The pectoralis major muscles, or pecs, originate from your sternum and clavicle and fan out toward the upper portion of your arm. Men often desire well-developed pectoral muscles, but have trouble building them evenly at the top, middle and bottom sections to give the square look we see from celebrities and bodybuilders. Fully developing your pecs requires a focused workout that targets all areas of the muscles evenly with a significant amount of resistance.
Exercises
An often-overlooked portion of the chest during a pectoral workout is the upper chest. To target this area, perform incline bench press and incline dumbbell press exercises. The mid-chest area is the most commonly worked area of the pectorals, because it is targeted during the flat bench press and basic push-up. The lower chest is also frequently overlooked, Matt Weik writes on the Bodybuilding; he suggests working this area by adding the decline bench press, dips and chest cable crossovers to your workout.
Mind-Muscle Connection
One of the keys to fully developing your entire chest is to focus on the feeling of contracting the correct area of your pecs during a lift. This is called the mind-muscle connection, the Fitness Black Book website explains. To improve your mind-muscle connection, perform exercises at a lighter weight with higher repetitions at first. For example, to build your upper pectoral muscles, perform a set of push-ups with your feet raised on a chair. Focus on contracting the muscles in your upper chest hard as you exert yourself. Learning the correct feeling of the exercise will help you use proper form when you add more resistance.
Considerations
Your chest workout should focus on your weak areas first, which will allow you to get the most from your muscles before they become fatigued. Most men have weaker upper and lower pectoral muscles, Dustin Elliott writes for the Muscle & Strength website, because the flat bench press is a staple exercise in most routines. If you perform the flat bench press early in your workout, your pectoral muscles will be tired and you will not be able to build the other two portions of your chest as well.
Workout Variety
Adding variety to your workout helps to keep you from reaching a lifting plateau and it keeps you interested in the workout. Elliott advises that your routine should always follow the order of "upper pec movements, overall/midlevel chest exercises, pec/fly movements [and] then finish with isolation exercises like machines." The exercises you choose for each of these four sections is up to you, but you should perform three or four sets per exercise and document your workout progress after each lifting session.
Expert Insight
Unfortunately, genetics may limit how well you can develop your pectorals. According to Elliott, each person has a unique distribution of Type I and Type II muscle fibers in their pectoral muscles. The more Type II muscle fibers you have, the more disposed your pectorals are to hypertrophy, which results in new muscle growth. If your muscles are high in Type I fibers, which support muscle endurance, it will be much more challenging to develop square pecs.
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