REVERSE BAND PRESS
The first exercise shown here, the reverse band press, is great for a number of reasons. In the video you're seeing that I'm using a shoulder-saver pad. That's due specifically to the fact that my shoulder's screwed up and I have shoulder issues and bringing the bar down to my chest is going to create more damage than good. For the sake of this description let's just act like that's not there and just go with the benefits of a reverse band press and some of the things you can get out of doing a reverse band press and different ways to do the reverse band press.
You can use the reverse band press for max effort work or overload work to where you work up to the heaviest one rep max you can do. Some people call this the future method, some people call it the laid method, to me it's just a reverse pin press using a max effort method. Don't get caught up in how much does it weigh? If there's one thing that drives me crazy it's that. Everybody wants to know how much the fucking bar weighs. The bar weighs whatever the weight is on the bar.
If you have 495 on the bar and you're using a reverse blue band then the weight is 495 with the reverse blue band. Don't make it too complicated by thinking, "Well, the band's taking off 135 or 185 pounds because the weight is X." The weight is not X because if you put that weight on without the band you're probably gonna get fucking stapled with it because the band's doing more than just deloading the bar, it's also helping to accelerate the bar, how do you read point. It's also helping to deload the bar on the way down.
It's doing more than just taking that weight off at a specific point of the press. The bar weight is wherever the bar weight is with the reverse band, very simple. Sometimes I hear people sit and discuss this for 10, 15 minutes trying to figure out what the fuck it weighs. Even if you have to know and you're so concerned about it, it's not that hard just to load the bar up with 185, 155, 225, or whatever you think it's gonna be then take it off the J-hooks and just let it hang. Wherever it hangs that's gonna be about your chest level, there you go. That's about how much weight's being taken off at the bottom of the press.
As I noted, it's irrelevant because it's coming off and coming back on in a different manner. It's not all happening at one specific time. They're not weight releasers. It's a combination of resistance that's gonna come back on, it's gonna come back off gradually throughout the process and it is going to increase the weight and the speed of how fast you're gonna get it off of your chest.
You can also use this for ultra high repetition work, which I personally have used for strained pecs for many years. With this, I will use a band that is equal to whatever the weight is on the bar close to zero if it was on your chest. Using the example of what I just said of how to determine how much weight is being taken off the bar. If you put one plate on the bar with a blue band and that is basically floating right at your chest then you're dealing with about zero at your chest. Then at the top you're gonna be dealing with 90 pounds maybe less, who cares? You just want it to be as light as it can possibly be to where there's still a little bit of weight but not much. Typically it's gonna be under the 45 pounds if you're just using bar.
When you do the alter high reps, the goal is to try to do 100 repetitions without stopping. To do this you have to avoid trying to do any type of voluntary contraction or flexing at all, otherwise you're not gonna get the 100 reps. When you're able to get the 100 reps it's just pumping a ton of blood into the area to help it with the recovery to help it with the restoration. This, by far, was one of the best things I ever did for my pecs whenever I strained them or even after full tears. It would be something that I would do before and after every training session. There's really no need to warm up, you just load it up and go.
If it was a strain and it was recently after the strain, I'd start by doing it three, four times a day and then take it down to where I was only doing it a couple of times a week. If it felt like the muscle was vulnerable then I would still throw it in a couple times a week after my bench sessions just to keep that circulation and blood supply in the muscle area. You can also use the reverse bands for repetition work, as I did in the video there.
Just basically straight bodybuilding work or muscle-building work where the repetition ranges are gonna be in the six to eight. What I find, it's a little bit healthier or at least it feels healthier on my elbows and shoulders than just using the straight bar.
I also throw these in with the bodybuilding work later in the training program instead of making it the first exercise. Couple reasons for this. The first reason is it gives you an excuse to be weak at it so your ego is thrown out the window and you're gonna worry more about working the muscle and the technique and the tempo than you are how much weight you're gonna be able to throw up. The second reason is your tempo is gonna be more warmed up so you'll be able to push a little bit harder. You're gonna be able to push a little bit heavier throughout the exercise.
One of the things that you can do with this setup is as soon as you're done with your sets and you strip the weight down; obviously, the bar's gonna pull off of the J-cups and it's gonna be hanging there. Go ahead and lay on the bench, grab the bar with your bench rep and pull the bar down to your sternum or to wherever you bench. Call it the opposite of a row, or a bench row, whatever you want to call it.
