I’m going to echo the sentiments on the awesomeness of repping a PR max in such short order.
Then I’m going to stick my nose where it might not be wanted, and note that your hands indicate overly internally rotated shoulders, which might lead to issues down the road.
Nice job on the pulls…old PR for 3!!! Awesome work cav
Holy Crap…A PR to a triple in 2 months…Cav really nice work… keep banging away…very impressed…
I think most people would KILL to turn a 1RM PR into a triple! Nice work Cav!
German, Goat, thanks very much.
Ddot, what’s the big deal? You guys keep doing the same thing all the time. Unless you were born benching 300 and lifting 500.
PG, thanks. What exactly is “overly internally rotated shoulders”? How serious is that?
Should I do squats today? It’s on the schedule, but I’m still feeling ehhh, the deads took a lot out of me, maybe just hit the elliptical?
Did squats anyway, wouldn’t you know it, hit a PR.
45 x 8
65 x 7
95 x 5
115 x 5
135 x 3 . did I touch the box? not 100% sure? seemed low, new PR
115 x 4
115 x 2 . grinders, my legs were trashed
Felt really good, getting the bar as low as I can, shoulders aren’t happy about it, but definitely gets me the leverage
Leg X
6 x 10
9 x 10
12 x 8
15 x 6
15 x 6
15 x 6
don’t know if it helps my squat, but love it anyway, I can handle more weight on the stack that most others in the gym, so there. Sort of a desert as a reward.
GHR - ow, got cramping, been too long since I did these. Gotta get them back in.
Got out of bed this morning and was really, really sore. Shoulders, hams, everywhere EXCEPT quads. Go figure.
For normal folk, overly internally rotated shoulders contributes to bad posture, i.e. slouching. Can lead to shoulder impingement issues.
For people that bench, here is something just written by the inimitable StormTheBeach, a powerlifter that posts and has a log on this site:
"Key Points for the Set-Up/Moving the Bar:
-Shoulder blades retracted/depressed (pushed down towards your butt) as hard as you possibly can. This will shorten the distance the bar has to travel and keep your shoulders in a strong, externally rotated position. When the shoulders are in an internally rotated position(especially under a weighted bar) the instance of a pec/delt injury increases. Once you establish the position, you stay in it until your entire set is done. At first, this will be harder than actually moving the weight.
Funny thing about the internally rotated shoulder position: Most humans spend all of their day in an internally rotated death box. Think about driving a car, eating food, typing, running with a chainsaw, strangling someone because you drug them out of their car for not using their blinker, throwing a rock through a grocery store window because you are hungry after a long night of drinking, and the act of drinking all of the smirnoff ice’s leading up to the vandalism/breaking and entering. These are just examples from my everyday life, I’m sure you could come up with some of your own. Being in the internally rotated death box all day does some terrible stuff to you. It causes all of your anterior thoracic muscles (chest and front of your shoulders) to shorten. The cumulative effect of day in, day out internal rotation is tight, weak anterior musculature that can’t bench press a whole lot. Also, the posterior musculature is being constantly lengthened. This will make it much harder to retract/depress your shoulder blades."
Link to his full blogpost if you’re interested:
deathtofitness.blogspot.com/p/compendium-of-bench-pressery-how-to-get.html
Cav Congrats on the PR!! And if doing an exercise helps or not but you enjoy it…than I say it helps!! Nothing wrong with enjoying a lift…
Punnyguy, what exactly did you see in my hands?
Couldn’t get the link working (deathtofitness), so Googled on internal rotated shoulders, found some info and a recommended broomstick exercise. Today was bench day. I tried the broomstick, felt really good. Next, did bench and made extra effort to pinch blades together. Strange. The warmups felt OK, like really controlling the weight, but something crapped out on the working sets:
45 x 10
45 x 10
95 x 6
115 x 6
135 x 3
that really felt heavy. last time did 165 x 1 for PR, better not risk it
155 x 0 . crossed signals with spotter, but still should have had it
135 x 3
135 x 3
135 x 3
135 x 3 . OMG, these were hard, real grinders
95 x 12
Sweet Jesus. Somehow I LOST strength. And I just don’t have any strength to waste on bench.
