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The Question:

I'm a 50 year old woman who trains 3x per week and does cardio 4-5 x per week. What chest exercises are going to work my entire chest;I want to make sure I'm including all areas.


The Answer:

The chest area is comprised of two muscle groups. These are the Pectoralis Major (lower chest) and the Pectoralis Minor (upper chest).
In order to work the Pectoralis Major you should be doing bench or machine chest presses, dumbbell presses, dumbbell or cable flys and pushups to name most, but not all, exercise possibilities. To work the Pectoralis Minor you should perform these exercises on an incline bench. Placing your upper body at an incline will help to isolate the “upper chest” muscle group.

There are a couple of variations that may help to emphasize the outer portion of your chest muscles. These variations can be done by bench pressing with a wider grip and by doing the dumbbell flys mentioned earlier. Variations that may help to isolate and develop the inner chest muscles would be bench pressing with a close grip and by simply squeezing or holding the contraction at the “arms extended” position of each mentioned exercise for one second. To get really confusing you can do a close grip press using an incline bench to work the inner and upper chest! I have to tell you that even if you did nothing but wide grip bench presses you would not just develop a big lump of muscle on the outer portion of your chest. Your muscles simply do not develop this way. All of the variations I mentioned help to provide a new stimulus to the muscles of your chest for overall development, toning, shaping, etc. But, don’t get caught up in thinking that you have to train with all of these variations every week. Even if you just did a basic dumbbell bench and an incline dumbbell bench you would be doing great!

 
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