Q: Although I train hard using the latest equipment, I don't have a big, full, barrel chest like yours in your heyday. What could be the problem?

A: The answer may be simpler than you think. The best way to build " the chest is by focusing on multijoint exercises, such as bench presses. These enlist the help of other major muscle groups like the delts, lats and triceps to lift more weight, thereby placing more overload on the chest, resulting in more growth.

A new species of bodybuilder, with appreciably smaller chests than in decades past, has evolved as a result of man's fear of being left behind the latest fads — in this case, "latest equipment" and "strict" training. When you sit a machine and perform a flye, you cannot maximally over-load the chest. Instead of being forced to function at full strength through a full range of motion in a compoud exercise, they are limited to a single-plane movement.

It's possible that machines can enhance detailed chest muscularity, but the logic is not cogent to me. Some definition might result from burnout reps or peak contractions, but the fact remains that definition cannot be carved into muscle that is not there; furthermore, isolation exercises do not build big, full, barrel-sized pecs. What I recommend is a chest workout of the three most basic, free-weight, compound exercises, pyramiding the weight to very heavy sets of low reps to failure. Since you will be going very heavy and using every muscle in your body, get a good warm-up of 15-20 reps of flat benches before you start, but not so much that your chest is pre-exhausted. Only rep lightly, until your muscles feel like there's some blood coursing through them.

Your first exercise is the most straightforward and productive chest exercise of all time: the old reliable flat-bench barbell press. Do five sets of five to six reps, pyramiding in sizeable jumps. Stay tight, bring your chest up to meet the bar as it descends, and explode.

Next, you'll do incline barbell presses, four sets of five to six reps. Finally, it's flat dumbbell Oyes, four sets of six to eight reps. Here, you can really feel your pecs stretch and contract, so concentrate and make them do the work.

All told, it's the finest barrel-chest-building workout I've found, and one that will give you bigger pecs without any fancy, cutting edge equipment. As happens so often in bodybuilding, basic in the case of pectoral training is indeed best. 

Haney's Barrel-Chest Workout

Exercise                               Sets                      Reps

Flat-Bench Barbell Presses         5                          5-6
Incilne Barbell Presses              4                          5-6
Flat-Bench Dumbbell Flyes        4                          6-8

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