 Hey, whoa, that's a nice shirt. Last shipment in. So if you haven't, if you wanted it, this guy, 3SB.co, damn, you trying to twinsy me, dude? You put it on after I walked in here with you. He walked in here with you. I walked in, I don't think that's how it worked. I was here at 8 a.m., bro. No, I did this and you did that. There's no show. You got the elk boys. Oh, you got the elk. Y'all heard of the Nelk boys? We got the elk boys. We got the elk boys. If you went on the venison game, man, that's the liver king and I'm the kidney queen. 3SB.co, if you guys want to cop them, we're getting after it. Elk's on the way. I'm hungry. I love elk. I don't know why, bro. It's hella lean and it tastes like juicy steak, but then it's lean like chicken. Bench day, we're talking bench. We got Coach Avi in the house. We're gonna give some bench tips on how she blows up a 190 pound bench weighing 86 pounds and I benched 405 weighing 90 pounds. So if you want to bench big, stay tuned, give this a thumbs up and we dive into some bench after I deadlift cause it's a push pull day boys. Today we got Coach Avi, 190 pound bencher, 123, fifth in the world, pro power lifter, me who's been coaching and benching folks for how long? 15 years. Maybe more now. I was doing the math. I'm 34. So a very long time. Very old. We're gonna touch on a couple of things that have helped my bench and some advice I'd give to multiple lifters, even sea bass, just little things that can maybe small tweaks allow you to bench more weight, handle more reps comfortably and make it really efficient. Especially when we're talking about all this arch stuff and I don't care about your fricking opinion. We already went over that. But there are little tweaks you can make that are technical in the lift. All of these things, no matter anything you're doing in life, there's technical. There's a technical skill aspect to it. So I don't care if the IPS is trying to take that away from everything. There's always gonna be a skill involved. There's a reason why everyone in the NBA shoots with a 90 degree, 90 degree. Cause it's the most consistent thing so it allows us to shoot more consistent, practice better in the game. We're gonna play better. Same thing goes here. I'm gonna warm up a little bit. Maybe as I'm benching, I'm gonna have Abby coach me or talk to y'all about a couple of her tips and then I'll go over some of mine. Okay, so my tip, I've actually been talking about this more recently. I just shared it with someone today and Kyle's cousin yesterday. And it's about back tightness. And I wanna say upper back tightness but I don't want it to be confused with shrugging. So I talk about squeezing more of this part of your back. It's more of like your lower versus upper back. But the idea is keeping all of it snug and tight and that's also something that I'm working on emphasizing when I'm benching. This will naturally bring your chest up to the bar too. Have a big chest which is one of a common cue for benching. And then this just locks your shoulders down into place engages your lats, your back, your rhomboids, a little bit of your lower traps. That's what allows me to be explosive off the chest and also just keep tightness overall. Leg driver also helps keep that tightness too. So I think the majority of lifters probably have a standard grip but the bulldog grip is when you have a slightly internally, your wrists are internally rotated. And I don't know it very well. I tried it but my shoulders, I have fragile shoulders and it makes it unhappy. So I avoided it. But what it does is it allows for more surface area of your hand to make contact with the bar which can allow for more force transfer. So it could allow you to lift more weight but my shoulders don't like it. If you wanted to try it out, I would do more research on it. The grip doesn't matter as much as like where we're placing the bar. And so, and I say overrated in the terms of like, I think the high bar, low bar conversations overrated. Not that putting the bar lower, putting the bar high is bad. I did this demonstration in the past and this is how I like to set up for the bench to kind of get you in a bulldog style grip. And some people talk about it like kind of the bulldog because they walk like this. And so then the bar path will be more along the inside of your thumb and the bar is heading this way rather than traditionally you're parallel to it. I don't think there's an actual advantage to that angle because I think, and I think you were just talking about shoulder tightness and back tightness. Some of the issues, unless you're a pretty veteran lifter, as soon as you start to do this with your hands, your shoulders start to do this. The gates, all our pressing stuff. So yeah, you got the right grip going but now you have the wrong shoulder position. You can put a lot of pressure on your delts, a lot of pressure on your elbows and now our range of motions all jacked up. But what I do think is important is less people to stop benching up in here and even in here and really get it in the pads of our meat because those are literal bones under there. And just like stacking when we're squatting, stacking when we're doing overhead, any kind of joint stacking we're gonna be in our strongest position. So instead of having that bar way behind and I know you're gonna mention some of your favorite benchers that put the weight up here and bench big weight, that's great but that's not you, that's not me. The