Bench Press Explosion! 3 Keys to Add Over 100 Pounds to Your Bench Press in As miniature As 4 Months

In 1999, I increased my bench press from 185 pounds to 300... In less than four months! I neither followed any special diet to achieve this, nor did I take any supplements or use any drugs. Don't get me wrong; if I could do it over again I by all means; of course would have eaten healthier and added a few high-quality supplements. (A multi-vitamin and a post-workout protein powder at the very least!) Alas, I did not. So how did I do it?

Well, there were a handful of contributing factors, but believe it or not, there were only three keys that were genuinely essential: 1) I used very literal, practice form, 2) I made a quarterly custom of attempting to lift more weight than I thought I could (with allowable form, or course), and 3) I gave each muscle group sufficient rest days to fully recover in between workouts.

Saw Bench

What do I mean by "strict practice form"? In the case of the bench press, literal, form means keeping your feet on the floor and your butt on the bench. If you feel the need to lift up your butt or arch your back like you're trying to do a back bend, that means the weight you are trying to press is more than you can handle. Period. You're good off training with less weight for a few weeks, and then arrival back to the current weight when you can pronounce literal, form. This may mean putting your ego on the shelf for a week or two, but suck it up! It's a small price to pay for a commitment to doing things right!

Strict practice form also means staying within the literal, range of motion. You need to keep your range of request for retrial consistent with how the human body is designed. In other words, only lower the bar until your elbows are to the sides of your ribcage. If your elbows drop any lower, some of the weight your pecs are bearing with will shift to your shoulder joints. This creates a weak link in your lift, which not only gives you a less-effective workout, but over time will originate rotator cuff issues.

By the way, the old thought that a bench press rep is "not faultless unless you touch the bar to your chest" is naturally not true, for 99.9% of the population. The remaining .1% have deep, barrel chests and short arms, which makes for good power lifter. At the point where the bar touches a power lifter's chest, his elbows are about even with the sides of his ribcage. If this doesn't describe you, however, that bar shouldn't come anywhere near touching your chest.

The second key I mentioned is to bite off more weight and reps than you think you can chew. As I made my way to benching 300 pounds, my workout partner and I would make sure the heaviest sets of each of our workouts were with more weight than we thought we could lift.

For example: Let's say we saw in our workout log that in our old chest workout our heaviest set of bench presses was with 205 pounds, for 6 reps. This workout, we felt distinct that we could bench 215, but 225 would be too heavy. So how heavy would we determine to go this time? 225, baby! And to our amazement, we practically always lifted the weight! As you can imagine, these unexpected successes resulted in very fast compel gains! I must stress again that even on our heaviest sets, we always lifted with allowable form. If we couldn't lift the weight without cheating, that set was over.

As for sets and reps, we would start with a weight that we could achieve around 15 to 20 reps with, and then add weight each set until we had to give it our all just to squeeze out even a few reps. Our sets commonly totaled 4 or 5.

Finally, we made sure to give our bodies fullness of rest in between workouts. This meant training each body part no more than one time per week. Remember, your body builds muscle in between workouts - not during - so you're good off erring on the side of too much rest than not enough.

And there you have it! Make sure your practice form is crisp before you jump into doing super-heavy sets. It won't do you any good if you injure yourself because you can't control the weight you are lifting. The old adage, "If you are going to do something, it's worth doing right!" never applied more.

Lift hard and lift safely!

Bench Press Explosion! 3 Keys to Add Over 100 Pounds to Your Bench Press in As miniature As 4 Months