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The top bodybuilders are all gifted with extraordinary
genetics for building extreme amounts of
shapely muscle mass, but some of them weren’t
fortunate enough to get that gift from head to toe.
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A few actually had to figure out how to bring up a
lagging muscle group or two, and what they learned
can help the average Joe like you and me.
For example, many bodybuilders struggle with
trying to build pecs they can be proud of, and often
the obstacle is dominant front delts and triceps that
take over and rob the chest of the stimulation it
needs. That was the case with ’06 Junior National
Champion Evan Centopani. His enormous melon
delts and 22-inch arms totally overpowered his
chest, so he had no choice but to take action before
the imbalance forever kept him from earning a pro
card. Here’s what he did—and what you too can do
for problem pecs:
Ditch the ego. “Like everyone else, I got
caught up in trying to use the most weight possible
on chest day, especially on the bench press,” Evan
confesses. “The trouble was that even though I was
pushing up a lot of plates, I wasn’t feeling my chest
work. That’s because it was hardly working—my
arms and shoulders were really moving all that iron
for me.” Centopani lightened up the weight considerably,
and he immediately felt what he had been missing.
“The mind/muscle connection that I’d always felt in other
muscle groups but not the chest was suddenly evident,”
he says. “With less weight I was able to really squeeze
the pecs and feel the stretch on the way down.”
Preexhaust. His second major solution was to employ
the preexhaust technique. Rather than start chest
workouts with a heavy pressing movement as most
bodybuilders do, he isolated the pecs with a few sets
of some type of dumbbell flye as well as a flye machine.
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That prefatigued the pecs so that when he moved on to a
compound pressing movement, the fresh front delts and
triceps were able to drive the tired pecs into a deeper
state of exhaustion. It also means you don’t have to use
as much weight on presses, which can save your elbow
and shoulder joints in the long run. For those who balk
at the idea of doing presses later in the workout, Evan explains
that you may not need to do that. “If you have no
problem feeling your chest work and getting it to grow,
then do whatever you want,” he suggests. “But if you’re
like me and your shoulders and arms take over, you
should really think about making some adjustments to
your chest workouts. I wouldn’t recommend it if it hadn’t
paid off for me.”
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