Chest is the most common muscle guys want to develop in the gym, and for good reason. A big chest is an obvious sign that you look good and can lift a lot of weight. However, a lot of beginners struggle to see change, even after months or years. They can grow their arms and shoulders just fine, but the chest seems too stubborn to budge.
There are 4 common reasons why you can’t feel your chest: bad posture, lack of warmup, bad technique, or poor workout programing. If you can’t feel your chest, you likely will not develop it the same way as your arms or shoulders. The following tips can help address why you cant form that connection, and what you can do to fix it.
Solution #1: Fixing Upper Crossed Syndrome
This is the most common reason people can’t connect to their chest. Upper Cross Syndrome (also known as kyphosis and “nerd neck”) is when you naturally slouch your head and shoulders forward, causing an exaggerated curve in the neck. This is very common for people who sit for most of their days, such as students, office workers, truck drivers, etc. Naturally, this posture causes the muscle of the chest and front shoulders to stay very tight while the upper back muscles stay weak and stretched.
How does this affect a chest workout? Every muscle needs to stretch and squeeze at it’s fullest range of motion to get a good workout. For example, an effective bicep curl requires you to completely straighten the arm at the bottom, then fully flex the arm at the top. People who only go up halfway in order to do more weight are not getting a complete bicep workout because they’re missing out on the other half of the rep. This is the same for the chest. Because the shoulders are rolled forward, you only get access to less that half of your chest’s full range of motion. Instead, the shoulders and the arms do most of the work.
How to Test if You Have Upper Crossed Syndrome
Upper Crossed Syndrome can be self assessed using only an empty wall. The following video was not made by Your Fit Perspective, but summarizes the test well.
Keep in mind you MUST keep the hands, elbows, shoulder, and hip on the wall the entire time. If any of these lose contact, you’ve failed the test. Other ways you may fail this test is by:
- Not being able to fully raise the arm without losing contact anywhere
- Arching the back significantly while raising the arms
If you’ve failed the test, here are ways to fix your poor upper body posture.
How to Fix Upper Crossed Syndrome
The fastest way to eliminate upper crossed syndrome and achieve a good upright posture is to do daily mobility exercises. For even faster results, perform these exercises multiple times a day. The more the merrier.
Exercise 1: Wall Angel
The test can be used as a daily exercise. Refer to the video above to see how to perform this as an exercise.
Just do 5 extremely slow reps for a single set every day.
Exercise 2: Handcuffs
If you’re doing this at home, you can do this on the floor instead of a bench. It’s actually more difficult on the floor, making the floor version more effective in the long run.
Again, you can do this for a single set of 5 slow reps.
What to Expect
As mentioned, either one or both of these exercises should be performed at least once a day. Depending on the severity of your upper crossed syndrome, correcting your posture can take between a few week to an entire year. This may sound discouraging, but correcting your posture can have the single most effective impact on your overall fitness than anything else mentioned in this list. Just stay consistent day by day, and you should start to see the benefits in terms of better sitting/standing posture, more comfortable workouts, less upper body discomfort/pain, etc.
You know these exercises are working when you start to feel your chest burn during your workouts, or see visible growth. If you don’t see or feel these, continue with these exercises and try the rest of the tips below.
Solution #2: Fixing Bad Lifting Technique
If your posture doesn’t need work, then the problem could be in your lifting technique. Here are a list of the most common mistakes make with any chest exercise:
Squeezing the Handles too Hard: Putting a death grip on the bar is a great way to summon maximum strength, but when the goal is to focus on chest development, this will only hinder your growth. A tight grip will make your arms and shoulder work much harder than your chest. Instead, use as loose of a grip as possible without dropping the weight. Also use just enough grip strength to prevent your wrist from falling back or forwards. Your wrist should be kept straight the entire time, with your knuckles pointing the same direction you’re looking, as shown in this picture.
Focusing on the Hands: Similar to the grip problem, focusing on the movement of your hands will make the arms work harder. Instead, focus on the movement of the elbow. For example, if you’re doing a dumbbell chest press, don’t focus on moving the weight up and down, focus on moving the elbows up and down. This sounds like the same thing, but this mental switch will cause less arm muscle to be recruited and more chest.
Forward Shoulder: Even those with good posture may find their shoulder popping forward during a chest exercises. This again causes the shoulders to take over the movement. Most chest workouts require the back to be flat against a bench, so before you start the set, imagine that your shoulders are nailed to the bench. It helps to squeeze your upper back so that your shoulder blade slide together and downward. Another way to think of this is to squeeze your shoulder blades together and tuck them down into your back pockets. If you can maintain this squeeze, your shoulders are more likely to stay back. If you still can’t keep your shoulders down, then this is a big sign to incorporate more upper back exercises into your routine as your back may not be strong enough to keep your shoulders under control.
