Possibly a dumb question (thickening the chest)

[Grey]

I don't go to a gym but instead used a bench and adjustable dumbbells at home.

Currently, I'm pretty happy with my triceps, but I want my chest to be bigger. On my chest/tri days I've been doing bench presses / flat flyes first, and then tricep exercises afterwards. Would it help me to enlarge my chest if I did tricep exercises first, and then chest exercises?

Currently it's

flat bench press
incline press
flat flyes
skull crushers
tricep extensions (or whatever they're called)

[cbiz]

Well if you want the bench presses to stimulate your chest more move the tricep exercises to the beginning so you pre-exhaust those muscles thus making your shoulders/chest take more of the load on the flat/incline presses

[Grey]

Cool wasn't sure if my reasoning was valid or not. Thanks.

[cbiz]

ya no problem its called pre-exhaustion CT wrote an article about it awhile ago on t-nation.com i think. I will try to dig it up

[kinda]

[ QUOTE ]
Currently it's

flat bench press
incline press
flat flyes
skull crushers
tricep extensions (or whatever they're called)

[/ QUOTE ]

Unless you are as big as your avatar. I smell some overtraining.

[Grey]

[ QUOTE ]
Unless you are as big as your avatar. I smell some overtraining.

[/ QUOTE ]I'm not as big as my avatar. I'm 5'7", 155 lbs. I sort of have a 4 pack. You can see the top 4 abs, but the others are covered with some flab. I'm pretty average build. 3 months ago I was pretty scrawny. My biceps when flexed are ~13.2 inches around. Chest I'm unsure of because my measurments have a lot of variability. It's like 35" without flexing

If you have any suggestions on a workout plan I'm all ears. Only having dumbells, an exercise ball, and an adjustable bench kind of limits me.

Currently I have 4 different days

chest/tris
back/bis
shoulders/abs
legs

I actually only do the legs every other cycle. They seem to grow really fast, and I just hate doing them.

[notfreemoney]

in order to work the chest more during bench you must pre-exhaust the CHEST! Your triceps tire more quickly than your chest during bench so pre-exhausting them would HINDER your chest workout because you would never be getting enough reps in to overload the chest. Heres what you do... you perform a single jointed exercise such as fly to pre-exhaust the chest. Then you can do bench and you will feel it more in your chest. You can also switch it up and do bench and then a single jointed exercise. Never listen to anyone that says to do the tricep before the chest when targeting chest.

[notfreemoney]

if you think logically you will realize that when you are doing bench... you generally have to stop not because your chest is overloaded but becuase your triceps feel like they are on fire. So burn out the chest before so that during bench you have to stop because your chest can no longer perform any work

[thirddan]

or you could perform an exercise that actually requires chest recruitment rather than tricep/shoulder work...look on t-nation for the "squeeze press", CT talks a lot about it...

for a lot of people the bench isn't even a chest exercise no matter what kind of fancy pre/post exhaustion you do...

[kinda]

can you feel your chest muscles squeeze when you do bench? one of the things that really helped me was learning to use the proper muscles during bench. when I first started lifting I mostly used my arms because I didn't have much (or any) chest muscle. As I got stronger (and became able to flex my chest muscles) I started to really try and squeeze out the reps using mostly my chest during bench and tried not to use my arms until the very last bit of the lift.

Oh, and my triceps developed a lot quicker than my chest did. So it might just be a matter of time thing for you.