Chest Exercises Ranked (BEST TO WORST!)
There are so many chest exercises, but which ones should you be focusing your efforts on if you want to build a bigger chest and increase your strength? In this video, I’m going to give you the most popular chest exercises ranked from worst to best and help you to determine which you should be doing
And so even though I love Arnold, the Bench Fly still gets the big red X.
What’s up, guys, Jeff Cavaliere, athleanx. com. So, what you see behind me is a bunch of different chest exercises likely that you recognize because you re wither doing them right now, or you ve done them in the past. However, today I’m going to rank them from the worst to the best so you can be sure that you’re only focusing on the ones that give you the gains that you’re after. So, by the time this video is over, you’re going to want to keep some of these and others that you’re going to want to kind of just throw away.
So that being said, let’s start ranking them one by one. All right, so as we work our way from the bottom up, it’s important to point out that the exercises are placed into these categories for a reason. There are some criteria that goes into selecting where an exercise will fall. For instance, we want to make sure this is an exercise that can actually deliver results. But we don’t want it to be something that is insufficient and being able to challenge you into cause growth.
We also want to select exercises or favor those that are multidimensional. They are good for building muscle, but they’re also capable of delivering good strength gains. We’re going to favor those. We also have some exercises that are just downright dumb. We’ll get to those too, and then we have the exercises that kind of invite injury risk.
And that’s something we want to avoid, especially if we have better, safer options. And that’s why we start at the bottom of the list right here with the Bench Fly. Now, look, I understand that Arnold loved this exercise, but just because he loved the Fly and I love Arnold doesn’t mean that I have to love the Fly. Not because I want to dislike the exercise, but more so that my physical therapy background tells me that there’s reasons to dislike it. When you perform it on a bench in this unsupported way with no safety net, you increase the risk of damage to the anterior shoulder capsule.
That is something that you don’t want to damage ever, because it’s very hard to repair and restore normal mechanics after that happens. Not to mention increased risk of pec tear that happens because of the extreme positioning of your arms during this exercise. Again, all of this negated most of all by the fact that there are better alternatives to this that I will cover for you later on down this list. The fact is, for all these reasons, guys, I have to put the big red X first and foremost through the Bench Fly. All right.
So next up in the category of worst is one that might actually come as a surprise to you, because you know how often I like to train on my feet, if at all possible. But it’s the Standing Cable Press. The issue with the Standing Cable Press is it provides more of a challenge to your core than the muscles you re actually trying to build. And just getting into this position here with any type of heavy weight is going to make my abs work much harder to make sure that I don’t fall backwards when I’m doing the movement. And even if I do this out of a split stance where I’m leaning, my weight forward is still not optimal if I’m going to press the weight that’s necessary to cause that overload and growth that we’re looking for.
For all these reasons, guys the Standing Cable Press is just not the best press to do when you’re looking for gains in your chest. So, a couple of big red Xs on the board behind me. We’re still not out of the worst category yet. Here we have to throw in the Incline Bench Press. Now, wait, before you riot, understand that just like size matters, angle matters too—a lot.
And when it comes to the Incline Bench Press what angle are you setting it at, because it really matters in terms of the gains that you see from the exercise, especially up here in the upper chest. We know that the front delt and the upper chest fiber’s share not only a close proximity to each other anatomically, but they share some function too. Well, we know that if we were to get completely upright, we would shift the majority of that function to the front delt, as we would in an Overhead Press. And if we got completely horizontal, most of the work would be done by the chest. Well, that being said, we have to find that happy medium.
And once you cross 50, 55 or 60 degrees, you’re actually starting to go into that realm of less work for the chest and more for the front delts which is not why you’re doing the exercise in the first place. If you want to maximize your gains on the Incline Bench Press, we’re going to choose a lower angle, we’ll cover that one later. But for now, the 60-degree Incline Bench Press has to get the big red X.
No time hasn’t made it any better, it’s still fucking stupid. So, now those gladly behind us I get to break out my blue marker as we work our way up the rankings into the Better Category. I say better, not best, because there’s still some limitations here that I think it’s important for you to be aware of. And we have to start right here with the king of all of the better exercises, it s the Pushup. And I say the basic pushup because the basic pushup is oftentimes, as I pointed out in our major criteria in the beginning of this video, not challenging enough.
It’s just simply not driving enough of a stimulus to cause change in the size of your chest because you can do too many of them. If you’re ripping off 30, 40 or 50 repetitions per set, there are variations that are going to provide a better challenge in the basic pushup no longer is it. Now, if you’re a beginner who’s still getting challenged by this exercise, then by all means you continue to build your strength up with it before you move on. But that being said, guys, most of us are beyond the point now where this is where we should be focusing our efforts. So, for that reason, I got to give it a Better listing, but not Best yet because we know there’s better variations to come.
So, since Betters are all about improvement, let’s go back to those flys again, because I wouldn’t leave you hanging, I wanted to give you an improved version of it or a safer version of it. And for that, we have to look at the Floor Fly. I’m a much bigger fan of this exercise because it gives us a chance to have resisted adduction, but we get a chance to do it in a safer setting with the floor acting as the safety net protecting that anterior shoulder because we don’t have those extreme ranges of motion at the bottom. Now, some would argue you don’t get the same amount of stretch, but I don’t even know if that’s the real benefit of the Fly anyway. Beyond that, we do get to increase the weight that we use on a Floor Fly versus the weight that we can handle to ensure that safety on a Bench Fly.
And for that, we can create more overload with this in an eccentric manner, which is going to give us an opportunity for more growth. For all these reasons, the Better version of the fly is definitely the Floor Fly. And wrapping up our better category here is an often-overlooked exercise that I believe deserves a second look, and it’s the Underhand Dumbbell Bench Press. And the best thing about this exercise is it provides those that don’t have access to an incline bench to still work their upper chest, especially better than that 60-degree incline dumbbell bench press. EMG studies have actually shown superior activation of those chest fibers during the underhand version rather than too high of an incline press.
That being said, it doesn’t come without its limitations. Namely the fact that you’r