The bench press is often used by bodybuilders as one of the most reliable ‘barometers’ for their success. When they want to measure how their strength measures up to that of their friends, you will often ask ‘what’s your bench press?’. Then when they ask what yours is you’ll lie in order to save face. That’s okay, they lied too…
The point is though, an impressive 1rm (1 rep max) on the bench is a highly desirable goal to go after and also rather useful seeing as the bench press is one of the most effective exercises you can possibly do for building massive pecs, shoulders and triceps and triggering a hormonal response.
But how do you go about increasing that all-important number once you’ve reached your apparent limit? How do you speed up your gains so that you can catch up and beat your competitive friends? How can you get your bench press to a point where you no-longer need to lie?
Step 1: Dumbbell Presses
One of the first things you can do to increase your bench press power is to take yourself off of the bench press and instead to perform presses with dumbbells. This has several benefits: for starters it will mean that each pec is forced to work on its own. This will prevent you from cheating by leaning the barbell slightly more to one side to take advantage of your stronger pec. The result is better symmetry in your pecs and thus better overall power.
Another advantage of using dumbbell presses to train for the bench press is that it forces you to balance the weights more as you press and thus calls to action more of your tiny supportive muscles. This ultimately results in more stability when you go back to the bench press with a barbell.
Step 2: Isolation
This will help you to train the supportive muscles and to improve your symmetry. Meanwhile though you also want to build more pure pushing power in your chest. Remember that your chest is often let down by other muscle groups when performing the bench press, so what you should do is to isolate and improve each different area responsible for your bench press on its own. You can do this by performing tricep dips for your triceps, shoulder presses for your shoulders, pullovers for your traps and chest presses for your pecs. This way you can focus on each muscle group individually and push them to their absolute limit before bringing them all together for the bench press.
Step 3: Slow Down
While actually on the bench press meanwhile you should try performing the movements slowly. This way you can concentrate on your actual technique, your stability and your endurance. Endurance is a big problem for many people on the bench and will often let them down, so train with a slow cadence and you’ll build up more endurance and better technique for when you use those explosive movements.
Another useful way to break the movement down is with ‘rest pause’ sets in which you will rest the bench press on your chest at the start of each movement. This prevents you from using any momentum in your technique and makes the whole movement much more difficult.
