Mark Ottobre coaches an athlete whose bench press technique won't get him to 140kg. The problem: his bar drops uncontrolled at the bottom, masking weak spots that lighter weights hide. They fix it with pauses, board presses, and tempo work over six weeks.
You do you. I just want to see what you do, if we speak the same language. Okay, it's a lot better than I thought it would be. Is it what I exactly what I want? No. The technique that you're currently using probably won't get you to 140. Yeah, because there's a lot of instability there. So we're going to do a couple of drills to get you more stable, and the idea is that the stability is going to actually make this bar come up even faster. I'm going to put my hand on your chest, my fist.
Now I want you to push up against my chest. Feel that even higher. So the whole time I want you to think of my hand as pulling As I push it in, it's the game is I push against you, you push against me. So drive your heels down and drive your chest up. Drive your heels down and your chest up. Okay, feel that position there. That's where I want you to be. See how solid that is?
Yeah.
As you come down, that's where you should be. As you come up, that's where you should be. So if I say chest up, this is what I mean.
Yeah. Again, I'm defining terms. We need to make sure that we speak the same language.
More, more chest, more chest.
This boy has power. Let's put on 80 for him. How did that feel in comparison to the way you normally bench?
It's more stable. You can feel a bit more stable.
The velocity of 60 kilos is super fast, right? The velocity of 80 kilos is starting to slow down a little bit towards those last couple, right? The problem that I have with it is we didn't see one rep repeated 5 times. We saw 5 different reps. Let's talk about the errors that he made. He didn't have any control over the bottom path. Why is that an issue? If they move, if it's a millimeter here or there, it matters. You've got to get the right groove because strength is a skill. The other thing is, if you're, you know, you've got 120 kilos and you come down with velocity, it's not 120 kilos at your chest anymore. It's something more like 130, 140. Because you've created velocity, but you've also created inaccuracy. So you need to bring it down slow to make sure velocity doesn't accumulate on the bar. I'm not going to tell you to pause at your chest, but I am going to tell you to control at that chest. Chest up, chest up, chest up, chest up, up. Good. Right. He still wants to bounce because what he's relying now is on basically tendon strength, right, to bounce him out of position. So there's a few different tools that we can use here. We can use pauses, board pressing techniques. So what I want to get you to do is I want you to pause an inch off your chest. So you're going to come down, we're going to pause an inch off your chest, then you're going to come down all the way, then back up. Watch that speed on the way down. So it's going to hold, then lower, lower. There you go, there you go, there you go. Like that. How'd that feel?
It feels tougher, but it feels better. Like, I can understand why I'm doing it.
This is 70. You will earn 5 reps. We are going to push you, but they all have to look like this. If you can't do it like this, the rep doesn't count. So what we're going to do in the next 6 weeks— that's him on bench press. I want him doing that at least once a week and probably dumbbell work on the other day. Maybe we do bench press twice a week at a lighter a lot of variation too, but he's going to be practicing that.
