out in a tight T-shirt. So it’s no surprise to me that another question I hear all the time is, “How much do you bench?” Everyone associates having a big, full chest with doing heavy barbell presses. But I try to explain that this isn’t really the case. Doing heavy benches can build mass and strength, but it isn’t enough to create the kind of chest you need to build a balanced, proportional physique. You end up with pecs that are big and hard but lack shape and detail. Some power-lifting-type pec training can be beneficial, but you need a more complete selection of chest exercises and a traditional programme of sets and reps to build quality pectorals. The problem is, you don’t just use the pecs when you bench press. This movement involves the front deltoids and triceps too. After years of heavy benches, many bodybuilders end up with front delts so over-developed that they overpower the pectorals. So what should you do instead? Learn to isolate the chest. Do exercises that allow you to hit the pecs with full intensity without involving a lot of effort from other muscle groups. This means not relying totally on barbell bench presses but also including dumbbell presses and dumbbell, machine and cable flyes. USING DUMBBELLS Don’t get me wrong, I think the bench press is a great exercise. Certainly, everyone just starting out in bodybuilding ought to be doing benches to build basic strength and structure. And some bodybuilders, depending on particular body type, can benefit from barbell presses throughout their lives. For example, if somebody is tall, with long arms, the bench press – particularly with a wide-grip – is a great exercise. But for someone who’s shorter and more compact, after a while barbell presses just don’t get the job done. Dumbbells have several advantages. For one, you’re training each side of the body independently, so the stronger side can’t help out the weaker side and prevent it from catching up. Also, having to balance each of the weights separately, without a bar in-between to help keep the weight under control, all of the secondary stabiliser muscles are made to work at their maximum. You hear all the time that one advantage of machines is that they stabilise and control the weight for you, letting you concentrate on just pushing the weight. But I think this is a major disadvantage when it comes to building basic size, shape and mass. Your muscles seem to grow best when your body is forced to do all the stabilising and controlling on its own. But the real advantage to using dumbbells is that you don’t have to lift them straight up and down. The basic job of the pecs is to pull the shoulders forward and across the body. So contracting the pecs creates a kind of circular motion. The way this circular motion changes into an up-and-down motion, as in a barbell press, is by the action of the triceps. When your hands are firmly locked in place by holding onto a barbell, you don’t have much choice but to lift up and down. But with dumbbells, you can lower the weights using a natural curved motion – down, out and to the side – then bring them back up following the same path. Whenever you’re sitting or standing, try bringing your hands together at your chest and swinging your elbows out and back. See how they move in a rotary path? You don’t have to straighten your arms to get your elbows back. When you do a press this way, you can see that your elbow bends a lot less during the movement, which means the triceps aren’t as much involved. This rotary motion is like the one you use for flyes, but not as exaggerated. You don’t lower the weights way out to the side – you just allow the elbows to follow a natural path, out and down, which makes the dumbbells move in a slightly circular path as you lift and lower them. When you do this, you can feel the pectorals stretching on the way down and you can contract them more fully as you bring them back up. And the point of bodybuilding, of course, is not to lift weights but to use weights as resistance as you extend and contract a given muscle through its range of motion. For a lot of bodybuilders, especially beginners, flyes are not really a “building” exercise. Because they’re a single-joint exercise in which you use less weight than when doing presses, they create more detail and quality than mass. However, because they involve isolation of the pecs, my advice to most bodybuilders is to be very careful with dumbbell flyes. A lot of the injuries you hear about in bodybuilding come from flyes rather than presses. Dropping the weights too low to the side and overstretching everything in the process is a good way to get a pec or biceps tear. Instead, feel the pecs stretch as you lower the weights and, when they’re fully extended, stop at that point. TRAINING CYCLE There are a lot of things that haven’t changed in bodybuilding training over the past 20 or 30 years – a press is a press, a flye is a flye. One thing that has changed though is the training cycle. In the old days, bodybuilders would often train six days a week, sometimes twice a day. You don’t see much of that nowadays. Bodybuilders now realise that you stimulate growth when you train, but you grow while at rest. If you don’t rest enough you won’t grow, no matter how hard you train. The training cycle used most often nowadays is: 3 days on, 1 day off, 2 days on, 1 day off. On many training splits, you always rest at the same point in your cycle so that some bodyparts are always trained when you’re fully rested and fresh, while others are targeted when you’re fatigued. With the above split, your rest days constantly fall at different points in your training cycle and you end up working every bodypart at some point after a day of rest when you’re fresh and at your strongest. M&F DUMBBELL FLYES >> 4 sets, 10-12 reps It’s a good idea to begin a chest workout with flyes to warm up the chest and get it ready for heavy training. A lot of people don’t realise that the bigger and stronger you are, the more careful you have to be. Beginners frequently aren’t strong enough to hurt themselves, but when you get stronger you can do some serious damage if you don’t warm up carefully. A lot of bodybuilders prefer to start with presses and just warm up doing light reps, and if that suits you and doesn’t do any damage, that’s fine. By the way, with any of these chest exercises, when you do them lying on a flat bench, you tend to hit the middle of the pec; incline movements work the upper chest; decline movements hit the lower chest. Which angle you work out at and how much depends on what your particular level of development calls for. MACHINE PRESSES/FLYES >> 4 sets, 8-10 reps It’s useful to do some type of machine exercise that lets you work very strictly, through the longest range of motion possible and allows you to increase intensity with negatives and forced negatives (having a training partner press on the bar on the way down to make the negative effort more difficult). I alternate the kind of machine I use. Sometimes I do inclines with a Smith machine, othertimes I use a pec deck or some other kind of chest machine. Again, whatever piece of equipment I use, the point is not to work super heavy for mass-building, but instead to go for strictness, a long range of motion, stretching as much as possible at the bottom and getting a full peak contraction at the top, squeezing out every rep. BARBELL/DUMBBELL PRESSES >> 4 sets, 8-10 reps As I have explained, barbell bench presses are a great mass and strength builder for bodybuilding, and some bodybuilders continue to get a benefit from them throughout their careers. When you do barbell presses, don’t let the bar down too quickly, let your butt come off the bench at any time or bounce the bar off your chest. That’s not going to help you build muscle. Do as the powerlifters do: lower the bar under control until it touches the chest, come to a full stop, then press it back up to the top. Work the muscle, don’t worry about impressing whoever’s watching you. Personally, I like dumbbell presses because they take my arms and shoulders out of the movement and give me a fuller range of motion. Actually, a lot of bodybuilders do both barbell and dumbbell presses – one on a flat bench, the other on an incline, sometimes in the same workout, sometimes in different workouts.

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