Thurston
Winger
Bench is an interesting one too because it’s obviously the lift pretty much everyone loves to do but it isn’t actually a great muscle builder for most people at the best of times (if you’re one of the people it works for, you’ll know it). Similar to the squat, if you’re overloading the weight at the expense of form or reps, you’re going to get even less out of out from a hypertrophy perspective.100%. There's a young lad who goes to the same gym as me who's always focused on technique and getting a decent amount of time under tension and his improvements are nuts compared to the ones who are just trying to lift as heavy a weight as possible while sacrificing form. There's one lad who benches for about 5 reps, with 3 of them heavily assisted by his mate, I just don't see the point.
Interesting to hear another suggest higher reps squats, I'm definitely going to give it a try when I finish the plan I'm doing. What kind of speed are you doing them?
This is well worth watching for how Jay Cutler bench-presses and what he has to say about it. It also really highlights the difference between pressing for power and pressing to gain muscle better than any video I think I’ve actually seen. It also really resonated with me because I’ve definitely found far more joy doing incline bench overall. And I have seen more noticeable improvement since I adopted his technique for regular bench than I did in the years before it.
I’d be interested to see how much difference it made for you if you reversed that and slowed down the eccentric phase rather than doing the reverse.I don’t specifically time it, I try to be slightly slower coming up than going down though. I’d say maybe 1 second down 2-3seconds up.
Nonetheless, slow and controlled is the way to go.
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