Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX.com.

Today I want to talk about one of the biggest problem areas for guys.

It's the lower chest.

A non-defined lower chest, or saggy lower chest.

We can fix it.

I'm going to show you eight exercises here that are going to allow you to better target

this area.

But it starts by asking you a question.

Of these two pictures right here, if you're one that's dealing with one of those issues

with your lower chest, which one is it?

Are you looking more like this guy over here?

Or more like this guy over here?

Because if you're looking like this guy over here, the first thing you're probably

dealing with is an overall high body fat level.

Which means your diet is really not in check at all.

You need to be much more on point when it comes to your nutrition to be able to drop

the lower levels of body fat, to be able to see what you're really working with.

I can probably guarantee that this guy, when he does drop down, he's still going to be

lacking muscular development of the chest.

That's what this guy is dealing with here.

The body fat levels are low enough, but the muscular development is just not there.

Meaning, he doesn't have this defined line that creates that definitive chest.

But again, we can target this.

Then what we have to do is apply a little bit of anatomy.

You guys know that on this channel I like to break out the anatomy, and sometimes the

muscle markers help us do that.

I've done this in a previous video that I'll link at the end of this for a little

bit more in depth, but the key is this: we know that with the pecs themselves we have

a couple of options here.

We know that the pec is pretty much divided into two main areas.

At least from a nerve innovation.

We have the sternal area of the pec, which is the whole area of the lower pec here.

The whole pec.

Then we have up here, running off the clavicle, we have the chest fibers here that are separately

innovated and can actually be targeted a little bit differently because of that.

But more importantly, what I like to say here to keep things nice, and simple on this channel

is, if you follow the fibers – meaning the direction of the fibers – when you go to

move your body, you're going to effectively target that area better.

You can contract the area with more focus and attention by following the direction of

the fibers.

So, the upper chest, running in this direction, out toward the arm would mean that anytime

you're bringing your arm up, and across your body you'd be hitting them more effectively.

The sternal area of the pec, we notice here, runs from the sternum out, toward that same

area here on our arm.

So, when we do things that come across our body in adduction we know that we can get

this main, beefy area of the chest a little bit more.

But what people don't realize is the abdominal head, which is this very small area right

here, when I contract you can see right there.

That little break of the line here, and then this underneath, and around.

A little hard to draw on here with this marker, but it comes up, and around, and again, heads

toward this same area.

What are the directions of those fibers?

Those fibers are running up, and out.

So, if we want to work that area more effectively, following those fibers in a consistent manner,

we would take our arm from this position and come down, and across.

From here, to here.

Not from here, to here.

But here, to here.

So, any exercise that we did, that allowed us to replicate that, and even add the adduction

– which we know the chest is craving – we know that we're going to be able to target

that area more effectively.

Now, the decline bench-press is the hallmark exercise that all of us use to try and hit

the lower chest.

Why is that?

Well, if you look a bit more closely what you might think is actually just pressing

away from your body, if you sit up the angle of your arms is actually not directly perpendicular

to your chest.

It's actually angled downward a little bit.

What is that?

That downward angle here is doing exactly that.

It's following that same direction that we're after.

But I'm not going to stop with the decline bench-press, guys.

That's something you already know.

What I want to do is give you eight other exercise options to really, really hit this

area hard, and to get your lower chest looking better than ever.

So, let's start with another one of the classic lower chest exercises.

The dip.

The dip, we should know by now, is going to hit that lower chest more effectively because

it's actually doing what we just said.

The movement of the arm during the exercise is actually following that same movement that

we're trying to get to.

But we know we can actually make this better.

We call this a Dip Plus.

What we're doing here is not only including another muscle that likes to work with the

lower chest, but we're actually angling our body a little more appropriately to make

sure we're hitting this lower chest area.

So, it means you're going to angle your body forward, but not too much.

If we were to go all the way over the top we're almost turning this into a horizontal

pushup, which is going to keep the arms more in this angle here, hitting more of the mid-chest

area.

But if we get ourselves back up just a little bit, but forward for vertical now you can

see that we actually have our arms following in the same direction that we're supposed

to be looking to do.

However, I mentioned another muscle we can include here.

The Serratus can actively be included as well.

This muscle right here, that likes to work in concert with the lower chest, by doing

what we call a 'plus' at the end of every, single rep.

That means when you get to the top of the dip you press away.

You try to protract your shoulders, get your shoulder blades around your body, push your

arms away with your arms straight, and you start to get this muscle to fire up, too.

You'll feel a much different contraction than you ever have, if you've never tried

this before.

But the combination of both of those elements makes the regular dip not just a good lower

chest exercise, but an even better lower chest exercise.

