This guy pushes straight, but he does everything different.
Still there is backwards bar travel. Look at the distance between the bar and the rack posts when the bar is on his chest compared to where he locks out.
This is the only heavy raw bench video I could find for Matt Wenning that is recorded from the side. It’s fairly straight, but again it’s not straight.
Oh man!
I was just kind of throwing that up there for fun.
I don’t mean to try to convince guys who bench way more than me to change things!
There’s no harm in debating these things. The way I see it, minimizing horizontal movement could be beneficial to some people (particularly equipped lifters) but guy like Bill Kazmeier do well with the complete opposite. In the OP’s case, he is struggling to lock out heavy lifts because it is hard for him to move the bar backwards. If he doesn’t move it back then he will fail the lift, and if he touches higher he will have less power off the chest. So either work on moving the bar backwards or make technique adjusments, but since he’s already at IPF world record levels I would hesitate to encourage him to change his technique.
Great points; I think the key thing here is individual differences. Thanks for the input, and thanks for the reading resources.