 Alright, this episode is the Bench Press Master Class. Everything you need to know about the Bench Press, how to get a bigger bench, the muscles they develop, why you can't bench very well, why you hurt, what's going on. Let's talk about one of the most popular exercises in gyms across the world. The gold standard is whether or not you're strong enough. That's what it used to be. Let's go. When we were kids. How much you bet? I was terrible, man. Yeah, I was tough. This has to be my worst lift of the big ones originally. Yeah, well, you're tall, long arms, the leverage. You know, it's up there, always among the top, like four or five exercises, I would say. And I would argue it belongs there. I don't think it's one or two, but I think it's definitely a good upper body exercise. Yeah, because it is, it's functional in the strength that it provides and it builds. And it's a phenomenal exercise for developing like the pushing muscles of the upper body, the chest, the shoulders and the triceps. You get really good at a bench press and all of those muscles are going to get pretty well developed. It's pretty incredible at its ability to do so. So it's a good exercise. It's part of the big five, but it's the last one of the big five, in my opinion. Yeah, I would say so. Yeah. But I mean, I think it's tremendous. All right, today's program giveaway is maps power lift. Here's how you can win that program. Leave a comment below this video, the first 24 hours that we drop it. Subscribe to this channel and turn on notifications. If you win, we'll let you know in the comment section. We're also running a 50% off sale right now. Maps starter or beginner strength training program is half off. And then we have a bundle that includes maps and a ball and maps prime. That's also 50% off. You can find both if you click on the link at the top of the description below. All right. Here comes the show. Um, do you want to start this by talking about a lot of the issues or things that hold people back from having a successful bench press first before we get into all the techniques and tips? Yeah, I think maybe we should talk about like the requirements, right? Like, like the things that you need, uh, your body needs to be able to perform, uh, bench press well. And then that could lead us directly to kind of what you're talking about. Yeah. You need to have, uh, I guess that the first thing would be like a stable shoulder girdle. Right. So the shoulder girdle is the shoulder joint plus the scapula kind of that whole area needs to be pretty stable. If it's not stable and you do a lot of bench press or you start adding weight to the bench press, then you run into a lot of problems. In fact, I would say the bench press is of all the strength training exercises has to be one of the most likely to cause shoulder injuries in people because they don't necessarily enter into it with good, like shoulder, you know, girdle stability. Yeah. It exposes any kind of weak point in terms of like you being able to track and maintain your shoulder in that position and have it stable while you're loading it so substantially. Okay. So that's going to go over the head of a lot of people. So what do we mean by, well, how does somebody know that they have a stable shoulder girdle or not? Like what are the key indicators that I need to improve that and what does that even mean? I think the easiest way to communicate that would be to communicate really good bench press form first. So when you, when you're bench pressing in a safe and effective way, which also is the way you'll also be able to lift the most amount of weight because it allows for the best recruitment pattern and the best leverage. It's a, it's a high chest. So you stick out your chest and your shoulder blades are pulled back and down and locked in that position. So your shoulder blades aren't rolling forward while you're benching and trying to get the weight up. You're in this kind of high tight position, shoulders back, but down also not hiked up. And this puts you in a very safe type position. But in order to maintain that position while lifting a bar off your chest, the muscles that hold that position have to be strong. That's what I mean by shoulder girdle, I guess stability. Yeah. And really with the bench, we're trying to get as expansive as we can to allow the chest to really work and the pectoralis to be, to be able to contribute as much as possible and not bear the load so much on the shoulders. And that's, a lot of times that's where we get a lot of potential injury. So it helps to understand why this is such a challenge for most people, right? So like if I were to stand up right now and shove Justin as hard as I could. Bad idea, first of all. He's tried one time. Big mistake. What would happen is naturally you would see yourself do this. You're rolling everything forward. You would just roll everything forward. So it's natural for us to kind of roll the shoulders forward in this pushing motion. But for a more optimal bench press for building your pecs, for building your chest, you've got to be able to keep your shoulders in that retracted position. Anchored. Yeah, anchored down. And it's just, it's unnatural because like I said, if you were to get up and just push somebody, you wouldn't do that. It would flop forward. When you teach somebody a proper bench press, they're in that role present. Then you add the problem that we have is that, not a problem, but just what we do all day long is everything is in front of us, right? So when we, you drive, you brush your teeth, you eat, everything. Yeah, nobody does anything back here, right? So you're constantly tightening and shortening all of these muscles up here that, that force you to already be in this rounded position. So not only is it natural for you to roll forward when you were to shove or push something, but then you're already in that advantageous position for rounding. Okay? So we have to find a way to teach somebody to get in that position and then be able to hold that position and then be stable