Adding shape and muscle to your chest means you develop your pecs to show off a well-defined muscular quality. If you have read some of my other articles on muscle definition, you know that there is a big difference between undefined muscle quality and well-defined muscle quality. If you don’t understand this difference, first visualize the thick but shapeless “barrel chest” that comes from doing nothing more than bench press to build your chest. Then imagine dense, powerful, chiseled pecs with a marked separation of your abs, arms, and shoulders. This second image shows the well-defined muscular quality that you must work to develop in your chest.
To achieve this goal, you need to balance chest training with exercises that build pectoral mass and musculature. In other words, your chest workout should first include high-intensity, low-rep exercises with heavy dumbbell bench presses, incline dumbbell presses, and weighted push-ups or parallel bar dips. When you’re starting out, these exercises should form the foundation of your mass and strength development program. As you progress, you should add heavy dumbbell pullovers and decline the dumbbell bench press to your program. Pullovers will thicken your upper mid-chest while the decline bench press adds mass and power to your lower pecs.
To build a visible contour or shape to your chest, you should also do high-rep workouts with a relatively light weight (ie, a load that allows you to do 12 to 15 reps per set). You should do these high-rep workouts with flat bench dumbbell flyes, incline dumbbell flyes, and cable cross flyes or pec deck flyes. To improve the visible separation of the lower pecs from the abs, try doing high reps of incline push-ups. You should also mix high-rep training with core chest-building exercises, i.e. the basic and incline dumbbell bench press, dips, and standard push-ups. While these high-rep workouts are essential to shaping your pecs and burning the calories needed to improve muscle definition, it takes more than weight training to develop a truly “muscular” pec.
High-intensity interval training, which involves short bursts of high-energy aerobic activity, is essential for burning subcutaneous and intramuscular fat that produces a smooth or “barrel-chested” appearance. Unlike slow, boring cardio that is typically limited to a single activity over an extended period of time, high-intensity interval training consists of multiple fast-paced exercises during a single aerobic workout.
For example, in a cardio session, you can alternate jogging and running on a treadmill, walking on a stair climber, jumping rope, and stationary cycling or rowing. You can do all of this aerobic training in a 20- to 30-minute workout by simply limiting your time in each activity to short but intense intervals of about 5 to 10 minutes each. You can also vary the pace or intensity of each individual activity to create intervals for each exercise. To illustrate this point, let’s say you can only do one type of cardio like running. You can still do interval training by simply mixing sprints, longer runs, and moderate distance runs into a single 20-30 minute training session. With interval cardio training, the possibilities for variety are endless. The only drawback is that you can never use “boredom” as an excuse to skip your cardio work.
The theme of “boredom” leads to one final but important point when it comes to adding mass, power, and muscle to your chest, and that point is periodization! While your body may initially respond with muscle growth to a new chest workout, this reaction will not continue as your nervous system quickly adapts to a particular training routine. When this happens, your progress slows because your nervous system activates fewer and fewer muscle fibers with each successive training session involving the same workout. At this point, muscle growth finally stops and the end result is boredom or frustration. The only way to avoid this problem is to vary your chest workouts.
Changing your workouts to avoid plateauing and ensure continued progress is called “periodization.” In essence, periodization describes the planned and continuous variation of your workouts over the course of a specific training period. Applied to your chest training, if you repeatedly do the same workout with the same combination and sequence of exercises, you’ll soon get bored and frustrated with your lack of progress. But if you periodize your training, you will continually challenge yourself with new workouts that will force your chest to react with more size, better shape, and greater power.
As with interval cardio training, you should never get bored with chest workouts or stop progressing due to training monotony. Training periodization is essential for the mental focus you need to enjoy continued progress in your chest building efforts. So, train hard with balance and variety and you’re sure to add impressive mass, power, and muscularity to your pecs.