Pressing For Perfection

Hate it or love it, the Bench Press is hands down the most popular exercise you will EVER see in the gym.

It is also the most common measure of strength amongst the general public and elite athletes. For instance, how often have you heard the old ‘well how much can you bench?’ question. To go with this popularity, bench press strength is the only significant difference between professional rugby league players and those still running around in park footy. This means if you want to do well in the professional rugby codes, chances are you had better work on your press.

So we all know it is kind of a big deal, especially for males aged between 15 and up. But what we are going to do here is cover the many aspects of pressing – safety, standards, variety, my preferred technique and tips to help you get better. To finish off this two part series, I will fire you a program that will have you pressing far above your weight. In fact the routine is so good you are more likely to find a 7/11 without an Indian manager than not make progress with it.

Safety

Firstly is it safe for us to do? We have all heard the well intentioned but misguided physiotherapists and sports physicians warn about the dangers of the bench press for the shoulder. This has lead to the average rsonal trainer and gym instructor teaching a restricted range of motion (ROM) with the bench press e.g. not allowing the bar to touch the chest. This also occurs with overhead presses and dips where trainees are instructed not to go below 90o of flexion at the elbow joint. Even worse for fear of unhealthy shoulders, trainers avoid these exercises with clients like the plague.

Do not fear though – all types of presses are perfectly safe. Interestingly enough, the avoidance of these exercises (especially overhead pressing) has actually led to an increase in shoulder problems according to many experts. The fact is that the shoulder joint (as with all joints in the body) is designed to load and deload and that the position of most instability in the glenohumeral joint is when the humerus is in line with the body. This means that is actually safer for the bar to make a full contact with the chest with a barbell bench press than it is limit ROM at the point of most instability (and perform the movement without touching the chest). Now if you cannot do a full ROM bench press without pain, I am sorry but you are not qualified to complete this lift. You need to go away, address the limiting factors and come back when you can press without pain.

With almost every exercise, any pain or ‘issues’ with the bench press can be resolved quickly and easily if you know how. Technique, adequate soft tissue and appropriate loading of the exercise in question are the keys for safe and optimal performance of any exercise.

For starters with the bench press (especially when using the barbell), you need to make sure you have adequate soft tissue and flexibility through the shoulders. From my experience, the most common problems causing pain with full ROM pressing (in any plane) can be narrowed down to a posterior capsule restriction, neck tightness and/or external rotation deficits between arms. For the anatomy geeks out there, the suprasinpatus, infrapsinatus, teres minor, posterior deltoid, levator scapulae, upper trapezius, pectoralis minor/major and subscapularis will need to be treated depending on restrictions. This is by no means an exhaustive list e.g. an adhesive coracobrachialis will cause anterior shoulder restriction & pain entering 100-110o of shoulder abduction; but it will deal with most of the problems. Go and get Active Release Techniques treatment on the structures and you will save a lot of wasted effort and pain. If you cannot find an ART practitioner, try the following stretches for posterior capsule tightness (pictured - especially A & B). When completing these stretches, you can subtly move your neck to develop the stretch. Also vary the degree of flexion you have at the elbow joint, which will involve the long head of the triceps. Even with just the stretching of the posterior capsule, this will alleviate up to 70% of shoulder problems that are occurring with pressing.

Variety

Pressing should not be just restricted to the bench press. There are a multitude of options and you should use presses both above and below the clavicular line for optimal health and performance. This includes overhead presses like shoulder and handstand presses, incline presses, decline presses and dips. Shortened range of motion work should include rack presses, floor presses and board presses. More interesting and exotic presses like Bulgarian dips, the Bradford press, log presses, the Sots press and the old time strongman favorite, the bent press can be used for a breath of fresh air with your training.

Standards

Every male wants to compare how they rate compared to other males. So here is my yardstick. If you are under 90kg weight, you are looking at a 160% bodyweight 1RM Biacromial Bench Press. Over 90kg, it is around 140% of your bodyweight. For those of you who do not know what a 1RM is, it is the most weight you can lift for one repetition. The Biacromial Bench Press is a press where your grip is the width of your shoulders, giving a pure line from shoulder to bar. If you have shoulder problems, you will find this width of grip much more tolerable than wider more common grips. You will also find this shortening of the grip makes the press a lot harder (especially if your tricep strength is poor) and you can expect to knock off at least 15% of what you would normally perform. This lift is performed with a 40X0 tempo – meaning you lower the weight in 4 seconds and lift as quickly as possible under control.

