Building a bigger chest seems to be a problem for a lot of people who have much stronger triceps or shoulders. Often the tris and shoulders overpower the chest muscles in compound pushing lifts like bench press and dumbbell press. If you're tricep dominant, those muscles will tire out first before your chest muscles are sufficiently stimulated.
Instead, your pecs are under-stimulated. It'll always be lagging behind your shoulder and triceps. And that's not what you want to happen if you're looking to build a bigger chest.
One solution is to use the post fatigue super sets (see shock article). Using post-fatigue super sets, you'll combine a compound and isolation exercise together. You'll do the compound lift first, then apply a chest-specific isolation lift that limits the shoulders and triceps to further work your chest in creating more microtrauma. The compound lift will leave some fresh muscle fibers needing more work.
The idea is to recruit more muscle fibers. More recruitment and activation means ore muscles worked, more growth. The compound lift will leave some fresh muscle fibers needing more work. And that's where the isolation exercise comes in.
Combine a low rep and high rep approah. For example,
flat barbell bench press 3 sets of 6-8 reps
dumbbell flies 3 sets of 10-12 reps
Do one set of bench press first, then immediately more to dumbbell flies, without taking more than 20 seconds of rest, and crank out a set of 10-12 reps. Do 2-4 sets of this once a week and you will start seeing better gains.
Mix this with other body parts of do it on its own chest day, if you're on a body part split program.
Use heavier weights
weight progression but cycle weights down and up
ex of weight cycling
recommend picking up pavel PTP for examples of different weight and load progression schemes with cycling, includes linear cycling, step cycling, ladder cycling
The approach of cycling weights is old school lifting, getting back to basics. A lot of muscle and strength is basically built through generations with this type of lifting.
Use dumbbells instead of babells
Exercise variation is important. Even with using weight progression as a means of progressive overload, there will come a time where you will stop getting stronger and plateau. The solution would be to swap exercises.
Use different exercises or variations of the main movements. Use dbs instead of barbells. You can do bench preses with 2 dumbbells instead of an olympic barbell. Here's a list of the alternate list,
db bench press in flat, incline, decline positions
single arm db press- increases core balance and stresses the stabilizer muscles. You will find you will be able to handle more weight.
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