Solution #3: Optimizing Your Chest Warmup
Most people warm up either by doing some light sets of their first exercise or doing 10 minutes on a cardio machine. While this is a great addition to any warmup, it does not prepare the upper body to keep the good posture and technique listed above. A good chest warmup activates the upper back and rotator cuffs as well as light stretching of the chest and shoulders. Here is a list of great warmup to do before a chest workout.
Handcuffs
Band Pullaparts
YTLW
Posture Pushup
A good upper body warmup should take between 5-10 minutes if not longer.
#4: Working Chest Too Much or Too Little
If you cant feel or see chest gains even with the above tips, it’s very likely you are either working the chest too much or too little.
How Can You Tell?
The most obvious sign of doing too much or too little is seeing no weight increases on the major lifts. Major chest exercises include the Bench Press, Dumbbell Chest Press, Pushups, etc. If you’ve been using roughly the same weight/reps for each exercise every time you perform them, then you need to do the following test to see if you’re overdoing it or underdoing it.
The Overtraining Test
Most guys over train their chest, so it’s best to start here. Here are the steps to see if you’re over training chest:
- Find out how many sets of chest exercises you do every week
- Reduce that number by about 25-50%
- See if either the weights on your bench press go up, you start feeling your chest more during chest exercises, or you see visible change/growth
- If yes to any of the above, then keep that change to your weekly routine. If not, either try reducing volume more or try the under training test.
Take the following as an example:
| Monday | Wednesday | Friday |
| Bench Press (3 sets) Incline Dumbbell Chest Press (3 sets) Machine Flies (2 sets) | Weighted Dips (3 sets) Plyometric Pushups (2 sets) Cable Flies (3 sets) | Bench Press (3 sets) Incline Dumbbell Chest Press (3 sets) Machine Flies (2 sets) |
This is a lot of chest volume per week. Volume is a measure that can help assess how much stress you’re putting on a muscle over time. It’s calculated with the following formula:
Volume = Sets x Reps x Weights
For simplicity, however, we’re only going to look at total sets, but just know that the above equation gives a more accurate picture. In this example, we’re getting a total of 24 sets a week. In this case, we can remove all the 2 sets exercises entirely to reduce sets from 24 to 18 (- 25% volume). The new workout looks like this:
| Monday | Wednesday | Friday |
| Bench Press (3 sets) Incline Dumbbell Chest Press (3 sets) | Weighted Dips (3 sets) Cable Flies (3 sets) | Bench Press (3 sets) Incline Dumbbell Chest Press (3 sets) |
If you are overtraining your chest, you should see at least one of these results:
- The numbers on bench press, dips, etc. have started to increase again
- You can feel you chest much more during the workout
- You can see visible change/growth
If this did not work, try lowering volume even more. In the example, you could remove the second exercise or reduce it’s sets.
The Undertraining Test
The under training test is basically the opposite of the test above.
- Find out how many sets of chest exercises you do every week
- Increase that number by about 25-50%
- See if either the weights on your bench press go up, you start feeling your chest more during chest exercises, or you see visible change/growth
- If yes to the above, then keep that change to your weekly routine. If not, either try increasing volume more or try the over training test
Again, let’s use the above example in reverse order to see it in action:
| Monday | Wednesday | Friday |
| Bench Press (3 sets) Incline Dumbbell Chest Press (3 sets) | Weighted Dips (3 sets) Cable Flies (3 sets) | Bench Press (3 sets) Incline Dumbbell Chest Press (3 sets) |
The total sets of chest we’re doing here is 18. To add volume, we can either add more sets to these exercises, or add more accessories. The latter approach looks like this:
| Monday | Wednesday | Friday |
| Bench Press (3 sets) Incline Dumbbell Chest Press (3 sets) Machine Flies (2 sets) | Weighted Dips (3 sets) Plyometric Pushups (2 sets) Cable Flies (3 sets) | Bench Press (3 sets) Incline Dumbbell Chest Press (3 sets) Machine Flies (2 sets) |
If you are undertraining your chest, you should at least one of these results:
- The numbers on bench press, dips, etc. have started to increase again
- You can feel you chest much more during the workout
- You can see visible change/growth
If this did not work, try increasing volume even more. In the example, you can add an extra set to each exercise that says 2 sets.