Pumping Iron

Many bodybuilders believe that to emphasise the chest when bench pressing one should flare the elbows out to the side, stick your chest out and have a slight arch in your back that is in accordance to the natural curvature of your spine.

For bodybuilding purposes you should not tuck your elbows into your torso or have a big arch in your back. This is a powerlifting technique designed to spread the load across chest, shoulders and triceps. The purpose of the exaggerated arch is to reduce the distance you need to lower and lift the barbell. Both of these techniques enable you to lift more weight but do not necessarily do favours for your physique.

Grip width affects where on the chest the emphasis will be placed. A grip where the hands are over the elbows when the upper arm is parallel to the ground puts most of the emphasis on the mid and outer pectoral strands of muscle.

A grip wider than this will put the primary emphasis on the outer chest fibers.

A close grip stimulates the inner chest. The trick here is to push your hands towards one another continously throughout each rep positive and negative without actually moving your hands. The tension will cause your inner pectoral fibers to contract. Try to lift the barbell on the strength of this contraction rather than pushing the bar up with your triceps strength.

The bench angle also has an affect on where on the chest the muscle-building stress is placed. A decline angle puts stress on the lower chest, flat on the middle and incline on the upper chest. Many benches can be angled at more than just three settings. The pectorals are a fan shaped muscles with a multitude of fibers stretched across your upper torso.  The advantage of using a variety of angles is that you can stimulate all the fibers.

Some say that where on your chest you lower the bar also has a bearing on where the stimulation is aimed. This is most noticeable when the bench is in the neutral or flat position. Lowering the bar to the lower area of the chest will tend to stress those parts of the chest whereas if you lower the bar to your neck or upper chest the stress will go there.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 27th, 2008 at 11:30 am and is filed under Training. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.