Incline movements for a better chest workout routine

While incline movements would hardly be the basis for the core of your chest workout routine, I think that you ignore them at your own peril. Without a fully developed upper chest you will run the risk of appearing as if you have the dreaded “mobs” or “man boobs.”

I've always thought that you need to hit any muscle group from every available angle and with the widest variety of movements possible to get full development. As an additional benefit, by working a variety of movements and angles you will more fully and completely develop the tendons, ligaments and other supporting structures for your chest muscles as well.

As with any chest routine movements in the incline category can be broken down into two types: flies and presses.

Incline Dumbbell Press

But before we begin to discuss these exercises, I think we should determine exactly what constitutes an incline fly or press. When I speak of an incline movement, I'm speaking of any movement where the back of your weight bench is set to between 30° and 45°. If you get much less than 30° of incline, it looks more like a flat bench movement. If you take the back of your bench much above 45° you're approaching the range where you're actually doing an overhead press. If you're doing flies it looks like some kind of weird vertical lateral.

When I'm going to do a chest workout and target my upper chest, I usually like to start with the basic pressing movement.

If you've read any of my writings before then you'll know that I'm enamored of dumbbells over barbells for all pressing movements. I believe that barbells restrict your range of motion and prevent you from changing your movement patterns over time. I don't have any proof that this could lead to repetitive motion injury but it seems like common sense to me. If your hands are locked on a bar throughout the vertical movement of a press, and if you perform this exercise multiple times over a period of years it seems reasonable to suspect that you might “wear a groove” into some of the supporting structures.

I’ll leave the reps and sets needed on incline presses to you with one caveat: Remember that the harder, the heavier and the longer that you hit your chest with presses, the longer you will have to rest and more likely the less weight you be able to use on flies.

I've seen people doing incline flies a couple of different ways. Sometimes you'll see the trainee holding the dumbbells out in front of his chest - i.e. with his arms perpendicular to his torso. It stands to reason that if you're going to perform the movement with this technique, the weight you’re going to use will be drastically reduced. Not to mention the fact that it kind of defeats the whole purpose of using an incline bench.

The proper way to perform an incline dumbbell fly is to press the dumbbells directly overhead, then slowly lower them to your sides extending your arms outward. Take a move it down to the point where you can feel a little bit of a stretch in your chest, but not to the end of your range of movement. This is just asking for an injury. When you bring the dumbbells back up and when you're lowering them for that matter be sure to keep a bit of a crook in your elbow a perfectly straight arm during flies can lead to over extending the structures on the inside of your elbow joint. At the top of the fly, bring the dumbbells together over your head. Some people like to do an isometric squeeze of the packs at this point. I think it's a waste of time and get you nothing. Not to me

If you follow the recommendations above and be sure to incorporate at least one of these movements into every chest workout you will see fuller, more symmetrical development of your pectoral muscles. And as stated before I believe that being careful to work all of the angles with a variety of different movements for every muscle group will lead not only to reduction of injuries over time but a more aesthetic and pleasing physique.