 First question is from Anthony Otto. What are some tips for improving your bench press or other lifts without a spotter? Oh, good old bent. And I used to think I needed a spotter with bench press all the time. That's because I would train to failure so often that you miss which rep is failure and then that's it, you're stuck. Right, you just didn't wanna be left in the situation where you gotta roll the bar down and then just totally smash it. I just wanted to put some 45s on there and I couldn't do it without help. That's what I'm saying. You wanna know what's funny? I know we're gonna answer this question by the way but this is something interesting. The early days of bench press, in fact you can see this in pumping iron. The bars on the bench press that held the barbell were close together. So you would grab the barbell on the outside of the bars which meant you couldn't load one side at a time. So it literally was designed for people to load both ends at the same time. So it's like they literally designed it originally for. So you needed two people. Yeah, Doug remembers, right Doug? I do. You know I got those weights at Sears I think it was back in the day they were like concrete and plastic? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I bought a bench with these two very narrow bars and I put that thing on there and the thing was so unstable it was a disaster waiting to happen. Now were the commercial gyms like that too? Cause I know that's like if you were to, if you just bought a at home bench set up just a couple, two decades ago it was like that. Yeah, no the original ones were. I mean very quickly though they figured out oh if you put them on the outside it's much more stable. You know what I used to do with those Doug is cause I had the same problem is I would move the barbell way over to one side so I could load one side then load the other side and then slide it over it was like this whole pain in the ass. All right, so let's answer this question, right? So bench press. Here's a general piece of advice and then I'll give you something a little bit more advanced to specific. First off, one of the best ways to increase your lifts is to do them very frequently but there's a caveat with this which is you can't do them super hard very frequently. So in other words, let's say you wanna improve your bench press. Maybe once a week you have your traditional hard bench press workout and then you can bench press another three days a week but you're not going as intense. You're either focusing on speed so you're going explosive with the push or you're focusing on form and technique or you're doing tension so where you're holding it at the bottom right above your chest maybe that's a sticking point. So basically frequency, lots of practice but again, modify the intensity and then the second piece would be this is something I discovered much later on. It's a great, great tool. It's variable resistance. So like adding resistance bands to the bar so that the bar gets harder the further away you push it from your body which makes it harder where you're stronger. That's an advanced technique but it's one of the best ones I've used. We kind of covered all the bases but in terms of your sticking point and kind of focusing on the weakest part of the lift and generating more force within that. And this is something that a lot of power lifters are known to focus on to really get them through and progress past some of their limitations but staying there and like doing pause reps where we're squeezing now and we're generating more force in that low position of the bench really makes a massive difference and just like increasing the grip strength and control will add more security stability within that exercise itself too which will then allow you to shuttle more force and increase your strength. So I feel like these are all kind of generic answers and the truth is this is really a depends situation because yeah and it is always right but like I'm listening to you guys give tips I'm thinking I'm going through my head of like my journey of like bench pressing and like there were very pivotal moments in that journey where I saw leaps, right? So like one of the first leaps in my bench press was actually moving to high reps. I never moved to high reps. Like I literally- Just changing the phase. Right I was a kid who trained in the, you know six reps was to build muscle everything that I read was around there I wanted to get stronger I wanted a heavier bench press so it made sense that I was lifting these low reps to do that but simply moving to the 12 to 15 rep range which I thought was only for people that wanted to get lean back then my bench press shot up. Another one was I talked about on the show earlier about not going past 90 degrees I was never doing anything like that getting really good at really deep body weight dips made a difference. I've talked about on the show before getting good at my incline bench for many years I neglected incline bench because I was terrible at it and again I just wanted to get good at a flat bench press because that's what we all compared when someone said what do you bench no one says what they incline bench they say what they flat bench and so I just wanted to get good at that so there was a huge discrepancy in my weight that I moved on incline versus flat bench so I made it one year a goal to get just good at incline and in getting really good at incline ended up increasing my bench significantly so it really does depend on what you potentially are neglecting now you guys gave good tips for like sticking points added resistance with bands and chains if you've never used some of these things but I feel like those are all things if you've already done all the stuff that I've mentioned like if you haven't addressed your programming and if you're neglecting good exercises that really build the strength like if some people think that they want to get a good barbell bench so