50 keys to a bigger bench press
Heavy Negatives
Let me give you a few examples of conditioning your body with an overload. A basketball player who is shooting jump shots while he is wearing ankle weights. A swimmer who does laps wearing pants and a t-shirt. A football player preparing for camp by running in the middle of the afternoon during a 90-degree summer day. A sprinter that runs with a parachute tied to his back. How about a powerlifter that does negatives with a weight that is much heavier than his one rep max.
Are you beginning to see the correlation? When you run in 90-degree weather, practice in 80-degree heat doesn't seem so bad. When you shot jump shots with ankle weights, you feel pretty light and explosive when you take them off. When it is time to unload in each situation the body can perform better because it has been strengthened by the overload. You get the point. Let's say your goal is to bench 400 lbs. If you've never tried it, the initial shock might surprise you. If you've felt the weight of 450 lbs and done negative sets with it, your mind and your muscles will be preconditioned to handle the 400 you were aiming for. You've felt heavier weight, making this weight seem lighter. Your muscles need to feel the shock of heavy weight to prepare for a max. Heavy negatives will accomplish just that.
A negative rep is simply an eccentric contraction. When you lower the weight towards your chest during the bench press you are performing a negative.
Use The Right Barbell
A bar's knurling is the roughened grip characteristic of most bars. If you do heavy deadlifts, you're well aware of knurling, as most of the skin of your shin can be found in the indentations of the bar. The amount of knurling that a bar contains often becomes a tradeoff between getting some hand grip and not losing all of the skin on your shins! No such issues in the bench, though.
If you use a bar that's shiny or slippery, you lose too much energy fighting the lateral hand slip, even when using chalk. If you want to keep your hands soft for your girlfriend, like the slimy character in "Of Mice and Men," you don't have to use the roughest bar. But you want one that provides an adequate grip. I find that a slippery bar can cause you to lose up to 5% of your 1RM.
Use Your Feet
Make sure your feet are planted FIRMLY on the floor and do not come up during your bench attempts. They should also not be moving around. This creates a stable base and foundation, which makes your bench more powerful. The whole body must be stable during a bench press and the feet are a huge part of that.
In addition, when benching you can learn to kind of "push" off with your feet for additional power. Try this during your normal chest workouts until you can get it down, then use it to help increase your max on bench
Don’t Bounce The Bar
Most bench press injuries occur during the transition between the eccentric and concentric phase, according to Dr. Sal Arria, Executive Director of the International Sports Sciences Association. A common technique flaw involves the fatigued lifter allowing the bar to "bounce" or "chop" down onto the chest, which subjects the pectoral attachments to sudden loads, which is often the stimulus for injury. A 200 pound bar lowered very slowly exerts about 200 pounds of pressure. But this same bar lowered quickly, may put many hundreds of pounds of tension on the target muscles and their attachments.
Try Pre-Exhausting Your Muscles
This is a great plateau breaker. Since the bench press is the favorite exercise for many lifters it’s usually the exercise performed first. Exhaust your chest by doing incline dumbbell presses first, than doing flys, and finishing with flat bench. Your flat bench will be much worse than usual because it is already exhausted from the previous two exercises. However after doing this for a few weeks you can once again start with the flat bench and you’ll see an immediate increase in your poundage. Can your ego handle lifting lighter weight on the bench press for a few weeks in order to make some real gains?
Posture
Laying your back as flat as it will go to get a "full range of motion" is wrong, making your upper arms stretch back further at the bottom only places greater stress on your front deltoids and those tie-ins. Take at least a natural arc in your back, but it's better to place your shoulders and ass as close together as comfortably possible, so that you reduce front delt stress at the bottom.
Heavy Negatives
Let me give you a few examples of conditioning your body with an overload. A basketball player who is shooting jump shots while he is wearing ankle weights. A swimmer who does laps wearing pants and a t-shirt. A football player preparing for camp by running in the middle of the afternoon during a 90-degree summer day. A sprinter that runs with a parachute tied to his back. How about a powerlifter that does negatives with a weight that is much heavier than his one rep max.
Are you beginning to see the correlation? When you run in 90-degree weather, practice in 80-degree heat doesn't seem so bad. When you shot jump shots with ankle weights, you feel pretty light and explosive when you take them off. When it is time to unload in each situation the body can perform better because it has been strengthened by the overload. You get the point. Let's say your goal is to bench 400 lbs. If you've never tried it, the initial shock might surprise you. If you've felt the weight of 450 lbs and done negative sets with it, your mind and your muscles will be preconditioned to handle the 400 you were aiming for. You've felt heavier weight, making this weight seem lighter. Your muscles need to feel the shock of heavy weight to prepare for a max. Heavy negatives will accomplish just that.
A negative rep is simply an eccentric contraction. When you lower the weight towards your chest during the bench press you are performing a negative.
Use The Right Barbell
A bar's knurling is the roughened grip characteristic of most bars. If you do heavy deadlifts, you're well aware of knurling, as most of the skin of your shin can be found in the indentations of the bar. The amount of knurling that a bar contains often becomes a tradeoff between getting some hand grip and not losing all of the skin on your shins! No such issues in the bench, though.
If you use a bar that's shiny or slippery, you lose too much energy fighting the lateral hand slip, even when using chalk. If you want to keep your hands soft for your girlfriend, like the slimy character in "Of Mice and Men," you don't have to use the roughest bar. But you want one that provides an adequate grip. I find that a slippery bar can cause you to lose up to 5% of your 1RM.
Use Your Feet
Make sure your feet are planted FIRMLY on the floor and do not come up during your bench attempts. They should also not be moving around. This creates a stable base and foundation, which makes your bench more powerful. The whole body must be stable during a bench press and the feet are a huge part of that.
In addition, when benching you can learn to kind of "push" off with your feet for additional power. Try this during your normal chest workouts until you can get it down, then use it to help increase your max on bench
Don’t Bounce The Bar
Most bench press injuries occur during the transition between the eccentric and concentric phase, according to Dr. Sal Arria, Executive Director of the International Sports Sciences Association. A common technique flaw involves the fatigued lifter allowing the bar to "bounce" or "chop" down onto the chest, which subjects the pectoral attachments to sudden loads, which is often the stimulus for injury. A 200 pound bar lowered very slowly exerts about 200 pounds of pressure. But this same bar lowered quickly, may put many hundreds of pounds of tension on the target muscles and their attachments.
Try Pre-Exhausting Your Muscles
This is a great plateau breaker. Since the bench press is the favorite exercise for many lifters it’s usually the exercise performed first. Exhaust your chest by doing incline dumbbell presses first, than doing flys, and finishing with flat bench. Your flat bench will be much worse than usual because it is already exhausted from the previous two exercises. However after doing this for a few weeks you can once again start with the flat bench and you’ll see an immediate increase in your poundage. Can your ego handle lifting lighter weight on the bench press for a few weeks in order to make some real gains?
Posture
Laying your back as flat as it will go to get a "full range of motion" is wrong, making your upper arms stretch back further at the bottom only places greater stress on your front deltoids and those tie-ins. Take at least a natural arc in your back, but it's better to place your shoulders and ass as close together as comfortably possible, so that you reduce front delt stress at the bottom.
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