STOP! You’re Training Your “Middle” Chest Wrong

If you have a problem with the middle chest line between your pecs, you will want to know how to fix your flat inner chest. You might know it as the inner chest or the middle chest, but the line between the two pecs is often a problem for people. In this video, I am going to discuss the inner chest

Let’s start with a little quiz. I wanted to  compare the following two pictures of chess and tell me which one is the better looking. Will it be chest A? Or will it be chest be? And obviously they’re the same chest, but one is  lacking that middle chest line.

And I think we all could agree the one with the middle chest  line looks a hell of a lot better. But how do you get it? Or how do you make the one you have  right now more prominent? Well, there’s actually three definitive ways I’m going to cover here in  this video. And we start with the first of which you actually can’t do anything about, but  that doesn’t let you off the hook.

You see, just because you’re not to blame for this, it  doesn’t mean that you’re not responsible for understanding the difference so that you can  take the right approach in the long run. And we’re talking about genetics. The shape of  your sternum and the attachments to it makes a big difference in how your inner chest will  ultimately look. And it starts with the finger test. Take that finger and place it right here on  the top of your sternum.

Drive your elbows down to your sides to activate your chest just a little  bit, and then start to drag your finger down the middle of your chest line. And what you should  feel is two sides of the pec muscles inserting almost right directly next to each other. In other words, if you rolled your finger just a little bit to the left, it would start to  go up a hill. If you rolled your finger just a little bit to the right, it would go up a hill as  well. If you have a really tight separation here, well, it means you are blessed with good pec  and sternum genetics, where the insertions of the muscles actually lie really tight and  close to each other, and they don’t leave a lot of exposed space on the sternum.

Well, what happens if you actually have an area where you just feel flat bone along the  way? Nothing, because there’s nothing, you’re going to be able to do about that, those are your  genetics. Any jagged lines or weird asymmetries where one pec might turn off to the side faster  than the other, it s just something you’re going to have to deal with, but it doesn’t doom you to  having a bad-looking chest. It’s just something you need to come to grips with. Now, as this  gap becomes wider, the appearance of the chest may become a little less desirable.

But again,  you can still develop a good-looking chest. Now it can get even worse than that, with a  condition that the internet named Steinerism based off of Scott Steiner’s dramatically different  looking chest than he had years ago. But this is most likely secondary to nerve damage from the  pec, from chronically overstretched position. Maybe through a clothesline or some other  wrestling move that these guys have to deal with. But that’s likely not what you’re dealing  with.

But you can see that the tighter the gap, the better looking the chest. Now, there are two bony reasons why your chest may not look exactly the way you want  it to. And the first is a sternal deformity called pectus excavatum, where the sternum itself is  actually kind of caved in. I made a whole video about this, using some physical therapy  techniques and some strategies to help to slightly improve this condition depending upon  how severe it is. Surgery might be the most successful option for you, but you’ll want to  watch that video to determine for yourself.

The second would be the shape of your  sternum. Because let’s face it guys, they’re not all straight. Some do look like this,  but others look like this. And once again, that asymmetrical chest that you might be battling may  not have a real solution because of the underlying structure of the bones. If you ever walked into  a house and saw a crooked wall, your inclination might be to blame the sheet rocker and say you  did a bad job.

But what if the framer built the wall crooked underneath and he just followed  what was done? You see, it’s not always the thing that you’re seeing, but the underlying  structure that’s the real problem here. But that’s okay, because we can do things still  that can dramatically change the appearance of your chest. But we do have to take ownership  of the next thing, and that is your nutrition. Because in any situation with any esthetic goal,  having more body fat covering what you’re trying to show off is never going to reveal the best  of what you’ve got.

Because even a bigger chest covered with more body fat is never going to  look as esthetically good as even a smaller chest that is much more defined, and that  comes from having low body fat levels. I’ve made different videos covering how you can  nail this nutrition aspect every single time, and I make it quite simple. I’m going to link  one of them, this one right here for you, at the end of this video you’re going to want  to check it out. It’s going to help you to bring out more muscularity at any level of muscle  growth that you’re displaying right now. But now we come to the fun part.

Why? Because it’s  the most impactful for how your chest is going to look and the one that you’re most in control  of. And we’re talking about your training. Now let’s get this off our chest right away. There’s no way to isolate the middle chest line.

There’s no independent head there. There’s no  one exercise that will isolate that middle chest of yours. However, when you learn how to train  the rest of your chest, your middle chest can be directly influenced by the growth of the other  heads. So, what do we do? We start by choosing the right exercises.

And I’ll tell you right now, stop  focusing solely on strength, but start there. And what I mean by that is do your bench  presses, do your heavy dumbbell presses, do your weighted dips, do your weighted pushups. Do all those exercises because those are the ones that are going to allow you to overload  them quickly and give you the opportunity to grow as much muscle as fast as possible. Especially if you’re a newbie just starting out, you want to take advantage of those gains that are  yet to be achieved. That said, understand this, continuing to focus on only those exercises will  leave you without the middle chest development that you’re looking for every single time.

And that’s for three distinct reasons. Number one, these exercises don’t incorporate  adduction, and adduction is moving your arm from a position along your side towards midline  and in this case across midline to get full chest contraction. And why full chest contraction? I’ll  get back to that in one second. But suffice it to say that those exercises, the big ones, they  aren’t doing that.

Sure, they’re adducting a bit, they’re adducting from a position over here  to right about just outside of midline. But I need you to take it across midline, right  across the center of your body by getting your hand on the other side of your shoulder. How do we do that? Well, obviously we’re going to do that with exercises like these. All of these  exercises give us a chance to drive that arm across midline more effectively.

And when we do  this, we reach a complete chest contraction, which again, you’ll see will be necessary to completely  develop the chest. But the second thing is how you perform the exercises, because that matters  just as much. Don’t always rush through the movements. Take your time and celebrate the pain. Because the reality is the chest is the laziest muscle in your body.

Think of it as the YouTube  fitness influencer who just does review videos of everybody else’s work. Lazy. Instead, you need  to make the chest do all of the work on