Rating Every Chest Exercise (REP or REJECT!)

There are so many chest exercises to choose from that you can include in your chest workouts, but which ones should you focus your efforts on if you want build a bigger chest and increase your strength? In this video, I am going to rate some of the most popular chest exercises and on each one, I am

So today we’re going to rate a bunch of different chest exercises many of which you’re either doing right now or having watched another ranked video or deciding whether or not to include them in your chest workout and we’re going to do it one of two ways if I like the exercise we’re going to rep it if I don’t like the exercise we’re going to reject it simple simple enough all right you throw me the exercises let’s see first up pec deck all right so the pec deck if you have access to the machine at the gym is going to give you at least access to an adduction based exercise you know how important I think that is to complement your heavy pressing that being said mounting and dismounting the Machine is probably my bigger concern as long as you get that right you’re off to the right start you basically going to do it like you’re seeing here we you reach back and grab the arm here rather than really reaching your arm back behind you and then trying to load up and grab the weight the other thing is if you can find a machine like this that has the articulating arms rather than the fixed pads you’re going to find it more comfortable and adaptable to you regardless of how long your arms are though it’s not my favorite way to adduct and overload adduction I will say it’s a good exercise and for me I’m gonna rep it all right so next exercise up is flat bench press of course I’m GNA have to rep this exercise obviously it provides the greatest amount of overload I do prefer to do it as a dumbbell bench press rather than a barbell bench press mostly due to my Orthopedic issues in my shoulders so anybody that out there has discomfort will probably find that to be the case too I also like to have the touch point of that outer lower portion of my chest that I can more easily hit with the dumbbells there’s no way around it though guys if you want to get a bigger stronger chest the best overload exercise option for you is going to be the flat bench press and so therefore rep it so next up on our list is this one I remember that one you remember me doing it like here what do you think my answer is going to be so everything I just said about good adduction based exercises that’s the opposite we don’t want to do it like this because there’s actually no resistance of adduction at all sometimes just the Creator themselves makes the exercise a rejection I don’t have anything else to say reject next exercise up is the incline bench press all right good so I see what we’re doing here we’re going to split them up incline flat good I’m obviously going to say we’re going to rep it again but to determine whether or not it’s incline or flat maybe for you you have to ask yourself do you have a very developed uper chest or not most of us don’t so if I had to choose one between the two it’s going to be that one that’s going to have though a lot more range of motion requirements there’s most range of motion required to do an incline then second most on a flat bench then the least amount of range of motion required on a clim bench so if you have any type of shoulder issues like I do you’re likely going to find the dumbbell variation is a lot more comfortable than any barbell variation is keep that angle at that 30 or 45 degree Max though on the incline to get the best for the upper chest regardless it’s going to sit there in the repit category it’s just a great exercise so we have now the underhand bench press all right so interesting followup here because let’s pretend you don’t have access to the incline bench press right you still want to get the upper chest development we know that if you actually just flip those hands around and take an underhand grip and then press it like you see me doing here you’re actually get good upper chest stimulation you’re actually going from that sort of low to high position that’s a requirement to hit those upper chest fibers now if you’re going to do the exercise I recommend dumbbells here rather than a barbell because for those that haven’t done it it’s going to feel a little bit awkward and it’s going to be a lot safer if you ever have to get rid of the dumbbells or make an alteration right the barbell is going to be too fixed to make this feel really comfortable especially it’s your first time out but because of its unique ability to hit those upper chest fibers in a limited equipment environment once again for me rep it so up next we have the plate press so just before you thought that I was going to say I love all the pressing exercises we have an example of one that I do not and that is simply because you can’t overload this exercise if you try to do it with two plates which I’ve seen people try to do you’re literally rubbing them together and risking the chance that one will slip and fall on you regardless of what the weight is and again you’re never going to be able to do too too much weight pretty much maxing out it maybe 25 lbs maybe 10 lb when you’re squeezing them together there’s plenty of better ways to actually do a press and regarding the isometric squeeze that you’re feeling on the inside of your chest there’s a better way to do this too you just take two dumbbells and you hold them end to end so you’re getting we call this an adduction press you’re getting a little bit of the isometric isolation of the chest but you’re still getting the ability to press heavy enough dumbbells to cause overload but for this specific variation the play press and I have to inject it sticking with the theme of bench pressing we have the press decline bench press so are we back to the ones that I actually like now the decline bench press like I said before is going to be the lowest Demand on you in terms of range of motion at the shoulder so whoever does have problems orthopedically with their shoulder and they’re looking for an onramp to be able to start pressing again start decline it also happens to be the variation of the bench press that allows the people who don’t have a really good time feeling their chest to start to feel it if I were to ask you to flex your chest right now what are you doing that right now no notice where you’re doing it from down here you don’t really ever see someone Flex their arms out here because you feel it more when you do a high to low crossover of the chest that’s because it’s a more natural motion for you if you’re going to do a natural base bench press the one that you’re looking to feel and increase that feel in the exercise start with a decline bench press but because again it’s a good press that you can overload it’s going to be another rep it for me next up we are going body weight with push-ups okay so this is good so rep but not too much what I mean by that is I feel like the push-up has become such a staple exercise but a lot of times it’s a crutch exercise for those that want it to be their main chest exercise and it’s never going to serve as your main chest exercise you need to have a better way to load the exercise and that’s where I think you need to opt for a more difficult version of the exercise so as a blanket statement I always say if you could do more than say 30 reps of a push-up then opt for a more difficult version of the push-up or if you want to get great benefits from the push-up use it as a immediate drop set to a regular flat bench press or an incline bench press so you do your repetitions with the heavy weight you drop down you do the push-up immediately after that to take yourself to failure now you’re going to get maybe 10 12 15 reps when in that in that fatigue state but it shouldn’t really serve as your main driver of hypertrophy if you could do