The UPPER Chest Solution (GET FULLER PECS!)

The upper chest is an area that a lot of guys struggle to develop. In this video, I’m going to show you how to get fuller pecs by putting the science back in 8 exercises for the upper chest. If you adhere to the principle of following the fibers, you will see how it is possible to add muscle to th

What’s up, guys? Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX. com. We’ve hit the outer chest, we’ve hit the lower chest, and today we’re hitting the upper chest. More than any other opportunity here, you’re going to have a great chance to get at this area because our anatomy is going to favor that.

What I’m talking about is, when it comes to the upper chest – we break out the muscle markers here, guys, to put the science back in strength, and we’re also breaking Jesse out a little bit, to show off some new gains. But that will be a moment from now. You can see that the clavicular portion of the chest comes off the clavicle and runs down in this direction. Separate than the rest of the chest itself. It actually separately innervated that allows us to actually target this area a little bit better than any other area of the chest.

But what we really want to do, as always, is follow the fibers. What that means is, if we can take our arm and move it in the direction that the fibers run, at the same oblique angle, then we know that we can hit this upper chest a lot more. That means we can take a strategic approach to the exercises that we do. Look, even if you look at the incline bench-press you can see that it’s following the fibers. It’s taking the arm through that range of motion.

If you’re not sure, if you think you’re pressing at an oblique angle, or if you’re pressing straight overhead, when you sit up – if you’ve kept your arm in the same position – you can see that it ends in that same position that you would if you followed the fibers and ended up here. So, we can do that with more than an incline bench-press. I know you know that exercise. I’ve got a lot of others for you here, including bodyweight options, that are going to allow you to really hit this area hard, once and for all. First up is actually a variation of an exercise that I’ve covered for you on this channel before.

That’s the UCV raise. We’re doing that with a dumbbell. You can see when we do this exercise we’re, yes, following the fibers. Moving in that preferred movement pattern. But we can actually take this and make it one step better because we can do this two arms at a time with a cable setup like you see me doing here.

Now, this is actually taking advantage of a PNF movement pattern. A principle based in physical therapy that allows our bodies to move as it’s neurologically preferred to move. Which is good news when you’re trying to get better recruitment of these upper chest fibers. So, what we do is have our arms out at our sides, a little bit away from the body, and as we pull up we’re getting that mimic of that movement pattern, but also we have the opportunity to cross the arms at the top, get the adduction we need to get a full chest contraction, and make this a great exercise. You’ll see as Jesse’s doing this exercise here, the one thing you really want to focus on is, as you come up and pull your arms across, into that adduction you don’t want to let the chest cave in.

You want to simultaneously stick the chest out as you cross, and go for that really good contraction every, single time. Next up we can put an advanced twist on a classical exercise that’s known more for hitting the lower chest. That’s the dip. You can see as Jesse’s doing it here, this dip is effectively targeting the lower pecs. Why?

Because it’s following the fibers, once again, hitting that abdominal head here, as we’ve talked about before, in our lower chest solution video, which is this video over here. If you haven’t seen it, guys, I will do you a favor and link it for you at the end of this video. But we know that we can go the opposite direction. There is a way to do a dip, but to get those arms up in that preferred position, following the fibers up top, we can do that. But like I said, it’s hard.

You can see as I back myself into a wall here and walk my feet up the crucial thing is keeping my arms up overhead, away from my body. Now as I get into this position I try to mimic a dip holding onto those dumbbells so I have the same feeling in neutral position on my wrists to come down every, single rep, and try to push myself back up. Again, this is not easy, but as you come around the front you can see I’m really trying to squeeze. If you could, if you have the ability to roll the dumbbells ever so slightly toward each other to get a little more of that adduction that you can’t do on a stationary dip station here. The fact is, this is definitely a tough exercise option here when it comes to training your upper chest.

But if you’re up for the challenge it’s definitely worth it. Sticking with the bodyweight options we actually have another exercise that’s slightly easier, but no less effective when it comes to hitting that upper chest. This is the push away pushup. The key here is the initial position of the arms. You want them, not vertically, right beneath your chest, but out in front of you a little bit.

As I go down into each rep the idea is when I push my body back up it’s not just up, but it’s up and back so I’m following the direction of those arms and allowing my chest – my upper chest in particular – to work here. But it’s not just that. I actually try, as I press up, to not just push, but actually squeeze. So I’m trying to visualize squeezing my biceps together to get an intense contraction here, a little bit of that feel of the adduction as I press away. If this is a little bit too difficult for you, you can do it with a little bit of a shortened position here by just hiking your butt in the air as Jesse’s doing, and just doing a pike pushup, or an incline pushup.

Again, with the arms positioned a little bit in front of your body it’s going to allow you to target more of that upper chest here. Regardless of which version you use. The next one here is one I actually love. It’s not just for the versatility of it because you could just do it with a single band, but also because you’re actually getting the contraction on that upper chest, coming both from below, and once again at the top. We call this a sunrise sunset.

You can see why. We start in this sunrise with the arms moving up, but most importantly, what are they doing? They’re following the fibers. They’re coming from the low, outside position, up and toward each other at the top. When you get that contraction, you can easily see the upper chest handling a lot of the load here.

But when you come back and reverse the direction, come all the way out to the side, loop around, and come back down, and we dive in from the top. This is actually mimicking what an upper chest dumbbell pullover would look like. I’ve covered that exercise before, too. That one didn’t even make this video and I love it. So, it goes to show you how many options we actually have.

The key though is, because we’re driving our arms down it’s finishing in the contracted position with them angled up, into this position right here. At the same time, it’s getting all that added internal rotation of the arms that can intensify the chest contraction as well. So, you’re hitting it at the top, you’re hitting it from the bottom, but most of all, you’re definitely hitting the upper chest. And that gives you another option here, no excuses, that you can do at home with just a single band. This next exercise actually gives us the option of using heavier weights because we’re going to shorten the range of motion and shorten the moment arm that will allow us to compensate with heavier weights.

We can load up this upper chest more effectively this way. I actually showed you something we could do that did the same thing in the past with an exe