“How to train chest properly?”
“What mistakes could I be making?”
Two very common questions related to chest training and I’m sure you’ve asked yourself, at least once.
Does it produce the results you want it to? Or are you stuck lifting the same weights for months and your chest isn’t growing?
The key to effectively training your body is by trying different techniques, exercises and making sure you are progressively getting stronger.
In this post you’ll learn some of the biggest chest training mistakes and specific actions to take to avoid making them ever again.
Keep the Shoulders Down
As you do a dip and you lower yourself down, it’s easy to let your body weight sink you down by shrugging and moving your shoulders up. That’s a natural reaction of your body because it makes it easier for you to hold your own weight. Unfortunately that puts your chest muscles at a disadvantage and it takes the necessary load off them.
What you need to do is to always keep your shoulders down as you move up and down doing a dip. It’s not easy to do, but it’s not supposed to be easy and the harder it is for your chest the better.
You’re not keeping your chest up
Now there are admittedly different variations of dips.
If you lean forward more, it will emphasize your chest, whereas if you stay more upright it will emphasize your triceps.
That being said, too much forward lean isn’t good and can be the cause of torso pain if it happens too much.
To prevent this from happening, keep your chest tight and up, while making sure that your shoulders stay back.
You’re not locking out your elbows
At the end of each rep, you should lock out your elbows.
Contrary to what some guys think, this will actually help prevent injuring your joints.
It will also insure that you are completing full reps each time and not cheating.
Your Rest Intervals Are Way Off
So far we’ve covered a bit of ground when it comes to chest training mistakes and what you can do to fix them.I feel as if these are the most common ones and at the same time – there is very little information out there on how you can avoid them.
But I can’t finish this post without touching on one of the most important muscle-building factors: training intensity.
Let me clarify:
Lots of people think they’re training intensively but more ofthen than not – they are lying to themselves.They get too distracted and often end up resting way too long.This not only kills their momentum and makes them lose focus and sense of purpose but it also drastically reduces their training intensity.This leads to poor and inefficient workouts that don’t stimulate your muscles nearly as much as they should.
But how much time should you rest?
For your strength-oriented sets where you lift 80-85% of your 1 RM for 2-6 reps, you need sufficient rest so you can do the most amount of reps with the same weight set after set.This makes for better strength progress over time because you are overloading your muscles much more.Aim for 3-5 minutes.
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During sets where you do between 6 and 12 reps, normally in the middle of your workout, a good amount of rest to aim for is anything between 1 and 2 minutes, tops.
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And for high-rep, end-of-the-workout finishers such as cable flyes for your chest, you should keep the intensity at peak levels and rest no more than 60 seconds.This is a good time to include 2-3 sets to failure and even 1-3 dropsets if you are past the beginner stage of lifting.
Keep Your Shoulders Back
Remember how you do your chest press. You keep your shoulders down and back by squeezing your traps together. This is exactly what you should be doing with dips as well. It’s not easy, and it puts the maximum load on your chest which is exactly what we want.
Not only that, it takes off the unnecessary load off your shoulder joints which otherwise can lead to injuries.