How To Gain Bench Press Strength

If you want to know how to gain bench press strength the first step is to learn proper lifting form on the exercise. Learning how to bench press properly will help you get stronger on the exercise without the risk injury.

If you go to a gym you've no doubt seen lifters who use terrible form when they bench. They raise their entire bodies besides their upper backs off the bench and practically drop the weight on their chests to get the weight to bounce a bit. Benching this way will give your joints a beating and can be dangerous - especially if you are pretty much dropping a heavy weight on yourself with no real control of it.

To bench press with proper form, you should lie on the bench and pull your shoulder blades inward to contract the upper back muscles. Doing this will "pop" your pectoral muscles out so they do more of the work while you're bench pressing. As an added benefit you'll decrease the distance that you have to lift the weight by a little bit without breaking form. If you bench press with you back flat against the bench you'll end putting more focus on the front deltoids and the triceps.

When you bench press with proper form you should also keep a natural arch in your lower back with your feet on the floor. You can increase the arch by a little bit, but you always have to make sure to keep your rear end on the bench.

Another thing that you need to do to bench press properly is to lower the weight slowly and under complete control. When the bar gets to your chest, concentrate on exploding it upward. If you need to bounce the weight off of your chest to get the weight up when you bench press, you are using too much weight. Leave your ego at the door and take advantage of the negative part of a bench press rep.

Once you get proper form down you'll be much closer to knowing how to gain bench pressing strength.

If you want to succeed at gaining bench press strength you constantly have to try to increase the amount of weight you bench or the amount of reps you do with the same weight. These small increases will eventually add up to a big bench press. Pyramid up in weight as you warm up. When you start performing your working sets keep doing reps until failure. This high intensity training is what will help you get stronger.

One great idea is to combine training for strength and size by varying your rep ranges on the bench press. If you lift heavy all of the time you'll build more strength on low rep sets. If you lift lighter weights for high reps you'll get more of a pump in the muscles. Training with low reps and heavy weight activates different muscle fibers than training with high reps. If you always do the same amount of reps per set you'll be doing yourself a disservice. You can use both low and high repetition ranges during your bench press workouts to get the best of both worlds.

If you want to do this you should set up your bench press routine so you do a "light" workout with high reps done on every set, a "medium" workout with medium weights and reps, and a "heavy" workout with low reps done on every set. The light and medium workouts won't be any easier, and actually may be harder, than heavy workouts because you'll go to failure on every working set. Your body will never get the chance to get accustomed to the same weights and reps and you'll hit both the fast- and slow-twitch muscle fibers. You could try using various rep ranges during the same bench pressing workout but this could add up to a lot of sets, which may cause overtraining. However, you should end all of your bench workouts with a high rep set or 2 to finish with a pumped feeling in your muscles.

If you train with high intensity, you won't need to spend a lot of time doing your bench press workout. You should be able to finish it within 30 to 40 minutes. Your level of training intensity will start decreasing after a certain point and you won't be getting as much out of every set. Go to the gym, train hard, get out, and rest. This the key to learning how to gain bench press strength.

Going to failure on all of your working sets will certainly help you increase bench press strength. However, you can go beyond this with a couple of high intensity techniques - forced reps and drop sets. Doing either of these will take a lot out of you, so use them sparingly to avoid overtraining.

Forced reps are basically reps that you perform with the assistance of a spotter. Once you reach failure on a set of bench presses you can have a spotter help you get one or two extra reps to really hit the muscles hard. Going beyond 1 or 2 assisted reps on the bench press is asking too much of a spotter since by then they'll be doing as much work as you are to get the weight up.

Drop sets are sets where you rep out to failure, then decrease the weight and continue doing reps. Drop sets on a normal bench press aren't very convenient since you'd be best off having a spotter on each side taking off the weight for you. However, they work great if you're using dumbbells or a bench press machine that allows you to simply pull a pin and put it higher up the stack. Drop sets are best used at the end of a bench press workout to really burn out the pecs.

One great technique if you want to find out how to gain bench press strength is to identify the part of a rep that you are weakest on and performing sets targeting just that section of a rep. Many lifters have difficulty with getting the weight off of their chests or locking out at the top.

If you have trouble getting the weight started upward when you bench press, you can do sets where you lift the weight from your pecs to only a few inches above it. The best way to do this is to set up a bench in a squat rack that will allow you to place stoppers a few inches above you that force you to only do the first few inches of a bench press rep. When you do this, lift the weight from your chest to the stoppers and hold it against them for a few seconds before lowering. You'll won't want to use very much weight if you try this.

If you have difficulty while locking out a bench press rep, you can use the same technique in a different way. You can just do some partial reps on a normal bench or you could get in a squat rack and set up stoppers that force you to only do the last few inches of a rep. In this case you would set up the stoppers so that you lower the weight to them and lift it to a locked out position. You should be able to go quite heavy when you do this.

This is something you should try if you want to increase your one rep max on the bench. Before long, you'll gain bench press strength on your weakest part of the lift - which should help you be able to bench heavier for full reps.