I guarantee you’ve been asked The Question “how much do you bench?” The truth is, unless you’re a powerlifter, how much you bench is not relevant to muscular development. If your goals are primarily hypertrophy and aesthetics, chasing a number on the bench may be detrimental to your progress. Developing a full chest, one that looks like it could bench a ton has to do with proper application of training. One of the best ways to develop the chest is to use mainly dumbbells for presses because they require you to perform both functions of the chest (drawing the arms together and pushing away from the body) for greater stimulation and overload. To ensure that you maintain tension on the chest, do not go below parallel to the shoulders; this way the chest is in its fully stretched position, but you are not putting the stretch into the shoulders since a muscle that is stretched with resistance will receive the most overload, so making sure you keep tension mainly in the targeted muscle is very important. Now this is not to say you can’t or shouldn’t ever use barbells for presses, but the more of your training protocol should be geared around dumbbells and cables. Another way (this goes for all bodyparts) is to increase one’s Training Efficiency Percentage, which is defined as the percentage of reps in a given set that forces an adaptive response. When this is increased, the intensity of the set and reps increases, as well as the stress on the targeted muscle. This causes more of an adaptive response. Therefore, you want to make sure to train intensely on every rep of every set, focusing on training the muscle and not your ego. Finally overall intensity is the key to any workout. I’m not talking about doing a one-rep max; I’m talking about exertion levels. When lifters come as close to their maximum workload capacity as possible, they will get much bigger payoffs in the end.
Posted on: Mon, 15 Dec 2014 19:18:36 +0000
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