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 one – we've talked about it before – the upper chest has the funicular fibers

that run in this direction. The middle chest – or sternal fibers – are 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 that – and I know it sounds a little backward – but 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 program – home workout program – that

requires nothing, no equipment at all – this 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.