Not hitting chest enough

Hey guys. I wonder if someone could give me some advice. Whenever I do chest exercises (various different ones) I never really seem to feel it in my chest, however I REALLY feel it in my arms. It is annoying, because for every other exercise, you feel the pain in the muscle when really push yourself and the muscle feels pumped afterwards. But I can never really hit my chest like this. Can anyone give me some advice as to what I could be doing wrong?

Drop the weight and focus on your form. To target your chest, you need to work on the mind-muscle connection. Start light, and really focus on your chest muscles. As your mind-muscle connection improves, begin to add weight again.

The most efficient program is the simplest one that produces results, so there’s no need to do a ton of different exercises. Try focusing on the Big Two upper body barbell exercises: bench press and overhead press. Alternate them between workouts since doing both in the same workout will simply overwork you because they tap into the same muscle groups. Warm up, then do three sets of five at your work weight, and you’re done. Increase the work weight every single workout (i.e., a linear progression). It won’t feel very difficult at first; that’s when you’re reinforcing the neuromuscular part AllTheMisc talks about. After a few weeks, the linear progression gets pretty difficult to sustain, but as you know, Doing Hard Things is good for you.

Don’t worry about how sore or not sore your muscles are. That’s not a good indication of the quality of work you’re doing. As your body adapts, the muscles become able to work at their maximum power output without becoming sore the next day. Measure progress by your consistent increase in weight lifted.

Bennyboywonder,
You can try doing what’s called a pre-fatigue method. This is where you exhaust your triceps prior to working on the chest. The triceps are a synergist to the chest, which means that it helps out a lot during your chest exercises.

The problem you are facing is that the triceps are weaker than they need to be and are lagging behind the strength of your chest. It is also a smaller muscle group than your chest so the muscles fatigue faster.

Do a few tricep exercises exercises prior to your chest exercises. When your triceps are already fatigued they wont be able to help out as much during the chest exercises. This will overload your chest and allow you to get that burn.

I used to have the same problem. What i did, was take my max and multiply it by .80. Whatever wieght you come up with, do three sets of those with about 3-8 reps. I usually would give myself 1 minutes breaks between sets. Hope that helps.