Chest Lagging?

[ludawg23]

Hello guys,

Just need some advice regarding my workouts. I've been working out for a about 2 years now. I have a pretty consistent routine and my diet is flawless. Now, the only thing I am having trouble in is the growth of my chest. All my other muscles are growing in nicely but my chest seems to lag in regards to my entire body. I work it out hard once a week and my routine varies from the following:

Flat Bench
Incline Bench
Flat, Incline Dumbbells
Seated Butterflys
Various Cable excercises

Should I be doing chest twice a week now? Maybe another type of routine to stunt my body? Any help or input would be much appreciated. Thanks everyone

[Gooseneck]

I've always found that for myself, heavy flat bench with low volume worked best. I would begin doing very heavy negatives with a spotter, followed up by my normal routine. I would suggest maybe doing chest twice a week, but DO NOT go to failure or your gains will be inhibited. Do just enough to stimulate the muscles and then flush your body with protein and nutrients. I also would probably drop some of the isolation movements like flys for right now and just concentrate on the heavy lifts.

[trainerbob]

I would agree to drop the cable and butterflyes, as they tend to be the least mass building in your list. I would probably keep doing at least some heavy flyes to give the muscles a different stimulation, and because you can get a super pump with flyes. But like Gooseneck said, definitely put your focus on the bench and incline bench.

Try two times a week, try varying workouts with sometimes lower (6) reps and sometimes higher (12) reps. Try supersets and negative reps. You've got to keep the muscle from reaching adaptation.

[.V.]

My chest would never grow, It was always simply just puny, even at 300lbs and D-cup sized man boobs the muscle under it was non-existant.

Everything I did, helped the rest of my body except my chest. HST helped thicken it up a little but not much (3x weekly flat barbell bench press).

Now it's doing a little better still, nothing impressive about it, never will be...but I'm doing something just a little different.

2x weekly flat barbell bench press. Five ramped sets of five reps on Monday. Friday is a repeat of sets 1-4 from Monday then for set 5, I do a 2.5% increase in weight from Monday's last set but only do 3 reps. Come Monday, I go for my 3 rep weight but do 5 reps.

My 5RM is reached at the end of week 4 but I keep increasing the weight every week and get a new 5RM. When it stalls and I can't go farther, I reset the program so that my 5RM is again at week 4 and ride it as far as it takes me again.

Helped me some. Maybe it'll help you, maybe not. Worth considering at least.

[WESTY]

That's like me i'ver recently started gym, my arms are looking great (improvement wise, not that i am arnold yet) but my chest has barely improved i think i really need to hit the bench up with some very HEAVY weights :P

[Gooseneck]

I think its also important to use a medium to wide grip when benching as this forces you to utilize the chest more so than the triceps. In many cases guys have enormous arms which overpower the chest while pressing.

[Cort]

Originally Posted by Gooseneck

I think its also important to use a medium to wide grip when benching as this forces you to utilize the chest more so than the triceps. In many cases guys have enormous arms which overpower the chest while pressing.

Ditto on widening the grip if you haven't already, as well as dropping the flies.

How long have you been using that routine? You should be changing things up (sets/reps/speed/etc...) every so often or you're likely to just plateau out.

[DarkLord]

There's one thing you guys haven't mentioned on here and it's the way I now doing it...keep your elbows back, drop the weight to about 50-80kg ( my preference) and work slowly on the eccentric and the concentric movement. Trust me!