Chest complex & getting the most from your pull-up

Chest complex

Get your chest ripped without doing a single bench press. With the bench-press movement, you’re isolating your larger chest muscles while your stabilizers—which are also used to, er, live—aren’t getting enough work. Starting a chest complex with dips will allow you to focus on isolating the chest while working your shoulder and forearm stabilizers. Your natural body weight will enable you to do the exercise safely. You can determine how deep you go in your dip. After no more than 20 seconds of rest, do as many wide grip push-ups as possible until you’re fatigued. After another 20 seconds of rest, put your back on a bench and do incline dumbbell flies—keep abs tight, lower arms to the side, then squeeze your chest to create peak tension and build the muscle you want. With these three exercises, you’re starting with the hardest movement, making your way to the easiest. This technique matches the benefits of hypertrophy drop sets.

Getting the most from your pull-up

Do you want to know how to become good at pull-ups? Well, I’ve discovered the secret magical formula: 1. Do more pull-ups. 2. After you’ve done more pull-ups, do even more of them. (If Harry Potter could drink a potion to turn himself into a water creature, why couldn’t he just drink a potion to get himself ripped out of his mind?). Don’t bother with the pull-down machine—the athletes are judging you. If you can’t pull your body weight, use a resistance band to assist you while you pull yourself up from the bar. It’s okay if you can only do one pull-up—just do 10 different sets of one pull-up­—that equals 10 pull-ups in one workout, for all those math wizards out there. I promise you, don’t be discouraged by the fact that pull-ups are hard; you have to go through the hard work to get to the amazing beach body. For the people who can’t do a single pull-up, there’s a legitimate formula for you. Jump up to a bar and hold it parallel to the middle of your chest, hold it for as long as possible, and slowly lower yourself to the ground. This movement is called “owning the negative”; the muscles involved in the pull-up will activate quickly and you’ll be cranking out one-arm pull-ups with weights on your back like a jacked baby baboon in no time.