The chest represents one of the main areas that beginning bodybuilders are particularly interested in developing; its basically a 'show' bodypart, in common with the arm muscles. Training the chest also involves an exercise with which the general public is quite well aware of, i.e. the bench press. If somebody realises you work-out with weights and want to know how strong you are, chances are that they'll ask you how much you can bench. However, there is a lot more to obtaining good chest development than just benching on a flat bench, as we will see.....

Muscle Size and Strength.... It is important for a beginner to develop a good strength foundation through the use of barbell and/or dumbbell flat/decline and incline bench presses. These are basically 'compound' movements that bring into play many different muscles in the performance of the exercise, and allow large poundages to be used, relative to the strength of the trainee, leading to the greatest possible growth stimulation of the targeted muscles. Compound movements also have the advantage of strengthening many of the muscles involved in stabilising the body during the execution of a movement, in addition to the 'prime mover' muscles. . In general terms, you should realise that in terms of basic mass training, a bigger muscle is a stronger muscle. The performance of isolation movements, in which a muscle or muscle group is exercised in isolation, simply are not effective in building large amounts of lean body mass; the training load is simply not great enough. In a nutshell, you can't build a big chest, or any other area of your body, with isolation movements alone.

The Muscles of the Chest....... The muscles of the chest, the pectorals, can be thought of as consisting of two main areas for the purposes of training, i.e. the upper and lower chest comprising the pectoralis minor and pectoralis major, respectively. Also involved in many of the pressing movements for the chest are the front deltoid muscles of the shoulder and the triceps of the upper arm. Stabilising muscles and muscles which rotate the scapulae (shoulder blades) are also involved. The upper chest is mainly targeted via movements done on an incline bench, while the lower chest is worked through flat or decline bench and parallel bar dip-type movements. (Coming Soon - Part 2)