The LOWER Chest Solution (GET DEFINED PECS!)

The lower chest line is something that many guys struggle to develop. In this video, I’m going to show you how to get defined lower pecs by hitting the bottom most portion of your pec muscles with the right exercise selection. In fact, I’m breaking out 8 exercises that will help you to hit your lo

What’s up, guys? Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX. com. Today I want to talk about one of the biggest problem areas for guys. It’s the lower chest.

A non-defined lower chest, or saggy lower chest. We can fix it. I’m going to show you eight exercises here that are going to allow you to better target this area. But it starts by asking you a question. Of these two pictures right here, if you’re one that’s dealing with one of those issues with your lower chest, which one is it?

Are you looking more like this guy over here? Or more like this guy over here? Because if you’re looking like this guy over here, the first thing you’re probably dealing with is an overall high body fat level. Which means your diet is really not in check at all. You need to be much more on point when it comes to your nutrition to be able to drop the lower levels of body fat, to be able to see what you’re really working with.

I can probably guarantee that this guy, when he does drop down, he’s still going to be lacking muscular development of the chest. That’s what this guy is dealing with here. The body fat levels are low enough, but the muscular development is just not there. Meaning, he doesn’t have this defined line that creates that definitive chest. But again, we can target this.

Then what we have to do is apply a little bit of anatomy. You guys know that on this channel I like to break out the anatomy, and sometimes the muscle markers help us do that. I’ve done this in a previous video that I’ll link at the end of this for a little bit more in depth, but the key is this: we know that with the pecs themselves we have a couple of options here. We know that the pec is pretty much divided into two main areas. At least from a nerve innovation.

We have the sternal area of the pec, which is the whole area of the lower pec here. The whole pec. Then we have up here, running off the clavicle, we have the chest fibers here that are separately innovated and can actually be targeted a little bit differently because of that. But more importantly, what I like to say here to keep things nice, and simple on this channel is, if you follow the fibers – meaning the direction of the fibers – when you go to move your body, you’re going to effectively target that area better. You can contract the area with more focus and attention by following the direction of the fibers.

So, the upper chest, running in this direction, out toward the arm would mean that anytime you’re bringing your arm up, and across your body you’d be hitting them more effectively. The sternal area of the pec, we notice here, runs from the sternum out, toward that same area here on our arm. So, when we do things that come across our body in adduction we know that we can get this main, beefy area of the chest a little bit more. But what people don’t realize is the abdominal head, which is this very small area right here, when I contract you can see right there. That little break of the line here, and then this underneath, and around.

A little hard to draw on here with this marker, but it comes up, and around, and again, heads toward this same area. What are the directions of those fibers? Those fibers are running up, and out. So, if we want to work that area more effectively, following those fibers in a consistent manner, we would take our arm from this position and come down, and across. From here, to here.

Not from here, to here. But here, to here. So, any exercise that we did, that allowed us to replicate that, and even add the adduction – which we know the chest is craving – we know that we’re going to be able to target that area more effectively. Now, the decline bench-press is the hallmark exercise that all of us use to try and hit the lower chest. Why is that?

Well, if you look a bit more closely what you might think is actually just pressing away from your body, if you sit up the angle of your arms is actually not directly perpendicular to your chest. It’s actually angled downward a little bit. What is that? That downward angle here is doing exactly that. It’s following that same direction that we’re after.

But I’m not going to stop with the decline bench-press, guys. That’s something you already know. What I want to do is give you eight other exercise options to really, really hit this area hard, and to get your lower chest looking better than ever. So, let’s start with another one of the classic lower chest exercises. The dip.

The dip, we should know by now, is going to hit that lower chest more effectively because it’s actually doing what we just said. The movement of the arm during the exercise is actually following that same movement that we’re trying to get to. But we know we can actually make this better. We call this a Dip Plus. What we’re doing here is not only including another muscle that likes to work with the lower chest, but we’re actually angling our body a little more appropriately to make sure we’re hitting this lower chest area.

So, it means you’re going to angle your body forward, but not too much. If we were to go all the way over the top we’re almost turning this into a horizontal pushup, which is going to keep the arms more in this angle here, hitting more of the mid-chest area. But if we get ourselves back up just a little bit, but forward for vertical now you can see that we actually have our arms following in the same direction that we’re supposed to be looking to do. However, I mentioned another muscle we can include here. The Serratus can actively be included as well.

This muscle right here, that likes to work in concert with the lower chest, by doing what we call a ‘plus’ at the end of every, single rep. That means when you get to the top of the dip you press away. You try to protract your shoulders, get your shoulder blades around your body, push your arms away with your arms straight, and you start to get this muscle to fire up, too. You’ll feel a much different contraction than you ever have, if you’ve never tried this before. But the combination of both of those elements makes the regular dip not just a good lower chest exercise, but an even better lower chest exercise.

Okay, let’s stick with the theme of the dips here and actually do an old-fashioned dip exercise. It’s the straight-bar dip. This is something I was actually doing in my basement as a kid when I had nowhere to do dips in my house. The thing is, it’s actually a pretty good variation to allow us to hit our lower chest again. What we do is, we have to hover over the bar, and we have to actually do this to balance on the bar because you’ll see the second you try to execute this exercise, if you’re not angled forward appropriately, you’re going to feel like you’re falling off the bar backward.

So, you have to lean forward a little bit. Well, what it actually does is puts your arms right in that sweet spot of where you want them to be. Not to mention, a little bit of internal rotation so when you come to the top of the exercise in a full chest contraction, we know that internal rotation is another element of a full chest contraction. So, you have that working in your favor as well. So, the straight-bar dip, if you haven’t tried it, is going to not only give you another dip variation to do, but a little bit of a different feel than the dip we’ve already covered.

Now I’m going to throw you a curveball because this exercise people think is for the triceps. But it’s actually a poorly performed tricep pushdown. But it becomes an effective lower chest exercise if you do this properly. This is our jackhammer pushdown. Now what we’re looking for here is, again, proper execution of an exe