Can You Do Chest Day After Arms Day? (Solved!)

Your chest workouts can take a heavy toll on your body.

You’ll likely be lifting some heavy weights in some big movements like bench press, cable flyes, and more.

As chest sessions can be so demanding, it’s important to fit them into your training week in the right spot to ensure you can perform to your best.

In this article, we discuss whether you can do chest after arms day.

This is an interesting topic as, when you think about most chest exercises, your arms are prime movers in the movements.

As well as looking at the pros and cons of doing chest after arms day, we also look at the safety element of doing so, as well as considering if other muscle groups are better suited to being trained after arms day.

Can You Do Chest After Arms Day?

While you can do chest after arms day, it’s not the most optimal way to train.

During many chest exercises, your arms (in particular your triceps) have a big role to play.

But after arms day, your triceps will be fatigued and will need some time to rest and recover.

So, getting them to work as hard (as they’ll need to in many chest exercises) can be very challenging and can limit how much progress you can make in your chest session.

Benefits of Doing Chest After Arms Day

You Can Follow A Lighter Session With A Heavier Session

Your arms are a relatively small muscle group when compared to others.

So, you’ll typically be lifting less weights on arms day than when training larger muscle groups like your legs, back, or chest.

To keep your training momentum going and to keep moving forward toward your training goals, it’s important to train hard and effectively.

Doing too many lighter sessions consecutively can slow your progress as you’ll burn less calories and your heart rate could stay lower.

By following a lighter session that targets a small muscle group with a heavier session that targets a large muscle group, you can increase the intensity, effectiveness, and benefits of your overall training plan.

It Can Work Some Arm Muscles A Little Bit More

After arms day, your arm muscles will need some time to rest, recover, and repair.

However, if you do chest after arms day, you can hit your arm muscles (with a particular focus on your triceps) a little bit more which can help increase muscle growth and development.

Before you give your arms the time they need to recover, you could put them under a little bit more stress in order to maximise your gains.

You’ll need to be careful to avoid overtraining but, if you get it right, doing chest after arms day can benefit both areas of your body.

Drawbacks of Doing Chest After Arms Day

You Can Limit Your Lifting Ability

As your chest is such a large muscle group, you’ll need to lift heavier weights than you would when targeting other areas of your body.

While your chest may be fresh and ready to go after arms day, your arms, which have a big role to play in pretty much every chest exercise, might not be.

This can seriously limit how much weight you’re able to lift and the movements you’re able to do in your chest session.

These limitations can hinder the progress you make towards a strong and developed chest.

Should You Do Chest After Arms Day?

You probably shouldn’t do chest after arms day.

Obviously, this’ll depend on your fitness goals and your personal preferences but there’ll be much better muscle groups to focus on after arms day.

As your arms are so involved in most chest exercises, going into a chest session with fatigued arm muscles will likely reduce the effectiveness of your chest workout.

Is It Safe To Do Chest After Arms Day?

It can be safe to do chest after arms day but you’ll probably have an increased risk of injury.

This will mainly be due to the fact that your arm muscles will likely be fatigued making them less able to assist in the chest movements they need to.

Going into any workout where some of the working muscles are fatigued or not fully recovered can put you at greater risk of injury.

With this in mind, there could be safer options for you to choose instead of doing chest after arms day.

Is It Better To Do Arms After Chest Day?

Yes, it will be a better option to do arms after chest day.

While it still might not be the most effective way of training (as your triceps may be fatigued from your chest session), it’s usually a much better idea to focus on the larger muscle group first.

As you’ll be lifting lighter weights during your arm workout compared to your chest session, having slightly fatigued triceps isn’t as much of an issue as it would be going into chest day.

Conclusion

In summary, you can do chest after arms day but your triceps may feel sore. This means you likely won’t be able to lift as much when it comes to compound chest exercises like bench press.

That’s all for this article, but can you do biceps after shoulder day? Or can you train biceps after back day?

Hope this helped!

Sources

https://www.healthline.com/health/exercise-fitness/bench-press-muscles-worked