The PERFECT Chest Workout (2025 EDITION)

With the return of the perfect workout series, I am updating the perfect chest workout to give you the best chest workout you can do. The biggest difference is that I am giving you not just one, but two perfect chest workouts for you to try that are not just randomly thrown together, but are based o

what’s up guys Jeff Cavalier aex. com do you remember the perfect workouts they became the most popular workout series ever here on YouTube and I have you to thank for that and to show my thanks guess what I’m bringing them back by popular demand the perfect chess workout kicks off the series here today for 2025 and Beyond now when it comes to a perfect workout or in this case A Perfect science-based workout I think it’s important to understand that there is no perfect science so any workout that is actually recommended to you based on the latest and science alone is not really going to cut it see here as we’ve always done we rely on the Sciences of anatomy and physiology and Kinesiology and we put it all together in a workout that actually makes sense and we’re going to do the same thing for you here and we’re going to sprinkle in what we know now to be the most effective techniques to employ when we’re trying to build a bigger chest but understand not just for today but for the Long Haul right longevity and joint health is also going to be a big concern of mine as a physical therapist and it’s not just because I’m a nerd for anatomy it’s because this actually matters when you’re trying to develop a muscle and when we talk about the muscle of the chest it’s got three different parts to it number one we’ve got the upper or clavicular head and we can see that the fibers run from the clavicle down and out and I always say if you want to know how to train a muscle follow the fibers which means if you want to move your arm in this direction from down and Away to up and in and across your body ideally you’re going to be able to hit the upper PEC most efficiently and some of the exercises we have here will do that of course we have the big large portion of the chest the sternal head and that has the fibers running sort of east to west so again we want to be able to bring our arm out in front of us but ideally something to bring our arm across our body too and then finally we have that lower abdominal portion of the chest that you can see here and what does it do it follows the fibers as well except this time from high to low and ideally across the body some even argue the strongest chest contraction you can get will involve exercises that bring you from this high to low position and guess what you’re going to find them in this workout too and I say workout but I’m actually kind of lying because it’s not just one workout but it’s actually two you see when it comes to The Perfect science-based Workout the first thing you really have to ask yourself is what’s the Frequency with which I’m training and the one thing we do sort of know with pretty good confidence these days is that two times a week for a muscle group is actually better than maybe just one time a week the third extra workout in the week isn’t really provide much additional benefit but the two will but it’s also highly related to the intensity at which you train if you train in extremely high intensity like Mike mener style training or even R 100 series workouts which I’ll make sure I link for you at the end of this one those are pretty damn grueling and those you can get away with doing just once a week because the intensity is so high but in this workout I wanted to make it available to almost every single person watching so we’re going to bring the intensity down just a little bit but it gives us the chance to split this workout up into two different workouts so you don’t just get one you do get two that being said when you talk about the volume of the workout you still want to acre the same amount of vium over the course of the two workouts so these will be a lot shorter and they’ll actually allow you to do a second muscle group on the day that you’re training chess we’ll get into that as we build out the entire series that being said what do these workouts look like well let’s break them down so with this chess workout and the one to follow what are we actually trying to achieve in terms of the overall set volume for the week because if you want to grow our chest there’s got to be some Target point for the number of sets we have to perform well the good news is science actually gives us the answer there too except it’s a little bit more vague you see they say somewhere between 12 and 24 sets is the target set volume that you want to have for your chest if you want to grow it best the reason for some of that vagueness is that there’s a lot of overlap between different exercises so some feel few more sets than others that being said for these workouts we’re going to try to aim for targeting just around 10 11 or 12 sets per workout so that when you put them together you’re at that 20 to 24 set total so how’s the first workout look we actually start with a primer and the first exercise up here is something called a banded external rotation exercise pretty simple you’ve seen me do it before why would we want to do this before for our next exercise and I’m going to give you a hint the next exercise is a bench press because when you do the external rotation work before you bench you actually warm up the shoulder a little bit more effectively you actually help to wake up the rotator cuff muscle which is a very important muscle to be primed before benching because you want to make sure that it’s doing its job the job of the rotator cuff is to keep that head of the humorous in the middle of the joint and not let it migrate up here’s the key point for that though how are you going to program it I only want to see you do one to two sets of the exercise done to a very submax level cuz any fatigue that you might accumulate here could actually decrease the performance of the rotator cuff and not allow it to keep that centralized position of the humorous while you bench press that would be a bad thing so again everything matters in The Perfect Workout you’re going to do this exercise the right way the next exercise up as I told you is the incline dumbbell bench press and we’re doing three sets of 5 to 8 now why are we talking about sort of the heavier weights that we’re using here especially if you’re a little bit in the older side and you’re thinking I can’t really lift heavy trust me you’re going to want to lift heavy you’re going to want to make sure that at some point in your training no matter how old you are you’re still feeling the weight you’re still subjecting yourself to heavier loads because we know that the tension itself can drive progress and growth and we also know that we need to maximize strength as we get older it is one of the key criteria for maintaining and having longevity in the gym is to not give up on the strength that you’re inevitably going to lose if you don’t focus on it now the exercise itself is one that I love and the thing about the incline press is that it helps us to ensure that we’re hitting the upper chest which is an area of the chest that is most undeveloped for most people what you’ll see me do on my reps though is something called a thumbs up dumbbell and clinb bench press and you could do the same and all it does is just allow me to kind of get my arms a little closer to each other at the top with a little bit more adduction and it doesn’t sacrifice the amount of weight that I can use remember keep the incline angle low at like 30° to maximally hit the upper chest five fibers now I talk about the upper chest the good news is remember because we had the two split workouts I don’t have to cram a whole bunch of volume towards that area of the chest in just this workout because I know I can hit it again in the next one what is up