Upper Chest Training: The Best Exercises

Training the chest muscles effectively requires specialized and targeted exercises that work your entire chest area, which we divide into the upper, middle, and lower sections of the musculature. The "Upper Chest Muscle" refers to the large pectoral muscle (lat. Musculus Pectoralis Major), whose strengthening ensures a particularly wide and full, visibly trained chest. With the exercises from this article, you target this upper chest area, even though other areas of the chest musculature are always involved. Before you start your chest muscle-building training, you should warm up well. After warming up, you can start with light chest exercises for the upper chest area. Then you increase the difficulty level from easy to medium to high.

The Best Exercises

For perfect upper chest musculature, the following exercises are recommended:

• Negative push-ups
• Incline bench press with dumbbells
• Machine incline bench press
• Incline dumbbell flyes
• Cable flyes on an incline bench

How to perform these exercises correctly and what to look out for, we explain here:

Negative Push-ups

With negative push-ups, you can target your upper chest without any extra equipment. This variant of push-ups for the upper chest is somewhat more challenging than the classic execution. Therefore, the prerequisite should be that you have no problems with normal push-ups. The exercise looks like this: position your toes on a higher position, e.g., on a chair at home, a bench in the park, or a flat bench in the gym. Go into the push-up position and make sure that your arms are about shoulder-width apart. Now slowly lower the chest by bending the elbows. Then press the chest back up until the arms are almost fully extended. If you feel too much strain on the wrists, you can also perform this exercise on your fists.

Incline Dumbbell Bench Press

For this exercise, sit on an incline bench with a dumbbell in each hand. You determine the angle of the bench yourself. Ideal for training the large chest muscle is a low angle of 30 degrees. However, to train the complete upper chest area, you should work with an angle of 45 degrees. Sit on the bench and place your feet firmly on the floor. In the starting position, your elbows point outwards and forearms point straight up. The dumbbell should line up with your upper arms. As you exhale, now extend your arms upwards. End the movement when the arms are extended and before the dumbbells touch. Then lower the dumbbells slowly back to the starting position while inhaling. Make sure that the forearms point straight up during the entire exercise and your head rests on the inclined part of the bench.

Machine Incline Bench Press

A third variant of the incline bench press is the machine version. This exercise is ideal for beginners in chest muscle-building training. The angle of the incline bench should be chosen between 45 and 60 degrees. For the starting position, sit on the machine, slide your buttocks all the way back on the seat cushion, press your back against the bench cushion, and place your feet firmly on the ground. Now grab the handles with an overhand grip and tense your abdominal muscles. Then press the handles slowly up at an angle. Again, pay attention to your breathing and hold the tension for a moment. Then move the handles back to the starting position.

Incline Cable Flyes

With this exercise, you can also excellently strengthen your upper chest. The exercise goes as follows: Lie on an incline bench (you determine the angle yourself) and grab the hand loops of the cables to the left and right of you. The weight hanging on the cables can be individually varied according to your level of training. Start light and gradually increase. Now pull the hand loops up to the middle of your chest area. Make sure that your arms are not completely extended to transfer the tension to the upper chest. Stop the movement when your arms point vertically upwards. The hands should not touch each other to maintain the force. You can repeat this several times and increase the weights step by step.

Conclusion

With these described exercises, you focus your chest muscle training on the upper area. However, make sure to train all areas of the chest evenly and not to neglect any in order to achieve optimal results. It is also important to pay attention to a clean movement process and not to lift as heavy weights as possible. If you perform movements incorrectly because you have put on too many plates, you increase the risk of injury. Train rather correctly and with less weight, then this training will help you build a more massive chest with a well-trained upper chest muscle.