Tips For Developing A Chiselled Chest

With The Maximum Efficiency Training (M.E.T.) System

By Mike Lackner and R. Gallop, © Top Trainers Network, Inc.

When it comes to muscling up your appearance and performance capacity, few muscles have as big an impact as the pecs or chest. The chest is made up of two muscles: 1) the pectoralis major, and 2) the pectoralis minor. These are attached to the humerus, which is near the shoulder joint and originates on the breastbone in the centre of the chest. 

A powerful chest is something everyone recognizes and is an important symbol of physical strength. If you have been training hard and consistently and are still coming up weak in this area, usually it is due to one thing… improper training. In this issue, we are going to look at a favourite M.E.T. workout that is guaranteed to build a chest that commands respect. The fact is, you can’t just randomly pick a few chest exercises to work into a routine and expect to get great results. Total chest development requires the right methods and number of exercises that will cover the upper and lower pectorals. Our program addresses this, as well as a carefully constructed number of principles and techniques aimed at maximum fibre recruitment. 

The M.E.T. Training Program groups body parts together as follows:
Day 1 - Back, Triceps, Biceps
Day 3 - Quads, Hams, Calves
Day 5 - Chest, Shoulders, Abs

Understanding The Agonist-Antagonist Principle
Agonist denoting a muscle in a state of contraction, with reference to its opposing muscle, or antagonist.

Maximum Efficiency Training (M.E.T.) workouts are set up in such a way that by the natural unfolding of the program people end up training more intensely and experience better recovery between workouts. This is accomplished in several ways. For starters, the program follows the M.E.T. two-sided (agonist/antagonist) method. This means we are not only training for muscle strength and size, but also are maintaining the balance of the joints.
How does this translate into better and more efficient workouts? First, the whole purpose of the muscle is to move your bones. Each muscle connects to two bones creating what is known as a “bone-lever” system. The muscles are connected to the bones by your tendons, which allow the force of muscular contractions to be transmitted from muscle fibres to the bones. The bones come together at the joints, where they are cushioned by cartilage and other material that stops them from rubbing on each other.
There is a muscle on each side of a joint to allow the bones to move in more than one direction. As an example, your biceps and triceps control most of the motion of the forearms. When your biceps contract, it pulls the forearm towards the shoulders. As the triceps contracts, it pulls the forearm away from the shoulder. While either the biceps or triceps are contracting, the other one is elongating. That is what creates the “two-sided” agonist-antagonist relationship. The muscle that is doing the majority of the work is called the agonist, while the muscle group opposing it, and helping with balance and control, is called the antagonist.