How To: Landmine Chest Press

This article is going to explain to you how to perform a landmine chest press, which is a great exercise if you want to target a bit more upper chest and middle chest during your chest workout.

What Equipment Do I Need To Perform This Exercise?

To perform this exercise you’re going to need a couple of different things. First things you will need a barbell and some kind of anchoring point for your barbell. Personally, I use a landmine attachment, but if you don’t have a landmine attachment, you can easily put one end of your barbell in a corner, and then throw either a 45lb plate or a sandbag over top of it in order to stabilize it.

Throughout this movement the bottom of the bar isn’t going to move around that much, but using a landmine is the safest way to do it, especially if you’re trying to overload with some weight. My GronkFitness landmine just slips into a couple of plates I put on the ground, and it also means I can do the movement anywhere instead of being confined to a corner.

How Is The Exercise Performed?

Once you have your set up complete, you’re going to load some weight onto the front of the barbell. It DOES NOT matter what size plates you use to load the barbell. There’s enough room from the plates to the tip of the barbell so that the plates aren’t going to touch your chest or your body throughout this exercise. Therefore, don’t think you have to load the bar up with 25lb plates – 45lb plates will work fine.

Once your plates are loaded, you’ll lift the barbell up, and hold the top of the barbell so that your hands aren’t quite touching your chest. This is the starting position. A few other things you need to keep in mind include leaning slightly forward when in the starting position. Leaning forward, instead of standing straight is going to help with stabilization and emphasizing more of your upper chest. Also, as you perform the movement, you want to keep your feet shoulder width apart, flex your glutes, and keep your core tight as you do your reps, which will again help with stabilization.

When in position, you’re then going to press the barbell up as high as you can, and hold it there for a second or two while squeezing your chest as hard as you can. Make sure you still keep your core tight while doing this, before returning to the starting position and repeating for reps. To be even more stable, you can also do this exercise on your knees. However, the same rules apply here, and you again want to be leaning forward slightly, while flexing your core and glutes as you press the weight up and down.

Can I Do This Exercise Using One Arm At A Time?

For those of you who want to take this exercise even further in terms of intensity and getting more out of it, you can actually do the movement using only one arm at a time. First off, you won’t need as much weight on the barbell because you can only handle so much weight when only using one arm. If you’re having a hard time picking up the barbell and getting into position because you’re really strong and you need to use 2-3 plates, usually you can get away with 2, 1 ¼ or even just 1 plate to get a nice workout when using one arm at a time. Also, when you’re using both hands, your feet are positioned shoulder width apart. When you’re doing one arm at a time, your feet need to be staggered, and this offers a few more benefits.

It makes it much easier to stabilize your body this way, it’s still easy to lean forward with your feet staggered, and you’ll also get some trunk (core) rotation. This rotation means that as you go from the top to the bottom of the movement, you have a bit more range of motion (ROM), allowing you to bring your arm back a bit more and really feel that stretch through your chest as you come back. It also works for more ROM at the top of the movement, as instead of being stuck in one position at the top, you can bring your arm across your body a bit further while squeezing your chest as hard as you can. This makes it almost similar to the feeling you get when doing a cable fly and squeezing your pecs together.

Can I Use Cheat & Recover Training With This Exercise?

This is yet another exercise that works well with my Cheat & Recover (C&R) method. Remember C&R consists of 8 cheat reps followed by 8 recover reps. In fact, you can do C&R with this exercise without even having to lower the weight. The way you do that is by starting the movement working one arm at a time.

For example, if you start with your left hand, once you’re in the starting position with feet staggered and glutes and core flexed, you can dip down a bit by slightly bending your knees and getting that torso twist, before explosively pushing the weight up. You’ll perform 8 cheat reps like that, using a bit of momentum, before switching to your right arm and performing 8 cheat reps for that arm too. Make sure that when you switch hands, you also switch your feet – your leading foot should be the OPPOSITE foot to the arm you are working (This means right leg forward while working the left arm and vice-versa).

Once you’ve completed 8 cheat reps for each arm, simply bring your hands together and complete your 8 recover reps. Always make sure you are flexing and squeezing your chest, and controlling both the concentric and eccentric portions of the movement while performing the recover reps. What’s great here is that you’re overloading with so much weight when doing one arm at a time that the weight is almost perfect once you bring your hands together for the recover reps.

Conclusion

If you were to add this exercise to your chest routine, you shouldn’t do it first. Always stick to your compound movements like your dumbbell flat bench, incline bench or decline bench first, then do this after at least TWO compound chest movements. Aim for about 3-4 sets of 8-10 reps, and remember that means 8-10 reps PER ARM if you are performing the movement with one arm at a time. But no matter how you do the movement, you know it’s going to be intense either way!