Does Lifting Weights Firm the Chest?

Weight training tears down your muscles a bit, but those muscles typically recover quickly -- assuming you’re training correctly -- and grow back stronger than before. If you’re starting a weight-training routine, include exercises that work all your major muscle groups, including your chest. Weight training can tone the pectoralis major -- your largest chest muscle -- and other neighboring muscles, just as it can firm up other areas of your body.

  1. Barbell Exercises

    • The bench press may be the best-known barbell chest exercise. You simply lie on your back and press the barbell up above your chest. Use a flat bench for a good overall chest workout, an incline bench to shift the focus to your upper pectoral muscles or a decline bench to target your lower pecs. Bent-over rows and barbell pullovers target your back, but your chest muscles assist your movements.

    Dumbbell Exercises

    • You can perform several fly variations to target different areas of your chest. Similar to bench presses, incline flyes hit your upper chest and decline flyes work your lower chest. You can also perform bench presses with dumbbells. Ditch the bench and do presses or flyes while you lie on a stability ball to work your abs along with your chest. Target your chest by doing dumbbell pullovers by lying with the backs of your shoulders across a bench, then raising and lowering a single dumbbell over your head.

    Machine Exercises

    • Replicate bench presses with a variety of exercise machines, including the Smith machine. Machines can also replicate flyes and chest dips. Stand with a pair of cable machines to your sides, for example, and pull the cables to perform machine flyes, some of which are also known as crossover exercises. Sit in a variety of pressing machines to work your chest muscles at various angles. Press the machine’s levers upward to target your upper chest and downward to emphasize your lower pecs.

    Weighted Exercises

    • Add a free weight to common body-weight chest exercises to increase the intensity. Have a training partner set a weight plate on your back when you do pushups, for example, or wear a weight belt when you do chest dips.

    Considerations

    • Warm up prior to your chest workout with five to 10 minutes of light aerobic exercise. To grow your muscles, lift 75 to 85 percent of your one-rep maximum weight and do three to five sets of six to 12 reps per set, resting for no more than 90 seconds between sets.