For the people that advocate overhead pressing to boost your bench, what variation do you recommend and what rep ranges? i.e. dumbbell ohp, barbell ohp, 1 arm, behind the neck etc. Again for the sole purpose of a bigger bench and not necessarily a bigger press
I don’t, but I will weigh in anyway. I do not advocate it just because I have tried and it has done nothing for me. My view is that if your bench is weak off the chest, then it might indicate weak front delts >> OHP can help.
I don’t think that db OHP will hurt, but I would say specificity is key, so I’d stick to plain vanilla barbell OHP, slightly narrower grip than your regular bench and similar work load >> 5x5 or whatever. Given that we want to boost max strength, any OHP needs to be quite heavy so I don’t see how behind the neck can be of any help, other than impinging your shoulder and risking a strain or an injury.
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I’ve never understood the relevance of behind the neck pressing although some elite athletes do it very heavy and dont seem to have any issues. Mariusz Pudzianowski, Ed Coan and Dimitry Klokov all press behind the neck, but when ive tried it strains the fuck out of my shoulders and never saw any improvements on size or strength. I’ve never really understood the relevance of any pressing overhead to boost your bench but so many people say it helps. If you dont recommend pressing, than what do you do to keep your shoulders healthy?
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I would mostly do seated barbell OHP, save your back for lifts that count and barbell because you can handle more weight than with dumbbells. I wouldn’t do it behind my neck because I have had some shoulder issues in the past and it’s high risk in general, but some people like Ed Coan have done those regularly. Dumbbells are good for higher rep hypertrophy work.
As for rep ranges, you are going to have to vary reps or you won’t get far. Start with higher reps (like 10’s or 12’s) and keep adding weight until you are doing hard doubles or triples at the end of a training cycle. If you are doing a hypertrophy phase you could use dumbbells to mix it up.
As for variations, I asked Josh Bryant about this at a seminar and he said the variation he uses, depending on goals and so on, are either seated or standing OHP, push press, “scrape the rack” press, dumbbell OHP, and Arnold press. If overhead pressing bothers your shoulders then various front and side raises can be used to build the shoulders.
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It’s to make your shoulders stronger, not healthier. For shoulder “health”, you can do various external rotation exercises, face pulls, band pull aparts, etc.
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Hey chris, I have seen you recommend this style of training before for main lifts (linear going from 12’s down to 2’s), at the moment i have 9 weeks till nationals and the plan is to run 531 for 6 weeks then working up to tm for 1-3 reps for 3 weeks. Would i be better off running the more straight linear approach leading into this meet then saving 531 for off season?
Gonna stick around and comment so I can be notified of thread activity here.
I like OHP, but don’t see much progress in it, and as a result not much carry over into bench, which goes up when I’m not doing OHP, so I’d like to figure something out.
I must say however, that when OHP was cranking my back, it was easier for me to grab a dumbbell and do a standing single arm dumbbell OHP (as if a strict circus dumbbell) with loading the oblique for what woulda been a banana press with a barbell.
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My best bench gains came from when I was benching 3 times a week and not doing any OHP. I was doing very little shoulder work in general and no pressing. A good analogy I can think of is WW2 when Germany tried to fight Britain and Russia at the same time. They failed because they couldn’t focus all their energies and manpower into one battlefront. I feel as though this holds true for OHP and bench. You might be able to make good progress doing both at once, but I feel like unless you are looking for overall strength development in all the barbell lifts, just stick to the powerlifts. Sort of like Chris said in his comment, “Save your lower back for the lifts that matter”. Feel like this holds true for a lot. Think about it like this-if you had 4 weeks to train to total a certain amount of weight at a powerlifting meet or else you would die, would you incorporate a bunch of rows, presses, arm isolation etc or would you do nothing but the powerlifts? Granted in a year long cycle you should incorporate some of these movements during deloading, things like presses really are only 10-20% of what you should really be focusing on
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I wouldn’t be doing 12’s on the competition lifts if you are 9 weeks out, more like 5’s or 3’s right now. It all depends on how you set up your training, I would personally do singles in the last few weeks but some people never go lower than a double. There are appropriate 5/3/1 variations but the regular setup a has you doing rep maxes which make no sense right before a meet. There is a peaking program in beyond 5/3/1 as well as in 5/3/1 for PL, those could work.