Inverse rows on Smith, bar on lowest position
x2 . x2 . x3 . my god, these were just impossible
cybex press
40 x 10
50 x 12
80 x 121
100 x 7 . these were fine, but
120 x 3 . these were HORRID
120 x 3
Inverse rows on dip handles, and called it a day.
Shoulders do feel good, nice and secure, but just despairing over my strength loss.
Strength ebbs and flows Cav, just keep on hitting it
Cav, i haven’t read all your workouts but are you trying to hit pr’s every week?
Cav, I have found there are good days and bad. Just hang in there.
Maybe change routines for a while.
Use dumbbells instead instead of a bar.
That’s seems to be a lot of sets on the bench, maybe less overall sets.
Soldog, if I’m stubborn enough to have kept pounding on this for the past 20 or 30 yrs, I won’t be quitting now.
German, I wasn’t trying to hit my max this time, got 165 last week, then this week tried 155 but that turned out to be too much.
2busy, I’ve gone through a variety of things in past years and nothing really galvanized my bench. I’ve done fewer sets before, and did HIIT one set to failure for a long time, zilch. Do you have a formula on how many sets I should do?
Are you all right? The reason I ask it seems you seem to be posting angry. I caught a post of yours on the PL forum regarding the 400 bench and your opinions on the Vampire. Anything I can help with?
Cav that is 94% of your max, i would consider anything 95ish+% of your 1 rm pretty close to maxing out as your strength can vary.
Well, dog, it’s probably the unemployment that’s hitting me. It’s been almost 4 months since the last job ended and the resume/interview stuff is going nowhere. Doing interviews, nothing. This has happened before and each time I just feel like the world’s against me. Thank god the unemployment compensation is coming, would really be in a panic if that wasn’t there. Since you brought it up, I’ll count to 10 before posting.
German, I’ll take another look at bench programs and see about modifying my weights.
When in a natural relaxed stance, your hands should be hanging in a neutral position. In your DL video, your hands seemed to be naturally pronated (back of hands showing). Most people will be slightly pronated, due to most every day activities (like sitting and typing on a keyboard). It is something to keep an eye on though.
[quote]cavalier wrote:
Well, dog, it’s probably the unemployment that’s hitting me. It’s been almost 4 months since the last job ended and the resume/interview stuff is going nowhere. Doing interviews, nothing. This has happened before and each time I just feel like the world’s against me. Thank god the unemployment compensation is coming, would really be in a panic if that wasn’t there. Since you brought it up, I’ll count to 10 before posting.
German, I’ll take another look at bench programs and see about modifying my weights.[/quote]
Cav, have you ever looked into Sheiko? Its a bitch from what I’ve gathered and can be really time intensive with lots of recovery needed. But it might be just the thing for you right now given you circumstances.
[quote]punnyguy wrote:
For people that bench, here is something just written by the inimitable StormTheBeach, a powerlifter that posts and has a log on this site:
"Key Points for the Set-Up/Moving the Bar:
[/quote]
That was really, really excellent.
Cav, a +/-5% variation in anything is more likely random chance than any other cause. Boring ol’ statistics, but truth. In my experience, and also yours seeing your recent squatting, PRs are like girlfriends. You get them most easily when you aren’t tyring to get them. Maybe it’s the relaxed state of mind. Who knows?
I say bask in the wonderfulness of having scored the PR in the first place, and stop chasing it so hard.
[quote]cavalier wrote:
2busy, I’ve gone through a variety of things in past years and nothing really galvanized my bench. I’ve done fewer sets before, and did HIIT one set to failure for a long time, zilch. Do you have a formula on how many sets I should do?[/quote]
I think the total number of reps under load is the important factor.
Seems the magic range for reps is a range of 24-36 total reps for an exercise.
3 sets x 8-12 reps covers 24-36
5 sets of 5 = 25
4 sets of 12, 10, 8, 6 reps descending adds up to 36 reps total.
I made my biggest bench gains doing 5x5’s
1 set was around 65% of max for warm up
2 set was 75%
3 and 4 sets were 85%, so that I felt I had no reps left at the end of set 4
5 set was negatives. Maybe 90% of max, using a spotter to help past the point where I would stop.
I did this once a week.
It progressed slowly for about a month then I was able to make some jumps on the weight level. I went from 175 to 235 in my max bench.
Hope this helps with some ideas on things to try.