Increase your Bench Press
If you have hit a plateau on the bench press and you want to be able to increase the weight, then the following advice may help. The following advice is assuming that you already consume 6-8 high protein meals per day, drink plenty of water, follow a well structured routine, sleep plenty and already use supplements such as creatine, but still can’t further increase your bench press.
- Vary your exercises, i.e. if you always do bench press, then try doing dumbbell press instead and rotate. If you already do both dumbbell and barbell bench presses, then try a superset. You can either do a pre-exhaustion superset where you isolate the pecs on an exercise like dumbbell flies, or cable crossovers to failure at around 8-10 reps, then jump straight onto the bench press as fast as you can and do as many reps as you can with a weight that is about three quarters of what you would normally do for 8 reps. This will train your pecs to a higher level than they are used to, therefore stimulating muscle growth. Other high intensity options include drop sets, where you perform an exercise to failure, drop the weight then continue to failure again, then drop the weight one more time for failure again – you can do this on the dumbbell or barbell bench press if you have spotters, or a bench press machine if you are on your own. (Free weights are best).
- Perform chest exercises at the beginning of your workout when you are most focused and you can exert maximum effort into your exercises.
- Power up your triceps! Do close grip bench presses (with your thumbs around 8-12 inches apart), or do heavy weighted dips for low reps.
- Squeeze your lats… the lats play a big role in increasing your bench press. By increasing the strength of your lats you can increase bench press. When benching, squeeze your lats as if your were pushing the bar with them, keep them tight and flexed for the whole movement. Also, try and increase your barbell rows for increases in your bench press.
- Don’t overtrain. 6-8 sets per week on the chest is enough when performed at a high intensity. This could be on one day, or on two days (3-4 days apart). Overtraining can reduce muscle size and strength.
- Always warm-up… the key is to be warmed up, but not too warmed up. You want to have full strength when you start your bench press session. Squeeze the bar prior to lifting and tighten your body, helping prepare you for the heavy weight. Also, you can avoid serious injuries to your shoulers, chest and arms.
- Don’t overdo it with the cardio workouts.
Let me know how you get on by replying to this post. Good luck!!!
March 7th, 2010 at 11:37 PM
Bench Press is triceps and pecs not shoulders and pecs. So many people do the bench press with their arms flared out. This puts your shoulders and rotator cuff under pressure. The bar comes down to the nipples or under (towards your tummy)with the elbows close to the chest. Leave those arms out in the air sooner or later you will injure yourself.
There is very little training you can do with a straped up shoulder!