 Ladies and gentlemen, before we hop in the video, we have an exclusive New Year's sale for Kaizen training, whether you want to lose fat, gain muscle or gain strength. We have programs that will help you out. Use code 2019 for 40% off all programs. Today is the last day. Click the link in the bio or check out kaizentraining.com right now. That's code 2019, say 40% off. Tell your friends, appreciate you. Good luck with your new goals. Ladies and gentlemen, Silent Mike back again. Another video today. Today we're going to talk about how to build your best chest, the best exercises and workouts to build big pecs. But before we get into the topic, please give the video a thumbs up, subscribe, check me out on Twitch. We're live streaming every single day, building a very, very fun community. Check out my podcast, 50% Facts. Drops every Wednesday on iTunes, Spotify, anywhere you want to hear it. Let's dig in. So I was on Instagram and I wanted to get to your guys' feedback. You can also comment below here anytime you want to bring up a topic, a rant, have a question and I'll answer it in upcoming videos. But my man asks, how can I build the best chest? What exercises are best for chest gains? And for me, what's worked over time, not that my chest is some chiseled artwork from Michelangelo, but what I've found the best gains are it's kind of a three-fold method based around strength and progress. Like everything else, if we want to progress in something, we have to slowly overload. And so overloading, the basics of it is we have to progress in some way and every week, once you become a little bit more advanced or even intermediate lifter, you can't just start adding pounds to the bar. So we have to progress in either reps, doing more reps, doing more sets or eventually adding small increments of weight. I always focus on strength with my first movement and the first movement, ba-da-boom, ba-da-bing. Take your best guess. It is. It's the bench press. The flat barbell bench press allows us to build the most amount of strength. It's the movement that most people can lift the most amount of weight for long term and so therefore stimulating our muscles correctly. What we want to do is train a variety of not necessarily angles because there's only two main muscles to the pecs. There's the pec major and pec minor. Majors kind of a shield-like kind of what you see and then the pec minor is a smaller muscle that kind of runs underneath it. But we do want to hit a variety of rep ranges to stimulate different muscle fibers, continue to build strength and also get a different stretch and stimulus onto the muscle. So the barbell bench press is what I like to start out with. I like to use it as a strength training method and we'll train maybe two to three times a week with a variety of reps. So the first session of the week might be sets of three to five, three to five sets of three to five, a little bit heavier, maybe in the 80% range. The second session might be a little bit lighter. We're going to do maybe three sets of maybe six to 10 reps and then the last one might be a little bit lighter but lower reps and it might again be sets of three to five but using maybe 70% range. So we're kind of hitting all boundaries, all repetitions while stimulating the muscle while allowing us to progress. So we have the strength training from the barbell sets of three to five, 80%. A little bit lighter reps, six to 10 reps, maybe 55 to 70% and then again we're doing about 60 to 70% but we're going to do triples or fives and work on our form, kind of a flush out, kind of a practice session. Now the second movement in our workout, what's worked really well for me is some kind of hammer strength, incline press, unilateral if you have that at your gym or just a dumbbell incline press. Now what we're going to be able to do is really squeeze those pecs. We're going to get a slightly higher pec stimulation working the muscle fibers on top. I like a really small angle. Some people go all the way up to 45. I like much steeper than that so it's just a little bit above a flat bench and I'm going to use higher rep ranges. So again maybe we're doing that two to three times a week. One day maybe we're doing sets of seven, fairly hard saving one or two in the tank and then the other session we're going to do sets of maybe 10 to 12 saving a few in the tank. The very last exercise that I enjoy is the fly. Peck fly is a great movement, isolation at the end of the workout. I use these a little bit higher rep range so you don't try to stress the weight too much. Maybe we'll do the same rep range every single workout, somewhere between 8 and 12, maybe even 10 and 15 and what we'll try to do is use similar loads and each week just add a rep or add a set to the fly. I prefer a cable fly particularly the cable fly machine with the adjustable arms. I just feel that it's smooth and it allows constant tension on the pecs and it feels really good on my shoulders. Rather than a dumbbell fly there is some portion of the movement that has less resistance in it because of gravity etc and leverages but the cables there's constant tension and it feels really really healthy on my joints and that's how I like to finish it out. I also finish out some of my workouts just to feel good. Now the pump is a little bit overrated, a pump may some muscle damage does allow for muscle progress but it's not the number one factor, it's overload over time but leaving the gym with a nice pump from pushups I do 3 sets at the end maybe with some tricep push downs to feel good and end my push day. Other things, other factors we always want to keep and focus in on our form. I always like to keep 1 or 2 reps in the tank as soon as you go to failure multiple things are going to happen. If you go to failure on any of these exercises besides maybe the pushup, the pushup might be okay but other exercises 1 you're going to allow for technical breakdown the closer you get to failure and more technical breakdown for 1 allows a chance higher risk of injury and 2 if we stimulate the muscle too much then we can't get the frequency over time. If you do 3 sets of 10 all out on Monday and you're supposed to bench Wednesday you're going to be too fatigued to have optimal performance rather than on Monday we'll do 3 sets of 10 saving 1 or 2 in the tank. Now Wednesday we're fresh enough to also do 3 sets of 6 at a high performance with good load and now we can get more volume over the week, over the month, over the year and that's what is going to allow us to progress over time. Now again to build any kind of muscle to progress in the gym we need to really focus in our hydration the basics right it's a new year hopefully we've got some new viewers here new subscribers and maybe you don't know as much about nutrition and this is your first time really getting into this thing. This is going to be key so what I tend to recommend is take your body weight in pounds divided by 2 and that's how many ounces of water you should aim for to drink in the day now that's a very broad category but that's going to be a really good start. Another thing is a calorie surplus if you're trying to gain muscle and get jacked and gain strength so whatever calories you need to eat maintenance to allow you to stay the same weight we need to eat a little bit more than that to allow us to build muscle and build mass over time you can refer back to another video I talked about how to gain weight how to lose weight the basics kind of of how to track food and then number three even though we love to be social creatures and we love to stay up till 2 a.m. playing Call of Duty blackout with your friends and giggling on Xbox live we need to get our sleep so sleep pattern is going to be very important a routine sleep pattern is going to be very important and how many hours so you know whatever it might be 7 8 9 10 hours of sleep but keeping it consistent keeping it routine will allow for the most optimal gains in the gym and out of the gym to keep your brain moving on the right level guys comment below let me know what you think let me know what you want to cover next I appreciate you guys so much give this thing a thumbs up be sure to subscribe I'm Salamike find me on Instagram Twitter 50% facts and on Twitch I'll catch you guys in the next video