Strength and deconditioning 5: Epic chest

Normally, I really cannot stand upper body training. Squats are my best workout. My legs and posterior chain are incredibly powerful, allowing me to pick up a massive, ego boosting amount on that lift. As long as I have gloves on or my hands wrapped, dead-lifts are the same way. The hand protection keeps me from ripping the calluses on my hands open and I can drag a fairly enormous amount of weight off the ground. This keeps me big, tight and fit, and makes me fairly popular with friends and family who need furniture moved! You can't just do lower body exercises, though, even if the squat is the most important movement in the world and the dead lift a close second. One must, at some point, work the upper body. I do not like working the upper body nearly as much as I do my legs and back. For one thing, my shoulders are a federally declared disaster area. I had to have my left one repaired and rebuilt after a disastrous wrestling match when I was sixteen (I was a fairly good light heavyweight... but my opponent was, unfortunately, a fairly good super heavyweight) and am constantly afraid that it's going to just fall apart of its own volition. The closest it has come, interestingly enough, didn't come from lifting some of the enormous weights that I pick up but from picking up a box of plastic containers when I did bakery work. Go figure. I also have, I'm almost certain, some undiagnosed football damage in the right shoulder, and so I am as careful as I can be with any pressing movements.

I do, however, work my upper body at least twice a weak, sticking to big, compound movements. Avoiding isolation exercises forces my muscles to work in concert with each other, engages my central nervous system and keeps me from putting too much pressure on any single joint that might be weak. The first exercise that I like to do is the bench press. Although I cover it in much more detail in "Strength and Deconditioning 1: Bench pressing in theory and practice," I can summarize here by saying that the golden rules for benching effectively are to maintain a tight arch in the back, squeeze the traps together and hold the bar like you'll die if you let go... after all, you might! Pull the bar to your chest in a controlled descent, hold it for a second at the bottom of your ribcage and then, with a jolt coming from the legs, drive it back up hard. Here is a very large man doing an even larger bench press.

The second exercise I do at every upper body session is the incline bench press. I set the bench at about a sixty degree angle and do sets of 6 with 205, 225, 245, 265 and 285. I lower the bar in a slow, controlled manner--this is especially important on incline bench since the bar is lowered so close to the throat, and you really don't want to drop it on your throat--pause for a second on my chest and then drive it up hard, fast and smooth. Always come from a dead stop. Bouncing the weight off your chest in any pressing movement scrambles the central nervous system and can actually make you weaker, but coming from a dead stop forces the muscles to work hard and grow. Ken Fantano, the legendary power lifter and owner of the Muscle Factory, did six sets of six dumbbell incline presses with a 220 pound dumbbell in either hand, which is ridiculously enormous. Here is the same man incline pressing 405 strictly and very impressively.

Although there are many exercises which can work the upper body--including the fly and the decline press--I always find myself coming back to these two and have had excellent success with both of them.