How To Get A Stronger Bench Press (3 Proven Methods You Need To Start Using)

If you want your bench press to go from this 10, one more beats him. One more for Christian. Oh, you gotta set it, you gotta set it. You gotta set it to this and in the fastest way possible. Then you've come to the right place. Like it or not, the bench press is probably the most popularized lift in the gym. It's often the first and only lift that people want to know your numbers on. And there's good reason for this as it's one of the best upper body exercises for strength and size and should definitely be a staple in your routine. But at the same time, it's also the one lift that people tend to quickly plateau on and struggle with the most in terms of strength improvements, which is detrimental given the strong positive relationship that we see between bench press strength and size. And although you've probably heard time and time again of different ways that you can increase your bench press, the truth is that only a handful of these methods have actually been proven to work and are worth your time and effort. And in this video I'll share with you what those methods are and how to properly use them to increase your bench press strength as quickly as possible. The first and most crucial tip to increasing your bench press is simply to bench more frequently, because benching is a skill, and as with any skill generally, the more you practice it, the faster it's going to improve. Illustrating this is an in depth analysis by Greg Nuckols, who looked at the effect of frequency on bench press strength gains across 11 different studies days. What he found is that there appears to be a very strong, almost linear relationship between weekly strength gains in the bench press and the number of times that you bench per week. And in fact, when volume is matched, when going from one to four bench sessions per week, each additional day of benching increase the rate of strength gains by an average of 28%, meaning that by just splitting up your bench press sets up into multiple benching days, as opposed to doing all of your benching sets on one day, you'll be able to increase your bench press strength significantly, significantly faster, which is likely due to the superior skill acquisition and motor learning that you experience by benching more frequently. However, although the previous studies match volume, another benefit of benching more often is that it does allow you to fit in more benching volume per session as well, since you have more days to allocate this volume to, which is beneficial since research indicates that more weekly bench press volume is also associated with faster strength gains and would therefore likely provide the additive effect. On top of the benefits of just benching more frequently. And in fact, a 2017 meta analysis from the journal Sports Medicine shows strong support of this. The researchers found that when going from less than 5 sets of bench per week up to roughly 59 sets of bench per week, strength gains became about 16% faster even in well trained lifters. And when increased even further to 10 or more weekly sets of bench strength gains were now about 20% faster, supporting the idea that a graded dose response relationship exists between weekly bench volume and strength gains. And all in all, suggests that both increasing the number of days that you bench per week as well as the number of weekly sets that you perform is the best way to speed up the strength gains that you'll experience. So how can you best do this? Well, first of all, you can start by benching more often by splitting up your weekly bench sets into multiple sessions. So rather than performing six sets of bench press on a chest day once a week, split this up into two or even three days per week by using the following upper, lower or full body splits, for example and then in addition to admin extra bench days, you can also gradually increase your benching volume from where it is right now. So let's say you're currently doing six sets of bench press per week spread across two upper body workouts per week. What you can do to speed up your strength gains is add another one to two more sets of bench press every single week and eventually even add an extra bench day to fit in these added sets. As for how many sets to aim for, based on the previous bench volume research that I went through, it seems that five to nine sets of bench per week already provides a significant boost in strength gains, and going up to 10 to 15 weekly bench sets provides a further slight boost. Therefore, what I'd recommend is build up to roughly 5 to 9 sets per week and increase it further to 10 to 15 weekly sets if your body is still recovering well and you'd like to really focus on maximizing your bench press strength. With that being said, though, you do need to ensure that you're not over training your joints by managing the volume and intensity of these individual bench sessions and your other workouts appropriately. Which is where the next tip comes in handy. The next thing you can do to increase your bench press faster is to mix up your rep range by varying your bench volume and intensity as opposed to just using the same rep range and intensity week after week indefinitely. This is beneficial because one it introduces novel stimuli to your routine to help you break through strength plateaus and mitigate something called the repeated bout effect, which is that the more you're exposed to the same stimulus, the weaker your reaction to it will be. Two, it enables you to maximize your bench press strength, power and hypertrophy simultaneously, and 3 it enables you to handle more volume since your recovery from each bench workout will be better managed, which all leads to faster strength improvements. And the best way to vary your rep range for strength improvements seems to be with something called daily undulating periodization or dup, which simply involves changing your rep range and intensities every single bench workout but in an organized fashion. And illustrating the effectiveness of this method is a paper from the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research