Okay, let's stick with the theme of the dips here and actually do an old-fashioned

dip exercise.

It's the straight-bar dip.

This is something I was actually doing in my basement as a kid when I had nowhere to

do dips in my house.

The thing is, it's actually a pretty good variation to allow us to hit our lower chest

again.

What we do is, we have to hover over the bar, and we have to actually do this to balance

on the bar because you'll see the second you try to execute this exercise, if you're

not angled forward appropriately, you're going to feel like you're falling off the

bar backward.

So, you have to lean forward a little bit.

Well, what it actually does is puts your arms right in that sweet spot of where you want

them to be.

Not to mention, a little bit of internal rotation so when you come to the top of the exercise

in a full chest contraction, we know that internal rotation is another element of a

full chest contraction.

So, you have that working in your favor as well.

So, the straight-bar dip, if you haven't tried it, is going to not only give you another

dip variation to do, but a little bit of a different feel than the dip we've already

covered.

Now I'm going to throw you a curveball because this exercise people think is for the triceps.

But it's actually a poorly performed tricep pushdown.

But it becomes an effective lower chest exercise if you do this properly.

This is our jackhammer pushdown.

Now what we're looking for here is, again, proper execution of an exercise that some

people do in a bad way for the triceps.

Look again at what's happening with the arms.

They're following the same direction that we've been targeting here all along.

But I want you to make a couple of tweaks.

You don't just stand here and move the elbows.

You're not just bending the elbows and straightening them.

Then you're going to be working the triceps a little bit more than you are working your

chest.

Instead what you want to do is open your chest up by getting your elbows out to the side

and let them ride up.

So, if they stay the same level here you're doing it wrong.

If they go up and down, then you're doing it right.

What we do is angle just a little bit forward over the top of the bar so when we press down

it almost becomes a very close cousin of that straight-bar dip.

Again, it becomes another exercise in your arsenal for hitting that lower chest.

This next one here is one that I actually love, and I did an entire video on it.

I'll link it again at the end of this video, so you can watch that because it goes into

great detail about why this is so effective.

What we're actually doing here what we call a Standing Cable LC press.

I talk about focusing in this video on the elbow riding high, and going low, and trying

to make contact with the sternum here, at the end of the exercise.

But what we also do is, when we get to the top we just twist a little bit to open up

this shoulder, get it into external rotation, so when we come back, and in, we get internal

rotation as that elbow drives toward that lower chest.

Again, following the fibers, using science, letting our anatomy dictate the exercise,

and making another effective option here when we're trying to hit that lower chest.

Now let's take that exercise one step further because we can actually do better.

We can get a little more adduction – provided we have access here to a cable machine, or

maybe a set of bands that we could anchor up to a pullup bar – but this is the kneeling

ex-press.

What we're looking for here is – the two advantages are more adduction, as we can actually

crossover our body here through midline – and we can also get a better stretch, because

we can allow that arm to drift up even higher and get more of a separation here on this

chest muscle from origin, to insertion.

That is what we're actually looking for.

If you try this, again, position yourself down on your knees and focus mostly on the

angle of your arms because that is really dictating how effective you're going to

be able to hit this lower area, and start to get it to respond.

Guys, the problem is, you don't have a good mind-muscle connection with this lower chest

area.

You probably don't even have a good mind-muscle connection with your chest in particular at

all.

You're probably trying to just press, press, press with a lot of heavy weight.

Go a little bit lighter here.

Leave the ego aside and start aiming for great contractions, one after the next, after the

next.

If you have to do 10 sets of 1 I'd rather see you do that, than one of 10 crappy ones.

This next one actually comes in handy.

Especially if you didn't have access to a cable machine, and maybe only have access

to one band.

If you can anchor that to something high, like a pullup bar, and get your arm in this

position here then you can do what we call this D2 Flexion pattern.

This is from PNF, a classic physical therapy technique.

But it actually works great when we're trying to train our chest because it's following

all the same rules that we're going for here.

That is, you start your arm up high, and you're aiming for your opposite pocket.

In order to get there, you have to go from this externally rotated position of your shoulder,

to an internal rotated position, as if you're going to take a sword out of that opposite

pocket.

Again, the other benefit here is, let's say you are stuck with using a band and you're

afraid that you don't have enough resistance by increasing the moment arm, and keeping

your arm out straight.

You can make that band feel a lot more difficult than some of these other exercises we've

already done here.

You take that arm all the way across, keep it nice, and long, turn it in, you're getting

adduction, you're getting that same downward and across angle that we're going for here,

and then of course, you go back nice, and slow.