Inner Chest

[Chain]

Originally Posted by Lift2Live

I agree, there are many myths. I also agree that it's amyth to spot train or be able to isolate a certain muscle in this sense. Emphasis is different. Obviously the sternal head is the biggest pectoralis head and you can't isolate one part of it. What i'm trying to establish is the way in which you work said muscle as far as angle, pressure, reps etc,. There are many people who say that cable crossovers are an "etching" or "shaping" exercise and not mass building but if all here is true then that is incorrect and you could build just as impressive a chest doing only crossovers as opposed to the bench press. That isn't the case though.

You could probably build a decent chest just doing crossovers if you were diligent enough about it. Has anyone dedicated ever tried? But that's not even the same subject. Then you're getting into recruiting more motor units and increased hormonal output and other factors that tend to make compound exercises superior to isolation exercises. Here we're talking about a basic principle of physics. You can't emphasize a portion of one muscle of the chest. I've been hooked up to EMG machines and been in tests with this personally in our human performance lab. It just doesn't happen. If that were the case then the shapes of muscles could change. Someone could make the top portion of their bicep grow more than the middle portion, or change the shape of the long head of the tricep, etc, etc. It just doesn't work that way. The muscle is a certain shape and it stays that shape. You can make it get larger, or it can get smaller, or you can reduce your bodyfat % and with that remove some of the fat covering said muscle and perhaps make it appear that the shape has changed even though it hasn't. But that's all.

[threenorns]

oh, poop. doesn't that just take the mickey out of it all, LOL!

[Chain]

Originally Posted by threenorns

oh, poop. doesn't that just take the mickey out of it all, LOL!

Sorry. Genetics are a b**ch. Speaking of Mickey, at least that freakin' mouse has skinnier calves then I do.

[threenorns]

<slyly pulls pant legs down over massive calves>

sorry.

[Axion]

Question for you chain. Being an engineering student i understand that the tension must be constant (more or less) throughout the length of each musscle. That said, depending on the way I do my bicep curls I can not only feel the burn shift from the lower part of my arm to the upper part, but i can also see a different part of the length of the musscle being pumped up for the next hour or so. How do you explain this?

[cursor]

Quick ... count the number of muscles in your body.

1. traps
2. shoulders
3. chest
4. abs
5. thighs
6. hamstrings
7. calves

... X2 = 14! Simple, right?!



With 640 muscles in the human body, it's tough to know what the hell they all do. When I do a 3-day split, I don't divide up the 640 muscles so that I'm doing 213 per day of the split. When I do a 'chest & shoulders' day, how many individual muscles am I really working? How are they systematically recruited when performing an exercise after a particular fashion? What sort of bulk/shape do the ancillary muscles contribute to the body that you sculpt? When you perform flyes, is the difference in feeling and results only a function of ROM?

Originally Posted by Chain

Take a rope and suspend a weight from it, the tension is evenly distributed throughout the rope. It's the same with a muscle.

The visual image that simple mechanics offers can be helpful.

First of all, a rope is a mechanically manufactured with uniformity in mind. How does the physiology of a muscle vary near it's insertion point as opposed to at the belly? How might fiber density vary across the length of a muscle? How does the increased density of blood vessels (and consequential nutrient flow) in parts of the muscle contribute to varied performance? How does the variation in balance of muscle fiber type add to the performance of a muscle (or a set of muscles) required to handle a particular chore?

Understanding how a single strand of muscle tissue behaves when loaded doesn't paint a clear enough picture for me to comprehend the complexity of cooperation required to address an applied load that's shared by (distributed between) all the muscle tissue that the body chooses to employ.

[Chain]

Originally Posted by Axion

Question for you chain. Being an engineering student i understand that the tension must be constant (more or less) throughout the length of each musscle. That said, depending on the way I do my bicep curls I can not only feel the burn shift from the lower part of my arm to the upper part, but i can also see a different part of the length of the musscle being pumped up for the next hour or so. How do you explain this?

There are 3 muscles that flex the elbow. The long head and short head of the bicep and the brachialis. Depending on the type of curl you perform (more importantly the position of your wrist) do you can change the emphasis of each of these muscles involved. This is actually one of those 'myths' that has some truth in fact. Many people talk about working the lower biceps but in reality they are referring to the brachialis.

http://www.exrx.net/Muscles/BicepsBrachii.html
http://www.exrx.net/Muscles/Brachialis.html

Originally Posted by Cursor

First of all, a rope is a mechanically manufactured with uniformity in mind. How does the physiology of a muscle vary near it's insertion point as opposed to at the belly? How might fiber density vary across the length of a muscle? How does the increased density of blood vessels (and consequential nutrient flow) in parts of the muscle contribute to varied performance? How does the variation in balance of muscle fiber type add to the performance of a muscle (or a set of muscles) required to handle a particular chore?

Understanding how a single strand of muscle tissue behaves when loaded doesn't paint a clear enough picture for me to comprehend the complexity of cooperation required to address an applied load that's shared by (distributed between) all the muscle tissue that the body chooses to employ.

Sure, a rope is a much simpler structure than a muscle in the human body and therefore not an entirely accurate analogy. And yes, there are differences in difference areas of the muscle like fibers deeper in the muscle tending to be more fast twitch than on the surface. It doesn't change the fact that you can't choose which part of one muscle is recruited. Tell me why it WOULD be the case that you could emphasize the inner chest? If such were the case, show me one picture of a bodybuilder who changed the shape of their muscle? Arnold always had the peak in his biceps. So did Larry Scott. Surely there would be one example of a bodybuilder making his inner chest bigger without also an equal (in relation) increase in the size of the pectoralis altogether?

[cursor]

Sorry, but don't follow the progress of professional bodybuilders. Even if they made such a claim, it wouldn't make it so (even if they believed it).

[Chain]

Originally Posted by cursor

Sorry, but don't follow the progress of professional bodybuilders. Even if they made such a claim, it wouldn't make it so (even if they believed it).

lol. Damn you cursor, that's exactly what I'm saying.