Keeping your back straight, push your hands into the ground so that your torso lifts upwards off the floor. Make sure your hands, wrists, and elbows stay in a straight line throughout the movement. With a slight bend in your elbows, lower your arms laterally until you feel a stretch in your chest. It’s also important to not put too much strain on your shoulders — as this can increase your risk of developing a rotator cuff injury. Make sure your technique is correct and the weight is not too heavy — no ego lifting. The machine chest fly is identical to the peck deck and cable flyes.
Chest Workout for Strength
Next, we’re going to incorporate more shoulder flexion into the previous push-up. You can do this by simply elevating your feet onto a platform. And can, again, progress this by adding more external resistance with a bag or with a band.
pushups
If you feel too much stress in your shoulders, avoid descending too low. Don’t force your chest onto the ground right away, but increase your range of motion slowly, instead. While the same muscles are at play, the inherent difference between standard push-ups and plyometric push-ups is that the latter require a higher velocity force production to get your hands off the floor. In short, the muscles have to produce more force per rep in order to generate enough acceleration and subsequent velocity to leave the floor.
Muscles Worked in Push-Ups
This is because the pecs are attached to your ribs, which expand with every breath. Lastly, although you might not realize it, you use your pecs a lot during daily activities. Anything that involves lifting, holding, squeezing or pushing requires your chest, so it definitely doesn’t hurt to have a little extra strength in that area of your upper body. If possible, supplement bodyweight chest workouts with workouts in the gym if you’re looking to build muscle and increase strength.
#6: Medicine Ball Push-Ups
Standard incline bench presses put your hips in a flexed—or bent—position, says Rusin. This basically takes your entire lower body out of the exercise, which isn’t always what you want. By elevating the bench just a little bit, you can incorporate leg drive into the movement in the same way you do (or should) perform a flat barbell bench press. This effectively turns the move into a full-body exercise, which will allow you to handle more weight. But if benching hurts your shoulders, you train at home without a trusty spotter, or you’ve found that barbell training just doesn’t give you a bigger chest, dumbbell work is the answer. In this article, we will guide you through some of the best dumbbell chest exercises and chest workouts with dumbbells.

You don’t need supplements to build muscle, lose fat, and get healthy. But the right ones can help.
Keeping your head up and abdominal muscles engaged, bend your knees and slightly push your bum to the rear as you lower down. When you touch the seat, hold for a second (not rest) then return to standing. We’ve removed the guesswork by focusing on a simple but madmuscles vs centr proven approach using effective movements that build strength and improve endurance.
. Barbell Row
- “With good posture comes better breathing, improved digestion, and circulation,” she says.
- When doing bodyweight chest workouts to increase mass and size, try to complete your sets to failure since you will not have external resistance to work with.
- If you have occasional low back pain, do crunches with care — move slowly and start with just a few reps.
- Then lower your arms on both sides in a wide arc until you feel a stretch in your chest and then bring the dumbbells back up.
- If possible, we recommend doing this exercise with dumbbells rather than a barbell.
- Extend the arms above your chest, shoulder-width apart but keep your elbows flexible at all times (do not lock your elbows).
Sit down on a flat bench with a dumbbell in each hand resting on your thighs. Dumbbell flies, are an isolation exercise and are usually performed after big compound lifts, like the bench and incline press. Unlike most chest fly variations, where you maintain a slight elbow bend, the objective during a pec deck fly is to keep your arms bent.
Resistance Band Chest Fly

Since your shoulders are more internally rotated and less externally rotated, you’ll take some of the pressure off your shoulder joints. Lie on your back with your knees bent and feet on the floor and hold dumbbells straight up over your chest.2. With a slight bend in your elbow, open your arms wide out to the side.
Inter IKEA Launches Electric Truck Fleet to Decarbonize Heavy-Duty Logistics in Italy
Dumbbells are particularly useful because bringing your arms together at the top can lead to better activation of the upper pectoral head (4). That said, despite its good overloading potential, you won’t get as much out of the movement if you don’t track your progress and aim to improve. The Hevy app lets you easily monitor your performance on each lift you log and display the data on customizable graphs. You can also reference the previous workout values to see what you did last session and determine what you should do now to make progress. Bench presses are an excellent compound movement because they target the chest, offer a good range of motion, and have excellent overloading potential.
Chest workout at home with dumbbells
“Dips are deceptively useful — they really stretch out your chest and help you build functional strength,” Dickson notes. Of course, having chest pain isn’t always a sign that your ticker’s in trouble. Tracking your workouts keeps you focused, motivated, and moving forward. If you’re not writing things down, you’re basically guessing your way through every session. You don’t need supplements to build muscle, lose fat, and get healthy. Step forward more to increase the resistance or step back to decrease the resistance.