Chest Workout Tips for Size (HARDGAINER EDITION!)
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Today we want to cover the chest. So we’ve had our Hard Gainer Edition, and our Hard Gainer Series here. Today it’s about exercise tips when you’re training your chest. Particularly as a hard gainer and this guy is starting to – he’s getting over the moniker now. He’s actually starting to become a gainer. As you can, too. But today I want to show you some of those tips you can apply when you’re training your chest that’s going to help you out, all right? We’re going to break it down to three parts. The first place we’re starting is the pullup bar. Okay, yes, I said pullup bar because again, we’re following suit with what we talked about before regarding hard gainers.
One of your biggest problems is going to always be activation. Remember the first time you ever did a dumbbell bench press, or a barbell bench press. You didn’t even know where the weight is in space. You’re doing your dumbbells and they’re kind of floating around. JESSIE: Right. JEFF: People tell you to bring them up together and you never really hit them in the same spot. That’s a proprioception issue. But there’s also a muscle awareness issue and one of the key points, whenever you’re going to press – and we’re going to have to press if we’re going to build your chest – is you’ve got to be able to press with the chest and not the shoulders.
We cover this in a video for our more advanced guys and as you can see it’s integral to what we do in this. It’s very important that you start now. So what I had Jessie do, and what I recommend you do is starting with some scap pulls on a pull up bar. On chest day, believe it or not, and just basically try to do a pullup without moving his arms. Without bending his arms. He gets up there and holds it for a couple seconds. The point here is we’re trying to activate his lower traps, get to the ability to be able to control the scapula, pull it down and hold it there. I’ll show you why it’s important in a second. A couple more. So I’d have him do a couple sets of this.
Six, seven, eight of them, held for a couple seconds each. Now come on down. We talked about how you want to ingrain it with what you’re actually going to do and that’s with actually pressing. So when we press, what we do wrong a lot of times as hard gainers, is we press and we lead with our shoulder, and we let our arm do the pressing. So let’s show what that looks like. As we press the arms are doing the pressing, especially as you’re trying to use heavier weights than you should. You’re pressing and letting your arm lead the way. That’s not what you want to do. You want to let your chest lead the way. So the arms have to stay back. The only way the arms can stay back, the shoulders can stay back, is by having an awareness of those muscles on the backside that you just hopefully woke up a little bit and made aware that they’re going to need to work. JESSIE: Scap pull downs.
JEFF: Exactly. So now let’s see with those scap pull downs. So here, you press out and you lead with the chest. So this is doing the contraction, this is staying back. Okay, so pressing that way. In as hard as you can, press. There you go. So I have him do some presses standing up in the air, just like that. You can see, even his posture is improving because we’re working on these things. Now we take it over to the bench press. Okay, so the bench press. It’s not an exercise that you want to avoid at any level. Especially as a hard gainer because it’s going to help you to start building more of that size. But you’ve got to do one thing for me, Jessie. You’ve got to do one thing for me, too. You’ve been doing one thing for me and that is, you’ve got to get over the small plate phobia. See, there’s nothing worse than heading to the gym and then getting ready to bench press and then all you can do is this: on the end of the bar.
Because you’d do anything to have people be able to see that big, 45 pounder on the outside so that even that girl is staring at you at the other side of the gym, at least she sees 145. She could imagine that there’s two, or three stacked on the inside of it, but you just want to get to the point where you can do the bigger plates. The biggest mistake is people doing that and not being able to – they’re monkey fucking the plates and the bar and they can’t get any good reps out. You’re defeating the entire purpose and that’s why your chest isn’t growing. So you have to start with a weight that you can control. But there is a way that you can incorporate heavier weights. It’s actually going to be necessary for neurologically waking up your muscles a little bit to help them feel more comfortable and confident in handling heavier weights. So what we do is we take the pins and we set them up high. I’m not concerned about depth, I’m not concerned about anything. What I want to do here is get a weight here that I’m going to adjust by 20% from what Jessie’s going to work with.
So if he’s working with 115 what we’ll do is we’ll get him up to 135 – again, a weight that he’s not going to try to lift because he’s not going to be able to do it so well since he’s just starting out. But instead what I want him to do is get comfortable with the weight in his hands. A touch up. So we get in here and all I want him to do is un-rack it. So for a few times he’s just going to un-rack and get it up over his chest. He adheres to the same principles of the chest, just up nice, holds it for a couple seconds, brings it back down. Again, a weight that he’s not necessarily comfortable repping out with. Do another one. He starts to feel more confident with the weight. Okay, put it down. Now after doing a couple of the un-pinnings here, now what he has to do is do one set. And I don’t care how – again, with the pins nice, and high – I don’t care how many reps he winds up doing. When he winds up failing, he comfortably is going to come down to the pins.
Eccentrically feel the weight all the way down. Get comfortable feeling what that weight feels like. Come on down. So now he’s going to lift up, gets in position here. Go ahead. And press up. There you go. Nice. All the way. Down slow. There. Okay, press, press, press. Down slow. Good. So that’s all he has to do. Do a rep, or two, or whatever it is to feel comfortable with that weight and then we’re going to go into his working weight. So now what I do is take his working weight, which is now instantly going to feel lighter because neurologically he’s commanded the weight that was heavier, he’s convinced himself that he can handle it. Maybe he’s not capable of handling it for full sets of reps, but from a confidence standpoint he can handle it. So now we get in here and now we do our working sets with this weight, which he could be in the six to eight rep range.
We’re trying to build strength here. But it’s a weight now that’s 20% less than what he just did and neurologically he turned himself on. That’s it. I won’t make you do the whole set. Just one more. It even feels a bit light from – go ahead, come on up – like the same way that a baseball player who would swing a donut on the end of a baseball bat would then go to the baseball bat itself and he neurologically turned that on. All right, we’ve got one more step here. Again, critical for getting hard gainers to start unlocking more size. Okay, last thing. Now we’re on a dip. Now what we want to make sure that you know how to do, and we could do this easily with the dip, is not just train to failure, but to learn how to take and train through failure. We talked about that. Again, as a hard gainer we tend to not understand what our true limits are and that usually holds u back. So on this exercise we can train him to failure, and then through failure by just using a band.
You can put a physio ball, push it inside this captain’s chair setup. But you just take a band, you press it down here, and you let it hand right in front of you. Now what Jessie’s going to do, he’s going to dip and then as soon as he reaches failure, where he would normally jump off the bar we’re going to teach him there’s more that you can do. There’s a drop set that you can do. You can actually extend failure. Take it to failure again via this band assisted dip. JESSIE: So just putting my knees on there. JEFF: Just put your knees on there. So go ahead. We’re going to keep them behind the band at first. Okay, adhering to all the proper principles of the dip. Shoulders stay back, he leads again with the chest. He’s squeezing here from the chest. He’s not shrugging his shoulders. We cover this in a lot of other videos. Keep going. I want to see you go all the way to failure here.
All right, one more if you’re there. Okay now put the knees right in. Get inside there. Now you’re going to go down and rep them out. We just took 60lbs off his bodyweight. Adhere to the same principles. Push all the way up. All the way up, all the way up, all the way up. Up, up, up, up, up, up, up, up. Okay, good. And down. So it could be another rep, or two, or three, but those are the productive reps because those are when he’s most fatigued. Those are when he would have quit and would have left them on the table. As a hard gainer we need to activate. We need to learn ways to feel heavier weight so we can get more confident in it and then we need to figure out ways that we can take it through our limits.
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