Building size and strength is the guiding principle behind most of the training plans you’ll find in the weight room. However, if your strategy is not in focus, you will spend a great deal of time and energy without solid direction, which will likely spell disaster for the progress you are looking to make. That’s why most training programs focus on specific muscle groups instead of randomly assigning exercises. If you want to achieve a specific goal, such as building a big strong chestfor example, you will have more success if you focus on training your chest.
That said, there are some limits to how specific your training can be. Many men want to build more defined pectoral muscles, so they will try to work different parts of the muscle group, often mentally dividing the pec into upper, inner, and lower sections.
Let’s zoom in on that last category, the lower chest. You may want to firm up a sagging spot you’ve noticed in the mirror in your lower chest region, or maybe you just want to make sure you’re targeting all parts of the muscle group evenly. Either way, your efforts in training only the lower part of your chest is deceived.
Can you really train your lower chest?
The short answer to the question is yes, but training the lower chest is not as easy as working other muscles, like the biceps. You will not find an exercise that isolate directly that exact area of the muscle group, like curls do for your arms. The lower part of your chest is different due to the musculature of the chest as a whole.
His chest is largely made up of his pectorals, or more specifically, his pectoralis major and pectoralis minor. Many trainers consider the pectoralis major to have all three regions mentioned above, but that doesn’t mean there’s a lower pectoralis muscle sitting alone, waiting to be the target of the perfect move. Chest exercises will engage the entire muscle group more broadly, so you’ll also be training the other parts of your pecs while targeting the lower body.
Similarly, if your goal is to “tone” your lower chest to reduce fat, you’re out of luck. Spot reduction is a mythso you can’t just isolate one part of your body to “burn off” the additional parts.
what you can do is concentrate on training the chest muscles as a complete unit. You can change the angles on some of these exercises to give your muscles a different stimulus to better activate your lower chest:some studies suggest this method might be effective—but unless you’re a die-hard bodybuilder, you’ll be better served if you work to build your entire muscle group.
With that in mind, you can add these exercises to your workout to target the chest to build strength and size.
Exercises to develop the lower chest
Push up
This classic puts you in a position to train your chest using your bodyweight. Don’t rush through reps, though: focus on keeping your core and glutes engaged, and increase your time under tension by emphasizing the eccentric (descending) portion of the movement to increase its effectiveness.
Dumbbell floor press
The barbell bench press is the gold standard of chest building exercises, but you should leave room in your routine for other variations that flip the script, like this floor press. You’ll give your shoulders a break by reducing your range of motion, and starting each rep from a dead stop will help you develop more pressing power and hone your ability to lock at the end of each rep.
wire fly
Most flight variations will challenge your chest to take on one of the main functions of the pectoralis major: horizontal adduction of the arm. Use a cable machine or bands to perform this exercise, but don’t make it a cable crossover by crossing your hands. Instead, focus on squeezing your chest in at the top of each rep.
Posture Change Wired Flight
Work from the ground to your knees to get the most out of this move, which also requires you to position the cable machine or exercise band at a point just above shoulder height. His positioning, meaning the anti-rotation challenge that comes with it, will also challenge your core more than you might expect.
T-bench glute bridge fly
This fly variation takes note of the dumbbell floor press by limiting your range of motion, which serves to protect your shoulders and allows you to work with a heavier weight. The glute bridge position will also give your core and legs an extra challenge.
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