Dr Chalmers Path to Pro - Why Bench Press Isn't the Best Exercise for Chest
A lot of people turn to the bench press to build their chest, but it might not be the most effective or safest way to do it. While it’s a common gym staple, the bench press doesn’t allow your chest to go through its full range of motion and can put extra stress on your shoulders. If your goal is to grow your pecs, exercises like cable flies or the pec deck could actually do a better job.
It all comes down to range of motion. Choosing movements that let your muscles fully stretch and contract can lead to better results and help avoid injury. It’s not always about lifting heavier it’s about training smarter and working with your body, not against it.
Highlights of the Podcast
00:03 – Why Bench Press Isn’t Ideal
00:45 – Full Range of Motion Is Key
01:26 – Best Exercises for Chest Growth
02:22 – Bench Press Works Triceps More
03:05 – Dumbbells Over Barbells
04:19 – Training Tip: Use a Spotter
05:21 – Safer Leg Training Alternatives
06:17 – Range of Motion = Muscle Growth
07:03 – Squats and Glute Growth
08:27 – Functional Training Over Numbers
09:00 – Final Takeaway: Stretch + Contract Fully
Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:00:03] So it's kind of funny, whenever people, whenever I meet people, one of the first questions people ask me is, what do you bench? I haven't done benching almost a decade now. Bench press has been has been named one of the best exercises for chest and blah, blah, blah. It's not. It does horrible things to your shoulders, first of all. But the other thing is that it's not a very good chest exercise. When you look at any exercise, the whole point of the exercise is get the joint as open as possible. So you open up the muscles as much as you can, then you bring it together as close as you get. So the largest range of motion you can muscle to get out of that muscle group. Then you resist it. So with biceps the curl where you go all the way down and then you come all the way back up is one of the best exercises you can do for biceps. The problem with bench is that when you're out here and you come down when you come up When you come up, you're here. Well, your pecs want your elbows to come to here. So if you're, here you're missing 30, 40% of the actual range of motion of the pack. So if we're trying to build your packs, the very best exercise for them is flies, especially when you're way apart and you come all the way together. That's the best motion for the actual muscle of the pack.
Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:01:26] So if you're trying to build your packs, the last thing you want to do is take an exercise that only gets you 40-50% of the range of motion of the muscle because you're if you are trying to grow the muscle, you want to grow with the whole muscle and growing 100% of a muscle is obviously going to get bigger size faster than growing 50% of muscle. You know, that's one of the biggest problems we have with with a lot of the exercises people are doing is they're doing exercises Just to be in the gym working out Which is fine Like i'm not arguing that you should be in The gym just working out if you want to spend your time doing bench and doing an incline bench and you're doing Decline bench, and stuff like that. That's awesome. You're in the jim. You are working out. You were doing fantastic things for your health I'm not knocking that at all. Keep it up But if you're trying to grow your pecs do the exercise that activates and utilizes the entire muscle. So, you know, if you wanna do pec deck, pec deck is a much better exercise at most gyms than bench presses. Now, if your gonna do cable flies, cable flies are my favorite. Cable flies are what I do most of. If you wanna build your chest and you just did a, you know. 8, 10, 12 set of flies, that'd be fantastic if you did like a high fly, mid fly, low fly. That'd be a fantastic way of growing and developing the pack. If you're going to do a bench press, just so you can do bench press and you want a bench press, work your triceps more. There's a lot more tricep invention there is pack a lot more, because you're still going to straighten your arms out in the triceps is what straightens your arm out.
Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:03:05] So if you want a higher bench, you know, that's your goal, like I want to build my bench up, build your triceps up, the stronger your triceps are, the higher your bench is going to get, you're going to grow your bench a lot faster with triceph work than you're going to with, you'll work on your packs, if you wanna grow your pecs up, so they look pretty flies the way to go. So, you know, and the other problem we get into is that, and I've talked about this a lot, when you're doing bench press, there's a ton of guys who have been working out for a long time. If you go to the gym, you find the 40, 50, 60 year old guys have been lifting since they were our teenage years. Lots of them are going to have shoulder issues, lots of them have shoulder scopes because bench press is an unnatural range of motion for the shoulder because your hands are locked together and they can't move around. So lots and lots of shoulder damage, lots and lots and lot of issues there because your arms actually have to move and the bone actually rotates and things like that. So, you know, it's not allowing for proper motion. Now, if you wanted to still do a press motion, dumbbells are fantastic for this. Cause you're going to get all that motion. You can bring them up together. You can get a lot more motion in the pack. You can keep that full extension on the elbows. So if you want a higher bench press, because that's your thing, which is fine. I don't really care if you're like, Oh, the fact that you're going to press 400 pounds, that's awesome.
Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:04:19] By the way, if you can bench press over 300 pounds, you're going to have a very, very, small percentage of people. Uh, but if that's your thing, do more dumbbell press, do more dumbbell bench. It'll save your shoulders. Like jump onto the bar and kind of warm up and get there, but do the dumbbells. If you'll do dumbbell press will really, really help your shoulders? I would also highly recommend that you find a friend, uh, or a lifting partner that can lift the dumbbell to you. Because one of the hardest, one of things that's most irritating is if you're looking 100, 110 pound dumbbells around to do, to press with, it's a pain in the ass. So have somebody hand them to you, it'll be a whole lot safer on your back and on your body to just have somebody to hand those to you. But the biggest one you want to do for your chest is going to be flies. So, you know, if you do more flies, you'll get more function out of it. You know, there's a lot of exercises that are kind of like this. One of the big, one of the other big ones that is always irritating. And we're starting to see more of this in the gyms. There's no reason, if you're trying to train your legs, you want to do the squatting motion, great.
Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:05:21] Talk to your gym find out like get those there's a lot of uh belts there's even belts you can buy for squat that takes the pressure off your spine there's no reason to put two three four hundred pounds on your spine when you're trying to work your legs wrap it around your hips use those those those weighted those squat belts and do that not the belt that you wear when you lift but like the ones that have chains on them or hooks them so they can hook into the weight or they hook into weight system so you can do squats that way that's much much much better for your entire spine than trying to put a whole bunch of weight on top of your spine and lift it that way. Horrible idea. But a lot of times when we're doing these lifts, we haven't walked through what's the most important thing when lifting. Get the range of motion of that muscle or that joint as far open as we can, and then as far together as possible. The bigger the range of motion, the larger the stretch, and there's research on this, the bigger the stretch the the growth of the muscle tissue. The thing about it is that if you have a bigger stretch, you're using more of the muscle tissue. The more muscle tissue you engage in the exercise, the more muscle you can damage, thus the more muscles you can grow. This is not, this shouldn't be controversial. You know, because if you're like, okay, where does the pet tie in? Alright, so pecs here that ties into the arm here. So if you are only doing this motion, you're not getting a lot of pack, but you're going all the way open and you're coming all the way to the center, you going to get a giant amount more peck work involved. The more pec work we get involved, the more function we get. I see the same thing with like go back to legs with women who are trying to grow their butt and they do Olympic style squats.
Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:07:03] So they come down a parallel and they come back up go all the way down and come all the back up hit your hit your butt to your heels that whole ass to grass thing the bigger the range of motion the bigger muscle function you can get the more you can grow there's a lot of hamstring involved in that too the cool thing is that if you do those full ranges you're going to shape the muscle differently and it's going to look more the way you want it to look so when you guys are doing some of these lifts run through and think about the range of motion you're actually getting and how much stress is put under that. Now... This is, we'll talk about this some other day. But the other thing is, is that when you're, and this is more of a leg thing. We'll go, but like I said, we're going to this more later. The more you're doing this, they get your knees over your toes, get your weight back a little bit. Start with body weight, then work up. But you need to access the more range of motion of the ankle and the hip and the knee. If you'll exercise and train in a larger range function, knees over toes, off to the side, things like that, the more you train in that awkward positions, The stronger you're going to be in those awkward positions that's safer and healthy your hips knees and ankles are going to big Now if you're an Olympic lifter everything what I just said is different. If you're an Olympic lifter and that is your sport, that's different. Your training, go down to parallel, come back up so that you can get your Olympic lift in. But if you're not an Olympic Lifter, all this stuff needs to be looked at differently.
Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:08:27] I see this with football players all the time, but come in and they'll be able to do, you know, I can I can squat 600 pounds. Yeah, but you're so wobbly, you know, you can push you over real easy because your ankles are weak or because your core function this week. So the more that we start recognizing that one, the biggest way you're going to grow muscles, the largest opening and then the largest closing that's resisted. And then how do you balance all that stuff? So cables and dumbbells, you've got to work on this motion and all the way up. So you get all the stabilization function, you know, this movement, you get, all this neuro recovery piece. So you're gonna get a lot more functional growth out of it than if you're just going to do bench. So. Save your shoulders, grow your pecs by actually looking at where they insert, where the origin insertion is. Get those two pieces as far apart as you can anatomically and then bring them back together. That's the way you lift. There's a whole lot of people who are doing 19 different exercises and they will go work out and they can't figure out why they're not growing. Largest range of motion possible to hit that, resist it, and then that's how you'll grow. Guys, if you have any questions for us in the comments or drop us a question at questions@chalmerswellness.com. Have a fabulous day. Thanks for your time.
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