all right hi everybody john meadows here with another chess video so today we're gonna talk about this lower and outer part of your pecs how to build that specifically i think there's a lot of confusion on if you can kind of target certain areas that your pecs a lot of people would say well it either contracts or doesn't your whole PEC contracts or doesn't and yes and no so yes it does but you know that the kind of the sort explanation is the origin and the insertion so the origin where the muscle originates is the same but it inserts all over the place you have a portion of your PEC up here that it that inserts this way and your clavicle your particular head you got a portion here the runs a little different so my point is the fibers run a little different so the angle where your exercise will impact the activation of the PEC itself so certain angles create more activation for different parts of the PEC now anybody who's trained for a long time will tell you that certain exercises make you more sore in certain places to me this is a completely common sense I don't know why there's even a debate over it so we're gonna do lower this kind of this lower and outer area today so what you have to think about is these fibers down here and the way they run so they're going to run more from here up through there right so what you're going to want to do is you want to sort in the distance between your words in an insertion so here and here I hate using all this anatomy stuff but you really should understand it here here so you're gonna want to do this now what a lot of people do is they do exercises like like a cable crossover don't do this that's actually the way these fibers run up here so we would actually do that more for our upper pecs or these lower pecs you're going to want to do something more like this now in my opinion and 37 years of training you're not going to do a bunch of cable stuff to build that area so I understand when people say you got to get into the cable crossover and you got to do all this stuff and anatomically you're right but you also can't forget the basics in the basics and how you'd load the muscle so I'm gonna start with a good old-fashioned decline press now I'm going to use a smith machine because most of the decline in benches that I see the angle is too steep and I think a real steep angle is hard on your rotator cuff so what I have set up over here is we got a smith machine and I have a 25 pound plate under here so this is going to give you just a slight decline we just need a slight decline because if you think about it I'm going to be laying here but if I was sitting up like this the press would be more like this so there is some downward angle so you're not going like a crossover but you're also not pushing up like an incline so it's a little you can watch how the bar path is traveling okay I want you to use about a medium grip I don't want you out here I want you to get a medium grip so you get a nice long stroke range of motion and boom okay so here's a couple reps all right so a couple things on execution there notice I was actually touching my chest a lot of times you guys will see me doing upper pecs and I'll stop short well these I actually want to use a for range of motion I want you to actually go all the way down stretch your PEC the lower PEC and then come all the way up and flex I feel like that kind of contraction is really good on the smith machine so i actually do like people come all the way up and flex i can already feel the blood just pumping in there right now their thing is is it's real important where the bar hits if you start getting the bar hitting up high like that and you start internally rotating your shoulder and you push you're going to create a really tough situation for your rotator cuff and your solder joint in general your shoulder is a very unstable joint so you have to be really precise with your angles so I'm taking the bar down to the lower PEC like the nipple area right here that's where the bars touching if you notice when I got in there I adjusted the way I was sitting because the bar wasn't coming down the right path so let me let me show you this again one more time another set medium grip [Music] right here okay now this is too high okay that's too high I want you right here on the lower patch all the way up flex lower pit all the way up flex [Music] that is exercise number one so sets and reps for this my goal is to get up to a heavy eight sometimes I might do a heavy six or seven so I've worked up to 245 on each end now if you follow me you know I can incline 300 for probably five or six I'm actually very weak on the decline presses so that's good it means I should probably be doing more of these I'm so weak on these but I'm thinking I'm going to get somewhere around six to eight with this so let's see how I end up [Music] [Music] so I got 10 I means I probably should have had another 5 or 5 or 10 pounds on there so what I'll do now is I'll actually do another set with a little bit of weight so I get my 8 so you can call that one set you could count the sense leading up to it I don't really care the main thing is is that last set has to be really really hard for 8 reps all right exercise number 2 dips another good basic movement now I like to do these kind of how Ben Scarlett used to do them so I'm going to come out I'm going to put my feet out here as opposed to going in this way I want my feet out here and I'm gonna sink into the dip and I want to stretch and then drive up so it's still that same motion now Vince Gironda used to do these sometimes even like this that's a little hard on my wrists so dips just like this the unclamp stretch [Music] Oh who if you can come up and flex that's good but on this one I don't really emphasize the Flex like I did on the last exercise if you can get up to about 3/4 of the way up and just keep that tension on this one I'm more worried about the stretch up to 3/4 of the way whereas on the decline we were coming up all the way in flexing so let's keep tension on that PEC by coming up about 3/4 of the way I'll knock out a couple more reps beat up front up 3/4 away [Music] right there and let your elbows flare out to the side a little bit so you can really stretch three sets of those to failure that's one to be tough that's exercise number two now another kind of cool option if you can't do dips a lot of people have problems with their elbows or shoulders which I totally understand this isn't the ideal machine but I think conceptually your org you are talking about so you can do a press for your pecs on the pad here right here and bring the pad up to your lower chest right here and bring it down and flex like that [Music] [Music] that's actually a great exercise this machine here these poles kind of get in the way right here but you probably have an alternative machine at your gym so that's another that's another way you can kind of simulate that motion but it feels really really good although you're going to do the one same thing like you're doing a ditch you're going to do like three sets of ten to twelve reps that's something that's real safe to go to failure on so it's not going to destroy your body so I would go to failure on those sets as well okay exercise number three now again remember what I said you're going to want to pull your arm out like this so now that we've got our good basic stuff the presses and dips out of the way now when you do this cable stuff it's a good finish area we can pump a lot of blood in there we're also going to use this to stretch like with Illinois dips but again like I would never use this as my main meat potatoes movement for lower pecs I think you'd be spinning your wheels but done done at this point to work out I think it's pretty fast so we're pulling from up high and we're going to lean and stretch you're going to pull down this way okay so not here you're actually coming down right here stretch [Music] right there so down flex now I just kind of did a demo set on each exercise and I have a crazy pump right now my lower outer pecs so that's it for today give this a try tell me if you feel it as good as I'm feeling right now and if you like the videos don't forget to subscribe and we'll see you next time