How I Added ½ Inch to My Chest in 8 Weeks

Posted May 29, 2008 at 03:00 PM by Donnell Peavy

Section: His Fitness, Strength Training, His Health, Physical Health, Lifestyle Health, His Inspiration, Success Stories

As you guys may know by now, I regularly enter the group fitness contests sponsored by my gym. My most recent undertaking was a contest called “beach body”, in which we were given 8 weeks to see who could make the most drastic change in their body. I wasn’t particularly interested in winning this contest, but I did want to make a change – I wanted to increase the size of my chest. Today’s post contest assessment informed me that I lost 3lbs, dropped my body fat percentage, lost an inch on my abs…and gained half an inch on my chest.

I group my workouts into push, pull and leg days, so my “chest day” also includes triceps and deltoid work. Of those exercises, four of them target the chest in some way – flat bench press, pullovers, close grip bench press and dips. Unlike many people, I don’t do incline, decline and flat bench presses. In all actuality, I don’t see the point of it. If you look at a diagram of the pectoral muscles, you will notice that the “upper”, “inner” and “lower” pectorals are so close together that there is no way you can work one portion without working all of them, but I digress. I wanted to increase strength as well as mass, so I kept my rep range between 2 and 8, but performed a lot of sets in an attempt to induce growth.

After my warm up sets, I jumped straight to 95% of my max for three sets of two repetitions. Once that was done, I dropped to 80% of my max for 10 sets of 5 – 10 reps, whichever I was able to complete. I finished with one wide grip set of my warm up weight for as many reps as I was able to complete. I didn’t have any special system in mind for the pullovers – I just picked a weight that felt good for 3 sets of 8.

My triceps work consisted of triceps press downs, dips and skull crushers performed in a super set for five sets. Once my tris were nice and tired, I finished them off with two sets of close grip bench presses.

During the 8 week period, I added half an inch to my chest and my bench press max increased 10 pounds, finally putting me over the 300 mark again. Quite naturally, I can’t guarantee that this routine will work for everyone, but it gave me positive results. Try it out and let me know how it worked for you.