Technique

What would you say if I told you I could add up to 30% on your best bench press in 15 minutes? Although you would probably think the author has been on some serious ‘smack’, it is not only very possible but also expected. The key is technique adjustment. Far too many trainees press with poor technique and as such they make snail like progress. Here are my tips:

1) Always get someone else to unrack the bar. The reason if you have to lift the bar off the racks you are going to lose any tightness through the upper back (which you will see is super important for pressing strength). Not only this but unracking the bar yourself can also cause minor tears in your external rotators of the shoulder. Alternatively train in a gym that has swivels on the press stations.

2) In your set up, your feet should be directly below your knees. There should also a natural curvature to the spine and your hips should stay in solid contact with the bench throughout the press. Now if you go to any powerlifting meet, you will see the exact opposite of what I have described. The feet will more under the hips and there will be a large arch through the spine. Now with all due respect to the sport of powerlifting (because there is a lot we can learn from it), it is a sport where you try to move as heavy as possible load over as short as possible range of motion. This means they will do anything possible to shorten the range the weight/bar has to go through e.g. wider grip, lifting of chest. However for healthy shoulders and mutant like strength outside of the gym, we want as full a range as possible.

3) Do not have your feet resting on the bench in the misguided belief it isolates the chest. I actually answered a question about this in a recent Mens’ Fitness column and these are my thoughts – ‘Unfortunately it (the feet on bench position) reduces muscle recruitment because the load you lift is much less than if pressing with a conventional set up. This position also increases chances of shoulder impingement and injury as the shoulder must go through more internal rotation to complete the rep due to lack of extension in the spine. Raising your feet also makes you extremely vulnerable when the juice monkey with invisible lat syndrome swaggers by and unknowingly knocks your legs. I have actually seen this happen and the results were about as appealing as being made to complete Richard Simmon’s exercise videos with your mother in law.’

4) Think of making your body as tight or as stiff as possible. As powerlifting extraordinaire Dave Tate says, ‘you cannot shoot a cannon off a canoe’.

5) Engage the back of your head into the bench. This engages the neck extensors, which are major strengtheners of the entire body. This is the reason why you will see Olympic lifters naturally looking up with the neck in extension before beginning their lift. Now rotation of the head will also weaken you during any movement so make sure to keep focused on what is directly in front and slightly above your natural line of sight.

6) Make sure to squeeze the bar as hard as possible. This also applies when gripping dumbbells or the floor with handstand and push up work. The technical name for this is Concurrent Activation Potentiation (CAP) and by purposely contracting seemingly unrelated muscles, research shows us it can improve the performance by 15-20%. CAP works just as well for the experienced trainee and the novice and you can also clench your jaw and brace through stomach to employ CAP. Interestingly enough, females do not get quite the same improvement in performance from CAP.

7) When you press, you also want to think of trying to ‘break’ the bar in two pieces. By purposely rotating your hands outwards as you grip the bar, this will engage your lats and provide more of that crucial ‘tension’ in the shoulder joint. This technique is commonly referred to as ‘flaring the lats’; which is an old powerlifting trick of the trade. This outward rotation also works especially well with handstand push ups. My trainees are always amazed at what an immediate difference this makes when learning the handstand push up. If you are a female and you cannot do a complete chest to floor push up, this will also instantly increase your strength.

8) The next two things to concentrate on is pulling the implement towards you on the descent; rather than lowering the bar, dumbbell or yourself. Then when you are attempting to lift the load, focus on pushing the bench into the floor rather than trying to lift the bar, dumbbells or yourself.

9) To be as biomechanically efficient as possible, your elbows want to be tucked by your sides in the bottom position of the press. As you press up your elbows may flare out but we are at a much greater mechanically advantage and there is less risk of injury when the shoulder has less than 45o of abduction. In fact, this type of pressing is not only safer but much more athlete specific as all pressing done in a sporting environment is done with the elbows close to the side. Coupled with the biacromial grip (which is the most common hand spacing in all sports requiring a pushing action) and you have an exercise that will transfer directly into the athletic field.