and strong in it. And it's just, it's probably in my opinion, I know a lot of people think that like the deadlift is like one of the hardest things to teach a client, teaching a lot of clients to bench press really well. A very technical exercise. I'm so glad you said that. Very, very. Everybody thinks it's basic. Yeah. It's very technical movement. Your low back is off, not your butt. Your low back is arched. Your shoulders are pinned down and back and stable. And there's a technique to the, you have to have, first of all, you have to have a strong mid-back in order to have a safe, strong bench press. You think what does the back have to do with anything? The back is what's stabilizing your shoulder girdle, your scapula. It's what keeps you in that safe position because the shoulder joint is very complex. It's a very complex joint. It's not just the arm that's moving up and down. The shoulder blade also moves along with it. And the humerus is like floating. Right. Right. It could twist and do. And now, evolutionarily speaking, they think that the reason why we have such, you know, I guess technical or advanced or complex shoulder joints is because we throw with accuracy, right? It's this really amazing joint that allows us to throw with accuracy. But in a bench press, you don't want 50 million moving parts floating around. You want everything stable as possible. And you want to generate power and kind of this, you know, almost straight man, not quite straight line, but in this, you know, linear fashion to keep everything really stable. You need to have a strong stable mid-back for this. In fact, oftentimes people's bench press suffer because their back is weak, their mid-back is weak. They have a good, you know, rhomboid strength and lower trapezius strength. Then you have the muscles that rotate the upper arm, the ones that cause you to be able to rotate the arm and stabilize the humerus. Those are smaller muscles, you know, like your supraspinatus, infraspinatus, the teres minor, subscapularis, like all these muscles that are on the, you know, when you hear someone say they injured the rotator cuff, the rotator cuff literally is like the part of the shoulder blade that all these muscles attach to. So when someone says, oh, I tore my rotator cuff, you can actually ask the question, which muscle, which one got injured because there's so many that attach there. So you need those strong stabilizers to keep your upper arm from twisting and doing weird things when you're trying to bench press. Here's a hot take for you. There's more shitty bench pressing happening right now than deadlifting. Probably. And I'll tell you the reason why. One, most people that are afraid of doing a deadlift are afraid of doing it. So they're way more cautious. They're way more cautious. They avoid it in the first place. If you have shitty deadlift form, it is very obvious, right? Which is why a lot of people won't do it unless they feel confident. I remember being a trainer and not deadlifting because I was self-conscious of not doing it well. So I avoid it. But bench press is actually really difficult to see somebody who's bench pressing bad if you're not, if you don't know what you're looking for. Yeah, I can totally get on board with that because it's not as respected. And that's one of those things you'll get from your doctor, your physician, like avoid deadlifts. It'll hurt your back. There's all this misinformation deadlift-wise where I think too, people are a bit apprehensive towards that. But nobody considers technique as crucial for bench pressing, especially when you start getting into maximal load. Yeah. Again, it's a technical exercise. It's a very effective exercise, though, when you do it right. If you treat it with respect, it can be incredible. And a lot of that has to do with making sure your mid-back is strong, your positioning is good, and you've got healthy stabilizers in your, like I said, the ones that attach to the rotator cuff. How do we do that? Well, you can prime properly. We can get into that. And then there's exercises you could do that help with that. But priming is a way to wake these muscles up and also allow yourself to connect to the muscles that you need to to provide you with a kind of stable position. This is funny because it sounds like, when I'm about to say, everybody's like, well, I know that exercise. One of the best ways to prime your bench press is to do some rows before you bench press. Band rows are my favorite for this. Band rows, they emphasize the squeeze because the band gets harder as you stretch it out. It's not so heavy to where you might have bad technique. But doing some band rows where we squeeze the shoulder blades back and down, doing a couple sets of that before we bench press, I use that with almost all my clients because it would almost always improve their technique and form when they bench press. I like isometric stuff too for that, right? So like zone one, the isometric hold against the wall, or what I'll do like if I don't have a band, because I think bands are phenomenal too. I would carry bands with me normally and have them in my bag. If I don't have that, I'll actually get over in a bent over row position and hold an isometric hold in the row position from my back. So I'll just bring the bar. That's really light for me to do that, right? Yeah, it's not a workout, by the way. You're just trying to activate. That's right. You don't want to get fatigued or else that will hinder how much you can lift on the bench. The idea is just to prime, wake all those muscles up because you're trying to help them stay active when you are getting into the bench press. Yeah, you know what's funny is, you know, I talk about like old wisdom or bro science. I remember learning like bench press technique for some older lifters. And now they didn't communicate it like we are, right? Because they don't think they understood why it worked. They just showed me one of the ways that they set their bench press up. And what they would do is they would get under