Bill, compare levrone’s shoulders, upper chest, lower chest and arms.
He used to have an extremely thick upper chest, delt tie in and crazy delts.
Now, as a natty, that is practically completely missing. Not that his delts are bad, but his arms shot up in size while his delts are now almost lagging by comparison, and his lower chest totally overshadows the upper part.
Now, let’s consider his benching style, fairly flat-backed, retracts his scapulae perhaps, but not nearly as forceful/doesn’t get his shoulders under him as a powerlifter would. That would give me a lot of front delt involvement, too little tricep, but probably quite a bit of chest.
I believe that his “lack” of benching strength/progress compared to what he could do is simply because now, for whatever reasons (lack of site injections/gear in general, different/sometimes “random” training style due to reliance on muscle-memory…?), his shoulders have become the weak link (good raw benchers need very strong shoulders… Hell, watch Stan Efferding’s 210lb DB incline press for 11 or whatever vid… His shoulders overshadow everything else), along with the fact that he cannot rely on test to boost his strength gains/make his current routine work as well?
He used to train fairly heavy, I think 4-6 reps on his top set back in the day for many exercises, haven’t followed his current training enough to see what he does/did, beyond the 4x4 bench routine he just completed.
So it might as well have been a nervous-system issue… He did a period of jump rope and other crap only as well, that can’t help your strength much I figure.
But still, I think he did 495 for 5-6 or so in his prime ? (stronger than Ronnie, relatively speaking, as he did not weigh nearly as much and even did them full ROM I believe)… He’s already back up to an estimated 440 or so for a single… True though, one would expect more compared to what he looks like.
(funny btw that everyone claimed Levrone used oil etc in his arms, but now you can see that his arms, even his triceps, are still a strong-point, and virtually the same shape as they used to be, even without use of any such substances… His delts and upper chest certainly did suffer, though… I haven’t seen him do his fav. delt exercise, Smith BTN presses anymore, either… Maybe there’s a reason, DB overhead presses just don’t allow for the same kind of progression… Or perhaps I missed him doing the smith BTN in some video?)
So yeah… Different training style, no gear, comparatively weak shoulders these days… I think those are the main reasons. His chest probably takes over a lot from the work his delts used to do on the bench… Chest used to be overshadowed by his shoulders back in his competitive days, now it’s the other way around.
Not saying your theory is wrong, btw, those are just some of the thoughts I’ve entertained for a while now.
Or maybe muscle-memory just works that way in his case… Size comes back before strength follows? Back in the day his lay-offs were only half a year or so each, now it was 4… Tendons could be weaker now or any other sort of limiting factor…
