Chest Building Variations

So you been banging away at the weights for a while & you’re doing ok,

You’re building some muscle in the right places

& feeling decent about yourself… Then BANG

Progress stops, or god forbid even goes backwards

Suddenly the workouts you were doing aren’t doing it for you anymore

Your muscles aren’t growing & your weights are stuck at the same point for a couple blocks of training (6-12 weeks)

So what the fuck do you do?

Well you keep going at it of course, pushing yourself through sessions making sure you’re getting the work done cos surely if you keep doing what you’re doing you’ll make progress…

But no… Nothing, Nada… Zero progress

So now your motivation drops and you cant really be fucked to put the work in no more cos obviously everyone making progress is on the roids.

So you go & take them yourself, get massive & live happily ever after…

The End.

Actually there’s another option.

Assuming your programming is pretty decent and you’re already taking advantage of the simplicity of progressive overload… For a continued time I might add.

Then adding some variations to your exercises may provide you the kick start you need to smash through a plateu, pack some muscle on & avoid becoming a “Yeah but he’s on the gear” judgemental douchebag.

Here’s some variations you can try. The explanations are brief as I don’t really like typing & you’ll probably just skip to the videos anyway. Plus I know you don’t care how smart I am (which is obviously very) and just wanna see what to do.

So….

Adding pauses into your sets

A great way to increase the tension to a lift.

Adding volume into your sets

Metabolic stress to the muscle will be high with this high volume variation.

Keeping tension in the muscle

Again metabolic stress will be high by avoiding the muscle ‘resting’ at the lockout part of the rep.

Adding an instability challenge

Technically the stress to the muscle could actually be lower due the unstable nature of this variation. So you’ll need to include a more traditional strength exercise as well but… Added motivation of varied equipment may help to get your ass in the gym which obviously has a knock on effect…