10) The bar should make contact with exactly the same point on your chest/upper abdominals every rep. This will ‘grease the groove’ and it is essential to increasing your strength. A tip I picked up off Dave Tate is to mark the bar with chalk. Complete your set and have a look at your shirt. A solid white line is what you want whereas a three or more chalk marks means you need to spend some time perfecting your movement before upping the weight.

Tips

1) You have to evaluate your structural balance and fix the weaknesses. The external rotators, rhomboids and lower trapezius are normally the main limiting factors when it comes to pressing strength. The geek word for why this happens is ‘antagonist inhibition’. If these muscles are weak, they will send a message to the brain saying ‘hold on buddy, we cannot tolerate this weight’ and as such you miss the lift. This is actually a defense mechanism to prevent injury and it will neurally inhibit strength gains. If you do address these weaknesses in your training, you can reap some serious benefits. Anecdotally, I personally added 12.5kg to my 1RM bench press after focusing on a weak lower trapezius for 6 weeks. All without touching a barbell bench press. This will not only work for strength gains but training these muscles will also give your shoulder health a normally much needed shot in the arm. Charles Poliquin has written extensively on this topic of upper body structural balance and if you want to learn more, I would suggest attending one of his internships or training under a Poliquin certified coach.

2) The next thing to concentrate on is tricep strength, which is the key for lifting eye-popping weight in the gym and for dominating on a sports field. I do not care what anyone says but any press is primarily elbow extension dependent. If you are weak in the triceps, you will be weak in the press. Include as much elbow extension work as possible to remedy this. As with pressing, you should vary the angle of the extension as much as possible. Also a cycle focusing on the long head of the tricep (which is notoriously weak) is usually needed.

3) You will also want to include incline and overhead presses in your program. I actually prefer the 45o Incline Press as a test of athletic potential in sports requiring a pushing action. Now the stronger you are in presses above the shoulder, the greater your strength in the bench press will be.

4) Spend a cycle of at least 12 weeks working on forearm and grip strength. The reason this will boost your pressing strength is that the less neural drive your brain has to send to the forearms and wrist to grip the implement, the more it can send to the prime movers of the movement e.g. pectoral & tricep. The more grip dependent an exercise is (e.g. a deadlift, chin up); the more this will influence the gains you make. One of the easiest ways of doing this is to use fat grip handles on everything you do for 12 weeks. A colleague of mine from Toronto, Werner Bruggemann makes the best transportable fat grip handles available. Go to www.fatgripz.com for more information.

5) Now if you really want to up your strength dramatically in a session, you will want to decrease the role of another neural mechanism called reciprocal inhibition. Stretch your external rotators, rhomboids, lats and biceps (which are all antagonists in a pressing movement) between your sets of pressing. This will relax these muscles and decrease their ‘resistance’ to the movement. Even better, get a accredited practitioner to perform ART on these muscles in between sets and you will be locking out ever increasing loads with your press.

6) Using dumbbells permit a greater range of motion and requires you employ more stabilizing musculature. Because of this, I suggest you do most of your pressing work with them. The greater range of motion means that you will develop healthy shoulders from the increase in flexibility through the anterior capsule. Meanwhile increases in the shoulder stabilizers’ strength have been demonstrated consistently in studies to reduce shoulder pain. Now I recommend at least a 2:1 cycle of dumbbells to barbells with your upper extremity training. This means that you do 2 cycles of DB work to every cycle of BB work.

The Behemoth Bench Program

The most common model of training the bench press you will find available online or in books is without doubt ‘the Conjugate Method’. This method was developed by the father of pylometrics, Dr. Yuri Verkhoshansky and its’ popularity is largely due to the success of Louie Simmon’s Westside Barbell powerlifting club in the U.S. However, I actually prefer to use an ‘Accumulation/Intensification’ model with the majority of my strength work. The ‘Accumulation/Intensification’ model, which German scientist Dietmar Schmidtbleicher is mostly credited for, suggests you alternate between first stressing the body with volume (accumulation) and then intensity (intensification) to keep making gains. This as you will see is reflected in the loading parameters in the following training protocols. Now you can definitely use the conjugate method and it is brilliant for strength & athletic gains but, as they say, you can only sit on one horse at any one time. So here we go.

