Bench Press Development
Mark Brown
December 29, 2022
Squat might be the lift that improved the most in 2022, but bench press is the one that got the most stable in terms of raw, repeatable strength. I thought going into this year that getting to 315 pounds with the lifting structure I finished 2021 with was possible if I kept with it. I got to June after I successfully finally got to 305 pounds, which is a 10 pound increase from the end of November 2021, and felt pretty good about that. Sufficed to say, I didn’t end up pressing 315 pounds. I made some dents towards it but I know what I need to be doing prior to 315 in order to finally get to it. I knew it had to start in January because I learned how much I screwed myself over in 2021 by not bench pressing for basically 6 months. However, instead of getting that top end single rep strength I got a larger base of raw strength from which I can build on in 2023. I did it by rotating lifts and equipment in the 3 week waves I keep going on about. The main difference between the waves for squat or deadlift and bench press is the sheer amount of equipment I have to flat or incline press with in the garage. In many ways, it is the defining characteristic of the garage gym Pete and I have put together. It is a presser’s dream space, but is somewhat limited on leg (don’t confuse this with squat or deadlift) development.
Since there is a more technical element to bench pressing than muscular development, the program rounded into better shape in late spring when I started to do bench press sessions with Pete again. I had been bench pressing all year but having a spotter really helped because I could start doing those higher intensity reps more often. Safety was never an issue because the pins in the power rack allowed me to get to failure without cutting my head off. The importance of the spotter was to help get those last truly max effort reps up with just a scant boost. I knew going into 2022 I needed to keep working on bench press so I used a flat press or an incline barbell press as a supplemental lift in the gym during January and February. Flat or incline dumbbell press was my main lift during winter. I didn’t want to make the same mistake in 2022 that I had in 2021. During this time, I experimented with a barbell floor press for the first time. I had heard about it on Dave Tate’s podcast Tabletalk before but never employed it until then. I will get into that specifically more in a bit. As I got back to the garage for lifting in general, the bench press became more the main pressing movement because of the power rack. I don’t tend to lift max intensity at the gym with barbells because the safety factor.
A major reason why the bench press became my most stable lift this past year was because I did so, so much pressing in general. When I started to press with Pete again on Sundays, that allowed me to work on bench press itself on that day and use the specialized bars on the other. Pete didn’t tend to press on that day, though sometimes would be doing something else to be be able to give a spot. The impact on bench press development in 2022 was that I was able to work on some of the technical aspects of the lift and identify weak points in it while still building strength and muscular development. The gym I go to just doesn’t have the bars I do so I just made straight barbell work do during winter, which can be quite a lot. The lift itself is probably one of the major reasons behind my beginning to understand programming a bit more. I began to be able to work in different supplemental lifts to support all the various main lifts I was doing week to week. Even something as simple as changing grips on a straight barbell while doing a regular press down to the chest requires some thinking of what the best supplemental lift for that is. Pete always did incline press right after a flat press, and I never challenged because it’s still a good supplemental lift but after that our lifting for the day diverged. My plan is more pressing focused than his is.
With Sundays always covered by a straight bar press, Wednesdays became the day I pressed with my American cambered bar or my cambered bar. I got the American cambered bar in 2020 and Pete and I pressed with it then. I’ve known for 2 years now how different a pressing implement it is. This year I used it differently than I have the last 2. I started doing giant sets with it, pressing with all 4 sets of handles in succession. That made it both ruthlessly hard and even more effective than the way I was using it before. The 2 inner most handles had been too heavy to lift with efficiently with the outer 2 handles prior to this past year. It was just more effective and time efficient to superset the outer 2 handles then superset the inner 2 handles after. By summer, I was able to just go from the inner most handle to the outer most without removing plates. I simply would stop pressing with the each specific handle when the weight got too much to handle, which for the inner most handle is about 218 pounds. I can get some reps at it but it’s not a big deal if I can’t do 2 sets of 3 reps at that weight during a particular session. This tactic with the American cambered bar produced about 100 pressing reps every time it was used, most of which were done at about 85% 1RM for the bar. The bar feels like I am lifting an offset dumbbell so it is a super effective muscular development bar, even at lower weights. I can feel it really making the pecs work at 128 pounds. The last time Pete and I used it we came to a conclusion that we will have to explore in 2023 when we get back in the garage. He hadn’t used the bar since 2020 to my knowledge so he was stepping into the weights I had been pressing with for the last 6 months on the bar. I always thought of the 6 reps on each handle in succession at 128 pounds as a warm up, but I came to realize that it wasn’t and it might be holding back higher weight pressing at the end. I don’t know quite yet if that is true, but I know I have done a relatively insane amount of working sets on this bar in 2022 and it has really helped with raw strength development.