which compared the effects of either sticking to the same rep range for a month at a time before switching it up, as opposed to switching up the rep ranges for every bench workout and well trained lifters. So after 12 weeks, despite both groups putting in the same amount of work towards their bench press, the DUP group experienced exactly double the strength gains when compared to the other group. And other papers have shown similar results as this as well, with DUP on average across these studies, leading to roughly 26% faster strength gains than when it's not implemented. Suggesting that if you want to increase your bench press as quickly as possible, then it would likely be wise to incorporate a different rep range during each of your bench sessions. But with that being said, it's important that you do so correctly. So for example, let's say that you bumped up your benching to three times a week using a full body workout. Split. What you want to do is first pick three different set and rep schemes for each day. One that focuses on hypertrophy by using moderate weight and a moderate rep range, one that focuses on power by using lighter weight and lower reps performed explosively off the chest, and then one that focuses on strength by using heavy weight in the lower rep range. Next, you want to now throw these into your bench days with the hypertrophy day first, the power day in the middle and the strength day last. Since research has shown that this specific HPS order leads to significantly greater strength gains when compared to other orders, since the power day in the middle allows for sufficient recovery between your more straining hypertrophy and your strength days. And if on the other hand, you only bench two times per week, you'd want to still apply the same concept of switching from hypertrophy to power to strength in that order every time that you reach your next bench workout. Now the last thing that you can do is Add in the right accessory exercises into your workouts in order to indirectly boost your bench press strength, and the best way to go about doing this is by choosing exercises that help strengthen the specific weak points of your bench press. So if for example, you seem to be the weakest and fail the most right off the chest, then a great accessory lift that you can perform to strengthen this weak point is the pause bench press where you incorporate a 2 to 3 second pause of the bottom position of each rep before exploding back up. What this does is it gets rid of any momentum in the movement and takes the stretch shortness cycle out of the equation, meaning that pure strength and leg drive will now be solely responsible for moving the weight off your chest. But if on the other hand, you tend to fail midway through your rep or during your lockout, then the limiting factor here is likely your lockout strength from your triceps. And a great accessory movement to accommodate this weak point is the floor press, which can be done with a barbell, but dumbbells are generally much easier to set up and for these you simply press the weight up as you would normally, but on the floor instead, which just helps prioritize strengthening that mid range to lock up position that's limiting your bench press strength. Some other great options as well include the close grip bench press as well as triceps extension movements such as dumbbell extensions or skull crushers for example. But by consciously being aware of where your weak point seems to be in the bench press, and then making the necessary additions and adjustments into your routine to accommodate these weak points, you'll be able to significantly speed up the strength gains that you experience. Now, to effectively apply all of this information into your routine, here's what you'll want to do. First, instead of benching just one time per week, increase your benching frequency to anywhere between two to four times per week depending on your schedule, as this can boost your strength gains by an additional 28% per extra bench day. Next, gradually increase your volume from less than five sets of bench per week to roughly 1015 sets a bench per week, as this can boost your strength gains by an additional 20%. Then you'll want to mix up your rep ranges during each of your bench days by using the hypertrophy power then strength protocol that I previously went through, as this can boost your strength gains by an additional 26%. And lastly, throw in the right accessory movements into your workouts based on where your weak points are in your bench press, which when done properly would likely provide another substantial boost in your rate of strength gains when all these steps are correctly applied. Theoretically, instead of gaining, let's say, ten pounds on your bench press after a few months, you'd be able to potentially increase this by more than double that, given all the little boosts that each of these steps provide. Do keep in mind though, that proper bench form still needs to be a priority, especially as you start benching more often. But hopefully you can see that by applying these steps into your weekly routine, the cumulative benefits that you experience from them will enable you to truly develop your bench press strength in the fastest, most effective way possible. And for a step by step program that builds these protocols and exercises into your weekly plan for you and shows you how to properly progress them over time and such that you can break through plateaus and pack on size and strength in the most effective way possible, just like countless other members have successfully done with their Built with Science programs. Then simply head on over to builtwithscience.com and take the Analysis quiz to discover which science based program is best for you and your body. Anyways guys, that's it for today. I hope you enjoyed this one. Please do me a favor and show your support by giving the video a like leaving a comment down below as to what you'd like to see me cover next and subscribing to the channel and turning on notifications for the channel as well as this all really does help help me out. Thank you so much everyone and I'll see you next time.