How to improve your benchpress – complete guide

These tips are aimed at the intermediate lifter. If you’re a beginner, you’re still making lots of progress, so you don’t need to read this, and if you’re an advanced lifter, you know what you’re doing already.

We all want to boast of a big benchpress but often in our pursuit, it’s easy to miss one or two important points that set us back. Hopefully this guide will help you find out if you’re missing out on anything that could help you make progress.

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Wider factors

It’s easy to focus too much on the benchpress and the chest when the issue could be with your general training. So let’s start with that and see if you’re doing everything right.

Consistency

One sure way to make progress is to lift consistently. Not one year or two but for years and years. Not for 5 years but on and off because “life gets in the way” but 5 years and every week, month in, month out. There is no “progressive overload” if you’re lifting heavy this month and then the next you’re not lifting at all.

You could also be training perfectly for a year; you will make gains, especially if you’re a newbie, but there’s only so much gain you can make in a year compared to 2, 5 or even 10 years.

The only way to stay consistent for years and years is to enjoy what you’re doing. So find a way to have fun in the gym, even if that means to break the “rules” and cheat curl because you like it, or use machines only.

Rest

Something else that’s so easy to overlook in your goal to max out your gains – overtraining or not getting enough rest. Rest is when growth happens, when you get your results. Training is providing the stimulus for muscle growth. So rest is just as important as training.

Rest doesn’t mean staying in bed all day but it does mean staying away from the gym for some time to give your muscles a break.

You might be concerned that if you rest too much, so you stay away from the gym too much, that your training will suffer. Your training won’t suffer with too much rest, but your progress might be a little slower with less training. But that’s completely fine, because the alternative – overtraining – could lead to injury and your training will definitely suffer this time.

Nutrition

The last factor that makes up the trilogy of building muscles, nutrition is as important as training and rest for obvious reasons. So make sure that you have this checkbox ticked when trying to improve your benchpress. Other muscles groups will thank you too.

Record your progress

Unless you have an amazing memory, you wouldn’t be able to remember every set, rep and weight you lifted in every session over months and years. Yet you need this information to know how much more you need to lift in your next session. This is the progressive overload that gets talked about so much. Just remember that it’s not just the extra weight that can be the overload, but the extra rep, partial rep, set and intensity. If only we could note something as subjective as the intensity.

Balanced muscles

To maximise the weight you can lift at the benchpress, you want to make sure that you have a balanced physique. You cannot have a big, strong chest without a big, strong back. Your body won’t permit it as the disproportion will cause injury. So the chest muscles are only as strong as their weakest link. Work your back, work your legs, work your core.

While the benchpress is a compound exercise and works secondary muscles such as the shoulders and triceps to a large extent, if you’re an intermediate lifter not seeing much progress, don’t just rely on this exercise to make them strong!

I don’t think that there’s any intermediate lifter out there who doesn’t do triceps and shoulders-specific exercises but this is a full guide after all, so worth mentioning that you do need to work on those secondary muscle groups too.

That’s it with the wider factors that you need to consider before doubling down on your bench press training. High quality nutrition, adequate rest, long-term training regularity, a proper and full record of every single workout and working out all major muscles are the very basic things you must already be doing before trying to break through a plateau.

Technique

Now let’s focus on the benchpress techniques to make sure that you’re being mechanically efficient to lift as much as possible. The benchpress technique is discussed here, so there no point in going in detail again. Instead, let’s go through the main points.

Eyes above the bar

Instead of wasting time trying to position yourself below the bar, just remember this cue: your eyes need to be directly below the bar resting on its support. This is especially important with very heavy weights as if the bar is too far back, you will never be able to lift it and bring it forward. Similarly, if the bar is too forward, you’ll hit the supports when pressing up.

Don’t lose your form

An easy mistake people can make is to take time to correctly position themselves, pull their scapula back and only to round their shoulders when lifting up the bar from its supports. Then they lower the bar and start pressing. All this time spent to pull back their scapula and pin their shoulders to the pad has been wasted.

This usually happens because the bar is too high up. Too low and they may struggle to lift it up. The right height is for the bar to be just low enough that your arms are slightly bent when grabbing them the correct width on their support.

The other mistake people make is to relax their muscles to allow the weight to go down. So they’ve previously tightened up all their muscles, lifted the bar up from its supports and then they relax everything to let the bar go down. Here’s a tip – imagine the bar being pulled to the chest. That way the muscles are still being kept contracted in this pulling motion.

Leg drive

Don’t forget leg drive and it’s not just contracting your quads or pressing on the floor but pressing to help push the weight up when you’re in the right position. Some say keep your feet flat for better stability; I feel more comfortable pressing with my heels raised. Find what works for you.

Back muscles

You already have your shoulders rolled back, chest forward, back reasonably arched and you’re pressing hard. Excellent technique. Did you know you could get a tiny boost in strength if you consciously squeeze your upper back muscles extra hard while pressing? This hard back contraction gives extra stability to the chest muscles.

It can be quite hard though to remember all the cues for the bench press, all the correct positioning and then on top of concentrating to push the weight hard off your chest, you also need to remember to contract your back muscles hard too. I find if I first contract my back muscles before lifting off the bar, when pressing, I can then contract everything hard – back and chest – and keep the contraction.

This is a little trick that I prefer to use just when going very heavy and trying to break a PR as it it quite exhausting, physically and mentally.

Bend the bar

Yet another cue to remember if you can and it does more or less the same as the above tip. When you grip the bar, try to bend it. This will engage your upper back muscles, especially your lats. This is a good cue if you have trouble engaging your lats.

It’s not exactly the same tip as above where you’re squeezing your shoulder blades hard together using your middle traps, so you do need to be doing both, bending the bar to engage the lats, and squeezing the middle traps. All this is doing is getting the whole upper back contracted but there is a lot to remember!

