4 Tips To Improve Your Push Workout & Build A Bigger Chest – Built for Athletes™

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Splitting your workouts up by different movement patterns is an effective way of organising a training routine. A lot of athletes like this way of working, using a push day to work their chest and shoulders - an area of importance for many of us. But after a number of weeks in a structured training plan, it’s common to have some stagnation and to feel like your progression has stopped. Changing or just altering your training stimulus can signal new adaptations and ensure you continue growing as an athlete. Here are four tips you can use to make sure your push day is as effective as possible. Change Your Angles The pectoralis major is the largest muscle in the upper body, and you need to use different angled movements to target each part effectively. To do this, make sure you are incorporating both incline and decline variants of push exercises. With the bench press, for example, you can use a flat bench to activate the lower and upper parts of the pecs, but an incline bench will help you target the upper part more specifically while a decline bench focuses on the lower portion. Factoring in all three variations will ensure you maximise growth. Time Under Tension Increasing time under tension is one of the best ways to improve strength as well as muscle hypertrophy. You can incorporate this into your routine by slowing down each rep so the muscle is contracted for a longer duration. Using slightly less weight for more reps is a more effective way of achieving an increase in size for some bodybuilders because it increases overall time under tension throughout a workout. Do Push Workouts Twice A Week If growing your chest is one of your big goals, then working it twice per week is an effective way to speed up development. This is also a useful way of making sure you cover all rep ranges because you can use one session to lift heavy and another to focus on lighter work. That way, both type 1 and type two muscle fibres get a stimulus. Build Strength To Build Size Even though growth might be your long-term goal, you can use advances in strength to achieve it. Focus on slowly building strength session by session, week by week. Aim to gradually improve the number of reps you can do at each weight and your one-rep max on an exercise that targets the chest, like the bench press. This will build the foundation you need to get bigger.