Instant Chest Activator!

Today I want to share a tip for all of you that class yourselves as chest “non responders”. This is for those of you who are either having a hard time building your chest, or maybe you’ve recently hit a muscle building plateau, where you just can’t add any more weight to your sets and reps because you won’t be able to handle it.

I’m hoping the majority of you are starting off your chest workout with some sort of dumbbell press, whether it’s incline or flat. I want you to take these techniques I’m about to explain to you, and do them before you start your first set, and then in-between every single set as well. One word of caution: what I’m about to explain is NOT meant to be a superset, and it’s not meant for you to use to achieve additional fatigue to your chest workout. You’re going to utilize this technique to try to activate more of those dormant muscle fibers in your chest. At the end of the day, if you’re having a hard time with growth, it’s probably because you have poor mind-muscle connection, or it’s just that you’re not able to activate the entire chest yet.

Exercise #1: Diamond Push-Up

The first thing you’re going to do is a diamond push-up on the edge of a bench. You want to do it elevated because you’re not trying to make this a difficult exercise to do. In fact, you can even do this on your knees if you want to. All I want you to do is focus on getting a flex in your chest. Obviously in order to maximize the flex of the chest you have to adduct your arms, and this does happen when you’re dumbbell bench pressing. You are bringing your hands together, but chances are that if you’re using really heavy weight, you can’t bring your hands really close, and you can’t maximize that flex. Therefore, maybe you’re not activating all that muscle fiber in your chest that you want to.

So you’re going to put your hands together (in the shape of a diamond) on the edge of a bench, come all the way down until your chest touches the bench, and then as you push back I just want you to focus on flexing that chest as hard as you can. Hold it for one second in the flexed position, then come back down and repeat that for 5 reps. Again, I don’t want you to fatigue your chest here, I just want you to feel those muscle fibers activating.

Exercise #2: Flat Dumbbell Fly

As soon as you’ve done your 5 reps of the diamond push-ups, you’re going to do 5 dumbbell flys with super light weight (but not too light). There are two things you’re trying to focus on with this overall technique – the first was the flex, and now it’s time to focus on the stretch. All you’re trying to do with the dumbbell fly is get to that point where you feel that nice DEEP stretch in the chest, and just sit in that position for 1-2 seconds to really feel that chest stretch, and then come back to the top position. Once again, you’re literally only doing 5 repetitions of this movement.

Conclusion

This is going to teach you to, or help you to, build a stronger mind-muscle connection (MMC). I guarantee you that if you start doing this, you will start to notice some growth, and for a lot of you, as you start to do this in-between your sets, you might be able to add 5lbs or 10lbs to the current amount of sets and reps that you’re doing, without having to really do anything else. This is because you’re activating some dormant muscle fibers and you are building a stronger MMC – it just makes sense that you’ll be able to start lifting more weight. Whether it’s 5lbs or 10lbs – any bit of weight helps!