Man boobs aren’t the best, sure, but when your pecs look like they’ve been carved out of marble from the Parthenon, well that’s when you have a chest worth showing off. There’s other benefits to exercising your chest though, apart from resembling an ancient Greek deity.

A bigger chest can ensure you fill out a suit. Strong pecs can also improve your back strength, as well as your ability to push things (and if there’s one thing we know will impress potential love interests it is using your superhero pecs to save a struggling puppy by shoving a car off it’s poorly paw). Plus, unlike the superficial, but ultimately quite useless bulging bicep, a strong chest can make you better at sports, especially those that require you to push and tackle other man mountains around like American football or rugby.

So it’s no surprise that one man who owns a rather impressive barrel of a chest is 77 times capped England rugby international James Haskell. As a flanker, Haskell reckons his position on the rugby field means he probably endures the most hits out of all the other players: “You need good muscle mass on your upper body to weather the collisions,” he says.

Fronting Up

Weighing in at around 120kg, Haskell doesn’t have to get any bigger to improve his performances on the pitch, so his workouts revolve around short but punishingly heavy sets. “To build up strength you want your rep range around one to five and then power is one to three,” says Haskell.

When he was in his teens, though, Haskell came in at a much lighter 95kg. “It was a bit like a Rocky montage. I went from being skinny as hell to starting my first professional contract at Wasps rugby club at 103kg and now I’m 120kg.”

A post shared by James Haskell (@jameshask) on Jun 12, 2018 at 7:29am PDT

It was during these years of toil that Haskell put on the slabs of muscle that have made him such a difficult man to bring down to the ground through his career. “If you want to build a huge chest you’ve got to be doing around 10 to 12 reps for each exercise. There is no way you can lift really heavy weights for 10 reps. You’ve got to be slow and tightly controlled, making sure you get that concentric movement just right. Take four seconds for each rep and don’t go heavy.