Breathing

Again, not something worth teaching to anyone who’s not a newbie but sometimes we may forget about a thing or two. So make sure you have a big lungful of breath that you’re holding in when pressing the weight or slowly breathing out. It’s important to create this pressure in your chest and abdomen to make the link between the feet pressing against the floor and your shoulders bearing the weight of the bar.

Grip width

This is a topic that will never get settled and I won’t even try to tell you what grip width you should adopt as I don’t know your size and it varies for everyone. Usually, the recommended width is such that your forearms are perpendicular to the floor your elbows make a 90 degree angle. Start with this and from there, try narrower and wider grips.

It may be that for a particular individual, they get maximum stimulation of their pectoral muscles with a slightly narrower or wider grip. That’s what you want to find out.

The wider the grip, the more you involve the shoulders and put them at risk of injury. The range of motion also decreases and there is no advantage in that if you’re not a powerlifter. You lose the beneficial stretch of the pecs at the bottom of the movement that stimulates muscle growth.

With a narrow grip, more emphasis is placed on the triceps so if yours are weak, you’ll press even less.

Elbows tucked in

Whatever grip you adopt, don’t forget to tuck in your elbows slightly to your sides rather than point them outwards. This reduces the emphasis on the shoulders and stretches out the pec muscles a little more. It’s easy to find out.

Just try this in the comfort of your chair. Hold an imaginary bar to your chest, about to start pressing with shoulders back and so on but with your elbows flared out. Then pull them in slightly. In the process you slightly rotate your wrists, bend the bar and stretch the pecs.

Straight bar path

The natural bar path in a bench press is up and towards your head, like an upside down J. Yet research has shown that advanced powerlifters push the bar in a straight line. To move heavy weight from A to B, the shortest distance is a straight line. This is what those powerlifters have achieved.

So when you press next time, see if you can train yourself to do it in a straight line. Due to a shoulder injury, I find it more comfortable to press ever so slightly towards my legs, so in the opposite direction of the natural path!

Full reps only

Do a full rep each and every time, unless using some advanced technique. Why? Simply so that you can accurately record your progress. A rep needs to be the same from one day to another, from one year to another. If you’ve done 10 full reps today and 9 reps and 2 three-quarter reps another day, did you progress?

The best way to achieve a full rep is to simply get the bar to touch your chest every time. If you suffer from shoulder injury and cannot go that low, just place the same object every time on your chest and touch that instead.

Have a spotter or safety arms

It’s impossible to push yourself to your limits if you’re sub-consciously holding back in case you get stuck beneath the bar on the last rep. You’re psychologically limiting yourself before you’ve even started bench pressing. Sometimes it’s good to fail on purpose to know where you stand.

So get a spotter or if you’re lifting so heavy that one spotter is not enough, use the safety arms or bench in the squat rack. Free your mind from fear so you can concentrate only on pushing as hard as you can without fearing to fail. Embrace failure!

Pressing beyond failure

It’s well-known that those last few reps are the most productive ones, i.e. stimulating the muscles the most. So why not extend them? Once you’ve reached failure with a full rep, do partial reps, negative reps or drop sets. Drop sets are best done at a machine. Just don’t do all of them at once!

Warm-up and intensity

With the same idea as above in mind – to push yourself hard – you cannot do this if you’ve exhausted yourself through many warm-up sets. These are meant to be easy, to get your blood flowing and remind you of your form, not to drain your energy. You want your working sets to be intense.

You cannot have intense working sets if you’re going to have 5 or more such working sets. If the first 1-2 sets have really been intense, then you don’t have much strength left and you’re already done. If you still have energy left, then you’re toying with the weight and not really pushing yourself.

Try and do just one set, but put everything you have in this, using partials, negatives, etc. Push like your life depends on it.


Advanced tips

This is probably what many of you have come here for!

Hold the weight

If you’re stuck at 150 kg, put something like 180 kg on the bar, unrack it and just hold it there. You get your body used to the weight and feel.

If you want to try and add some progress, try to do baby reps with it, just lowering it as little as you can. Baby reps have got a bad reputation on Youtube and TikTok but there is a time and place for it and this is it.

Lift heavier than usual

A similar idea to the above that I’ve found out for myself is to bench press more than your max. It simply means if you can benchpress 150 kg for 5 reps, benchpress 155 kg for 1 rep. Or even the same 150 kg for 1-2 reps then put the weight back, wait a short time to gather your strength again and go for your PB.

The initial heavy set is just to prime your muscles and mind for the heavy set that will come. So when you lift 150 kg again, your body is already used to it. Because that priming set is short, you haven’t exhausted yourself even though the weight is heavy.

This only works if you’re attempting to do multiple reps, not a 1-rep max.

The weakest part

Most lifters fail the benchpress when the bar is a few cm above the chest. Lower than this and the pec are sufficiently stretched to give enough power. Some people are weaker closer to the top of the movement, possibly due to weaker triceps. Find out where you fail – bottom, middle or top of the movement and do some additional sets with partial reps just to cover this part.

Give up the flat benchpress

If you’ve done all this and more and you’re not making progress and don’t feel your chest muscles get a good stimulation, you might have to accept that the benchpress is not for you and that you will never progress at it.

Don’t cry, you won’t be the only one. Dorian Yates famously said that he bench pressed at a slight decline because the flat bench worked his shoulders too much and his chest not enough.

So while you may have to give up the flat benchpress, you can and should try other variations, just as you should try different grip width. Even if you make good progress at the flat benchpress, you might find that you make even better progress on other variations.

The only way for you to find out is to experiment. And not just for one session or two but for longer to measure your progress. We’re all built slightly differently, so what works for one may not work for someone else.

Here are some more advanced tips to break through a plateau.

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