After having attented a workshop with two world champion powerlifters, I confess that the barbell bench press is a biomechanically fucked up movement - in my personal opinion. Even with a corrected technique, I will never be great at it. Mark my words.
From a powerlifting perspective it seems it would be more beneficial/rewarding to focus more on the squat and the deadlift.
I see your point, but then what are you gonna do when dudes ask āwhadya bench broā? You canāt just lie.
I am 285 lbs BW. I can tell whatever number I want tooā¦
That said, I canāt bench worth a damn either.
This whole benching convo convinced me to experiment with form this week. I always bench in my squat shoes (which is like a 1 inch heel), now Iām wondering if that is screwing me up on bench.
I hardly bother with flat bench anymore. I prefer dumbbell bench or the slight incline/decline style (plate or two under bench head/foot) recommended by John Meadows (RIP Mountain Dog)
I took a solid yearlong break from flat bench and only did incline BB/DBā¦ Got my incline up to 275x5 and decided it was time to try flat bench again.
Then my flat bench max was literally 275x5ā¦
Apparently training Incline BB Bench is more or less equivalent to Flat BB Bench 
It is. An old buddy had like a 685 squat and 7+ deadlift for a 1700 some total. His training was directed toward getting the biggest bang and bench was not the place to get it.
The bench press is an assistance exercise for the press.
Once you make that paradigm shift: the bench is a lot less mysterious.
I am very slowly starting to come around to this way of thinking
I confess I test upper body days as a fill in for when Iām too tired to do lower body
My numbers show that 
Itās funny, I turned in all my best bench pressing workouts when I adopted that train of thought.
Went to a Halloween party, had too much jungle juice. Apparently, I tried to do cartwheels with a friend in the yard. I proceeded to lay down and roll around saying āIām a cartwheel!ā. Later on I kept sticking my hand in the ceiling fan and someone decided to turn it off.
Following this line of thought, I have had my best success high bar squatting in the past few months once I treated high bar as an accessory lift to build my low bar.
My close grip bench is feeling fantastic now that itās not my primary bench, but an accessory lift to a normal grip bench press.
Maybe there is a trend hereā¦.
John Meadows and Jon Andersen (also, Dan John and John Berardi are just awesome dudes too, whatās up with the John/Jon connection?) both talk about how they tried to never do the same workout twice in a row. I think thereās a lot of wisdom there. We stop trying to chase numbers IN training and just chase effort. Movements are simply assistance to becoming more awesome. There is no sacred cow.
Dude, I confess I should have listened to you since you know you know your shit. I flipped it and realized the āorthopedic layerā was only on one side of the mattress. But I slept on a rock-hard pocket spring mattress for 4 days, as in my tailbone could literally feel the fucking springs. Plus an endlessly whining wife. The pain still persisted so it couldnāt have been the orthopedic layer. But it got better gradually Then I decided to flip it back around since itās HEAVY AS FUCK - I dunno if I posted this in my log but Iām struggling with 135lbs x 6 for high bar squats now lol and this mattress is like around 10kg+ heavier than the last one:
If anyone recalls, Wrt to the last mattress, Iām so fucking clumsy with this shit I broke a fucking 55" smart screen TV while trying to get a FULL ENCASEMENT mattress cover on. I was squatting 3+ plates for reps at the time. You can imagine how hard this was for me but I was āsmartā enough to pull everything within the area far from the bed. Fucking lucky I was intending to get a new one anyway since at the time I bought the TV, local sellers only stocked the China version and I wonāt use anything other than Xiaomi. At the time I broke it, they were finally selling the global version, which meant I can control everything from the vacuum, curtains, TVs to the FUCKING TOILET SEATS lololol.
Huawei is rubbish anyway. The stupid nationalistic furor because of data theft was just silly. MY COUNTRY hypothetically does the same shit in the US. There are no intelligence agencies worth their salt that donāt have spies and stooges they pay off in every single fucking country in the world. The fact that Huawei got caught shows how much they suck lol. But they profited by turning it into a ābuy only Huawei campaignā. These fuckers rip off technology and sell the same shit. Xiaomi rips off technology and MAKES BETTER or buys a large stake in a good company and does the QC, marketing and adds some technical stuff to existing products to improve them from what a little birdie told me.
Anyway, back to the mattress, thereās NO MORE PAIN. You were right. Or maybe the foam/latex (I think thatās what the layer is made of) got compressed enough from the weight since this fucking mattress is even heavier than the last one. But the probability that you were right is WAY higher or the mattress just needed some time to āexpandā or some shit like that which the manufacturer told me.
So, every time I considered just fucking selling it for $100 dollars on a local ebay-like platform but insist that the buyer arrange collection and delivery, and buying a new one, I thought of what you wrote, and I stopped myself because of that. Mother fucking thing cost me over 1K. Would have spent another 1K getting a new one.
This was because I kinda made an educated assumption that someone whoās as good as you with hardware and creating stuff would have a high carry over even if itās just an opinion on stuff like this.
Thanks bro! You saved me 1,000+USD plus maybe a hundred for setting it up, moving shit and other stuff (ācoffee moneyā Iād have to pay the delivery guys).
Any time!
My long standing theory on this started with boots. Iād get the same kind every year to minimize the pain of breaking in. The new ones were relatively unchanged in the course of the week, but my feet hurt for about 3-4 days in them.
It just takes a while for the bones and soft tissue to adjust to the new surroundings.
Edit: Iāve also been documenting (pics) some stuff on drilling and tapping in harder materials to put in my log for home projects & stuff.
Well, i wouldnāt say āhypotheticalā lol. They were caught stealing data from Huawei users for sure.
They also had cell tower equipment near our ICBM sites which was pretty suspicious, considering they arenāt everywhereā¦ only around the US military bases which contain our nuclear arsenal.
Also, the US is very aware that the CCP cannot be trusted for security. When i was working on the NASA X-59 project (google it if you like airplane stuff), we installed a componentā¦ come to find out traceability showed it was made in China. We tore a few weeks worth of work apart to remove that component (itās contractually not allowed in any defense program).
When China came out with their FJ-31 (their version of the F-35) this was becoming quite apparent.
Anyways, sorry for the derail. I work in a, umm, nuanced division of my field.
My company were all told not download/use TikTok due to the security concerns and the amount of data the app collects on the users (the EULA allows cross app key stroke tracking).
TikTok is the best data gathering effort ever created and also is responsible for making Americans objectively dumber.
Same here. It also allows for key logging across any other device you own, even if you didnāt download or use tiktok on that device.
Youāre 100% correct about it being the best data gathering/producing effort in history. The US does our Intel gathering wrongā¦ looking for the golden nuggets rather than hoovering up everything and post-analyzing like China does.
I use the term āhypotheticalā to absolve myself if anyone in the future decides to claim I made a statement of fact lol. @flipcollar was the one who started it lol.
Yes, yes, you lawyers and law students. I know this is nonsense, but I quite enjoy using the term for shits and giggles and the only difference between you and me is I never took the bar exam so piss off. 
What I meant was that every country steals data along with the rest of the stuff I wrote. The āprivateā companies are backed by the CCP and they decide who to put in top positions in certain ones, just like what MY country hypothetically does lol.