majority of us are gonna be better off having it stacked on our joints. So what I will do is I'll set up with a fake suicide grip which means no thumb which is something I don't recommend. But when I'm setting up for it, I'll do that so I can get the weight in the palm of my hand and then before I bench or when I set up the rest of my body I'll just slip my thumb around. And so I still have all that weight right here rather than naturally if you grab a bar sometimes we're like this and now it's way behind my elbow so I'm not pressed, I'm not stacked and it's putting some strain on my elbow. I'll put it here in that suicide, I'll grab the bar I'll sneak my hands around and I'll set myself up. And you can see through the whole weight it'll be stacked as much as I can in my joints. Obviously our joints have to move, it's a compound movement I'm moving my elbows, I'm moving my shoulders but as much as we can stack this hence even reason we use wrist wraps, right? Is that this wrist wrap half up my hand so my hand can't go backwards. You're not wrapping your wrist, right? That's not helping shit, I'm gonna wrap my hand I'm actually trying to get 50% above and 50% below the joint itself. So I would say in like the scheme of things a wrist wrap probably, and maybe this is more personal I guess, cause a lot of it is but I'd probably say it's probably last for me and probably recommendations for most people I'd probably go belt, probably then knee, knee, knee sleeves and then probably wrist wraps. I've done, you know, 80, 90% of my bench with no wrist wraps and you start to get used to it it does feel like a little bit more luxury but again, talking about stacking and like anytime we can get rigidity to transfer our power, the better off we're gonna be. That's why we always talk about breathing and bracing, right? Because we're trying to transfer the power from my quads into the bar way up here and if there's any movement in here any wet noodle stuff going on we won't be able to transfer that power. Let's get it on. That's on beat. And then same with the bench if there's any wet noodle stuff here and I'm really trying to push, you know we're gonna be leaking power so obviously this can help gripping the bar tight can help that grip stuff we talked about where we put the bar can help where the bar's placed matters a lot again, even if it's behind and then these things I say I would put above this just cause like I get a lot of confidence when my knees feel warm not that they're actually gonna do a ton necessarily but I just feel really good and it'd be a little bit more aggressive tell you move. Initially I have really weak wrists and they would get hurt sometimes just doing dumbbell accessories so wrist wraps up a lot with bench but I found when I tried to not use them as often during my warm up my I do start to strengthen my wrists or maybe it's my forearms or I don't know what it is but I find that I don't necessarily need them too much anymore so I think the more you use it the more you'll need them maybe and then the more you train without them the less you'll need to use them as often maybe until you get into a higher like heavier weight it does like feel comfortable more more stable like like Mike said the tension we're gonna talk again maybe Abby defines these differently each coach talks different but when I'm talking about variations I typically mean that you're gonna be very close to what the competition looks like so for me probably even all the way to like something like a floor press I'll call that a pressing variation if we're using a barbell and we're pressing in a horizontal manner probably call it a variation if we're talking about accessories I typically think about any body part lift even overhead that will then push yourself towards hopefully having a better bench now I think all of it to be honest is overrated because everyone's always talking about this I used the overhead and I used the floor press and did I carry it over to my PR what does that mean? What does carry over me? Like it's never gonna be direct pound for pound you had a five pound PR on overhead or you had a five pound on floor press your bench could still suck it doesn't mean it's gonna go up that being said I think of all the lifts and some of this is personal some of it's anecdotal but I still believe it to be true that accessories for the bench are the most important variations may be more important in the short term the micro but in the macro putting on more muscle in your arms, shoulders, backs, chest is gonna lead to a bigger bench down the road so we're talking the one year, two year, three year plan so the more you compress stuff like this triceps heavy, shoulders, et cetera, et cetera three years from now your bench will thank you it's not gonna carry over you're not gonna hit a tricep dip or a tricep push down PR and then go smash a big bench but a year from now if you're eating correctly sleeping correctly, you stay consistent you're gonna have bigger, stronger triceps which literally can't hurt and so it's basics build your pecs, build your shoulders, build your triceps I like some kind of incline press because we're doing everything flat I prefer this machine it's easy to load but dumbbells works great even a barbell is great I like some kind of shoulder if you're a strength athlete I think pressing shoulder is huge if you just want to build your shoulders side lateral or lateral raise on a cable or something's great and