If you ever spend any time in a gym you will probably here questions asked like…
“How do I build up my inner pecs?” or “How do I improve my biceps peak?”
Many times, people will respond with re-hashed answers that they have heard from someone else, or they have read in a magazine. Such things as doing incline bench press for your upper pecs, decline bench press for your lower pecs or even concentration curls to improve the peak of your biceps are false and go against the basic laws of anatomy and physiology.
First of all, you cannot change the shape of your muscles by doing different exercises. For instance concentration curls will not improve your bicep peak. The shape of your muscles is determined by your genetics. What you can do though, is make the muscle bigger through proper training, or make it a lot more vascular, cut and defined through proper dieting techniques.
Now onto doing different exercises for different parts of the muscle. What many people don’t understand is that when you stimulate a muscle, you stimulate the whole muscle, from it’s origin through to its insertion. It is physiologically impossible to train a certain part of a particular muscle.
A perfect example is the chest. The chest is one large muscle. There isn’t an upper or a lower pec. Whether it be decline, incline or regular bench press, you are stimulating the whole chest muscle. A muscle fibre either contracts fully, or not at all.
Again, genetics play a large part in the natural shape of your muscles. If you want to improve a certain part of your chest, for instance the inner pecs, all you have to do is build your chest muscles. Continually training your chest muscles will eventually result in an increase in size throughout the whole muscle, filling in your weak points.
This training certain parts of a muscle could be one of the main reasons why so many people don’t get the results they want. They are doing way too much work. Doing this exercise for that part of the muscle, another for this part, is too much work and will only cause you to overtrain.
Remember, to successfully increase the size of your muscles, you need plenty of rest and recovery. Doing too much will only lead to diminishing gains. So, if you are doing incline bench press, decline bench press, flat bench press and dumbbell flyes all in the same workout, you will never increase the size of your chest, because it is way too much training. Simply train hard with 1 or 2 of these exercises, and then give them plenty of rest and food to grow.
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