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ANSWER

For quite a few bodybuilders, the upper chest muscles lag behind the lower ones, and this is rarely due to purely genetic reasons. Often it is due to an incorrect selection and sequence of exercises.

For example, most athletes always do the flat bench press first and then - if at all - an incline variation. While the incline bench press works both the upper and the middle and lower chest muscles, pressing on a flat bench almost exclusively targets the fibers of the lower and middle chest area.

When doing bench presses, it's not just the chest muscles that are used. The triceps and shoulders are also involved. After a few sets of flat bench presses, these auxiliary muscles have already done a fair bit of work and are pretty exhausted. In most cases, there is much less strength left for incline bench presses. As a result, you are usually no longer able to complete enough repetitions with a sufficiently heavy weight and ensure adequate growth stimulus in the upper chest. Of course, you can train to muscle failure here - but the question is whether it was really the target muscles or rather the secondary muscles that failed...

Therefore, you should always choose the incline bench over the flat bench, especially if the upper chest area is a weakness. Or even better: eliminate the flat bench press from your training plan completely.

Personally, I haven't done flat bench presses for over 15 years! At first it was because of a torn muscle in my chest, but later I became convinced, due to much better results, that incline bench presses are much more effective.

In fact, many internationally known bodybuilders nowadays only do incline bench presses and also do bench presses on a negative bench if they have weaknesses in the lower chest area. I think this approach makes a lot of sense and I'm sure that changing the order of exercises like this will bring you the desired results too!