Let me take you on a little mental journey:
It's Monday afternoon 4:30 PM, you just got home from work or school and you're completely exhausted.
Then a message comes in ‘Bro, it's Chestday today’
Your eyes start to sparkle, your adrenaline begins to pump, and you can't wait to throw in at least 6 scoops into your mouth and then spend half an hour just scratching as if you have rosehip seeds under your skin ‘if you know, you know’
Your Chestday-Buddy and you obviously start by running to the bench like Usain Bolt, which is also the only cardio you do, just to secure that bench spot.
The warm-ups feel good, you are fully in your zone and you really feel that 100kg PR coming.
The moment is here, your buddy is ready behind the bench to deadlift the weight if it doesn't work, but you assume you’re just going to kill it. You unrack the bar, slowly lower it to your chest, and push as hard as you can, the bar doesn’t move an inch and your buddy feels like he should have done some warm-up sets for his deadlift first.
All jokes aside, in this blog I will explain everything about bench pressing and give you 8 tips to improve your bench press.
Which muscles do you train with Bench Pressing?
Shall I honestly tell you that when I used to bench press heavy often, I sometimes had muscle soreness in my lats and hamstrings the next day.
This is because I tensed my whole body during bench pressing.
Chest
Yes, that makes sense, right? Although bench pressing is not a typical chest exercise. It is a compound exercise, which means you train multiple muscle groups with it.
If your chest is lagging, for example, you could choose to add more isolation exercises such as a Fly variant or a Dumbbell Press variant.
Triceps
The Triceps are very active during bench pressing, especially the short & middle tricep heads. The other head (Yes, the tricep consists of three heads, hence the name TRIcep) The long head is not fully stretched and tensed, so it will not contribute much.
It is therefore a good idea to include an overhead tricep variant in your routine to optimally train the long head of the tricep.
Shoulders
Especially the front shoulders are heavily engaged during bench pressing and actually in every pressing movement the front shoulders are strongly tensed.
Most common mistakes in bench pressing
Set-Up
You see it regularly, people walk to the bench, lie down, and start bench pressing. Their feet are positioned differently every time and nothing is tense.
When bench pressing, you want your whole body to be tense like a kind of catapult. You basically pull the bar towards your body and create enormous tension before pushing the bar upwards as hard as possible.
Elbow Position
Sometimes you see people bench pressing with their elbows pointing completely towards the wall, in other words, very wide. This causes enormous stress on your shoulder tissues, which you don't want.
On the other hand, you see people whose elbows don't match their grip width. You can see this because the wrists are not in a straight line with their elbows, which also causes enormous pressure and stress on your joints.
For optimal strength and safety, you always want your wrists to be directly above your elbows when bench pressing.
Bonus; Don't let your training partner deadlift
Yep, I said it. Of course, it's important to train 'heavy' and with sufficient intensity, but it's neither necessary nor wise to have your buddy deadlift your last 3 reps.
First of all, it's very injury-prone if you push your sets so far that you need a spotter every time, but it also means you recover much less effectively.
Make sure you train heavy enough that you have 1-4 repetitions left before stopping.
8 Tips to help you improve your bench press
Tip 1
You still train like a typical 'BRO'. You have a chest day / back day / leg day etc., and you train each muscle group once a week to complete failure.
Train your bench press more often. Strength is a skill. Suppose you want to learn to play the piano well, would you practice once a week? No man, you play for 3 hours every day until your fingers almost fall off to get as good as possible. I'm not saying you should go from training your bench press once to six times a week, but if you currently do it once a week, you can gradually build up to twice a week.
Of course, make sure to adjust your volume accordingly and not just double everything. You also want to recover, so pay close attention to this.
Tip 2
Use lifting accessories.
Yes, you didn't expect it of course, but using lifting accessories can definitely help you make better and faster progress.
Wrist wraps are often used when benching wrist wraps. If you want to know more about wrist wraps, click here.
Because your wrists take a big hit when it comes to 'pressure' on the joints, wrist wraps can help keep your wrists in an optimal position and provide extra support. This then allows you to focus more on generating maximum strength.
Sometimes even a Powerlift Belt is used when benching, to brace optimally. Give it a try, it might work for you too. If you want to know more about the Powerlift Belt, click here.
Tip 3
Make sure your technique is 'on point'.
How often do you see people lie down as if they are lying in bed?
If you want to bench optimally, your whole body is tense and you have a slight arch in your back. Tighten your butt and put your feet flat on the ground.
Tip 4
Experiment with different grip widths.
Yes, the closer you go, the more tricep dominant it is, but that doesn't mean you have to go ultra wide.
It could very well be that you do better with a slightly closer grip than, for example, a wider one or vice versa.
In general, people are stronger with a wider grip, because the ROM (Range of Motion) is smaller but maybe you are an exception and are stronger with a narrower grip.
Tip 5
You don't have 'enough' muscle mass. It's obviously said and told everywhere but it's really true; A bigger muscle is a stronger muscle.
Chances are if you have a chest like Arnold's, there's also quite a bit of strength in it.
So make sure that besides benching you do enough other exercises that make your chest grow. Don't forget to eat enough by the way.
Tip 6
This is just a personal experience tip.
I've tried quite a few things myself, and often followed the scientific fitness industry because that's often optimal, science right?!
For me, this worked so far. After a while, I realized that I don't really do well training at RPE 6/7 to leave 3-4 reps in the tank to do more volume. I definitely push my sets through to RPE 8-9.
If you then do 15-20 sets per week, you can't recover well from that for very long and you'll run into all kinds of problems.
Good story Martijn but what are you trying to say?
Listen to your own self, what do you like?
Do you like to stop 3-4 reps before failure and like to do more volume? GREAT. Then focus on multiple sets per week. Keep in mind that you actually can add a rep here and there or some weight every week or improve your technique.
Are you like me and like to push your sets a bit further? NICE. Then make sure you don't do TOO MANY sets.
I have been guilty of this and believe me, it is not pleasant.
For some context; I now do about 10-12 sets of chest per week and make very good progress.
Of course, this does not mean that you cannot change this, your stress levels or the amount of time you can or want to spend in the gym can also change and you can respond to that.
Tip 7
Film yourself.
Again, film yourself to see where you can make progress. And especially send your videos to people who can help you or post them on your social media asking for tips.
Tip 8
Increase or Decrease your volume.
It may be that you do TOO LITTLE or TOO MUCH.
Do you live at home, go to school, have no job and get cooked for every evening and have a life 'without' stress?
There is a good chance that you can recover well from quite a bit of volume. Quite a bit is of course very personal. A rough estimate is somewhere between 15-20 sets per week.
Do you have a lot of stress? Think about your job / relationship dramas / financial problems etc? Then count on the fact that your recovery is not optimal and that you better reduce your volume a bit to, for example, 10 sets per week.
Do you notice that you make better progress because of that? GREAT. You can then, for example, add 1 set per week to see how much you can recover.
The same applies if you do TOO MUCH, reduce your volume until you notice that you can recover well and make progress again.
This was the end of this blog again, if you got something out of it or were able to make some nice PRs or progress on the bench, show them to me on insta?! @thorathletics
Until the next blog,
Martijn
