I have been reading so much about the bench not being the best exercise for pec development. So I starting doing isolation exercises and tweaks on the bench and incline. I felt more pump in the muscles but the development hadn’t come like I had hoped. Well I decided to enter a local bench contest for the hell of it and started hitting bench again this time with a more narrow grip than usual for me.
Well holy cow the pump and density of my pecs has increased dramaticsally. I have been using your double progression model and it has been great. Any reason why the bench is now working so well for me now?
[quote]matt_t2004 wrote:
I have been reading so much about the bench not being the best exercise for pec development. So I starting doing isolation exercises and tweaks on the bench and incline. I felt more pump in the muscles but the development hadn’t come like I had hoped. Well I decided to enter a local bench contest for the hell of it and started hitting bench again this time with a more narrow grip than usual for me.
Well holy cow the pump and density of my pecs has increased dramaticsally. I have been using your double progression model and it has been great. Any reason why the bench is now working so well for me now?[/quote]
-
The previous activation work I paying off… you have to reprogram your nervous system to use the pecs. Once this is done you can begin to stimulate it with the big lift but it still takes some time to make a visual difference.
-
A narrower (not close-grip but narrower) actually is better to recruit the chest because the shoulder/arm angle at the bottom is more pronounced which means that the angle of travel of the arm from bottom to top is larger than with a wider grip, which means more transverse flexion/adduction thus more pectoral recruitment
-
Changing the exercise (modifying the grip to a point where the movement feels different IS changing exercise) an make your muscles sensitive again and you get a getter pump.