I started to rotate the cambered bar with the American cambered bar much like I it with the safety squat yoke bar on squats. The cambered bar has a 14 inch camber on it but is otherwise a straight bar. The weight that goes on the bar is offset by 14 inches. This produces a lot of instability that causes both wobbling and swaying when held or moved. On a squat, this is a bit more manageable because the quads and lower back are bigger muscles. On a bench press, that swaying requires much more effort to tame. That makes it an ideal bar to find physical weaknesses on and work on the stabilizers most people use dumbbells to work on. I experimented with a cambered bar press in 2021 but held back on it then because I wasn’t ready to fully run with it. This year put it in and forced myself to get stronger at it. What I discovered is the lift really is made far more difficult because of that 14 inch camber. It did that by really forcing me to press the bar off my chest at the lowest point with my lats more emphatically. It felt like I was using the pec deck machine with my hands starting way behind me, which is interesting because the straight bar has never felt like that. The hardest part of the bench press is the bottom 2-3 inches, both in terms of the lift and physical toll on the body. With the cambered bar, the weight never gets above the bottom part of the lift. It has helped gain more strength over 2022.
The backbone of the bench press work was working with the straight bar on Sundays with Pete. Not just because I had a spotter for the first time in a year and a half, but also I had so many variations I could use to find out more information about what I needed to improve. Each grip or physical accessory helped me understand a little bit more where strength was lacking or technique was off during a press. The grip changes every 3 weeks forced me to get locked in because I didn’t have long stretches to really get married to any particular set of circumstances or accessories. I had experience with a more narrow grip press because it was what I did naturally for years thanks to always using dumbbells. I almost never press wide on dumbbells. I trained my preferred grip width on the bar out to my ringer finger resting on the gap between the knurling over the space of 2020-2022. Floor press was particularly helpful in doing so. Moving from my preferred grip to a narrow then one as wide as possible, which is also the furthest any lifter can legally grip in competition, showed me I needed to develop more lat strength. There is about a 10 pound difference between my top reps of narrow and wide grip press. The wide grip really is quite hard, but also works more of the pecs it feels like. Working in these waves made the year fly by in terms of training because moving within just the 3 grips I mentioned is 9 weeks of bench pressing, or just over 2 months. I can see why powerlifters work like this.
The other variations of bench press that I did on Sundays involved accessories added to the bar as weight, added resistance or changed some aspect of the lift. The first to discuss is bands. I hadn’t done banded press since 2020 because a spotter verges on necessary. I should do them more often even when I don’t have a spotter. Bands are designed to help the lifter train explosive movement to increase force production. The bands increase tension all the way up to the top of the lift so the lifter feels the greatest stretch and tension at the top of the lift and the least at the bottom. This keeps the bare weight on the bar down. It was fascinating to see how much progress I had made on this in the last 2 years. I remember being only able to lift made 205 pounds with the 70 pound Monster bands back in 2020. Now it’s mostly the starting point. I went up to 225 and 235 pounds with 100 pound bands a few different times. That’s when the bands started to slow me down a bit too much. If I do more of it in 2023, I’ll get the hang of it better. There’s something there.
The last 2 have been pretty good indications of where my top end strength on this lift actually are. The shoulder saver pad is 2 board press. As I stated above with the cambered bar, the last 2-3 inches are the hardest part of the bench press. It’s the spot where I fail the lift when I am not able to complete it most of the time. I can do 305 pounds, which is my 1RM for bench press, more often with the shoulder saver pad. It also makes my normal working sets at 285 and 295 pounds easier. I’m able to get more reps while using it. That is helpful all around. Pressing with chains adds resistance and weight, which makes it slightly different than bands. Bands de-loads the resistance at the bottom but the weight remains the same. With chains, only some of the weight gets de-loaded along with all of the live resistance. I don’t have enough chain to change the lift a ton but I can definitely feel the effect. Dave Tate says you need at least 50 pounds of chain to de-load at the bottom to get the full effect. They are there to help train explosive movement, after all. I have a chain for each side that weights just short of 30 pounds, and the calculations I did indicate that about 7 pounds per side gets de-loaded. Generally speaking, I don’t add the chains until the after the first working set at 225 pounds of bare weight. Yes, that means there’s a big jump up to 270ish pounds at the bottom and 285 at the top for the first working set of bare weight and chains but I can feel the difference between pressing with chains and just with plates. I will work up to 255 pounds with chain for a couple sets of 2 or 3 reps. I can do 265 with chains on some days, not all of them. That makes sense with a 305 bare plate press being my 1RM best. I’m on the verge of pushing to 315. The chain press is a really valuable lift to me. Just to throw the cherry on top for this thought, I spent 3 weeks each doing these variations. When I add those 9 weeks to the 9 weeks mentioned for pressing with varied grips, that’s 4.5 months of straight bar pressing with barely any repeat.
