Developing Your Pecs

Whether you are a bodybuilding aficionado or one who just wants to put in some chest muscles to look good, it is important to know the underlying processes that happen when we exercise. This is important as failure to know understand these things may result in undesirable consequences, like growing muscles on the wrong areas or worse, incurring injuries.

When you lift weights, some muscles become damaged in a sense, so the body’s defense mechanism works to rebuild the injured muscles, eventually making it denser with muscle fiber and more resistant to injuries. This happens over a long period, so in order to make muscle mass bigger and stronger, it is important to allow the body to recover after strenuous workouts and supply it with proteins, carbohydrates and some fat that it needs to rebuild muscles.

Developing the pectoral muscles will not only increase your chest size but also contributes to the stability of shoulders. Frequently, however, the Pecs fall victim to uneven development usually caused by doing flat bench presses only. Mere bench pressing for long periods will result in Pecs with thick outer edges, but shallow inner sections.

Concentric actions that occur when muscle fibers shorten do not cause much fiber damage. On the other hand, eccentric actions that happen when the fibers lengthen do much more damage when repeatedly applied with force. This is because during the eccentric lowering of the weight, the contractile sarcomeres that contain actin and myosin proteins responsible for the “sliding filament” contraction actually break under great tension. At each rep, sarcomeres are broken and after the workout, thousands of sarcomeres would be broken at different points. One can easily pull or tear a muscle if he goes on exercising without allowing the fibers to heal.

In chest development, you are getting more or less the same fiber recruitment if you bench press either with a narrow or wide grip. However, a narrower grip causes your elbows to remain close to your torso while the wider grip allows a greater stretch in the fibers at the bottom of the rep which means more force can be developed. The wider grip will increase force production and therefore damage. This makes the wider grip a better option in developing your Pecs.

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