The Official Workout Thread (albums, fan, track, quote)

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Originally Posted by grindy

This sounds like quite reasonable and thought out workouts.
Some things that come to mind (and sorry if a lot of the below is painfully obvious, I know you're not a beginner.):

-Maybe your chest isn't a limiting factor on your presses. If you aren't already doing it, you might try to work on your triceps or front delts. Overhead press for delts and close grip bench press for triceps have a pretty good carry-over to the normal bench press.

-You might work on your bench press form a bit. For example even small changes to elbow flare/grip width can have quite a big impact on chest engagement.

-The smith machine might be suboptimal for you due to the bar path. It's not bad but barbell bench press might be somewhat better. I assume however, that the gym might not have any barbells.

-Very high rep work is not ideal to build muscle. Therefore I highly doubt that the swimming/push up routine is going to work. Maybe try weighted push ups to decrease the reps a bit? Deficit push ups are also great, due to the increased stretch on the pecs.

-Talking about stretch, a slower decline and a hold when doing presses (I usually do a 3 second lowering phase and 3 second hold at the chest, when doing the paused bench) can be a good variation.

-Maybe try working in the 5-6 rep range instead of 3 reps on bench press. While strength training is important for increasing loads and thereby tension and thereby hypertrophy, rep ranges below 5 are thought to not be particularly hypertrophic by themselves.

-Having a second workout in a day for the same muscle can be unnecessarily fatiguing and messing with your recovery or work capacity on the main workout. Adding a third day for chest is most likely a much better solution.

-Chicken breast or not, definitely take care of sufficient protein intake (1,5g per kg bodyweight is sufficient) and also proper sleep.

Thanks for your thoughts! I'll try to implement some of the advices (like giving up on the 3rep range presses).

It's true that I don't really pay attention too much to arm exercises specifically since I already consider my arms maybe a bit too large for the rest of my upper body. Ideally I would like not to grow my arms too much more but I realize that may be impossible if I want to grow my chest. I've started doing a day with arm exercises lately (covering shoulders, forearms and biceps/triceps but the latter just one set each). I focus a lot on shoulders because I noticed I was getting more and more injured as I grew older in that region when I did bench presses (also I started warming up better because my body is definitely not 25 anymore).

I'm stuck with the smith machine (until they open a decent gym nearby) since we don't have a normal bench and the dumbells don't reach a big enough weight. I kind of like it because it allows me to go harder without the risk of killing myself (I don't have spotters in the gym because I don't like people).

The pushups I can do a max of 15 at a time after swimming. So after the first couple of sets I decrease to about 12-10 to reach the 100. Should be ok. I'll continue for a few months just to see if something is happening...

People recommend 2g of protein per kg, which in my case would come to 160g so I'm probably not reaching that. I drink about 50-60g through shakes (any more I feel like it messes with my PVCs ("heart skipping")). But anyway, diet is a problem, I just don't have the determination to subject my whole diet to ingesting enough protein. I favor it strongly and try to incorporate it in every meal, I just stop short of weighing stuff and having the exact recommended mix of macros at every meal, which I guess is necessary for getting decent results. :/