Coach Damon V demonstrates the chest press with Trevor, a rare move that builds strength in the chest, front delts, and triceps. He emphasizes shoulder depression, controlled negatives, and full-body engagement to maximize time under tension and muscle growth.
Transcript
What’s up, guys? Coach Damon V here with another rare move for y’all. Today my boy Trevor is going to show us a chest press.
This is a great exercise for strength. It’s going to target the chest, the front delts, and target the triceps. So let’s get into it.
Trevor’s going to lean his chair as far back as he can. We’re using — this is probably about a 5- or 7-pound bar. You can use a broomstick, a pool noodle, you can buy a bar, whatever you want. It’s the movement pattern that we’re after.
So what we’re going to do is place the bar on the chest. We don’t want it in the neck, because that’s going to place unnecessary strain on the shoulders. We want it in the chest. Trevor is going to depress his shoulders. Depress means pull down into the hip so we can use the chest and not all shoulders.
From here, our SMA athletes struggle with the concentric part of the exercise on the way up. So I’m going to help him all the way up. Once he gets to the top, he’s going to iso, squeeze it, and then negative all the way down — nice and slow.
Ready, Trev? One, two, three — press.
Great press, that was a lot. And hold. And lower — nice and slow.
Yes, sir, it’s all you. Elbows in your pockets.
There you go. Press hard.
Yep, let’s go.
Nice job, Trev, using your whole body.
Hold, elbows in your pockets.
Yes, yes.
One more big press. Ready?
Right — let’s go.
Nice, nice.
Hold, hold. Yeah. Keep pushing, keep pushing. And rest.
Great work, Trev. Come on up, baby.
So this is a great exercise. We’re going to do this for strength. What we’re going to do is we’re going do three to five reps, keeping the reps low because we’re doing negatives. All that time under tension — that was probably a 5- or 8-second negative, because Trevor’s super strong.
That means we only need to do three to five reps. We’ll do three to five reps with 5- to 8-second negatives. Then we’ll take a break and repeat that for three to four sets. One to two sets is not enough. You have to hit this three to four times to really start building some muscle.
Excellent job, Trev. Thank you, brother.
