Chest is one the most prominent muscle group that allows you to maintain overall balance. Although a lot of us may think building a large chest is just to show off our physique & is purely aesthetic, having a wide & toned chest helps us to do a variety of exercises with ease. Chest is home to vital body organs such as heart & lungs(to name a few) & as such building this muscle group has a lot of potential benefits including protection of these vital organs. Building your chest helps you improve your posture & form which reduces the ill effect of ageing. Building your chest muscles will also help you improve your own movements such as flexion, rotation & adduction. This is important both for folks who want to maintain a healthy lifestyle as well as athletes given that your shoulders, neck & arms would be supported & it will help you carry on tasks easily. Besides, having a large chest helps you boost performance of other exercises- pull up, running, push ups.

Let us discuss some basic exercises which you can do to tone your chest. These exercises can be done using weights, resistance bands or body weights.

1. Chest Press( also known as bench press): There are a lot of variations which you can do using dumbbells, weighted barbells, resistance bands & even through different push up forms. These can further be diversified by holding either of these equipment/forms as close grip, normal grip or wide grip. Barbells & resistance bands are relatively easy to control as compared to dumbbells allowing to generate more power. When we use dumbbells, each side of our body works independently, thereby allowing more stabilising muscles recruitment. Wide grip allows more lateral movement of pectorals( chest) while  close grip whereas close grip recruits more medial fibres of your pectorals

Incline chest press allows for more muscle recruitment of the upper part of your pectorals while decline chest press focussed on fibre recruitment of lower part of your pectorals.

2. Dips: Dips are a must have exercise when you are building your chest. To do this exercise, lean forward by placing your legs further behind you in the dip movement and will be a good alternative to the decline bench press.

3. Plyometric pushups: This is a real explosive exercise which uses body weight to activate & recruit your chest muscle. This is a great alternative to bench press. This exercise is really beneficial for people who have faster twitch muscle fibre & helps increase size & power of your chest.

4. One arm landmine press: This is a great exercise to build your chest & improve your shoulder mobility. This can be done explosively to activate & recruit fast twitch muscle fibres.

5. Dumbbell/cable fly/ fly using resistance band/Archer push ups: This exercise can sculpt your anterior deltoids giving your pectorals a great workout as this provides constant tension throughout workout

Normally any chest exercises you do will contribute to building all of the muscles in your chest. The combination of above mentioned exercises. are specifically targeted to be more focused on different areas of the chest. For instance, working out your deltoids will also benefit your pecs, but you still need to hone in on your pecs to get the full value of your workout.

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