Develop Your Upper Pecs With These Steps
If you’re like most people, your upper chest will be one of your weakest muscle groups. The upper chest can be one of the most stubborn muscle groups to develop. You’ll need much more than a vanilla chest workout program to develop your upper pecs.
Making a single adjustment will not be enough to see positive progress. You’ll need to make a series of modifications to ignite new muscle growth and make your upper pecs show improvement.
Train Your Upper Pecs At The Beginning of Your Chest Workout
Most people train their upper pecs later in their chest workout when the fatigue starts to kicks in. You should make it a point to train your weaker muscle groups at the beginning of your workouts while you’re fresh and full of energy.
Depleting ATP (Adenosine Triphosphate) stores can reduce the overall effect of the exercises on your upper pecs. If you train your upper pecs later in your workouts, you might not have the best mind-muscle connection and the resulting pump.
Use Advanced Training Principles
Many people stick to the stock training programs of 3 sets of 12-10-8 repetitions. If you follow this workout for too long, your body will get accustomed to it and will stop showing progress.
You should include at least one advanced training principle like the drop-sets, super-sets, intra-set stretching, BFR training, etc. in your workouts. You need to keep your muscles guessing in order for them to grow bigger and stronger.
Thanks to the advancement in exercise science, there are enough advance training principles that you can employ a new one in your workouts every week for a long period of time.
Show Your Upper Chest Some Love on Shoulder Day
It’s common practice amongst gym-goers to train their weaker muscle groups twice a week. For instance, if an individual has weaker biceps, he might train his biceps on Monday with his triceps and on Thursday with his back.
Most people don’t follow the same approach with their chest and reserve their pec training to a single day. If you have a lagging upper chest, you should do a few sets of incline bench work on your shoulder day.
You could do some incline bench presses, dumbbell flyes at the end of a shoulder workout or modify your military shoulder presses to target your upper pecs by using a 75-80-degree incline bench. You’ll be destroying two targets with a single arrow with the second approach.
Change Your Rep Tempo
You need to constantly shock your muscles into growing and changing your rep tempos is one of the best ways of doing it. Most people follow the vanilla (1:1:1:1) rep tempo where they take one second each to lower the weight, pause at the bottom, elevate and pause at the top respectively.
Modifying the rep tempo and following something like (4:2:1:2) can change the entire dynamics of your workouts and wake your upper pecs from hibernation. There can be a million combinations of the rep tempos and you should keep experimenting with them.
Header image courtesy of Envato Elements
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