Student Fitness

By: Veljko Petranovic

Ah, yes, the pectoral muscles. Ever since the image of Arnold’s unbelievable chest musculature entered the mainstream, everyone and their uncle spends hours upon hours benching in the gym. The pecs are composed of two muscles – the major and the minor. For the life of me, I can’t comprehend why people think they need, like, 6 different chest exercises on each workout. It’s only two muscles, guys! Two or three exercises, executed with proper form and intensity, are well enough! It’s not like it’s a large muscle group anyway. It’s not even that hard to exhaust. Yet I keep seeing trainers making the same mistakes all the damn time.

Mistake one: prioritizing chest to the expense of other body parts. A great body is evenly developed, end of story. Besides, the size of your chest is directly proportional to how much muscle you’re carrying overall – I’ve yet to see someone with great pecs and nothing else happening elsewhere. If your pulling (bent over row) weight isn’t about the same as the pushing (bench) weight, you are in the process of developing a muscular imbalance, which not only looks funny, but can result in injury.

Mistake two: Flat benching all the time. Unless your fitness goals include looking like a Neanderthal, with slumped shoulders and droopy pecs, lay off the flat bench. I’m serious. It’s not that great a movement. Yes, it works for some, and it is a great mass builder, but the trouble is that for most of us, the flat bench works mostly the anterior deltoids and triceps. If you must do it, keep your upper arms parallel with the bar, instead of letting the elbows slide downwards. This rotation is keeping the tension away from the pecs.

Mistake three: Benching heavy. Yeah, I know it’s impressive and cool and all, but if you’re doing it for the bragging rights, you are not doing yourself a favor. You can, and eventually will, get hurt. No one but your buddies cares about your benching weight. Girls couldn’t give a rat’s ass, believe me. They appreciate the results, not the effort. And if you’re sacrificing form for the sake of going heavy, you’re exercising your ego, not your body.

Mistake four: Attempting to “hit the chest from all angles”. Look, there is only one angle that is beneficial to your pecs’ development, and it’s the 90 degree angle of your humerus to the torso. Like I said, it’s only two muscles. An exception would be the parallel bar dip, which I’m very fond of doing, but it, too, works the triceps too hard while the pecs receive about a third of the total stimulation. I just thought of another one – the pullover, though I’m not sure whether it works the chest or the lats more. All I know is, my lats hurt after the pullover, and expanding the ribcage with an exercise is a big load of hokey.

Mistake five: Isolation. No amount of cable crossovers is going to put striations and cuts and whatever on your chest. This sort of detail is reserved for people who have two things: one, a good chest, and more importantly two, low body fat. Don’t kid yourself – pack on the muscle with properly performed dumbbell presses and flies. Free weights rule over puny cables. Not that they don’t have a purpose, but one shouldn’t rely on cables alone. The pec-deck can be great, just remember not to put your forearms on the pads and push that way – it’s much better to grab the bars of the apparatus and push with your hands.

Mistake six: Too much volume. It’s a relatively small muscle group. Eight time Mr. Olympia Lee Haney has a great proverb about this – stimulate, don’t annihilate. Four sets of three exercises is enough for a regular human being. Just one drop set will put the burn in your chest like you wouldn’t believe. Never mind all the articles with the top pros who do chest three times a week for 30 sets. Us mortals need time to recover and grow. It’s way more important then training. Otherwise you’d be seeing some amazing transformations with the gym rats who train six times a week, 2 hours a day. Sadly, you never do.

Mistake seven: Forgetting the “upper” chest. I remember doing only incline benches and flyes just before this contest in 2002. When all was said and done, I ended up with a pretty good overall pec size. I strongly feel that a quality chest is supposed to be even from top to bottom. Yes, I know that your bench weight decreases by about 10 percent when you go incline. Please refer to mistake number three.

Mistake eight: Saying “bah” to push ups. Yeah, I know, you’re a big boy and have heavy weights to play with, and you could do about a hundred if you wanted to, and the floor is dirty and you’re not in the Army. I used to think some of those things, too. That was until I devoted an entire summer to doing push ups with my feet on a chair exclusively. Guess what? It worked the same way as weights do. When it gets easy and boring, as 50 rep sets can do, push up slower. Add weight on your back, be it manual resistance from a friend or a heavy backpack. Be careful, it can slide down and hit your head. Try clapping in between reps, it’s fun!

Mistake nine: Having no mind-muscle connection. For good stimulation, ensure that you feel each rep of the execise in your targeted muscles. This applies to everything. Don’t just move the weight like a piston. Feel it. Once you start feeling pain, you have 1 or 2 good reps left in you. Then just back off. No need to administer self torture, even if you have been bad.

Mistake ten: Copying what others are doing. Be it an IFBB pro, or a fellow trainer you see every day, it’s far from given that you’ll look like him if you train like him. We’re all different. Genetics, drugs, lifestyles, experience, all that jazz. He might have the kind of body you want, and he might have gotten it doing everything contrary to this article. If that’s the case, just remember that it was written by a hard gainer, for hard gainers. We outnumber the easy gainers 50 to one. And we can, given common sense and hard work, look great and improve independently from others.

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Posted in Dorm Room Workout | By Veljko |

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