Incline Barbell Bench Press can be a great exercise for upper chest or your front delts can take over. This is how you fix it.
Essentially, you're doing pin press (off the rails in the rack) with an incline bench. There's more to it, of course.
I find when doing normal incline barbell bench press where you unrack the bar, then lower to your upper chest, then press back up, for me it turns into a front delt and tricep exercise. I hardly feel my upper chest working.
The moment you unrack the bar, you lose retraction in your shoulder blades, which tends to shift the loading to the front delts.
To make it worse, as you do reps, your chest tends to flatten out due to the compression of the load, which also tends to favor the front delts.
THIS setup allows you to fix that issue on every single rep so you press from an ideal position on every single rep.
Because you're starting off the pins out of the bottom, you can reset your shoulder retraction and chest position before you press. This gets your shoulders back and helps to get your upper chest a better line of pull to actually work.
It doesn't take the front delts fully out but it helps so that they don't take over fully.
At the start of each rep, you'll do a short inverted row where you pull your chest towards the bar and pull your shoulder blades back behind you.


IMPORTANT... as you press up, your shoulder blades should move naturally - don't try and keep them retracted.


The beauty of this setup is, even though you do lose that retracted position on the way up (and down), you RESET that retraction at the bottom where it matters most.
You'll be doing a set of repeated single perfect reps (4-6 reps is good) rather than a set of reps that put your upper chest in a progressively worse position to get mechanical tension (which is key for growth).
There's more to the setup in the video (lots more info there). It can definitely help you build your upper chest, if you haven't had success before.
For a bodyweight approach to upper chest training, try Upper Chest Bench Clench Push-Ups
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