5 Best Chest and Shoulder Exercises for Men to Build Mass and Strength

Guide to chest and shoulder execises for mass and growth. (Photo by Arthur Edelmans on Unsplash)
Guide to chest and shoulder execises for mass and growth (Photo via Unsplash/Arthur Edelmans)

Chest and shoulder exercises can often be done on the same day, as they’re both push movements. In fact, most chest compound exercises, such as bench press or incline press, engage the chest and shoulders.

If you’re following a push, pull, and legs split, you will be able to do chest and shoulder exercises on every push day. However, you may not be able to work on the rear delts, as they’re worked primarily on pull days. If you want to, you can add an isolation exercise for your rear delts on push days.


Chest and Shoulder Exercises for Mass and Strength

Here are five chest and shoulder exercises men should incorporate in their workout routine to help grow their muscles:

1) Bench Press

One of the top chest exercises for mass and growth is the bench press. You can do the exercise using a barbell or dumbbell, depending on what works best for you.

When you’re bench pressing, your elbows shouldn’t flare too much. It’s best to keep them tucked, chest flared, and back arched. However, even when your chest is primarily engaged, the shoulder and tricep muscles work too.

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2) Dumbbell Incline Press

The incline press is another chest and shoulder exercise where the pectoral muscles are the primary target.

You can do a dumbbell incline press, as it works on each side separately. That enables you to fix any muscle or strength imbalance in your pectoral muscles.

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3) Shoulder Press

When you’re focusing on chest and shoulder exercises, you can’t just do chest compound exercises to engage the shoulders, so you must do shoulder exercises. The top shoulder exercises for volume and intensity are shoulder presses. Like the bench presse, you can do a shoulder press using dumbbells or barbells.

When you’re doing shoulder press, it’s important to take a weight that engages your shoulder and doesn’t let the other muscles such as triceps take over. However, as it’s a compound movement, the triceps will engage during this exercise.

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4) Cable Front Raise

Cable front raises are a good isolation exercise for the shoulders. In fact, it allows you to focus on one shoulder at a time to fix any imbalance.

Cable front raises can be done with variations, which enables you to work on the muscle group from various angles.

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5) Push-up with Lateral Raise

Chest and shoulder exercises are usually compound exercises. if you want to add volume and mass. Nevertheless, you can do isolation exercises like supersets to work on the pectoral and shoulder muscles at the same time.

Push-ups can be standard, incline, or decline, and with or without bands. You can use dumbbells, cables, or the lateral raise machine too.

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Bottom Line

Chest and shoulder exercises are foundation movements. There are variations to the foundation movements as well.

You should begin to add variations without straying too far from the basic movements till you become stronger and begin to add mass. You must be on a calorie surplus to add mass, but you can add some muscle when you’re on a calorie deficit diet as well.

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