FACT or FICTION: Inner Chest Exercises (Middle Chest Myth!)

The A-X System - Where broscience ends and real science produces fast gains - http://athleanx.com/x/serious-training-serious-results

What’s up, guys? Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX. COM. Today let’s talk about something I call the Middle Chest Myth. Can you influence or have an impact on preferentially, the inner portion of the pec when you’re training your pecs?

Right. The big myth here is guys that you can’t. See, I’m an actual believer that you can. If you don’t believe me, let’s try a quick demo together. Grab some sort of a band or even use your own arm against your own resistance and what we’re going to do is, we’re going to take our arm through the function of the pec.

We’re going to get it out in front of us, as if at the end of a press, and then we’re going to horizontally abduct and bring it across our body. Now, what accounts for the fact that I can be in a contracted position, so, for those that say, it’s all or none contraction, I am in a contracted pec position here, k. But as I continue and continue and continue, you can see there’s more and more fibers literally you can feel the wave if you do this yourself. I’m out here in front, I’m across, in abduction, you can see the arm is in front of my body, but yet as I continue and continue and continue, you can literally see the wave of contraction increase here across my chest. So, what accounts for that?

Well, let’s take a look at the anatomy. As we take a look inside, again, the function there guys is we know that the pectoralis major is going to take our upper arm, our humerus, and drag it and bring it across our body because of the orientation of the fibers. You can see here as I demonstrate on Raymond. But now let’s come back out and see what’s really going on, and it’s all about the fibers and more importantly, the fiber type. So, you’ll see as we showed on Raymond there, you’ve got your fibers that go from the sternum here, this would be our inner chest that we’re mostly concerned about.

Our sternum attaching to the area up here on our humerus, k. So, all will run in this direction. What you don’t see is that not every single muscle fiber, this is the key point, connects from an attachment, an origin attachment, ok. It doesn’t have a tendon, a belly, and a tendon attachment. There’s something called non spanning muscle fibers, and they don’t just exist here in the pecs, but this is a great example of why we need to look a little bit deeper sometimes to understand why things actually occur, or more so, why things occur that we already know occur because if you tried that demonstration already, you know that you can feel an increased contraction on the inside portion of your pec but some people would just swear to you that there’s no such thing, that you can only look at the upper and lower, but you can’t have an influence on the inner.

That’s not right because these non spanning fibers, guys, actually sit in and reside inside again, the muscle belly, and they taper off and they actually dive into the belly here. So, you got a lot that actually stay right there. Well, guess what? If it’s not attached to another tendon on the other side, how the hell are these actually contracting and contributing to the force? The way that happens, guys, is the fact that these fibers get pulled along for the ride as the motion occurs at the joint here, in the shoulder joint, as the motion occurs and brings the arm across the chest because what happens is, each one of these non spanning fibers is surrounded, ok, surrounded by a muscle sheath that is very sticky on its surface, ok.

There’s different proteins on the surface that actually make it somewhat sticky so that when these long spanning fibers contract and pull down and come through, they actually grab hold of these non spanning fibers which then can contribute to the force. See, a lot of people are under the misunderstanding that all force is generated through a mild tendinous element, like the myo is the muscle portion and the tendon is origin/insertion. That’s not true. We have a lot of connective tissue from our myofascial that’s around the muscles to then these inner sheaths, this endomysium here that’s around these smaller muscle fibers themselves. They will contribute to the force as well.

So, again, you’re pulling them along for the ride. Let me show you another demonstration of exactly how this works. Alright guys, so let’s do a quick demonstration. What I have here is a piece of tape, ok. This tape is going to be our spanning fibers, the ones that go from our arm over here all the way to our sternum on the inside of the chest, ok.

So, what you’re looking at now is the non spanning fibers that sort of just sit around on the inside of the muscle belly itself. As this thing contracts, so we’re going to contract it, we’re going to take it from the outside of the arm and as we cross here, across the body, and pull ourselves into that abduction across our chest, you’ll see that it’s contracting, contracting, contracting, and it’s picking up these muscle fibers as we go, ok. You’re seeing that it’s grabbing these fibers as it goes, and it’s involving them now in the contraction. They can contribute to the overall force. In the beginning, they weren’t doing anything.

They were just sort of sitting around here until the contraction became large enough to pick them up and bring them along for the ride. So, it’s another added support for actually taking your exercises through a full range of motion, but on top of that, it’s actually adding a lot more force and overall a lot more strength to every exercise that you do. So, you see, it’s this added effect that allows these non spanning fibers to actually start contributing. The further and further into contraction that you go, the more and more of them that become involved and sort of dragged into the action. And that’s what’s going to allow us to increase the contractile force and increase our ability to influence fibers that we never thought we had influence on before.

Matter of fact, these fibers contribute so much to the overall strength and development that when they do things like fasciotomies and they actually take the fascia off of a muscle, even that alone on the outer level dramatically decreases the strength that can be produced by the muscle itself. So, we know in science that this happens. We just have to make sure that we’re not listening to all the ‘Bro’ Science out there that says, ‘Guys, you can’t target your inner chest. The only thing you can do is upper and lower. ’ It’s the same reason why in other exercises I’ve shown you guys, you can see, you can feel the difference as you actually execute the moves.

Here, I’m showing you what we’ve got what you guys have named the Cavaliere Crossover. Right. This is where we drag the arm up into a shrug but also an abduction at the same time where you can clearly see the innervation, the activation of the upper and inner chest. The same thing with our 3D Crossover here. You guys have seen this plenty of times now.

Again, as I get across the body and then further into rotation, I can actually elicit a stronger and stronger contraction and yet again, you can see the influence that is has on these inner chest fibers as I’m able to activate them even more. Alright, and an old classic one, our X-Crossover, again, one more time, showing that added activation of the inner chest as we continue to bring the arm through a greater range of motion because we’re picking up more and more of these non spanning fibers. So you guys see, we have our t-shirts, right? It’s PhysX, Bitch. We talk about it all the time.

In this case, ‘It’s Anatomy, Bitch. ’ We know that if you apply the sciences, whether it be anatomy, whether it be physics, k, whatever if you start putting the science back in strength, you’re going to see that a lot of that Bro Science will go away. And I think it’s time that