Building size and strength is the guiding principle of most training plans you’ll come across in the weight room. If your strategy isn’t focused, however, you’ll be spending a great deal of time and energy without a solid direction, which will likely spell disaster for the progress you’re looking to make. That’s why most training programs home in on specific muscle groups rather than assigning exercises at random. If you want to achieve a specific goal–like building a big, strong chest, for instance—you’ll have the most success by focusing on training your chest.
That said, there are some limits to exactly how targeted your training can be. Lots of guys want to build shapelier chest muscles, so they’ll aim to hit different parts of the muscle group, often splitting up the chest into upper, inner, and lower sections in their mind.
Let’s narrow in on that last category, the lower chest. You might want to firm up a droopy spot you’ve fixated on in the mirror in your lower chest region, or maybe you just want make sure that you’re focusing on all parts of the muscle group evenly. Either way, your efforts at training only your lower chest are misled.
Can You Actually Train Your Lower Chest?
The short answer to the question is yes, but training your lower chest isn’t as straightforward as targeting other muscles, like your biceps. You won’t find one exercise that directly isolates that exact area of the muscle group, like curls do for your arms. Your lower chest is different because of the musculature of the chest as a whole.
Your chest is largely made up of your pecs, or more specifically, your pectoralis major and pectoralis minor. Many trainers view the pec major as having the three regions mentioned above, but that doesn’t mean there’s a lower chest muscle sitting all on its own, waiting to be targeted by the perfect move. Chest exercises will engage the whole muscle group more broadly, so you’ll also be training the other parts of your pectorals as you aim to hit the lower portion.
Similarly, if your goal is to “tone” your lower chest area to reduce fat, you’re out of luck. Spot reduction is a myth, so you can’t just isolate one part of your body to “burn” the extra bits away.
What you can do is focus on training your chest muscles as a whole unit. You can change up the angles on some of these exercises to give your muscles a different stimulus to better activate the lower chest—some studies do suggest this method might be effective—but unless you’re a hardcore bodybuilder, you’ll be better served if you work to build up the whole 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 Build Your Lower Chest
Pushup
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 ramp up your time under tension by emphasizing the eccentric (lowering) portion of the movement to level up its effectiveness.
Dumbbell Floor Press
The barbell bench press is the gold-standard of chest building exercises, but you should make room in your routine for other variations that flip the script, like this floor press. You’ll give your shoulders a break by reducing the range of motion, and starting each rep from a dead stop will help to develop more pressing power and hone your ability to lock out at the end of each rep.
Cable Fly
Most fly variations will challenge your chest to take on one of the major functions of the pec major: horizontal adduction of the arm. Use a cable machine or bands to perform this exercise, but don’t turn it into a cable crossover by crossing your hands over each other. Instead, focus on squeezing your chest at the top of each rep.
Stance Change Cable Fly
Work from the floor in a kneeling position to make the most out of this movement, which also demands that you set your cable machine or exercise band at a point just above shoulder height. Your positioning—namely the anti-rotation challenge that comes with it—will challenge your core more than you might expect, too.
T-Bench Glute Bridge Fly
This fly variation takes a note from the dumbbell floor press by limiting your range of motion, which serves to protect your shoulders and allows you to work with heavier weight. The glute bridge position will also give your core and legs an extra challenge.
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