the bar of the bench press and they would use, they would do like an inverted row with the bar from the bench press. So they'd get underneath it and then they'd pull their chest up to the bar and do some reps squeezing back. And then they'd get into position and bench. And I remember not understanding like why he did it but he's like, oh, when I do this I could bench more. He was literally priming his back. It was intuitive. It was intuitive. It's one of those. I do the same thing, not knowing what I know now in terms of, you know, the significance of that but it's really to activate those muscles that are going to keep you anchored there to the bench to keep everything in contrast to what you're doing in terms of like pressing outward. We want to stay as stable. The thing about like physics and leverage and all this kind of stuff, it's like, if you think about a less stable body in this position, if I have any kind of movement left to right, if I'm loose at all. If you're in a waterbed. Yeah, exactly. How efficient are you going to be lifting something on a waterbed, right? That's a great example. It's all about efficiency and effectiveness. So the more tense and rigid I could make my body and create that sort of like anchoring all the way from, you know, my shoulders all the way down even through my feet, which is something I learned later on in terms of leg drive incorporating that into the bench. You get so much more output. I love when we talk about things that take me back and remind me of like a moment. Yeah, exactly. Like there was this moment in my training career where like this light bulb really went off for me. So for, we've talked about this for many years. Most of us, definitely me, maybe not Justin as much, but for sure. So I did a lot of the bro, you know, single body part stuff, right? Arm day, chest day, back day, leg day. And the theory then is that like, if I'm just focused on one muscle, I can give it all to that. I'll get the most out of that muscle because I'm focused just on that muscle. And so I always thought that there was a superior way of training. And I remember this is years into already being a trainer and I was still training this way. And my buddy who is doing a, you know, push pull type of routine and he's doing a back routine first fall by chest. And I remember thinking like, that's a stupid idea. You're going to be so exhausted from your back exercises by the time you get to chest, you're going to be so weak. And I followed it with him. I hit a PR. And that was the moment for me. I went, holy shit. I know I'm tired from all those back exercises we did, but I just hit a PR on chest from doing that. And I realized how important it was for me to get in that stable, rigid, get those muscles all activated so that when I went into the bench press, I could get everything out of that movement. And that was like such an aha moment for me that I could exhaust myself in these other back exercises and be stronger going to chest than me be going fresh into my chest. Like that was so mind blowing. So people might argue like, what are you talking about? You made your back tired. How are you able to use your mid-back muscles to stabilize you better? It's not that they were dead before and you had to wake them up. What happens is, he's able to feel those muscles because he just worked them out. So now when he gets in the bench press, he can put himself in respond better. Yes. So as trainers, we used to do this with clients where if I was trying to get them to activate a muscle, sometimes what all I would have to do is touch it. I'd put my finger on it and be like right here, squeeze right here and then oh, there it is. Now I can feel it. And that's hard to do with the back for a lot of people, especially when you're pushing. How do I activate my back while I push? Doesn't my back want to pull? So that's exactly what you notice. So even though you were more tired, you were able to activate those muscles and give yourself a more solid stable base. Another priming movement I love that primes the rotator muscles really well without you having to focus on exactly what you're doing necessarily is our shoulder dislocates. Shoulder dislocates are excellent. All you need is a stick. A broomstick would work or a PVC pipe or a lot of gyms now have them, just a stick. And that allows your rotator muscles to kind of warm up and activate and you can feel how you need to move your shoulder. And it's a great way to quote unquote warm up before a bench press, especially if you tend to have shoulder pain in the back of the shoulder or the top of the shoulder when you're bench pressing. It's one of my favorites. We have videos for that. Obviously, there's techniques to consider while doing that, grabbing it as wide as you can to start pulling outward to create tension. So this is all important things and also not allowing your back to arch substantially just to make sure that you're performing that at a high level. But yes, it's going to go ahead and wake up and prime and activate a lot of those rotational muscles that are there around the shoulder that will help to contribute keeping it in place, keeping it in that track. The more we can keep it in place, the more effective lifts can be. Yeah, you mentioned earlier too leg drive and Adam, you're talking about aha moments. Boy, that was out of huge room for me. I always heard power lifters talk about leg drive when they would bench press and it never made any sense to me. What the hell do the legs have to do with the bench press? They don't do anything. I could push all I want off the floor. I lift the bar. I have to use my arms. It made no sense to me whatsoever. Then I had this guy working out who explained it to me and he said, look, and this is an example I've used on the show. He said, squeeze your right hand as hard as you can but relax every muscle in your body, including your face. You're not allowed to tense any other muscle but just squeeze your right hand as hard as you could. And then he said, now squeeze your right