Five Quick Tips to Increase your Bench Press

Five Quick Tips to Increase your Bench Press
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The bench press is the most common measurement used to compare one’s strength to another’s in weightlifting. In this article, I hope to give you a few tips to increasing your bench press that you might not already be familiar with and that you can begin to use immediately.

The primary muscle involved with the bench press is the pectoralis major, which stretches from the center of the chest to the top of the arm. The bench press also requires the use of the front of the shoulder and triceps, along with a strong back to act as a stable platform for the exercise.

Important Exercises

There are a large number of exercises that hit the pectoralis muscle, but only a few are very effective at creating the muscle growth everyone likes to see. There are two main ways to exercise the chest, through the use of machines or free weights.

Often, when someone begins weightlifting, they like to stick to the machines. Machines may be easier to use, and can prevent you from causing injury to yourself, but they also have their drawbacks.

When using free weights, many other muscles are recruited besides the pectoralis major, which otherwise would be neglected by the machine bench press. The free weights require your body to use different muscles to stabilize the weights, causing your nervous system to grow in efficiency.

The best exercise to cause growth is the dumbbell bench press or its variation, the barbell bench press.

Bench Press

You can also perform two variations of the bench press to hit all portions of the chest - the incline and decline. The incline and decline are the same as a regular bench press, but with the bench either inclined or declined to isolate the bottom or top of your pectoralis muscle respectively.

The tricep is also a muscle that should be actively strengthened since it is often one of the first muscles to restrict your bench press amount. You can best attack the tricep muscle by doing tricep pull-downs. My favorite method is to start at a high weight and do as many repetitions as you can in the set. Then, for your next set, reduce the weight by 5 or so pounds, and proceed to do repetitions until you are tired. Repeat as many times as needed, continuing to decrease the weight each time.

Proper Form

It can be very easy to use improper form while bench pressing, which can just as easily cause an injury and set you back weeks or even months. By using proper form, along with appropriate stretching before and after exercise, the risk of injury can be minimized. It is also recommended to use a spotter when doing the bench press.

The proper form for the bench press is to lie back on the bench, keeping both feet planted firmly on the ground for stability. Make sure to pinch your shoulder blades back so that you create a flat, stable surface. Grip the bar with your hands slightly farther apart than shoulder width. Slowly lower the bar to right above your chest without touching it, inhaling as you do so. After a short pause, proceed to raise the bar until your arms are locked, while exhaling or doing a short hold of your breath. By using proper form here, you may have lower lifts at first, but by forcing the muscles that should be doing work to do work, you will see large benefits later.

Complementary Muscles - Back and Shoulders

Pullup

The back and shoulders create a stable base for your benching, and without developing these muscles you risk injury and limited weightlifting gains. It is easy to neglect the back, but like trying to build a house with no foundation, you aren’t going to get very far.

A good exercise to begin with is the pull-down. This can be performed on either a pull-up bar or pull-down bar machine.

The shoulder plays just as large a part in stability, and is a very easy muscle to injure. You should do some shoulder exercises such as the shoulder press or lateral dumbbell raises. Since the shoulders can often be injured easily, it is best to start on a low weight with them and strengthen the tendons and ligaments before actively working on the muscles.

Testosterone Boosting Muscles

One of the lesser known tips to increase your bench press is to target the large muscles of your body. By doing so, you will be releasing more testosterone than you would if you did other exercises that target smaller muscles. This release of testosterone creates growth in all of your other muscles, even if you didn’t happen to use them!

The chest and back are two of the largest muscles that you will already be exercising, so the remaining large muscles are the legs. You can do many different exercises to hit the hamstrings and quadraceps, which will also balance your upper body strength. With these muscles, you can do machine exercises, such as the leg extension and leg curl. Yet, like the chest, doing exercises with free weights such as squats, lunges and deadlifts are the best you can do.

With free weight exercises, you are using the stability muscles, even to a greater degree with these than the bench press. It is necessary to use your entire core and lower body to do these exercises and they will greatly increase your overall weightlifting ability.

Good Nutrition

In order to allow your body to properly grow from exercise, you need to get the proper amount of protein, EFAs, vitamins, and minerals. Protein is the essential building block to muscle growth, and without it, you won’t see any progress. EFAs, or essential fatty acids, have benefits in basically every form, from cognitive ability to heart strength, weight loss to muscle growth.

It is recommended for weightlifters to get about 1.5g of protein for every kg of lean mass. There are many different foods that you can eat in order to achieve your protein goal. Good sources of protein include milk, chicken, red meat, fish, yogurt, eggs, and cheeses. You can also use supplements such as whey protein, which can be absorbed nearly immediately upon digestion, making for a perfect immediate post-workout meal.

You can get EFAs from sources such as fish, but it can be hard to get daily EFAs through regular food and properly balanced supplements are available at a low cost. This may also be true for vitamins and minerals, which are easy to become deficient in if you do not achieve a balanced diet with fruits and vegetables.

References

https://www.exrx.net/WeightExercises/PectoralSternal/BBBenchPress.html - Retrieved June 14, 2010

https://weighttraining.about.com/od/nutritionforweights/qt/protein_howmuch.htm - Retrieved June 14, 2010

https://weight-lifting.suite101.com/article.cfm/machine_weights_vs_free_weights - Retrieved June 14, 2010

https://ezinearticles.com/?How-Training-Your-Legs-Affects-Training-Your-Upper-Body&id=1447433 - Retrieved June 14, 2010

Image References

All images are public domain.

Pectoralis Major - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gray410_pectoralis_major.png#filelinks

Bench Press - https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/aa/Bench_press_1.jpg

Pullup - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pullup.gif