Posts Tagged ‘push-ups’
First of all when you’re looking to build your chest, you want to make sure that you target your body’s fast-twitch muscle fibers, because they have the most potential to grow.
You do that by training for strength and explosive power. Use heavier weights and low reps and try to explode on the lifting phase of the exercise. Ever notice how big the power lifters and strong men get? They don’t get that way by working on light weight and high reps.
I get disagreements on this one, but it works for me. The Best Chest Exercise is the WEIGHTED DIP… no contest! Why? It’s very simple, doing dips (and pushups) is the only chest exercise in which you move your body through space, instead of moving the weight through space. .
Moving your body through space uses more brain to muscle connections than just moving iron through space because it challenges your central nervous system more. The result, more muscle recruitment.
Dips work a lot of triceps and shoulders along with the chest. To hang a weight on you you’ll need a dipping belt or a strap or jump rope and you’ll need to be able to perform bodyweight dips. Start out light and do full range movements, keep them smooth and controlled. You can pick up your knees and lean your body forward to emphasize the chest even more.
Next up is the PUSH-UP, yes, that exercise that you’ve done or seen done all your life, but in reality it’s one of the few chest exercises that really demands a lot of strength and agility, because you must execute this with perfect form to get the most out of it. And it works out your abs and back (that’s where you first begin to sag and lose form).
Also, there are so many variants of the PUSHUP that are even more explosive. One of those is the MEDICINE-BALL ARCHBISHOP PUSH-UP; a long name, but this exercise works.
What you do is put 3 to 5 medicine balls in a semicircle, then get in the push-up position and put both hands on the ball to the far right; your chest should be over the ball and your feet must stay anchored throughout this exercise.
Now, move your left hand to the ball at the left and do a push-up, then bring your right hand to that ball. You want to continue moving left, doing push ups until you get to the last ball on the left. Then work your way back across the balls. That’s one rep.
The reason why you want to use the medicine ball is, when you put your hands on a ball, the inherent instability forces your core to work 20% harder than when you do a regular push-up, so this exercise trains your abs and hips to remain stable longer.
Try doing supersets of weighted push-ups with lying cable flies. Have your training partner place a weight on your back for the push-ups. When you do the flies, try holding the peak contraction for 3 seconds, and then do a 5 second eccentric contraction or lowering phase.
Keep your form strict and clean to both prevent injury and to keep from cheating. But, It is acceptable to cheat and heave ho on the last couple of reps.
Resistance bands will also work very well for both resisted push-ups and dips. They don’t require a partner, travel easily and won’t ding the floor. For pushups, just put the band behind your back. you can put it on your lower back to work your core more or up around your shoulder blades. Now put your hands into the band loop and pin it to the floor and go to town. If it’s to loose at the bottom of the stroke, just put a loose overhand knot in the center of the band and you’re set.
For dips, drape the band around the back of your neck so it comes down the front of your shoulders and then place your hands in the band and grab on to the dip bar and have a field day.
The band can also be used to assist both of these exercises should you not have the strength, initially , to do them.
The last exercise that we suggest is the BENCH PRESS. And this isn’t because the bench press is a weak chest exercise, far from it. This exercise is essentially irreplaceable when it comes to chest exercises, and no man should completely eliminate the bench press from his workout routine.
Keep in mind that you can do the bench either, flat, incline or decline and you can use barbells or dumbbells.