That sounds like a challenge.
Let me think…
I know how!
With a big enough weight, a fragile enough floor and enough clumsiness, I know I can make it.
Simply not true. I’ve worked out at home, seriously, and tripled my baseline strength. For pecs, see my above comment.
Rippetoe etc. all concur that the bench press in its many forms is not ideal for pec development. I never could get even dumbell benching to work my pecs before my arms fatigued. Not so with dipping.
Yep. Dips good.
So, I have to ask what your thoughts are on decline bench press for the chest muscle??
Unnecessary and risky.
There are a lot of fitness accessories and many of them are useless or close. A roller is good for abdominal exercises. But I wouldn’t put push up handles in the same category.
Pushups remain a decent exercise. Once the standard ones become too easy, you can work towards archer and one-armed pushups.
Bench presses are pretty effective and are done because people enjoy doing them. Ego is involved because you can lift a lot of weight, but this is not an entirely bad thing, and they do work. Dumbbells allow a better range of motion. If there are safety concerns, a Smith machine doing floor presses may be helpful. The machines have a more prescribed motion but have their place at the end of a workout.
Dips are one of the best pec exercises. You can emphasize the chest or triceps by bending your legs behind or in front of your body, and after working up to a high volume can add weight.
Flyes and posterior flyes have their place too to work the chest and shoulder rotator cuffs. The chest plays a secondary role in rows, close grip pull-ups, squats and deadlifts, but since bigger weights can be used this can still be significant.
A dip belt would be the best accessory for working the chest. Pushups are not very uncomfortable and the tools that make them slightly more comfortable likely don’t lead to better results. You might get better results from gymnastics rings, but many gyms don’t Have these or let you bring your own.
What are the best uses for gymnastic rings? I can suspend them from my pull-up bar.
They’re just suspended rings, right? I can either buy them for $20-30 on Amazon or improvise something cheaper from the hardware store.
It’s true that this is the difference between having definition vs. being smooth but to have muscle definition you have to have muscle to define, otherwise getting your body fat down makes you look like a prisoner of war.
Lots of dip lovers here. 
They’re a great exercise, but they can be hell on the rotator cuff even if performed correctly. Of course that can be said of most chest exercises, but it’s especially true with dips. If not performed correctly, they can really rip them up.
The other con from dips is that they focus more on lower pec development as the humeri will be in a similar position as in decline benches. Most people want more upper pec development for aesthetic reasons.
I haven’t met anyone that was serious (using my definition) about pec development and also built an impressive set of pecs strength or size-wise that didn’t employ some form of bench pressing. I have trained with professional powerlifters and bodybuilders for over 20 years and have trained for 35 years.
Rippetoe said that? Can you cite that, please? Who are “etc”? It seems like you’re claiming the majority of strength or bodybuilding coaches claim that various forms of benching are less than ideal for chest development.
For those that are unaware, Mark Rippetoe is the former powerlifter and strength coach that wrote that wrote Starting Strength. His program of the same name focuses on the bench press as “the” chest exercise.
In all volumes of that book, you will find the following:
The reason that isolated body part training on machines doesn’t work is the same reason that barbells work so well, better than any other tools we can use to gain strength.
…
So, as good an exercise as the dumbbell bench may be, you will be bench pressing with a barbell, as the weight of history and precedent demands. The bench press, or supine press (one occasionally sees old references to the “prone press” in badly edited sources), is a popular, useful exercise. It is arguably the best way to develop raw upper-body strength, and done correctly, it is a valuable addition to your strength and conditioning program.
Mark said the following in a fairly recent interview:
*:If we’re talking about the muscle group chest, this is the kind of thing that if you are interested in developing your “chest,” you better be benching heavy because all of the cable crossovers and dumbbell flyes in the world will not make the damn thing grow like getting your bench press up to 350.
If you want a noticeable chest through your shirt, the most important thing you can do is get your bench press up.
…
You have to approach this sensibly, in a way to get your bench up. The best way to get your chest big is to get your bench big.*
How about using raised leg push-ups or using a loaded backpack?
Well, yes. But the specific coversation was re someone who had been doing exercises to make gains in muscle definition. So I was using the model of a person who already had a baseline level of muscle mass and wanted to have it more clearly defined when i made that statement. While doing endless repetitions with an air pump certainly won’t build much, if any, muscle, it does probably provide a slightly better calorie burn. So in that sense, it does assist in furthering muscle definition (however slight that assistance may be).
Sure, there are few exercises I would say “don’t do that” to. It all depends on your goals. “I want the strongest pecs I can possibly get” is going to involve a different exercise selection and programming than “I want to be a little stronger than I am now.”
