The Road to 315lb (143kg) Raw bench press.
Yup thats may max bench press so far... Its not world class, but its decent for a fairly long armed guy (imperfect leverages) who doesnt place that much emphasis on the bench press (it does not have that great a carry over to sports performance) and who doesn't use any assistance from equipment.
However, a friend of mine asked me the road i took to get there and so here it is.
I was at about 120 kg for a long time. I believe this is because I did not train for speed out of the bottom position enough. My lockout has been decent all the while. I could lock out 143kg (3 plates) but i could not get it off the chest. The approach I took to fix this is called "canadian ascending decending training or -CAD" credit to canadian strength coach Jean Boutet.
The idea is to train all of the strength qualities (this is fundamental to performance enhancement) within 1 training session. you will do 4 exercises each workout to develop the lift that you want to improve + other exercises to prevent muscle imbalances/injuries
The 4 exercises need to be similar... but different in terms of the strength quality they train. For the bench press I chose.
B. Speed Bench Press: (Strength-speed) - Same thing but lower weight and FAST
C. Balistic Bench Press smith machine (yes the smith has a use finally!) or box push up: (Balistic) - lower under control and THROW the weight up as far as you can then catch it and lower it again. (see above pic + videos below)
D. Drop Push up: Shock (plyometric) - you can see it HERE its the one where you fall down into a pushup position.
Each week I would train the bench press 2 times with 72-96 hours rest in between. I did the same thing with the lower body at the same time. I beleive that if you focus on the bench press while doing a maintanence workout with the lower body, progress would be even faster.
Once a week was Ascending i.e. in the workout i do D, C, B, A that means that the first exercise is the most explosive, but the lightest weight, the last exercise is the slowest moving but the highest weight. The other training session during the week i did the same exercises and same rep scheme but i did Decending. i.e. A, B, C, D.
The reps and weights are such that the quality being traind remains strong. e.g. balistic dont use a weight that u cant throw! For slow speed strength, light weight would be meaningless.
Reps are 3-5 for all exercises. But thats Just for me. You will need to experiment a bit to find what works for you. this is a template not a personalised program (which is of course impossible over the net).
After this I would do chinups or rows to prevent push/pull imbalances. This lift was done at 86kg. I am not attempting to do it at 81kg using the same method ( I have been using a full body training style for a long time before going back to CAD). Will keep you updated! Pics of the lift are below.
Sticking Point...Grunt...
posted by Coach Jonathan Wong @ 5/15/2006 08:32:00 PM
Comments: 0
