Bench Pressing is NOT Killing Your Gains!!

The demise of the bench press has been greatly exaggerated. In this video, I’m going to show you how the deficiencies of the bench press as an exercise are easily overcome and therefore are no reason to avoid the exercise all together. There have been many to say that when it comes to building mus

What’s up, guys? Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX. com. Today we’re talking about something that’s NOT killing your gains and it’s going to be the bench-press. Some people out there have beat up this exercise of late in favor of others, for developing your chest.

I have a problem with that and I’m going to explain why. Before we do, you’ve been following me for a while now and you should be able to ace this quiz, I want to give you. It deals with something called ‘adduction’. Horizontal adduction. I want you to tell me which of the following – A, B, or C – is horizontal adduction.

You ready? Here’s A. Something you see here with the bench-press. Here’s B. Something you’d see here more with the fly.

And C. JESSE: Adduction. Adduction. Adduction. JEFF: Okay.

No, no, no. Never. Still isn’t. Won’t be adduction. Ever.

JESSE: Adduction. JEFF: Stay behind the camera this time. They saw you far too much last video. JESSE: I’m still here. JEFF: Over here, please.

Guys, adduction. Let’s talk about it for a second because it’s going to be very helpful in explaining the benefits of the bench-press. For those that aren’t aware, adduction – you’ve got to stop focusing on what’s happening from here down. It has nothing to do with what’s happening beyond the elbow. At the elbow I can influence what looks like, in terms of adduction, because I can bend it.

It’s a secondary joint. When we’re focusing on horizontal adduction we’re talking about the shoulder. So, we only want to focus on what’s happening from here to here in our humerus. So, when we think about adduction it doesn’t have to be that it’s all the way across the body, although that’s ideal. The act of horizontal adduction means that it’s coming from some point behind the body toward midline.

Bringing it toward midline. It will help underscore this if I take out a muscle marker and just draw two little landmarks for you. Number one: I’m going to draw one right about here toward the end of my bicep. The other one I’m going to draw, I’m going to put it somewhere on the sternum. If I can bring this X closer to this X I’m horizontally adducting.

That’s one of the main ways we can see that. And we know if I were to take my arm from here and bring it all the way across my body, I’ve taken that X that’s way out here, all this distance, and I’ve brought it across my body and gotten them close to each other. Right there. Now, if I’m going to bench-press, if I’m in this position here, where is the X in relation to this? From here to here.

When I come out and bench – again, this could be with a barbell or a dumbbell – when I come up, and I bring my arm in front, to the top you can see I’ve completely closed that distance down. We area horizontally adducting here. Which is why the bench-press works. Horizontal adduction is the key focus of what the chest does at the shoulder joint. But there’s a limitation here.

The limitation is: is the bench-press taking us through full, horizontal adduction? The answer is ‘no’. But I’ve made this point many times on this channel. Does that make it a bad exercise? Does it make it an exercise that’s not capable of delivering gains and benefits?

Of course not! I’ll throw you another example. The deadlift. Would anybody argue that the deadlift doesn’t build your back? Probably not.

What type of the range of motion are the muscles in your back undergoing during a deadlift? Not much. As a matter of fact, if you want to take the lats, everybody knows the lats are really important for holding the tightness through our deadlift. My arms, in relation to my body when I grab the bar in front of me, are very much a little bit of flexion of the shoulder. It puts a little bit of stretch on the lats.

You don’t need to be all the way out here to have that dramatic of a stretch. But when I come up and the bar rides up my body it goes into a tighter position along my sides. So, the lats are involved in that, but the range of motion is minimal. As I’ve said, does it negate the benefit of that exercise for building your back? Not at all.

So, it’s not that the bench-press is incapable of delivering gains. You’d be fighting years and years of training evolution to say that the bench-press doesn’t deliver gains. It absolutely does. The main benefit of it is that you can load it the most. That is the exercise that takes you through horizontal adduction with the highest capacity for load.

But the range of motion is definitely something you want to do something about. So, I’ve addressed this before. I’ve said what you’d always try to do, if hypertrophy was your goal, you’d try to complement the exercise. You’d try to accessorize that as your main lift with something else. That would be to complement the range of motion gap.

That’s why I said you bring in something like the crossover where I can take my arm from this position, which I’m kind of limited to, in terms of adduction on the bench-press and even with a dumbbell fly, and I could get further. I could go past midline. We know the shoulder joint is capable of more horizontal adduction controlled by the chest if I go beyond midline. I can get a stronger contraction. So, if could do that I would do that.

So, I’m filling in the gaps with my training. The focus of my training is to fill in the gaps that exist. So here, the bench-press range of motion limitation is overcome by a complementary horizontal chest crossover here. Likewise, it doesn’t just have to happen in terms of range of motion. It could also be strength curves you’d also want to try to complement.

If I did a spider curl like you see me doing here, I’m placing the peak tension and contracted range of the exercise. So, does that mean it’s ineffective because you’re only hitting that portion of the exercise? No. You could build your muscles with that exercise. Especially if you progressively overloaded it.

But our goal in our training would be more complete if we were aiming for hypertrophy. So, I pick an exercise like the incline curl to hit more in the bottom of that exercise. So, it’s how you put your training together that matters. I will say this, though. If you are a power lifter and your goal is to become stronger in the bench-press, and competitively, that’s how you’re being judged and gaged; would the addition of the complementary range of motion be of any benefit to you?

The answer is ‘no’, because at no point in time, to succeed in the bench-press – which takes you only to a point where your arm is about this much adducted, in relation to your chest – would you need to go any further than that. You’re never going to be required to do anymore than that. That doesn’t serve a purpose for you. So, I would argue that becoming minimalist depends upon what your goals are. Minimalists, in terms of strength training, you can be more minimalized.

If you’re trying to gain more muscle mass and build more muscle, hypertrophy-based training, you’re going to want to fill in those gaps when you’re presented with those gaps. That’s why I want to do that. So I think the idea here where people jump to the conclusion that bench-press, in and of itself isn’t as effective because it gets you through there – guys, you can even make a couple of tweaks on the exercise alone, if you feel that’s what’s happening to you. You wouldn’t want to bench entirely wide because what you’re doing is, by being very wide you’re limiting the amount of adduction that you’re getting. Even more than normal.

The wider you go, the less your arms are required when you get to full lockout, to be adducted, in relation to the chest. If I were to narrow my grip and come from her