Target Your UPPER CHEST (Pec Isolation Reality!!)

Build a bigger chest - from upper to lower and everywhere in between!

upper chest lower chest is there really such a difference today we’re going to talk about exactly that and more importantly what you can do about [Music] it what’s up guys Jeff Cavalier aex. com we’re going to talk today about one of the most highly debated probably classic bodybuilding should we say issues of all time and that is the difference between the upper chest the lower chest the inner chest the outer chest can you train them independently now we know right off the bat the chest muscle is going to act like all other muscles it’s going to contract all or none that means if there’s a muscle contraction going on the entire belly of that muscle will contract so that would be enough evidence for most people to say there’s no such thing as going after the upper chest there’s no such thing as going after the lower chest now before we even get into it we’re not going to to discuss the inner and outer chest at this point because there really is no separate portion of that muscle all right but for this part upper and lower there is now there is a a portion of the chest I’m going to show here with my drawing going to simulate Jeff’s chest that is the clavicular portion of the pectoralis and it basically attaches here to the clavicle and heads down and out in this direction and then we’ve got the PEC major here which is the sternal part of it which attaches to the sternum and comes across here so what is the difference well number one and very key is this has a separate nerve inovation than does this part of the PEC two separate nerve interations that means capable of being controlled a little bit differently all right so that’s number one number two in terms of what part of the PEC is working it’s really hard to argue here that there’s no such thing as more of an upper Peck exercise versus a lower Peck well how do we display that because the first thing guys is if you put your arm behind you right here and then you Flex forward you’re going to see that I get this line of the delt okay the anterior delt pops out and I can see sort of what’s left over here and this is is what we’re talking about be the Peck in through here now the actions of the PEC are going to be to flex the arm horizontally ad duct it bring it across your body and internally rotate at the shoulder if I were to do a movement down here and adduct my arm across my chest here okay there’s no doubt that I have lower Peck activation here mostly again PEC major from the sternal portion okay right across from from here down there’s not all that much going on up in these fibers why because the motor units responsible for Contracting the sternal the the uh the clavicular portion up here aren’t really being recruited they’re not necessary at that point the mechanical advantage there at a disadvantage when we’re talking about something down here so down here the mechanical advantage at this point is going to be the sternal ver portion of it so they’re going to activate but when I start to raise that up and Beyond look at the look at the sternal portion here I’m still adducting my arm across my body I’m still internally rotating my shoulder I’m still flexing the the the shoulder all three components of pet contraction no doubt everything is Contracting everything’s Contracting but the only thing that’s really working on overtime here are the muscle fibers here the motor units firing in the sternal portion to get them to work and if I turn just a little bit to the side you can see that you didn’t see it down here you can see it here because it’s true so when anybody ever tell us you stop doing your you know the different versions of the exercises because they’re not useful that’s completely false you want to make sure that you are targeting the upper chest and uh in different ways than you would be if you’re using all your other kind of pressing motions and things like that now here’s one other thing you can do I look at it like the glutes when we talk about the glutes GL as an athlete the glutes are often underactive and that causes the hamstring to act more and normally when the hamstrings have to act for both themselves and the glutes you get hamstring injuries when we talk about the pecs if I just showed you here that part of what of shoulder elevation is going to be this clavicular portion of the chest working to fire to actually Elevate then if I were to do this and hold it in here bring it across my body so add duct and then lift up you can see I can get some activation here so I can actually train activation small movement just get wake them up like the glutes wake them up get some activation of these fibers get control of that it’s then going to assist the front delt to do the job it’s supposed to what happens when it doesn’t if you don’t have if you have sort of this Amnesia of the upper area of your chest where you can’t get it to fire then the front delt has to do all shoulder elevation and when that happens guys without getting too deep it overpowers the rotator cuff pulls the humoris up leaves less space inside of here and you can get some serious rotator cuff problems so you can see we can take an aesthetic thing of how do I get my upper chest to look better and tie it into something athletic because of what we’re talking about here this Amnesia from one muscle when it’s supposed to be meant to help another muscle so so a lot of complicated things here but breaking it down there is a difference and the difference is not in the contraction muscles contract all or none but the difference is in how are they firing what is the recruitment going on what muscle fibers are being recruited and the reason that happens is because of the mechanical advantage if I’m doing something down here mechanically it’s more advantageous for me to flex from down below if I’m doing something up here again the same motions is more advantageous for me to contract from up above there a difference so you got to train that way guys I hope this worked out and was useful for you it got a little bit again into that zone of um maybe deep right but if you break it down step by step you’ll see and start doing them yourself feel the difference and doing the exact motions that I just did and you will see that there is a difference so when it comes to your training whether it be aesthetic goals looking better or athletic goals you got to kind of tie them together and that’s what we talk about with training like an athlete there’s it’s always going to have an overlap AP so I don’t care what your individual specific goal here is there’s going to be an overlap and you still have to train the Right Way start training the right way by heading over to aex. com right now and grabbing our 90-day training program and start to do things like this the way your muscles are meant to be trained in the meantime I’ll be back here guys in just a couple days with yet another workout and leave your comments below and a thumb up if this kind of help to clarify the mystery a little bit [Music] thanks [Music] a