What should you do when your chest has stopped growing? The best chest exercises that build new muscle

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How to get your chest to start growing again

Everyone has their goto bunch of exercises that they use when they KNOW they’ve hit a wall. Sure-fire workout routines that build muscle are a MUST HAVE in anyones box of training tricks.

What should you do when your chest has stopped growing?

I can’t stress enough that gains, no matter how small, are fricken GAINS! A ‘gain’ is adding 1.25kg’s to your bench press, or its adding a single rep to a set that you normally couldn’t do the last time you did exactly the same exercise.

If you can’t seem to add 5kg’s to your bench-press each and every week, remember—not even Superman can. That’s largely because he’s fictional.

So how does one get their chest to grow week after week?

You need to eat more, get a decent amount of sleep and use a method called progressive overload or ramping. Each week you want to be increasing your weights or be adding a rep to each set without going to failure.

If that isn’t happening within your current training regimin, you need to re-assess the eat & sleep requirements you are currently adhering to.

Why no training to failure?

Like I’ve said before, failure (all the time) is bad mmkay. It sends negative feedback to your central nervous system telling it you suck, and can’t lift the weight. Your CNS will learn from this and won’t allow you to progress. Cheeky huh?

All that is fine, but what are the best chest exercises?

Every man and his dog has their own theory as to which exercises grow the most muscle. Ones that cause a serious ‘burn’ or ones which leave your chest aching for days afterwards. These are all great, but are largely hit-and-miss.

I’ve decided to concentrate on specific exercises which I highly rate and have used in my OWN personal development.

Barbell Guillotine Press

This is a genius exercise which takes the deltoids out of the movement allowing you really isolate the chest

Dumbbell Incline Press

This is the mother of all chest building exercises! It directly ignites the fire of your upper-pectorals. If your upper chest is a bit of a weak spot, I’d definitely add some of these into the mix. If you don’t have dumb bells, substitute with a bar.

Weighted Chest Dips

I use this as more of a finishing exercise, but can be added to any stage of your chest workout. Use a weightbelt or dumbbells to increase the weight from set to set.

Example chest workout structure

Below is a sample structure that you can use as a guide for the above mentioned exercises. It uses a 5×5 principle with progressive overload. Rep ranges can vary depending on your goals (higher reps for muscle mass, and lower reps for strength). Add this format into your current regimen, remember to remove the warmup sets for each subsequent new exercise.

To wrap it up

By the end of a month, you should notice a significant increase in size and/or strength. Just make sure that you are eating and sleeping properly during this time to maximise your gains.

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