Tonight was the first time I have ever benched in shirt.
I borrowed a much to big single ply Metal shirt to practice in, and learn to tuck hard and such.
Given how loose it was, I was able to get it to touch pretty easy and was doing triples with 315. I got a bit cocky and started moving the weight up and doing singles. Worked up to 415. Setup was great, and the shirt was jacked just right.
The weight popped up nicely, but my wrists cocked back and the movement started to very quickly turn into a skullcrusher. Scared the hell out of me. I felt the bar moving way out of the groove and starting screaming for help.
Thankfully, I had very good spotters, and they easily took the weight and returned it to the rack for me. They got a good laugh while I checked to make sure that I had in fact not shit my pants.
Really put shirted lifting into perspective. I have a whole new respect for people moving literally hundreds of pounds over their raw max. Showed me just how much learning there is when you start using super tight/jacked multi-ply gear.
That’s a very common way to miss a shirted bench. I saw it happen a bunch of times at a meet last weekend. The spotters were on it every time. Always have your side spotters keep there hands under the bar when you’re in a shirt. It happens so fast you can’t react to it.
I have always been paranoid of that. To the point that my bench style involves locking out over my upper abs/lower chest as opposed to over my face. When I first got into the sport about 4-5 years ago, everyone seemed to be switching from the denims to the newer style polys like RageX’s and F6s. These shirts lend themsleves to overthrowing the weight back over your face- particularily for a lifter not accustomed to these style shirts. All the meets seem to have several near-decapitations. Good spotters are gold- use them and be one.
Soon after I started to use my first shirt I moved into a power rack so I could setup the safety bars above my face incase anything ever did happen. I would recommend trying this if you have a decent movable bench and have a rack where you can do this. It was really nice knowing that if I dumped it that it could never hit my face if the spotters didn’t catch it for some reason. I still use that setup even though I’m pretty confident in my shirt work, I just don’t always have spotters that I trust, so it still works out nice.
yup, I almost dumped it on my face, my first day in a shirt. There’s a lot of scary shit that can happen in gear. Probably my fourth time squatting in a suit I had it blow out. Luckily it was a light weight, and the spotters caught it.
The first time I ever spotted for someone wearing a shirt the dude dumped 455 backwards like you describe, with no sidespotters and only one other person in the room (holding boards). I caught it before it hit his face, but it scared me pretty good.