Stage 3 - Swiss Ball/Dumbell Push-Ups

Now that you’ve experienced instability at both ends of push-up, it’s time to put them both together and feel burn!

Be sure you are comfortable with other two progressions before attempting this one and be sure you are not too close to anything should you lose your balance and roll off.

Set dumbells up as you did in Stage 1 and set ball up as you did in Stage 2. Place your hands on dumbells first then set your legs on ball.

Now do push-ups on three rolling, unstable surfaces!

Make sure you drop down and get a full range of motion (the dumbell handles will allow you to go further down than if you were doing them on floor).

The first few reps may feel easy but as you continue, you will notice a burning sensation in deep muscle fibers of your chest. Keep going! This is where it gets good. You are now hitting muscle fibers that have most likely never been effectively worked by standard chest exercises!

And if you think you’re getting a burn on first set, just wait till you do a few more sets. You’ll feel it across your abs and sides too!

The reason this exercise is so effective is simple: complete instability.

Since vast majority of chest exercises are performed in a reasonably stable position, there are some muscle fibers that never get fully worked. They aren’t required to work because you’re stabilized.

By placing your legs and both hands on independently moving objects, you demand massive amounts of stabilizing work on part of your pecs. Your pecs never normally get this work with most chest exercises. Now they’re stabilizing your entire body and your limbs while you’re moving yourself up and down!

All this intense stabilizing work fires many more muscle fibers than are normally required for a push-up, resulting in a tremendously effective exercise for chest.

To view exercise progressions explained above, go to:

http://www.fitstep.com/Misc/Newsletter-archives/issue8-chest-tip.htm

p.s. click on this link and you’ll receive not only a great tip that can dramatically increase intensity of this already incredibly effective exercise but a secret Stage 4, which was just too powerful to put into this article.

One of major reasons Arnold Schwarzenegger had such incredible chest development was that he finished his chest workouts with dumbell flyes, an exercise that emphasizes stretched position of pectoral muscles. He would pump his chest up full of blood during workout then do flyes, holding stretch at bottom of flye. This gave his chest room to grow to amazing proportions.

Fascial stretching is more rigorous than regular stretching but results can be amazing. When you stretch hard enough to cause fascia to expand, you will really feel it! When you are stretching fascia, you should feel a powerful pulling sensation and pressure as muscle works against fascia to expand it.

Be sure you do not stretch so hard that you cause muscle to tear or cause injury to yourself. You will rapidly learn to distinguish difference between a good stretch and a bad stretch. You should not feel any sharp pain, just a steady pull.

Hold each stretch for at least 20 to 30 seconds as you must give your fascia time to be affected by stretch. Stretch hard like this only when you have a fully pumped muscle as you must give your fascia a reason to expand. If your muscles aren’t pumped, just stretch normally.

You can find instructions for stretching at:

http://www.fitstep.com/Library/Info/Stretching1.htm

One set of hard stretching after each set you do for a muscle group, besides obvious benefits of increased flexibility, can have an incredible effect on size of your muscles and their further ability to grow.