This is gonna do a couple things. It's gonna train your lats, for one, and it does a great job of training your lats. If you do train in gear, it's gonna teach you how to pull the bar down when you're benching so you don't have to fight the bar so much. It's also going to help build your lats ability and strength to get a lowered bar a little bit faster than what you typically would. It's not always a good idea to lower a bar super slow if you're trying to go for a PR. It's also not good to just let the bar drop with abandonment if you're trying to go for a PR as well. You want something in the middle.
From what I see, most people are actually most advanced lifters of lowering too slow and most beginners are lowering too fast. This will help to build the strength to be able to lower the bars a little bit more control and you're actually using the same movement pattern in the opposite direction.
The same setup can also be used for movements like JM presses and other type of modified extensions while taking some of the stress off of the elbows. I would not use this setup for a full-out extensions. From my experience, that just puts more stress on the elbows and makes it even worse. It's just not, you can't control the movement as well as what you should because the bands are actually controlling a lot of the movement more than what you think they do.
I don't want to say that the bands are controlling the movements the same way a Smith machine would, but the bands are controlling the movement to a certain degree, making some movements that are not gonna be a straight up and down movement like a tricep extension. More complicated to be able to do and to get the right feel with.
THE CHAIN PRESS
The second exercise shown, the chain press. This can also be done a number of different ways. The one way that I learned from Westside Barbell and became a max exercise of ours that we used a lot. I mean it was right up there with the two-board press and a board press as far as popularity was to be able to work up to a weight that was about 60 percent of what our one-rep max would be or since we didn't do benchpressing to the chest in the gym, it would be close to what our one-rep max would be off of a one board, which essentially is close to the same thing.
We would do 60 percent of that. For me, most of the time it was 275 or 305, somewhere in that range. Then once we warmed up to that weight, we would add one chain per side, per triples and continue to keep doing triples until we weren't able to do triples anymore, while adding one chain per side. When it got to the point where we couldn't do the triples anymore, we would jump to singles and then work up until we weren't able to work up anymore.
There comes a point where you will get so much chain on each side and depending upon the setup and what you use and you can actually get more chain using easy straps than the way that we used to use them where you just clipped the chain onto another chain. What begins to happen when you get to the seven, eight, nine, ten chain level is the chains begin to pile on top of themselves and then things start to become a little bit imbalanced as far as how it feels. I would say your injury risk goes up a little bit.
I've never seen anybody get hurt doing this, but it does start to feel like it twists a little bit and it becomes a little awkward. When that becomes the case then that's when I would suggest jumping your straight bar weight up 20 pounds the next time you do the exercise then each time from there on out. Not jumping 20 pounds every single time you do it just increasing it 20 pounds until you get up to that point where you hit max chain. For me, it seemed like I hit max chain at about nine or ten chains. After that it just became like a sloppy mess so it was easier just to start, at that point, to increase the weight and then fall back down to a six-chain max or seven-chain max then work the chain back up to a ten-max and then taking the weight up from there
This is also a great setup for dynamic work. Obviously, the weight and the percentages are gonna change significantly because the goal is gonna be on speed where the amount of chain would typically be about 20-30 percent of whatever your training weight's gonna be. If you were going to train with 200 pounds for your speed work, your chain weight would be 50 pounds or two chains per side. Factor that out this way because I don't include the whole chain weight. I only include about a half of the chain because half of the chain stays on the floor at all times. If my speed work was gonna be 185 to 225 there's typically gonna be between two and three chains per side for that.
Whenever it's dynamic work, first rep should look the same as the last rep. That's true throughout all sets. Your first repetition of your first set should have the same force and the same speed of the last repetition of the last set that you do.
The chains, again, can be used for regular bodybuilding training, the same way the reversed bands can be. The benefit of this is you're taking some of the stress off the bottom position which is where most people have problem with rotator cuff or the shoulders, elbows, and so forth. You're bringing the stress back in as you press or back up again. You're accommodating the resistance of that movement to be able to get more muscle activation out of the movement. If it is for bodybuilding or muscle building purposes, I would slow the tempo down a little bit so you don't bust through the chain. A lot of benching against chain or even benching against band is to try to explode through the chain so you're always ahead of what the chain is. That way the chain can't hinder and slow your bar speed down.
In the case of the bodybuilding work you're gonna want it to be able to try to slow the bar's speed down so you can get more maximum recruitment of the muscle because what you're trying to do at this point is to build muscle, not to build the explosive strength or speed strength. For exercises you can deal with the same setup. Once again the chain presses are great. Extensions are good as well. This is a little bit different than when it's a reverse bend because you have more freedom of movement with the chains by how they're set up. You can do the extensions with that. You can do JM presses with that. I mean there's a host of things you can do lying flat on the bench with chains.