Guys love to train their chests. So much so, in fact, that they’ll spend an hour or more on it, pounding their pecs with so many sets that they look enormous by the time they leave the gym. As soon as their “pump” deflates, however, they’re left with the same sunken chests they’ve always had—and a lot of soreness. Our plan trains your chest twice as hard in half as long and yields results you keep.
Actually, the chest component of each workout takes only about 10 minutes to complete. You’ll hit it hard using supersets and tri-sets with little rest in between, then train the rest of your body in the remaining 20 minutes. This will allow you to maintain size and strength everywhere else, as well as cause the release of muscle-building hormones that will enhance the results you see in your chest.
The first workout starts with a modified tri-set for the chest, designed to pump your pecs and stretch the connective tissue that surrounds them, thereby allowing more room under your skin for the muscles to grow. The second chest blast is done by pairing pushups with very heavy sets of dumbbell bench presses. Though you’ll be brutally sore afterward, the combination of high and low reps will flush an enormous amount of blood into your chest and maximize the recruitment of your biggest muscle fibers, setting the stage for big gains.
On the third day, you’ll do a variation on an old bodybuilding technique called “running down the rack.” You’ll perform dumbbell bench presses on an incline bench, flat bench, and then decline bench without rest in between. Instead of lightening the load on each set and reducing the demand on your muscles (the way the technique is normally done), you’ll simply change the angle from incline to flat to decline—this puts you in progressively stronger mechanical positions, so you can keep the superset going without having to stop or switch dumbbells.
Directions
Frequency: Perform each workout (Days I, II, and III) once per week, resting at least a day between each session.
How to do it: Perform the exercises marked uppercase A and B, or uppercase A, B, and C, as a modified superset or tri-set, as prescribed. That means you’ll complete one set for each exercise in order, resting or not resting as prescribed between sets. So you’ll do one set of A, then one set of B, and repeat, or one set of A, B, and then C. Rest after the last exercise in the group, and then repeat the process for the prescribed number of sets. Perform the remaining exercises as straight sets, completing all the prescribed sets for one exercise before moving on to the next.
Weight: Except where otherwise noted, use the heaviest weight that allows you to complete all the prescribed repetitions for a given set.
