The Official Bench Press Check List (AVOID MISTAKES!)

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What’s up, guys? Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX. com. Today we’re going to talk about the bench press. Classic exercise.

Now, it’s probably one that you’ve done a million times, but you’ve got to make sure you’re doing it right all the time because one bad rep on a bench press could lead to a lot of problems. A lot of times, in your shoulders. Sometimes in your elbow. Sometimes in your wrists. Sometimes in your chest, with a torn pec.

You’ve got to make sure you’re doing it right. So I’ve put together a checklist, and we’re going to go through it step by step and make it really, really simple so we’re making sure you nail each portion of this. The first thing, when you load the bar, ideally you’re doing it in a cage here. Secondly, you’re putting a clip on the bar for safety. However, I will point out – as someone that has learned this from experience if you’re training at home – you may not want to use the clips.

Why? Because if you get stuck and there’s no one around to spot you, your only option to really get out from under that bar is to dump it and if the clips are on here, you’re not going to be able to do that. So again, not something I advise. I would rather you setup in a rack to do it. Now, the next thing.

This is stupid simple, but look over my shoulder here. What is the placement of the bar in the rack itself? Is it centrally located? Because a lot of times you’ll come up and find them kind of like that. All of a sudden it’s already throwing off your alignment and it’s really easy – again, stupid easy to do – but make sure you do it because it’s important.

So once we get that lined up, then we look for the placement of the bench in relation to the middle knurling of the bar. You can see here that we’re lined up perfectly. You want to make sure that you’re doing the same thing. Now I come in here, and I want to know how far under the bar the bench should be. You have to understand that when we lay back down here my eyes are going to want to be looking straight up at the bar.

Which I’m going to cover in more depth in a second. So in order to accommodate that, I have about this much room between the top of my head and my eyes. So it should be at least that much room beyond the bar with the bench that can accommodate my head. So I’m not leaning my head off the back – which I’ve already done. So now you lean back.

Now we sit here, and we position ourselves now under the bar. So come up on top and you can see. As far as the bar in relation to my body on the bench, you literally want to be staring right up at the bar and you can see that my eyes are literally lined up with the bar in this position so that it sets up my liftoff position – which I can explain more from the side here. Take note now of what we’re doing from here. As far as your grip, you want to know how wide your grip should be, and you want to know the type of grip you should be using.

When you look at the width of the grip you have to come down to the bottom to understand where it should be. Now you start down here – I will cover, again, the fact that the elbow position is going to be key. You don’t want to bench with your elbows all the way up here in this guillotine position. If you’re doing the guillotine press, that’s a different thing, but you want to make sure you’re using a much lighter dumbbell, and not trying to load up, as I’m showing here for the classic bench press. What happens is, in this top position you’re leaving yourself no room for the rotator cuff to really operate.

Of course, if the weight gets a little heavy and the bar path starts to go forward a little bit you’re going to get internal rotation that’s going to really, really destroy the rotator cuff in this position because your elbows are too high. Your elbows should be more about 75 degrees away from your body here. So if you know that, you set this position up like this, you get your elbows at 90 degrees bent, and you have your forearm perpendicular to the ground, pointing straight up toward the ceiling. Wherever that is for you – because again, arm length is going to vary between persons – you then reach straight up to the bar from here. You can see that mine kind of ends with my ring finger on the non-knurled part of the bar.

So that’s what my width would be, so that when I’m on the bottom I have a fully supported bar with my forearm pointing, and supporting the bar underneath. Which brings us to the next question: the grip itself. What is the right grip? There’s a thumbless grip that some people will use because they want to look cool when they do it. That’s all set, but what happens if the bar slips out of your hands forward?

You’re in trouble. So what you want to do is, you always want to have your thumb wrapped around the bar, but how you approach the bar is really important for getting that right. If I come down – which a lot of times people will do, they’ll come this way. Okay, I just said my ring finger is where I need to be. I come this way and I grab the bar, and then I go and I grab around, or I grab this way.

Around my thumb. Whichever is more comfortable for you. This is stronger, but if I come this way, the issue is that the bar is too high on my fingers. So now when I lift off, automatically the bar is going to roll backward and look what I’ve done to my wrists. So now I don’t have the support of my forearm under the hand anymore.

The bar is about 2”-3” behind that and it weakens my pushing power. It also increases the likelihood that I’m going to screw up my wrists. So what I want to do is, I want to come from underneath. So if I come from underneath, now the bar is lower on my hand, and I can wrap around to the right position. But now you can see when I lift off I have a fully supported bar because my forearm is now directly underneath this and I’m using the support and strength of my bones to actually allow that to happen.

Now, when we get ready to lift off, where are we lifting from? These things better allow you to have bend in your elbow because – look at the position I’m trying to lift from. I’m trying to lift, again, with a bar that is placed over my eyes. So it’s a little bit behind my body here. So if I try to lift from here – essentially it’s like a pullover – I don’t have much strength here.

So if I have a fully straightened out arm and I have the catches of the bar too high, I have no lifting power at all to get that off. None. So I need to have at least a little bit here that I can actually push because my elbows can still have some straightening left in them to actually push off of. Same note. If I were to lower it too low, now I’m also putting myself lower to the sticking point where I lose some strength as well.

So for me, it’s roughly about this amount of bend in my elbows that makes it really comfortable for me. So now, as I get ready to lift, the next thing – I promise you, I’m actually going to lift this bar. This is what I’m talking about. All the setup that’s really important here. It’s as I go to lift the bar, the bar path is now going to be my major concern, okay?

Because I want to make sure that this thing comes down, not over my eyes as I talked about, but it winds up over my chest. So that means that the bar path is going to have to come forward a little bit. It’s going to have to come down, and forward a little bit. Again, if I have my elbows high and I hit the bar path right, that’s even worse because now I’m really internally rotating the shoulders. That’s how you blow an AC joint.

That’s I hurt this shoulder on my other side here. You can see that it’s always sticking up for the rest of my life because I actually popped my AC joint on my left shoulder. I got down to the bottom of a rep, my bar path was good, but my elbows were too high. The internal rotation popped d