Don’t forget programming. This is as or more important than exercise selection. There are lots of gurus out there that are going to give you subpar or plain bad info. If you’re interested in doing a little research yourself, here are some names to Google that will give you solid info (in no particular order, some more for size than strength and vice-versa):
Eric Helms, Brad Schoenfeld, Mike Israetel, Greg Nuckols, Bret Contreras, Layne Norton, James Krieger and a few solid YouTube channels: OmarIsuf, Jeff Nippard and SoheeFit.
At the risk of getting in a debate as his channel was mentioned in this thread, I don’t recommend ATHLEAN-X.
Why not?
Also curious. I’ve found their advice useful for my lower back (thanks, Quicksilver!) but if there are important caveats, I’d like to know them. You don’t need to reply to combative replies.
I mean, you can get yourself some dumbbells and a bench for petty cash. That stuff is forever for sale secondhand.
Get plate-loading dumbbells if you can, so you can increase the resistance as you get stronger.
Work out at home if it helps you stick to your routine. For myself, I prefer a gym - it would be a long time before my monthly gym fees added up to more than buying all the barbells/dumbbells/plates/racks/machines that are available where I currently work out. YMMV.
Regards,
Shodan
I guess my problem is more that I live in a flat and a bench might take up a little too much room. Then again, maybe not.
Thanks.
Plus, it’s hard to progress in benching/chest work w/free weights when you are training alone. Part of the reason I prefer training at a gym is the availability of spotters.
This might be a little sloppy as I don’t have a lot of time:
Aside from the click-baity titles, Athlean-X also give clic-baity advice in the video content, often just declaring one thing is “the best” and gives little evidence to support it. Taking a quick look at his channel, I see the following title “The Fastest Way to Big Biceps (WORKS EVERY TIME!).”
Okay, that caught my eye as intended. I want big biceps fast, I gotta click it!
In the video he claims a specific modified chin-up is the answer to fastest biceps growth. The reason he states later in the video: "You'll be shocked at how much this will overload your biceps, in a novel and unique way, because if you're used to just curling dumbbells or curling a barbell, you're likely not getting as much stress on your biceps as this is going to do." He makes some other claims regarding why his modifications are superior, but provides no evidence. The technique is going to be impossible for most people to carry out and I'm not buying the blanket claim that it grows biceps "faster" than using a curl bar. For beginners? For advanced athletes? I guess just for everyone. No studies, just some unfounded claims. I've seen too many similar videos on his channel.He must have learned a lot since 2013 as he had a not so commonly used curl variation for building biceps “the fastest”:
Years ago Jeff got slaughtered online for a video that he has since deleted ( Ithink it’s been deleted, I couldn’t find it) claiming the underhand pressdown is superior to the overhand pressdown or neutral grip using a rope for triceps development.
Here is a good video explaining why he’s wrong. You can skip to about the 2 minute mark for the anatomy:
Jeff was a little butt-hurt regarding being debunked and still defended it the superiority of the underhand pressdown years later: His reason: Apparently one can't help but to internally rotate the shoulder with a palms-up grip. Strange, as I have no problems not internally rotating my shoulders even with a narrow bar, but they do, of course, have wider bars for pushdowns (I prefer a rope).One of the folks I recommended earlier, Brad Schoenfeld, (who has a PhD in exercise science) doesn’t get it either:
Speaking of triceps, here’s a video where he claims the triceps kickback is a great triceps exercise.
He tells us what the criticisms are regarding why they aren't that great- the criticisms are correct. He then says just do the last third of the exercise as regarding the first two thirds "who cares what leads up to that." Seriously? He doesn't care about full range of motion?The title of the above video is “The Tricep Exercise You STOPPED Doing (BIG MISTAKE!).” The reason people “stopped” doing it is because they have access to a weight stack that allows them to perform a superior exercise where the humerus is in the same position relative to the torso: the triceps pushdown with a rope. Why is it superior? Because the weight is going straight up and down and one is getting lots of tension at all phases of the movement. That’s not an insignificant difference. Try several sets of heavy pushdowns one day and kickbacks another and the difference you’ll feel is huge.
Out of time, but he’s selling forms of creatine more expensive than creatine monohydrate, which is super cheap and effective. It’s been studied more than any supplement that aids in muscle building currently on the market and claiming they’re superior forms:
Yeah, there are company sponsored studies showing more expensive forms are superior. The majority of studies show plain old creatine monohydrate is going to saturate the muscle with creatine without claims that Jeff is making such as gastric upset, etc. when taken at doses that are going to do the trick (5 g or less a day).In short, the people I suggested earlier don’t have click-baity advice and I don’t usually disagree with any of them.
Correction: That should end with “palms-down grip.”
Regarding his original video that was heavily criticized at the time, he did not mention the internally rotated shoulder bit as to why palms-up is superior. He came up with that reasoning later.