hand and squeeze the rest of your body. Which one are you able to generate more force with? And I was like, oh, that's what's happening. Why does that happen? The central nervous system can fire more effectively when it's firing throughout the body versus just in an isolated place. So if I bench press and my legs are just hanging off the bench and my feet are on the floor, I can't press as hard as when I'm driving my legs into the floor, tightening my glutes and literally activating the lower half of my body. Power lifters have known this for decades. So leg drive is what they call it is very important in creating an effective bench press. So not only that, but then you also get the other factor because you're so locked in tight and everything's firing, you're rigid and there's no leak in power. And back to your, Justin loves to talk about this with the shoulders. That was another big aha moment for me was learning how to prime my shoulders and get them, all the muscles around the shoulder to be primed, warmed up and stable so that when I go to press there's not any of this floppiness or movement in the shoulder. If you're going to lift really heavy weight, you're braced with your legs, you're braced with your core, you're in that position and then there's this movement in the shoulders. Any movement. Because it's not stable and locked in and rigid, you're leaking power and when you're making it, when you're doing a movement that big with that much potential weight on it, it can be the difference of like 25, 50 plus pounds that your body can load more just by being able to be primed, warmed up and stable in order to do that lift. That was a huge one for me was piecing that together and really noticing that like, wow, when I do all these rotator cuffs or wall circles or zone one, really give, I love W's on the suspension trainer. That movement just kind of primes and wakes all those up. I'm so rigid and stable to bench press. Alright, one more thing with technique is a good, now there's different bench press forms and techniques and yes, they all have some value but generally speaking for most people, you want to have a form where your elbows are not completely flared out and also not completely by your sides. You want them slightly tucked. So you've got this kind of slightly tucked shoulder position as you're pressing that maximizes leverage and it minimizes risk of injury. Elbows flared way out. Sometimes you'll see body builders do this. That can maximize maybe chest involvement but the risk of injury goes through the roof with that position and I would say until you are a master at bench press you've got good stable shoulders. You know how to perform it really well. I would not mess with those different varieties and versions. Like if I take somebody who's really learning technique on bench press and then I haven't flared their elbows out, I've just increased the risk of potential injury by double, right? So you want that kind of slightly elbow tuck position. People always ask to hand grip positioning. You want your hands outside your shoulders. You don't want them super wide and you also don't want them too close together. That's a different exercise. I think an easy way to teach it is that when you bring your elbows down you've made a 90-degree angle. Yeah, this is the position where your hands should be. You should have this nice in your elbow. You should have this nice 90-degree. And by the way, that doesn't mean that you can't ever do a bench press like this. You can't ever do a bench press like this but for a standard like teaching. Consistency. Yeah, basic bench press. What does it look like to get ready for it? If I take the bar, take no weight on it or a stick just so you can see it and I bring it down. If my hands are out here, I've got that huge angle. If my hands are way in here, I want to be right at 90-degrees when I'm looking at it. Yeah, I mean the barbells have definitely designed this edging in there for you to kind of line up your hands and to make sure that your thumb is sort of outside and it's somewhat of a generalized starting point at least for you to experiment with you know, widen it out a little bit but again, it's not going to be too far away from what that's already designed for. Yeah, I like the standardized lines because most barbells will have a line right around the same place once you kind of figure out your grip. Yeah, what finger goes on that. Yeah, so like if a taller guy it's going to be a little different than a shorter guy but you kind of know where your hand goes and you know your hands are even on the bar. This is important because by the way, the reason why those lines because if you're too far to the right or the left obviously the leverage changes and you made it you're in trouble. Yeah, you made it a dangerous exercise. You also want your reps to be controlled with the bench press. There is a tendency with the bench press to do to want to do two things. Either one, rebound off the chest a little bit so come down to the chest bounce and come up or two, not completely finish the rep at the top and you kind of see these half like not full extension type reps. If you want a really good bench press that's really effective across the board you want to come all the way down to the chest touch the chest but don't rest on the chest then press all the way up to your arms are fully extended in a controlled fashion meaning it's there's no bouncing or jerking it's a very controlled type of rest. This is the must way if you're coaching trainers the must way to teach first it doesn't mean that those two other ways that you just suggested or talked about doesn't have value or you can't do an explosive but it's like ignore any coaches or trainers that are suggesting that as a way for you to get good at the bench press taking it through it's full controlled range of motion get very good at that get very strong at that and then when you get into advanced techniques you can start to play with shortening reps up to increase the tension on the chest