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Bench Like a Man

Flush with righteous wrath after my rant about squats, I figured I might as well target my next gym peeve, the halfway down bencher.

They’re closely related to the wanna-squatter. We’ve all see them. Bar comes off the rack, they lower it, lower it, lower it low – WTF? You’re pressing it back up? You were still 8 inches off your chest!

Now suffering from the occasional shoulder issue myself, I’ll admit there are those people who probably can’t lower the bar all the way due to inflexibility or injury. But if that’s the case, guess what? You probably shouldn’t be doing bench press. You’ll just make your injury worse. And if a case of inflexibility, there’s this thing called stretching….

Since you are doing bench press I’ll make the radical (and probably incorrect assumption) that you’d actually like to do it right. And doing it right means lowering the bar all the way until it touches your chest. A novel concept, I know, but give it a try. Oh, you’ll have to take some weight off since you aren’t doing those faggy half-presses anymore…. And one more thing: touch is not the same as bounces off of. Your chest is not a springboard, stop using it for one.

Don’t grip the bar too wide – that’s how you hurt your shoulder in the first place. Don’t grab it too narrow – now it’s a triceps exercise. Go for a medium grip, one that finds the balance between involving both the chest and the triceps. That’s how you get the maximum benefit. You’ll be able to move the most weight and activate the most muscles.

Yeah, I wrote a How to Bench Press post in the weight training section of Nutribody. Go read it. Watch the video of the guy who drops the weight on his chest, and let his pain be a lesson to you.

Now go bench like a man!

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