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  • What's up, guys? Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX.com.

  • It's a bodyweight Wednesday and because of that I'm going to show you how to start hitting

  • the different areas of your chest with a home exercise. Now you don’t have to hit the

  • gym all the time and do incline bench presses to hit your upper chest, or flat bench presses

  • for your middle chest, or dips for your lower chest.

  • If you understand the basic biomechanical principles of those exercises you can translate

  • them to the home environment. I'm going to show you how to do that here. The two most

  • important things you have to understand is the direction of the fibers from the different

  • areas of the chest.

  • Number onewe've talked about it beforethe upper chest has the funicular fibers

  • that run in this direction. The middle chestor sternal fibersare going this way.

  • Then the abdominal head runs down in this direction. We can hit that like I've shown

  • you in previous videos right here. The important thing is to understand what is happening with

  • the upper arm in relation to the rest of your torso.

  • That tells you the whole story. Even though the exercise may look completely different

  • it won't look different if you understand the positioning of the arms. Let's start with

  • the upper chest. Look here on an incline bench press. You can see that my arms are not directly

  • in front of my chest. No 90 degrees to my torso. They're actually a little higher than

  • that.

  • So 0 degrees would be down here at my side, then 90 degrees would be straight out here.

  • On an incline bench press my arms are angled even greater than that; like 120 degrees up.

  • If we want to translate that to a bodyweight movement we can do that with a decline pushup.

  • See, when I position myself here against the wall with my feet on the wall you can see

  • that, yes, even though my body is facing down where it used to face up in an inclined bench

  • press, just focus on that positioning of the arms.

  • You're going to see it's the exact same thing as it was on the inclined bench press. So

  • you can target more of the upper chest by doing a decline push up. Now, we all know

  • that doing a straight, classical pushup is going to do the same thing that a flat bench

  • press would do. That is to target more of the middle area of your chest. That we've

  • already got covered. Now you want to flip it over one more time and you now want to

  • start targeting those lower portions of the chest.

  • You can do thatand I know it sounds a little backwardbut the inclined pushup.

  • Once again, look at how this all ties back together. If you look at a decline bench press

  • you can see that the arms are now in relation to the rest of the body forward, or below

  • that 90 degree angle. They're down a little bit lower and you're creating that line of

  • push which is down and across. Down and across.

  • The same thing happens where when we do this inclined push up because our body is positioned

  • a little bit ahead of our arms, those arms are angle in position to our torso down and

  • across. So I know it looks different and completely opposite of what it is, but if you understand

  • that, then you can piece it all together. Of course, at ATHLEANX, we piece things together

  • because we want to help you to get the most out of everything.

  • We've kind of got the ultimate home chest exercise if you want to hit all these areas

  • together. So what you do is you set a bench up here, as you can see in front of you, about

  • 5ft or 6ft in front of a wall depending on how tall you are. Now you position your feet

  • up on the wall to be able to perform a decline pushup. Remember, decline pushup: upper chest.

  • You do three reps here.

  • Then you walk yourself down the wall until your feet are flat on the ground and then

  • you do three reps of a regular, old pushup and get yourself immediately into an incline

  • pushup position, which will work the bottom portion of your chest. You do three reps there.

  • All you keep doing now is go back and forth, up and down, up and down, up and down until

  • you fatigue.

  • Remember, creating muscle growth is going to require that you push yourself to the point

  • of fatigue. If you're training at home and you have a weight vest that you can use; even

  • better. You'll be able to create that overload faster. The idea is understanding the different

  • orientations of the fibers inside our chest and how it is commanded by the position of

  • your arm.

  • That will unlock everything you need to know to target those different areas despite the

  • fact that you don’t have access to the equipment that you thought you might have needed to

  • do that.

  • Guys, if you're looking for a complete training programhome workout programthat

  • requires nothing, no equipment at allthis even uses a bench. I'm talking about nothing

  • at all. Head to ATHLEANX.com and get our ATHLEAN0 program.

  • In the meantime, if you've found this video helpful let me know in the comments below

  • and let me know what else you want to see here on a future bodyweight Wednesday video.

  • I'm happy to bring those ideas and topics to you.

  • All right, I'll be back here again in just a couple of days.

What's up, guys? Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX.com.

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