The Best Exercise For Building Your Inner Pecs
Some intermediate lifters still don't know many good exercises that target the inner chest almost exclusively.
It's pretty common knowledge that flat presses hit the central chest, incline presses hit the upper chest, and decline movements hit the lower chest. But a commonly neglected part of the chest is the inner portion.
There is one exercise I learned about a few years ago that I find hits the middle chest exponentially better than even intense cable flys with hard muscular contractions.
This exercise is the Hex Press.
The Hex Press essentially entails you doing dumbbell presses on a flat bench or incline bench.
The catch is you will turn your wrists inward so that the dumbbells are parallel to each other. This is different from a typical press where they would be end to end horizontally.
Once you have the dumbbells in this position, the key is to do a press, but to squeeze the hell out of your pecs. Contract them during the entirety of the movement.
You will notice that it's much easier to flex your chest in this inward position because the dumbbell positioning is close enough that you can now actually flex your pecs during the reps.
Whereas with a normal dumbbell press it is much more difficult to actually contract your pecs hard during a rep as the pecs are too spread apart from one another.
An awesome thing about this exercise is it takes a lot of negative strain off of the shoulders as well. Most presses largely use the front delts in the movement. This puts them in a vulnerable position for injury.
With the Hex Press you can use your chest far more without having to use your shoulders to nearly the same degree you would on a normal press.
Next time you train your chest, do this as a finisher exercise:
- 3-4 sets
- 12-15 reps per set
I think this may be one of the best (if not the best) exercises for driving blood into the pecs and inducing growth.
