STOP, You’re Training Your Chest All Wrong!

STOP, You’re Training Your Chest All Wrong. If your chest workout is built around doing the same traditional sets, resting two or three minutes, and then repeating them again, you may be wasting a lot of reps that aren’t doing nearly as much for muscle growth as you think.

You can make your chest workout a lot more effective by doing the right type of reps. Jesse, do me a favor. Lay down. I want to demonstrate a typical set and see if people can see the difference. Okay.

So, what Jesse’s doing is he’s got a weight that would make him fail somewhere in the 10 to 12 rep range. Okay. So, start your repetitions, but I want you to tell me how you feel on each repetition. In other words, effort level. >> Good.

Okay. These should be rather easy, right? >> Yeah. This is fairly easy. >> Okay.

This is number three. How is it? >> Good. Okay. So, start to tell me when it starts to get like, you know, challenging or hard.

All right. I’m starting to notice a little bit. >> Okay. So, just the noticing point. >> Yep.

There it is. >> Okay. Here you go. Is that like six or seven? >> Yeah.

How’s it feel? Difficult. >> Starting to get difficult. >> Okay. Starting too.

All right. This is getting harder. >> Okay. So, you got to keep going. >> All right.

It’s getting really hard now. >> A lot of people would stop already. By the way, >> don’t do that. >> Okay. >> Yeah.

It’s really hard now. >> Okay, you got one more on you. I’m >> trying. >> Could you get up for one more for failure? No.

Okay, that’s it. So, come on up. All right, cool. Sit back a little bit. So, what you just saw there was a set to failure with whatever it was, 10 11 reps with that weight.

Y >> now, typically, how long would you rest? >> Uh, I’d say probably two to three minutes. >> Two to three minutes, which is pretty typical, right? Yeah. >> I want you to get back down there now.

Now, >> now. Now. >> Okay. So, now with like a 15 to 30 second rest, I want you to get back down. But do me again a favor.

Tell me when it starts to feel what you feel on every repetition. Okay, >> here we go. >> Oh, it’s already starting to be difficult. >> It’s already You’re feeling it? >> Yeah.

Okay, go. >> All right, it’s good. I’m in a groove. >> How’s it feel? >> It’s getting hard.

All right, so it’s hard on the third rep. Keep going. >> It’s really hard now. >> Okay, four. Yeah, it looks like it did towards the end of your last set.

Five. One more. All right, come on up. So, five repetition. Now, sit back.

Now, I want to explain what’s going on here. Okay, so what you just saw, guys, is effective reps. What we call effective reps. The idea is if the purpose of the first six or seven reps that you did on the first set was just to get you to a point of fatigue and effort that got you to those really meaningful hard reps at the end of the first set, right? Why do we want to continue to regenerate to allow you to do all those sort of ineffective reps or those sort of meaningless reps the next time we go through the next set?

Why can’t we shortcut that process? And we can. We can do it by shortening up the rest period. Again, we’re talking about a hypertrophy method here, not strength, not power. When we’re training for strength and power, we want those longer rest periods, right?

We want to be able to get good, high quality repetitions. If you’re training for power, they should be very specific and purposeful. They say practice makes perfect. No, only perfect practice makes perfect. So, you want to make sure you’re doing high quality repetitions.

Strength and power development is about being efficient with your training. Here, when you’re trying to drive hypertrophy and new muscle gains, you want to be inefficient. I can make you more inefficient by resting less and getting you into these effective reps more quickly. So, there’s two ways that you can do this, okay? Two main ways that you could do this.

You now could have continued to use the same weight and allowed yourself to realize that now the next time you go down, you’re going to go do another set. You’re probably going to do even less than five this time. >> Yeah, probably >> maybe like three or four. That’s okay. What you do is you continue to do this in this rest pause fashion until you reach a total number of what we call effective reps.

So when I program this, I would say this is the exercise. Give me 20 effective reps. >> Okay, the ignition set does not count. The first set does not count. So you’ve got six, whatever, six effective reps in the first set.

You drop down maybe the next one you’re doing four. Now you’re at 10. You keep going until you chip away to your 20 effective reps. Once you hit your 20 effective reps, that set is over. That exercise is over.

Okay? >> You don’t have to do anything else for there. Now you do a different exercise that hits the chest in a different way. Cable crossovers, right? Or a dip.

Yeah. Right. Or an incline, something that hits a different area of your chest. But this exercise is done. If you kept the weight the same, then you would probably expect two things to happen.

Number one, it’s going to take you a little longer to get to your 20 rep effective count. >> Yeah. >> Why is that? Just because you’re you’re starting to again dwindle the rep count from five effective to four to three to two. You might be repping out singles or doubles towards the end of that, >> which might take more total sets to get to the 20.

Okay. The alternative is if you start to see that number drop into that three or two rep range and you don’t like to just do the singles or doubles or triples to get to your 20 total, you can go and drop that weight down in between one of your sets to five or 10 lbs less and come back and then do it the same way. The rest is still the same. It’s still that short 15 to 30 second rest period and you get back into it. You do it and then you’ll see that you’ll probably get a few more effective reps in each subsequent set, but it will take you less overall sets to do it.

So, your time to do it would be less, >> right? >> One thing I’ll point out between beginner and more advanced. Likely the more advanced are going to actually need a longer period in between sets, closer to the 30 seconds or so. Why is that? Because you can elicit a higher effort, right?

You know what it is to train to failure. You know what it is to give a high effort. So, you’re likely not leaving anything on the table. A lot of times, beginners underestimate their capabilities so that they are probably ready to get back into it even sooner. closer to the 15 or 20 second range.

Right. Right. But but as you start to become more a aware of how to dial that in, then you’ll know what to do. >> Engage failure. >> Yeah.

Yeah. Now, as far as lightweights, you know, people say, “Can you do this with lightweights? ” The issue with lightweights is that it’s sort of on the other end of the spectrum. People are once again underestimating the value of where the set actually means something. Okay?

When it comes to lightweights, even more so. All the stuff in the beginning is meaningless. It’s meaning some would actually argue with lighter weights it becomes more of a mileage factor where you’re just wearing and tearing with no real benefit. If you don’t bring yourself at these higher rep ranges, 15 rep sets, 20 rep sets, 25 rep sets to absolute failure, you’ve wasted the set. >> Okay?

So, higher rep sets are not a great way to do these effective reps. But if you’re going to do higher rep sets as part of your training, don’t waste the beginning reps. They were meant to get you to the end of that set where you can actually do the real meaningful part, which is those last five or six grinding repetitions that you don’t want to do. >> Yeah. >> Now, what would you do as another exercise here?

Again, you could go take this right into a crossover and do a dif