Troubleshooting Your Bench Press
The bench press is a very popular lift for building strength and size. It’s often viewed as being simple, but there are complexities to the lift that can lead to mistakes. The main areas of focus are range of motion, bar touchdown, bar path, grip positioning, stance set up, and bar speed. If you are having problems progressing in your bench press, it would be best to add in accessory work (in additional to doing your bench press) depending on which area the weakness is showing up.
You Probably Care Too Much About Exercise Form
“Proper” form is not the end-all be-all when it comes to injury prevention nor being able to lift more weight. There are many high level strength athletes who have unique forms when lifting and are healthy and injury free.
Can We Target Individual Muscles?
Different exercises for the same muscle groups do work muscles differently, but not in the hyper specific way that people think it’ll tighten, lift, or radically create muscle growth. Variety in exercises to make sure the entire muscle group is strengthened can be incorporated into workout routines, but more variety doesn’t mean better/more gains. If you have a good program with a little bit of variety, it’s more important to focus on consistency and adding weight over time, rather than worry about tweaking exercises.
Should You Train To Failure?
Training to failure is sometimes heralded as a secret technique for gaining mass and strength, and sometimes demonized as being uniquely likely to cause injury. Here’s what the science says, and how you can effectively implement training to failure in your own training.
Muscle Activation Is More Dependent On Load Than Form
It's commonly believed that small tweaks to your exercise form can sometimes have huge results in terms of muscle activation, and you can use this to preferentially target certain muscles. However, it's far more important to focus on good progression first.