6 of the Best for Pec Mass | Maxx Charles' Off the Wall Chest Workout
6 of the Best for Pec Mass
Maxx Charles' Off the Wall Chest Workout
Meet Maxx, the Man Who Does It All Wrong
Maxx Charles (who recently added an extra “x” to his name because he felt like it) is already legendary for how he has been able to rise to the upper echelons of the pro ranks so fast, in spite of how “wrong” his nutrition and training practices are. In the off-season, he subsists on just three meals a day of chicken, rice and beans, while guzzling two to three gallons of V8 fruit and vegetable juice blends, Sprite and Mountain Dew (regular, not diet).
His training style is equally unorthodox. Most top bodybuilders today strive to complete their workouts in 60-90 minutes. Maxx will take three hours or more per daily session. And I do mean daily. He trains every day, with no rest days unless he really feels he needs one. The volume and frequency are high, and so are the reps. As for a rep range, forget about the standard eight to 12 reps. Mr. Charles hits sets of 20-30, and at times uses rest-pause or drop sets to push that total to 40-50.
Finally, range of motion, or ROM, is something Maxx has taken liberties with. More accurately, he has found a ROM that delivers the best results for him, even though most others would harshly denounce what he does as “partial reps.” But since we are talking chest, two of the men with the greatest chest development in the IFBB today are Branch Warren and Johnnie Jackson. If you’ve ever seen them performing their presses, you know that neither of them utilizes a full range of motion either. More on that later— but suffice it to say that when it comes to Maxx Charles and what he does for his chest, it’s worked. His pecs are thick, round and full from top to bottom, practically bursting off his torso.
The Evolution of Maxx’s Chest Training
Those impressive pecs, along with Maxx’s arms, had one heck of a head start on the rest of his physique due to the fact that he trained them three times a week in his first couple of years of training. Even then, though, he had a method to his madness. “I would work upper chest one day, mid-chest the second day and all lower pecs in the third workout,” he clarifies. After that, he reduced the frequency to hitting chest twice a week, with one day for the upper region and the middle and lower chest sharing the second weekly session. Eventually, his training split changed to reflect what areas need more attention. His quads and back are both areas that still need improvement, so Charles trains both of those twice per week. His arms got to the point where any direct training at all made them grow out of proportion and disrupted his balance, so they are no longer trained at all. Maxx’s chest and shoulders had both become strong points, so they are worked once a week at present.
Warming Up
Most of us only think about warming up our shoulders before we work either chest or shoulders, but Maxx feels we should be equally if not more concerned with our elbows. “When you are pressing very heavy weights, the elbows take a real beating,” he notes. “You should never go into those heavy movements with cold elbows.”
Maxx found out about the importance of warming up the elbows the hard way, and for several years had to rely on thick neoprene elbow sleeves to make it through chest and shoulder workouts with tender elbows. Recently, he tossed them in his closet. “I realized I had begun to depend on them too much, to the point where I didn’t even feel like I could have a good workout if I didn’t have them on,” he says.
His warm-up on chest day before he even gets to his first exercise is two sets of 40-50 reps of cable triceps pushdowns, and a third set of 40-50 of overhead cable extensions. There is no lockout of the elbow and no emphasis on triceps contractions, as the sole purpose is to bathe the area in warmth and make it more pliable. Now let’s look at the six movements the 5’11” Haitian sensation, who carries 265 pounds of ripped muscle on contest day, uses to train his armor-plated pecs.
1) Incline Barbell Press
This is the first and most important exercise for Maxx on chest day. He will do either four or six sets here, four if he’s close to a show and six if it’s the off-season. Those numbers also happen to roughly correspond to the number of plates he will do as the sets progress. Charles starts with one 45-pounder per side, or 135, and adds another plate for each subsequent set. He plays it safe and tops out at a “mere” 405 when he’s dieted down and nearing a competition, but will go all the way up to 495 or even 585 on occasion, at his heaviest off-season bodyweight of 305. The sets are for 20 or more reps, although the range of motion is decidedly curtailed.
You could easily argue that there is no way in hell he could do 20 full-range reps from chest to lockout with 495, and Maxx doesn’t argue with that. “What I do works very well for me,” he shrugs. “I don’t train to please anyone or to show off. I train to be the best bodybuilder I can be.”
Often, Maxx will employ the rest-pause technique on his final set on the incline bar. He will rep-out to failure, rack the bar for about 20 seconds, and then have his training partner hand it off to him once more for as many more reps as he can grind out. Another Maxx Charles quirk is that he prefers to use wrist straps to securely fasten his hands to the bar for that final, heaviest set. Why? “It just gives me a little more confidence and feeling of safety,” he tells us.
2) Hammer Strength Incline Press
The incline barbell press is nearly always his first pressing movement, unless Maxx has a minor injury or some pain in the shoulders or elbows that make a machine the wiser option on that day. You may have seen photos or videos on social media of Maxx using the Hammer Strength incline press. You would definitely remember if you had, because he loads the apparatus up with what is truly a ludicrous amount of weight. How much? Even Maxx isn’t sure. The posts are loaded to the ends with 45s, and then a few more are slid on to the padded handgrips. “It ends up being eight or nine plates a side,” he guesses. That would be more than 800 pounds in plates, for those of you keeping score at home. Again, the reps are 20 or more constant-tension pulses in the mid-range of the rep.