explosive stuff where you're using momentum to help you out but when you're learning that movement doing advanced techniques that somebody might have taught you or showed you to me has little to no value and or carries a lot of risk with it here's an area people never talk about is the grip on the bar when you're bench pressing because you're a false group because you're pushing the bar people tend to not focus on the grip you want the bar to sit in the palm of your hand here not too far up on your hand because that'll cause risk issues but you want to also be able to do so with your thumb wrapped around the bar this is the best way to learn how to bench press when you get good at it with this you're gonna be totally fine some people will do what's called a false grip I don't ever teach that now if you're super advanced then you know how to do it right and whatever fine but I've seen way too many people start to lose it on a bench press and lose the bar and you're under the bar that you lose not a good idea and it doesn't make you bench more by having a false grip it doesn't really contribute to anything other than maybe someone learned that way and that's how they felt most comfortable thumb around the bar and squeeze the bar yeah again you know to your point of like going full range of motion and making sure like you know you teach that that technique first like we can get to all these other nuances of like how to you know address some of those things but like yeah you'll see see guys where their their wrists are broken and they're doing the false grip I've just always whenever you're grabbing a barbell you want to make a nice tight fist so it's supporting your wrists and so to be able to be able to wrap that thumb all the way around to grip it really tight and create even create a little bit more force and tension through the muscles by squeezing a little bit harder maven contribute towards your overall performance but it's protective for the wrist the wrists are very exposed in the bench press yeah absolutely alright now there are exercises that oh by the way I want to go over this as well frequency bench press is an awesome exercise because it's one of those that you could do you could bench press I mean three days a week you could bench press and get phenomenal results now I wouldn't say you bench press heavy and hard three days a week but you could bench press three days a week you can't really say that about every exercise but with the bench press this seems to be true most people in my experience do better with the bench press if they do it more frequently then they do it less frequently now what does that look like there's typically one heavy day in there there's typically one where you may be higher reps maybe another day where you're just perfecting technique but the practice of the bench press the frequency seems to work very well yeah I like having a day that is really heavy a day that is really light and speed and then another day that's kind of like mild hypertrophy pump type of like day like those three I think work really well and then again spread them out based off of using three times a week modifying the intensity one of the ways to modify the intensity is by lightening the load doing one day that's like speed technique day and then another day that's more of like feeling the muscle and pumping and then one day of the getting after it trying to really load it yeah I agree now there's lots of different exercises will help contribute to the strength of the bench press but there's a few that seem to have the most carry over with most for most people one of them is bench press so this is more true for someone let's say bench pressing for a couple years they kind of get stuck sometimes getting better at other exercises will get the bench press better and overhead press is one of those movements where if my overhead press goes up my bench press almost always also goes up it's almost never the case where my overhead press goes up and my bench press doesn't see an improvement in that same kind of vein I would say because people think flat barbell bench press that's what they think and I think that one of the most neglected exercises is the incline bench press I just think that I did for years and so did all my friends like because we were weaker at the incline press and nobody asked you how much you can incline right nobody asked how much you can incline press it was all about how much you could barbell bench press and so and we know the law of specificity the more I'm practicing barbell bench press I'm going to get better and better at that so I'm just going to focus on getting better at that meanwhile I was scoring the incline and there was a time when I had a massive discrepancy I mean I could barely do 135 on the incline but I'm pushing over 250 on the bench press I had that much of a discrepancy between my incline and my flat bench and then I went on a kick of just focusing on getting that incline up and it shot up my bench press so there's huge value in focusing on the incline bench and don't avoid it or make it like the oh every once in a while but because you're not good at it like get good at it same thing with the dumbbell variety right dumbbell chest presses got obvious carryover yes to the bench press and then another one is dips heavy dips I know Justin you talk about this yeah this was very enlightening for me and two and I was taking a year of just focused training body weight I I tried everything I could with gravitational forces with instability like so I was working with suspension trainer and with like Olympic rings and I started to try to work on dips which is very difficult to do dips with the rings there's just so many factors of like having to stabilize myself in space and then also working on getting depth with that and then once I start working on getting depth and really being able to generate force at the very bottom position and drive my way back out it was amazing the how that transferred over to my bench press in terms of like where that