Bounce Pecs
Muscle pro wrestlers and action movie stars know how to look intimidating just by flexing a couple of muscles. If you want to learn to flex your pecs like Hulk Hogan and Arnold Schwarzenegger, you can learn to practice your bounce and workout to emphasize your chest muscles.
Contents
Steps
Flexing Your Pecs
- Do some exercises to get the blood pumping. If you want to try to flex your pecs right now, drop and give yourself twenty push-ups. Anytime you want your pecs to appear larger and more muscular, it's good to drop to the floor work them out for a minute. This forces blood into the muscle, making it swell and making it much more easy to flex it in a visible way.
- If you've just finished a workout, it's the perfect time to flex in the mirror for a while and check out whether or not your pecs are bounceable yet. It'll take a while, but you'll always have better results after a workout instead of before.
- Go to the mirror. Basically, bouncing your pecs is just flexing your pecs, but flexing pecs that are sufficiently large so that the spasm is visible when you do it. If you're going to practice, do it right: go in front of a mirror in the weight room or in your training room, and remove your shirt so you can get a better view of your chest.
- To maintain your muscle memory, it's a good idea to always practice in front of the mirror, so you combine the feeling of flexing with the effect that you want. It might feel great like you're Arnold-rescue, but it might not look like much.
- Contract your pectoral muscles. In the mirror, with your pecs well-exercised, stand with your arms straight down at your sides and attempt to contract your pectoral muscles. It should be a lot easier if you've just worked them out. If they're burning, you'll be able to feel very quickly whether or not you're doing it right.
- Turn your upper arm (humerus) in toward your chest and you should feel your pec flexing. That's one of the functions of the pectoralis major muscle: rotating your upper arm.
- Don't worry about flexing them each separately yet, just worry about flexing them both on command. At first, it's hard enough to do just that.
- If you're like most people, your pecs probably aren't something you're used to flexing on purpose. But, once you get a feel for where they are and how to do it, it can be as easy as flexing your bicep.
- Try to isolate each pec. The more you practice and work out your chest muscles, the closer you'll be to feel them enough to flex them separately. Try to isolate each of your pectorals, and flex them independently of the others. When you see something that starts looking right, stick with it and keep flexing until it starts bouncing like a jumping bean.
- Stick with it and keep practicing. Some people have to weight train for a long time before starting to notice results like bouncing pectorals. If you can even flex them independently, you're doing pretty well.
- Maintain your pecs. Once you've got it figured out, it's important to commit to keeping your chest strong and your pecs bulging. Pec bouncing is less a skill that you learn and more a product of having really big and muscular pectoral muscles. If you can do it, congrats. Now keep working out that chest.
Making Your Pecs Bigger
- Start working out your chest on a regular basis. If you're not seeing much in the way of Hulk Hogan-style bouncing in your pectoral region, it's probably because your pecs aren't quite big enough to show yet. No shame. It takes a fairly large pectoral muscle to flex it enough to bounce in the way the bodybuilders do. That's what makes it impressive. Want to bounce your pecs? Keep working out.
- Integrate chest workouts into your regular strength training routine. Even a single workout per week dedicated specifically to chest exercises can have your pecs getting swollen in a couple of weeks. Stick with it.
- Do bench presses. Working out your upper arms and chest is the best way to get your pecs big enough to bounce. The best way to do that is good old fashioned bench pressing. Go high-rep with a manageable amount of weight to start burning those pectorals.
- Depending on how experienced you are with training, it might be better to start with more or less weight. You ideally want something that will be challenging for all the reps you have to do, but light enough that you'll be able to do all of them. 3 sets of 10 or 15 reps with a short break in between sets is common.
- It's also a good idea to work incline bench presses and decline bench presses to work your upper and lower chest, respectively. Use a similar amount of weight and number of reps to keep your pecs shaped.
- Do pushups. Don't have the gear to work out on a bench? Do what George Foreman did and workout your chest by doing pushups. Plyometric exercises like pushups, in which you use your own weight for resistance, are a great way of building muscle, as well as the fast-twitch response necessary to bounce those muscles. Do a few sets of a manageable number of push-ups, going as slow as possible to really feel the burn.
- Wide-grip and incline pushups are also great ways of targeting slightly different targets throughout your pec muscle. If you want to keep it shapely and strong, don't do the same old pushups each time.
- Do dumbbell flys. By far the best way to build muscle in your pecs is doing dumbbell flys. Laying back on a bench with matching hand weights in each hand, raise your arms straight up above you, then drop them straight down to your sides, perpendicular to your body, keeping your arms slightly flexed. Bring your hands back up to meet to do a rep. Use a weight that will be challenging for the entire set.
- If you have access to a weight room, you can use the chest press machine to do similar exercises from a seated position.
- Do full body workouts as well. Chest training needs to be a part of an overall, full-body workout, or it won't be doing you much good. Make chest training part of a full-body regimen.
- Be very careful to avoid overtraining your pecs. Chest workouts should be a part of a complete, full-body weight training regimen, not an isolated exercise. There's no two-hour shortcut to bouncing pecs like Arnold.
- Eat a diet high in lean protein. To build muscle in your pecs, workouts and a diet that emphasizes muscle-building protein are essential. Lean chicken, legumes, and vitamin-rich vegetables and whole grains need to be a major part of your diet.
- You can work out your chest all you want, but if you're still eating cheeseburgers and pizza every day, that muscle will keep getting bigger under a layer of fat, making your chest look round, and making your pecs bounces invisible.
Tips
- At first lift your arms and bend them in front of your chest to make contracting your chest after working out easier. As your pecs get bigger and stronger move your arms lower and lower. When you can contract your chest with your arms at your sides, then you can "bounce your pecs."
- When doing push ups don't use things like "The Perfect Push Up." You might be able to do more push-ups with it, but regular, old fashioned push ups really shape up and strengthen your pecs.
Warnings
- Be very careful not to overtrain. You can't bounce a torn pectoral muscle.
