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Go to your local gym and you’ll see blokes working out the Bench Press almost to exclusion of every other exercise for their upper body. There’s good reason for this.

The bench press is one of the best weight lifting exercises for your upper body and especially for your chest. It’s not the only one however.

Others include:

Inlcine Bench Press
Flat Bench Flyes
Incline Flyes
Cable Crossovers
Dips

I tend to think that most times the chest workout should start with focus on either the bench, or dips.

The reason being that they are great comprehensive exercises, and if you’re looking to gain mainly size and strength, there’s no need to do focus exercises for any particular body part.

And plus, why workout harder or longer than you need to!

Bench Press

So how does it work?

1. Lie on the bench with the bar above your line of site
2. If you’re lifting heavy, get a spotter to help you grab the bar at arms length, and settle it above your chest (in line with your nipples is best)
3. Breath in as you lower the bar slowly with control
4. Breath out as you push that weight as hard as you can toward the sky!
5. Repeat until muscular failure

This exercise is great for working out the total chest and shoulder area. You’ll feel it in your triceps (especially if you use a narrow grip) and in your lats too.

Take care to do a good workout using lower weights to warm up the area before lifting. You’ll be able to tell the difference in your workout if you “prime” the muscles using a warmup that builds to the desired weight like this.

Say your max weight is about 220lbs (totally random figure used for example only!)

You’d start with a warmup of about 90lbs and do 15 reps, then 140lbs for 8 reps, then 170lbs for 4 reps, then 200lbs for 1 rep.

This ensures you’re not only warm, but ready to handle the weight without wearing out the area.

You’re “primed” for doing the real work where you work the muscle to total failure. This is where you’ll achieve maximum muscle growth potential. Go 100%!

Dips: Dips are great because unlike pushups, they use your entire body weight. They will also develop your triceps as well as your chest. They’re also great if you’ve had a shoulder injury, working similar muscles, but less intense on the shoulders.

You can do dips on a chair/bench, or using dip bars.

Read full article: Weight Lifting Exercises For Your Chest

The margin of time that determines muscle building success or failure in the gym is a heck of a lot shorter than you might think. Just as fraction-of-a-second moments during a 100 metre dash will make or break a sprinter’s race, fraction-of-a-second moments will also make or break your body’s muscle growth response in the gym.

In fact, your entire margin of success in the gym can ultimately be reduced to just a short time span of 60 seconds. That’s correct, how you choose to handle a short 60 second time period during your workouts will translate to either poor, mediocre or significant muscle building results.

Although each entire workout will last for about an hour, only 60 seconds of that actual time will determine what kind of gains you achieve.

You may be scratching your head right now and wondering what the heck I’m talking about, but allow me to explain…
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You see, every individual set that you perform in the gym is ultimately being performed for the benefits that will be achieved on the last 1-2 reps. Muscles respond to stress, and the only truly stressful reps that actually trigger your body’s muscle building mechanisms are those at the end of each set when the body is on the brink of muscular failure.

If a given set consists of 6 reps, then reps 1-4 are only performed in order to get to reps 5 and 6. Reps 1-4 will do very little in terms of stimulating muscular growth, but are necessary to perform in order to overload the muscles on reps 5 and 6.

In other words, it is only the very last 1-2 reps that will ultimately yield a muscle building response from the body. The longer you can push yourself to battle the weights during this small time frame at the end of each set, the greater results you will achieve.

Any of you who have read my articles know that I’m a big advocate of training to muscular failure. There is simply no better way to trigger your body’s adaptive responses than to train until your muscles cannot move the weight another inch.

Read full article: Wimp Out In The Gym And Your Gains Will Be Gone In 60 Seconds