3) Flat Barbell Bench Press (not shown)
After his upper chest has been pulverized with heavy incline presses, Maxx moves on to flat barbell bench presses for the mid-chest. Unlike most pros, he never touches dumbbells on chest day. “I found that with a barbell, the stronger I got, the bigger my chest grew,” he begins. “But with dumbbells, no matter how heavy I could go with them, I never saw any results. So I stayed with the flat barbell bench press instead.”
Many of today’s bodybuilders avoid this movement like the plague, but Maxx feels he has figured out how to do it in a safer way. “I would never do the flat bench first, because then I would be using too much weight,” he explains. “Doing it after my incline presses, I don’t have to go as heavy.”
In the off-season, he works up to five plates per side, or 495, while closer to a contest when he’s lighter and leaner, 405 will be his maximum weight. That final, heaviest set is a long one, because Charles always makes it a drop set, getting 20 or more reps and then peeling a plate at a time until he is down to 135 for the final drop. The rep total can be anywhere from 75-100 or more, and the pump when it’s all over is fully blown.
4) Standing Machine Dips (not shown)
Maxx’s favorite lower chest movement is one he came up with a few years ago. “I always noticed that if I leaned forward as much as I could when doing dips, I felt it all in my lower pecs,” he explains. “So one day, I tried to mimic that using the Hammer Strength dip machine, and it was perfect.”
If you want to try it, this is what to do. Stand facing into the pad on the machine, and lean forward until your chest is balanced on top of the pad. Grasp the handles with the wide, pronated grip just like you would use when doing a bench press. Now push down until you feel the tension on the lower pecs. That’s the section of the ROM you want to work in. Watching Maxx do these, his reps look even shorter than they do on his incline and flat presses. Yet this is the “sweet spot” he’s found that nails his lower pecs just like a decline press.
5) Seated Bench Press Machine
There’s nothing fancy here. There are many versions of seated chest presses available in gyms. Even at Bev Francis Powerhouse Gym in Syosset, where Maxx calls home, they have an assortment. The one he prefers is a plate-loaded version made by the Flex Leverage series, in which the handles come together in front of you as you press. “This one gives me the best contractions, and the best pump,” he notes. Four sets of 20-25 reps with the entire weight stack is the end of his pressing for the workout, and it’s more than enough to make every last fiber in his pecs scream.
6) Cable Crossovers
The final two movements in his chest workout are both isolated flye motions to work his inner chest. First, he does three sets on the pec flye machine. Maxx being Maxx, he does those in his own unique style. Instead of holding the handles, he gets his arms around the vertical movement arms, nestled in the crooks of his elbows with his hands free, and pushes together until his fists touch. As you might imagine, he uses the whole stack for all three sets.
After the pec flye machine, he moves on to the cable station to wrap up this epic pec blast with crossovers. Oddly enough, this is the only exercise in his chest workout where Maxx uses almost a complete range of motion. “At this point, at the end of the workout, I do want to feel a good stretch,” he explains. “So I will go further back before coming together with the cables and squeezing my inner pecs.” It’s also the only time when you won’t see Charles using superhuman weights. That’s all been done in the two to three hours that preceded the cable crossovers.
Conclusion
Getting back to what we were talking about at the start of this, it does seem that Maxx Charles goes about his training all wrong. He does too much in terms of volume, and his reps are so short at times that you can’t even call them half-reps. Yet, look at his chest! It’s clear that his methods have worked incredibly well for him. In his second season last year as a pro he gained his first victory: The Tampa Pro and then went on to finish twelfth at the Olympia. Who’s to say that giving his style a try, at least for portions of your workout, won’t yield startling results for you? If you have been using standard form with a full range of motion, and your chest still hasn’t improved in a very long time, you have nothing to lose by giving the Maxx Charles style a try for yourself.
Maxx’s Chest Workout
Incline Barbell Press 4 x 20
Flat Barbell Bench Press 4-5 x 20
Standing Machine Dips 3 x 20-30
Seated Machine Press 4 x 20-25
Pec Flye Machine 3 x 20-30
Cable Crossovers 3 x 20-30
Training Split*
Sunday: Hamstrings
Monday: Back
Tuesday: Chest
Wednesday: Quadriceps
Thursday: Shoulders
Friday: Back
Saturday: Quads
*Maxx has not trained his arms for about two years, as they grow too easily.
The Short ROM: Is It Really Wrong?
Anyone who has ever watched Maxx Charles train chest, either in person or on video, has definitely noticed that his range of motion, aka ROM, is fairly short. He neither gets a full stretch nor a full contraction, instead working within a roughly six-inch stroke in the middle portion of the rep. Maxx has been blasted by critics ranging from exercise experts to anonymous teenage trolls for his rep style. The ironic thing is, inevitably, those who profess to use perfect form don’t have anywhere near the pectoral development that Charles does. Their superior form, using a full range of motion, has failed to yield superior results. This begs the question, then: Is a full range of motion actually the best way to train? Not for Maxx. “I have tried using a full range of motion in the past,” he begins. “Yet my chest was not responding and growing. I realized that when I locked out, I was losing tension in my chest. As I experimented, I found that as soon as my biceps were higher than my chest in any pressing movement, the stress shifted from my chest to my shoulders and arms.” Maxx discovered that working in the mid-range of the rep allowed him both to maintain that critical tension and to use far heavier weights, and that combination soon led to new gains. His chest grew thicker and fuller as time went by, using his unique style. So while you may be able to argue that a full range of motion works best for you, it evidently doesn’t work best for Maxx.