then for triceps I like something behind the head I like a French press I tend to do it on a cable and a rope but any kind of triceps heavier or not if we're talking about pure variations they'll do a closed script bench if I want someone like Abby if I'm her coach and she's got a moderate arch, a wider grip I'm doing flat back closed script stuff just to build muscle, build muscle, build muscle like every other exercise there's probably a group of like five things I tend to lean on but I don't think any of them are that much better than the other it depends on the individual if someone's a closer grip venture maybe we do ultra wide grip build some chest, build some shoulders get them in an arranged motion they're not used to dumbbell stuff's great floor press is great Larson's great there's a million things a little spoto stuff extra pauses tempo is great to learn different bar paths but none in my opinion is that much of a hierarchy above another favorite variation I agree it's really hard to say I have so many different accessories I don't know which is exactly playing into increasing my bench too much for a variation I do like Larson press I notice when people are trying it for the first time they're very wobbly and they don't know how to stabilize without their feet or their legs so learning how to stay tight and stay embraced during that is so important otherwise you can easily kind of rock yourself side to side I haven't really put around with too much of a closed script bench I don't like it so my favorite but I think it's important to build your triceps for sure you don't have to do variations you know different coaches have different lanes that they hang in some are a little bit more leaning towards variations some are not I mean you can get strong for a very long time maybe arguably forever beginners need to do more of the strict competition list because you need to do it then maybe somewhere in the middle you need to get some variations in there so you can build more muscle and work on the little stuff like stability and when you're doing Larson you're really pressing with your arms you don't have this kinetic chain helping you and then probably back to the other side when you start to get to the elite elite sometimes you really just need to hone in on your competition list again and if you're changing intensities and you're changing volumes and you're managing fatigue you can do the straight bar bench forever you know you don't have to do variations one reason why I'm not like too sure with which a variation or accessory helps the most is because when I'm benching regular common bench I'm still trying to figure out like everything like lay drive and then bracing and then tightness and then like what works best for me even like I've been thinking about hand placement or bar placement in my hand more I'm just I'm still trying to figure out and have everything quick so variations like they help but learning the actual movement like competition movement itself is probably the best because it's a skill you got to practice what's your frequency at right now and what would you say the frequency of bench to get better at it has helped you the most right now it varies for everyone right but I think most people can take four days a week and obviously you're not a very high RP or like a lot of volume it varies getting that frequency in helps a lot I know some people are afraid of benching or doing any movement more than maybe like three times a week you know and maybe that could be true for squat and deadlift not necessarily but for bench I think four times is a good place to start or to be at yeah but definitely build up to it don't go from like one day to four days I probably agree I think a lot of it depends on again that curve of how experienced you are and how strong you are because if you're a 700 pound bencher sneaking in four days just the overall load it doesn't matter that you're stronger because you're still human you have the same flesh just the systemic fatigue and the overall load your handling will be a lot more so maybe someone like that's handling two or three days but I agree with Avi the majority of folks probably benefit most from anywhere from three to five days and again maybe two of those are in the RPE 8s or 9s couple of those days might even be RPE 5s you might be doing three sets of five at 60% but you're getting that practice in that's a smaller muscle group so you can get a lot of work in it is fairly technical once you work on your bar path and all those things you talked about is thinking about so the more you get to get under the bar the more you get to fix that if you're doing three sets of five at 60% now you can worry about your hand grip if you're handling a one by one at RPE 9 it's hard to worry about your grip you're just worried about fucking pressing that repetition just getting in the volume and doing more reps and then like focusing on each rep and trying to make it like the best rep each time hopefully that helped y'all avi.lu avi.lu avi.li.lu at Instagram check her out 50% facts podcast we had her on we're chatting about lifting, benching, et cetera brand new videos every Monday and Thursday join the discord link below 3sb.co cop your apparel by the squad sweatpants, tees, a couple things left in stock before the next launch a lot of sizes are sold out so act fast, appreciate you guys we over me, be a part of something bigger yourself we'll catch you in the next one