The PERFECT Chest Workout (20 MIN EDITION!)

If you want to build a perfect chest but you only have 20 minutes for your chest workout, what would you do? In this video, I’m going to show you the best workout for chest that you can do if you are pressed for time and want to not have to skip yet another workout.

If you’re running short on time, but you don’t  want to shortchange your results, I’m going to show you what you have to do by trading and  workout length for workout intensity to keep the gains coming in your chest. Guys, we’re talking  about just 20 minutes to get the job done.

What s up guys, Jeff Cavaliere, Athleanx. com. Look, we’ve all been there short on time, but still long on desire to not miss  yet another workout. But what do you do? Do you skip it yet again or do you find a  way to get the job done?

Today, I’m going to show you and introduce a all-new series here  an abbreviated way to train to not compromise the games that you’re after. We’re starting right  away with chests. If you only had 20 minutes, could you get the job done? I’m going to take  you inside my head to show you the training strategies that I use to adapt to the short time  frame to make sure we keep the gains coming. Now, I think we should start with two  important caveats.

The first is going to be, don’t make a habit out of this. I’m giving you a  game plan here to allow you to get the job done without much sacrifice. But if you make a habit  of doing this every single time you train, I would suggest finding time to actually dedicate more  time to training so you’re not always in a pinch. Consistency with your workouts and consistency of  effort in those workouts is and always will be the fastest way to get to where you want to be. And that brings me to my second important caveat here for this video and that is one exercise  you will not find in this workout is the Barbell Bench Press.

And no, not because I don’t like  it. I just named it my number one exercise of all of our chest exercises. It’s the fact that  I primarily use this one for building strength. Using this technique, these short, condensed,  20-minute workouts are not conducive to maximizing strength. Whether it be the warmup progressions  themselves that take a lot of time for some people, or whether it be the fact that your rest  times in between sets are generally going to be three minutes on the low end of the five  minutes.

You simply are going to run out of time before you can even complete, let’s say, a  five by five. Not to mention, as you’ll see here, we’re going to have to drop the weight as we move  through this workout. Simply changing plates can take more time than you have available to you  and doing with dumbbells is going to be that much faster. So, the focus of this video is  going beyond hypertrophy and how to continue to build muscle in those time crunch limited  situations. This is how we get it done.

And so the journey into my brain begins  here with our first exercise combination, how we start our workout. And it’s with the Cable  Crossover directly into the Dumbbell Static Press. Now, this is a chest focused workout. Yes. I’m going to get into more complexity as we go down the line here if you guys like this  series, so make sure you let me know below.

Because we know that complexity gets increased as  we increase the number of muscle groups that are participating in the workout. Less time we’ve got  more stuff to cover. But it’s a little bit easier when we focus right here. And I use the first  exercise that Cable Crossover as a pre-exhaust for the second. You see, we know that when it comes to  chest workouts, the chest oftentimes likes to play that third fiddle to both the shoulders and the  triceps.

We don’t want that to happen. We have a limited amount of time, and we want to drive  as much tension into the chest as possible. So, we can do that with this exercise. Now, one of the  limitations, this exercise is if you go to heavy, it becomes a bit of a core challenge. But we don’t  have to go heavy here.

We can lighten up the load and use this to really, really focus on letting  the chest initiate every single contraction. We know when we head into the second part of this  combination, the Static Bench Press, we re going to get the help we need from the shoulders and  the triceps. But right here, pre-exhaust the chest by using just an exercise that allows you to  do this. Fight for every single repetition here, take it to failure. we know.

When we head into the  second part of this combination, the static bench press, we’re going to get the help we need from  the shoulders and the triceps. But right here, pre-exhaust the chest by using just an exercise  that allows you to do this fight for every single repetition here, take it to failure. From there we go right into that second half of the combination here, the Dumbbell Static Press,  which is something I got from that one-legged monster, Casey Mitchell and it’s a great way to  intensify the traditional Dumbbell Bench Press. And remember, if we’re trading in that time, we  have to up the intensity, this for sure will do the job. And the best part about this is I don’t  have to necessarily go right into light weights because I had the pre-exhaust before this.

I can still use relatively heavy weights, but make sure that I’m accommodating  for those by lowering the repetitions but still keeping the tension high. The Static Press does that because as you can see here, I’m maintaining that high tension  position on every single rep. Whether I’m pressing or holding there’s still a lot of tension here. And the slow speed of every repetition is actually pretty forgiving on those rusty shoulders, the  guys that need a lot of warm up, because the slow pace allows you to focus one side at a time. Not  to mention the pre-exhaust before this did have a bit of a warmup effect on getting ready to do this  second half.

And so, it takes 60 rest after that combination with the goal being to perform three  of them to form failure, the first half with a 10 to 12 reps range on the crossover and about  five repetitions each on the Static Press. That would bring us to a combination that leads  to 6:15 of total elapsed workout time by the time this is done. Now, a note on that rest it s 60  seconds. I understand, guys, it’s a compromise. Ideally, I’d like to get at least 90 seconds  to 120.

But the way we account for that, if we don’t focus so much on maintaining  the weight that we started with. You can see here in the second set of Static  Press, I’m okay with dropping the weight down. Remember, your muscles don’t understand  numbers, they don’t read they just feel, and they feel tension. If you can keep the tension  high by forgetting about the number of reps and instead of making each one of those reps count,  that is how you’re going to continue to ensure the intensity is high enough to drive the  gains you’re looking for in this workout. And that brings us right into our second exercise  of this workout.

Again, the clock is ticking, we go right there to the Incline Dumbbell Bench  Press. Now for you guys there training at the gym, you’re still on the same bench you were just  using. Just prop it up here, all importantly to that 30-degree angle, not the 60 degree. If you  don’t understand why you might want to check out my chest exercises, ranked video, where we tell  you about the all-important difference. But for here, I simply grab this set of dumbbells  that’s still on the heavier side for me, accounting for the mounting fatigue here.

I’m not trying to just sacrifice and go all the way down to lightweights where I’m turning  this into simply a metabolic burnout workout. You want to push and drive muscular growth,  you’re going to have to push yourself hard. Here, I m going into the Dumbbell Incline Bench Press. I love this, number as a perfect complement to the fact that we did a flat bench exercise first  and we have