Body And Fitness Blog

Tuesday - chest workout

Incline dumbbell press

A couple of warmup sets and a few stretches to ensure the muscles and ligaments are all warmed up before going into three working sets. Weights indicated are for each dumbbell.

• 16kg x 12 reps (warmup)
• 20kg x 12 reps (warmup)
• 24kg x 12 reps
• 26kg x 10 reps
• 24kg x 10 reps

I was pleased with these sets, I managed to do more reps at 24kg than I managed last week and I even managed a set at a slightly higher weight than last week (26kg). Next week I will try three sets at 26kg and just see how many reps I can get, hopefully between 10 - 12 for set 1, and less for the next couple of sets.

Pec Dec

I’m not sure if this should be spelled deck or dec, I’ve always seen it written as pec dec, but in the gym yesterday I saw their pec machine called pec deck, if anyone has any definitive naming for this I would love to hear about it.

My aim with my pec dec workout today was to increase the weight slightly from last week’s weight, 47.5kg to 50kg. However, after the first set, I couldn’t face two more heavy duty sets, so instead opted to do a couple of normal sets at a higher weight and only the one more heavy duty set, for a total of four sets.

• 50kg for 1:30, heavy duty style, about 9 seconds per rep
• 60kg x 10 reps (not heavy duty style)
• 50kg for 1:15, heavy duty style, about 9 seconds per rep
• 60kg x 9 reps (not heavy duty style)

My chest was feeling very pumped after that workout. I was surprised at how hard 60kg felt doing it non-heavy duty style, I thought it would be relatively easy. Looking at the increase in the weight (10kg on 50kg) it’s a 20% increase in weight, which is about right. With heavy duty you should be training at about 80% of what you would lift during normal training.

Chest press

My main aim with chest press is to slowly get to the end of the stack (100kg), it could take a while though… Today I was aiming for three sets to failure, and by accident I increased the weight by 2.5kg - I didn’t notice that the extra 2.5kg plate was on until after my first set, when I checked to see if I had the right weight since the reps had been harder than last week!

• 62.5kg x 6 reps
• 62.5kg x 8 reps
• 62.5kg x 5 reps

One thing that I did on my last rep was to hold the rep at the top, then slowly release it to work the static then the negative part of the movement until failure.

After my chest workout, my chest was looking very pumped up, as were the front of my shoulders and triceps. It’s annoying really that after a workout my upper body is looking pretty good, but when I do my progress pictures I don’t look anywhere near as good. I’m sure eventually my physique will look good when not pumped (ie, after a workout) but until then I’ll just have to keep on working on it.