Chest Training

 

 Throughout the course of this blog, we’ve covered training multiple times. However, there’s so much detail regarding training, that it seems prudent to take time to talk about training each muscle group in detail. Each muscle groups utilizes different exercises to grow. Additionally, each muscle group can recover at different speeds from training.

The recovery speed of a muscle group is predicated on the muscle fiber content. There are two types of muscle fiber types that are worth mentioning, slow twitch and fast twitch. Slow twitch fibers are used for long periods of low intensity exercise, and fast twitch are used for short bursts of high intensity exercise. For example, calves are predominantly slow twitch, meaning they require lots of training, and very little recovery. On the other hand, hamstrings are predominantly fast twitch, meaning they will require lots of time to recover from, and will require relatively little training volume.

 We will keep these principals in mind when structuring training for a given muscle group.

 

As a disclaimer, due to genetic differences the fiber composition of a given muscle can vary widely depending on the person, so it’s always wise to listen to your body as you exercise.

 

For this blog post, I’d like to start with chest, because it’s one of my personal favorites to train.

 

Chest is a predominantly fast twitch muscle, meaning you likely won’t be able to train it as frequently as something like calves or shoulders.

 

It’s at this point that I’m going to introduce some vocabulary, so hang with me because it will help me explain training going forward.

 

There’re four terms that I’ll use to describe how much volume a trainee should be using:

 

MV (maintenance volume)- This is simply the minimum amount of sets a trainee will perform to maintain muscle mass, don’t expect large amounts of growth at this level.

For Chest, this will usually be around four sets per week.

MEV (Minimum effective volume) – This is the minimum number of sets for a trainee to reliably gain muscle mass. For intermediate lifters, this is usually around six sets, but can require more depending on the person.

MAV (Maximum adaptive volume) – This is the range where a lifter will be likely to see the most muscle growth. For chest this ranges from four to 12 sets depending on the person. This range is so wide because this isn’t incredibly well studied yet.

MRV (Maximum recoverable volume) – This is the most training a lifter can do and expect to recover. For chest, it depending on the number of sessions of chest you’re doing per week, but with two sessions this is around 20 sets per week.

 

I introduce all these terms to illustrate that a lifter shouldn’t be haphazardly selecting the number of sets they preform per week.

 

My recommendation for chest training:

For beginner lifters, I would train chest starting with 6-8 sets per week, adjusting as necessary. For heavier compound movements, I would preform your sets in the 6-12 rep range, for lighter isolation movements, I would preform sets in the 12-25 rep range.