Build a Big Chest with Bands (NO WEIGHTS!)
If you want to build a big chest with bands and did not think it was possible, then this is the video for you. Here, I’m going to show you the best ways to build a bigger chest using just resistance bands and no weights. In times of gym closures and an increase in the number of people doing home che
I used to work out a lot with weights, and the check comes due on that, your joints start to hurt, this, back, knees, it just happens. Sometimes getting into that kind of shape can kill you. There’s fantastic trainers like Jeff Cavaliere on Athlean-X, his videos are amazing. But at my age, I found the hardest, toughest, most productive way is bands. Training with bands.
I can’t argue with a thing he said.
What’s up, guys? Jeff Cavaliere. Athleanx. com. Look, I am not one to ever argue with Sylvester Stallone.
As a matter of fact, anybody that’s followed me knows he was my childhood inspiration for doing what I do today. So to hear those words come from him is literally the pinnacle of what it means to me to do what I’m doing right now. That being said, the bands, and the comment about bands, guys. I am putting together a whole new series here for you starting today on the best exercises you could do with bands. Because I think they’re one of the most underappreciated, underutilized tools that we should all be using.
Not just as we get older, but right now, to make better gains. Today, it all starts with the chest exercises, guys, the eight best. Let’s start breaking them down one-by-one. And we start it right off here guys with a powerful one that’s going to make you feel a chest contraction like maybe never before. All with the use of just a single band and it’s called the saw.
It’s not a crossover. Okay, a crossover would take your arm out in front of your body, but that invites a lot more shoulder into the exercise. We want to limit this as much as we can to the chest to enhance the work done by the chest. So with the saw setup, you take a band like this, you anchor it about chest height to something sturdy, you put your hand inside the band with the elbow locked in place. Because what you want to do is allow the elbow to power your arm to drive across the chest.
Again, it’s not about getting your arm away from your chest, you simply just drive your hand across your body into adduction. If we can drive this even an extra inch you’ll feel even more of a contraction. Speaking of adduction, one of my favorite ways to actually include it into a more standard exercise that you can do at home or anywhere, like a push-up, is to simply anchor the band to a low point here, grab hold of it, and then perform this crossover push-up. And you can see that I perform a regular push-up unaltered, but as I come to the top, I’m able to take my arm, reach it across my body against the resistance of the band to get that resisted adduction and increase the overall effect on my chest. It’s a simple modification to a standard exercise, but it results in bigger dividends for you in your chest gains.
Exercise number three while we’re talking about push-ups is actually just a resistant push-up. And a lot of people have probably done this before, but are you doing it the right way? See, what I like to do is turn this more into a speed pressing exercise. So I take the band, then I wrap it around my body, and I have good resistance at the top of the exercise. As I push up, I’m encountering more and more force.
My goal is to drive you into full extension of your elbows as powerfully and as quickly as possible. If you just take it you go at a slow pace, I think you lose a lot of the benefits of the movement. Now we don’t have to restrict ourselves to just a push-up on the floor. If you have access to a bench, and you want to turn this into a more standard bench press feel, then you simply anchor the band under the bench like this, take hold of each side of the loop, and then again, drive your hands up over your body with power and speed. Don’t make this a slow exercise.
The faster you go, the faster you’ll start to see better benefits from it. Now if the more traditional standing version of a banded bench press is something you’re looking to do, then exercise number four is tailor-made for you with one very important modification. You see, we call this the wrap around press. So you take the band, and once again, you anchor it to something behind you. What you do though is you allow your elbows to flare out a bit to the side, which is actually a natural pressing position for a standard bench press anyway.
But what’s important about this is it creates the sort of wrap around or the corner effect that the band has to go around, which will actually introduce some adduction stresses to the exercise too, those all-important adduction stresses. So what I do is instead of having my elbows tucked to my side and pressing straight out, by just flaring them a little bit you can see that now the band wraps around the corner of my delt, and that right there provides the resistance that I need as I bring my hands across into adduction. You can actually see the resistance in the band change as it gets a little slack when I pull into adduction where we’re getting both the elements of pushing our hands away and across that makes this a better version of a standing press. So as we head into exercise number five, you might be asking yourself, This is great, Jeff, but what do I do for my upper chest? Actually, there’s s few things you could do that are tailor-made, and actually maybe even better with bands than potentially with a dumbbell version.
And this is called the upper chest pullover. And I’ve shown this to you before on how effective it is to change a traditional lat exercise to more of an upper chest exercise by modifying the position of our hands as we do it. But the band actually does this even better. Because I hook my hands in this position on the bands, and what I’m trying to do is actually squeeze the back of my hands together, creating internal rotation. Now you might be saying, Wait, Jeff, an internal rotation, that never happens.
Most of the times it wouldn’t, but we’re not actually going into elevation, we’re actually bringing our arms down away from elevation, while we get into internal rotation so we’re not looking at the same impingement stresses that we might get. But it will do is it gets that squeeze, again, in adduction with our arms operating in that same position that they would be in a normal incline bench press. So we’re getting that better activation of the clavicular fibers of the upper chest. Give this one a try, guys, I promise you the banded pullover will light your upper chest up like never before. And with exercise number six, we’re going to stick with that upper chest.
This one’s called the prone punch-out. And what it is, is basically simulating the same line of push that we would have in a traditional incline dumbbell press, except we do this down on the floor. And as we press the arm out in front of us, I’m almost dragging it across the floor. Of course it’s off the ground, but I’m keeping it low, because what I’m trying to simulate here guys is this: the same angle here. Because whether I’m down here on the ground, if I sit up, you can see that this is actually the same angle of push that we would have on a traditional dumbbell or barbell incline press.
That’s the way we’re going to hit the upper chest here, guys. And just because you’re using bands, it doesn’t mean you have to compromise that goal. So now I’m six exercises down, two to go. We’ve talked about the upper chest, we’ve talked about the middle chest. How do we hit the lower chest or the abdominal head?
Well, we know we can do dips to do that, and the best thing about bands is they take dips, and they make them a lot better. If we want to, we can use them in an assiste