There were a number of supplemental lifts that stuck throughout the year and helped improvement in both technical and strength development. Dumbbell press almost goes without saying. I pressed dumbbells flat or inclined at least once a week throughout the year. I got more familiar with the idea that supplemental lifts help the main lift throughout 2022. That meant that dumbbell pressing was best served for days I used the American cambered bar, which I already stated what that lift feels like, and for the Sundays that were opposite me working with the cambered bar on Wednesday. The dumbbell press surprised me at quite a few points because it acted as a barometer of strength development. Being able to dumbbell press for any kind of decent number after the barbell pressing I was doing showed me strength development. I used pin press sparingly this year. I did it mostly when I was pressing by myself. There’s a lot of different names for it, but the concept remains the same. Pushing from the bottom of the bench press without any of the eccentric loading. Hence “push press,” for those wondering. It does help force power development by not allowing me to load the triceps and puts more emphasis on making the lats do more work.
Floor press was the other main supplemental lift I did. I started them back in January having listened to Tabletalk and figuring how I could what Tate and Sam Brown called “commercial gym” conjugate.” This exercise was one of the mainstays of it. I started at about 225 and worked up to 265 pounds by the end of the year. What I find most fascinating about the lift is that is lat dominant in a different way than the pin press was. There’s more eccentric loading in the floor press than pin press, but there’s not really a lot. In that way, I find it to be a bit more useful as supplemental lifts go. Starting around October, I found the lift really complemented the cambered bar press, especially after doing holds with that that bar. All 3 movements are lat dominant. When I added a straight arm lat pulldown to this mix of lifts as primary accessory, the light bulb went off in my head and helped me become more cognizant of lift pairings. I’d already been aware of them, but to really feel it this way was quite eye opening.
There are a couple of accessory type lifts that are worth mentioning here because they became mainstays in the program either throughout the year or by the fall. The first is a timed hold I did with the cambered bar after completing my sets or press with the bar. Holds aren’t new to me. I did them in early in the fall at the gym on a leg/back day with kettlebells for some extra work on biceps but found my back got killed in the process. The bench helps stabilize the back during this particular hold. Doing holds with the cambered bar held fully out while in the flat position allowed me to exaggerate a negative rep, which is used to help lifters get used to heavier loads by forcing the body to resist the load over a period of time. The cambered bar is ideal for this “movement” because it sways and wobbles, forcing the stabilizer muscles in the arms to keep working for a set amount of time. In my case, 1:30 for a wider press and 1:00 for a narrow grip press. I noticed it also really made me focus effort by pushing my lats into the bench to keep the bar’s sway down. That is what made it ideal for doing after the press and before floor press. The lift is also mentally taxing, so the suck factor on it is high.
The other is another one I have known about for a long time and done intermittently without fully understanding the value. Straight arm lat pulldowns have much greater effect than standard seated lat pulldowns do for me. I can feel them a lot more. They are good on straight bar pressing days in general but I found they really belonged on the days I pressed with the cambered bar. I was already hammering my lats with a multiple lat dominant presses and a heavy flat hold. The way those lifts made the straight arm lat pulldown harder helped me more fully understand how to integrate accessory movements into the program on pressing days. The physical effect is nice but the impact on my thought process has been more useful. The concept of using the main and supplemental lifts to tire out muscle groups then hammer them with muscle building accessory sets isn’t new, but sometimes it takes that “whoa” reaction to something familiar to really get the lesson to sink in. Well, lesson learned. The combination of cambered bar press+cambered bar hold+floor press+straight arm lat pulldown exercise is very powerful. Add in some tricep work and I found a formidable midweek lifting session. Learning to how to better answer “why” I’m doing specific lifts is becoming easier.
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