Accumulation 1 (Weeks 1-3, perform 2x per week)

Exercise Tempo Sets Reps Rest

A1: 30^o DB Incline Bench Press 4110 4 8-10 75

A2: One Arm DB Row 3012 4 8-10 75

B1: 45^o Incline DB Tricep Extension 3210 3 10-12 75

B2: DB Scott Curl 5010 3 10-12 75

C1: Single Arm Low Cable External Rotation 3012 3 10-12 45

C2: Single Arm DB Bent Over Raise 4010 3 10-12 45

Intensification 1 (Weeks 4-6, perform 2x per week)

Exercise Tempo Sets Reps Rest

A1: Flat Bench DB Rotating Press 4010 5 4-6 120

A2: Neutral Grip Chin Up 3012 5 4-6 120

B1: EZY Bar French Press 3210 3 6-8 75

B2: DB Hammer Curl 4110 3 6-8 75

C1: Single Arm DB External Rotation (On Knee) 4010 3 6-8 60

C2: Single Arm Cable Bent Over Raise 3012 3 6-8 60

Accumulation 2 (Weeks 7-9, perform 2x per week)

Exercise Tempo Sets Reps Rest

A1: Biacromial grip BB Bench Press 4210 5 6-8 90

A2: Chin Up 4010 5 6-8 90

B1: 45^o Incline 1 1/4 DB Press 3010 4 7-9 75

B2: Single Arm Cable Row 3013 4 7-9 75

Intensification 2 (Weeks 10-12, perform 2x per week)

Exercise Tempo Sets Reps Rest

A1: Mid Grip BB Bench Press 30X1 6 4, 2, 4, 2, 4, 2 150

A2: Pull Up 40X0 6 4, 2, 4, 2, 4, 2 150

B1: DB Floor Press 3210 4 5-7 75

B2: Seated Row To Face 3013 4 5-7 75

A few notes:

• All exercises are performed in superset or circuit type fashion. Thus, when you see exercises marked A1 and A2, you perform one set of A1, one set of A2, then return to A1 again. Repeat until you have completed the prescribed number of sets for each of the two exercises.

• I use a four digit formula for exercise tempo prescriptions. The first digit of the tempo formula is the lowering (eccentric) phase; the second is the pause (isometric) phase, the third is the lifting (concentric) phase and the last digit is the pause before the next rep (isometric). Each digit refers to the number of seconds it takes to complete each phase. The letter X means to complete the phase as rapidly as good technique allows.

• With this program, you will also want to train your legs twice per week. Normally these sessions would be the day after your Bench days and a typical week may look like this – Monday: Behemoth Bench Tues: Legs, Wed: Rest, Thurs: Behemoth Bench, Fri: Legs, Sat/Sun: Rest.

• With the ‘45^o Incline 1 ¼ DB Press’, the ¼ movement is completed in the top range of motion. With this, you complete one full press followed immediately by one ¼ press and this is one rep.

• All DB pressing movements are to completed with a neutral grip unless otherwise stated. This means you press with your palms facing each other throughout the movement.

• Make sure you are borderline OCD with your rest periods. I suggest a simple stopwatch to take care of this.

• With the 2nd ‘Intensification’ cycle, the A station contains a ‘4/2’ wave which is great for priming the neural system and delivering big strength gains. Your weights should move up and down in a wave like fashion to coincide with the 4 & 2 reps. Now your 4RM & 2RM will fall somewhere between 86-89% and 92-95% of your 1RM respectively depending on how neurologically efficient you are. Therefore a sample loading scheme for a ‘4/2’ wave for a trainee with a 100kg 1RM would look something like this: 85kg for 4, 90kg for 2, 87.5kg for 4, 92.5kg for 2, 90kg for 4 & 95 kg for 2. Next session you would aim to add 2% to all your weights and so on.

This program will work best for the intermediate level trainee although everyone from the novice to advanced trainee will get results following this 12 week protocol. Long story short – the ‘Behemoth Bench’ program is guaranteed to return bigger and better number with your pressing. So what are you waiting for - get stuck in and move some tin!