Getting a Chest Workout

You can change the feel and focus of many chest exercises by adjusting the angle of the bench you use. Performing chest exercises on a flat bench emphasizes those fibers in the center of your chest. When you adjust the bench a few degrees to an incline position, you shift the focus of the exercise to the fibers in your upper chest and shoulder muscles. Doing the opposite — adjusting the bench to a decline position — concentrates the work on the lower fibers of the chest. By the way, decline exercises are probably the least important category of chest exercises because they work a relatively small portion of the pecs. We won’t be showing you how to operate one popular chest machine: the Pec Deck. You sit with your arms spread apart, each arm bent and placed on a pad. You push the pads toward each other, as if you’re clapping in slow motion. We think the Pec Deck should be renamed the Pec Wreck, or more accurately, the Shoulder Wreck. These machines place an enormous amount of pressure on the shoulder joint and rotator cuff and frequently lead to injury. What’s more, they don’t actually do much for your pec muscles. A safer and more effective alternative to the Pec Deck is the dumbbell chest fly.
Because your chest muscles are among the largest in your upper body, we suggest that you perform more sets of exercises with these muscles than with the smaller muscle groups of your arms. In general, we recommend:

• Performing 3 to 12 sets of chest exercises per workout. True beginners should start with one set. By the way, when we say 12 sets, we don’t mean a dozen sets of the same exercise; you may want to do 3 or 4 (or more) different exercises. And, if you’re like most people who sit during the day, you need to do more sets of back exercises than chest exercises to address any muscle imbalances and prevent slouching and a collapsed chest.
• Beginning each exercise with an easy warm-up set. Even powerlifters who bench-press 500 pounds often warm up with a 45-pound bar.