In the hope that it will make the road to progress a bit shorter for others, I’d like to share my experience in training and bench press competitions with an article series. A little background information first…I’ve been competing in the bench press for eight years. Ever since I was eight years old and received my first weight set—you know, the old plastic-coated concrete on an aluminum bar and a bench with uprights you can barely fit your head between—I’ve been obsessed with strength and physical performance. I started out trying to get bigger, stronger, and faster for baseball, football, and other sports. But somewhere along the line, I started to enjoy training more than I enjoyed participating in the other sports. So naturally once I found out I could compete in the lifts that I trained, I couldn’t wait to get into a meet.
This finally happened shortly after graduating from high school when I was 18 years old and about 165 lbs. In that contest, I managed to press 240 lbs and thought I was doing pretty well. Just short of eight years later, I made my first 600 lb bench weighing 190 lbs. So, what the hell happened that put 360 lbs on my bench in that time frame? I feel there are six main components that contributed to this improvement—technique, training, equipment, training partners, body weight, and mind-set. In part 1 of this article series, I will focus on bench press technique.
Technique
Technique can’t be emphasized enough. As an example, a football player practices a given play over and over to make sure the execution is flawless, and this must be done with all the plays in the playbook. Yet, I routinely go to meets and talk to lifters who put virtually no effort into learning and perfecting their technique. In powerlifting and even more so in bench only competitions, we need to take advantage of the fact that we have relatively few things to learn to excel in our sport.
Some key points to consider in your bench press technique are arching the back, tucking the shoulders, controlling the angle of your elbows to your body, generating leg drive without raising the hips, learning to focus on your triceps immediately from the word “press,” and developing a set-up that takes all of these things into account so that you automatically prepare yourself to bench once you take the lift off.
Arch is obviously important as a method for shortening the range of motion. However, I believe it is also an important way to keep your entire body tight so that no strength is wasted. As an analogy, think of the difference between running in the sand and on a track. As the sand moves beneath your feet, it is dispersing some of the force you’re applying to the ground, making it difficult to gain speed. On the other hand, a solid track surface allows you to channel all of your force production into sprinting forward. As you can see, it is vital to have a very tight set-up.
This tightness also comes from your leg drive, and the key component to taking advantage of your leg drive is proper foot placement. I don’t believe there is one ideal foot placement for everyone so you’ll need to experiment a bit with this. But remember, you want to find something that will allow you to push into the floor with your feet without allowing you to raise your butt off the bench. For me, this means having an extremely wide foot placement somewhat to the rear and about even with my hips.
Arch and foot placement are two of the three parts of your set-up that will establish this tight body position. The third, and probably most difficult to explain in writing, is tucking the shoulders, or having upper back tightness. Most people want to shrug their shoulders, which causes the barbell to move more toward the face. This will lead to a high bar placement on the chest, meaning you won’t be taking advantage of the short range of motion available by arching. This can also lead to misgrooving in your shirt, which will often end with the bar being flung back at your face. To say the least, this would be an “unsuccessful” attempt.
To properly “tuck” the shoulders, you need to actually focus on three separate things. First, simply retract the shoulder blades. Second, squeeze the lats. This is what will keep the bar path low. And third, tighten the traps but not so much that you truly “shrug” the shoulders up. Elbow angle works along with lat contraction (properly tucking the shoulders) to create the proper bar path as well as to help place the focus on your triceps. Squeezing the lats will usually automatically lead to proper elbow angle, but it may also help to think of rotating your ulna inward (bring your “funny bone” towards your sides).
Learning to focus on your triceps is actually something that comes more from proper training protocol than from technique, but it is important to mentally focus on firing your triceps immediately when you begin to press the bar up. By focusing on your triceps initially, they will already be “engaged” when it’s time to lock out the bar. If this isn’t done, there will be a slight stall in the transition between the initial press and the lockout portion of the lift. Many lifts fail at this point. This is also a reason to include speed work in your program, but that will be discussed in a later article.
Finally, you will need to develop a set-up that takes all of these factors into account. This really needs to be done through trial and error on your part along with the assistance of training partners, ideally those who are more advanced and/or experienced in competition than yourself. I’m sure you’ve noticed at a meet the many different ways that lifters will set up to bench. The key is to find something that is comfortable and easy to execute for you so that you can focus on the lift at hand rather than an overly complicated set-up.
Mike Strom runs Industrial Strength Sports, his training business, where
he works with a variety of clients ranging from athletes to the general
population. He competes primarily in bench only events, although he continues to
train his squat and deadlift. He typically only competes in full meets one or
two times a year. In Mike’s most recent competition, he captured the AAPF 181 lb
bench press record at 247.5 kg (545.5 lbs). Watch for Mike as he continues to
move up the top 100 in both the 181 and 198 lb classes.
Elite Fitness Systems strives to be a recognized leader in the strength training industry by providing the highest quality strength training products and services while providing the highest level of customer service in the industry. For the best training equipment, information, and accessories, visit us at www.EliteFTS.com.
Copyright© 2006 Elite Fitness Systems. All rights reserved.