How To Increase Your Bench Press Quickly
If you are trying to figure out how to increase your bench press fast, you are not unlike the majority of other guys in your local gym. In fact, boosting performance on this particular exercise seems to be one of the areas of fitness training that baffles the masses of gym members around the world.
The good news is you’re going to learn three tried and tested methods of breaking your plateau today.
The first thing you need to do is look at what is holding you back at the moment. It is usually one of three things:
1. Underdeveloped muscles surrounding the target area, i.e. shoulders and triceps.
2. Underdeveloped grip strength which is unable to carry you through the movement.
3. Simply not enough strength in the muscle you are trying to lift the weight with, i.e. you are shooting above your weight.
You can usually figure out what the problem is by simply looking for these issues the next time you are doing the exercise in the gym. Do your shoulders and triceps give out long before your chest? Does your poor grip let you down or does your chest simply not have the strength it needs to reach the next level?
You might find more than one issue strikes. That happens to a lot of people. It doesn’t really matter, it just means you have slightly more to work on than you originally planned. If you get the correction process underway quickly, you can achieve a new personal best within a very short period of time.
If you can identify the issue first, correcting it is really rather easy. For those who are affected by their shoulders and triceps giving way too easily, it would be wise to spend some time strengthening those muscle groups in your routine before you attempt to pack on more weight to your chest-based exercises. No matter how big or powerful your pecs might be, they won’t perform at maximum ability if the smaller muscles in the exercise are underdeveloped. This is a sign of someone who is undertaking an unbalanced training program and you should move fast to correct it before it reflects in your physique.
Also, the importance of a strong grip cannot be underplayed. If you do not work on developing your forearms to handle large loads, you will notice that your progress on power lifts such as deadlifts begins to wane quite quickly. Your legs and back might be able to take the stress, but your grip will fail first, causing you to stop short of your true maximum. Likewise, learning how to prise the bar apart on a chest press is a useful tool to increase your results and requires a strong grip.
Plate grips, timed hangs and wrist curls are useful forearm exercises.
If you have simply reached a plateau because the muscle itself cannot handle a heavier weight no matter how hard you try, you can still kick start results by switching your strategy for a brief period. Focus on isolation moves for the muscle to really blast it into new growth before attempting your next heavy lift.
Moves such as incline dumbbell press, flat cable flyes and push-ups are great for isolating the area in question.
Learning how to increase your bench press fast can often become a game of opinion, with everybody using their own techniques to get themselves out of a hole from time to time. However, the 3 techniques shown to you today will work for the vast majority of individuals and offer the added benefit of yielding quick, consistent results.
Our writer: Top south shields personal trainer Russ Howe PTI helps actors and models every week in the gym. His detailed post showing how to increase your bench press fast will shed more light on this topic.