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Chest Exercises You Can Do With or Without Exercise Equipment

While chest exercises often involve weight training and body building, there are plenty of chest exercises designed to build strength and endurance. Consider the push-up. It is one of the oldest and most popular exercises for upper body strength and is popular with both men and women. There are several variations on the standard push-up; some variations are designed specifically to build muscles.

Push-ups are more than just chest exercises. They work not only the chest muscles but the shoulder muscles, back muscles and triceps as well. Push-ups are good core exercises that can be adapted to individual fitness needs based on the position and level of resistance.

You can also do chest exercises and push-ups on a stability ball but these are more challenging than the standard push-ups. These are great core exercises and good for building upper body strength. Many chest exercises, such as push-ups are also good for strengthening the back which can help to prevent injury. So while it appears that push-ups are for developing and strengthening the chest, in reality they work out many of the surrounding muscles as well.

Resistance bands are a good choice for chest exercises and they also provide a flexible workout routine as they aren't limited to any one muscle group. They are also good for traveling as they can be used almost anywhere. Similar to the bench press, you can work the chest muscles as well as the shoulder muscles and triceps by holding the resistance band and bringing your elbows together.

Dumbbells are popular to use when doing chest exercises and come in a variety of weights, colors and sizes. Dumbbells are as fun as they are functional today and can be found in a hot pink coated plastic set or the more traditional cold steel variety. Dumbbell exercises are not only good chest exercises but work the back muscles, the core muscles and the arm and shoulder muscles.

Dumbbells can be used with or without a weight bench and can easily go anywhere. Dumbbell exercise is very popular these days as evidenced by the wide variety of dumbbells on the market. Dumbbells can be used for simple toning exercises and they are often used for the building up of muscles as well.

Barbells are used for strength training and bodybuilding and like dumbbells are used with or without a weight bench. The bench press is one of the more popular chest exercises using barbells. In this exercise, you are lying flat on your back and lifting the barbell off of a rack and bringing the barbell down to your chest and then lifting it back up toward the rack above you. This exercise has variations too in that you can lie on a bench that is on an incline or decline as opposed to one that is level.

If you'd rather work out with a machine than free weights or you want to vary your routine, the machine chest press can help you strengthen and build up your chest and shoulder muscles and your triceps. While working with free weights is considered to be a more advanced workout than using the weight machines, at least with the machine you don’t have to worry about dropping the weights.

It goes without saying there is a wide variety of exercises you can do to strengthen the chest muscles with or without using home or gym exercise equipment. In fact, many people working on this muscle group employ several different methods to aid in their strength training, sometimes working out on the weight machines and sometimes taking to the floor and doing push-ups.