Building up chest muscles

[sluttysteve]

First, a little background. Asian male, 25, 5'11", 165lbs, very little to none workout experience before recently. I recently moved to Beijing around 5 weeks ago, and decided to enroll in a gym and hire a personal trainer, since it is China and a trainer cost only $15/hr.

Started out on a one-hour session every other day, with a normal rotation of chest, biceps, triceps, shoulders, back, lower body, abs, etc. Most of the other areas are fine, but I've been having trouble with finding an effective chest workout.

I emphasized to the trainer that I was looking for more tone rather than mass, and thus my workouts consists of 4-5 sets of high reps counts with increasing weights. Unfortunately I find that my shoulders and occasionally triceps are feeling the most burn, and I have very little feeling in my chest, other then when it feels "stretched". I'll be slightly sore in the chest area the day after a workout, but not as much as I'd like. My trainer keeps on telling me to concentrate on "using" my chest muscles and try to contract them during the workout, but I find that I just can't "use" those muscles at will, it's like someone telling me to wiggle my hair. He says that the reason this is happening is that my chest muscles are so weak right now that I immediately rely on my shoulders and tris during workouts, and has been emphasizing the importance of form, telling me to make sure not to adjust my form to finish a rep and instead rely on his help. He claims that my chest muscles are still getting a workout and eventually they'll become strong enough that I'll be able to "use" them.

Right now he has me doing a variety of exercises to try to get the right feel. Bench press, incline bench cable flies, incline dumbell flies, cable crossovers, etc. Was just wondering if there's anything that you guys recommend, or any tricks to try to get a stronger chest workout. Sorry for the noobness of this post, I'm not quite a fitness guru. Thanks in advance for help.

[einbert]

I think that most somewhat trained individuals (as opposed to total newbies) don't get very much "pec" work from bench press. The reason for this is that shoulders and triceps simply dominate the movement unless someone's pecs happen to be extremely strong relative to shoulders/tri's.

I do train mostly for mass, and I have found one exercise to be very helpful for gaining pec size. It's the squeeze together dumbbell bench press, a very simple movement that is just like a bench press except you squeeze the dumbbells together hard throughout the movement (they should be touching through the entire movement). Add a few sets of this when you do bench press to get that little extra chest definition.

As always, don't forget to keep it compound and keep it heavy.

Best of luck.

[kyleb]

Dumbbell bench press is probably better than bar bench for new lifters - it's what a lot of baseball players use in-season anyway so they don't tire out their arms.

You can try the chest fly machine as well to help isolate those muscles. Be sure to lean forward to help activate your chest and avoid the whole motion being dominated by the arms. You will notice easily if you are doing it right.

[mperich]

roll your shoulders back when you are doing bench. i think this will make a big difference to most newbies because its not the natural way of lifting the most weight (at least it wasnt for me) roll them back as far as they can go and keep them rolled back throughout the press movement. you can practice it right now in ur chair, try rolling ur shoulders back and doing a press motion...then try ur normal motion. You should be able to feel the difference in ur chest right away.

Also, do incline/decline bench, and do flies. Ask your trainer if he can show you dumbell flies instead of a pecdec. Go very deep with these and keep the weight light.

Also, I would probably use dumbells more often at the start, mixing barbell in occasionally

-Mike