 Next question is from Houdak on Health. What's the deal regarding arching the back during the bench press? I personally can't arch my back that much, but I see some people with serious arches when benching. Is it a big benefit? There's two things here. One, there's the natural arch that's good for good form. And then the powerlifting arch. And then there's the powerlifting arch that is utilized to maximize leverage for the bench press. Okay, so let's start with the natural arch. A natural arch on the bench means if you lay down flat on a bench with your feet flat on the floor, your low back should not touch the bench. You should have this little bit of arch in your back, and you can exaggerate it a little bit. And what this does is it allows you to pull the shoulder blades back and down, protect the shoulders, utilize better leverage, better mechanics, reduce your risk of injury. So that's a better way to bench press. You don't want your back totally flat. You want your butt on the bench, but you don't want your lower back flat on the bench that throws the shoulders forward, tends to bring the shoulder blades out and round them forward and can cause problems. Now with powerlifters, the rules in powerlifting say that the upper back and the hips or the glutes need to touch the bench. So what powerlifters do is they exaggerate the arch so much to reduce the range of motion. So with a super big arch, you don't need to bring the bar back down as much on a bench, and you can lift more weight. You don't need to do that kind of an arch. In fact, the average lifter doesn't know how to do that properly. If they overarch, they could cause problems. You're really just emulating a decline bench press. I mean, that's all they're doing. If you looked at the angle that a powerlifter is doing on a flat bench, you look at the angle that they create with that arch that they create. It's just like they shorten the range of motion up. They've got their hips up and their butt, even though their butt has to be on the bench. But they're really just creating that same angle as you would on a decline, which anyone who's done a decline bench knows that a decline bench is a lot easier than a flat bench. So it makes a lot of sense for a powerlifter who's trying to increase their weight that they're lifting to create as much leverage as possible. It's just less length. You've got to press it up off your chest. If you want to simplify it to that point. But yeah, they do that literally as a technique for them to be able to lift heavy weight, but also not have to press it so far up. Now that being said, there is something to learn from powerlifters. I feel like I got much better at bench pressing when I started to lift like a powerlifter, though instead of a bodybuilder, right? So, you know, I came from the kind of bodybuilding mentality first, which was the flare the elbows out only come down to 90 degrees. And I got so much more out of my bench press when I stopped lifting like a bodybuilder and I started trying to lift like a powerlifter. I was able to increase my bench press. I never felt the pain in my shoulders. I used to get pain in my shoulders a lot when I had bench pressed when I was lifting like a bodybuilder because technique is so important for a powerlifter. Their mechanics on the bench press are really good. And when you're trying, it's less about the arch and it's more about exaggerating the retracting and depressing of the shoulders, right? So think about the upper back, even though you can't see what's really going on with someone's shirt on and they're on the bench. All we see is this massive arch. So everybody looks at the arch in the back and goes like, Oh my God, that looks like it's so dangerous. That's so bad. What you don't realize, the main thing that's causing that arch is that person is really retracting the shoulders back and depressing them and that's causing this excessive arch and the retraction, the depression of the shoulders is what's so important in a bench press to protect the shoulders, to get the most out of your bench, to be able to take it to full range of motion. So there's a lot to learn about bench press technique from a powerlifter from that standpoint. Anchoring your shoulders in place, it's very stable to do that and also that just slight arch even really helps to then provide leg drive too. So now I can focus on getting that kind of tension to go all the way distributed from the top of my body down through my feet which adds even more availability to increase my force production. Not to mention that so many people think that it's so dangerous because they see almost any other exercise that we talk about like if you had an excessive arch and a deadlift or a squat Oh yeah, bad. Oh my god, or an overhead press. Oh my god, bad, bad, bad, bad, so bad. But you got to understand where you're resisting the weight and where the gravitational forces are really at. It's nowhere near the lower back. No, it's on the shoulders. Yeah, the weight is pushing down on your shoulders. It's not pushing down your spine. Yeah, so there's really not that much risk injury-wise and the reason why I bring that up because as a young trainer I didn't know better and I used to see people that were trying to be power lifters or lifting like that and clients would ask me, they'd be like, what are they doing? Oh, they don't know what the fuck they're doing. They're cheating. Well, yeah, exactly, they're cheating just to get the weight up and that's dangerous. They're going to hurt themselves. Yeah, they're going to hurt themselves. I didn't fully understand what was going on and so I would tell clients, you don't ever want to bench press that way and that's bad or that's dangerous or whatever and the truth is there's not a lot of risk in the low back like that but you're not thinking about the art so now if you're a listener and you hear me saying like that's not bad don't go into the bench press trying to arch the low back. It's all about the retraction and depression of the upper back, the shoulders that you're peeling back. That's what creates that. I would say stick the chest out and pull the shoulders back rather than think about the arch. Right.