Basically, you either need a coach or a peaking program and doing 5/3/1 for 6 weeks is neither.
While your Nazi analogy is amusing, I should probably clarify what I am saying here. There is no use in having OHP as a main lift if you are a powerlifter, except maybe in the offseason and only if shoulders are a major weakness for you. Even then I would think twice. I only do 2 sets a week of OHP and I’m seeing progress, and it’s the 3rd exercise of the day when I do it. It should not be taking away from your bench training at all. Mike Israetel said in one of his presentations that 2-3 sets per week of overhead pressing is plenty for a powerlifter, I agree.
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Thanks for that chris, something else i was considering was a 5x5 starting at 70-75% for the main lifts but a close grip bench press as a main lift instead of the press. Also squatting a 2nd day after deadlift but a bit lighter for 3-5 sets of 5’s. Progress linear with 2.5kg-5kg weekly increases down to a 3x3 around weeks 5-7 then working up to a heavy double on week 8, week 9 up to opener squat/bench, light squat/bench 2 days later. Would that be a better approach?
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I think strong shoulders are an asset in the bench. It’s going to vary whether press is the movement to give this to you.
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I agree. I think my time is better spent on bench at the moment because I have a meet in December. I want to eventually do a strongman meet, so I’d like to get strong at pressing, and I’ll probably prioritize that for a strongman meet. I plan on doing some Bulgarian for Trap Bar Deadlift and OHP soon. Might be dumb, but worth a try when its after a meet and I want to do other stuff.
I trained at a powerlifitng gym temporarily for my last meet, and then went back to a commercial gym for a while. During this time, I couldn’t get my squat and deadlift back up to reps/weight I was doing at the PL gym, and because I couldn’t get a reliable spotter, I just did OHP instead. After I finally joined a powerlifting gym, the first lift that close to my old maxes was bench, even though I only did OHP for a few years. Also to add, my OHP was POVERTY, although my bench was only 260 at the time, I was struggling to a do a full 3x5 with 95.
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Building up variations of overhead press gets you bigger stronger delts, triceps and upper chest (depending on how much you arch or angle your back). Getting bigger and/or stronger in the muscles involved in the bench makes your bench stronger.
That’s the thought process behind whether or not press helps bench. So press does help bench but might not be the most efficient use of time or recovery resources for several reasons for example it doesn’t get as much chest action as say an incline press variation, it’s not a comp lift or close to a comp lift etc.
So now that we’ve established that OHP helps bench (tho other options might be better) what variations and rep ranges would be effective.
IMO if powerlifting is your focus and you absolutely must use OHPs then use them to build useful muscle for benching with relatively high reps which are slightly more effective/efficient to accumulate volume and build muscle with. You should end up varying your rep range anyways going from volume focus to greater intensity levels but as per phase potentiation go with the volume accumulation first
For variations would recommend using ones that are safe/sustainable e.g. if you can’t tolerate much volume on the behind the neck press then it’s useless, favor > ROM (within safe limits) to increase total work done e.g. not overhead lock outs off pins and have a relatively low overall recovery requirements e.g. standing OHP with heavy weight for high volume will use recovery resources that could be put into the comp lifts or more specific variations of said lifts.
For above said purpose I’d go with Seated DB Press tho it’s not much better than some alternatives listed. Personally I’d just go incline press because bang for your buck but each to his own.
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I don’t bench much, and absolutely light recently due to a wrist issue, but since I’ve been doing behind the neck press in the last few months as a main exerceise, there’s a thing I’ve noticed that makes BTN press useful for the bench: the BTN press overloads the traps A LOT, and just not the upper traps. Middle and low traps are stimulated a lot, and it promotes a fuckton of improved scapular stability, which is fairly critical when benching.