sticking point is for the most part where you don't have a lot of ability to generate forces at the very bottom right and this is why you want to kind of bounce off her chest and this is why you know a lot of people kind of get stuck down there at the very bottom but if you can you can grind and generate more force the really low dips it's great great exercise to work on that it's also good for shoulder health that's the when you go back to the things that we pointed out right being able to a stable shoulder girdle having a primed warmed stable shoulder being able to take something through full range of motion the dip really a loaded dip really addresses all those things it really does a really good job of getting you strong at all those positions and definitely this was a later one for me right so again thinking back of like those aha moments or like when this really came together for me I never really did heavy loaded dips I just if I ever did dips it was like a body weight thing that we would throw in there as a super sad or like just an exercise I would do every once in a while I would get a pomper if I was limited to equipment never did I ever like try and get like how strong could I get at dips and actually doing two to three reps like that just seems silly to me like why would I ever do two to three reps for dips but boy if you've never trained yourself like that before like let's see how much I can load and how much I can dip dip with even to the point where I'm starting to train three four reps at a time just continually pushing the load man that carry over into digging out of a bench press huge huge difference totally and dips are interesting because they help you at the bottom of your bench they also help you at the lock out yeah they do really good with dips at the top you have to really lock your arms out and stay strong you'll see that lock out because that's the other area I'd say most common sticking point on a bench press is the bottom second would be more advanced lifters tend to get messed up with the lock out so I see a lot of power lifters training that lock out portion right dips tend to help that pretty well advanced techniques let's talk about maybe some advanced ways of getting your bench press to go up higher bands on the bar made a huge difference now they you know Mark Bell has a sling shot which is very similar to what a band will do so people will use a sling shot but man I saw I was so stuck so long and just adding bands to the bar and bands what they do is you know when you if you had a band properly on a bench press the bottom part of the bench press you don't feel much resistance because as you stretch the band out the resistance gets harder well I'm also getting stronger as the bar moves up so I'm getting resistance that's kind of matching my strength curve oh my god I added like 20 pounds of my bench press in such a short period of time from using bands it gives you help at just the right portions of the rep because it's an amazing tool especially like if you start hitting those sticking points and plateau a little bit to be able to increase weight but give yourself just enough help where your body just isn't producing that amount of force because you know there are those portions of the rep you do increase your strength and so then it challenges that you know portion of the rep very effectively with the bands so I like using chains you guys are explaining chains are my favorite to increase load as I get through the top of the bench press I love bands for the speed training that you can get with bench press like so I think there's that's better it'll flop around you can go fast with bands yeah so typically if I'm chains I'm going to load right so I'm going to I'm lifting heavy that day and I want to progressively get heavier and heavier through that lift and so it's more like that and then if it's a day where I'm like I want to do speed like wait but then I'm going to add bands to it and I like doing speeds and the bar doesn't fly at your hands yes yeah speed speed work with benches really good what does it look like by the way speed work with a bench you're not going down and up real fast I've seen people do this before they're like oh I got to practice speed and then no no really what you want to do is you want to go down control and then come up and now with the speed press it's important to maintain that stable shoulder girdle because what you're moving forward and if you're doing that with the speed bench you're going to hurt yourself so it's be able to stay stable with the shoulder girdle and then stable anchored and controlled so you start to maintain control as you're moving fast you only want certain parts of your body to move like that and then one that requires no additional equipment is just pausing the rep at different parts of the bench press like pausing it at the bottom where it's like barely touching your chest or pressing up halfway pausing for three seconds and then pressing all the way up and the pause reps are awesome because you don't need any additional equipment to make a rep more challenging in the points that you need it to be more challenging with so it's in that same in that same space like floor presses or like that or like kind of like pause reps only you're using the feedback from the floor that's actually supporting it kind of like where you take like bottoms up type of squats I think there's a lot of value in that especially if you have that sticking point right digging out the hole you can control and from that coming out like if you come from a dead stop it's really tough to do that you have to learn to really put yourself in a really good position to be able to get out also switch over to kilograms so you don't really know what weight it is just gonna throw that one in there sidebar that's a good one so there you have it there's your bench press masterclass look if you want more free information from mind pump go to mind pump free.com you can also find all of us on Instagram and I'm at Mind Pump to Stefano