they don't ever fuck with dumbbells it's like that was another thing I really got good at dumbbell benching and that carried over into my barbell bench independent loads yeah no there's lots of different things that were just kind of you know spraying spaghetti out there and like you pick what might make the most sense in terms of what you can apply that maybe you're neglecting within your programming or you're not addressing things like for me my limitation was I would get shoulder pain I'd get impingement and so my shoulder wasn't tracking properly and so I had to address that mobility wise and add more rotation and add more of those type of drills to add security in my shoulder which then provided more of a stable situation where I could load my body signal that hey everything's accounted for so I can now apply more force which was huge and then the other you know thing that I noticed that drove a lot more strength was focusing on leg drive and so that was another thing that provided a lot more rigid security throughout my body was able to distribute more force and get my body more involved past just my upper body my torso you know including that leg drive and that tension and strength that I could summon from that increased my bench as well you just named another one that was a big leap for me was when I was introduced to like priming and understanding how important that was before going into the lift so I too was that's by the way that's an easy way to add like a rep on almost everybody's bench press right right away like just getting myself into the proper position so I had this tendency of the shoulders always rolling forward when I started to you know do like a band row or prime my upper back right before so I could hold myself in that retracted position when I go into bench that made a huge difference so I feel like there's a lot of things that you should kind of check and then Sal you mentioned another huge leap for me frequency you want to get good at bench press you want to get good at anything and you only do it once a week do it two or three times minimum of a week just practice it and don't go to failure on it practice get good at that movement right so if you want to get good at the bench press strength is as much of a skill as it is your muscles contracting harder that's right and that's what it is you're practicing the skill of the lift and you just get better at doing that lift Justin you mentioned leg drive I want to emphasize that for a second because that one made zero sense to me for so long it does to a lot of people yeah I never understood I'm like you're on a bench you're pressing with your arms you're doing nothing with your legs what the hell does driving your legs into the floor and tensing up your legs have to do with the press and people like oh you're more stable I'm like well I mean I guess but really what's going on I don't know then I realized oh you're just your CNS fires harder when all of it fires versus when there's an irradiation effect yeah so like the example I always give is if you squeeze something as hard as you could with your right hand but had to keep everything relaxed including your face and then you tried that again but allowed yourself to tense up your whole body you'd see like a 10-15% increase in strength so when you're pressing off of a bench driving into the floor and tensing up your legs and your lower body just creates more of a central nervous system firing signal and just allows you to press more here's another one now some exercises have a lot of carryover to other exercises and so sometimes just getting good at something else and you mentioned some of them Adam like dips and incline presses here's one that's not so obvious that has tremendous carryover to bench press it's actually one of the exercises that probably in my experience again this is general so everybody's different but generally speaking has some of the best carryover to bench press overhead press overhead press you if you're stuck at your bench press sometimes and I've had I've done this before where I didn't even focus on my bench I focused on my overhead press and then right away would see a gain and not a bodybuilder military press a full range of motion yeah down to the upper chest overhead press you're right I mean another great one you get good at that I remember that getting good at that carried over into my bench press so I don't know there's a lot of things that we just listed off and I think the thing that you neglect the most out of all the ones that we said I would say probably and and by the way even though you guys gave chains and bands first I actually think you check the boxes and all the other ones if you're programming sucks that doesn't matter right like if you're not doing frequency you're not doing the exercises that we talked about you're not manipulating rep ranges at tempo we didn't address or you're training too hard or overtrain yeah, those aren't tracking properly yeah, stabilizing hit all those and then if you've checked all those box enough consistently then playing with cool tools I think like we mentioned I think are you know what's funny if you're watching this right now try this I bet you at least 50% of the people watching this will increase their bench press by one rep or five pounds by doing this following and it'll happen right away prime your shoulders with either a prone cobra or maybe like a suspension trainer W or something like that right do some of that priming connect then go bench this it's the strangest thing you'll all of a sudden see that small increase in strength right away you didn't build more muscle all you did was turn things on differently and get things and move a little bit better so I dare everybody to try that I bet like I said 50% I would bet about half of the people watching this would see their bench press go up by you know five pounds that was one of my Friday fitness tips like I don't know a month or two ago I agree