The Shaping Myth

“What exercise can I do to peak my biceps?” / “What exercise will work my lower chest?”

All the bodybuilding magazines give exercise routines work the lower pec to give that massive drooping slab of pectoral muscle or an exercise routine that works the biceps peak to give that Mount Everest-like like peak. The truth is you cant shape muscles, you can only make the whole muscle bigger or smaller. A muscle is just like a rubber band, it provides a pulling motion between its two attach points. You can make that muscle bigger or smaller with exercise but you cant change its shape any more than you can make a rubber band bigger in one particular spot by pulling it in a special way. So why are some people’s biceps shaped like fish and others like baseballs? Unfortunately, its genetics and there isn’t a whole lot you can do about it. What you can do though is come up with isolation exercises that can exercise one muscle and make it bigger while leaving the surrounding muscles unchanged. If you want a big inner chest then what you have to do is train hard to add a couple of pounds of muscle to your chest and some of it will go on the inner chest.