How to Fix Your “FLAT” Chest (PANCAKE PECS!)

If you have been wondering how to fix a flat chest and build up those pancake pecs, you’ve come to the right place. In this video, I am going to show you how you can fix a flat chest with not just the right chest exercise selections, but how to perform these exercises the right way. Remember, it’s n

If you’ve got pancake pecs and want to turn them into a chisel chest or even something like this, better known as tigle bitties, you got to do the right exercises. And guys, you got to do them the right way. And it starts right here with a dumbbell bench press. And yeah, I assume you’re doing a lot of dumbbell bench pressing right now, but your chest is still flat. Likely because you’re deprioritizing your chest and you’re making your shoulders do more of the work.

And there’s two things that you can do here that will fix this for you. First is going to be the speed of the repetition that you’re performing on the bench press. And second is going to be the position of your head as you lower the dumbbells. First of all, when it comes to the position of your head, you’re going to allow yourself to just lift even just one or two inches off of the bench as you lower the dumbbells down. And all that’s doing is setting the stage for what’s going to happen during the press itself.

Because naturally, I’m going to want to put my head back in contact with the bench along with it my shoulders, which is going to give me the leverage and the counterforce necessary to drive those dumbbells away from me. But what’s happening most importantly is is putting the chest and the pecs out in that prime position as the main drivers of the movement. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not lifting to the point where I’m straining my neck. We’re talking about a simple 1 to 2 in. As a matter of fact, I would argue that those that keep their head in contact with the bench the whole time and drive down from there actually place more potential strain on their neck than those that are actually doing this simple lift.

Now, when it comes to the speed of your press, that’s the second thing you’re going to want to focus on. You need to try to become as explosive as possible. Even if you’re using heavier weights, you want to try to move the weight as fast as possible on the way up and of course really control slowly on the way down. You see, the chest is actually comprised of the third highest percentage of type 2 fibers of all the muscles in your body. What does that mean?

It means this muscle is geared to handle more acceleration during the concentric of the exercise. So, if you’re driving those dumbbells up explosively, much more explosively than you are right now, you might actually start to create more of that chest growth that you’re lacking right now simply by training the muscle the way it prefers to be trained. Now, there are some instances where even if after you implement those two changes to your bench press, you still really can’t feel your pecs. Well, that’s where I recommend a detox exercise, right? It’s it’s my mind muscle rehab and it comes in the form of a cable incline bench press.

Now, the cables are the game changer here. It’s worth the setup if you have access to this. What you’ll find is that by setting the cables out wide and having to actively adduct them just to get them in position to press, you’re almost pre-engaging the pecs and setting the stage once again for them to do more of the work and take the delts out of it. So, if anybody suffers from feeling the pecs during a press, I guarantee you with 100% certainty, you will feel the pecs during this exercise. And some of us might think, “But I can’t lift as heavy here as I could with dumbbells or a barbell.

” But that’s not the point. The point is, you don’t have the my muscle connection here to get the most out of those variations of the exercise. So, why not work with this detox exercise and work on developing that so when you go back to those exercises, you’re doing it better? The next thing you have to do to fix that flat chest is actually start to care about your lower chest. Even somebody that has moderate levels of body fat might be able to see the top row of abs.

That top row of abs literally delineates the lower chest line. It’s right up against it. And if your abs look more prominent right now than your lower chest, believe me, it’s going to look like you have a flat chest. So, what you need to do is develop this area mostly with a dip. It’s the classic exercise, but you have to do it the right way.

Here, I want you to make sure that you are not allowing your shoulders to shrug at any point during the exercise. If you allow your shoulders to rise up and shrug up, then that chest is going to get hollowed out. And when you press, most of the pressing is going to come through the front delt and the triceps. But instead, if you drive your shoulders down, keep them forcefully unshrugged. Lean forward so that you get your chest out more so than your delts.

And then when you get to the bottom, you don’t try to escape the uncomfortability of the stretch, but you actually try to wallow in it by performing something called a one and a half dip. Again, anything you can do to spend more time in that lowered stretch position of the pecs is going to contribute more to the growth of that lower pec line and one that looks less flat. Now, with that lower chest more prominent, I can tell you nothing fixes a flat chest more than working on a more prominent upper chest or that upper chest shelf. As a matter of fact, you can even see this when wearing a shirt if you have any kind of a low cut V-neck. How do you develop it, though?

This is one of my favorite ways to do it. It’s called a cable Y pullover. And it’s very important that you set the exercise up properly. You want your bench far enough away from the cables that you can get your arms up overhead into this Y position. You pull your hands together at the same time that you drive your arms forward like you would in a traditional pullover.

The benefit here is you don’t have to stop at vertical, right? But if we had a dumbbell in our hand here and kept going forward, we’d be concerned that we might drop it on our junk and actually taking away all the work being done by the pecs. But with the cables, you have the opposite effect. You still have tension. So you get a tremendous amount of range of motion and you get a tremendous amount of contraction right in those upper chest fibers that are lagging right now.

I would also argue that this exercise becomes somewhat shoulder protective because anyone that spends a great amount of time doing their chest exercises in this more delt dominant way is likely to have more of that rounded shoulder posture. This is a good way to restore some overhead mobility and some more normal biomechanics to the joint to make this exercise more than just an upper pec builder, but also a shoulder protector. If you’re relying solely on dipping and pressing and wondering why you still have those pancake pecs, then this is going to be one of the main reasons why. because you need to do and perform all functions of the chest if you want it to grow the best. Here, we need to have exercises that bring our arms across midline.

And perhaps there’s no better or more direct way to do this than with the exercise that literally does this, the crossover. Now, the best thing about the crossover is its versatility. You can perform this in one of three different planes of motion. either straight out here in front of your body, anchoring from a low position and raising your arm up and across your body, or anchoring in a high position and lowering your arm down and across your body. Going from high to low is going to work more of that lower chest line that we already discussed with the dips.

Going from low to high and up and across your body follows the fiber direction of those upper pec fibers of the clavvi