Every guy who works out wants to get a full pectoral muscle, and when you come to the gym every time you do a big weight of bench press, as well as all kinds of pectoral muscle training, but when your pectoral muscle growth, but still very slow, it must be very frustrating for people. In fact, this situation is encountered by many gym goers. Every bodybuilder wants to have athletic, strong, well-defined muscles. In other words, we want to have more strength through fitness and at the same time should look more fit. To achieve this result, you have to work hard and there are no shortcuts.
But among these, the chest muscles (consisting mainly of the pectoralis major and pectoralis minor), are notoriously the most difficult muscles to build. But it is not impossible to get improvements, as long as you follow our advice and avoid these mistakes below, you will feel the growth of your pectoral muscles back.
1. you don't warm up
Surprisingly, many people go straight to the gym and start training, for example, straight away with exercises like the bench press. Guys, stop it, you need to do some warm up before the official training, your arm swing a few times is not going to work.
In 2015, the British Journal of Sports Medicine published a systematic review of the effects of upper body warm-up on athletic performance and injury. Thirty-one studies were reviewed, and the results showed that a high-load dynamic warm-up enhances strength performance and physical function.
Warmed-up muscles are more flexible, have greater mobility, can produce greater explosive power and are less prone to injury. Giving yourself a little more time before each workout to get your blood flowing and give your target muscles a slight feeling of congestion can make a big difference.
2. you don't complete the movement slowly enough
There are always those people in the gym who look like they are trying to break the world record for number of bench presses completed in 30 seconds. If your goal is to build muscle, completing the process quickly won't help.
In order to cause "damage" to the muscle fibers, which would be a signal for the muscles to repair themselves, your muscles remain under tension for a while. Fast action may boost your confidence, but it won't make your muscles bigger. A study published in the journal Physiology reports that completing training movements slowly in a fatigued state improves the rate of muscle protein synthesis more than fast movements.
In the bench press, for example, many coaches adhere to the 2-1-3 rhythm lifting method: hold for 2 seconds on the way up, a 1-second pause, and 3 seconds on the way down.
However, moving too slowly may have negative effects. When training at a very slow pace, muscle activity is reduced by 36%, so there is no need to slow down excessively. According to research, there does not seem to be any benefit to slowing down movement beyond 3 seconds during the descent and ascent phases, and doing so may actually be detrimental to growth.
3. You don't train enough weight
Let's keep it simple. If you want to build pectoral muscles that the various fitness gods are proud of, then you have to work your muscles hard. Of course, everyone has their own limits, we are not here to judge. Because you will be surprised to find that if you give it your all, you can always possibly do better.
If you're a beginner, there's no need to show off your muscles. Once you're in good posture, and in shape to control heavy loads more proficiently, you can consider doing more advanced workouts that include harder movements and bigger weights, especially for big muscle groups like the pecs.
Before each exercise, try turning up the volume of the music in your headphones. A study published in the journal Strength and Conditioning found that during strenuous exercise, your strength performance improves when you listen to alto music with a beat count between 130 and 140 per minute, take a few deep breaths and get your arms moving. Note: Listening to love songs will not have the same effect.
For safety and training effectiveness, the weight must be chosen as a weight you can control. Because when the weight rises to a weight you can't control, the shoulder muscles, triceps, and even core muscles will be overly involved in firing, which inevitably affects the stimulation of the chest muscles.
4. you are not thinking like an athlete
Although still controversial, some research institutions have begun to confirm the connection between the brain and muscles. Now, we are not asking you to control any object with your mind, but rather that the more you pay attention to the muscles you are working, the more muscle fibers you can activate.
A recent study published in the European Journal of Applied Physiology found that people who went to the gym improved their bench press exercises when they focused on using their chest muscles.
The next time you're at the gym, think about how your target muscles will work harder when you exercise. As you lift or lower the barbell, focus on the contraction of your chest muscles and how strong you feel while you're doing it.
5. you don't rest enough
This is something you all know, right? You know that your gains to muscle growth are more often than not soundly rested on a full, well-fed diet.
Without adequate recuperation, your muscles will never grow. In fact, working out too often on the same body part can hinder muscle growth and actually sabotage the results of the workout you've already worked so hard on.
We know that you can still train in the gym the day after a workout, but if you don't rest enough and your muscles haven't fully recovered, you're likely to fall victim to overtraining, which may even lead to illness and injury that will further affect your training later.
Constantly banging away in the gym without enough rest can lead to overtraining and energy depletion. How best to avoid it? A good rule of thumb is to wait at least 48 hours after a strenuous chest workout before exercising the same muscles again.
