National chest Monday and arm days are very popular in the lifting world and this is because most people are very influenced and intrigued by these muscle groups due to Hollywood and stuff of that nature. There is nothing necessarily wrong with that either because they are muscle groups in the upper body and they should be trained especially if they are a weak point.
The big problem is that most people are going to the gym and constantly training their chest and arms in the hopes of looking a lot bigger, but today I will give you 4 reasons why only doing chest and arms while neglecting certain other muscle groups will make you appear small and I could almost guarantee you that you won’t look as big as you’d think.
1) YOU APPEAR MORE NARROW WHEN YOUR UPPER ARMS OVERSHADOW YOUR SHOULDERS.
One of the biggest problems with training arms all of the time in most cases is that if your arms get too big to the point to where they start to overshadow your shoulders then you will inevitably run into problems because if your shoulders look smaller then you will look narrower. This is very bad because the key to looking big is looking broad so getting your arms a lot bigger than your shoulders might not be the best idea for creating the illusion of size. The solution to fix this is to make sure that you are training your delts just as hard as your arms. When training your shoulders, make sure that you put a lot of emphasis on your rear delts because that’s the meaty part of your shoulders.
2) IF YOU WANT TO LOOK A LOT BIGGER THEN YOU NEED TO FOCUS ON BRINGING UP YOUR BACK AND SHOULDERS MORE THAN YOUR CHEST AND ARMS.
I mentioned above that if you want to look big then you need to be wide because nobody ever got the big man card by being narrow. These means that if you want to create the illusion of size then you need to train your back and shoulders because those are the muscle groups tin the upper body that make you appear the widest from the front and back view.
3) MOST PEOPLE WHO ONLY TRAIN THEIR CHEST HAVE SHITTY POSTURE AND POOR BACK DEVELOPMENT.
One of the biggest problems with people who mostly only train their chest and arms is that it will result in poor posture and that’s actually what most of these people have. Bad posture results in slouched shoulders too which will also compromise your width and thickness from the sides too so it is important that you train your back heavy and make it a huge priority because that is what will help improve your posture a lot. Some of the most bang-for-your-buck back exercises that help improve your posture are rack pulling and rowing variations.
The problem with why most people have bad posture is because they will have:
• Chest day (Horizontal Presses, Dips, Fly’s..etc)
• Shoulder day (Vertical Presses, front raises…etc)
• Arm Day (Triceps Dips, Close grip Bench Presses..etc)
They will have all of these days with pressing involved, but they will only have one back day where they would barely do any rows, rack pulls or stuff of that nature.
If you want to correct this then I would recommend that you hit your back twice per week to fix a lot of your imbalances. Make sure that you are squeezing hard at the top of all of your rowing variations, do rack pulls, rear delt work and exercises of that nature that will help reinforce better posture. The funny thing is that if you do that alone then you chest will appear much bigger because the better your posture is then the more your chest sticks out (which is what you wanted in the first place anyways).
4) AN OVERDEVELOPED CHEST CAN OVERSHADOW YOUR UPPER BACK THICKNESS.
If you are training your chest a lot more than your upper back with the hopes of looking bigger then you are doing yourself a huge disfavor because the upper back is one of the most essential muscle groups for looking big and if it starts to become overshadowed by your chest then you won’t be maximizing size from an illusion standpoint.
Not to mention that there are more muscles in the back anyways so if you want to improve your posture, shirt size and chest measurement then just train your back more often like I listed above.
CONCLUSION:
In the end, I hope that you understand that I am not saying that there is anything wrong with chest or arm work, I am just saying that if it gets too excessive then it won’t make you look as big as you really think and you will be leaving a lot of potential size on the table.