All this said keeping in mind that:
- I can press behind the neck just fine (actually, it’s more comfortable on the shoulders than regular pressing to me, for some reason I completely ignore);
- my scapulae were pretty fucked up due to cranky shoulders that I carried from boxing in high school, so whatever improvement I noticed might not translate to anyone who already has healthy scapulae. What I noticed is that ever since I started lifting, my bench setup felt unstable and asymmetrical, especially on the right side (the right shoulder/scapula is the one that had more issues in the past). Doing a ton of face pulls, pull aparts, dislocators and a steady diet of rowing and chinning has helped over time, but it’s been since I’ve added behind the neck pressing that I finally managed to get into a bench setup that feels symmetrical, stable and “packed” (if that makes any sense, let’s say I can finally feel my upper back getting tight and STAYING tight in my bench setup). As I said, I haven’t benched heavy in months so I can’t really speak about how it transfers to actual strength, but what I can say for certain is that I now have a much better feeling of controlling the weight and keeping tight, while before I’d often find myself feeling like my upper back progressively slipped out of position and controlling the weight got more difficult as the set progressed.
As a side note, I also feel that depressing the scapulae is responsible for keeping stress off the shoulders in the bench much more than scapular retraction.
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70-75% sounds a bit light at this point, maybe work up to 80-85% for a set of 3-5 and then do your light 5x5 work. You need to get used to handling heavier weights now, if you wait until the last minute you will have issues.
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I like doing OH pressing variations for assistance work. I also will run a three week wave of doing max effort OH work now and again. I almost never do seated presses for these (OH pin presses being the exception). For barbell work, I like varying grip from index finger about an inch off the smooth part of the bar to ring finger just outside the ring. I will also use logs and/or swiss bars or football bars. I’ll also usually use fat grips or an axle. Sometimes I’ll use a push press and sometimes I won’t. For me, I consider push pressing more of a skill to be developed than a strength to be built. It’s not a skill that I’m great at, but I’ll do 2:1 strict:push because the all around strength is more important to me at the moment. For assistance work, I’ll keep them in the 8-12 rep range (and always strict). Max effort will be working up to a heavy single.
I’m not saying this will have the best carryover to bench or that this is the best use of your time. I like strongman and would like to preserve (and build) the strength in my OH press so that I can compete in strongman eventually. Therefore, while it may not be the best use of my time to build bench, it is a good use of my time to work towards both goals. I never go behind the neck (I have enough problems getting my shoulders into proper position for squatting much less trying to press there). I will also do single arm dumbbell presses as assistance (standing but with no body english to assist) since circus dumbbell is a thing.
If I had no interest in strongman, I’d probably still keep them as a max effort movement and use them maybe once out of a six to twelve week period to really change it up. For assistance, it would depend on my deficiency. If I am deficient in lockout, I’d be more likely to use a pin press variation. For being weak at the chest, I’m not so sure that it would help as much.
They are brought up in the Westside stuff now and again, but only on the principle of if they seem to help. I stopped using them for a while and my bench stopped going up. When I came back to them, I had lost about 20-lbs off my max strict press. When I was making better gains on the bench, my OH press seemed to be going up. So with that, I’ll say that they at least correlate well for me one way.
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Yeah my reasoning for starting lighter was i just came off the nationals qualifier meet so i will bump it up to around 80% next week, thanks for your advice chris.
From personal experience the seated military press transferred to my bench a lot. I had a training cycle where I had a heavy military press day and a medium load bench day every week. I focused on increasing my military press and leaving bench on the back burner. Increased my bench by 20lb in 8 week. This will probably work well for you if you have a wider grip bench press. If you have a shoulder width grip or just outside shoulder width i would suggest focusing on triceps via closegrip bench and weighted dips.