Building size and strength is the guiding principle of most workout plans you’ll come across in the weight room. If your strategy isn’t focused, however, you’ll spend a lot of time and energy without solid direction, which will likely spell disaster for the progress you seek to make. This is why most training programs target specific muscle groups rather than assigning exercises randomly. If you want to achieve a specific goal, like building a big, strong chest, for example, you’ll have the most success by focusing on training your chest.

That said, there are limits to exactly targeting your workout. Many guys want to develop shaper chest muscles, so they will aim to hit different parts of the muscle group, often dividing the chest into upper, inner, and lower sections in their mind.

Let’s limit ourselves to this last category, the lower part of the chest. You might want to firm up a droopy spot you’ve focused on in the mirror in your lower chest area, or maybe you just want to make sure you’re focusing evenly on all parts of the muscle group. Either way, your training efforts only your lower chest is misled.

Can you actually train your lower chest?

The short answer to the question is yes, but training your lower chest isn’t as simple as targeting other muscles, like your biceps. You won’t find a single exercise that directly isolates that exact muscle group area like curls do for your arms. Your lower chest is different due to the musculature of the chest as a whole.

Your chest is largely made up of your pectorals, or more specifically, your pectoralis major and your pectoralis minor. Many trainers consider the pec major to have all three regions mentioned above, but that doesn’t mean there’s a lower chest muscle sitting all by itself, waiting to be targeted with the perfect move. Chest exercises will work the entire muscle group more broadly, so you’ll train the other parts of your pecs as well when you’re aiming to hit the lower end.

Likewise, if your goal is to “tone” your lower chest to reduce fat, you’re out of luck. Spot reduction is a myth, so you can’t just isolate one part of your body to “burn off” the extra bits.

What you can do is focus on training your chest muscles as a whole unit. You can change the angles of some of these exercises to give your muscles a different stimulus to better activate your lower chest – some studies suggest this method might be effective – but unless you’re a hardcore bodybuilder, you’ll be better served. if you work to develop the whole muscle group.

With that in mind, you can add these exercises to your workout to target the chest to build strength and size.

Exercises to strengthen your lower chest

Pumps

This classic allows you to train your chest using your body weight. Don’t rush the reps, though, focus on keeping your core and glutes engaged, and increase your time under tension by emphasizing the eccentric (downhill) part of the movement to increase its effectiveness.

Floor press with dumbbells

The dumbbell bench press is the gold standard of chest-strengthening exercises, but you should make room in your routine for other variations that flip the script, like this floor press. You’ll give your shoulders a break by reducing the range of motion, and starting each rep from a dead spot will help develop more pressing power and refine your ability to lock out at the end of each rep.

cable fly

Most fly variations will challenge your chest to perform one of the primary functions of the pec major: horizontal arm adduction. Use a cable machine or bands to perform this exercise, but don’t turn it into a cable crossover by crossing your hands over each other. Instead, focus on compressing your chest at the top of each rep.

Position change cable fly

Work from the floor in a kneeling position to get the most out of this move, which also requires you to set your cable machine or exercise band to just above shoulder height. Your positioning, namely the anti-rotation challenge that comes with it, will also test your core more than you might think.

T-Bench Glute Bridge Fly

This fly variation takes a note from the dumbbell floor press by limiting your range of motion, which serves to protect your shoulders and allows you to work with a heavier weight. The glute bridge position will also give your core and legs an extra challenge.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and uploaded to this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content on piano.io