Chest Muscles Explained

Your chest muscle is made up of the pectoralis major and the pectoralis minor.

Which is why they’re often abbreviated as pecs.

This muscle group spreads across from your shoulders to the breast bone.

The pectoralis major Is as you might have guessed the bigger of the two and helps flex the shoulder joint, while moving your arm toward and across the chest.

The pectoralis minor is smaller and found underneath the pectoralis major.

Its job is to help pull the Shoulder forward and down.

As you probably know there are countless chest exercises.

So for now I will stick with the most common and important ones.

For compound exercises we have the barbell bench press which you can do normal so flat, incline and decline dumbbell bench press.

Again normal incline and decline push ups and chest dips.

These trained not only a chest but also triceps and shoulders.

Chest isolation exercises include the pec deck dumbbell flys and cable flys.

As a beginner I suggest you focus on barbell and dumbbell bench pressing and build up strength over time.

A common mistake is to do dozens of sets of isolation exercises especially cable flights because they look cool.

So when you see someone at the gym hogging the cable tower,

because they need to hit their chest from multiple angles,

you can usually tell that they have no idea what they’re doing.